Neo-Victorianism and the Sensation Novel: Sarah Waters's Fingersmith

Ghent University: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy “Terrible plots? Laughing villains? Stolen fortunes and girls made out to be mad? The stuff of lurid fiction!” Neo-Victorianism and the Sensation Novel: Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor Paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels” by Tine De Schryver July 2010 Acknowledgements The quotation in the title of this dissertation is taken from Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith , page 421. I am grateful to my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor, for her assistance and her support of my research. I would like to thank my parents for giving me so many possibilities in life, and for their support, love, care, and patience throughout the years – you are the best! Many thanks to Hildegarde Mariman, who has read this dissertation and has given her opinion on its language and content. Thanks to my friends, who have been very patient and very kind every time I let them go partying by themselves because I had to write my dissertation. I cannot name you all for fear I would forget someone, but thank you so much – for the advice, the lively discussions, the late-night text messages, and the diversion whenever I needed it. Very, very special thanks to Karen. I love you, always. This dissertation is dedicated to the loving memory of my grandfather. Table of Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. Neo-Victorianism 4 2.1. Recently Developed Domain 4 2.2. Difficulties of Terminology 5 2.3. What Is Neo-Victorianism? 10 3. The Sensation Novel 13 3.1. The Victorian Fascination with Sensation 13 3.2. The Sensation Novel 18 3.3. Sensation Novelists 23 4. Characters in Fingersmith 28 4.1. Sue Trinder 28 4.2. Maud Lilly 39 4.3. Mrs Sucksby 53 4.4. Mr Lilly 55 4.5. Gentleman/Mr Rivers 57 4.6. Minor Characters 59 5. Fingersmith as a Sensation Novel 60 5.1. Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White 61 5.2. Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret 68 5.3. Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas 77 5.4. Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations 82 6. Fingersmith as a Neo-Victorian Novel 87 7. Conclusion 106 8. Appendix: Sarah Waters: Biography 109 9. Appendix: Fingersmith : Plot Summary 113 10. Works Consulted 119 De Schryver 1 1. Introduction In the last decades, many writers have in some way returned to the days of our Victorian predecessors. Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith is an example of this practice: even though the novel is written in the first years of the twenty-first century, its focus lies on the Victorian era. The novel is set in the 1860s, and its characters, plot, style, and themes are distinctly Victorian. But Fingersmith is more than simply a novel that pastiches Victorian literature – it is part of the general neo-Victorian surge of the last decades. In a number of fields, ranging from literature to “fashions and furnishings” (Sadoff and Kucich xii), the Victorian era is being reinvented and reinterpreted – a practice indirectly inherited from the Victorians as well: The Victorians had a habit of adapting just about everything – and in just about every possible direction: the stories of poems, novels, plays, operas, paintings, songs, dances, and tableaux vivants were consistently being adapted from one medium to another and then back again. We postmoderns have clearly inherited this same habit, but we have even more new critical materials at our disposal – not only film, television, radio, and the various electronic media, but also theme parks, historical enactments, and virtual reality experiences. (Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation xi) Writers of neo-Victorian literature use characteristics of Victorian literature, culture, and society at large, often with the purpose of adapting them to address certain present-day concerns. This dissertation aims to prove that in Fingersmith, Sarah Waters similarly appropriates the classics of Victorian sensation fiction to serve her purposes as a neo- Victorian writer. The first chapter, “Neo-Victorianism”, therefore provides a theoretical explanation of the neo-Victorian phenomenon. The struggles of this newly developed domain within postmodern literature are disclosed, and an attempt at definition of neo-Victorian De Schryver 2 literature is offered. The second chapter, “The Sensation Novel”, focuses on the sensation phenomenon and the Victorian sensation novel in particular. The importance of sensation to Victorian every-day life is illustrated, and its influence on the development of sensation fiction is exposed. Additionally, the characteristics of the sensation novel at its heyday and the main sensation authors are discussed. The third chapter, “Characters in Fingersmith ”, treats the origins and evolution of the main characters throughout the novel. This hinge chapter contributes to the further discussion of Fingersmith in the fourth and fifth chapter. In the fourth chapter, “ Fingersmith as a Sensation Novel”, an overview of the main similarities between Fingersmith and several sensation novels is given – Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White , Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret , Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations 1 are discussed alongside Fingersmith. The fifth and last chapter, “ Fingersmith as a neo-Victorian novel” analyses how Sarah Waters uses and abuses 2 the conventions of Victorian sensation fiction to address contemporary issues that she personally feels very strongly about. In the appendix, a biography of Sarah Waters and a plot overview of Fingersmith are added. The methodology applied during my research is fairly straightforward. For the discussion of the theoretical backgrounds of neo-Victorianism, the online journal Neo- Victorian Studies proved particularly helpful. I have endeavoured to reconcile different opinions on the neo-Victorian phenomenon, and to create a rather coherent theoretical framework. The discussion of Fingersmith ’s characters is based on Sarah Waters’s own indications in interviews and articles, accompanied by a few research articles and my own insights. The analysis of the similarities between Victorian sensation novels and Fingersmith is mainly based on recurrent plot structures, characters, themes, and ideas. Linda Hutcheon’s 1 The reasons for including Great Expectations, obviously not a sensation novel in itself, are listed in the chapter proper. 2 An expression used by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism. De Schryver 3 theory of historiographic metafiction as explained in A Poetics of Postmodernism has been especially utilizable in the discussion of Fingersmith as a neo-Victorian novel. As the neo- Victorian domain is still so distinctly new, research and insights are regularly added to it. Theories about neo-Victorianism, and consequently the analysis of neo-Victorian novels, change rapidly. Sometimes suitable theories are still missing, which complicates the attempt at analysis by the researcher. Moreover, Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith is a novel that derives its power and its effect from its marvellously intricate plot. Therefore, any attempt at discussion of the novel is complicated by the reluctance to spoil the experience for other readers, for, as Julie Myerson says in a review for the The Guardian : “There are always novels that you envy people for not yet having read, for the pleasures they still have to come” (n. pag.). De Schryver 4 2. Neo-Victorianism 2.1. Recently Developed Domain The literary domain that is frequently called “neo-Victorian” is a relatively new one. However, novels that are retrospectively categorised as “neo-Victorian fiction” were written long before the term was coined, or before people were even thinking of coining it. Scholars on the subject disagree when it comes to delineating the “start” of the neo-Victorian surge in British fiction. Some, such as Andrea Kirchknopf, argue that the trend emerged in the 1960s (53), others, such as Marie-Luise Kohlke, claim that applying chronological boundaries on the movement is not that easy (2). Often, scholars propose the 1960s as a boundary, because of the publication dates of some influential neo-Victorian novels, such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) (Kohlke 3). But as Kohlke argues, everything that was written on the Victorians after the Victorian era – which ends in 1901, with the Queen’s death – should in fact be investigated within the field of neo-Victorianism (4). As this field is still struggling with severe growing pains, the earliest neo-Victorian writings are still largely undiscovered lands. But Kohlke does admit that there is a “perceptible disjunction between the current fashion for all things Victorian and what might be called the relative unfashionableness of earlier twentieth-century works already in conversation with the resurrected Victorians” (4). The novels were there already, but as mentioned before, the domain has developed only recently. “Neo-Victorianism: The Politics and Aesthetics of Appropriation”, the first large-scale international conference dealing with neo-Victorianism, took place in September 2007, at Exeter University. Influential books dealing with the topic were mainly published in the new millennium – for example Christian Gutleben’s Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (2001) and John Kucich and Diane F. Sadoff’s Victorian Afterlife (2000). The first issue of the e-journal Neo-Victorian Studies De Schryver 5 was released in the autumn of 2008. Apart from providing articles that deal with the many examples of neo-Victorianism in novels and on the screen, the journal is very much concerned with discussing and establishing the theoretical backgrounds of neo-Victorianism. Creating firm boundaries is still precarious, as Marie-Louise Kohlke, general and founding editor of Neo-Victorian Studies , explains.

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