Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years

10. Sensationalizing Women’s Writing: Madwomen in Attics, the Sensational Canon, and Generic Confinement

183 10 Sensationalizing Women’s Writing Madwomen in Attics, the Sensational Canon, and Generic Confinement Tamara Silvia Wagner When Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar directed new attention to nineteenth-century women writers in 1979, they firmly linked together the representation of the confined Victorian antiheroine, the iconic madwoman in the attic as her double, and the female novelist’s self-conscious engagement with her own marginalization. This linkage has become one of the major premises of discussions of Victorian literature by women and in particular of their contributions to midcentury sensation fiction. What has been seen as the genre’s underpinning interest in domestic confinement has marked it out as intrinsically subversive, even proto-feminist. Yet this focus has further marginalized an array of domestic women writers, including until very recently Margaret Oliphant, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Charlotte Yonge. Nicola Diane Thompson has provocatively asked of the ideological limitations in feminist recuperative work, “What, for example, do you say about a conservative woman novelist like Charlotte Yonge once you’ve discovered her?”1 Precisely the incorporation of new fictional paradigms into domestic realism , however, singles out the most revealing cases of the intricacies of popular Victorian women’s writing.Yonge adapted literary sensationalism to serve a religious agenda, and in the process engendered alternative forms of representing domesticity, the heroine’s struggles within its confines, and, most intriguingly perhaps, easily sensationalized emotional distress at home. That 184 Tamara Silvia Wagner much of the rediscovery of nineteenth-century women writers can be, to a decisive extent, conducted via a remapping of the sensation novel’s cultural impact does more than simply testify to the genre’s range and adaptability. In disclosing important interchanges between sensationalism and domestic realism, the transformative deployment of sensational elements by domestic, even notoriously antifeminist, novelists not only asks for but helps to facilitate a reassessment of popular fiction and the centrality of women’s writing within its development, reception, and reworking. Far from presenting placidly subdued heroines—proverbially suffering in stillness—such ambiguously anti-sensational novels by domestic women writers minutely delineate intensive emotional experience and its symptoms. The poignancy of their delineation, I wish to argue, counters the absorption of any emotional experience into the general sensationalization of the mundane that characterizes the sensation genre’s domestic Gothic. A muchneeded reconsideration of their critical engagement with what could loosely be termed emotional instabilities and their containment therefore also offers a crucial opportunity for a renewed evaluation of the impact Gilbert and Gubar ’s work has had on the making of a sensational canon of women writers. This canon itself needs to be carefully reappraised to do justice to its various, at their best epistemologically sophisticated, exponents. If their invocation of cultural anxieties about socially constructed madness has formed a defining element of Victorian sensationalism, then these alternative takes on divergent reactions to the “abnormal” evince the complexities of contending discourses on normalcy and their fictionalization.Yonge’s treatment of emotional distress and its perception in an often unforgiving society may first and foremost continue to serve a specific agenda, and yet it also illustrates her ambiguous reuse of the sensational in depicting domestic ideals in danger of collapse. It is not only that her treatment of intersecting emotional, mental, and spiritual uncertainties becomes increasingly more sympathetic and less rigidly tied to either religious doctrine or an easy identification with current medical claims. This rejection of a medicalization of emotion offers an important alternative approach to sensation fiction’s investment in clinical discourses. In order to trace Yonge’s continued concern with protracted emotional distress,I shall focus on its changing representation in her midcentury works. There is a perceptible shift from her fiction of the 1850s to that of the early1860s . The Castle-Builders; Or, The Deferred Confirmation (1854) is notorious for promoting doctrine so explicitly that it overshadows the plot more than any other of Yonge’s novels. It firmly identifies expressions of “low spirits ,”including their poetic expression, with spiritual carelessness. By contrast, The Young Step-Mother; Or, A Chronicle of Mistakes (1861) leaves its original Sensationalizing Women’s Writing 185 didactic agenda behind fairly quickly to delineate instead the slow, laborious, almost belated, recognition of what are variously—and with a significant amount of ambiguity—termed the combination of “hereditary low spirits, a precocious mind, a reserved temper, a motherless home.”2 In drawing on the extensive oeuvre Yonge produced...