Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre (review)

In their introduction to Victorian Sensations, Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina suggest that while most recent collections devoted to sensation fiction "have focused on individual authors, notably Braddon and Collins, we bring together essays on the sensation genre as a whole" (xi). The first of these assertions is undoubtedly true, the second exaggerated. Although Charles Reade, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Rhoda Broughton are represented by two essays each, the collection takes only the most tentative of steps beyond the "canon" of sensation fiction. Conspicuous in their absence are Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), Florence Marryat, Felicia Skene, Matilda Charlotte Houstoun, and Edmund Yates. The subject of five essays apiece, Mary Braddon and Wilkie Collins continue to dominate, although attention is given to several of their more neglected texts, including Collins's Basil (1852) and Braddon's Vixen (1879) and The Octoroon (1861–62). Surprisingly, Ellen Wood appears as the subject of a single, if insightful, piece by Andrew Maunder. Focusing on the class politics of the little-known 1864 dramatization of East Lynne (1861) at the East End Effingham Theatre, Maunder's piece is one of several in this narrow volume that offer fresh insight into familiar texts.

Indeed, two of the strongest pieces are devoted to the best-known sensation novels, Collins's The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). In an interdisciplinary study of the former, Andrew Mangham explores how "male anticipations of women's madness might uncover more about the unbalanced nature of masculinity and the psychological strategies used to anticipate and control those forces than they did about the alleged 'dangers' of femininity" (117). While much has been written about the psychological dimensions of the novel, as well as its construction of masculinity, rarely have the two domains been brought together so productively. Adopting a similarly interdisciplinary approach, Jennifer Swartz reads The Moonstone as Collins's contribution to the ongoing debates surrounding the law of coverture. As she argues, from the moment that Franklin Blake anticipates the rights of a husband by appropriating Rachael's diamond, Rachael is forced into the role of the feme covert and, bound by coverture, is both literally and metaphorically unable to testify against the man she loves. The significance of this essay is greatest in its analysis of the novel's conclusion. It is now a critical commonplace that the final words of the novel—forecasting the ongoing adventures of the Moonstone—undermine the seemingly conservative resolution that restores both class and gender boundaries. Yet Swartz's assertion that "the novel's 'happy' ending comes about through the death, disappearance, banishment, and marriage of every single woman in the text" (168) forces readers to recognize the limitations of Collins's radicalism and, more specifically, his support for the legal rights of women.

The collection is predictably organized into three parts: genre; gender and sexuality; and class, racial, and cultural contexts. The editors claim that the collection was conceived, in part, with the undergraduate market in mind and a significant portion of part 1, together with the introduction, will best serve those who are new to sensation fiction. In situating the volume within a critical history of the sensation novel and an overview of its key themes and issues, the introduction fails to generate new questions and possibilities for reading. Addressing issues relating to genre, textuality, and reception, several of the essays contained in part 1 are narrow and miss a number of opportunities to engage with the broader cultural and literary significance of this decidedly scandalous body of writings. Two of the most engaging essays in this section, on the other hand, adopt reader-reception theory in order to shed new light on the audience's horizon of expectations and how such expectations shaped generic boundaries and understandings (Richard Nemesvari), and were open to manipulation by market-astute writers such as Braddon (Albert C. Sears). This interest in the reading process...