Nancy Armstrong

The Sensation Novel

In trying to arrive at what he somewhat awkwardly

described as “the tradition to which what is great in

English fiction belongs,” F. R. Leavis hit a road bump (16).

In view of the novels the educated people of his time were

reading, he found it especially “challenging” to

discriminate the major novels of George Eliot, the only

Victorian whose novels he considered great, from those

fuelling the “present vogue of the Victorian Age” (9). A

note of moral defensiveness creeps into his otherwise well-

tempered argument as he explains that it is crucial to

distinguish Eliot from this pack, because Victorian fiction

“is so large and offers such insidious temptations to

complacent confusions of judgement and to critical

indolence”(9). Authors to whom he attributes this malignant

influence include “Anthony Trollope, Charlotte Yonge, Mrs.

Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, Charles and Henry

Kingsley, Marryat, and Shorthouse” (9-10). All but Yonge

and Gaskell are known for their sensation novels. Given the

prominence of this form in a field he finds rife with such

temptations, it should come as no surprise that in arguing

for the importance of good form in fiction, Leavis repeats

the argument that Victorian reviewers had first mounted

against these very novels. An essay of 1863 warns that

these novels “are clever, very clever; their plots often

improbable, but always exciting; they will while away a

leisure hour very pleasantly, and are sure to be eagerly

read; while few readers will g[i]ve any heed to the moral

poison which is everywhere diffused through them” (Anon.

“Thackeray,” 80). Writing about eighty years later and for

a quite different readership, Leavis occasionally lapses

into the same defensive rhetoric as his Victorian

predecessors, I believe, because his standard of good form

was the same as theirs.

In attacking a popular mid-nineteenth-century

subgenre, both sought to defend the same generic ideal,

first formulated by Sir Walter Scott in a review of Jane

Austen’s Emma (1815-16)—a novel he distinguished as the

first mature example of “the art of copying from nature as

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she really exists in the common walks of life” (230). Like

Leavis, the majority of Victorian reviewers measured the

enormously popular new form against this standard of realism

and found it conspicuously deficient. Often cited as a

spokesman for this critique, Henry Mansel condemned the

sensation novel for lacking “[d]eep knowledge of human

nature, graphic delineations of individual character, vivid

representations of the aspects of Nature or the workings of

the soul—all the higher features of the creative art” (36).

Stripped of character, the novel is consequently reduced to

a formula that completely bypasses individual decision-

making:

Each game is played with the same pieces, differing

only in the moves. We watch them advancing through the

intricacies of the plot, as we trace the course of all

x or a y through the combinations of an algebraic

equation…with about as much consciousness of

individuality in the ciphers. (36)

Putting aside its semi-salacious subject matter, let us

consider the cause of the uproar. Of all the forms of

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popular fiction to thrive in the popular press, what made

sensation fiction uniquely capable, as Punch proclaimed, of

“drugging thought and reason, [and] stimulating attention

through the lower and more animal instincts” until it

destroys “conventional moralities,” rendering the public

generally unfit “for the prosaic avocations of life” (Anon.

“Our Female,” 107)? Was it that the sensation novel lacked

“the higher features of the creative art,” as Leavis

claimed, or that in lacking these features the sensation

novel assaulted all that domestic realism stood for—most

notably the nuances of character? The reviewers certainly

felt the assault.

This aesthetic lack came with weighty epistemological

baggage: How can the reader know what type of character we

are dealing with if the novel will not explain why she acts

or even what she’s done? Depriving the individual of the

very faculties that make her a member of liberal society—

including self-reflection, judgment, sympathy, family

feeling, and a sense of the greater good—also has obvious

moral implications. In the absence of “character,” as

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realism had defined it, how can we evaluate the motives or

the consequences of human action, much less the motives and

consequences of the actions we ourselves perform? Moral

norms go up in smoke, along with established codes of

conduct.i Nullification of the norms and codes organizing

home and schoolroom, as well as the public institutions for

which the Victorian period is known would pose a significant

political threat as well, one that went well beyond a few

novels. As one reviewer explained, “[t]he novel has really

become a domestic institution. In truth, so general is its

influence, that its presence is felt in almost every link in

the great social chain” (Anon. “Philosophy,” 21). If novels

had indeed become as much a social institution as families

and schools, then liberal society faced a crisis whenever

the novel assaulted the conventions that wed individuals to

the habits of domestic life.

The attack on the sensation novel was neither the first

nor the last attack on novels capable of engaging the

i Kucich aptly describes this problem as an ethical crisis in which Victorian culture confronts head-on “the very real power of lies” (38).

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popular reader. But the attack on the sensation novel was

certainly different in magnitude than any attack of its kind

before or since the period in question. Sensation novels

were so offensive, not because they failed to meet the

standard established by Austen and Eliot, but because they

never even tried. To read sensation fiction for its

psychological “complexity” or sensitivity to “social

concerns” (Maunder xxvii) is consequently to fall in with

those who defend what Leavis called “the higher features of

creative art.” The same must be said for criticism that

celebrates the authors of sensation novels, on grounds that

most of them are women rebelling against a form designed to

constrain both women and their writing. To read it either

way is to judge sensation fiction by the very standard it

opposed. Any literary form that had sensation fiction’s

enormous appeal for readers, yet was so consistently

denigrated by the critics and reviewers, has to be taken

seriously. When that form continues to attract scorn a

century later by someone of the stature and influence of

F.R. Leavis, we have an interesting problem on our hands:

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Can we break the habit of reading it for its lack of realism

and read the sensation novel as a form in its own right?

The obvious test case for this project is Mary

Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861). Singled out in

its own day as the pre-eminent sensation novel, this novel

was among the first of a growing number of sensation novels

to be taught in today’s colleges and universities. Armed

with a model of this novel’s distinctive features, we should

be able to figure out how other sensation novels varied the

form and, on that basis, speculate as to why they failed.

To assess the legacy of the sensation novel, I will look

briefly at Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and simply ask whether the

“weakness” and “strengths” of this novel do, as Leavis

claimed, stand apart “as fairly neatly separable masses”

(97). Assuming that they do, are we obliged to agree as well

that “the mass of fervid and wordy unreality” overwhelms the

“strengths” of the novel in much the same way he feared that

sensation Victorian novels were eclipsing George Eliot’s

greatness (97)? At stake in the question of whether Leavis

can extricate domestic realism from the sensational elements

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that have taken up residence within Daniel Deronda is the

larger issue of the sensation novel’s rightful place in

literary history. If the Victorian novels we consider most

worthy of critical consideration today consistently

incorporate the features that made the sensation novel

sensational, then sensation fiction is not marginal but

absolutely central to the history of the novel.

The poetics of sensation

A poetics of the sensation novel begins with the problem of

character. In rejecting the premise that we know an

individual—and can assign him or her a character—on the

basis of information we take in through our senses, the

sensation novel was not simply refusing the gambit of

realism; it also proposed an entirely different way of

being, knowing, and interacting with other human beings as a

community. Consider Lady Audley. With nothing else to

recommend her, neither wit, nor principle, nor courage, nor

kindness, nor loyalty, nor even a natural capacity for

affection, her character would seem to rest solely on her

striking physical beauty, and others consider her “childish”

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for lacking the very faculties by which one ordinarily

judges adult behavior. On occasion, however, and for

reasons even those closest to her cannot fathom, she is

wracked with fear and behaves erratically. A glimpse at a

portrait concealed within the gilded sanctuary of her

apartment exposes the problem of knowing her:

No one but a pre-Raphaelite would have painted, hair by

hair, those feathery masses of ringlets with every

glimmer of gold, and every shadow of pale brown. No one

but a pre-Raphaelite would have so exaggerated every

attribute of that delicate face as to give a lurid

lightness to the blonde complexion, and a strange,

sinister light to the deep blue eyes. No one but a

pre-Raphaelite could have given to that pretty pouting

mouth the hard and almost wicked look it had in the

portrait. (bk 1, ch 8)

The painter has exaggerated the color, texture, and shape of

stereotypical feminine beauty until its conventional

features no longer indicate a docile interior.

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The number and vividness of these sensations overwhelm

any stereotype that might contain and make sense of these

details--if not as ideal feminine beauty, then as fiendish

female beauty. But it is not just in this respect that the

painting makes sensation seem sensational. By offering more

visual information than the character of Lady Audley herself

does, the painting invites us to see these details as tell-

tale signs of predatory tendencies beneath a beautiful

exterior. At the same time, the novel blocks all

referential routes from the image to the woman herself,

attributing the details that lend her sinister life to the

painter’s response: “No one but a pre-Raphaelite could have

given to that pretty pouting mouth the hard and almost

wicked look it had in the portrait.” Coupled with the

conditional “would” or “could,” the narrator’s refrain, “No

one but a pre-Raphaelite…,” turns the record of how Lady

Audley looked when posing for the portrait into a record of

how the painter responded to her, a record that in blurring

the distinction between stimulus and response, also blurs

the distinction between stimulus and object.

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To understand the epistemological problem a novel

raises when its protagonist resists characterization in this

way, we might compare Lady Audley to one of Jane Austen’s

heroines, who initially tend to be as bedazzled by the world

as Catherine Moreland of Northanger Abbey is on first setting

foot in Bath. Over the course of that novel, and as

testimony to Catherine’s maturation, the crowd of

fashionable people in the Pump Room settles into discernible

types. Over time and with consistency, these types become

familiar and yet highly individuated actors on the stage of

life, whom Catherine learns to evaluate in terms of cause,

or motive, and effect, or degree of usefulness to the

community. According to the sensation novel, domestic

realism has it exactly backwards. The material world is in

fact the blur of sensory information it initially seems, and

the heroine acquires a discerning and discernable ego within

that field only as she domesticates and manages the

information surrounding her.ii Her ability to do so depends

entirely on consistency within the field of which she is a

part, for it takes repetition of appearance and behavior

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over time to sediment a character. To acquire the solidity

of character is to become someone, and to be someone is to

secure existence and be safe. How does the process of

negotiating the field of sensations turn into sensationalism

rather than the fullness of being that Austen heroines

achieve?

Terrified of slipping through the cracks of a domestic

novel, Lady Audley will do whatever it takes to maintain a

place among those who do have such solidity. In the

process, she acquires a string of names—Helen Maldon, Helen

Talboys, Matilda Plowson, Lucy Graham, and Lucy Audley.

This string identifies a sequence of zigzags and loops in a

chronological narrative that break up one story into that of

several different characters, none more real than any other.ii In 1885, physicist Ernst Mach published a theory of sensations that comes uncannily close to explaining this phenomenon. Among the sensory perceptions surrounding us, he argued, only some associations remain relatively fixed. These “exhibit, first, certain complexes of colors, sounds, pressures, and so forth, which therefore receive special names, and are designated bodies” (italics original 2). His description of the subject-observer carries out a similar inversion. While “the composites ‘ego’ and ‘body’ assert instinctively their claims,…[t]he primary fact is not the I,the ego, but the elements (sensations). The elements constitute the I” (italics original 19).

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Put in motion, this other way of being requires a way of

knowing opposed to the “inductive” method pursued by the

detective figure (bk 1, ch 16). In a plot that makes

mincemeat of the Bildungsroman form, detective and criminal

circle around and redefine one another like the antinomies

of the dialectic—the one destroying evidence in an effort to

elude his claim to realism, the other exposing her evasions

and cover-ups in order to reassert realism’s mastery, until

it becomes impossible to separate their lives. The

detective plot is seemingly driven by Robert Audley, as he

accumulates enough empirical evidence to convince the

reasonable reader and future jury members that his uncle’s

second wife is none other than the wife of his old friend

George Talboys—that she abandoned their child, gave her real

name to the deceased Matilda Plowson, accepted a position as

governess to the Dawson family, and murdered George in order

to conceal her bigamy. As the search for proof of bigamy

leads to a search for proof of murder and then to a search

for proof of arson, however, the detective plot produces its

own antithesis.

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That is to say, as one bit of empirical evidence after

another fails to elucidate who she is and why household

after household collapses in her wake, something like

arepetition-compulsion eclipses Robert’s search for proof,

and a very different form of evidence surfaces: George paces

restlessly and then disappears, Lady Audley’s husband, Sir

Michael, occasionally walks “straight out of the house”

(bk1, ch 1), and his daughter Alicia “bounces” (bk 1, ch

16). But no one is more affected by Lady Audley’s impact on

their household than Sir Michael’s nephew, Robert Audley,

who finds himself recruited to the role of detective by the

coincidence of Lucy Audley’s appearance in his uncle’s

household and the disappearance of George Talboys. Of all

the characters in the novel, Robert alone understands the

degree to which he is no longer thinking for himself nor

acting by his own volition: “A hand which is stronger than

my own beckons me on” (bk 2, ch 3). Compelled to pursue a

course destined to dismantle the only home he knows, Robert

admits that “[t]he one idea of his life had become his

master” (bk 2, ch 7). It would make perfect sense to

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indentify what short-circuits the detective’s power of

rational observation and drives him to expose Lady Audley as

monomania or repetition-compulsion--were it not a group

phenomenon.

Braddon uses the language of contagion to indicate that

the reaction not only spreads infectiously among members of

the group but also alters them at the level of the body.

Both George Talboys and Sir Michael Audley, for example,

respond to Lady Audley with “feverish ardour” (bk 1, ch 2).

Robert feels “a stern coldness that was so strange to him as

to transform him into another creature” (bk 2, ch 11), and

Alicia, his cousin and Sir Michael’s daughter, withdraws to

the exclusive company of her horse and dog. Completely

alone in the company of others, but totally reactive, each

moves from edge to center of the narrative and back again,

always hanging onto the group--as if there were no identity

separate from it. Those who disappear are as good as dead.

Only something like this model of community, or life in

common, can explain the forces that usurp the place of

character, linking Robert’s surprising affiliation with

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George—“’Who would have thought that I could have grown so

fond of the fellow,’ he muttered, ‘or feel so lonely without

him’” (bk 2, ch 2)—with a similar change in the behavior of

the family dog: “Lady Audley happened to enter the room at

this very moment, and the animal cowered down by the side of

his mistress with a suppressed growl…incredible as it

appears that Cæsar should be frightened of so fragile a

creature as Lucy Audley” (bk 1, ch 14). The sensation novel

was far from alone in troubling the Enlightenment assumption

that an individual’s mind could master his body.

Along with the proliferation of sensation fiction, the

1850’s, 60’s and 70’s also saw the rise of a body of

literature loosely described as physiological or

“materialist” psychology. Coming at the problem of the

mind’s relation to the body from very different angles, the

new research succeeded in unsettling the Enlightenment

assumption that the individual mind housed qualities that

distinguish man from animals. From observing how sensations

registered on the nerves, this research concluded that the

body often responds without interference from conscious

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processing. As Vanessa L. Ryan explains, “[m]id-nineteenth-

century advances in physiological psychology led both

scientists and nonscientists to consider whether…there is a

type of thought, a kind of ‘thinking without thinking,’ that

can serve as an epistemological alternative to reasoned and

logical thought” (277).iii In The Physiology of Common Life

(1860), George Henry Lewes offered examples demonstrating

that human beings, like animals, have other cognitive

centers than the brain, thus other ways of processing

information. In The Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin

provided a theoretical basis for these challenges to human

exceptionalism, when he made such qualities of mind and soul

as reason, altruism, imagination, and spirituality no less

the products of our biological heritage than masculine

strength and feminine beauty.iv

Sensation novels brought these arguments to life for a

popular readership by showing how easily individuals reared

in traditional homes could act as members of a pack who

think through the body and behave as a single entity.v What

may seem like ambiguity testifies not to depth within such

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characters but to an excess of sensory information that

emerges as they try and fail to maintain identities as self-

governing individuals and members of the community. As this

information emerges, individuals begin to function, in the

words of Braddon’s narrator, as “the smaller wheels and

meaner mechanism of the human machine, which knows no

stoppage or cessation, though the mainspring be for ever

broken, and the hands pointing to purposeless figures upon a

shattered dial” (bk 2, ch 6). Without a mainspring, the

iii Jenny Bourne Taylor’s pioneering research established a direct relationship between sensation fiction and the complex of scientific and pseudo-scientific arguments over the mind-body relationship. From this same line of research, Gilbert develops an explanation for the relationship between Victorian women’s writing and disease, Dames extracts a Victorian “physiology of reading,” Cohen sees it as a pervasive reconsideration of the senses as materially embodied, and Ryan proposes an epistemic change in the way one thought about thinking, a Victorian prehistory of neural science largely forgotten by cognitive scientists today.iv One can track Darwin’s career-long development in this direction from The Origin of Species (1859), where he foresees a new psychology based on the assumption that natural selection is responsible for human intelligence, to The Descent of Man (1871), where he argues for the biological origins of a range of cognitive functions, including self-consciousness, abstraction and individuality. Finally, in The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals (1871), his research converges with that of physiological psychologists.

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machine can no longer distinguish past from present or

future, except as minor variations of a pattern of responses

embedded in the species. Where earlier novels trace a

sequence of gradual changes turning past into present, the

sensation novel takes a chronological slice through both

personal and historical time that turns past into the

eternal present of repetition-compulsion.vi This slice

disables affiliations based on lineage and personal

sympathy.

The Limits of a Subgenre

It would be easy to argue that the sensation novel was

nothing new. Jane Eyre (1847) and Bleak House (1852-53), for

example, are in many respects sensation novels avant la lettre.

But of those novels published before the 1860’s that exposed

compulsive behavior, exploitive domestic arrangements, and

subplots featuring adultery, bigamy, and murder, few have

gone down in literary history as sensation novels proper.

Once it achieved dominance and a label, moreover, the

sensation novel encroached on literary territory that would

be claimed, in later decades, by the detective novel, Thomas

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Hardy’s naturalism, and even the invasive behavior and

species consciousness of Bram Stoker’s vampire. These

difficulties in identifying the limits of the subgenre are

compounded by the variations among novels generally received

as sensation novels. Two principles nevertheless hold true.

First, while many novels before and after the 1860’s

incorporated various features of the sensation novel, it was

chiefly during the 1860’s that these formal characteristics

coalesced to form a distinctive kind of novel with alarming

v Arguing against Freud’s decision to reduce the several wolves populating a patient’s dream-life down to the wolfman’s father, Deleuze and Guattari describe “the pack,” much, I believe, as the sensation novel asks us to see the groups that form within society. They draw on the work of Elias Canetti to distinguish packs from crowds on the grounds that packs are characteristically “small or restricted in numbers.” Although “each member is alone evenin the company of others…, each takes care of himself while participating in the band” and doing so by moving from edge to center and back again (33). vi Fleissner identifies a parallel American phenomenon, whenshe describes the female protagonists of Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Gertrude Stein as caught in “acompulsive female temporality”(27) associated with the cultural phenomena of “endless description, domestic time, the fad, drift, and the rhythmic back and forth of the deathdrive”(32). This feminine temporality overwhelmed the masculine quest for identity shaping earlier American novelsand consequently “problematized linear historical time” (32).

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appeal to the readership. Second, sensation fiction

continued to be published into the 1870’s and beyond,

spawning variations that for one reason or another failed to

survive.

My guess is that many of the later sensation novels

sought to capitalize on the success of novels by Braddon and

Wood while still avoiding the moral condemnation of the

reviewers. This speculation derives from Franco Moretti’s

claim, borrowed from Walter Benjamin, that “[f]ormal

choices…try to ‘eradicate their competitors’” (218).

Assuming that “form is precisely the repeatable element of

literature,” Moretti reads popular fiction for the “device

designed to colonize a market niche, forcing others to

accept it or disappear” (original italics 218). This device

consequently “returns fundamentally unchanged over many

cases and many years” (225). Adopting this logic, we can

see novels so contrived to display passion and reward virtue

as Dora Russell’s Beneath the Wave (1878) as an effort to

survive in the market place while accommodating the

reviewers. Because so many of these later novels soon

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plunged into obscurity, where novels by Braddon, Wood, as

well as those by such now lesser lights as Florence Marryat

and Rhoda Broughton continued to be read, it stands to

reason that formal variations that compromised the poetics

of repetition-compulsion cost sensation fiction its

competitive edge after a decade of conspicuous success.

When formal choices “don’t replicate each other but rather

move away from each other,” Moretti observes, they turn “the

genre into a wide field of diverging moves. And wrong moves

mostly…” (original italics 217). Let us see if we can,

without Moretti’s apparatus, identify the formal choices

responsible for the sensation novel’s apparently sudden and

brief success.

In reading Lady Audley, we saw that sensation and

response wipe out the distinction between subject and

object, breaking up the autonomy of character. Where we

encounter Lady Audley only after she has accumulated a

string of names and ruined households, however, it is more

common for the sensation novel--including Braddon’s own The

Doctor’s Wife (1864), Margaret Oliphant’s Salem Chapel (1863), and

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Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861)—to offer us heroines as free as

Austen’s of such baggage. These protagonists are invariably

assailed, like the spotless heroine of Florence Marryat’s

Love’s Conflict (1865), by “a new, wild feeling, that leaped up

in her heart, and ran through her veins, making the life-

blood in them tingle. Was it? Could it be? Elfrida turned

herself around, like a hunted animal who knows that death is

close at hand” (bk 2 ch 29). Captive to marriages that

aggravate their capacity to think through the body, Elfrida

Salisbury, Isabel Vane, and many more, set off a chain of

reactions that brings down the household containing them.

The process quickly turns what at first appears to be a

conflict between impulse and conscience within these

characters into a new conflict between the individual’s

claim to self-control and the claims of her animal nature.

The book market apparently ruled out the possibility

that death could resolve this conflict and restore the

viability of character. According to Lillian Nayder, the

sensation novel allowed “the devout and proper” Felicia

Skene “to give transgressive figures an appeal they are

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denied in Tracterian works” (xiii). While steadfastly

denying these women anything like domestic happiness, Skene

ends Hidden Depths (1866) with a sentimental death scene that

dispatches the sincerely penitent woman to a home in heaven.

Novels that end on this note resurrect the very mind-body

split that sensation fiction sets about to challenge, and

these novels did not do well for very long in the literary

marketplace. The gothic devices so integral to sensation

fiction exactly reverse the logic of Skene’s Christian

sentimentalism. And virtually all sensation novels feature

gothic devices--the return of the dead, the discovery of

dreadful family secrets, forced marriages, false

imprisonments, inexplicable doubles, and so on—to imply a

supernatural agency behind the cluster of coincidences and

behaviors that defy rational explanation. The sensation

novel uses the gothic against the sentimental to show that

what determines human events is antagonistic to every other

form of personal sympathy. But the sensation novel

ultimately turns against the gothic as well by insisting

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that what might seem a superhuman agency behind events is

actually biological in origin.

A case in point: the extremely popular East Lynne invites

us to assume that good and evil are at play when it divides

the qualities found in Lady Audley between two relatively

simple types: the ingénue Isabel Vane and the libertine

Frank Levison. The drubbing he receives, first at the hands

of a mob and then in a court of law, goes a long way toward

expunging the scandal of Isabel’s involuntary adultery. His

punishment indeed seems to pave the way for her absolution

by way of a death scene that initially calls to mind the

sentimental apotheosis of Skene’s heroine. Called by duty

to the deathbed of the family governess, Mr Carlyle

initially “steps back…though he was a little given to show

emotion as man can well be. The falling hair, the sweet,

mournful eyes, the hectic which his presence brought to her

checks, told too plainly of the Lady Isabel” (bk 3, ch 61).

Remaining true to the sensation novel, however, Wood mingles

the possibility of a sentimental apotheosis of the fallen

woman with the dreadful possibility that the disfigured

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governess is turning back into his aristocratic bride before

Mr Carlyle’s bewildered eyes. He does do the sentimental

thing and sends her off to the next world with this tearful

blessing: “’May God bless you, and take you to His Rest in

heaven! May He so deal with me, as I now fully and freely

forgive you!’” (bk 3,ch 61). But then—seamlessly--animal

magnetism pulls him back into what would certainly become

the most sensual scene in the novel were she to revive:

“Lower and lower bent he his head, until his breath nearly

mingled with hers. But, suddenly, his face grew red with a

scarlet flush and he lifted it again” (bk 3, ch 61). By

allowing Isabel to hover for several pages between life and

death, the novel not only kills her off but also revives in

him the adulterous impulses that originally broke up the

Carlyle household.

No sensation novel puts gothic devices to naturalistic

purposes better than Collins’s The Woman in White (1861),

which famously begins as Walter Hartright encounters a woman

on a lonely road at night: “every drop of blood in my body

was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly

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and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me” (Hartright 1).

By virtue of the fact that his physiological memory of the

one infiltrates his response to the other, this sensation

links the woman in white through Walter to Laura Fairlie,

the woman he eventually marries. On watching Laura approach

across a porch in the moonlight, Walter recounts, the

“thrill of the same feeling which ran through me when the

touch was laid upon my shoulder on the lonely high-road,

chilled me again” (Hartright 8). The mysterious continuity

between the two women is enhanced by Ann Catherick’s

persistence in wearing Laura’s cast-off white clothes. But

there is also a curious continuity at another level.

Laura’s demeanor gives Walter the impression of “something

wanting, something wanting” in his love object that

resembles Ann’s feeble-mindedness (Hartright 8). Rather than

realistically contrast the two look-alikes from very

different social stations, as a conventional work of realism

might do, their “gothic” doubling indicates the lack of

precisely this sort of contrast between the two women and

thus their potential interchangeability. Her marriage to

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Sir Percy Glyde sets Laura on a course that indeed follows

Ann’s from Limmeridge House, to the anonymity of an insane

asylum, and into the obscurity of a mismarked grave. A

second double counters Laura’s tendency to slip out of what

would seem to be a secure position within an English country

house and into the nameless, faceless population. Laura’s

half-sister Marian Halcombe has that “something” Laura

lacks, which shows itself in a grotesque discontinuity of

face and figure: “the lady’s complexion was almost swarthy,

and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a mustache”

(Hartright 6). That Marian and Walter must fight the

formidable Count Fosco for Laura’s identity—and the right to

live in Limmeridge House that hinges on that identity—

implies that Laura, on her own, is indistinguishable from

those elements of the population who routinely fall through

the cracks of liberal society. Doubling in this case

indicates that one is quite literally part of someone else:

As Marian explains, “I won’t live without her, and she can’t

live without me” (34). The same holds true for self-

doubling. “The return of the dead” is such a common

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occurrence in these novels, because so many characters are,

like Lady Audley, fundamentally homeless. Should anyone

leave, the group reorganizes itself without that individual,

who is consequently as good as dead. Thus we see the

sensation novel drawing on gothic conventions in order to

fold them into domestic realism, where they take on a new

explanatory power.

In The Moonstone (1868), Wilkie Collins seems intent on

demonstrating that no domestic framework can contain, much

less explain human life as the sensation novel defines it.

In doing so, he also shows how many variations he can

perform on the prototype and still have it pack the punch of

a sensation novel. The romantic relationship between

Franklin Blake and the mysteriously absent, apparently

hysterical Rachel Verinder provides the framework for

Collins’s account of a purloined diamond that destroys

whomever takes possession of it. Just as Braddon’s heroine

comes to Audley Court with a load of baggage destined to

dismantle the English country house, so Franklin comes to

his Aunt Verinder’s home for the celebration of Rachel’s

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birthday bearing both the stolen diamond that her uncle had

bequeathed to her and a trio of former Brahmins from the

West of India charged with recapturing the gem. The

disappearance of the diamond not only forestalls all thought

of romance but also exposes the interior of the household to

a police investigation and the best efforts of the

detective, Sergeant Cuff--a scandal in its own right.

Although this novel starts out as a detective novel, it

predictably fails to turn up convincing evidence concerning

the identity of the thief and the whereabouts of the

purloined diamond. In contrast to Lady Audley, Collins’s

detective plot comes to us interwoven in the accounts of

“certain persons concerned in those events,” whom Franklin

deems “capable of relating them” (1st Period, ch 1). Having

commissioned these accounts on the assumption that the whole

truth can be constructed from the sum of its parts, Franklin

discovers, to no one’s surprise, that the various accounts

he has assembled identify only the piece missing from the

diamond’s history: who stole it, and where did it go?

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The creation of such a hole in its own web of

narratives calls for the same way of knowing through the

body we identified in Braddon’s novel. Persuaded that the

thief can be no one other than himself, Franklin agrees to

an experiment engineered to make his brain recall what his

mind has forgotten. To relive the theft and recall where he

put the diamond, Franklin has to be given a comparable dose

of opium and preoccupied “again with the various questions

concerning the Diamond which formerly agitated it” (3rd

Narrative, ch 10). To “justify” the theory behind this

repeat performance of the crime, Collins inserts into

Franklin’s account quotations that come directly from the

work of experts with whom the educated Victorian reader was

presumably familiar: Drs. William Benjamin Carpenter, a

well-known physiological psychologist, and John Elliotson,

Professor of Medicine at University College, London. The

process of rendering Franklin unconscious and watching him

reenact the crime is clearly the event that turns an otherwise

rambling and disjointed collection of personal narratives

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into a sensational page-turner. It also provides a theory

of the event in miniature.

I am not suggesting that Collins used the psychology of

his day to explain a crime that seems to lack a discernible

motive. To the contrary, the novel pits one notion of the

unconscious that preserves the autonomy of mind against

another that regards the unconscious as a way of thinking

through the body, only to show that the unconscious is not

an individual but a group phenomenon. By splitting the

protagonist between Franklin the detective-narrator and

Franklin the unconscious criminal, this scene sets in motion

the same dialectic that shapes Lady Audley’s Secret. The

detection plot aimed at locating the diamond gives rise to

its own antithesis—a counterplot that spans two continents,

engages several generations, and aims at rescuing the

diamond from the threat of commodification by returning it

to the shrine in India from which Franklin and Rachel’s bad

uncle Herncastle had stolen it. This counterplot eclipses

the detection process and turns the other efforts to locate

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the diamond into a process that places it irretrievably

beyond any individual’s reach.

In compromising the distinction between body and mind,

the physiological unconscious also challenges the

distinctions between one individual and another and

ultimately, between an individual and the “multitude”

(Epilogue, ch 3). Which brings us to the problem of the

sensation novel’s ending. The dialectic set in motion by

the sensation novel forecloses the possibility of that sense

of a fullness of being which, according to Charles Taylor,

secular cultures promise that one can achieve in private

life in lieu of heaven. Novels never found it all that easy

to imagine households capable of supporting that emotional

weight, but the difficulty of doing so only increased during

the nineteenth century, a chapter in literary history

veritably littered with failed households. What can

possibly be the appeal of restoring the family in a

perfunctory manner, as numerous Victorian novels do, often

pointing out the fictional character of the conventional

ending they feel obliged to offer readers?vii The sensation

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novel exacerbated this difficulty by making the home a nodal

point in visceral currents of affect that no home could

possibly contain. The Moonstone initially marshals this

affect to coalesce the group unconsciously against the

explicitly foreign threat of Indians who lurk in the shadows

of the Verinder household hoping to retrieve the diamond.

By so identifying the danger to the household, the novel

appears to revise the way readers imagined the nation along

the same lines that Patrick Brantlinger describes in The Rule

of Darkness: from a nation that reached around the globe to a

society in danger of engulfment by the those that had been

incorporated under Empire. But this, alas, is only half the

story. The Empire has aleady infiltrated the Verinder

household not only by the gift of the diamond, but also by

the opium that prompted old Herncastle to steal the diamond

and his nephew to repeat the crime twice over. And then

there’s Godfrey Ablewhite, who competes with Franklin for

Rachel, only to make off with the diamond disguised as an

Indian.

34

Although it has become a critical commonplace that the

sensation novel flourished in the 1860’s and then declined

in the 1870’s, to describe this bizarre phenomenon and to

make sense of it are two very different things: Why should

British novels disrupt the modern British household with

such regularity and violence during the 1860’s? Known for

his sensation novels featuring horrific violence, Charles

Reade dismissed the label “gothic” on the grounds that all

his best material was inspired by the Times. In Deadly

Encounters, Richard Altick argues that indeed no sensational

device—no bizarre coincidence, swapped identities, illicit

affiliation, pilfered fortune, or act of incredible violence

on the part of one member against another—found its way into

novels that had not already appeared in local newspapers and

weekly magazines during the 1850’s and 60’s. Moreover, as

Altick notes, these crimes were committed by people vii A few examples of such endings are in order: In Waverley, Scott comes up with a caricature of the country house to resolve the conflict between England and Scotland, and Dickens, at the end of Bleak House, suddenly conjures a house by the same name for a heroine who had no expectation of surviving in his city. The endings of Hard Times and Villette accomplish the same thing by delivering the mere hope of such a home.

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ordinarily considered respectable. Or at least they were

until the doors of their household were opened to public

scrutiny and found to be quite otherwise in a sequence of

articles that laid out the crime in gruesome detail,

followed the police through the process of detection, and

gave everyone a front-row seat in the legal trial

establishing guilt. In publishing so many of these

accounts, the newspapers apparently stimulated an appetite

for more, which in turn raised the larger and more troubling

question of why these household scandals appeared to be

increasing in violence and frequency. The newspapers took

up the question. One commentator pointed to an “endemic

excitement” that directs certain “minds into a homicidal

course” (quoted in Altick123), while another attributed the

outbreak of crime to “a moral malaria in the air,

travelling, like cholera, with unerring pace” (quoted in

Altick 123). Still another saw “most of our sensation

novels” not as an exaggeration so much as an accurate

reflection of “the moral disorganization” of modern times

(quoted in Altick 145). Putting aside the fact that the

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newspapers themselves were obviously responsible in part for

working popular culture into such a frenzy, their

explanation sounds suspiciously like the one we have

inferred from the sensation novel itself—a problem endemic

in the household.

Michel Foucault characteristically reverses the

relationship between social anxiety and cultural response.

In the case at hand, he would invite us to consider the

persistent and violent disruption, not the problem needing a

solution, but the solution to another problem that could not

be stated in so many words. Arguing that England and France

once defined themselves as nations by waging war against an

external enemy, Foucault saw nineteenth-century England and

France strategically refiguring themselves as societies

threatened from within. By doing so, they created the means

of classifying most of their populations as less human than

those who upheld the norms of a liberal society. What

distinguishes this threat from that posed by an earlier

generation of strangers—Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, for

example—is an absolute lack of the racial essentialism, and

37

this is what makes the difference between insider and

outsider seem so ephemeral in later fiction. Virtually

anyone might lose her grip on a place in the community and

slip over to the other side. Sensation fiction is so

scandalous, from this perspective, because it establishes

continuity rather than difference between individual and

mass, implying that we are not by nature individuals but act

as groups, whether packs or mobs. Thus, in The Moonstone, the

effort to ward off a threat posed by three Brahmins--

indistinguishable from each other and from previous

generations “who had forfeited their caste, in the service

of the (moon) god” (Prologue, 2)—turns into the quest to

detect an embezzler who destroys the community,

paradoxically, in a desperate attempt to maintain his place

within it. What such figures accomplish, however, is to

redraw the line within liberal society between rights-

bearing individuals and those who—like the Indians—are less

than individuals, have no discernible character, and can be

allowed to die. Here, then, is what the sensation novel

offered that readers found so gratifying: the household

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perpetually under threat, the transformation of its members

into a cohesive body that thinks without thinking, a group

that coheres as a family as it splits off and subordinates a

piece of itself, in short, a family newly constituted on a

defensive basis.

The Legacy of the Sensation Novel

After the 1860’s, the sensation novel lost some of the

popular appeal that had made this formal permutation of the

novel something of a sensational event in its own right.viii

For over a century, the social architecture of the

viii Brantlinger (1998) argues that “[t]he development of thesensation novel marks a crisis in the history of literary realism, in part because of its challenge to the naïve empiricism or observation that serves such realism as its epistemology.” The scandal is that such traditional forms of authority—or whatever deployed the norms of respectable culture—“disappears, abdicates authority, or proves untrustworthy” (161). As Dames suggests, however, “the work of physiological novel theorists presents a different picture. Where we might expect fear of mass reading, we getcelebrations of its spread” (15). Daly emphasizes the fact that sensationalism went well beyond the novel, supplanting religious spectacle to offer a means of constituting a unified mass. “If one aspect of ‘sensation culture’ is a preoccupation with the tide of crowd-pulling novelties and spectacular entertainments that threatened to overwhelm the lines of good taste,” argues Daly, “the other is an interestin just how the wandering gaze of the mass subject might be held” (8).

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respectable English household, modeled on that of the lower

gentry, had enjoyed the same interiority as the English

nation: a differential cluster of discreet egos held

together by a relation of mutual definition and apart from a

rapidly expanding, increasingly heterogeneous field of

socio-cultural information in which that cluster was likely

to disintegrate. By modeling the household and periodically

updating its relationship to the external world, novels made

it possible for successive generations of readers to imagine

not only themselves but also other readers in these terms.

During the 1840’s and 50’s, this model came under

considerable stress. Government officials, social

scientists, and ardent do-gooders invaded the homes of the

poor, only to discover, to no one’s great surprise, that

instead of a peaceful society in microcosm, the interiority

of such homes concealed forms of brutality and moral

turpitude invisible to those passing by on the streets of

Dickens’s city. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1859 opened

the doors of seemingly respectable people to similar

scrutiny, feeding a stream of scandalous news from police

40

reports and trial records into the newspapers that sprang up

after the repeal of the stamp act and the duty on paper.

Apparently creating an appetite for more, the quest for such

stories eventually pried open even the doors of the gentry

to public view, much as the narrators of Jane Eyre, Bleak House,

and Great Expectations reveal the secrets concealed behind the

facades of the great estates. Readers consequently bore

witness to something dreadfully wrong at the heart of the

household that completely disqualified it as a model for

either the individual or the nation. By perversely

implanting predatory impulses where there was supposed to be

tolerance if not affection, the sensation novel dealt a

fatal blow to fiction that maintained the home as a little

world apart from the cruelties and hardships of the world

outside. By the 1860’s, the domestic novel had become

obsolete, and novelists who wanted to be successful had to

write in relation to the sensation novel.

George Eliot was no exception.ix Remove the historical

perspective that brings order if not purpose to the

destruction of Dorlcote Mill and the Tulliver family, and it

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is easy to read The Mill on the Floss (1860) as a sensation novel.

Those households that try to integrate the heroine are

demolished by a current of affect, or in Eliot’s words,

“this stronger presence that seemed to bear her [heroine]

along without any act of her own will, like the added self

which comes with the sudden exalting influence of a strong

tonic—and she felt nothing else. Memory was excluded” (bk

6, ch 8). This “presence” is not Maggie’s personal

unconscious but that of the group that unwittingly

conspires, against Maggie’s every effort, to bring her

together with the man whom they have assigned to her cousin

Lucy. Eliot assembles a new household around the grave

containing Maggie and her brother Tom, a household that

consequently acknowledges its foundational exclusion. And

certainly the great sacred cow of Eliot’s philosophical

self-reflexivity flourishes on the unwholesome textual

terrain of the sensation novel.

The romance plot of Middlemarch (1872) is put on hold

for most of a very long novel by a complex of steamy

subplots that conspire to rob Will Ladislaw of the

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inheritance he needs to marry Dorothea Brooke, throwing her

together with Edward Causabon, who personifies the

obsolescence of Enlightenment reasoning. His is simply a

hyperbolic version of the conventional thinking of the

“respectable townsfolk” as they assess young Dr Lydgate’s

character. Like Casaubon, they too were “not more given

than mortals generally to any eager attempt at exactness in

the representation in themselves of what did not come under

their own senses” (bk 2, ch 15). To provide a keen sense of

what the townsfolk cannot see, Eliot’s narrator calls up the

moment in Lydgate’s past where he succumbs to the attraction

of the French actress Laure and proposes marriage: “He knew

that this was like the sudden impulse of a madman—

incongruous even with his habitual foibles. No matter! It

was the one thing he was resolved to do.” Here, Eliot calls

on much the same way of understanding the operations of the

unconscious that the physiological psychologists proposed:

Lydgate “had two selves within him apparently, and they must

ix As Cvetkovich puts it, “The ties between the sensation novel and George Eliot’s work are…stronger that she might have been willing to admit” (129).

43

learn to accommodate each other and bear reciprocal

impediments” (bk 2, ch 15). Prevented from possessing

Laure, the first object of his obsession, however, Lydgate’s

repeats the pattern against his better judgment with

Rosamond Vincy. The pronoun “us” bonds the narrator’s

awareness of the involuntary nature of Lydgate’s actions to

his own, as if they were a single consciousness: “Strange,

that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our

infatuations, and even while we rave at the heights, behold

the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits

us” (bk 2, ch 15). Character, Eliot’s narrator tells us, is

a form of “instrumentality” that molds others to our

“purposes” (bk 2, ch 15). To lay claim to realism a novel

will indeed have to distance itself from the types that one

acquires in the eyes of the group.x

I have credited the sensation novel with breaking up

the social architecture of home that fixed character to one

of a rather limited number of positions either within or

external to it. The sensation novel did this, I have

argued, by demonstrating that human beings engage one

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another as elements caught in currents of attraction and

revulsion that make them coalesce as groups. These groups

are groups by virtue of the fact that they act cooperatively

when their various members are least conscious of doing so.

No novel pursues this line of thinking from character to

home more fearlessly than Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Nor does any

novel assault the idea of the British nation as a benevolent

parent in a more devastating manner. In saying this, I am

tentatively agreeing with Leavis’s claim that two bodies of

information stand apart as two nearly separable masses in

the novel. On the one hand, we have a narrative account of

landowning families and their dependents and how their

future fell apart despite Sir Hugh Mallinger’s benevolent

oversight. This account reads like a sensation novel. On

the other, we have the largely mythic narrative of a Jewish

population scattered throughout Europe and the Middle East

and the account of how they strive to come together as a

x Eliot needs the sensation novel, Logan suggests, in order to establish both the “fetishism” that makes us believe the objects toward which realism gestures are really there and the surplus of sensation allowing us to distance ourselves from them.

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people. Two different models of sociality--one made of

individuals who carefully maintain their identities as such,

and the other whose members live in, through, and for each

other however scattered they may be. Daniel Deronda’s

unknown origins allows each group to imagine him as the

missing piece, the head that will give that group autonomy,

direction, and duration over time. Were it not for his

powerful ties to both groups that make it impossible for

Daniel to sever either connection, the fantasy is—for Leavis

as for Gwendolyn Harleth, Mirah Cohen, and even Daniel’s

Mother—that self, household, and nation might be whole if

only they could claim him. Eliot saw it differently.

As the lynchpin that holds the two narratives together

in a single world, Eliot cannot allow him to complete either

group. Thus he is not only the missing piece whose

inclusion would repair the traditional household. He is

also the extra element—Jewish and international by birth,

Christian and English by upbringing—whose exclusion is

necessary to the separation of what Leavis alternately calls

its “two masses” and the “good and bad parts.” By including

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Daniel, the novel would sustain the illusion of liberal

society’s tolerance for difference and could still produce a

subrace of migrant populations by excluding Jews as a

people. There obviously came a point when the household

could no longer supply the imaginary means of domesticating

such segments of the population. Nor, on the other hand,

could it supply the means of warding off awareness of this

other mode of being human. In wishing that he could cut out

“the bad parts” and marry Daniel off to Gwendolyn, Leavis is

simply taking Eliot’s bait (137).

Despite Daniel’s compulsion to rescue Gwendolyn that

begins on the first page of the novel and ends only when the

novel does, Eliot has him withhold himself cruelly from

Gwendolyn, while intensifying her longing for him.

Apparently not up to another hollow marriage, Eliot makes

one imagine the pair falling into one another’s arms and

then dismisses that fantasy as naive.xi She stages this

moment in sensational terms: “The world seemed getting

larger round poor Gwendolyn, and she more solitary and

helpless in the midst. The thought that he [Daniel] might

47

come back after going to the East, sank before the

bewildering vision of these wide-stretching purposes in

which she felt herself reduced to a mere speck (bk 8, ch

69). Here, the two “masses” are suddenly and traumatically

integrated, as Gwendolyn loses the domestic boundaries of

her ego and dissolves in the grander currents of life in

common. In this respect, the ending of her domestic novel

is not all that different from Daniel’s story of a people.

In a letter to Daniel on the occasion of his marriage,

Gwendolyn assures him “that I may live to be one of the best

of women, who make others glad that they were born” (bk 8,

ch 70). Just one page later, the dying Ezra assures Daniel

in terms borrowed from The Book of Ruth, “Where thou goest,

Daniel, I shall go. Is it not begun? Have I not breathed

my soul into you? We shall live together” (bk 8, ch 70).

Still working within a dialectic stalled between individual

subject and species being, Eliot refuses to imagine a more

inclusive liberal society. Using the Jewish parts of the

novel to transform the sensation novel’s insistence on the

biological connections that make communities, Eliot

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idealizes the pack, thereby infusing species-being with the

sense of fullness that secular humanism offers as its

reward.

xi Brown describes a twofold process in nineteenth-century France by which the French decorporatized the Jews as a nation, a nation within a nation being intolerable, and incorporated Jews as individual citizens: “Jews were enfranchised on the condition of assimilation, on the condition that they shed identifying and constitutive Jewishpractices, or at least on the condition that these practicesbecame completely private” (66). Is this not a perfect description of the options Eliot establishes for her Jewish born but English and Christian reared protagonist, who can either be accepted as an individual or tolerated as a Jew?

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