Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic by Tamar Heller (review)

232Rocky Mountain Review responses to the common questions, that is, by putting each author in the context of the others, a pattern of cultural intertextuality emerges as we read one interview after another. At the same time, her questions are flexible enough to allow each author's distinctive style to emerge. Thus, the reader acquires both a sense of the underlying continuity of Spanish literature and a sense ofthe individual personality of each author. Gazarian Gautier's familiarity with the prevailing critical reading of various works enables her to elicit denial or confirmation, and at times fascinating illumination, of this reading from some writers. Others, of course, choose not to attempt to "explain" what they've written. In all cases, the discussion takes place at the critical level of theme, content; meaning, and style, and not at the technical theoretical level we've come to associate with such terms as deconstruction, poststructuralism, and so on. A valuable aspect of the book is the discussion by each author of the creative process. As we listen to each writer discuss the inspiration, perspiration , creativity, and planning that go into a work of literature, we acquire insight into a seldom explored perspective, the relationship between author and creative process. In spite of a great diversity in the final products, we see that all the writers interviewed participate in a set of factors common to the creative process itself. For both those familiar with and those new to Spanish literature this book will serve to recapitulate the factors which have influenced it over the last fifty years, from the Civil war and the tradition of Cervantes, Quevedo, and Unamuno, to the "Boom," and the mutual influence of the writers in this volume. When the writers are not discussing this larger context of Spanish literature, their comments on the creative process and on their individual works are no less worthwhile. JERRYHOEG Arizona State University TAMAR HELLER. Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. 201 p. Stepping deftly between the Bloomian anxiety of (male) influence and Gilbert and Gubar's alternative tradition of "Milton's daughters," Tamar Heller's important reassessment of Wilkie Collins weaves feminist modes of discovery with acute historical contexting to explore that most puzzling of Victorian phenomena, the female Gothic. Heller plumbs the persistent image of "buried" writing and marginalized protagonists to show how Collins inscribes his own ambivalence about his profession (authorship being only recently legitimized as a profession) and his choice of genre (one dominated by women writers). Two major premises undergird Heller's study. In chapter one, "Reigns of Terror: The Politics of the Female Gothic," Heller traces the origins of the genre and its traditional exposé of female victimization. Heller suggests the genre articulates this concern yet both silences and diffuses its implications. Book Reviews233 She tracks this containment of the female victim's subversive potential through key Gothic texts that define the tradition Collins joins: works by Radcliffe, Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley. The second major premise of Heller's analysis is shaped by a juxtaposition in chapter two of Collins' Memoirs (1848) of his father, Royal Academy painter William Collins, and Collins' first historical novel, Antonina (1850). In both, Heller defines a recurring pattern, in which "a narrative about literary authority is cast as a story about gender and, in particular, as a family romance in which the father is invested with the social and artistic power from which the mother is excluded" (38). From the biography, which purges any allusion to conflict between father and son, to the novel, which shifts the rebellion against authority to the female protagonist, Heller's tracing of the dark side of the Memoirs' filial piety powerfully illustrates Collins' ambivalence about (female) subversion and (male) authority. Resisting a Bloomian reading, Heller demonstrates the rare strength of her study. Collins' Memoirs subtly questions his father's artistic domination of Nature, while his fictional characters depict the son's artistic aspirations and his failure to win paternal (or critical) approval. In chapters three and four of her study, Heller continues to trace the mixture of private and professional motives in Collins' work. The protagonist ofBasil (1852...