SOURCE: “The Fallen Angels of Wilkie Collins,” in International Journal of Women's Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4, September/October, 1984, pp. 343-51.

[In the following essay, Frick discusses Collins's ambivalent treatment of fallen women in his novels.]

INTRODUCTION

In her recent study of the Victorian heroine, Woman and the Demon, Nina Auerbach argues that the fallen woman, far more than the angelic one, galvanized the mid- and late-nineteenth-century imagination. This assertion is especially true when we examine the fiction of Wilkie Collins, friend and protegé of Dickens, sensation novelist par excellence, and grandfather of the modern English detective novel. While Collins at times upheld conventional notions of womanhood through pale-cheeked and fainthearted heroines, such as Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White, his true emotional and intellectual affinities were with the fallen angels of his time—prostitutes, mistresses, murderesses, adulteresses, divorcées, and other female deviants from “respectable” society. While he sometimes resorted to stereotyping these women, he more frequently made them the center of his novels, endowed them with appealing or admirable traits, and rewarded them with morally upright husbands—much to the horror of his critics. In this paper I shall examine the roles of Collins's rebellious fallen heroines and demonstrate how, for the most part, they challenge common Victorian assumptions about “the one unpardonable sin”¹ and its social, moral, and spiritual consequences.

I

Why was Collins so fascinated by fallen women? What factors contributed to his often sympathetic and unorthodox depictions of them? One answer lies in his own unconventional relationships with two women who dominated much of his life and writing. In her reminiscences, Mrs. Kate Perugini, Dickens's daughter, records that “Wilkie Collins had a mistress called Caroline, a young woman of gentle birth and the original of The Woman in White.”² This enigmatic figure was Caroline Elizabeth Graves. At the time of her first encounter with Collins (believed to be in the early part of 1859), she was the wife, perhaps the widow of George Robert Graves, about whom nothing is known. After living with Collins, unmarried, for about ten years, Caroline suddenly married the son of a distiller, Joseph Charles Clow, in 1868. Collins himself was reported to have attended the wedding. Nevertheless, in the early 1870s, Caroline appears to have left or to have been abandoned by Clow, for she returned to re-establish a household with Collins and remained with him until his death.

In the interval between Caroline's abrupt and mysterious marriage to Clow and her return to Collins, he began a relationship with a second woman, Martha Rudd, who later adopted the name of Mrs. Dawson. In the course of five years she bore Collins three illegitimate children, two daughters and a son, whom he later acknowledged as his own in his will. Little more is known of her, except that she sent a wreath to Collins's funeral in 1889.³

Undoubtedly, Collins's relationships with Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd made him especially sensitive to the problems of women who lived at odds with conventional society. For example, direct references to Caroline throughout his letters are infrequent or carefully guarded. As Sue Lonoff has pointed out in her recent study of Collins, he was not one to suffer Victorian hypocrisies lightly: “He knew too many men who publicly inveighed against impurity while they privately patronized mistresses and prostitutes, too many women who preached intolerance and failed to practice charity.”⁴

It would be imprudent, however, to insist exclusively on this biographical basis for Collins's favorable treatment of fallen women, for the impetus behind his concern for magdalens of all kinds was as much public and philanthropic as it was private and personal. At the time he launched his career, during the 1850s, there was a widespread display of interest in the lives of fallen women. As this excerpt from the Saturday Review of February 1, 1852, reveals, “Magdalen fever” was sweeping the nation:

The fast man makes love to them; the slow man discusses them; the fashionable young lady copies their dress; the Evangelical clergyman gives them tea, toast, and touching talks at midnight; and the devout young woman gives herself up to the task of tending them in some lovely and sequestered retreat, while they are resting between the acts of their exhausting lives.⁵

While traditional moralists continued to urge the view that prostitutes could only look forward to short, unhappy lives, painful, squalid deaths, and eternal damnation, other investigators and reformers supplied additional evidence about the lives of the fallen. William Acton's Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects, in London and Other Large Cities (1857) provided concrete evidence which contradicted the myth that all seduced women became whores and that all whores soon died.⁶ Moreover, Acton was one of the first to call attention to the medical problems of fallen women, since he realistically deduced that their illnesses might be visited on the next generation of Englishmen.

Among those especially concerned with the plight of the fallen woman were also some of Collins's closest friends. While he privately indulged in liaisons outside his marriage, Dickens publicly directed his energies towards Urania Cottage, a refuge for homeless women, and urged compassion and pity for “the daughters of the streets” through his sentimental portraits of prostitutes such as Martha Endell and Little Emily in David Copperfield. Additionally, the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Collins's brother, Charley, actively campaigned for the rescue and reform of fallen women, and in works such as Millais's “Virtue and Vice,” Rossetti's “Found,” and Hunt's “the Awakened Conscience,” revealed not only their tragic destinies but also their disturbing beauty.

With so many portraits of the fallen placed before the public eye, and with such a supply of causes, motivations and consequences for their actions being proposed, Collins could hardly have avoided writing about female outcasts. For one thing, the lives of fallen women were inherently more interesting than the lives of conventional heroines, and therefore had stronger sensational appeal to his readers. Secondly, as one committed to literary realism, he could hardly overlook this important aspect of contemporary Victorian life. Still, he faced the difficult task of reconciling his own more liberal notions of female sexual behavior with the conservative expectations of much of his audience.⁷

II

In approaching this problem, Collins occasionally fell back on two standard conceptions of the magdalen: the man-trapping jezebel and the madonna-whore. Significantly, even these stereotypes reveal important departures from tradition. Sensual, coldhearted, and sinister, the jezebels slither across the pages of his novels like vipers, infecting the virtuous characters with their corruption and depravity. Margaret Sherwin, the linen-draper's daughter who secretly marries the hero of Basil (1852), only to betray him by having an affair with her tutor, is cast in the role of the conventional siren whose appearance signals domestic chaos and prolonged suffering. With her “olive cheeks,” “large dark eyes,” and “full lips,” she evokes all the swarthy, voluptuous, and non-English sensuality of a Pre-Raphaelite stunner like Jane Morris, and is deliberately contrasted with Basil's fair-skinned and pure-minded sister, Clara. Despite the protagonist's idealistic speculation that Margaret's dark face “would shine forth in the full luxury of its beauty when she first heard the words, received the first kiss from the man she loved,”⁸ Collins emphasizes that Margaret has little to do with love. Her appeal is blatantly sexual, as Basil's dream vision of her as The Dark Lady of the Wood underscores:

Her eyes were lustrous and fascinating as the eyes of a serpent—large, dark, and soft as the eyes of the wild doe. Her lips were parted with a languid smile; and she drew back the long hair, which lay over her cheeks, her neck, her bosom, while I was gazing on her. … I touched her hand, and in an instant, the touch ran through me like fire from head to foot. Then, still looking intently on me with her wild, bright eyes, she clasped her supple arms round my neck, and drew me a few paces away with her towards the dark wood.

(Basil, p. 51)

In the same way, Lydia Gwilt, the scheming governess of Armadale (1866), is yet another “one of those beautiful women of elegant figure and golden locks whose fascinating exterior only hides a subtle brain and a pitiless heart.”⁹ “Fouler than the sinks and sewers,”¹⁰ as one reviewer described her, Miss Gwilt has lived to the ripe age of thirty-five having committed forgery, theft, bigamy, having served a jail sentence, and having attempted suicide. Her sordid life, however, has taken no toll on her beauty, and her delight in her own sexuality is frankly undisguised, as she suggests in this account of her latest attempt to ensnare her Prey:

She sighed, and walking back to the glass, wearily loosened the fastenings of her dress; wearily removed the studs from the chemisette beneath it, and put them on the chimney piece. She looked indolently at the reflected beauties of her neck and bosom, as she unplaited her hair and threw it back in one great mass over her shoulders. “Fancy,” she thought, “if he saw me now.”

(Armadale, pp. 382-83)

While Collins's response to these seductive sirens is on the whole traditional and punitive, it also reflects his uneasiness with some of the myths surrounding them. After her infidelity has been discovered, Margaret Sherwin becomes fatally ill (from the small pox, which she has appropriately contracted from her lover). Her death is prolonged, remorseful, and painful, so much so that Basil can hardly recognize her:

The smouldering fever in her cheeks; the glare of the bloodshot eyes; the distortion of the parched lips; the hideous clutching of the outstretched fingers at the empty air—the agony of the sight was more than I could endure.

(Basil, p. 292)

Yet at the same time that Collins crushes Margaret for her brazen behavior, he also makes her his mouthpiece for criticism of those “decent” people who publicly denounce fallen women and privately indulge in their own transgressions. In the height of her delirium, she remarks to Basil:

Put roses in my coffin—scarlet roses if you can find any, because that stands for Scarlet Women. … Scarlet? What do I care! It's the boldest color in the world. … How many women are as scarlet as I am—virtue wears it at home in secret, and vice wears it abroad in public.

(Basil, p. 289)

Similarly, Lydia Gwilt receives another traditionally sanctioned punishment for her impurity: she commits suicide when she realizes that she has fallen in love with the very man she has set out to deceive. Her suicide note confirms the myth that a woman's departure from propriety can never furnish real rewards, for she confesses to her victim, “I have never been a happy woman.” Her death and her remorseful clichés, however, are sharply undercut by the attractive and appealing portrait of her that Collins has skillfully woven into the novel. Charming, cultivated (she appreciates Beethoven, Byron, and Dickens), and, of course, strikingly beautiful, she clearly outranks any of the good women who compete with her. Her frankness, humor, and intelligence are hardly diminished by her penchant for self-destruction and deception.

Collins's use of other stereotypes also reveals his concession to and challenge of conventional portraits of the fallen woman. In The Fallen Leaves (1879), the child-prostitute Simple Sally continued the tradition of the madonna-whore which was popularized in novels such as Mrs. Gaskell's Ruth, or Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh. Small, frail, and victimized by poverty and social indifference, Sally seems entirely incapable of understanding the moral implications of her prostitution. To the hero of the novel, and to Collins, she remains miraculously pure, in spite of her fall:

But for the words in which she had accosted him, it would have been impossible to associate her with the lamentable life that she led. The appearance of the girl was artlessly virginal and innocent; she looked as if she had passed through the contamination of the streets without being touched by it, without fearing it, or understanding it. Robed in pure white, with her gentle blue eyes raised to heaven, a painter might have shown her on his canvas as a saint or an angel: and the critical world would have said, Here is the true ideal—Raphael himself might have painted this!

(The Fallen Leaves, p. 275)

According to formula, Sally faced three basic patterns of destiny as an idealized magdalen: she could remain a spectral and pitiful outcast; she could temporarily find work in a refuge, where she would die a deserved but penitent death; or she could commit suicide with edifying pathos. Significantly, Collins rejects all of these traditional solutions to Sally's dilemma and rewards her with marriage to Claude Amelius Goldenheart, a Socialist reformer who spirits her away to the New World and, presumably, to a happy life.

In exonerating Sally from all blame and in rewarding her with respectability in spite of her fall, Collins makes a bold departure from tradition. Nevertheless, Sally remains too pale, self-denouncing and lifeless to constitute a real threat to public morality, and the reader, along with Collins, is more likely to forgive and forget her than to condemn her.¹¹ By contrast, the heroines of No Name (1862), Man and Wife (1870), and The New Magdalen (1873) represent a much more radical break with conventional notions of the magdalen, for not only are they rewarded with respectable husbands after their falls, but they also grow in power, self-possession, and magnetism because of their errors.

Magdalen Vanstone, the protagonist of No Name, is herself the daughter of a fallen woman. When she cannot marry Magdalen's father because he has already been led into marriage by a cruel and vicious adventuress, Mrs. Vanstone consents to live with him, but only after she has taken every necessary precaution to create the illusion of their having been married:

She set herself from the first, to accomplish the one foremost purpose of so living with him, in the world's eyes, as never to raise the suspicion that she was not his lawful wife. … She took all the needful precautions, in those early days, which her husband's less ready capacity had not the art to devise—precautions to which they were largely indebted for the preservation of their secret in later times.

(No Name, p. 115)

But it is the heroine of the novel, not her mother, who receives the name Magdalen and who most truly lives up to it. When her parents suddenly die, Magdalen and her sister, Norah, must face two gruesome revelations: they are illegitimate and, because of this, they are not legally entitled to their parents' inheritance. While Norah passively submits to her fate, Magdalen is openly and admirably defiant. Drawing on her “born talent as an actress,” she launches a campaign of treachery, disguise, and deception to dupe the hier-at-law into marrying her so that she may win back the legacy that is morally, if not legally, hers. Although her plan eventually fails, she derives strength, mobility and power from her fall in ways that her clinging and conventional sister can scarcely comprehend. Despite Collins's statement in the “Preface” to No Name that he aimed to make Magdalen “pathetic … even in her perversity and error,” she remains the strong-willed center of her own universe—patient, firm, and scheming.

Like Magdalen, Anne Silvester, the protagonist of Man and Wife, discovers freedom, self-assertion, and self-knowledge when she is seduced by a caddish young athlete, Geoffrey Delamyn. Unlike traditional models of the fallen woman, Anne refuses to see herself as a helpless victim of male bestiality. In reviewing the events which lead up to her fall, she admits frankly that her participation in the act was willing, that her attraction to Delamyn was primarily physical:

She has seen him … the hero of the river-race, the first and foremost man in a trial of strength and skill which had roused the interest of a nation; the idol of the popular worship and the popular applause. … A woman in an atmosphere of red-hot enthusiasm, witnesses the apotheosis of Physical Strength. Is it reasonable—is it just—to expect her to ask herself, in cold blood, “What morally and intellectually” is all this worth?—and that, when the man … notices her, is presented to her, finds her to his taste, and singles her out from the rest? No. While humanity is humanity, the woman is not utterly without excuse.

(Man and Wife, p. 62)

When Delamyn refuses to marry her and be a father to their unborn child, Anne rejects the role of meek martyr to her own folly. She insists that Delamyn marry her, consults a lawyer to see if their Scottish marriage is legitimate in England, and fights to protect the reputation of her brother-in-law, who has innocently tried to help her resolve her difficulties.

The victim of an evil man and an evil legal system, Anne emerges from her struggles self-sacrificing, but also strong and admirable.

Finally, in discussing Collins's fallen heroines who have special appeal, it is important to look at Mercy Merrick, the protagonist of The New Magdalen. The illegitimate child of a gentleman and an actress, left to support herself at the age of ten, raped while fainting from starvation, and driven into prostitution, Mercy reforms through penitence and self-discipline and, at the outset of the novel, appears as a nurse on the front lines during the Franco-Prussian War. Despite her past, Mercy's demeanour and bearing are heroic, elegant: there is an “innate nobility in the carriage of … her head, an innate grandeur in the gaze of her large gray eyes.”¹² Like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, she seems to glow with a mysterious energy which has resulted from her fall:

The sick kissed the hem of her black dress; they called her their guardian angel, as the beautiful creature moved among them, and bent over their pillows her gentle compassionate face.

(The New Magdalen, p. 51)

At the front, Mercy meets a young gentlewoman, Grace Roseberry, who is on her way to England to meet a distant relative, Lady Janet Roy, whom she has never seen before. The two women exchange life stories, and Grace's petty, cruel and hypocritical nature becomes apparent when she refuses to take Mercy's hand in friendship. When a burst of cannon fire leaves Grace apparently dead, Mercy sees the way to abandon her past life permanently. Taking Grace's name, clothing and papers, she leaves for England and Lady Janet's household, where she passes herself off successfully, wins Lady Janet's love, and even acquires a respectable fiancé. Her basic integrity and heroic nobility resurface, however, when the real Grace, very much alive, shows up. Mercy confesses all, loses her fiancé, and once again faces the possibility of loneliness and ostracism.

In all of these novels, Collins rewards his fallen angels with conventional respectability. Broken and exhausted from her efforts to win back her inheritance, Magdalen Vanstone is rescued by Captain Kirke. When Geoffrey Delamyn dies while trying to murder her, Anne Silvester is rescued by her mature and charming family solicitor, who offers her marriage and security. Mercy Merrick receives perhaps the most shocking award—she is married to Julian Gray, an Evangelical minister.

These happy endings suggest that Collins deliberately challenged his readers' restrictive notions of the fate of fallen women. When we look at them more closely, however, they also suggest a certain degree of ambivalence, for in restoring his fallen heroines to the traditional refuges of marriage and respectability, Collins simultaneously strips them of much of their power, independence and magnetism. As a mistress of disguise and deception, Magdalen Vanstone towers over her opponents, in charge of her own destiny. As the chastised wife of Captain Kirke, however, she is merely a shadow of her former self. Similarly, Anne Silvester and Mercy Merrick sacrifice much of their power and independence to conventional marriages. In Mercy's case, Collins indicates that the respect that she regains through marrying Julian Gray definitely has its limitations. At their post-nuptial ball, the couple discovers to their disillusionment that only married ladies are present; their single daughters shall not suffer the risk of contamination through contact with a former prostitute.¹³

It would be easy to condemn Collins for this subtle ambivalence and for continuing to promote, on whatever level, some of the same restrictive values which he purports to challenge. However, it would be fairer to commend him for his bold attempts to treat the whole subject of fallen women with courage, frankness, and open-mindedness, if not with absolute consistency. Unlike most other writers of his time, he never blames any of his heroines for their sexual lapses per se and suggests that “the one unpardonable sin” may carry special rewards, as well as dangers.

Notes

1. Wilkie Collins, The Evil Genius (New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, 1902), p. 228. This novel, like the others discussed in the body of the paper, also illustrates Collins's tendency to overlook his fallen heroines' sexual lapses and to reward them with promising futures. Sydney Westerfield, a sensitive and ingenuous young governess, is seduced by her employer, Rodney Linley. When the affair is made public, Linley leaves his wife and daughter to live with Sydney. When she realizes, however, how much suffering her relationship with him has caused the child, Sydney repents and gives him up, dedicating her life to hard work and the service of others. At the end of the novel, Collins intimates that she will be rescued and reintegrated into respectable society by the noble Captain Bennydeck. While Collins does not completely overlook her fall, he resists the temptation to condemn her for it, and even suggests that the fault may not lie either with her or her seducer, but with the society of which they are both products.

2. Kenneth Robinson, Wilkie Collins (London: David-Poynter, 1974), pp. 121-22.

3. Ibid., pp. 123-25.

4. Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and His Victorian Readers (New York: AMS Press, 1982), p. 152. Lonoff additionally suggests that Collins's preoccupation with fallen women may also be prompted by “an element of fantasy, obsession, or wish-fulfillment.”

5. Eric Trudghill, Madonnas and Magdalens: The Origins and Development of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (London: Heinemann, 1976), pp. 286-89, passim.

6. Sally Mitchell, The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women's Reading 1835-1880 (Bowling Green: Bowling Green Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 53-54.

7. For other discussions of Collins's ambivalence towards his heroines see Lonoff, and Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 135-43, 205-06.

8. Wilkie Collins, Basil (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1902), p. 37. All subsequent references to Collins's novels will be taken from this 17 volume Illustrated Library edition by Harper and Brothers (1873-1916), and will be cited in the body of the paper.

9. “Recent Novels: Their Moral and Religious Teaching,” London Quarterly, 27 (1866), 104, as cited in Mitchell, p. 74.

10. H. F. Chorley, unsigned review, Athenaeum (2 June 1866), 723-33, as cited in Norman Page, ed., Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 147.

11. Other examples of the idealized fallen woman include Sarah Leeson, the timorous servant in The Dead Secret (1857), who gives up her unborn baby when her fiancé is killed in a mining accident.

12. Wilkie Collins, The New Magdalen (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902), pp. 12-13.

13. Another one of Collins's heroines who receives nominal respectability is Mrs. Catherick, the grim mother of Anne Catherick in The Woman in White. When faced with disgrace and social ostracism because of her alleged affair with Sir Percival Glyde, Mrs. Catherick remains in her village, sternly enduring the rebukes of her neighbors until they eventually stop, and she is “accepted” once again (“The clergyman tips his hat to me”). Collins emphasizes, however, the purely mechanical way in which others acknowledge her, and stresses the real source of her disgrace—her absence of compassion—which sets her apart from the human race.