Wilkie Collins, writing in the same decade and same genre as Braddon, was bolder in creating criminal women. Using sensational elements to startle and shock, he structured his work around people rather than events at the same time that he deliberately challenged the conventions of middle-class Victorian society. His women are more realistic and their motives more complex than those of most sensation novelists, in part because he was more adept at character development. But he was also convinced that women were not only as intelligent and determined as men, but equally convulsed by the agonies of moral choice and equally capable of asocial or amoral solutions.

Questioning the Victorian convention that self-abnegating devotion to family was a woman's finest aspiration, Collins repeatedly raised the issues of women's self-protection and self-respect. Collins's women struggle in a society in which they are unequal to men politically, socially, economically, and sometimes legally. Their recurrent, “unfeminine” boldness implies that radical action offers women an option for dealing with domestic problems that the law or social custom cannot resolve.

Prominent among his concerns was the violence which stemmed from women's vulnerability in male-dominated Victorian society. His novels make clear that women's dilemmas grow out of domestic conflicts, based in the sexual tensions between them and men. Unlike romantic fiction, where men are defenders and protectors, in his work they are frequently women's adversaries. Wife abuse, for instance, which Collins uses as background material in The Woman in White (1860-61) and Armadale (1866) becomes a central theme in Man and Wife (1870).

Domestic violence figured prominently in the works of other Victorian novelists—not only those of Dickens and Eliot, but also Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), William Makepeace Thackeray's The Newcomes (1854-55), and Dinah Mulloch Craik's A Life for a Life (1859). Sensation novels, like G. A. Lawrence's Barren Honour (1868), included abusive, and often drunken, husbands. But before Collins, the realistic and frightening underside of unhappy marriages was a minor theme, frequently obscured by a conventionally happy ending. Unlike his contemporaries, Collins made his women strike back. Before Armadale, physically abused wives died or ran away; they did not kill. Women characters who murdered men did so for other reasons, like revenge or ambition. Afterward, the moral quandaries posed by victim-precipitated violence became an increasingly common theme in fiction—in Eliot's Daniel Deronda, for instance, or Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. In one real-life adaptation of this explanation for domestic violence, Adelaide Bartlett's defense attorney combined the argument that her husband had been too sexually aggressive with the claim that she was nevertheless innocent of his death. To the court's astonishment the jury found her innocent.¹

While he does not condone murder, literally or metaphorically, Collins repeatedly stresses the social causes of criminality—alienation, abuse, economic deprivation—and shows profound sympathy for women faced with the unpalatable choice between suffering and violence. Using crime as a metaphor for rebellion against the status quo, Collins frequently makes his women who do kill strong and resourceful. His innovation is important; with the exception of Thackeray's Becky Sharp, no woman criminal in earlier English fiction was either particularly intelligent or particularly rebellious. After Collins, they frequently were.

Winifred Hughes points out, however, that “equivocal heroines” like Collins's were denounced by Victorian literary critics as morally repulsive and held up as examples of the chief threat to the “social and moral fabric of Victorian England.”² Because womanly demureness and dependence were seen as the cornerstones of society, and women were revered for being different from—and better than—men, the aggressive boldness of Collins's women was intolerable to many.³ Collins also infuriated the critics by assailing the Victorian assumption that depravity was a primary cause of women's criminality. His women are undeniably sexual creatures, conscious of their own physical and emotional desires and willing to play on men's infatuation to fulfill their ambitions. But Collins is very careful to establish that neither sexual immorality nor uncontrolled sexual desire is the primary factor in any character's decision to murder.

Collins's purpose is neither to idealize women nor to denigrate them, but to stress their normalcy, even when they are criminals. While his narrators are sometimes critical of women who commit acts of violence, the motives for those crimes are always carefully defined. I have already pointed out that Collins described recurrent physical abuse as a cause for violence; the related issue of financial dependence, which resulted from the profound difficulty women experienced finding legitimate, profitable employment, also figures repeatedly in Collins's assessment of women's motives for crime.

To emphasize the seriousness of the underlying social issues implicit in women's deviance, he strove for verisimilitude in their behavior even in his most sensational novels. His women killers most often use poison rather than knives or guns, just as women did in real life. Collins also emphasizes premeditation—a necessary component of a poisoning murder but a relatively unusual theme in Victorian fiction. One reason others avoided it may have been that describing someone plotting a murder could undermine any sympathy a reader might feel for her. There may, in fact, be circumstances when stabbing a man through the heart is a more palatable murder than lacing his soup with arsenic. But Collins took the risk.

Realistic murder weapons are only one way Collins drew on real criminal cases as sources for his fiction. As many critics point out, he often adopted specific details, putting the incriminating nightgown of the Constance Kent case (which was finally resolved in 1864) into The Moonstone (1868). Sometimes actual cases which highlighted social problems or miscarriages of justice suggested the theme of a novel, as the Susannah Palmer wife-abuse case (1869) did for Man and Wife (1870). In other novels, tidbits from spectacular cases, including the poisoning charges against Madeline Smith and the execution of Maria Manning, crop up randomly, along with allusions to their press coverage and their seemingly endless fascination for the public.⁴ That is, Collins deliberately associated his criminals with notorious women overtly at odds with Victorian mores.

Another way Collins worked for verisimilitude was to use letters and diaries as a technique for character development. In part a reversion to the first-person tradition of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel, the technique was even more directly related to the Victorian habit of voluminous correspondence and extensive journal-keeping. In Madeleine Smith's spectacular murder trial (1857), the most damaging evidence of her potential (but not proven) criminality was the explicit language of her love letters; unguarded letters also helped to convict Christiana Edwards, Florence Maybrick, and Edith Carew of murder before century's end. The similarly revelatory and incriminating power of a diary had been demonstrated, as well, by the Robinson case in 1858, when Mrs. Robinson's effusive but probably self-deluding descriptions of her sexual liaison were the grounds for her husband's unsuccessful divorce suit.⁵

When Collins's women speak for themselves, either in letters or diaries, they are more assertive and direct than they are in conversation or when their words and deeds are filtered through the perceptions of a masculine narrator. In Armadale and Man and Wife, for instance, women's diaries play out the conflicting emotions and torturous decisions crucial to the planned murders, so Lydia Gwilt and Hester Dethridge are developed more sympathetically than they could otherwise be. Self-explanation, which admittedly is sometimes strictly self-justification, here serves the more valuable task of describing provocation and motive from a woman's perspective. Collins ultimately overworked the device. In his later novels, diaries provide the only evidence of guilt, and they are often conveniently “discovered” to prove a case against a killer when the plot provides no other evidence. More disturbing, he came to accept the cliché asserting women's particular compulsion to confess. But in the earlier work internal debates between good and evil, like Lydia Gwilt's in Armadale, resemble the agonizing, often subconscious, torture Dostoyevsky portrays in his criminals.

As Collins became increasingly committed to using fiction as a vehicle for social criticism, he turned for source material to the debates raging in the medical and scientific communities about the causes of crime. Curiously, despite his iconoclastic treatment of heredity versus environment (in The Legacy of Cain) or the relationship of insanity to criminality (in Jezebel's Daughter), he ignored the contemporary crime theories most directly related to women—the ones that proposed biological explanations for women's violent behavior. He never suggests, as his medical contemporaries would have done, that the hallucinations that tempt Hester Dethridge to murder may be related to menopause or that Lydia Gwilt's periodic depression may be hormonally based. If it was delicacy that kept Collins from describing women's bodily functions, it is an ironic contrast to his forthright treatment of other taboo subjects, such as prostitution, which he insists was fostered by economic factors, not sexual depravity. It is more tempting to think that he rejected biomedical explanations for the same reasons they are so unpalatable today: that they are so often employed, wittingly or not, to denigrate women.

The Woman in White was Collins's first attempt to create women criminals. The protagonist is fractured into three characters: one strong and two weak. Marian Halcombe is a capable and potentially rebellious woman; her half-sister, Laura Fairlie Glyde, is an abused wife; and Laura's illegitimate half-sister, Anne Catherick, is a misused daughter. Paralleling the protagonists is a triad of female antagonists: Mrs. Rubelle and the Countess Fosco, the agents of the novel's charming villain, and Mrs. Catherick, Anne's mother, a cold and calculating woman who married one man she despised to cover up her sexual indiscretion and then blackmailed another into supporting her for life.

One important question the novel raises is who fights women's battles. And the answer—except in Mrs. Catherick's case—is that men do. Initially Marian thinks herself capable of protecting her sister from Percival Glyde; when she sees the bruise he has left on Laura's arm, she realizes she would have killed him had she been his wife: “She showed me the marks. I was past grieving over them, past crying over them, past shuddering over them. They say we are either better than men, or worse. If the temptation that has fallen in some women's way, and made them worse, had fallen in mine at that moment—Thank God! my face betrayed nothing that his wife could read. The gentle, innocent, affectionate creature thought I was frightened for her and sorry for her—and thought no more” (book. 2, chap. 7). But Marian does not kill Glyde, or Count Fosco either. She can anticipate their moves and repel their advances, but she is incapable of making them stop or forcing them to admit their guilt. Despite that frustration, she is adamant that they pay for Laura's abuse and pushes Walter Hartright toward revenge.

In the novels that followed, women take their own revenge against the abuses they suffer. They are victims of abuse like Laura and Anne, but share Marian's intelligence and Mrs. Catherick's amoral self-interest. The combination makes them formidable and almost always potentially sympathetic. None of them is more carefully developed than the spectacular Lydia Gwilt, the red-haired villainess of Armadale. Gwilt is an unusual protagonist for a Victorian novel, and Collins is ambivalent about her and the implications of her behavior.

Collins makes Gwilt reprehensible, as any character who plans a cold-blooded murder must be, and at the same time the most vibrant, natural, and candid character in the novel. She treats murder as an acceptable method of achieving revenge and employs her practiced sensuality to enthrall the men whose cooperation she needs for her various schemes. She sets ethical considerations aside at crucial moments and represses her guilty conscience when it inconveniently interferes with her plans. While she is resolutely amoral, Gwilt's driving motivation is identical with that of conventional Victorian heroines: the emotional and financial security provided through marriage. This passionate struggle between her willingness to kill and her craving for love is the substance of her character.

Gwilt's physical appearance reflects this duality. Her beautiful face, capped by luxuriant red hair, is the clearest evidence of her womanliness; at the same time it embodies her potential for evil. Described as “the one unpardonably remarkable shade of colour which the prejudice of the Northern nations never entirely forgives” (bk. 3, chap. 10), her hair, like her character, is “hideous” (3, 10) and “magnificent” (4,7).

Gwilt consciously, deliberately, uses her beauty to advance her schemes of revenge, fraud, and murder, likening herself to Eve in undermining men's power. She is not only more beautiful and more intelligent than the conventional fictional heroine, but she is also older and more sexually experienced. She uses the skills she has gained with great deliberation and considerable theatricality. Flattered by her smiles and her artfully discreet caresses, men acquiesce to her requests because they hope that she will repay their devotion; this adds a specifically sexual element to Gwilt's appeal which Collins makes no attempt to disguise. Her “sexy” approach is not infallible; some men are immune and others discover some sinister quality in Gwilt's behavior which turns them away from her. But when her sex appeal works, it is a powerful weapon.

In the crucial scene which begins her seduction of Ozias Midwinter, the narrator is outspokenly explicit: “Perfectly modest in her manner, possessed to perfection of the graceful restraints and refinements of a lady, she had all the allurements that feast the eye, all the Siren-invitations that seduce the sense—a subtle suggestiveness in her silence, and a sexual sorcery in her smile” (bk. 4, chap. 7).

Having worked her magic, she carefully engineers Midwinter's departure to inflame his passion and make him more vulnerable at their next encounter. Though briefly appalled by her own hypocrisy, she acknowledges the physical as well as emotional pleasure of her conquest and is candidly unembarrassed by her sexual power. Indeed, as she undresses before the mirror and swirls her hair around her naked shoulders she relishes the thought of Midwinter's being there to admire her. Though hardly bold by twentieth-century standards, Gwilt's method for learning Midwinter's secret identity—by kissing him passionately on the mouth to end his resistance—emphasizes her practiced awareness of male vulnerability.

But Gwilt deceives herself, for she is as driven by passion as the man she wants to manipulate and she wants passion to be the expression of love and devotion rather than simply a physical act. When Midwinter's lust for her is satiated and his emotional attachment to Armadale surpasses his feelings for her, Gwilt is thrown into despair.

Collins's contemporary, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, as we have seen, hid Lady Audley's true character behind a mask of delicate beauty (Lady Audley's Secret, 1862), and his colleague, Charles Dickens, gave the heartless Estella strikingly good looks (Great Expectations, 1860-61). But while the sinister aspect of Gwilt's exceptional beauty follows convention, coupling her beauty with an unusually astute and analytical mind and a highly developed cynicism is unprecedented. Unlike Lady Audley, or George Eliot's Hetty Sorrel, who delight in their prettiness for its own sake and only secondarily for the attention it brings, Gwilt considers her face and figure a marketable asset. When she invests unsuccessfully, she pragmatically cuts her losses and tries another approach—with another man.

Gwilt plans her boldest crime for financial gain. It involves not only fraud but the unprovoked murder of an essentially harmless, if rather annoying, young man. Her scheme forces the reader to think of her not as a victim striking back but as a desperate woman grasping for security. On the other hand, she makes the choices she does partially because of the failure her life has been. The question Collins raises in the book's introduction persists: is Lydia Gwilt reprehensible or is she a woman whose admittedly criminal behavior is the direct consequence of women's social and political inequality?

Collins maintains that Gwilt's complex and contradictory character was developed by an equally complex and contradictory environment, a society which offered women too few opportunities and held them to too many constraints. That criminals like Lydia Gwilt are made, not born, is one of the novel's central themes. She was drawn into crime initially as a vulnerable young woman alone in the world, preyed upon by a series of unscrupulous characters eager to turn either her beauty or her brains to their own advantage. No challenging legitimate occupation offered a workable alternative. The lawyer Pedgift grudgingly acknowledges that she would have been a formidable attorney if the Bar were open to women, but it was not. And though suited by her education to be a governess, her one attempt was a resounding disaster.

Lydia did no better at marriage. She was convicted of poisoning her abusive first husband, though she was saved from execution by the power of indignant public opinion: “The verdict of the Law was reversed by general acclamation; and the verdict of the newspapers carried the day” (bk. 4, chap. 15). While Pedgift deplores this ironic, chivalric wrinkle in the Victorian reaction to women killers, contemporary readers knew perfectly well that it was predictable: no middle-class woman was likely to be executed for such a crime.

To some extent Gwilt is a liberated woman, who would be shocking even if murder were not part of her plan. What she really wants is the power to make her own decisions, find her own financial security, direct her own destiny. Yet as intensely as she wants independence, she repeatedly surrenders it because she can imagine no way to survive on her own. Though she rebels against the constraints which make women subservient, she repeatedly chooses marriage as a means to fulfillment. There is a powerful irony in Gwilt's intention of becoming Allan Armadale's widow without ever having been his wife. Widowhood, in this case, means financial security, the surest means to independence.

Despite her elaborate plans, Gwilt is a strikingly unsuccessful criminal. None of her schemes turns out as she intends: she tries to murder Armadale by masking the taste of poison with brandy; his allergy to the alcohol makes him drop the glass. She arranges for him to be murdered as sea, yet he escapes; she tries again to poison him but he changes bedrooms. In addition to being incredibly unlucky, she is plagued by an overwhelming sense of shame and guilt that disrupts her concentration at critical moments and drives her to laudanum for temporary peace. And most debilitating of all is her emotional dependence on the self-righteously moral Midwinter, who is incapable of loving her as she craves to be loved.

Collins's resolution to the complex conflict between Lydia Gwilt and her society is to have her commit suicide. But does she kill herself because she is shamed by Midwinter's goodness and wants to spare him the agony of a guilty wife, as she maintains? Has she been worn down by the emotional trauma of planning a murder that has been foiled by coincidence at every turn? Does she suspect that this time her luck has run out and she will be denounced and arrested? The answer is that Collins accepted the convention that demanded that criminal women whom society cannot punish must destroy themselves.

Barbara Gates concludes that Gwilt's suicide is the most shocking assault on Victorian sensibilities that Collins could conceive; she argues that the reading public feared suicide because it was “subversive,” signalling as no other action could a total rejection of the status quo. And while she concentrates on suicide as the novelist's decision instead of as the inevitable consequence of Gwilt's character, she does comment: “Collins's novels involving suicides are not formulaic. No suicide … is unmotivated, nor is self-destruction divorced from the painful social conflicts that beset character.”⁶ Gates also stresses the ambivalent emotions that Gwilt provokes in readers, seeming both beyond redemption and at the same time redeemed by her guilty conscience and her emotional desperation.

Had Collins allowed Gwilt to survive, even though her plan to kill Armadale failed, he would have been bolder yet. Had she remained unscathed like her respectable yet totally corrupt associates, the abortionist Dr. Downward and the con artist Mrs. Oldershaw, Gwilt would have posed a more serious threat to the social order. But Collins was not ready—yet—to write a novel where a beautiful woman could make crime pay.

In The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins retreated from the outrage evoked by Lydia Gwilt and provided a mid-Victorian look at two women suspected of theft, not guilty of murder. However, the assumptions his investigator, Sergeant Cuff, makes about women's motives and proclivities for crime demonstrate that Collins's interest in deviant women was expanding to include the explicit impact of social class on the motives and consequences of crime.

Rosanna Spearman and Rachel Verinder are as different as two women can be. Rosanna, an unattractive, belligerent woman with a deformed body and a limited education, is a former convict who has been rehabilitated as a housemaid. She is nostalgic for her old, criminal life and insists that she never felt shame and unworthiness while she was a thief. “It was only when they taught me at the Reformatory to feel my own degradation, and to try for better things, that the days grew long and weary,” she explains morosely (pt. 2, chap. 4). Rachel, in contrast, is beautiful, rich, and full of enthusiasm for life. Theft and murder are totally alien to her experience, but in an ironic sense her encounter with them transforms her from a child to a resolute woman.

To Sergeant Cuff, the London detective hired to solve the mystery of Rachel's missing diamond, the heiress is as guilty as the felon-turned-housemaid. The motive is as clear to him as the culprits are. He believes Rachel got rid of the diamond because she needed ready cash to pay off debts she wanted to keep secret from her mother. She has run up gambling debts, he suggests, or must pay for some “needed service” on which he does not elaborate but which seems a clear allusion to an illicit abortion. Furthermore, he clearly implies that her crime is not at all unusual. Cuff's view is that women—including upper-class women—customarily steal if they need money, regardless of their social standing and position. In fact, he seems to blame Rosanna's backsliding into crime on Rachel too. The maid's skills as a fence, he asserts, would be useful in getting rid of the diamond once it had disappeared. Cuff insists that most convicted working-class women “go straight” if they receive kind treatment in domestic service as Rosanna has; thus, in his mind, Rachel is guilty not only of stealing her own gem to pay for her sins, but also of selfishly leading Rosanna back into a life of crime by using her contacts with the underworld.⁷

Cuff is antagonistic to Rachel not only because of her deliberately suspicious and provocative behavior, but because she does not behave as he believes a lady ought to. He resents her arrogance and despises her power to frustrate his investigations. While he is blunt—even insulting—with Rosanna, his ego is not bruised when he talks to her; thus, he is more flexible in his judgments. The class distinctions between the two women work the opposite way for the Verinder employees; unlike Cuff, they are willing to condemn the working girl rather than the lady. The principal narrator, the butler Bettridge, categorically refuses to believe any of Cuff's accusations of Rachel. It is inconceivable to him that she is guilty. And while he has been kind to Rosanna and gone out of his way to accommodate her strange behavior, he accepts her guilt when she emerges shaken and white from her interview with Cuff. His conclusion is also class based: he blames her crime on her inappropriate infatuation with Franklin Blake rather than on the influence of her former life. The unhappy conclusion of these suspicions, compounded by Blake's rejection, is that Rosanna drowns herself.

The doomed Rosanna is a particular criminal type, one for whom Collins felt a great deal of sympathy. As the illegitimate child of a prostitute whose “gentleman” deserted her, Rosanna is “typical” in the sense that her social and economic environment has been conducive to a life of crime. In addition, she has been robbed of love and attention, including the love of the father whom she has never met. Surely her yearning for paternal affection explains her attachment to Bettridge as a father-figure and also her passion for Franklin Blake, which is a combination of sexual passion and hero-worship. Her deprivations, in combination with her physical deformity, label her an outsider and contribute to her paranoia, her sense of alienation, and her frustrated passion. Collins never suggests that her feelings are unjustified; rather he makes them the background for her criminal career and the direct cause of her ultimate self-destruction.

Collins is playing games with the reader's moral judgment. On the one hand, Rosanna is unfairly accused of theft on the basis of her past life, ungainly body, and “strangeness.” She is driven to suicide by others' suspicions and her own alienation. Yet Rosanna's willingness to cover up what she thinks is Blake's guilt by stealing the incriminating nightgown and her pride in her old career are explicit in the suicide letter she leaves for him: “In the days when I was a thief, I had run fifty times greater risks, and found my way out of difficulties to which this difficulty was mere child's play. I had been apprenticed, as you may say, to frauds and deceptions—some of them on such a grand scale, and managed so cleverly, that they became famous, and appeared in the newspapers. Was such a little thing as the keeping of the nightgown likely to weigh on my spirits. … What nonsense to ask that question!” (pt. 2, chap. 4).

Rachel is both more conventional than Rosanna and more appealing to Collins' middle-class audience. She is a classic heroine—virtuous and ultimately happily married. But she is also unusual; the lawyer Bruff—who loves her like a daughter—finds her independence perplexing. Rachel's boldness provides a stark contrast to Rosanna's despair. The advantages of wealth, beauty, and determination allow her to squelch the suspicions that hover around her. Collins's message is clear: women, if they are to survive, must save themselves. It was a theme to which he returned, with some startling innovations, in Man and Wife.

That novel's dramatic theme—that wife abuse cuts across class and age barriers and encompasses not only violence but also legal manipulation and social persecution—suggests that murder may be the only way for women to save themselves. To arrive at this radical conclusion, Collins describes several unhappy marriages—always stressing that women suffer more from marital discord than men do. In particular he dramatizes the dilemma which plagued abused wives: the impossibility of obtaining protection from their husbands through court-enforced legal separations, and the difficulty in supporting themselves when forced to earn their own living.

There are three unhappy wives in this novel: the heroine, Anne Silvester Delamayn, her mother, Anne Silvester, and the cook, Hester Dethridge. While both Anne and her mother show flashes of rage at their situation, neither murders. Clearly it takes a particular kind of woman to strike back, a woman like Hester Dethridge, whose torture extends over a protracted period of time and who finally refuses to tolerate any more misery. Collins is attentive here to the impact of personality and class on behavior; while working-class Hester grows more assertive as she is forced to deal with her miserable marriage, middle-class Anne becomes increasingly passive and withdrawn.

But the similarities between different social groups in terms of domestic violence are more striking here than their differences. While Collins is sensitive to the more overt suffering in the working class, where women without family or political connections have less opportunity to change their circumstances, he insists that there are victims of domestic violence throughout Victorian society.⁸ The Dethridges' story, for example, epitomizes working-class abuse: physical violence, drunkenness, exploitation, and emotional torture. Yet the same elements, in an only slightly more refined way, characterize the Delamayn marriage. Like Joel Dethridge, Geoffrey Delamayn is a reprobate, the kind of man who kicks a dog because its barking annoys him. He is also profligate, arrogant, and greedy. Delamayn drinks too much and restrains Anne's freedom by holding her a virtual prisoner in their home.

But at least as vitriolic as Collins's attack on individual men is his assault on the laws of a supposedly civilized country which offer women no protection. In Victorian England, the legal remedies for unworkable marriages were divorce and death. A divorce, as Collins and his readers were well aware, was extremely difficult to obtain. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 established civil authority for divorce actions, but made the conditions under which women could win a legal case much more stringent than for men. Furthermore, the cost was prohibitively high, so that the majority of the population (especially women) could not afford to bring suit. And though divorce was difficult, death was no more reliable—except in fiction, where novelists conveniently killed off unsuitable spouses.

Hester Dethridge's story, the tale of an industrious and virtuous wife abused by a lazy, drunken husband, is not only pathetic but based specifically on a contemporary case. During Christmas week of 1868, a woman named Susannah Palmer was charged by her husband with assault. He declared that she had struck him in the hand with a kitchen knife, threatening his life. She was arrested, tried, and convicted, but the court and the press (especially her most outspoken champion, the journalist and women's rights activist Frances Power Cobbe) made clear that Mrs. Palmer was the victim rather than the criminal.⁹

Testimony demonstrated that throughout her marriage, her husband had savagely beaten her, turned her out of the house at night, openly lived with a mistress, and frequently disappeared for months at a time, leaving her to support herself and her children by working as a charwoman. Periodically, however, he returned home and helped himself to her wages, sold her furniture to raise more cash, abused her physically, and disappeared again until his next visit. Under the law, he had every right to her property and she had no right to a divorce. Nor were there any legal provisions that could effectively protect her from beating. The law said he could be fined, whipped, or jailed if she complained that he abused her. But there was no way to prevent him from returning home if he chose to do so—and he chose to come often enough to avoid being charged with desertion.

In transforming Palmer's misery into fiction, Collins elaborates in great detail the abuses that Hester Dethridge suffers at her husband's hands. Refusing to work, Joel Dethridge spends all of Hester's small inheritance in drinking and enjoying himself. When she is forced to find a job to support them, his obnoxious behavior at the places where she works repeatedly gets her fired. He sells the furniture she has bought to get money to buy drink; he goes away and returns at will, always managing to trace her no matter where she has moved. And he beats her mercilessly, knocking out teeth and finally hitting her so hard that her ability to speak is impaired.

Hester does not suffer silently. She repeatedly seeks legal help to protect herself, but her quests are always useless. No mechanism exists, she is told, to keep her husband away from her if he chooses to stay: “If he had run off from me, something might have been done (as I understood) to protect me. But he stuck to his wife—as long as I could make a farthing he stuck to his wife. Being married to him I had no right to have left him; I was bound to go with my husband; there was no escape for me” (chap. 54, pt. 6). Nor can his legal right to her possessions be abridged. The only protection for her property could have been written into a premarital legal agreement, a provision Hester had not known about before she married and probably could not have afforded if she had.

Even more than the squalid living conditions and the physical danger to which Hester is exposed by her marriage, her emotional isolation is a major factor in her decision to kill. Unlike Palmer, for whom Frances Power Cobbe's advocacy secured a job which protected her from her husband, Hester Dethridge's appeals for help are rebuffed. Her family scorns her for marrying beneath her, and her clergyman is unable to cope with her anguish. While she earns the admiration and sympathy of her employers, none of them will tolerate the commotion that her husband's presence inevitably brings.

Moving constantly in a hopeless effort to forestall her husband's return, Hester lacks even the comfort that familiar surroundings and valued possessions can provide. She explains her dilemma this way:

Where was the remedy? There was no remedy, but to try and escape him once more. Why didn't I have him locked up [for beating me]? What was the good of having him locked up? In a few weeks he would be out of the prison; sober and penitent, and promising amendment—and then when the fit took him, there he would be, the same furious savage that he had been often and often before. My heart got hard under the hopelessness of it; and dark thoughts began to beset me, mostly at night. About this time I began to say to myself, “There's no deliverance from this but in death—his death or mine.”

[chap. 54]

But she cannot kill herself. Her misery does not make her overwrought and excitable but cold and hard. She tortures herself by feeling that anyone else, given the same provocation, would have risen above the temptation she feels. In describing her resolution to kill, she comments: “Horrid—I am well aware this is horrid. Nobody else, in my place, would have ended as wickedly as that. All the other women in the world, tried as I was, would have risen superior to the trial” (chap. 54). In her resolution to kill him, she feels herself cut off from humanity and from forgiveness. But her desperation is so strong that she cannot stop herself.

Hester's compulsion distinguishes her from Lydia Gwilt, whose decision to murder was always a choice from which she maintained intellectual and even emotional distance. Dethridge, once committed to murder, hopes for outside forces to intervene but never wavers in her own determination. Concocting an elaborate plan, she manages to gain access to the room in which her drunken husband has locked himself and smothers him. The police conclude he died of natural causes brought about by acute alcoholism. Dethridge's guilty conscience and her dread of discovery are complex emotions, and Collins wants the reader to struggle with her culpability. She has committed a premeditated murder to which she has not confessed. She feels no remorse, but she is haunted by the memory of her crime. Not only does she constantly punish herself with self-imposed silence and isolation, but she is tortured by the recurrent vision of a spirit, a specter of herself, urging her to kill again:

I felt … a creeping chill come slowly over my flesh, and then a suspicion of something hidden near me, which would steal out and show itself if I looked that way. …

The Thing stole out, dark and shadowy in the pleasant sunlight. At first I saw only the dim figure of a woman. After a little it began to get plainer, brightening from within outward—brightening, brightening, brightening, till it set before me the vision of My Own Self, repeated as if I were standing before a glass—the double of myself looking at me with my own eyes … ; and it said to me, with my own voice, “Kill him.”

[chap. 54, pt. 14]

Collins leaves Hester's urge to murder open to interpretation. Many of the novel's characters suspect she is insane. The medical profession would, no doubt, have used menopause to explain her visions and the resulting mania. The devout could point to the repressed remnants of her orthodox Christianity, which would condemn her for breaking the commandments no matter how profound her provocation. But closest to Collins's own point is that she cannot stop herself by force of will when confronted with a scene which recalls so clearly her own miserable marriage. Her second murder is not a random crime: she is an avenging protectress, not a demonic force, for she kills Geoffrey Delamayn at the moment he is about to murder his wife. Hester's urgency to save Anne, with whom she feels kinship as an abused woman, is compounded by her violent hatred of Delamayn, hatred based in part on his disposition and in part on his knowledge of her guilty past.

Although Anne is responsible to some extent for her unhappy marriage by having forced Delamayn into a loveless union to legitimize their child who was then born dead, the novel's message is clear: men have no right to abuse their wives physically or psychologically. If they do, Collins warns, they will be destroyed either by the vengeance of a misused woman—like Dethridge—or by the poison of their own warped values—like Anne's father.

The consequences of the second murder complicate the novel's other point, that women must protect themselves and each other, for Anne's dramatic rescue is won at the expense of Hester's sanity. In each case Hester's motives are clear and her violent actions are not only justifiable but even beneficial. Had she not killed Joel Dethridge, sooner or later he would have killed her, and if she had not killed Geoffrey Delamayn, Anne would have been slain. Yet what the law and the reader might well excuse destroys Hester Dethridge: her mind is unhinged and she is institutionalized.

Collins wants it both ways. The novel brings the burning social issue of physical wife abuse to the public's attention without risking condemnation for letting a woman killer escape unpunished. In some ways, of course, mental oblivion may be the kindest resolution for a woman who cannot forgive herself for violence. But for a novelist who insisted that fiction had the right and responsibility to confront serious social issues head on and to treat women as responsible adults, it is disturbingly conventional. What, we are tempted to ask, kept him from having her not charged with murder on the basis of self-defense or having her tried and acquitted?

The novels after Man and Wife are neither as original nor as well-developed as those Collins wrote in the 1860s. As he became increasingly committed to the novel as a platform for social criticism, his work became cruder, and often more rigid and conventional, in its presentation of dangerous women. A typical example is his examination of obsessive mother-love in Jezebel's Daughter (1880). Yet some of the novels elaborate ideas raised earlier and hint at the direction that popular mystery fiction was headed in its treatment of women criminals: toward a greater complexity of motivation and an increasing urgency for self-protection.

The Legacy of Cain (1888) is the most interesting of the later books. Dominated by women, it sustains reader curiosity if not critical approval. Characteristically, Collins has a thesis to exploit as well as a story to tell; because the two are so closely intertwined, the result contributes several new ideas to his treatment of the criminal personality and the effects of heredity and environment on criminal behavior. The plot is dramatic, if contrived: two girls—Helena, the daughter of a clergyman, and Eunice, the daughter of a murderess—are brought up to believe they are really sisters. Since their home is not only comfortably middle class but also devoutly religious, and each girl is treated in exactly the same way, the narrator suggests that if one of them can be provoked to murder it will be the daughter of the criminal, not the daughter of the clergyman. Yet just the opposite happens. In fact, Helena Gracedieu is Collins's most cruel and vicious woman and the only one impervious to her own guilt.

The novel raises some provocative questions about the genesis of a woman's criminal behavior. If deprivation, abuse, passion, greed, or self-preservation does not provide the motive for crime, what does? In each of Collins's earlier works at least one of those factors was present. But Helena seems at first to act only for spite. On the other hand, she is intelligent and ambitious, bored with her housekeeping duties, and frustrated by her repressed sexuality. Nor is there any reason for her to think that the future holds the chance of much improvement. So while Collins intends her to be reprehensible, it is hard to ignore the roots of her malaise. Her situation is a variation on Lydia Gwilt's.

The attempted murder, though, is blatant enough to eliminate any sympathy for her. She does not love the man she tries to kill although they are engaged, and there is nothing to be gained financially whether she marries him or not. He has not abused her, although he does not love her; she is more self-reliant than he is and perfectly capable of getting along without him. But the fact that he is not enthralled with her annoys her, and so she poisons him. At least that way she can be sure he will not marry her sister, of whom she is jealous.

The inescapable conclusion is that she is a vicious human being. The narrator observes, in analyzing Helena's “diabolical depravity,” “the doctrine of hereditary transmission of moral qualities must own that it has overlooked the fertility (for growth of good and for growth of evil equally) which is inherent in human nature. There are virtues that exalt us, and vices that degrade us, whose mysterious origin is, not in our parents, but in ourselves” (Postscript). Helena feels no remorse, and apparently no shame for attempted murder. After serving her sentence, she moves to America and becomes an outspoken, even passionate and extremely popular advocate of women's rights.

Collins had been building up to such an ending during his entire career as a novelist. Minor characters in earlier books survived their criminal acts unscathed. Heroines accused of moral, but not criminal, deviance pursued and won their right to happiness. But never before had a woman guilty of violent crime been impervious to social disgrace and her own conscience. Helena is not admirable, but she is aggressive and yet womanly; she explodes the persistent Victorian cliché that criminal women were inevitably doomed because they had denied their essential womanhood. She never considers suicide and certainly does not become insane. And the narrator, pressed to say that she will pay for her crimes, dismisses the likelihood of the “poetical justice” she deserves with a scornful “poetical fiddlesticks!” (chap. 62).

Collins, exploring subjects and developing characters unimagined before, is explicit about the complexity of women's emotions, their cultural oppression, and their sexual passions. Yet sometimes he faults women for being manipulative, much as he criticizes men for their inhumanity to women. The effect is to emphasize the similarity, rather than the difference, of sexual exploitation and criminal motivation in both genders. His candor and zeal in assaulting the self-satisfied hypocrisy of the Victorian bourgeoisie and the oppressive respectability of the novelists who wrote for them produced radical changes in the way criminal women were conceived in the fiction that followed.

But it would be wrong to suggest that Collins transcended his era. The novelist's work is full of conflicts between radicalism and orthodoxy which leave the reader ultimately uncertain about his views. For example, in Man and Wife, his most outspoken assault on male privilege, he seems torn between deploring the anti-woman bias which allowed society to ignore, if not condone, wife abuse, and advocating the view that women's “natural condition” was to be dependent on men. Similarly, he stresses women's capacity to commit crimes for self-aggrandizement and their need to commit crimes in self-defense, but until his last novel he never lets a woman escape punishment. He was willing to show women shaking their collective fist at society, but he was not ready to let them break down its gender barriers.

Notes

1. See [Mary S.] Hartman, Victorian Murderesses, 179, 213 [London: Robson Books, 1977].

2. [Winifred] Hughes, Maniac in the Cellar, 46 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980].

3. [Wilkie] Collins, in his prefatory note to Armadale, included in the 1866 and subsequent editions, is particularly harsh in condeming the rigidity of Victorian morality.

4. U. C. Knoepflmacher, “The Counterworld of Victorian Fiction,” in The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, ed. Jerome H. Buckley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), 368, discusses the dark themes of Collins's fiction in a different context.

5. [Thomas] Boyle, Black Swine, 103-15 [New York: Viking, 1989].

6. Barbara T. Gates, “Wilkie Collins Suicides: ‘Truth As It Is In Nature,’” Dickens Studies Annual 12 (1983): 305.

7. Cuff's views are not only sexist but classist. See Nicole Hahn Rafter and Elizabeth Anne Stanko, Judge, Lawyer, Victim, Thief (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1982), 51, for a discussion of the biases of the Victorian reform movement. One potentially explosive subject Collins declines to elaborate is the explicitly revolutionary threats Rosanna's friend Lucy Yolland makes against men, the upper classes, and the rich—radical feminine politics, Victorian style.

8. There is one superb, but unintentional irony, however, in Collins's assault on abusive men. The least likable woman in the novel, Lady Lundie, is not only a busybody but a shrew; she makes a fatal error in scorning Anne, thereby earning her brother-in-law's (and the narrator's) hatred. But when the estimable Sir Patrick Lundie tries to imagine how Lady Lundie might be made manageable, he remarks: “If she had been the wife of a bricklayer, she is the sort of woman who would have been kept in perfect order by a vigorous and regular application of her husband's fist” (chap. 26).

9. [Frances Power] Cobbe, Life of Frances Power Cobbe, 2:70-71. Cobbe had covered the story for the newspaper The Echo from Friday, 15 January 1869, through Tuesday, 19 January 1869. Between 3 February and 8 April of the same year, the Times reported three other cases of women assaulting or killing (presumably abusive) men.