Wilkie Collins is currently enjoying a revival in critical attention, both as a constructor of sensational plots and as a writer who takes a critical stance to the bourgeois realism of the Victorian novel, as well as to the ‘clap-trap morality’ of its ethical values. U. C. Knoepflmacher has been influential in spreading the view of a radical Collins who poses an amoral counterworld of great energy and attractiveness against the pallid vapidity of his heroes and heroines.¹ Knoepflmacher would include even a ‘moral’ heroine like Marian Halcombe of The Woman in White in his guerrilla force. Feminist critics too indulge in admiration of Collins, seeing him as a slightly less outrageous Mary Elizabeth Braddon, with the same fondness for unconventional heroines who abandon their domestic role to pit themselves against men, actively engaging in plot-making in the conspiratorial as well as narrative sense.²

Emphasis is almost always put on Collins as a sensation novelist: aggressively contemporary, interested in the details of Victorian medicine, law, psychology and science, his narrative self-referential and his heroines unconventional. All this is true, and this chapter will argue strongly for the appropriateness of the term ‘sensationalist’ to describe Collins, although the usual positive feminist evaluation of this sub-genre will be questioned. There is, however, another side to Collins which, to use the definition proposed in the Introduction, has been called ‘female’ Gothic: the entrapped heroine, the sinister house, ghosts, dreams, and a sense of a divine order. …

In this [essay] attention will be paid to the aggressively modern heroines of Collins's other fiction. Behind the facade of a liberal discourse of personal autonomy, there will be shown to exist a demystification of the home and the woman as moral values. But this revelation, it will be argued, lacks the liberating quality that recent feminist scholarship allows it, as the domestic ideal is secularized in order to provide male erotic pleasure, which is located in increased control over the female. The argument about female autonomy will necessarily range over the debate about the nature of Providence and free will that is characteristic of Victorian authorship in general. Here, the ‘houses’ of narrative that Collins's errant (and thus homeless) heroines construct for themselves against the ravages of the providential sea are removed out of their grasp, so that their free will is gradually lost, and they end their careers as victims of a fate that Collins equates both with patriarchy and with his own control as author.

Collins's most interesting errant heroine, the aptly named Magdalen Vanstone, is deprived of a moral base, her home, and of masculine protection in the form of a surname—hence the title of the novel, No Name (1862). Combe-Raven, the secure and comfortable family home of the Vanstones, reveals its latent instability in the last two syllables of its name, as well as in tiny details of dress and conduct in its inhabitants, showing Collins's use of the techniques of the story-painting genre. So the mere fact that Mr. Vanstone mislays a key and walks indolently indicates a carelessness that will prevent him leaving a will and lead to his (unexpectedly illegitimate) daughters' homelessness and impoverishment.

While the elder sister, Norah, seeks work as a governess, Magdalen eschews this conventional resource to attempt a career as an actress.³ Acting is only a temporary strategy, since Magdalen decides to seek marriage as a means of getting her name and her money back. In Collins it is the homelessness of the errant woman that activates the plot, as she uses all sorts of stratagems to gain a home and social identity through marriage. The desire for a husband can take desperate forms, as in the case of Anne Vanborough in Man and Wife who is seduced by a muscular oaf, greatly her inferior in mind and character, whom she determines to force into marriage as a means of gaining justice for herself, despite her detestation of him.

Magdalen Vanstone similarly seeks to marry a man she hates—her cousin Noel who has inherited her patrimony and who refuses to share it. In order to mount her amatory attack, Magdalen resorts to disguise and a false name, while acquiring the services of a ‘family’ (without which no respectability is possible) and a house. From this secure base Magdalen mounts the classic sensation-novel ‘breaking and entering.’ She assaults her victim through an attempt to penetrate the security of his house. Collins sets the encounter between the cousins at Aldborough in Suffolk, on a coast well known for ‘the extraordinary defenselessness of the land against the encroachments of the sea.’

In Collins, as is common in the Victorian period, the sea and its tides stand for the operation of fate, so Noel Vanstone's confidence in the unassailability of his villa is hubristic, seeming to tempt Providence:

“There is only one safe house in Aldborough, and that house is Mine. The sea may destroy all the other houses—it can't destroy Mine. My father took care of that; my father was a remarkable man. He had My house built on piles. I have reason to believe they are the strongest piles in England. Nothing can possibly knock them down.”

“Then if the sea invades us,” said Magdalen, “we must all run for refuge to you.”

“I could almost wish the invasion might happen … to give me the happiness of offering the refuge.”

(Fourth Scene, Ch. 4, p. 304)

As the novel will later reveal, his body is as weak as the security of his house. A further irony in the above quotation centres on Magdalen's aim of forcing entry into Vanstone's house as his wife. Although the novel presents her manoeuvre as a bold and shocking enterprise, the unconscious accuracy of Vanstone's and Magdalen's flirtatious conversation points out the conventionality of her scheme. Plenty of women of the period marry for money. Magdalen is not carving out an independent future for herself, nor is she openly and boldly fighting Vanstone for her lost inheritance. Rather, she is following—although perhaps in a parodic form—the conventional route of marriage, regaining her surname through taking that of her husband, and her money in the same way.

It might be argued here that Magdalen's assumption of a false name in order to trap her cousin makes her action less moral and also more radical, since hers is a deliberate plot, more than a conventional sexual manoeuvre. Certainly feminist critics regard her as the most successful of Collins's heroines:

Magdalen acts for herself, not for a surrogate self [as Marian Halcombe does in The Woman in White], using men for her advantage rather than subordinating herself to them. Though her conscious goal is to regain the name and inheritance unjustly taken from her, she is more profoundly rebelling against the fragility and emptiness of conventional feminine identity.⁴

In fact Magdalen acts primarily for the sake of her sister Norah, her resolve strengthened when she accidentally sees the degradation and trials of Norah's first position as a governess. The same critics view the elder sister harshly as a ‘passive, pallid, good girl who accepts disinheritance and disgrace as submissively as she accepted the idle security of middle-class respectability.’⁵ Unfortunately Norah does not fit the stereotype of the submissive Victorian daughter any more than Magdalen is a liberal feminist in embryo. In the Combe-Raven section of the novel Norah appears as a reserved and ironic observer who fails to take the family stance of approval towards Frank Clare; it is rather Magdalen who is the spoiled darling of her father and who accepts wealth and servants as her right. Further it is Norah who chooses the more independent course following her disinheritance: becoming a governess she depends on nothing but her own labour and the friendship of the redoubtable Miss Garth. Despite her submissive position within her employer's household Norah defends her sister's behaviour, thus losing her job. Magdalen deliberately cuts herself off from female support only to put herself in the power of a man, Captain Wragge, who will help her to exploit her sexuality to gain a husband. Both sisters seek a home, but Norah enters one openly as an employee, whereas Magdalen forces her way in by deceit.

The scenes describing Magdalen's vamping of Vanstone and the plots devised by her and the resourceful Captain Wragge against the watchful Mrs Lecount, Vanstone's housekeeper and ‘minder’, are exhilaratingly swift in their see-sawing of advantage from one group to the other. Once Magdalen's goal is at last achieved she is able to write triumphantly to Miss Garth:

I have done what I told you I would do—I have made the general sense of propriety my accomplice this time. Do you know who I am? I am a respectable married woman, accountable for my actions to nobody under heaven but my husband. I have got a place in the world, and a name in the world at last … You forget what wonders my wickedness has done for me. It has made Nobody's Child Somebody's Wife.

(Fourth Scene, Ch. 12, p. 418)

The above passage does indeed seem to justify the view of those who argue for Magdalen as a successful, rebellious nonconformist. And yet this confidence in her position is woefully misplaced. She loses her husband's affection, her true identity is soon discovered, and on her husband's early death she is again disinherited. Becoming ‘Somebody's Wife’ brought little power; rather, it put her totally within the control of her husband, with very few rights under the law.

As well as the authors of Corrupt Relations (see note 4), critics like Sue Lonoff see in Magdalen's career the possibility of a ‘liberated lifestyle’ which Collins then punishes by allowing his heroine to fail in her endeavour to steal the trust (or at least look at it), and then fall ill.⁶ It is not, however, just the physical collapse at the end of the novel that jerks Magdalen back on the lead of convention. The goal of marriage inevitably led to a loss of power and independence. And indeed the whole enterprise of disguise and machination was already ambiguous in its relation to the current dominant ideology with regard to women. Nina Auerbach describes Magdalen's ‘dangerous psychic void’ which ‘creates the fascination of the novel which denounces her,’ the effect of her lack of a social identity and of her ability to act. This void is however, the novel's own perception of feminine identity, and one that is promoted rather than denounced.⁷ In the first description of the heroine as she runs down stairs to breakfast, her mobility of feature helps to constitute her sexual attraction. First the narrative sets up expectations about the unity of her appearance which are then confounded—her eyes are not the violet of convention but ‘incomprehensively and discordantly light.’ Her hair, complexion and eyes are monotonous in tone, yet:

The whole countenance—so remarkable in its strongly opposed characteristics—was rendered additionally striking by its extraordinary mobility. The large, electric, light-gray eyes were hardly ever in repose; all varieties of expression followed each other over the plastic, ever-changing face, with a giddy rapidity which left sober analysis far behind in the race.

(First Scene, Ch. 1, p. 16)

As Jeanne Fahnestock has made us aware, the Victorian reader would have been able to read off Magdalen's character from this account: the chin showing firmness of mind offset by the mobility of the eyes and expression, the low forehead implying a lack of abstract intelligence, the large mouth and sinuous body sensuality.⁸ Magdalen Vanstone is ‘the heroine of irregular features’ taken to extremes; the modernist dislocation of the parts of her body fetishises it, making it an erotic focus by its very contradictions: the dull passivity of the flesh and the vigour and force of the eyes and bearing. Not only can the reader predict in advance Magdalen's response to various situations (and thereby she ceases to be the absolute threat that some critics would like), but her pliability has been sited firmly within the erotic field, so that her future disguises will be sexually exciting rather than morally disturbing.

Martin Meisel has indicated the exact nature of the mid-Victorian unease with the actress: it is not so much the professional actress who poses a threat, since she is all too often associated with the roles she plays, becoming the victim of her art. Rather it is ‘the power of impersonation, of being other than oneself’ that ‘appears as a significant literary symbol of moral peril, especially in a woman not already a frank professional of one kind or another.’⁹ To act, he argues, involves both dissembling one's feelings and also sharing in the feelings that one acts. Magdalen fits this role completely, since her skill is not so much in acting as in impersonation and mimicry. So we first see her copying the speech and mannerisms of her elder sister to create a character in The Rivals. When Magdalen comes to make the stage her living, she does not join a company of actors, but works alone. In a sense she acts herself; her performances are (ironically) called ‘A Young Lady at Home,’ and much of the interest to her audience is in her person and her situation, as much as in the power of her acting. Just as her amateur debut had depended on the making public of the private characters of her sister and governess, so she now earns money by making public the skills and accomplishments that young ladies learned in order to entertain their family and friends at home. Magdalen's acting career is not some blow for freedom—there is no sense of irony or humour in her performance—so much as something parasitic on the social idiom it imitates.

Magdalen goes on to play further roles for real: Miss Garth, the vamp at Aldborough, and the parlour maid at St Crux-in-the-Marsh. Each of these ‘parts’ represents a role that women play in the Victorian home and each is one of sexual vulnerability and also allure, constituted in the first and third roles by the social ambiguity and lower status of the work. As it was when Magdalen acted her ‘at homes,’ so here the fact that it is a lady who assumes these positions only increases the sense of sexual provocation.

It turns out that Magdalen Vanstone's attempt to use her body as a weapon rebounds in making her an object of sexual currency. Her objectification begins at Aldborough with what she regards as Captain Kirke's intrusive admiration. She had already learned with anger that her description has been published on a handbill: ‘“Is this thing shown publicly?” she asked, stamping her foot on it, “Is the mark on my neck described all over York?”’ And her plot to marry Vanstone demands that she conceal the marks with cream so that her suitor can view their absence against a written description. The whole episode represents a further reduction of her person to a list of attributes.

Her final humiliation occurs when she takes the position of maid in order to gain entry to Admiral Bartram's house. She makes her preparations while lodging (respectably) in the highly ambiguous area of St John's Wood, only to find herself treated at Admiral Bartram's to the racy pleasantries of the Admiral and his eccentric servant; they treat her kindly but as a sexual object, to be smacked on the behind and admired for her ‘clean run fore and aft.’ Collins contrasts the stiff silk dress and revealing bodice of a lady with the close-fitting but high-necked servant's uniform—to the advantage of the latter mode of dress, calling it ‘the most modest and the most alluring that a woman can wear.’ In it ‘no admirer of beauty could have looked at her once and not have turned again to look at her for the second time.’ (Seventh Scene, Ch. 1, p. 516).

Magdalen's imitations of the actress, the vamp and the maid come in for praise in Corrupt Relations: ‘the course she chooses is to impersonate women in stereotyped roles, thus eluding the constraint of any one role and making them serve her purposes rather than conforming to theirs.’¹⁰ The chapter goes on to argue that Magdalen explores her own character by these encounters with the prevailing models of womankind. But Magdalen Vanstone is not Jane Eyre, who recognizably does view other women in this way, although No Name affects some of the allegorical nature of the former novel. In No Name Magdalen is defeated at every turn; she is rarely able to take full advantage of the roles she assumes. Her adventures end in illness and rescue by the aptly named Captain Kirke, the man whose admiration she had once deprecated as impertinent, and the novel ends with Magdalen questioning Kirke about the account of her adventures she has given him to read: ‘Say what you think of me with your own lips’ (Last Scene, Ch. 4, p. 609). He responds not with words of respect and admiration, with no celebration of her moral worth, but by bending down and shutting her lips with a kiss. Thus he confirms her sexual rather than moral value, the former redeeming the latter. Their earlier roles at Aldborough are reversed, and it is now he who bends down to her level, not she to his. By his embrace, Kirke confirms that the roles Magdalen has assumed, far from being any sort of threat to masculine power, only serve to increase her nubility, because it is in marriage that the parts of actress, maid, flirt and servant will be domesticated, removed back from the public world to the private house.

There is, however, some demystification of the lady and of domestic values in No Name. Some little time is taken to establish Combe-Raven as an example of a well-run, comfortable and tranquil Victorian house, only to then reveal that the house's respectability is but a facade, since Mr. and Mrs. Vanstone are not really married. Similarly Magdalen's maid's successful impersonation of a lady implies that this is a role that can be copied: ‘Shall I tell you what a lady is? A lady is a woman who wears a silk gown, and has a sense of her own importance’ (Sixth Scene, Ch. 2, p. 510). This statement is not as radical as it sounds, since Magdalen is, to some extent, speaking of herself and, bitterly, of her own failings. It does point, however, to Collins's assumption that personal identity is external: one is whatever others can be made to think one is. The main critique of the lady is to be found in Collins's next novel, Armadale (1866), which will be discussed below. What Magdalen Vanstone does in No Name is to whittle away the barrier between public and private, the social world and the home, upon which the concept of woman as a source of moral value had come to rest.

Collins wishes to present Magdalen as a heroine, however errant, and he uses a variety of devices to preserve her character from corruption. Her adoption of a stage career is presented as the logical outcome of the law's removal of her identity. Homeless and nameless, she has but two options: she must either efface herself and accept her nothingness as her sister does, or else take on the identity of someone else, on the stage or in real life.

This identity in No Name is accorded and sustained by men. Without Captain Wragge as her uncle, Magdalen could not set out on her attempt to marry Vanstone. And once launched into this public world—which is presented as a play, its sections divided into ‘scenes’—to act in any way is also to ‘act’ as a performer, to pretend and deceive. So the heroine cannot be other than imperfect, as Mary Elizabeth Braddon writes in justification of Aurora Floyd:

But then, if she had been faultless, she could not have been the heroine of this story; for has not some wise man of old remarked that the perfect women are those who leave no histories behind them, but who go through life upon such a tranquil course of quiet well-doing as leave no footprints on the sands of time; only mute records hidden here and there, deep in the grateful hearts of those who have been blest by them.¹¹

To leave footprints is to act publicly, and to act thus is guilty since by doing so the heroine creates the plot of the novel, in both senses of that word. With the structuring of his novel in dramatic terms, with the double use of ‘plot’ and ‘action,’ Collins begins an identification of moral and aesthetic categories that will provide him with a poetics that finds full expression in the novella, The Haunted Hotel (1878). In Collins all action by women outside the home is, by implication, guilty, since it involves them in ‘plots.’ (There is, however, no suggestion that male characters similarly offend who take an active role in events.) Yet because it is always the unfair operation of the patriarchal law that exposes women to the homelessness and lack of identity that forces them out into the public realm, they are at once guilty and innocent, guilty of action but guiltless of intention to act. (Hence Magdalen's biblical Christian name, which as well as pointing to her sin and repentance, is intended to deflect the stones of judgement from her throughout the novel, to keep her securely on the side of the angels.)

Once a woman enters the world of plot and counterplot that constitutes society in Collins—‘Is it the object of half the world to cheat the other half, and the object of the other half to put itself in the way of being cheated?’ as a Spectator reviewer asked pertinently—she necessarily lays herself open to the operation of the rules of the game: cheating and plotting against her.¹² And it is a game in which men alone, for example, Noel Vanstone, the Admiral and then George Bartram in No Name, hold all the best cards; no woman can finally succeed against them. Although Collins's errant heroines often end by marrying well, it is for love alone, not as part of some greater plan or purpose. Their own plots usually fail, and marriage is brought in as a consolation prize.

Both the (latterly) penitent Magdalen and the more venal Lydia Gwilt of Armadale fail in their machinations at the point at which each loses her single-minded sense of purpose. Lydia falls in love with the man she intended to trick, thus losing control of events and ending an atoning victim of her murderous intentions; Magdalen, full of self-disgust, submits her will to the operation of chance. Unable by her own will to take the poison that would end her inner struggle, she decides only to do so if an odd number of ships pass her window during a half-hour period. Eight ships pass and her life is saved. Reborn, Magdalen is being prepared for the return of another ship, the Deliverance, captained by the religiously named Kirke, who will rescue her.

In this way Magdalen is released from guilt but also from the active control of events that might have brought success; from this point on all her plans turn out badly. ‘Chance’ or ‘Providence’ acts as a third, more successful plotter, since it is this force of coincidence that causes Norah to marry Bartram and, accidentally, to find the hidden trust. Further, the use of fate as the agent of causation removes any sense of independent action from the novel's characters, but especially from the heroine, as it is she who most asserts, against the law and conventions of correct female behaviour, her will to act as she pleases.

The use of place in the novel as a means of signification illustrates this use of fate. The various ‘scenes’—Lambeth, York, Aldborough, St Crux-in-the-Marsh—externalize the current state of mind of the protagonist, her plans and the choices available to her. Most of them involve a house to which Magdalen must force an entry, as at Lambeth, where Vanstone's house is surrounded by the hovels of the poor, who are ‘the writing on the wall’ to a society which, like Vanstone, worships money but fails to pay its workers a living wage. In this scene Magdalen shares the prophetic role of the poor, her own poverty and desperation being a threat to Vanstone's security. As has been shown, Magdalen's amatory attack on Vanstone is mirrored by the invading action of the sea at Aldborough, making her appear to be on the crest of fate. Her assault seems to have the inexorability of the sea itself, until the scene with the ships, when fate (for which the sea is often an emblem) starts to operate on her too. But with the exception of the East End which Magdalen chooses as somewhere cheap and anonymous to live, the places of the ‘scenes’ are all chosen for her: she goes to the walls at York while waiting to see a theatrical agent; Lambeth and Aldborough happen to be places where Vanstone is living; and St Crux-in-the-Marsh is where the trust is hidden.

What the combination of symbolic detail in the settings of the scenes and the element of choice in Magdalen's next action makes is a ‘situation’ in the contemporary theatrical sense of a moment of crisis or significance in the action of a play, often illustrated pictorially by the cast forming a group picture, each person in an attitude expressing his or her relation to the situation and to the other characters. The use of situation in Collins, I want to argue, is directly related to his articulation of human freedom, and I shall end the discussion of No Name by illustrating how the aesthetics of situation is linked also to the divide between the home and the public world outside.

Martin Meisel is quite sure that the use of situation can be traced right back to No Name.¹³ He is referring to the situations caused by the intense plot-making of the two groups of schemers, the choices and dilemmas that their activities cause, but this is not the only use of theatrical situation in the novel. What is particularly interesting about the achievement of the situations that involve Magdalen on her own in No Name is that they are not just human tableaux but result from the interaction of the person and the physical setting. The ‘effect’ of the encounter of Magdalen Vanstone and Captain Wragge on the walls at York is preceded by the ‘picture’ of Magdalen alone, standing by the Mickelgate, looking at the sunset, caught between the city on one side of the wall and the start of the country on the other. The setting is described in naturalistic, and quite unmelodramatic detail, as Wragge passes the minster, the railway, even a spare strip of overgrown ground, only to find Magdalen at the parapet: ‘There she stood in the lovely dawn of her womanhood, a castaway in a strange city, wrecked on the world’ (Second Scene, Ch. 1, p. 165).

The employment here of intensely detailed physical description combined with a specific—and crucial—moment in the protagonist's history is akin to a Pre-Raphaelite use of situation, rather than a melodramatic one. Meisel describes how Millais and Holman Hunt turn from the static and idealized qualities of the stage situation, the aesthetics of effect, to present in their paintings a moment in a specific story, which would give a realistic rather than an emblematic effect; it would imply a continuation of the story after the moment portrayed, rather than a renewal of the action.¹⁴ In Hunt this use of situation results in works like The Awakening Conscience in which he tries to show the ‘perceiving subject’ in a moment of metanoia, moving out of her frame, just as Meredith's heroine seeks self-realization, freedom from the social ‘framing’ represented by the contemporary opinions of her with which Diana of the Crossways begins.¹⁵ Similarly in the Mickelgate scene Collins ‘paints’ Magdalen enjoying a breathing space, a moment of existential choice.

Collins had close links with the Pre-Raphaelites through his brother Charles, whom Millais wished to admit to the Brotherhood, and Millais, a close friend, is the source for the story of the meeting with ‘the woman in white’ on Hampstead Heath, and her identification with Caroline Graves, Collins's mistress. (This scene provides Collins himself with a ‘situation,’ as he who decides to pursue the beautiful fleeing woman.)¹⁶ Collins wrote a defence of the movement for the general public, and in A Rogue's Life gave a rough-and-ready outline of some of the Pre-Raphaelite qualities: ‘variety, resemblance to nature; genuineness of the article, and fresh paint.’¹⁷ His remarks in the preface to Basil about the closeness of the drama and fiction, ‘one is a drama narrated, as the other is a drama acted,’ could serve as a manifesto for much of the Pre-Raphaelite output of story pictures. The temporal dynamism for a static painting is provided by the narrative element, while the pictorial presentation of a scene in a novel provides a means of exploring psychology while using the dramatic mode of dialogue.

Although Collins's more Gothic fictions exploit his ability to evoke memorable and symbolically effective landscapes and houses, with the exception of the scenes in No Name and the set pieces on the ‘Grace de Dieu’ and at the Norfolk Broads in Armadale Collins eschews this mode of writing in his sensation fiction. Indeed, place dwindles to a mere sentence at the beginning of each scene, little more than a stage direction—less perhaps than would be included in a mid-Victorian melodrama in which artists of the standing of Clarkson Stanfield would paint extensive and detailed backdrops. And in the drawing-room dramas of T. W. Robertson, individual interiors would be recreated down to the last antimacassar.¹⁸ This change in Collins's style, when it is noticed at all, is usually explained in terms either of his declining powers and ill health, or his growing interest in dramatic performance. However, Collins's intense interest in the theatre predates his abandonment of physical description, and indeed, despite the success of the play version of The New Magdalen, his period of most intense dramatic activity is that of his association with Dickens, with whom he conceived and took part in The Frozen Deep (1857) and The Lighthouse.

The 1870s did, however mark a series of changes for Collins in his circle of friends: Dickens died in 1870 and his brother Charles Collins in 1873. While Holman Hunt and Millais remained his friends, the latter was no longer painting in the Pre-Raphaelite manner, and the former was deep in his obsession with the biblical East, no longer interested in painting moments of decision within contemporary settings. Ill health and opium addiction may also have contributed to the paring-down of detail in an attempt to keep control of the material (the increasing length and insistent tone of the prefaces with which Collins polices his novels, anxious to limit the interpretative range of his readers, points to a lack of confidence in his authorial power).¹⁹ Collins's views on the possibility of human freedom—and that of women in particular—equally affect the development of his narrative style.

In Armadale one can chart both the gradual demise of the landscape description, and also the ‘fall’ of the independent woman into the realm of fate. The situations that are enacted by landscape and the house in No Name present the heroine with conscious choices, and hints of the significance of her actions. Similarly in Armadale Lydia Gwilt half creates such a picture by her arrival at Hurl Mere, again a scene prefaced by an extended description of the desolate Broads:

The sun was sinking in the cloudless westward heaven. The waters of the Mere lay beneath, tinged red by the dying light. The open country stretched away, darkening drearily already on the right hand and the left. And on the near margin of the pool, where all had been solitude before, there now stood, fronting the sunset, the figure of a Woman.

(Third Book, Ch. 9, p. 233)

There is a free-floating quality about this description, which the preceding paragraphs telling of Armadale's and Midwinter's wanderings in the wood confirm. Situation and effect here unite to present an image of mystery and inexorability, the woman's ‘fronting the sunset’ suggesting that her presence has all the natural inevitability of dusk following day. Unlike the scene of Magdalen Vanstone at York, this picture lacks the narrative details that inform the reader/viewer about the woman portrayed, that give specificity to the image. If this is a Pre-Raphaelite picture, it is Millais's Autumn Leaves in which a group of girls gather leaves in a twilight garden, the meaning of their activity unspecified, hinting at transience, but also pregnant with mystery. Where the scene at Hurl Mere differs from the Millais painting is in its frame: it resembles a Rossetti picture with its accompanying poem or literary reference written on the actual frame of the work in having a narrative appended to it:

Midwinter was the first to speak.

“Your own eyes have seen it,” he said. “Now look at your own words.”

He opened the narrative of the Dream, and held it under Allan's eyes. His finger pointed to the lines which recorded the first Vision; his voice sinking lower and lower, repeated the words:-

“The sense came to me of being left alone in the darkness.

“I waited.

“The darkness opened and showed me the vision—as in a picture—of a broad, lonely pool, surrounded by open ground. Above the farther margin of the pool I saw the cloudless western sky, red with the light of sunset.

“On the near margin of the pool there stood the Shadow of a Woman.”

(Second Book, Ch. 5, p. 122)

These words follow immediately upon the description quoted above, and serve to dramatize the choice between fate or chance that is similarly produced by the passing ships in Magdalen Vanstone's suicide scene. Further, the reference to Armadale's earlier dream puts the scene in an ironic context, thus reducing the element of freedom in Lydia Gwilt's actions. The scene created then is over-determined in a manner of which Lydia Gwilt, who thinks she has contrived the meeting, is unaware.

Lydia Gwilt bears the weight of representing human free will in Armadale, for its male protagonists seem singularly unable to act, either from the indolence that riches cause, or from a guilty superstition. Both the sunny Armadale who accepts life as it comes and his lugubrious friend Midwinter with his much handled account of Armadale's dream on the abandoned ship accept the rule of fate, while it is women who initiate events. Even the ‘good’ heroine, Miss Milroy, causes her first encounter with the eligible Armadale by trespassing in his grounds and stealing some flowers—an innocent version of Miss Gwilt's housebreaking. With her accomplice, Mrs Oldershaw, Lydia Gwilt seeks to take Thorpe-Ambrose by storm, marrying its owner for his fortune, then, when circumstances make this plan unworkable, marrying his namesake in order to pose as Armadale's widow, murdering him if necessary. While these female plotters remain untouched by any sense of guilt about their activities they seem to defy the fates, or rather to make them their accomplices:

If the other young booby had not jumped into the river after you, this young booby would never have had the estate. It really looks as if fate had determined that you were to be Mrs Armadale, of Thorpe-Ambrose—and who can control his fate, as the poet says?

(Third Book, Ch. 2, p. 138)

Mrs Oldershaw is referring here to Lydia's attempted suicide, when she jumped from a Thames steamer only to be rescued by Armadale's uncle, who died as a result. Lydia herself comes to accept the fatalist reading of these events for real when, married to Midwinter, she is faced with the narrative of the dream and recognizes her own part in its working-out: ‘These may be co-incidences, but they are strange co-incidences. I declare I begin to fancy that I believe in the Dream too!’ The narrative fulfils for Lydia Gwilt the role that original sin does in Benjamin's account of German tragic drama: ‘The core of the notion of fate is, rather the conviction that guilt … unleashes causality as the instrument of the irresistibly unfolding fatalities. Fate is the entelechy of events within the field of guilt.’²⁰ Fate is thus an effect of plot, which is driven by humanity's own willed action. By showing his wife the dream account Midwinter makes her bite at the apple of guilt and accept her fall into fatalism. In terms of the narrative, Lydia's descent from the heights of self-determination begins at the point when her letter to Mrs Oldershaw describing Midwinter's successful courtship of her is broken off while she consults her diary. Up to that point the journal had been a means of defence in case she forgot what story she had told and to whom. The diary after Midwinter's revelations moves into a mode of self-analysis, questioning of her own motives and desires as well as future plotting. When Lydia Gwilt asserts her independence, it is obvious that it is under threat, ‘I won't, I won't, I won't think of it! Haven't I a will of my own? And can't I think, if I like, of something else?’ (Fourth Book, Ch. 10, p. 399).

Whereas Victorian reviewers deprecated the claims seemingly made at the end of the novel for Lydia's rescue of her husband from the poisonous fumes with which she had hoped to kill Armadale, and regarded her subsequent suicide as morally weightless, modern critics are disappointed that the cynical, witty tone of the Gwilt-Oldershaw correspondence gives way to the melodramatic repentance of her last scene; they see Collins as trying to draw back from the moral anarchy that he has himself released.²¹

There is certainly something odd about Lydia's change from melodramatic villainess to agent of divine atonement. It is necessary for Collins to destroy Miss Gwilt in order that relations between the two Armadales be purged of guilt (again in its hereditary sense of original sin). However, despite his ironic treatment of her plotting, Collins still wishes to preserve some sense of moral freedom in Lydia's action, or it will fail in its atoning purpose. With the chief villainess promoted to the role of sacrificial victim, the whole melodramatic structure of the novel is put at risk. Admittedly dangerous in the way her letters revealed the essential triviality of the innocents she preyed on, without her evil and vengeful counterpoise the ‘good’ characters cease to preserve any weight, and the void left by the death of Lydia Gwilt collapses the moral tension of the novel. This marks a move away from a melodramatic notion of character, which, when internalized in Lydia Gwilt becomes modernistic, inherently contiguous and unstable.

In an appendix, Collins affects to present the reader with an open ending: ‘they are free to interpret it by the natural or the supernatural theory, as the bent of their own minds may incline them.’ He then proceeds to inform readers of a ship called the Armadale which was found at Liverpool after the completion of his novel, with corpses in the deck-cabin, having died from poisoned air. This over-determination effectually closes down the hatches on the reader's own hermeneutic activity, while the reassurances that he gives as to his detailed knowledge of the Norfolk Broads and the necessary chemical processes for Lydia Gwilt's murder plans call attention to the fictive nature of the work itself. The first of these two moves tries to limit the free will of the readers, while the second shows up only too clearly that the elaborate apparatus of fate in Armadale is no more transcendentally situated than in the head of the novel's author. Winifred Hughes is correct about Collins in stating that: ‘Destiny, however piously invoked, has no moral content in the sensation novel.’ Being arbitrary, it has lost ‘its effectiveness as the controlling mechanism of an ordered and predictable universe.’²² The reason for this in Collins is not so much the failure of a religious perspective, as part of the novelist's desire to control and direct the interpretation of his texts, which results in the conflation of authorial decision and Providence itself.

It is, however, the argument of Collins's feminist critics that he is anxious to constrain the autonomy of his female rather than his male protagonists. To understand the rather complex attitude that Collins takes on the subject of female autonomy one must look at the use of fate and Providence in his novels under another guise: as imagery about the sea and shipwreck. Again Martin Meisel takes the accepted view that the sea is an equivalent for fate in the Victorian novel and melodrama, carrying ‘an unspecified charge of psychological and metaphysical disaster … and as the frozen analogue of metaphysical doubt and despair’ and shows how it is also linked to ‘a fictive threat to domestic happiness.’²³ One can see this association in nautical melodramas with their rescues from the waves, and in a popular Gothic play like The Flying Dutchman, with its threat to the marriage of the hero and heroine. Poems like Arnold's ‘The Forsaken Merman’ and Tennyson's ‘The Wreck’ link a wife's abandonment of her husband and child to shipwreck. In the latter work, the woman internalizes the event: ‘My life itself is a wreck, I have sullied a noble name / I am flung from the rushing tide of the world as a waif of shame.’

Collins exploits the same associations in the play, The Frozen Deep. It is constructed like some cosmic dinner party when the sexes have parted, with the first act in an English drawing room of women, while the second reveals their male relatives in the arctic regions on an exploratory expedition. In the midst of the tea-drinking one of the women, Clara Burnham, goes into a trance and sees her rejected lover Wardour in the northern waste, in the act of raising a gun to shoot her fiancé. When performed, a backdrop of the Arctic Ocean (painted by Dickens's friend, Clarkson Stanfield) was let down behind the realistic drawing-room set, while one of the women played Home, Sweet Home on the piano, as if to emphasize the point that the male frozen deep with its scene of violence is associated with the female realm, the domestic world portrayed at the front of the stage. A crimson light stains the whiteness of the backdrop, and Clara faints to end the scene in pure ‘situation’ terms, in a tableau of crisis.

The scene in the Arctic is thus revealed as what Peter Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination calls ‘the moral occult,’ by which he means the spiritual and psychologically truthful situation that everyday life obscures, but which melodrama elicits, often by concentrated language or gesture, ‘gestures which in the world constantly refer us to another, hyperbolic set of gestures where life and death are at stake.’²⁴ Here muteness (of the unconscious Clara) produces that hyperbolic gesture, as well as the extreme qualities of the sea and the Arctic terrain.

When the women are transported to Newfoundland in Act III, the identification of treacherous Arctic seas and that of the domestic house suggested by the Act I situation is complete: they are the same, or rather the former is the psychic reality behind the latter. Wardour and his rival are both missing, believed lost, only to suddenly float into view on an iceberg, Clara's Frank in Wardour's arms; he delivers his rescued rival to Clara and then dies, the threat to the expedition and to domestic peace overcome.

The Frozen Deep is unusual in Collins's dramatic and sensation works in having a domestic threat posed by a man, although there is a link with the later Armadale in the threat to the unity of the expedition posed by male jealousy: the heart of the play is the male bonding rather than the romantic interest. What is most characteristic of Collins's fiction as a whole is the threat posed by women to domestic security. We have seen how the career of Magdalen Vanstone is articulated in nautical terms, from her situation, ‘wrecked on the world,’ through her tidal assault on Vanstone at Aldborough, to her rescue by Captain Kirke of the Deliverance. The phrase ‘wrecked on the world’ suggests the helpless innocence of Magdalen as a victim of circumstances, while around her circle the unsettling associations of doubt, crisis and domestic upheaval, as well as fate itself. It is this sense of Magdalen as a castaway heroine that causes her parodies of female roles—the roles have lost their domestic moorings and so seem threatening to the stability of others—but also makes her actions innocuous. The association of the sea and fate is so strongly asserted that it removes the autonomy and thus the sense of responsibility for her actions from the heroine. Armadale makes even more of the shipwreck motif. The novel begins with an account of murder during a sea rescue, its adventuress jumps from a steamer, while the dream that forms the basic situation for the plot takes place on the murder vessel. Armadale's own murder is planned for a sea voyage on his yacht. The theme of disaster at sea is also parodied comically in the long section about the picnic on the Norfolk Broads, which ends in amatorial misunderstandings and the romantic appearance of Miss Gwilt by the pool.

Allan Armadale's dream on the wrecked ship, with its ‘Man Shadow’ and ‘Woman Shadow’ who gesture and form patterns of which the meaning is unclear, presents a backdrop tableau to the rest of the action, similar to that of Act I of The Frozen Deep. The ship becomes the place both of secrets (as the site of a murder) and of revelation; it provides the insight into the ‘moral occult’ hiding beneath the surface of later scenes, even though the characters are unable to use its information to alter their behaviour. Rather, the setting of the dream on the Grace de Dieu reveals it as the ship of Providence itself. All the events of the narrative are ‘on board’ in the sense that they are in the foreknowledge of the Deity.

The ship of Providence also produces a text: the account of the dream which Midwinter produces at crucial points in the narrative. It is a patriarchal text in the sense that the dream is a warning to Allan from his dead father, and also in the sense that it allies Providence to the male point of view in the novel. The Gwilt-Oldershaw correspondence forms a competing female text, equally a privileged one in that it interprets other texts in its own light. It is openly, though ironically, feminist:

I declare when I reflect on the origin of our unfortunate sex—when I remember that we were all originally made of no better material than the rib of a man (and that rib of so little importance to its possessor that he never appears to have missed it afterwards), I am quite astonished at our virtues, and not the least surprised at our faults.

(Fourth Book, Ch. 19, 8, p. 361-2)

The sweep of Mrs Oldershaw's invective is breathtaking as she ironically denigrates women through a contempt for men; she justifies her own and Lydia's nefarious activities by thus alluding to the low opinion held of women and its natural origin; most shockingly she mocks the biblical account of the creation in Genesis 2. For the two women the only good men are dead ones, and it is Beethoven who for Lydia Gwilt is ‘the only man I care two straws about,’ while the male protagonists are remorselessly satirized. It is the women who bear the intellectual weight in the novel, larding their letters with references to Shakespeare and Dr Johnson (although these allusions can, on occasion, lack reverence, as in Lydia Gwilt's ‘“To bed! To bed!” as Lady Macbeth says. I wonder by-the-by what Lady Macbeth would have done in my position? She would have killed somebody when her difficulties first began. Probably Armadale.’) (Fourth Book, Ch. 10, p. 390).

While the correspondence of the conspirators holds sway over the reader's access to events, a real drama is created, and the women seem to have succeeded in building some linguistic roofs over their heads. When the alliance breaks up and Lydia begins to let the Armadale dream drift into her narrative, that latter text becomes primary and she finds herself ‘on board’ the ship of Providence. Whereas the dream narrative is impregnable in the sense that it is not open to misuse by the others, the sparkling wit of the female conspirators' letters is all too vulnerable: Mrs Milroy's interception of one of Mrs Oldershaw's letters reveals their plans, and the return of a letter to Miss Gwilt's mythical reference proves it to have been a forgery. These discoveries show the fragility of the Oldershaw philosophy: ‘A woman, my dear Lydia, with your appearance, your manners, your abilities, and your education, can make almost any excursions into society that she pleases, if she has only money in her pocket and a respectable reference to appeal to in cases of emergency’ (Third Book, Ch. 1, 7, p. 143). The reference is the homeless or errant woman's equivalent of a house and family; it is easily put to the test, while the letter's privacy in its use of a seal and envelope is all too easily violated. And even though the reader is forced to view events for much of the novel through the eyes of the adventuresses, the fact that this knowledge comes not through a first-person narrative but by eavesdropping on a private correspondence effects a certain ironic distance between the reader and the writers. It creates a feeling of power in the reader who is able safely to enjoy the brazen and unrepentant criminality of the writers because their unconscious exposure renders them relatively harmless.

Lydia Gwilt's other weapon, her sexual attractiveness, is similarly fragile. She is indeed presented as seductively beautiful, her description echoing that of Magdalen Vanstone in the way that it is built up in terms of a set of contradictions. Just as Captain Wragge had a written description of his niece on a printed handbill, so Midwinter checks Lydia Gwilt's appearance against that of the woman followed by Mr Brock (who was actually Lydia's maid, pretending to be her mistress):

The nose in the rector's description was aquiline. The line of this woman's nose bent neither outward nor inward: it was the straight delicately moulded nose (with the short upper lip beneath) of the ancient statues and busts. The lips in the rector's description were thin, and the upper lip long; … this woman's lips were full, rich and sensual.

(Third Book, Ch. 10, p. 245)

Again the erotic charge comes from the opposing characteristics, and again also the particularity of the account is pruriently intrusive. The total effect is somewhat unreal; her hair is called ‘terrible’ as if it were a supernatural attribute, and her gait is never one of simple walking but gliding, as if the inexorable progress of a heavenly body in its orbit: ‘Nearer and nearer, and fairer and fairer she came, in the glow of the morning light’ (Fourth Book, Ch. 7, p. 333). In her approach to the aged and besotted Bashwood she moves sinuously as a snake: ‘Noiselessly and smoothly she came on, with a gentle and regular undulation of the print gown,’ the breathing seemingly unrelated to Lydia herself, as if she were an articulated machine.

Lydia herself makes fun of her serpentine quality: ‘Did you ever see the boa-constrictor fed at the zoological gardens? They put a live rabbit in his cage, and there is a moment when the two creatures look at each other. I declare Mr Bashwood reminded me of the rabbit’ (Third Book, Ch. 11, 2, p. 254). The mesmeric power of Lydia Gwilt is described as siren-like in her ‘sexual sorcery,’ thus giving her a role in the nautical melodrama. In some legends the sirens are sea-serpents, half fish and half woman, and in all versions they tempt men to their doom by their music. When their spells fail they die, just as Lydia does when her power over Midwinter fails. As serpent, Lydia is a Lilith in the male Eden of Thorpe-Ambrose, while like Adam's first wife she fails to hold his affection and is displaced by the approved and providential Eve, Neelie Milroy.²⁵ As the virginal sirens maintain their seductive power by their inaccessibility, so Lydia Gwilt can only keep her hold on her admirers until she accepts them. Although she conquers Waldron who marries her, causes a music master to commit suicide, and easily attracts Armadale, Midwinter and Bashwood, most of them cool towards her. Her husband maltreats her, Manuel uses her as a tool, Armadale quickly transfers his affection back to Miss Milroy, and even Bashwood cheats her. Midwinter's love she seems to lose at the point at which she reciprocates it. Magdalen Vanstone loses power on marriage, while Lydia Gwilt loses hers with possession.

From the dissolution of this tension, and thus the destruction of Lydia Gwilt as a character, results the Victorian critics' unease with her role in the novel, an unease not expressed in relation to the scheming and immoral adventuresses in other novels of the period.²⁶ They could accept as characters sexually aggressive, even successful morally dubious women like Lizzie Eustace but, like the feminist critics today, they wished to find some consistency of characterization in a figure like Lydia Gwilt who only exists melodramatically as a tension between polarities. Collins allows even an outcast like Midwinter with an alias and no secure social identity a moderately realist character and a comfortable home with Armadale, as well as a secure textual roof over his head in the apparatus of his father's deathbed letter and the dream narrative; yet a similarly shipwrecked figure like Lydia, parentless and homeless as he is, with no social identity save that of a criminal, has her day of plots and stratagems but is then destroyed. The career of Lydia Gwilt from villainess to willing victim charts the victory of providential plot which ties itself, as Ulysses did, to the narrative mast to defeat the modernist siren.

The themes of fate, control over one's own narrative, and the female protagonist are rehearsed again in a late novella, The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice. T. S. Eliot admired the story, arguing that ‘as the chief character is internally melodramatic, the story itself ceases to be merely melodramatic, and partakes of true drama.’²⁷ Eliot is referring to the Countess Narona's obsession with the idea of her own destiny, by which she deliberately arranges that coincidences occur; it is tragic in its element of self-destruction. One can, however, see in the internalization of the melodramatic that Eliot points to, a destruction of the will that will remove any sense of consistency of character from the Countess. Not only does her determinist attitude destroy her reason, it also causes her to internalize the murder plot perpetrated on her husband, in order to reproduce it as her own imaginative creation—a melodrama—which she urges the actor-manager, Francis Westwick, to buy for future performance. She fragments, becoming author of her own life story, detective of her own crime. She is consciously, unlike Franklin Blake of The Moonstone, the heroine of her own version of events, as well as the cast of characters she writes of in her play. As Lydia Gwilt dramatized her activities in letters and a diary, the Countess, herself an adventuress and housebreaker, who marries Lord Montbarry for money, and then joins in a plot to kill him, writes her melodrama in order to assert her control over events and their interpretation, while laying herself open to discovery by the act of writing. She even leaves the ending open as if inviting the reader to apply judgement to the events described.

The handwriting grew worse and worse. Some of the longer sentences were left unfinished. In the exchange of dialogue, questions and answers were not always attributed to the right speaker. At certain intervals the writer's failing intelligence seemed to recover itself for a while, only to relapse again, and to lose the thread of the narrative more hopelessly than ever.

(Ch. 28, p. 122)

In style the play moves from melodrama to modernist stream-of-consciousness, while the Countess herself falls apart under the weight of fatality. ‘“My invention has gone,” she said, “I can't write my fourth act. It's all a blank—all a blank.”’ There is no fourth act because the third completes the tale of the Countess's crime; she dies just after this, thus identifying herself with the play and becoming textualised, an open-ended work, as the mechanical breathing of the corpse negates the finality of death.

The Countess shares the physical contradictions of Magdalen's and Lydia's countenances with their erotic charge, becoming in her, ‘the startling contrast between the corpse-like pall of her complexion and the overpowering life and light, the glittering metallic brightness in the large black eyes’ (Ch. 1, p. 4). They create a face of Gothic contrasts, the death-in-life of Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, turning eerily here to life-in-death when the body of the dead Countess is found still to be breathing. Her face interests Dr Whybrow as a physician rather than as a man, for having given herself up to fatalism, the Countess reveals the dark meaning behind her attractions, the murder behind the seductive smile. Life and death, eros and thanatos are held in tension, arcs of desire in language, themselves pointers to the moral occult that lies behind the sexuality of the earlier temptresses, and showing them to be closer to the unlovely, emasculating Rosanna Spearman in The Moonstone than might be realized.

Unlike the earlier women, the Countess Narona is much more confidently melodramatic; and neither do the tensions that energize her collapse under her acceptance of the action of the furies. In the figure of the Countess lies the whole plot of the novel: narrative plot and fate are not opposed but seen—by the Countess herself—as the same. For this reason, Winifred Hughes's remark about Collins's novels exhibiting ‘the triumph of form’ belongs most properly to this work. As we have seen, Collins's formal experiments in the sensation genre are also, necessarily, explorations into the nature of the limits of human freedom.

In The Haunted Hotel Collins returns to an interest in the house as the location of secrets, providing the reader with a Venetian palazzo, complete with vaults, a secret room and authentic Gothic decay. Unlike Radcliffe or Maturin, he fails to capitalize on these resonant details, despite his ability to paint local ‘effect’ with great skill. The setting in Venice, which at that time was invariably associated with the encroachment of the sea on the sinking city, transience and decay, lends itself to a story about the inevitability of judgement and one's destiny. Similarly the palazzo turned into an hotel is a stopping-place—a temporary abode—and thus an image of life itself, and the border between life and death. The history of the building from ancient private house to public hotel charts the history of the Gothic novel with its associated gloomy mansion to the hotel setting of so many detective stories. In this way the hotel becomes a lens, or rather a series of lenses for viewing the events of the story. A number of strange events take place when the Westwick family, in various combinations, visit the hotel: Henry Westwick, accommodated (unknowingly) in the room in which his brother died, suffers from total insomnia and lack of appetite, only to regain his ability to eat as soon as he quits the building; his sister suffers from terrible dreams while sleeping in the same room; Francis Westwick is assaulted by a disgusting smell; Marion Westwick sees a spot of what she is convinced is blood on the ceiling; the widow of Lord Montbarry, the Countess Narona, enters a trance; and the dead man's cousin and jilted fiancée sees his head descend from the ceiling, and the eyes open to confront the Countess. These various visitations form a reasonably comprehensive list of possible supernatural effects of a haunted house. Yet running alongside the ghostly experiences is an equally strong detective interest, culminating in the discovery of an actual severed head in a secret cubby-hole above the room that produced the supernatural effects. An analysis of the teeth proves that the head is indeed that of Lord Montbarry.

So the hauntings of the whole Westwick family become clues to the existence of the criminal secret of Montbarry's murder. The Countess's unfinished melodrama similarly is a clue to the solution of the crime, being as much a confession as a pathetic attempt to control the interpretation of events, and to assert free will; the sheet from the old guidebook to the palazzo is a clue too, telling Agnes and Henry Westwick of the existence of the cubby-hole. Collins seems to be working out a quite complex rhetorical schema. The various plot tropes can be viewed as evidence of ghostly invasion, the existence of a crime, mental derangement, the plot of a melodrama or the working-out of destiny. Collins's novella suggests that all these explanations can work simultaneously.

It is the house/hotel which activates all these events, seemingly unable to preserve its own secrecy: a change of door number is useless in checking the Westwick family's vulnerability to supernatural visitation. The house here is incapable of the hypocritical respectability of the villa in Basil. Its revelations come to a climax when the perfect lady, Agnes, comes to stay and mediates the Countess's vision and her destiny. It is as if the errant heroine has come home at last to grant her moral approval to the house and to be confirmed in her own heroine status by its spiritual power. Agnes is indeed an errant heroine, since she is poor, a governess to members of her own family, without a home of her own. In turning to work, to the public realm, she yet remains domestic, not just by becoming a governess, but by confining her field of operation to her own family; she thus returns the public heroine to private ownership, while forcing the public hotel to reveal the secrets of its ‘private’ past. The Palace Hotel is made truthteller by Agnes, its very structure revealing the truth beneath its surface, just as her mute presence (Collins's use here of muteness as the activator of the moral occult is one of the strongest examples in his fiction of this particular melodramatic convention) judges and forces the truth out of the Countess. The Countess faints on first meeting Agnes, and the arrival of the latter woman in the hotel lounge is the direct cause of the Countess's loss of ‘invention’ and the degeneration of her narrative into fragments. Just as Agnes Lockwood causes the Countess's death-like trance, and possibly her actual death, so her arrival makes of the Countess's life a blank page, like the last act of her play. It is as if Agnes erases the self-determining texts of the homeless adventuresses of Collins's earlier fiction, first forcing them into confession and self-revelation, and then into blankness.

Something similar seems to be happening to the sensation genre itself. The palazzo's history is that of Gothic house turned detective novel hotel, just as the plot moves from ghost story to crime novel. The extreme over-determination of the events of the story leads each genre to demythologize the others, so that the sordid facts of the murder, in the matter-of-fact way in which they are described (especially the checking of the teeth), is a reduction of the Gothic qualities of the novel to the banal, rather than a revelation of strangeness under the seemingly banal, which Collins achieves in some of his short stories. With the murderess's confession and the supernatural evidence rather forced on the characters like cards on an unsuspecting tyro poker player, the role of the detective is reduced to a mechanical checking of the clues provided. Having secularized the Gothic, Collins then proceeds, through Agnes, to attempt some reconstruction, with a heroine not unlike those of Le Fanu who, as will be seen later, uses the heroine to criticize the patriarchal Gothic house, and in so doing to assert some new mode of spirituality. But Agnes's production of truth from the haunted hotel by her very presence merely serves to reveal its rhetorical structure; it provides a grammar of mystery, more than mystery itself. As the Countess Narona's play calls attention to her crime, but equally to itself as fictive, so the novella—like so much of Collin's later work—is self-referential, dissolving not even into a plot, but into plot as an abstraction.

Agnes Lockwood fails to redeem the ancient palazzo from its modern role as a commercial hotel. The descent of the aristocratic Gothic house to the commercial status of an hotel is mirrored by the degeneration of Collins's heroines into commodities. Of the women mentioned so far, Margaret in Basil has been literally sold by her father, while Magdalen Vanstone and Lydia Gwilt have been homeless, and thus ‘public’ women—not in any professional sense—but as women who exploit the domestic skills and sexual charms of femininity to gain public advantage. To use the analogy of buildings they are themselves hotels, offering a public version of a private country house.

Lydia Gwilt is definitely luxury class in the quality of her accomplishments: she plays Beethoven easily, ‘There is the “Moonlight Sonata” open and tempting me on the music-stand;’ her spelling and grammar are far superior to that of the gently bred Neelie Milroy; she is very well read; her ‘dainty neatness’ is a quality usually reserved in fiction for the most moral of heroines; her attention to the needs, the conversation and the breakfast cup of Major Milroy far exceeds that of his daughter. Miss Gwilt even possesses that most characteristic of heroine-like attributes, a ‘modest little work-basket,’ although the fact that it is ‘in the window’ suggests some desire to impress. With the official heroine of Armadale a coquettish, impertinent simpleton, it was no wonder that contemporary reviewers of the novel resented Miss Gwilt's gentility—and her snobbery. ‘How I hate the coarse ways of the lower orders!’ she exclaims, and the reader's uncertainty about whether the remark is ironic only increases further the sense of irritation (Fourth Book, Ch. 10, p. 379).

Lydia Gwilt's gentlewomanliness is the result, of course, of an expensive education, something reviewers seemed able to accept in the case of characters like Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. What shocks in Collins's assertion that gentility and ladylike feelings can be taught is his underlying assumption that there is no essential female, moral quality: women are only what society makes of them; their nature is protean. The ritualized nature of the behaviour of a Victorian lady makes it all the easier to imitate, but imitate is all that any women does, not just the adventuress. Lydia Gwilt does this self-consciously; she imitates the domestic ideal—as Lady Audley does in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novel—but she is also, unlike Lady Audley, able to make fun of herself and it:

If so ladylike a person as I am could feel a gentle tingling all over her to the tips of her fingers, I should suspect myself of being in that condition at the present moment. But with my manners and accomplishments the thing is, of course, out of the question. We all know that a lady has no passions.

(Fifth Book, Ch. 1, p. 488)

The novel seems here to be mocking the contemporary idea of the lady, and to bear out the feminist claims made for it. There is no such person as a perfect lady in the pages of Armadale. The gentlewomen of Thorpe-Ambrose are dismissed as uncharitable hypocrites, Miss Milroy has already been shown to be ill-bred and petulant, her mother is a jealous monster, and Allan's revered mother practised deception on her own father. The male characters bear all the weight of courtesy, kindness and loyalty. The result of this demystification is not, however, any more liberating for the female protagonist than it was in No Name. Rather, the fragility of female identity exposed by Collins is used to justify a need for male mastery of a woman, mastery that Collins associates with the acceptance of fate. After The Moonstone Collins loses interest in mystery stories, and in removing the detective element from his work he removes also the active detective role of the reader. He comes to focus, as he did in Armadale, on the mechanics of the thriller plot, in which, as in a James Bond story, all the reader has to do is to respond to a set of predetermined stimuli.

The result of this policing by Collins of his texts to control their interpretation serves to fix his female characters especially within a textual and moral confine that is his linguistic equivalent of the patriarchal house. His increasing lack of interest in subjectivity, combined with his analysis of the fragility of female identity results in female characters who are no longer sensation heroines and adventuresses who break and enter the male house but house-prisoners. But paradoxically, in the process of fixing his women all the more firmly in their place, Collins loses control over his rapidly self-deconstructing texts. By removing all human motivation except for fatalism (as in The Haunted Hotel) his characters collapse into nothing but difference, and plot similarly into metonymic chains that cancel each other out. The move into melodrama produces nothing but a fallen drama, rhetorical rather than actual, difference rather than moral opposition being all that separates his characters from each other, as word is separated from word, no longer good and evil.

Indeed, what Collins's discussion of destiny and its association with patriarchal and authorial control reveals is that his sensation fiction is actually a version of ‘male’ Gothic. His interest in the destabilization of female identity, and in the secularization of the domestic house, combined with a social and quasi-religious determinism marks him as the descendent of Lewis and Maturin. His female protagonists owe more to the Juliettes of the Marquis de Sade's libertine texts than the Emilys and Ellenas of Radcliffe. However, his work lacks the heavy sense of a particularly masculine guilt that I claimed … characterized much of this masculine tradition. ‘Monk’ Lewis's Ambrosio was destroyed by the power and cunning of a female demon. But Collins casts a female as his protagonist, and gives her the guilt that causes her own destruction. This guilt makes her tamely reenter the private house, and accept the authority of its master. The endings of Collins's sensation novels may lack the climactic drama of those of the earlier Gothic period, but they are equally punitive.

Notes

1. U. C. Knoepflmacher, ‘The Counterworld of Victorian Fiction and The Woman in White,’ in Jerome Buckley (ed.), The Worlds of Victorian Fiction (Cambridge Mass., 1975) pp. 352-69 (p. 353).

2. See, for example, Dorothy Sayers's introduction to The Moonstone (London, 1944) p. viii; Merryn Williams, Women in the English Novel 1800-1900 (London, 1984) pp. 132-37; Elaine Showalter, ‘Family Secrets and Domestic Subversion: Rebellion in the Novels of the 1860s,’ in Antony S. Wohl (ed.), The Victorian Family: Structures and Stresses (London, 1978) pp. 101-18.

3. Magdalen follows the example of Mary Braddon herself who became an actress to support her family. See Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (New York, 1979).

4. Richard Barickman, Susan Macdonald and Myra Stark, Corrupt Relations: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and Collins and the Victorian Sexual System (New York, 1982) p. 121.

5. Ibid., p. 120.

6. Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship (New York, 1985) p. 151.

7. Nina Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (New York, 1985) p. 165.

8. Jeanne Fahnestock, ‘The Heroine of Irregular Features,’ Victorian Studies, vol. XXIV (Spring, 1981) no. 3, pp. 325-50, especially p. 341 on Magdalen Vanstone.

9. Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth Century England (Princeton, 1983) p. 333. Meisel is referring to Becky Sharp. Hardy, in his own version of the No Name plot, The Hand of Ethelberta (London, 1875-6), makes his heroine not an actress but a lady by marriage who exploits a private gift for storytelling for public gain. The effect of her performance is thus the more shocking—and carries a stronger erotic charge—than straightforward professional acting.

10. Barickman, Macdonald and Stark, Corrupt Relations, pp. 56-7.

11. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd (London, [1863] 1984) p. 330.

12. Norman Page (ed.), Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (London, 1974) p. 149.

13. Meisel, Realizations, p. 66.

14. See ibid., pp. 351-5. Millais is discussed on p. 355:

    Millais put forward a series of original narrative paintings (not dependent on a prior fiction) designed to contain the whole interest and significance of a story in a plausible circumstantial setting and configuration, a “situation” … In all but one, the situation is like a diagram of countervailing forces, present together, and recorded at the moment of equilibrium.

15. See Chapter 1 of Meredith's Diana of the Crossways (London, 1885). Braddon too shows an interest in ‘framing’—of a specifically Pre-Raphaelite kind—in Lady Audley's Secret (1862). Lady Audley's detailed, exaggerated and colourful portrait reveals potentialities that go beyond her conventional role and her angelic surface. As in the narrative paintings by Hunt and Millais, the framing of Lady Audley does not enclose so much as dramatize her, and reveal choices and possibilities.

16. See Kenneth Robinson, Wilkie Collins (London, 1951) pp. 120-22.

17. Cited in Tim Hilton, The Pre-Raphaelites (London, 1970) p. 55.

18. See Michael Booth, Melodrama (London, 1965) pp. 157, 163.

19. It is interesting that such an independent and individualist writer as Collins begins authorship with a biography, pious in tone, of his father, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins R.A. (London, 1848), and that the death of his mother in 1868 coincides with a deterioration in his health and his fiction: see Robinson, Wilkie Collins, p. 193f. Alethea Hayter in Opium and the Romantic Imagination (Berkeley, 1968) pp. 264-7, attributes the decline of Collins's powers to his opium addiction.

20. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, John Osborne (tr.) (London, 1977) p. 129.

21. See, for example, Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (New York, 1979) pp. 138, 143, 205-6.

22. Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton, 1980) pp. 55, 61.

23. Meisel, Realizations, p. 198.

24. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, 1976) p. 8. See also p. 54.

25. The myth of Lilith, Adam's first and evil wife, was popular with the Pre-Raphaelites. See, for example, D. G. Rossetti's sonnet, “Body's Beauty,” No. 78 in The House of Life sequence, in William M. Rossetti (ed.), The Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London, 1905) p. 216. Also see the painting Lady Lilith (1864).

26. This is a complicated issue. Trollope was indeed criticized for his lack of moral proportion in such works as The Eustace Diamonds. It was not, however, his morally dubious women themselves who were the origin of this criticism—indeed they were often praised as social types. Rather Trollope was accused for not including an equivalently prominent good character to balance them. See David Skilton, Anthony Trollope and his Contemporaries: A Study in the Theory and Conventions of Mid-Victorian Fiction (London, 1972) pp. 70-74.

27. T. S. Eliot, “Wilkie Collins and Dickens,” in Selected Essays (London, 1958) pp. 460-70 (p. 467).