| This text served as an introductory chapter
of a larger dissertation of mine called "Wilkie Collins's The
Woman in White: Law and Literature: Legal Structures and Poetic Justice."
Before you're all bored to death, let me just say that the Sensation Novel
is a really "fun" literary genre! If you like it, just contact
me, because there is plenty more where this came from. Anyway, here
we go...
The Sensation Novel: “the Secret Theatre of Home”.
© 2001 Els De Clercq
As indicated above, when The Woman in White
was first published, it was an immense popular success. When Sampson Low
published the work as a three-volume novel, it sold out on its publication
date. At the same time of this huge popular success, however, literary
critics objected to what they came to call the ‘sensational’
content of the novel: the elaborate conspiracy plotted by Count Fosco
to acquire Laura Fairlie’s inheritance, purposely mistaken identities,
carefully constructed marriage settlements, the treatment of insanity,
false aristocratic titles, illegitimacy, etc. all added to the novel’s
‘sensational’ status – a term which was always used
pejoratively by opposing critics.
Collins’s novel proved to be the beginning of a
real “Sensation Mania” in the domain of the novel, which would
last about a decade. According to an anonymous critic in the Westminster
Review this type of novel was like “a virus … spreading in
all directions” (Nayder 1997: 71):
"Just as in the Middle Ages people were afflicted with the
Dancing Mania and Lycanthropy, sometimes barking like dogs, and sometimes
mewing like cats, so now we have a Sensational Mania. Just, too, as those
diseases always occurred in seasons of dearth and poverty, and attacked
only the poor, so does the Sensational Mania in Literature burst out only
in times of mental poverty, and afflict only the most poverty-stricken
minds." (O’Neill 1988: 4)
Margaret Oliphant, who, generally speaking, displayed a negative attitude
towards the sensation phenomenon, nevertheless acknowledged Collins’s
craftsmanship, but feared that he might have instigated a dangerous game
with his novel because, she writes, his “disciples will exaggerate
the faults of their leader, and choose his least pleasant peculiarities
for special study” (Balée 1992: 198). H. L. Mansel,
in 1863, reviewed sensation fiction in the Quarterly Review and came to
the conclusion that the genre generally subverted female morality in order
to shock its readers solely for the sake of shocking them.
The Sensation phenomenon was not confined to literature,
but was an all-encompassing phenomenon in the 1860s. The decade of the
1860s was itself indeed characterized by excess on different levels: from
sensational courtroom cases (e.g. Madeline Smith, Constance Kent), which
were reported lavishly in the newspapers, to melodramas (especially Dion
Boucicault), and novels, which even became the stake of numerous bets.
Novelists that should be included are Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon,
Charles Reade, and Mrs Henry Wood, but even novelists like George Eliot
and Anthony Trollope could not escape including ‘sensational’
elements in their work. These sensation novels, also known as ‘fast
novels’, ‘bigamy novels’, or ‘adultery novels’,
could perhaps best be described as “tales of modern life”
(Pykett 1994: 4). Contemporary critics realized this, and this was indeed
the main reason for their concern:
"The sensation novel, be it mere trash or something worse,
is usually a tale of our own times. Proximity is, indeed, one great element
of sensation. It is necessary to be near a mine to be blown up by its
explosion; and a tale which aims at electrifying the nerves of the reader
is never thoroughly effective unless the scene be laid in our own days
and among the people we are in the habit of meeting" (Hughes
1980: 18).
These tales of modern life took the form of complicated plots focusing
on secrecy, deception, suspense, doubleness and mystery or in Thomas Hardy’s
words: “Mystery, entanglement, surprise and moral obliquity”
(Pykett 1994: 4). The most shocking element of these novels was indeed
the fact that they took place in the every-day domestic sphere of a modern
middle-class or aristocratic household. In his review of Mary Elizabeth
Braddon’s Aurora Floyd Henry James acknowledged this fact:
"[…] those most mysterious of mysteries, [were] the mysteries
which are at our own doors… Instead of the terrors of Udolpho, we
[are] treated to the terrors of the cheerful country house, or the London
lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely the more terrible."
(Pykett 1994: 6)
In referring to Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho
James points to the Gothic Novel, from whose ashes, amongst others, the
Sensation Novel arose. However, he immediately indicates the main difference
between the Sensation Novel and the Gothic Novel, namely the proximity
of the Sensation Novel versus the remoteness (in time and place) of the
Gothic Novel. Although the terror of the familiar was already manifesting
itself in Anne Radcliffe’s ‘explained supernatural’,
the threat to middle-class security was considerable lower than in the
Sensation Novel.
If we analyse the Sensation Novel in relation to the
contemporary developments in the field of literary production and distribution,
we can see that the genre was primarily seen as a commodity in the commercialised
literary market. Novels like Collins’s The Woman in White,
and Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret were among the
bestsellers of the nineteenth century. The increasing popularity of the
Sensation Novel with its almost formulaic appearance did cause reason
for disturbance, especially because of the fact that it crossed and blurred
different boundaries, generic, as well as stylistic and class boundaries.
In reworking material from different genres, the Sensation Novel greedily
borrowed from ‘lower-class’ genres, from penny dreadfuls,
and especially from popular melodrama. Winifred Hughes sees in the Sensation
Novel “for the first time in an age of increasing literacy,
[…] an undisputed example of “democratic art””
(Hughes 1980: 6). It had origins in lower-class literature and was read
by all classes of society. Lyn Pykett analyses the Sensation Novel as
both “the product and symptom of quite profound changes in
fiction and the fiction market in the mid-Victorian period.” (Pykett
1994: 9)
Moreover, the Sensation Novel was preoccupied with some
of the most central contemporary social tensions and anxieties of the
Victorian middle-class. The anxieties displayed in the Sensation novel
revolved mostly around the cornerstone of Victorian society, namely the
family. This was done on four interrelated levels. The first level is
concerned with gender roles, marriage and the role of the woman in the
family. In light of the insistence on womanly purity, Victorian middle-class
society saw the morally ambiguous heroines and villains of the Sensation
Novel as a threat to the entire society. Indeed, in the Sensation Novel,
the heroine is no longer the moral certainty (cf. Lady Audley) she used
to be in the traditional romance:
"For whatever reasons, the heroine of the sensation novel has
become enmeshed in a sordid tangle of crime, blackmail, and seduction;
she has become a participant, however unwilling, as well as merely a victim."
(Hughes 1980: 44)
In the most extreme case she is, like Lady Audley, not at all the domestic
angel she appears to be:
"Social and moral chaos has spread even to the inner sanctum,
infecting the emblem of domesticity. The one island of security and certitude
remaining in a tumultuous age has been invaded and despoiled."
(Hughes 1980: 45)
The second level is involved with the legal aspect of the family and the
role of the law in regulating and organizing the Victorian family. A third
level looks at social class and relations between classes. A fourth and
last level deals with ‘property’ and its effect on the family.
On each of these levels, the family is debunked as an “illusory
sanctuary” (Pykett 1994: 12). As such, the Sensation Novel
can be seen as an intervention in contemporary social debates.
As already indicated, formally speaking, the Sensation Novel tended to
borrow from different genres:
"Formally sensation fiction was less a genre than a generic
hybrid. The typical sensation novel was a catholic mixture of modes and
forms, combining realism and melodrama, the journalistic and the fantastic,
the domestic and the romantic or exotic." (Pykett 1994: 4)
Charles Reade’s standard subtitle “A Matter-of-Fact Romance”
describes best the ambiguity of the Sensation Novel, its deliberate mixture
of romance and realism (modes of writing which are usually opposed to
each other), resulting also in the ambivalence of the sensational heroine
and villain. Formally, the Sensation Novel is also characterized by emphasizing
incident and plot. A much heard criticism of the Sensation Novel is indeed
its lack of ‘character’. This insistence on plot runs parallel
with an external characterization (e.g. dress, physical characteristics).
Winifred Hughes records a contemporary reviewer’s opinion:
"A sensation novel, as a matter of course, abounds in incident.
Indeed, as a general rule, it consists of nothing else… . The human
actors in the piece are, for the most part, but so many lay-figures on
which to exhibit a drapery of incident. Allowing for the necessary division
of all characters of a tale into male and female, old and young, virtuous
and vicious, there is hardly anything said or done by any one specimen
of a class which might not with equal fitness be said or done by any other
specimen of the same class. Each game is played with the same pieces,
differing only in the moves." (Hughes 1980: 23)
Henry James indicts this lack of character as well in his review of Braddon’s
Lady Audley’s Secret. Lady Audley is a “non-entity,
without a heart, a soul, a reason.”
"But what we may call the small change for these facts –
her eyes, her hair, her mouth, her dresses, her bedroom furniture, her
little words and deeds – are so lavishly bestowed that she successfully
maintains a kind of half illusion." (Hughes 1980: 26)
The Sensation Novel is characterized by a mixture of both realism and
fantasy, and it is “this mixture itself, this disregard of
fundamental categories of art, that becomes the focus of the aesthetic
objections to the sensation novel.” (Hughes 1980: 52) Because
of this mingling, the sensationalists came in conflict with the anti-sensationalists
or realists. The realist critique of the sensationalists was mainly aimed
at the probability of the events in the Sensation Novel. The realists
saw these as distortions and exaggerations of experiences of the modern
urban context: “To heap together startling and exceptional
incidents in defiance of all probability is the obvious resource of inferior
artists” (Hughes 1980: 52). These events failed to meet the
mimetic standard and were seen as ‘unnatural’ or ‘grotesque’.
This criticism is inevitably linked to the particular worldview of the
realists, which is essentially a moral worldview, based on ‘truth’,
and ‘human nature’ as constants, something which manifested
itself in their novels as a belief in ‘truth-to-life’ and
‘life-as-it-is’. The sensationalists’ mixture of both
modes, fantasy and realism, was rejected by the realists who thought that
the two should be duly separated, or, that fantasy and the improbable
should be situated elsewhere or in another era. However, although the
Sensation Novel was denounced everywhere in theory, even the realists
(and to a certain extent the naturalists) could not escape including sensational
elements in their own works (Trollope, Eliot).
Ultimately, the Sensation Novel did not survive the sensational
sixties, mainly because it denotes a transitional model. The sensation
novel looked for alternatives for the realistic mode, but did so by looking
to past models (popular romance and melodrama), a strategy which ultimately
failed because it was not adapted to the new context:
"[…] they were finally unable to detach themselves from
the hoary conventions of an obsolescent mode, even though they were responding
to a new situation for which they found realism inadequate. The old stereotypes,
revived and decked out in modern, middle-class dress, could not quite
contain the new meaning. Because of this tension between meaning and form,
the sensation novel was discomfiting and controversial to the mid-Victorians."
(Hughes 1980: 70)
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