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The Construction of Womanhood in Victorian Sensation Fiction, Abeer The Construction of Womanhood in Victorian Sensation Fiction, 1860 - 70 Abeer Zahra Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds. School of English September, 1990. ABSTRACT The status of sensation fiction as “popular literature” led Victorian critics to dismiss the genre as light literature, a tendency which has been perpetuated in literary criticism until very recent years. In this work, I attempt to place the genre in a new light by asserting the seriousness with which it addressed major psychological, social, economic and political issues of the era. Through analysis of the Victorian critical reception of sensation fiction, I reveal the ways in which sensation novelists challenged the aesthetic and ethical codes of conventional realism through their insistence on a new perception of the real. I further discuss the influence which the novels’ introduction of fantasies of rebellion and escape might have had on their major consumers: women. My purpose here is to reveal the link between the cultural conditions of women’s lives and the ways in which they might have responded to the subversive elements in the sensation novel. My study reveals that the sensation novel closely examined the ideologies responsible for the gendered power structure which characterized the Victorian era. By pushing psychological and sexual constructs of identity to their e remes, the sensation novelists managed to reveal the internal contradictions in these ideologies on which society based its notions of stability. The novels exposed the falsity of the gendered constructs of character by calling into question the age’s models of the self-controlled male and the irresponsible, explosive female. Not only do they suggest that the fixed model of individual identity is an idealistic aspiration rendered impossible by uncontrollable, psychological drives or inexplicable external influences, but also that the model itself becomes a source of psychological stress because of the need it creates to display external composure while suffering from internal stress. In the case of women, the novels unmask the material underpinnings of ideological constructs of female irresponsibility, passivity, explosiveness, and incapacity, thus undermining the validity of the constructions of womanhood which appealed to notions of female “nature.” In the way they link women’s subversive behaviour directly to the stifling economic and psychological conditions of their lives, the novels reveal that women’s madness is not the result of their instability as the doctors claimed, but of their confined lives. The novels further maintain that ideological notions of female helplessness and irresponsibility were inseparable from the material benefits they guaranteed for men. The institutions of the family, the asylum, and the law became effective means to ensure women’s subjection. Although the sensation novels challenged Victorian psychological and sexual ideologies, they often resorted to these self-same ideologies in order to establish order in their novels. Rebellious females are incarcerated as mad, while marriage, which is often depicted in the novels as a source of female subjection, is offered as a final reward. Yet, this final establishment of order cannot be taken at face-value since it stands in direct opposition to many of the suggestions in the preceding narrative. While appearing overtly conformist, sensation fiction raised many troubling questions about the ideological and material organization of Victorian society. Contents Abstract Acknowledgements Introduction............................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER I: The Contemporary Critical and Public Reception of The Sensation Novel........................................................................................ 6 The Distorted Mirror: Sensationalism and Realism.................... 7 Women Writers Within Patriarchal Morality.........................21 The Sensation Novel: A Threat to Social Stability......................25 The Appeal of The Sensation Novel.............................................35 CHAPTER II: Medical Ideology and Narrative Form.........................44 The Sensation Novel and The Medical Ideologies of In sanity.........................................................................................58 CHAPTER III: The “Innocently Indecent” Heroine: The Challenge to Victorian Sexual Ideology........................................................................ 110 CHAPTER IV: Sensation Fiction and The Legal System....................174 Conclusion................................................................................................ 208 Select Bibliography................................................................................ 213 Primary Texts................................................................................ 213 Secondary Material........................................................................214 To d h iath who shared with m e the joys and disappointments oj tfvis experience 1 Introduction Criticism of sensation fiction, from the Victorian era until fairly recent years, has been characterized by its limited approach to the genre and a systematic insistence on its non-seriousness. Victorian critics of the sensation novel insisted on its status as a commercial commodity, denying novels and novelists alike any overriding moral or social concerns “except the market law of demand and supply.”1 The status of sensation fiction as a mass-market product seemed sufficient justification for these critics to dismiss it from the realms of serious literature. Respectable literature, in the eyes of the pillars of the Victorian literary establishment, should be seen to reinforce the dominant moral, social, and political values of the day. Since sensation fiction insisted on disrupting and questioning these values and revealing their ideological basis, the critics immediately attached a host of aesthetically and ethically pejorative terms to the genre. One favourite way of undermining sensation fiction was to classify the novels as novels of “incident,” thus denying the sensation novelists the artistic ability to portray “real” characters or study in detail aspects of “human nature.”2 Sensation novelists, Victorian critics believed, obtained effect through the use of illegitimate aesthetic and ethical means. While lulling their readers into a false sense of security through their use of detailed, familiar, even mundane, settings and characters, they then introduced explosive desires and rebellious instincts. The sensation novelists stretched the boundaries of what the critics identified as real by presenting incident, accident, and inexplicable psychological and sexual drives as an essential part of the realistic world. They furthermore suggested that the notions of individual coherence and self-control on which both realist literature and the industrial society built their theories of stability were invalid, since individuals were often unable to predict or control internal drives and external events. 1 H. L. Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” The Quarterly Review , Vol. 113, April (1863), p. 483. 2 Ibid., p.486. 2 The term “sensational” seems to have become a label which the critics attached quite liberally to incidents or novels which did not accord with their notions of the acceptable. As my study reveals, although the sensation novels shared specific characteristics, they differed widely in the way they presented their material, and more significantly, in the kind of sensation they presented. While Collins's novels often create sensation through mystery and suspense, Mary Braddon's and Mrs Henry Wood's have less overt mystery in their novels. The major secrets they introduce are those of the female protagonist who manipulates and, often defies, patriarchal ideology through her subversive actions. Rhoda Broughton, on the other hand, seems to discard the notion of secrecy or murder in her fiction. Her novels were classified by the Victorian critics as sensational merely for her radical representation of female sexuality. Far from attempting a specific definition of a genre which, by the very aesthetic mixture it introduced, defied categorisation, I will examine the implications and consequences of the new elements which the sensation novelists introduced into literature. Only recently has sensation fiction started to acquire a new status of literary seriousness mainly through studies, feminist or other, which investigate the links between literature and ideology. The subversive element of female rebellion introduced in the novels, especially those written by women, proved particularly interesting to feminist critics, providing the grounding, for example, for Elaine Showalter’s arguments for a female literary tradition in A Literature of Their Own.1 However, Showalter follows a rather limited approach in her study of the genre. Her method necessarily leaves out the male sensation novelists and does not explore the ways in which both male and female sensationalists interrogated the social, medical, and sexual ideologies of the period. Rather than concentrate on female rebellion as the primary characteristic of female sensation fiction, in this work I study the reasons responsible for the ideological constructs of gender examined in sensation fiction, how these constructs operate, and their effects and consequences on the psychological make-up of individuals.
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