A Masculinizing Investigation: the Detective and the Problem of Female Reticence in the Sensational Detective Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins
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A MASCULINIZING INVESTIGATION: THE DETECTIVE AND THE PROBLEM OF FEMALE RETICENCE IN THE SENSATIONAL DETECTIVE FICTION OF MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON AND WILKIE COLLINS By BRITTANY L. PARKHURST A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2007 1 © 2007 Brittany Parkhurst 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are many people who have contributed to the success of this project and who deserve acknowledgement. My sincere gratitude is given to Dr. Chris Snodgrass and my director, Dr. Pamela Gilbert, whose enthusiasm, intelligence, patience, and guidance have made this thesis possible. Their meaningful questions, shrewd suggestions, and overall expertise significantly impacted the way I conceived of this project. Further thanks is given to the friends who supported my work by way of advice, a willing ear, or a cup of coffee. I lastly thank my fiancé, Kyle Roberts, for his candid opinions and love. His willingness to set aside his own work to help me develop my ideas prevented (almost all) mental breakdowns. Sometimes you need the confidence of others to take over when yours starts to drop off—all of these people provided that confidence to me. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................3 ABSTRACT.....................................................................................................................................5 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................7 2 LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET....................................................................................................12 3 THE MOONSTONE................................................................................................................28 LIST OF REFERENCES...............................................................................................................44 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .........................................................................................................47 4 Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts A MASCULINIZING INVESTIGATION: THE DETECTIVE AND THE PROBLEM OF FEMALE RETICENCE IN THE SENSATIONAL DETECTIVE FICTION OF MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON AND WILKIE COLLINS By Brittany L. Parkhurst May 2007 Chair: Pamela K. Gilbert Major: English This project seeks to trace the process by which bourgeois men come of age in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. In each novel, this process is one, I argue, that develops alongside the process of detection. That each novel belongs to the sensation genre of the 1860s distinguishes each from other more traditional detective novels insofar as the mystery of the sensation novel is one that is largely concerned with the enigma of femininity. In the novels considered here, the process of detection is complicated by women who withhold information from the “amateur” detectives who seek it. Silent women consistently threaten to unman the detective and jeopardize the empirical virility of the detective plot as a whole. Yet, the challenge posed by this silence is actually crucial to the narrative of detection, and the coming-of-age of the detective, in that it creates the central mystery of the text that tests its detective’s ability to expose, contain, and control the “truth” of the novel, which for the sensation novel is a “truth” about femininity. Thus, learning to “know” women becomes part of the process by which these detectives become men. Ultimately, in this project, I seek to continue the work of Lyn Pykett, Ann Cvetkovich, Winifred Hughes, and 5 others who have sought to emphasize and problematize the role of women in sensation fiction, while also removing the veil that has covered the male body from critical inquiry. 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Both Lady Audley’s Secret (1861) and The Moonstone (1868) can dually fit into the genres of sensation and detective fiction. Although both novels are by and large universally accepted as belonging to the sensation “fad” of the 1860s, their status as detective novels is generally seen as more tenuous. A.D. Hutter, however, has indeed called The Moonstone a “prototypical” detective novel (175), while T.S. Eliot has identified it as “the first and greatest of English detective novels” (377). Similar claims are often made about Lady Audley’s Secret. What largely seems to distinguish these works from more canonical detective stories is the detective’s amateur status as a member of the family involved in the crime. The central detective figures of these sensational detective novels are not hired like the outsider “Sherlock Holmes” characters of the latter part of the century, nor should they be as they really aren’t very good at what they do; instead, they are themselves profoundly implicated in the mysteries that surround them given their position in the family and are thus as much a part of the larger puzzle as any “trifle” of a clue. The sensation novels are often identified as such due to their reputation of bringing the frightening mysteries of the gothic into modern British society as well as their ability to evoke physical sensations in the body of their readers. The plot of the sensation novel works gradually to restore the order to the family these strange circumstances have compromised. Typically, all is considered well when there is a marriage or a child (of course only at the end of the novel or else it is quite likely that neither the marriage nor the child will turn out to be legitimate, thus causing even more problems). But significantly, in each novel considered here, the mystery itself is not divisible from the courtship narrative. For the detectives of both Lady Audley’s Secret and The Moonstone, solving the crime means making the circumstances of their own marriages possible. 7 And crucially, as John Tosh has observed, marriage articulates for middle-class Victorian men the achievement of masculinity: The complete transition to manhood depended on marriage. A fondness for female society could be indulged as a bachelor among the demi-monde; only marriage could yield the full privileges of masculinity. To form a household, to exercise authority over dependents, and to shoulder the responsibility of maintaining and protecting them—these things set the seal on a man’s gender identity. (108) Marriage, though, is only possible for these young detectives when their investigation succeeds and the case at hand is solved. To achieve success in the investigation requires both detectives to learn what it means to be a man. While Andrew Dowling emphasizes the roles of “active sexuality, rigid duty, proud nationality, and straightforward speech” in allowing the individual man to become part of the hegemonic idea of manhood (3), both James Eli Adams and Herbert Sussman suggest that it is emphatic self-disciplining that authorizes a man’s status as a gentleman. As Robert Audley and Franklin Blake learn how to become detectives, they likewise learn how to practice self-control, something neither one is very good at before their mutual investigations begin (the former is lazy and indulgent while the latter is a debtor and philanderer). Ascertaining the right time to speak, act, finesse, or simply keep quiet is crucial to solving their case. Performing these acts of self- control through their performance as detectives is a way, Adams would argue, of “performing” masculinity. The success of which, evidently, facilitates marriage, which in turn serves to solidify their masculine identity. Ultimately, through the process of the detection—a process, I will show, that is significantly complicated by women—these “amateur” detectives are able to come of age, to become men. Largely, this project participates in the ongoing discussion generated by the scholarship of Peter Brooks in Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative, which posits the body as an “epistemophilic project” (5). In Body Work, Brooks explores the nexus of “desire, the body, the 8 drive to know, and narrative” (5). He observes that in modern literary works (which he defines as beginning during the mid-eighteenth century), a central protagonist will generally desire a body—either his or her own or, more often than not, the body of another—that he or she feels will provide the “key to satisfaction, power, and meaning” (8). Crucially, Brooks finds that, “on a plane of reading, desire for knowledge of that body and its secrets becomes the desire to master the text’s symbolic system, its key to knowledge, pleasure, and the very creation of significance” (8). In the works discussed here, which are in this respect representative of the larger pool of sensation fiction, the body desired is the female body. The mystery, according to Lyn Pykett’s work, is always one involving the enigma of femininity. With the sensational detective novel, then, the “key to satisfaction, power, and meaning” for the detective is tracking down and “knowing” women, which I suggest becomes part of the process that allows them to come of age. So while the detectives in these novels might, on one hand, be looking to solve the mystery of a missing George Talboys or the theft of a Moonstone, they are also, on the other hand, trying to make woman’s body