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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 63.4 (2002) 471-500



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"Overpowering Vitality":
Nostalgia and Men of Sensibility in the Fiction of Wilkie Collins

Tamara S. Wagner


In Wilkie Collins's controversial novel Man and Wife (1870), nostalgic and nostalgically presented old-fashioned Sir Patrick sarcastically summarizes the "cant of the day" that takes "physically-wholesome men for granted, as being morally-wholesome men into the bargain": "I don't see the sense of crowing over him [the model young Briton] as a superb national production, because he is big and strong, and . . . takes a cold shower bath all the year round." 1 The antiheroes of Collins's novels eschew Victorian fashions of a muscular masculinity, anticipating the rise of the new fin de siècle antihero but also harking back to the sentimental heroes of the late-eighteenth-century novel of sentiment or sensibility. 2 The shift from heroic masculinity to praiseworthy physical delicacy, which figures as a sign of moral strength, is connected to a sentimental reaffirmation of lovesickness and happy endings as well as to a corresponding redefinition of the villains, whose vitality contrasts with a series of similar feminized hypersensitive heroes. To understand this development, one needs to take a close look at the mental, moral, and bodily strengths and weaknesses of Collins's heroes [End Page 471] and also at their relationship with formidable, robust women—a relationship that sheds an intriguing light on gender issues in Victorian fiction. In particular, Collins's later novels consciously engage with the sensibilities and sensations of desirable, admirable heroes, nostalgically reclaiming an older ideal of manliness and thus doubly promoting nostalgic longing. Indulgence in emotions—especially in longing, pining, nostalgia, and lovesickness—is, after all, the redeeming quality of his nostalgically recalled men of sensibility.

The legacy of the novel of sensibility as recuperated by the Victorian sensation novel is a fascinating topic that has been ignored in literary criticism. Yet there are significant parallels between the late- eighteenth-century heroes of sensibility and the enervated (male) victims of sensation in Victorian sensation fiction. The reworking of the sentimental ideal of manliness in this body of literature places in a new light the reactions against ideals of the muscular hero in the late nineteenth century. Sensation novels such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) and Charles Reade's Hard Cash (1863), written in the wake of Collins's popular novel The Woman in White (1860), create hypersensitive antiheroes who are reconfigured as assertive men possessed of recharged energies. Collins's fiction maps a shift away from this reassertion of energy and willpower. While drawing on Collins's extensive oeuvre, I shall focus on No Name (1862), written when the "sensational sixties" had reached a peak, and Heart and Science (1883), one of his mission novels, which redeploy the techniques and themes of the sensation genre to attack particular issues, such as, in the latter work, vivisection. Both novels discuss fashionable ideals of male as well as female beauty and their influence on the creation of fictional heroes and heroines. They link the question of proper masculinity to manly willpower as well as to feminine sensibilities. Their juxtaposition maps the development of a new antihero of feeling, exemplifying a shift from an ambiguous treatment of sensitive antiheroes in Collins's earlier novels to a new ideal of male sensibilities. [End Page 472] Man and Wife, published eight years after No Name and thirteen years before Heart and Science, provides a useful point of entrance to the recurring theme of what constitutes a desirable hero.

The recuperation of delicate heroes and heroines of sensibility in Collins's fiction, however, has also to be seen against the background of Victorian preoccupations with health and strength, which tie in with anxieties about manliness. Recent reassessments of the Victorian sensation novel focus predominantly on its interest in gender issues, in particular on the relationship between women and madness. Insanity, the norms of normality, and incarceration in insane asylums or private attics are without doubt the...

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