Abstract
Despite its contemporaneousness, the sensation novel’s reworking of the Gothic evidences its interest in the past: it is the crimes and secrets of the past which return to haunt the characters’ present (Percival Glyde’s illegitimate birth; Aurora Floyd’s marriage to her father’s groom). This interest in the past is echoed in the neo-Victorian novel, with its more insistent focus on history via its reimagining of the Victorian age. Both genres, then, evince a concern with the manner in which the past impacts on the present. This chapter explores the complex relationship between Gothic, sensation, and neo-Victorian fiction. It considers the manner in which Victorian sensation writers rewrote the Gothic novel and the subsequent reimagining of Gothic sensation fiction in twentieth-century writing, via an examination of two pairs of texts: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Daphne Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel (1951); and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Joanne Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister (1993).
An earlier version of part of Chap. 2 was published as ‘“[T]he Ghost of Myself”: Women, Art and (Neo-) Sensational Representation in Joanne Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister (1994)’ in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Vol. 7: 3 [2013], pp. 346–360).
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- 1.
Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox , Introduction to Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Peterborough: Broadview, 2006), p. 9.
- 2.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon , Lady Audley’s Secret (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2003), p. 358. The quotation is used by Lady Audley to describe her mother, but also serves as an apt description of the heroine herself.
- 3.
Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, ‘The (Mis)Shapes of Neo-Victorian Gothic: Continuations, Adaptations, Transformations’, Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence, and Degeneration in the Reimagined Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), p. 4, emphasis in original.
- 4.
Arias and Pulham, Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction, p. xi.
- 5.
Ibid., p. xv.
- 6.
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. ix.
- 7.
Kohlke and Gutleben, ‘The (Mis)Shapes of Neo-Victorian Gothic’, p. 28.
- 8.
Kym Brindle, ‘Dead Words and Fatal Secrets: Rediscovering the Sensational Document in Neo-Victorian Gothic’ in Kohlke and Gutleben, eds., Neo-Victorian Gothic, p. 279.
- 9.
Peter K. Garrett, Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 75.
- 10.
Kohlke and Gutleben, ‘The (Mis)Shapes of Neo-Victorian Gothic’, p. 4.
- 11.
Nathalie Abi- Ezzi, The Double in the Fiction of R. L. Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, and Daphne Du Maurier (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003).
- 12.
Sally Beauman, ‘Introduction’, My Cousin Rachel (London: Vintage, 2003), p. vi.
- 13.
Margaret E. Mitchell, ‘“Beautiful Creatures”: The Ethics of Female Beauty in Daphne du Maurier’s Fiction’, Women: A Cultural Review, 20:1 (2009), p. 36.
- 14.
No explicit date is provided, but clues in the narrative suggest a date of around 1840 (Philip is twenty-four, and refers to his father’s death ‘fight[ing] the French’ (113), when he was very young, which would seem to suggest he was born around the time of the Napoleonic wars , which concluded in 1815.
- 15.
The letter is given to Philip by one of the tenants on his land, in a scene which strongly echoes that in Braddon’s novel in which Luke Marks, on his deathbed, presents the note from George Talboys to Robert: ‘Sam Bate, […] who was in bed, poorly, wished very much that I would go and see him as he had something of importance to give me’ (201).
- 16.
Carla T. Kungl, ‘“The Secret of My Mother’s Madness”: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Gothic Instability’ in Ruth Bienstock Anolik, ed., Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), p. 172.
- 17.
There is an echo of this portrait in Victoria Holt’s Shivering Sands (1969), in which Miss Stacy, a character heavily influenced by Miss Havisham, paints a portrait of ‘a heavily pregnant Edith, her face twisted in an expression of something between fear and cunning’ (Shivering Sands [Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2013], p. 157), which bears little resemblance to the original. See Chap. 6 for further discussion of Holt’s novel.
- 18.
Several portraits feature in My Cousin Rachel , mainly of Philip’s ancestors, reinforcing the narrative link to the past. On Philip’s twenty-fifth birthday, his butler presents him with a portrait of himself, which Philip hangs on the wall. Though unimportant to the story, the notion of the image of the servant on the wall overlooking the inhabitants of the houses is suggestive of a central trope of the sensation novel.
- 19.
Jennifer S. Kushnier concludes that Robert Audley too attended Oxford (‘Educating Boys to be Queer: Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 30:1 [March 2002], p. 63). She associates Robert’s education with his homoerotic tendencies, but it might also be speculated that both Robert’s and Philip’s education contribute towards their misogynistic attitudes.
- 20.
George Eliot to John Blackwood (11 September 1866) in Gordon Sherman Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 1862–1868 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 309.
- 21.
Roger Michell’s 2017 film adaptation of My Cousin Rachel also emphasises Philip’s tendency towards violence : upon hearing of Ambrose’s death , he violently threatens Signor Rainaldi (0:08:56), and when he is informed of Rachel’s arrival in England, the camera cuts to the hammer he is holding, which he raises slightly as if to hit something (0:14:47).
- 22.
Mitchell, ‘Beautiful Creatures’, p. 38.
- 23.
Garrett, Gothic Reflections, p. 1.
- 24.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 16–17. There is a deliberate echo here of Virginia Woolf’s comments on killing the Angel in the House in her 1931 speech ‘Professions for Women’. Though Gilbert and Gubar’s work was first published over thirty years ago, their analysis remains relevant, as neo-Victorian writers attempt to dismantle or remove these ‘masks’, thus continuing the process of ‘kill[ing] the aesthetic ideal’.
- 25.
Contrary to this, neo-Victorian author Maggie Power suggests that ‘the angel/whore dichotomy persists, although the weight of cultural validation has shifted somewhat to the latter’ (Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘Neo-Victorian Goblin Fruit : Maggie Power on the Gothic Fascinations of Demon Lovers and Re-Imagining the Victorians’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 4:1 [2011], p. 85).
- 26.
Braddon’s Lady Audley and Aurora Floyd, and Collins’s Lydia Gwilt, for example.
- 27.
The multitude of texts presenting the heroine as an objet d’art include Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), Wood’s East Lynne, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872).
- 28.
See John Berger , Ways of Seeing, in which he proposes ‘Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ ([London: Penguin, 2008], p. 47).
- 29.
In ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Laura Mulvey argues that ‘The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure’ (in Patricia Erens, ed., Issues in Feminist Film Criticism [Bloomington: Indiana University Press], p. 33). On the male gaze in neo-Victorian writing, see Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism.
- 30.
Sophia Andres, ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Realism of the Sensation Novel’ in Gilbert, ed., A Companion to Sensation Fiction, p. 3.
- 31.
In addition to Sleep, Pale Sister, examples include Elizabeth Savage’s Willowwood (1978), Maggie Power’s trio of Neo-Victorian novels (Goblin Fruit [1984], Lily [1994] and Porphyria’s Lover [1995]), John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004), Elizabeth Hand’s Mortal Love (2004), Newbery’s Set in Stone, Fiona Mountain’s Pale as the Dead (2002), Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, and Elizabeth Hickey’s The Wayward Muse (2008)—many of which also incorporate elements of the Victorian sensation novel. The story of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood has also been adapted for television, in Desperate Romantics (BBC, 2009). While the series was undoubtedly ‘sexed up’ for the contemporary viewer, aspects of the history of Dante Gabriel Rossetti , Millais et al., including Millais’s marriage to Ruskin’s first wife following the annulment of her marriage to Ruskin , and Rossetti’s retrieval of his poetry from his wife’s grave several years after her death , are not dissimilar to the typical plots of Victorian sensation novels.
- 32.
Ruskin married Effie Gray in 1848, but the marriage was subsequently annulled on the grounds of non-consummation—critical speculation suggests Ruskin was horrified by the sight of his wife’s pubic hair (see Mary Lutyens , Millais and the Ruskins, [London: John Murray, 1967], p. 156). Effie subsequently married the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Millais .
- 33.
For the character of her heroine , Harris draws on both Ruskin’s wife and the figure of Rose La Touche , with whom Ruskin later became infatuated following the breakdown of his marriage . He met Rose when she was nine years old (like Effie in Harris’s novel), and proposed to her some years later (she declined).
- 34.
Her abilities as mesmerist are reminiscent of the character of Count Fosco in The Woman in White. This supernatural element marks a departure from the sensation novel, but reinforces the narrative’s position as Gothic text.
- 35.
Joanne Harris, Sleep, Pale Sister (London: Random House, 1994), p. 13.
- 36.
This confusion between the ‘pure’ and the ‘impure’ woman recalls the ambiguous works of the Pre-Raphaelites , such as Ford Madox Brown’s Take Your Son, Sir! in which aspects of the Madonna image are combined with those of the fallen woman.
- 37.
The uncomfortable relationship between woman as art and her male ‘creator’ also recalls Robert Browning’s poems ‘Andrea Del Sarto’ (1855) and ‘My Last Duchess’ (1842).
- 38.
Dodgson’s photograph and his relationship with Alice Liddell have inspired other neo-Victorian works, including Katie Rophie’s Still She Haunts Me (2001) and Melanie Benjamin’s Alice I Have Been (2009).
- 39.
Examples of the passive, beautiful heroine in Collins’s fiction include Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White and Hide and Seek’s Madonna.
- 40.
Laura is not the only character in the novel to be constructed in these terms: at various points in the novel, Anne Catherick, Marian Halcombe, and Madame Fosco are all compared to the figure of the child.
- 41.
The embroidered lily also features in Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1849–1850).
- 42.
See William Holman Hunt’s The Lady of Shalott (1886–1905), and John William Waterhouse’s later painting ‘I am half-sick of shadows’ said the Lady of Shalott (1916), for example.
- 43.
Edgar Allan Poe , ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846) in Edgar Allan Poe’s Complete Poetical Works (Whitefish: Kessinger Publisher, 2004), p. 225. Elisabeth Bronfen examines artistic representations of women and death in Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). The notion of the poetic death of the beautiful woman is encapsulated by Pre-Raphaelite model and Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddall , who was buried with a volume of her husband’s poetry. When he retrieved it some years later, it was rumoured that her beauty remained intact, and that her red hair had continued to grow, and filled the coffin.
- 44.
There is a contrast here with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), in which the heroine chooses to escape the constraints of patriarchal society via her suicide.
- 45.
See Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’ in Selected Essays (1931; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 140–145.
- 46.
The Woman in White’s relationship to the female Gothic is complex, given Walter’s relationship to Laura, but its highlighting of the injustices faced by women in a patriarchal society evidences its participation in this tradition.
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Cox, J. (2019). Neo-Gothic Sensations. In: Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29290-4_2
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