Redemptive Portrayals of the Fallen Woman in Nineteenth Century British Sensation Fiction
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Redemptive Portrayals of the Fallen Woman in Nineteenth Century British Sensation Fiction Hannah Lacey Bryant Rigby “A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature.” Chapel Hill 2011 Approved by: Dr. Laurie Langbauer Dr. Allan Life Dr. Thomas Reinert Dr. Beverly Taylor Dr. James Thompson © 2011 Hannah Lacey Bryant Rigby ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT HANNAH LACEY BRYANT RIGBY: Redemptive Portrayals of the Fallen Woman in Nineteenth Century British Sensation Fiction (Under the direction of Laurie Langbauer) A study of portrayals of fallenness in the nineteenth-century sensation novels, including those written by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Ouida, my dissertation locates the genre of sensation fiction front and center in allotting its heroines— bigamists, prostitutes, and the divorced—a potential for redemption unavailable to their counterparts in realist fiction. Novels became best-selling sensations because of their risqué subject material, predominantly their positioning of women in places of power, even sexual power; content—which created a sensation in the titillated reader—became synonymous with this literary form. The sensation novelists were under no compunction to reiterate overwrought clichés to argue for a correspondence between sexual purity and moral goodness like their more conventional and canonical counterparts. I argue that because sensation novels allow sexual and powerful women admission into the institution of marriage, all the while insisting their fallen heroines’ moral fitness to be wives, the novels actively challenged Victorian ideals of femininity and female virtue and in doing so became a crucial component in the unmasking of nineteenth-century sexual hypocrisy. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks for the guidance of Laurie Langbauer and advice of the faithful readers in the dissertation group: Sarah Cantrell, Katie Carlson, Sarah Ficke, Sarah Shaw, and Cheryl Thayer. I am especially grateful to my husband, J.R. Rigby, for his support. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I. “MERE TRASH OR SOMETHING WORSE”: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SENSATIONAL FALLENNESS OF LOOSE WOMEN AND CORRUPT NOVELS..............................................1 A Tale of the Times: The Novel Sensation of the Sensation Novel......................................................................................................................8 Sensational Fallenness..........................................................................................32 II. THE ACCIDENTAL BIGAMIST: MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON’S AURORA FLOYD AND THE REDEFINITION OF FALLENNESS....................................................................................................46 The Bigamy Novel, Braddon, and Aurora Floyd……………………………………..49 Introducing Aurora: Secrets and Foreshadowing................................................57 Talbot Bulstrode..................................................................................................65 John Mellish.........................................................................................................76 Vanquishing the Threat........................................................................................86 Conclusion...........................................................................................................95 III. THE VIRTUOUS PROSTITUTE: WILKIE COLLINS’S THE NEW MAGDALEN AND THE CASE FOR REFORM......................................................97 Reclaiming Magdalens: Victorian Charity and the Reform Campaigns..........................................................................................................104 Novel Voices......................................................................................................114 Portrait of a Penitent Prostitute..........................................................................116 v Conclusion.........................................................................................................133 IV. THE SINLESS DIVORCÉE: THE FAIRY TALE OF DIVORCE IN OUIDA’S MOTHS....................................................................137 Once Upon a Time: Setting the Fairy Tale Scene..............................................142 Divorce Law and the New Fairy Tale................................................................157 Conclusion.........................................................................................................176 CODA………………………………….…………………………………………………………….……….182 WORKS CITED...................................................................................................................187 vi “Mere Trash or Something Worse”: An Introduction to the Sensational Fallenness of Loose Women and Corrupt Novels1 “For when a woman sins, does she sin alone? Rather for one sinful woman are there not fifty—ay, a hundred—sinful men?” —Josephine Butler2 - “These works are censured and ridiculed, but they are extensively read. The author has a hold upon the public.” —Henry James3 On July 3, 1862, The Times of London published an anonymous letter, claiming to be interested in congestion in Hyde Park caused by the ongoing Exhibition (as with the more famous Great Exhibition of 1851, this second International Exhibition featured goods from countries around the globe) and the equally exhibiting riders of Rotten Row, where aristocrats rode to see and be seen. The bulk of the letter, however, seems interested in an entirely different topic, to which its expressed purpose is marginally related: a woman who could cause Victorian traffic jams. Sir,--Early in the season of 1861 a young lady, whom I must call Anonyma, for I have never been able to learn her name, made her appearance in Hyde Park. She was a charming creature, beautifully dressed, and she drove with ease and spirit two of the most handsomest brown ponies eye ever beheld. (12) This assertion of ignorance on the part of the author is nonsense, a lie no one believed. Her name, everyone knew, was Skittles, which was not her name any more than Anonyma was. 1 Henry Mansel wrote, “The sensation novel, be it mere trash or something worse, is usually a tale of our times. Proximity is, indeed, one great element of sensation” (488). 2 Butler 156. 3 Henry James here discusses Mary Elizabeth Braddon and her novels (594). [Type text] Both sobriquets of Catherine Walters, these two nicknames became synonymous with “pretty horsebreakers” and fair temptresses, up-market prostitutes displaying their wares in equestrienne parade.4 The letter continues with a description of the converts Anonyma made of aristocratic ladies, who tried to draw notice to themselves by borrowing her tactics: If she wore a pork-pie hat, they wore a pork-pie hat . if she reverted to more feminine attire, they reverted to it also. Where she drove, they followed; and I must confess that, as yet Anonyma has fairly distanced her fair competitors. They can none of them sit, dress, drive, or look as well as she does; nor can any of them procure for money such ponies as Anonyma contrives to get—for love. Skittles, then the mistress of Spencer Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington and later the 8th Duke of Devonshire, led the fashion. Crowds turned out in expectation of her rides. She became famous for her famous lovers—including Prince Albert Edward, later Edward VII, who reputedly wrote her over 300 letters—as well as for her beauty, and she ended up living out her life in comfort and ease. She died in 1920 (Aronson), a good sixty-five years after she first embarked on a career as a courtesan. That women like Skittles lived long, successful lives seems at odds with fictive portrayals and artistic portraits of prostitutes and other fallen women leaping to a watery grave in the Thames or succumbing to disease. Certainly the modern prevailing view that Victorians were horrified by fallen women is confirmed by much of Catherine Walters’s biography. The success of this one courtesan surely came at its own price, very likely 4 Catherine Walters’s nickname “Skittles” derives from her youth, when, after running away from a convent school, she worked at a livery stable in Cheshire and possibly played the game skittles quite well (Hickman 279). She may have even worked in a skittles alley; she supposedly met Hartington when he and the Prince of Wales came to play skittles, a game similar to bowling, in the alley (Aronson). Walters’s skill as a rider also dates from this period, and here she learned the art of display too, for her livery stable work involved riding with the hunt to market the stable’s horseflesh (Hickman 279). Walters’s nicknames quickly became the stuff of novels. Anonyma, or Fair but Frail and Skittles: a Biography of a Fascinating Woman were both published by George Vickers in 1864, with resulting speculation over the identity of the anonymous author. Michael Sadleir’s bibliography of nineteenth-century fiction notes that the so-called ‘Anonyma’ series was just that, a group of novels republished in 1884 by C.H. Clarke that were not necessarily written as a series or even by the same author. Titles of the 1884 series include Skittles in Paris as well as novels that were published earlier with attribution to the Anonyma author, such as Cora Pearl, Formosa, Left Her Home, London by Night, Love Frolics of a Young Scamp, Mabel Gray, Revelations of a Lady Detective, and Women of Paris (8-12).