The Sensation Novel: "Secret Theatre of Home"

This text served as an introductory chapter of a larger dissertation of mine called "Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Law and Literature: Legal Structures and Poetic Justice."

Before you're all bored to death, let me just say that the Sensation Novel is a really "fun" literary genre! If you like it, just contact me, because there is plenty more where this came from. Anyway, here we go...

The Sensation Novel: “the Secret Theatre of Home”.

As indicated above, when The Woman in White was first published, it was an immense popular success. When Sampson Low published the work as a three-volume novel, it sold out on its publication date. At the same time of this huge popular success, however, literary critics objected to what they came to call the ‘sensational’ content of the novel: the elaborate conspiracy plotted by Count Fosco to acquire Laura Fairlie’s inheritance, purposely mistaken identities, carefully constructed marriage settlements, the treatment of insanity, false aristocratic titles, illegitimacy, etc. all added to the novel’s ‘sensational’ status – a term which was always used pejoratively by opposing critics.

Collins’s novel proved to be the beginning of a real “Sensation Mania” in the domain of the novel, which would last about a decade. According to an anonymous critic in the Westminster Review this type of novel was like “a virus … spreading in all directions” (Nayder 1997: 71):
"Just as in the Middle Ages people were afflicted with the Dancing Mania and Lycanthropy, sometimes barking like dogs, and sometimes mewing like cats, so now we have a Sensational Mania. Just, too, as those diseases always occurred in seasons of dearth and poverty, and attacked only the poor, so does the Sensational Mania in Literature burst out only in times of mental poverty, and afflict only the most poverty-stricken minds." (O’Neill 1988: 4)
Margaret Oliphant, who, generally speaking, displayed a negative attitude towards the sensation phenomenon, nevertheless acknowledged Collins’s craftsmanship, but feared that he might have instigated a dangerous game with his novel because, she writes, his “disciples will exaggerate the faults of their leader, and choose his least pleasant peculiarities for special study” (Balée 1992: 198). H. L. Mansel, in 1863, reviewed sensation fiction in the Quarterly Review and came to the conclusion that the genre generally subverted female morality in order to shock its readers solely for the sake of shocking them.

The Sensation phenomenon was not confined to literature, but was an all-encompassing phenomenon in the 1860s. The decade of the 1860s was itself indeed characterized by excess on different levels: from sensational courtroom cases (e.g. Madeline Smith, Constance Kent), which were reported lavishly in the newspapers, to melodramas (especially Dion Boucicault), and novels, which even became the stake of numerous bets. Novelists that should be included are Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, and Mrs Henry Wood, but even novelists like George Eliot and Anthony Trollope could not escape including ‘sensational’ elements in their work. These sensation novels, also known as ‘fast novels’, ‘bigamy novels’, or ‘adultery novels’, could perhaps best be described as “tales of modern life” (Pykett 1994: 4). Contemporary critics realized this, and this was indeed the main reason for their concern:
"The sensation novel, be it mere trash or something worse, is usually a tale of our own times. Proximity is, indeed, one great element of sensation. It is necessary to be near a mine to be blown up by its explosion; and a tale which aims at electrifying the nerves of the reader is never thoroughly effective unless the scene be laid in our own days and among the people we are in the habit of meeting" (Hughes 1980: 18).
These tales of modern life took the form of complicated plots focusing on secrecy, deception, suspense, doubleness and mystery or in Thomas Hardy’s words: “Mystery, entanglement, surprise and moral obliquity” (Pykett 1994: 4). The most shocking element of these novels was indeed the fact that they took place in the every-day domestic sphere of a modern middle-class or aristocratic household. In his review of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd Henry James acknowledged this fact:
"[…] those most mysterious of mysteries, [were] the mysteries which are at our own doors… Instead of the terrors of Udolpho, we [are] treated to the terrors of the cheerful country house, or the London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely the more terrible." (Pykett 1994: 6)
In referring to Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho James points to the Gothic Novel, from whose ashes, amongst others, the Sensation Novel arose. However, he immediately indicates the main difference between the Sensation Novel and the Gothic Novel, namely the proximity of the Sensation Novel versus the remoteness (in time and place) of the Gothic Novel. Although the terror of the familiar was already manifesting itself in Anne Radcliffe’s ‘explained supernatural’, the threat to middle-class security was considerable lower than in the Sensation Novel.

If we analyse the Sensation Novel in relation to the contemporary developments in the field of literary production and distribution, we can see that the genre was primarily seen as a commodity in the commercialised literary market. Novels like Collins’s The Woman in White, and Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret were among the bestsellers of the nineteenth century. The increasing popularity of the Sensation Novel with its almost formulaic appearance did cause reason for disturbance, especially because of the fact that it crossed and blurred different boundaries, generic, as well as stylistic and class boundaries. In reworking material from different genres, the Sensation Novel greedily borrowed from ‘lower-class’ genres, from penny dreadfuls, and especially from popular melodrama. Winifred Hughes sees in the Sensation Novel “for the first time in an age of increasing literacy, […] an undisputed example of “democratic art”” (Hughes 1980: 6). It had origins in lower-class literature and was read by all classes of society. Lyn Pykett analyses the Sensation Novel as both “the product and symptom of quite profound changes in fiction and the fiction market in the mid-Victorian period.” (Pykett 1994: 9)

Moreover, the Sensation Novel was preoccupied with some of the most central contemporary social tensions and anxieties of the Victorian middle-class. The anxieties displayed in the Sensation novel revolved mostly around the cornerstone of Victorian society, namely the family. This was done on four interrelated levels. The first level is concerned with gender roles, marriage and the role of the woman in the family. In light of the insistence on womanly purity, Victorian middle-class society saw the morally ambiguous heroines and villains of the Sensation Novel as a threat to the entire society. Indeed, in the Sensation Novel, the heroine is no longer the moral certainty (cf. Lady Audley) she used to be in the traditional romance:
"For whatever reasons, the heroine of the sensation novel has become enmeshed in a sordid tangle of crime, blackmail, and seduction; she has become a participant, however unwilling, as well as merely a victim." (Hughes 1980: 44)
In the most extreme case she is, like Lady Audley, not at all the domestic angel she appears to be:
"Social and moral chaos has spread even to the inner sanctum, infecting the emblem of domesticity. The one island of security and certitude remaining in a tumultuous age has been invaded and despoiled." (Hughes 1980: 45)
The second level is involved with the legal aspect of the family and the role of the law in regulating and organizing the Victorian family. A third level looks at social class and relations between classes. A fourth and last level deals with ‘property’ and its effect on the family. On each of these levels, the family is debunked as an “illusory sanctuary” (Pykett 1994: 12). As such, the Sensation Novel can be seen as an intervention in contemporary social debates.

As already indicated, formally speaking, the Sensation Novel tended to borrow from different genres:
"Formally sensation fiction was less a genre than a generic hybrid. The typical sensation novel was a catholic mixture of modes and forms, combining realism and melodrama, the journalistic and the fantastic, the domestic and the romantic or exotic." (Pykett 1994: 4)
Charles Reade’s standard subtitle “A Matter-of-Fact Romance” describes best the ambiguity of the Sensation Novel, its deliberate mixture of romance and realism (modes of writing which are usually opposed to each other), resulting also in the ambivalence of the sensational heroine and villain. Formally, the Sensation Novel is also characterized by emphasizing incident and plot. A much heard criticism of the Sensation Novel is indeed its lack of ‘character’. This insistence on plot runs parallel with an external characterization (e.g. dress, physical characteristics). Winifred Hughes records a contemporary reviewer’s opinion:
"A sensation novel, as a matter of course, abounds in incident. Indeed, as a general rule, it consists of nothing else… . The human actors in the piece are, for the most part, but so many lay-figures on which to exhibit a drapery of incident. Allowing for the necessary division of all characters of a tale into male and female, old and young, virtuous and vicious, there is hardly anything said or done by any one specimen of a class which might not with equal fitness be said or done by any other specimen of the same class. Each game is played with the same pieces, differing only in the moves." (Hughes 1980: 23)
Henry James indicts this lack of character as well in his review of Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Lady Audley is a “non-entity, without a heart, a soul, a reason.”
"But what we may call the small change for these facts – her eyes, her hair, her mouth, her dresses, her bedroom furniture, her little words and deeds – are so lavishly bestowed that she successfully maintains a kind of half illusion." (Hughes 1980: 26)

The Sensation Novel is characterized by a mixture of both realism and fantasy, and it is “this mixture itself, this disregard of fundamental categories of art, that becomes the focus of the aesthetic objections to the sensation novel.” (Hughes 1980: 52) Because of this mingling, the sensationalists came in conflict with the anti-sensationalists or realists. The realist critique of the sensationalists was mainly aimed at the probability of the events in the Sensation Novel. The realists saw these as distortions and exaggerations of experiences of the modern urban context: “To heap together startling and exceptional incidents in defiance of all probability is the obvious resource of inferior artists” (Hughes 1980: 52). These events failed to meet the mimetic standard and were seen as ‘unnatural’ or ‘grotesque’. This criticism is inevitably linked to the particular worldview of the realists, which is essentially a moral worldview, based on ‘truth’, and ‘human nature’ as constants, something which manifested itself in their novels as a belief in ‘truth-to-life’ and ‘life-as-it-is’. The sensationalists’ mixture of both modes, fantasy and realism, was rejected by the realists who thought that the two should be duly separated, or, that fantasy and the improbable should be situated elsewhere or in another era. However, although the Sensation Novel was denounced everywhere in theory, even the realists (and to a certain extent the naturalists) could not escape including sensational elements in their own works (Trollope, Eliot).

Ultimately, the Sensation Novel did not survive the sensational sixties, mainly because it denotes a transitional model. The sensation novel looked for alternatives for the realistic mode, but did so by looking to past models (popular romance and melodrama), a strategy which ultimately failed because it was not adapted to the new context:
"[…] they were finally unable to detach themselves from the hoary conventions of an obsolescent mode, even though they were responding to a new situation for which they found realism inadequate. The old stereotypes, revived and decked out in modern, middle-class dress, could not quite contain the new meaning. Because of this tension between meaning and form, the sensation novel was discomfiting and controversial to the mid-Victorians." (Hughes 1980: 70)