Abstract The thesis analyses the sensation novels of Edmund Yates and Wilkie Collins with emphasis on the representation of devotion within the texts. The thesis examines the depictions of four distinct types of character, the wife, the female friend, the disabled male and the servant, and identifies a trend within the novels of Yates and Collins whereby characters defy the conventional power structures of class and gender, obtaining agency via acts of devotion that nevertheless also perform and reinforce conventional social structures. The devotion between characters can therefore be understood as a force that ‘queers’ identity, reconfiguring relationships in ways that unsettle the bounds of heteronormativity. The sensational devotion of Yates and Collins is analysed in the context of the periodical press with which both Yates and Collins were closely involved. By using periodical articles as indicators of contemporary opinion and argument, the thesis explores Yates’s and Collins’s divergence from cultural norms, a divergence that opens up new possibilities for the sensation genre. Via these discussions the thesis seeks to re-assert Yates as a significant member of the sensation canon. 0 Devotion and Identity in the Works of Edmund Yates and Wilkie Collins by Lucy Victoria Brown Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics University of Sheffield February 2015 1 Contents Introduction p4 1. Wifely Devotion p49 2. Female Friendship and Devotion p89 3. The Devotion of the Disabled Male p130 4. Servant and Employee Devotion p179 Conclusion p227 Appendix One: Contested Authorship p236 Appendix Two: Summaries of Edmund Yates’s Novels p240 Bibliography p242 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank to my supervisors Anna Barton and Angela Wright for their support and input. In addition, I’m grateful to the Victorian Popular Fiction Association, both for existing at all and allowing me to present on aspects of my research in a friendly and stimulating environment. There have been several people who have supported me during my research and without whom I wouldn’t have completed it including: Cathryn Bancroft, Stephen Bancroft, Sal Bates, Laura Brennan, Graham Brown, Marjorie Brown, Laura Browne, Claire Cooper, Chris Edwards and Nicola Walters. Also, I would like to thank Wakefield Jelly for providing a brilliant co-working atmosphere which has helped me in the last eighteen months of my research and Create Cafe @ Wakefield One for providing an editing haven in the latter stages. 3 Introduction Whether it be a single act or a series of habitual acts through which the power of self- sacrifice is shown, or whether the absolute renunciation of selfish interests and purposes be testified by the consummation of all possible earthly self-sacrifice in the giving away of life itself, those who witness it cannot but admire...Self-sacrifice, in the abstract, is a virtue to be preached and practised; and there are few circumstances of ordinary life in which we can see it in practice without a sensation very different from that of cynical equanimity. The Saturday Review, 18641 Devotion and queerness in and sensation fiction A recurring motif of sensation fiction is the perseverance of heroic characters in unravelling the intricate plots that the genre is famous for and defending or avenging those they care about or desire. This motif is found in canonical sensation texts such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859), where both Walter Hartright and Marian Halcombe work to try and protect Laura Fairlie, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), where Robert Audley’s motivation is to uncover what happened to his friend George Talboys. This perseverance is also found in other classic sensation texts such as Collins’s Armadale (1866), where the friendship between Allan Armadale and Ozias Midwinter is integral to the unravelling of the complex plot. Devoted attachment, then, is the solution to many sensation plots but these associations are often overshadowed by the fact that the genre as a whole plays on the stereotypes of devotion to mock the sanctity of the domestic sphere. This thesis will examine hitherto unexplored representations of devotion in sensation fiction utilising the novels of Edmund Yates and Wilkie Collins. By examining the depiction of devotion in four separate relationship types, this thesis will argue that devotion in sensation fiction can offer power to subjugated characters whilst challenging the stereotypes 1 Anon, ‘Self-Sacrifice’, The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 2 January 1864, pp13-14, p13 in British Periodicals (Online) [Accessed: 28th October 2011] 4 discussed in the contemporary periodical press and generating narrative suspense within the novels themselves. Deriving from ecclesiastical Latin, the most common use of the word ‘devotion’ is in relation to religious duties, with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) citing the first recorded use in this context as circa 1225. In the 1500s the OED records another use of the word, described as, ‘The quality of being devoted to a person, cause, pursuit, etc., with an attachment akin to religious devotion; earnest addiction or application; enthusiastic attachment or loyalty.’2 This devotion to a person forms the basis of this thesis with each chapter analysing a specific type of attachment: the devotion of a wife to her husband, female friends to each other, the disabled male to the woman he loves and the devotion of servants to their employers. The phrase ‘akin to religious devotion’ mentioned in the OED definition brings with it the connotations of devotion in its more common religious sense. These attributes include ‘reverence’, ‘devoutness’ and ‘divine worship’. The application of these connotations to the practice of being devoted to another person allows for the intensity of the attachments to be realised: they are, as the OED suggests, akin to the worship of a deity. In his 2007 article ‘Henry James’s Brooksmith: Devotion and its Discontents’ Denis Flannery analyses devotion in a way which can be applied to intense human attachment. He explains that, ‘Devotion to a deity involves adherence, certainly, but also has crucial narrative effects. The devotee initiates a narrative through the act or acts of devotion, part of which is to pass on to the divinity the power to direct the narrative of the devotee’s life.’3 In terms of the devotion towards another person analysed in this thesis, the ‘crucial 2 'Devotion, N.,' Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford University Press) (Online) [Accessed March 18th 2014] 3 Denis Flannery, ‘Henry James’s Brooksmith: Devotion and its Discontents’, The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2007), pp89-106, p95 in JSTOR (Online) [Accessed: 4th March 2014] 5 narrative effects’ which Flannery describes can be applied to each type of devotion discussed. The attention given by each devotee to their ‘deity’ propels the narrative and affects, to a greater or lesser degree, the outcome of the novel. Flannery goes on to say that: There is a peculiar combination of rigidity and surrender in devotion that makes it part of a narrative will to power at the same time that it suggests either the surrender of all power to the object of devotion, or...creates a susceptibility to third parties and extraneous factors. It is not surprising then that the word also invokes a giving over to powers of evil and destruction, zealous susceptible service, and the pronouncing of a curse.4 The ‘peculiar combination’ Flannery identifies creates this ‘narrative will to power’ which is drawn from the devotee’s attachment to their ‘deity’. In terms of human devotion, it suggests that the devotee obtains agency from their attachment which they then use for the betterment of their ‘deity’. Flannery’s framing of devotion as something which encourages action is integral to this thesis. However, where I depart from Flannery’s theory is his argument that devotion either suggests surrender or susceptibility. Sustained analysis of the Yates and Collins novels examined in this thesis will demonstrate that power is more fluid than Flannery allows. While devotion to the ‘divinity’ does ‘direct’ the life of the devotee, within the relationships depicted in several novels by Yates and Collins this power relationship is inverted, providing the devotee with the ability to ‘direct the narrative’ of the ‘deity’.5 Within the sensation canon generally, devotion takes on a complex, and occasionally sinister, role. In challenging the sanctity of the domestic sphere, the sensation novel mocks the stereotypes of the devoted wife and loyal servants. Bruce Robbins points out that, 4 Denis Flannery, ‘Henry James’s Brooksmith: Devotion and its Discontents’, The Yearbook of English Studies, p95 5 Further to this, Flannery’s argument about ‘giving over to powers of evil’ is pertinent to the first chapter in this thesis on criminal wives: the devotion expressed by the wives is used for criminal purposes but their involvement in these criminal activities is sanctioned because it forms part of their wifely devotion. 6 ‘There was in fact a sudden and well-documented new anxiety on the part of masters and mistresses about the damage that servant spies and informants could do. If they were groundless, the fears were nonetheless quite real.’6 These fears of danger within the home expand beyond employees to include interlopers within the family as well. Although Robbins concedes these fears were ‘groundless’, they still circulated and the sensation novel exploited and exacerbated them. In two canonical sensation texts by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the word ‘devotion’ is used in ways which dilute the intensity of its original meaning. These two texts invert devotion, taking the idea of something expressed by an inferior towards a superior and reversing it.