Image, Consumerism, and the New Woman: Gordon Browne's Illustrations for The Sorceress of the Strand

In Gordon Browne's illustrations for L. T. Meade's The Sorceress of the Strand, images of female victims and a male detective reflect cultural stereotypes of women as both beauty-obsessed consumers and beautiful objects of visual consumption. The illustrations mirror the consumeristic objectification behind the Strand's advertisements, which use images of women's bodies to market beauty products. Depictions of the detective's scrutinizing gaze, the villain's domestic intrusion, and victims' responses complicate the serial's implicit argument about women's status as passive consumers; they prompt women readers to resist objectification by turning their own critical gaze upon a culture of obsessive consumption.

The Editor of THE STRAND MAGAZINE respectfully places his first number in the hands of the public. . . . It may be said that with the immense number of existing Monthlies there is no necessity for another. It is believed, however, that THE STRAND MAGAZINE will soon occupy a position which will justify its existence.¹

When editor George Newnes introduced the fledgling Strand Magazine in January 1891, he seized the opportunity to justify its entry into an already saturated periodical marketplace. Newnes envisioned a general interest monthly that would rival its American counterparts Harper's and Scribner's by featuring not only excellent literary contributions but also an unprecedented "picture on every page."² In pairing eye-catching images with engaging letterpress, Newnes capitalized on the technological and cultural moment of the late Victorian periodical press.

By the fin de siècle, advances in printing technology made image reproduction increasingly practical and profitable.³ Meanwhile, as Patricia Anderson notes, developments in marketing and distribution made visually rich publications an "integral part of people's cultural experience at every level of Victorian society."⁴ As a periodical that combined engaging content with illustrations on nearly every page, the Strand emerged as what Emma Liggins and Minna Vuohelainen call the "visual embodiment of a technologically advanced age."⁵ Nonfiction articles and serial fiction were illustrated with lithographs, halftone photographs, and engravings. Under the leadership of art editor W. J. K. Boot, the Strand featured work from prominent illustrators such as J. F. Sullivan, Phil May, J. A. Shepherd, and Sherlock Holmes artist Sidney Paget, which bolstered the magazine's reputation.⁶ In addition to publishing a wide variety of illustrations, the Strand printed approximately thirty pages of advertisements at the close of each issue, with over one hundred advertisement pages appended to its volume editions. The illustrated advertisement was a ubiquitous feature of print culture by the 1890s, signaling, according to Gerry Beegan, "a new commercial alignment in which the product became an integral part of the periodical and the illustration was used as a means of mobilizing mass consumption."⁷ Some Strand advertisements used typography to draw readers' attention, but the majority featured an image as the focal point: illustrations of household products for sale, before-and-after images showcasing the success of personal care regimens, detailed renderings of gowns and beauty implements, or portraits of glamorous men and women—including celebrities such as Lillie Langtry and Suzanne Adams—endorsing toiletries and patent medicines (figure 1).⁸

A cursory glance through an issue of the Strand reveals visual continuity between the advertisements and the letterpress: images of beautiful people and things appear prominently alongside fiction, interviews with celebrities, travel narratives, and other features, together producing an aspirational vision of how a middle-class British person ought to look and live. To achieve these aspirations, the reader need only flip to the nearby advertising pages to locate a product and then send for a free sample by post or head out to the shops to make a purchase. Many advertisements cater to women's needs and interests, making it unlikely that, as Reginald Pound claims, "while posing as a family magazine, The Strand primarily appealed to men."⁹ Indeed, as Liggins and Vuohelainen note in their introduction to the special issue of VPR on the Strand Magazine, "More work remains to be done . . . on the monthly's female and child readers."¹⁰ In my essay, I answer this call by demonstrating how the Strand conveyed complex messaging about the identities of its female readers not only through content overtly directed toward women but also in its features aimed at men or general audiences. Even as the Strand's letterpress and advertisements positioned women as consumers, some of its content offered readers a model of resisting conventional representations of consumeristic womanhood.

Elizabeth Thomasina Meade's The Sorceress of the Strand, six mystery stories serialized in the Strand from October 1902 to March 1903, provides an ideal gateway to exploring how image and consumption under-girded the reading experience of the Strand's female audience.¹¹ In her serial, Meade (writing under the byline L. T. Meade) recounts the efforts of detectives Dixon Druce and Eric Vandeleur to thwart the crimes of corrupt London beautifier Madame Sara, who uses beauty procedures as a front for blackmailing, robbing, or murdering her young female clients.¹² Elizabeth Carolyn Miller reads Sara as a New Woman figure whose position

Figure 1.

Advertisement, "Edwards' 'Harlene' for the Hair." Strand Magazine 24 (July–December 1902): ix.

as both a criminal and a successful medical professional underscores contemporary cultural anxiety surrounding the New Woman's entry into avenues of the marketplace previously denied to her. Additionally, Miller interprets Sara's wielding of cosmetics as a means of both empowering and manipulating women: through cosmetics women can control how others perceive them, but the pressure to purchase beauty products "convey[s] the peril of inculcating a social duty of attractiveness in women."¹³ Although Sara's entrepreneurial success does, to a certain extent, speak to women's growing presence and agency in the commercial sphere, I would argue that Sara is a source of terror, not inspiration, to women; her business endeavors and cosmetic innovations are driven by and are inseparable from her criminality and objectification of her clients.¹⁴ Far from limiting her portrayal of women to a criminal-victim dichotomy, however, Meade does feature a New Woman in the serial: Helen Sherwood, the young woman featured in "The Face of the Abbot" (December 1902).¹⁵ While I acknowledge that the New Woman was defined in multifarious ways during the fin de siècle, for the purposes of this analysis I define Meade's New Woman as self-reliant, strong-willed, and risk-taking, yet also feminine in the conventional sense, in terms of both domestic morality and social propriety.¹⁶ As a New Woman, Helen Sherwood resists victimhood by stepping into the role of detective and working to expose Sara's stratagems.

The relationship between the New Woman and her antagonist is illuminated by Gordon Browne's forty-nine serial illustrations, which utilize patterns of illumination, concealment, and point of view, as well as strategic disruptions of these patterns, to depict Sara and her adversaries.¹⁷ Given the association between Sara's corrupt beautification trade and the market for beauty products represented in the Strand's appearance-focused advertisement pages, Browne's illustrations also provide insight into the nuanced relationship between consumer culture and the magazine's women readers. These illustrations reflect the Strand's status as a literary commodity that is supported by advertisement revenue and is itself bought and sold in the marketplace.¹⁸ Yet at the same time, they offer a counternarrative for late Victorian consumers, stimulating critical awareness of both advertised commodities and the periodical itself. Reading The Sorceress of the Strand through the lens of its accompanying illustrations and the magazine's advertisements, we encounter the serial as both a text enmeshed in commercial culture and a vehicle for exposing the perils of obsessive beauty culture to the Strand's fin de siècle women readers and consumers.

My investigation of the relationship between images and text in the Sorceress series builds upon recent scholarship examining the text-image dynamic in Victorian periodicals. Beegan, for instance, identifies the wider cultural impact of images at the fin de siècle, the amalgamation of which "enabled late Victorian readers to conceptualize their society" by coalescing a "collective identity" around the consumption of periodical content.¹⁹ To meaningfully engage with this conceptualization, Linda Hughes encourages lateral (or "sideways") reading as a holistic approach to Victorian periodicals' complex integration of text and image. She proposes reading the periodical press as "an interconnected web of discourse" in which "printed texts initiated and sustained a pervasive dialogism—ideological, political, visual, aesthetic, and commercial."²⁰ Lateral reading of illustration takes into account not only the relationship between an image and its accompanying text but also the image's connections to other visual elements in the periodical. Encountering an illustrated periodical such as the Strand consequently involves a complex interplay of reading, viewing, and cross-referencing diverse genres of periodical content.

In the pages that follow, I will examine how Browne's visual repetition of the illuminated, exposed female victim and the shadowed, observing male detective reflects cultural stereotypes of women as both beauty-obsessed consumers and beautiful objects of visual consumption. By mirroring these stereotypes, the illustrations interact with and reveal the consumeristic villainy behind another visual element of the Strand: its advertisements, which use images of women's bodies to sell merchandise and turn female readers' attention to their own physical deficiencies. Depictions of the male detective's scrutinizing gaze invite us to consider the relationship between the Strand and its female audience within this consumeristic context. At the same time, Browne's depictions of Madame Sara and Helen Sherwood complicate the serial's implicit argument about women's status as passive consumers by both revealing the perils of obsessive beauty culture and encouraging readers, particularly women, to resist objectification within consumer culture by turning their own critical gaze upon it. These parallel strands reflect the complex role of the serial's women readers—as both compliant and resistant consumers.

Consumerism as Villainy

In the Strand, letterpress content is framed by the advertisement pages that open and close each issue. This proximity invites a lateral reading of the illustrations and text of the Sorceress serial. Some advertisements use the human body to market everything from waterproof coats to cameras, but the human figure is particularly prominent in the advertisements selling cosmetics and fashion. One page, for example, features two full-length illustrations of women (one wearing Barker's widow's suite and the other promoting the Fell Formula Association's weight loss treatment) and a half-length view of a man sporting the latest Thompson Bros.' dinner jacket (figure 2). While advertisements like these depict the human body in isolation to focus attention on specific features of the advertised product,

Figure 2.

Advertisement page. Strand Magazine 24 (July–December 1902): lxxix.

others craft a narrative around a product's potential effects on the purchaser's life. The female body in particular is presented as an object that ought to be perfected in every respect; advertisements hold the aspirational female body as just one product or procedure away from attainability. As Michelle Smith observes of the advertising pages in women's magazines, "Young women's bodies were imbricated in creating the spectacle associated with merchandise, as symbols of consumption and objects of desire for the readers."²¹ Beauty advertisements market not only beauty products but also a fashionable, refined lifestyle. An advert for Lewis's "wonderful velveteen," for instance, pictures a well-dressed woman and man being ushered into a glittering society function; it implies that if the female reader would purchase a length of this reasonably priced velveteen, she, too, might hope to enjoy an enviable social life (figure 3). In this way, advertisements advance a comprehensive vision of how the ideal human form should appear in aspirational social contexts.

Browne's Sorceress illustrations seem to support the notion of the aspirational female body. Female characters mirror fashion advertisements with elegant poses that exhibit both figures and gowns to the best possible advantage, and men appear in stylishly cut suits, their stances mimicking the confident, debonair gentlemen of cigarette and dinner jacket advertisements. An illustration from "The Blood-Red Cross" (November 1902) features three such figures: the elegant Druce posed like a contemplative menswear model toward the left of the frame, the similarly dressed George Rowland in the center, and Antonia Ripley on the right, standing at the angle most advantageous for exhibiting the sleeves, bodice, and train of her evening gown (figure 4). They resemble the beautifully dressed people the Strand's cosmetics and fashion advertisements urge readers to emulate.

Visual similarities between the serial illustrations and the advertisement pages suggest the serial's complicity in promoting consumer behavior. This cohesion makes sense given that advertising revenue helps sustain the publication in which the serial is printed. However, when analyzed in conjunction with the sensational plot of the serial text, the illustrations take on a dual role of supporting the purchase of home and self-improvement products while also prompting readers to question the ethics of an increasingly intrusive advertising culture. Through the figure of Madame Sara, Meade decries the corrupt, self-absorbed aspect of consumer culture. Flawlessly and eternally attractive and promising youth and beauty to those who undergo her procedures, Sara is revealed to be a dangerous fraud in story after story as her clients' health and beauty deteriorate rather than improve. Druce describes nineteen-year-old Violet Bouverie of "The Bloodstone" (February 1903), for instance, as having once been "bright, upright, dark of eye, with a vivid colour and an offhand, dashing, joyous

Figure 3.

Advertisement, "Lewis's Wonderful Velveteen." Strand Magazine 24 (July–December 1902): x.

Figure 4.

"What is it, little one?" Illustration by Gordon Browne for "The Blood-Red Cross." Strand Magazine 24 (July–December 1902): 516.

sort of manner. A perfect radiance of life seemed to emanate from her."²² After falling under Sara's influence, Violet appears "old, almost haggard, her colour gone, her eyes tired, dull, and sunken."²³ Ironically, while Sara's dangerous influence causes Violet's physical decline, this decline spurs Violet to seek out Sara's services more frequently. As Vandeleur explains, "Your friend Violet is human . . . she is losing her looks; she gets thinner and older-looking day by day. Under such circumstances any woman who holds the secrets Madame Sara does would compel another to be guided by her advice."²⁴ By "another," the text here implies another woman, emphasizing the cycle of beautification into which gullible female consumers are drawn by an industry—embodied by Madame Sara—that points out an endless number of physical flaws and an equally endless number of products and regimens to correct them. An illustration depicting a conversation between Druce and Violet later in the passage highlights female consumers' gullibility. Violet, robed in a "long, straight, rather heavy, pearl-grey velvet dress," resembles a fashion plate from the neck down.²⁵ Her face, however, betrays physical signs of sustained apprehension, fear, and emotional distress. Although Violet has donned the trappings of fashion, the dark circles under her eyes, her shadowed cheeks, and her strained mouth speak to Sara's invasion into her private affairs. As both text and illustration show, Sara's presence in the homes and intimate social circles of her victims reflects the perniciousness of advertisements in the lives of late Victorian readers. Through the pages of periodicals, advertisements invade the domestic sphere, and the products they market are designed to enter and alter the body itself. Sara gives human form to this invasion, and her victims' trust in her highlights both the gullibility of consumers and the questionable integrity of advertisers.

Figure 5.

"She sat still, gazing into the flames." Illustration by Gordon Browne for "The Teeth of the Wolf." Strand Magazine 25 (January–June 1903): 286.

Depictions of Sara in domestic spaces cast her as a uniquely insidious villain. She does not invade her victims' homes; she is welcomed in, and once inside she maneuvers family relationships and social gatherings to secure what she desires. Sara's pernicious domestic ease is particularly apparent in an illustration for "The Teeth of the Wolf" (March 1903), the culminating story of the serial (figure 5). The scene is quintessentially domestic: a well-dressed man and woman sitting on a cushioned sofa and enjoying an evening fire. In their conversation beside Mrs. Bensasan's hearth, Sara relays to Druce her intent to possess Orion, a magnificent diamond owned by the future father-in-law of their hostess's daughter: "'I have a passion for jewels,' she said, slowly, 'for articles of vertu, for priceless, unique treasures. I am collecting such. I want Orion. If that gem of gems becomes my fortunate possession it would mean the overthrow of a certain lady.'"²⁶ Sara seeks to accumulate not only jewels but also women themselves, and the avaricious villainy of this bold statement is accentuated by her posture in the accompanying illustration.²⁷ Browne depicts Sara in a state of relaxation, her arms crossed behind her head, her eyes closed, and a slight smile on her lips. On Mrs. Bensasan's hearth, a location in the home associated with warmth, security, and companionship, Sara plots against her hostess in the ultimate violation of polite hospitality. Browne's depictions of Sara thus suggest both consumerism's appalling greed and the subtlety of its infiltration into the late Victorian domestic sphere. Just as Sara uses her presence in the London social scene to undermine her victims both socially and financially, advertisements' invasion into Victorian homes via the mass-market periodical transforms the domestic sphere into a commercial space.

In addition to conveying a subtle warning against the incursion of consumerism in the home, Browne's illustrations also critique beauty advertisements themselves. Lori Anne Loeb argues that in late Victorian consumer culture, "the attainment of the social ideal was determined not only by the cultivation of culturally desirable habits, attitudes or virtues, but by the acquisition of material things as well. Gentility came to be expressed in the Victorian print advertisement almost exclusively in material terms."²⁸ Advertisements serve, therefore, as "both a mirror and instrument of the social ideal."²⁹ Browne's illustrations cast Sara as a mirror of the social ideal, as well as the wielder of its instruments. At least five of the serial illustrations feature a mirror among the setting's decorations, but only one shows a human reflection: the illustration of Sara showing Druce the back rooms she uses for her beautification business (figure 6). In one room, Sara keeps "an array of extraordinary-looking articles and implements—stoppered bottles full of strange medicaments, mirrors, plane and concave, brushes, sprays, sponges, delicate needle-pointed instruments of bright steel, tiny lancets, and forceps"; in the adjoining chamber, "a still more formidable array of instruments was to be found," including an operating table and anesthetics.³⁰

Sara uses medical instruments to physically mold her clients into the fashionable ideal of beauty, but Browne's illustration does not show these troubling tools; the most illuminated portion of the image is the empty dentist's chair surrounded by lights and reflectors. This unoccupied chair signifies the invisible client, the consumer who trades money, health, and perhaps life itself in pursuit of the illusory beauty promoted by illustrated advertisements. Sara herself, reflected in the glass on the back wall, embodies this social ideal. She possesses enviable, impossible good looks and perpetual youth, and her clients, looking at her, see a model of what they might become. By picturing Sara's face in a literal mirror, which is associated with vanity and egotism, Browne suggests the moral vacuity of her beauty and of the social ideal it represents. Both Sara's reflection and the absence of medical instruments in this illustration, then, mimic and critique the image-driven advertisement that promotes artificial beauty as attainable and authentic.

Figure 6.

"This is my sanctum sanctorum." Illustration by Gordon Browne for "Madame Sara." Strand Magazine 24 (July–December 1902): 391.

The Detective and Consumer Culture

In addition to linking consumer culture with Sara's villainy, Browne's illustrations showcase the complex role of the detectives who challenge Sara's insidious presence in the homes of respectable women. Dixon Druce, the serial's narrator and primary detective, watches Sara as he works to foil her plots and bring her to justice, but in the process he also intensely watches her victims. Like the Strand's beauty advertisements, he objectifies women, but unlike obsessively consumeristic beauty culture, Druce wields visual scrutiny with benevolent intent.

Dixon Druce is part of the social sphere of Sara's victims and is at ease in their domestic spaces, but his investigative suspicion gives him the added position of a critical outsider even as he sits at the dining tables and hearths of his friends.³¹ Vandeleur holds the greater weight of professional authority, and Druce continually defers to his experience and judgment, remarking, "No shrewder or sharper fellow existed than Vandeleur."³² However, because Druce narrates the stories, his thoughts and opinions are more prominent than Vandeleur's; it is Druce's perspective that shapes readers' experience of the mystery plot. Druce appears in all but six of the forty-nine serial illustrations, further extending the prominence of his point of view.

Browne's portrayal of Druce—including where he is positioned in the frame, his facial expressions, and his body language—calls attention to Druce's fraught role. Like Sara, Druce violates the sanctity of the domestic sphere by bringing his profession into it and blurring the boundary between friend and client. Unlike Sara, however, Druce has benign, even altruistic motives, and in each installment, he is invited to lend his assistance to solve a domestic mystery.³³ These invitations typically come from the male friends and relations of Sara's victims rather than from the women themselves, highlighting the women's passivity in the detection process even while that process plays out in their own homes. For instance, Druce first learns about Sara and her uncanny ways after a chance encounter with an old school friend, Jack Selby, while sailing home from Madeira. Sara is a fellow passenger and a prior acquaintance of Selby's wife, Beatrice, as well as his sister-in-law, Edith Dallas; Selby invites Druce to visit their home and help untangle a mystery involving Sara and the family fortune. "I should like your opinion of her," Selby says, taking comfort from Druce's double trustworthiness as both an old friend and a professional investigator; "I am right glad I have met you . . . it is like old times."³⁴ Although Druce has the opportunity to converse with Sara in public settings aboard the ship, it is in the private sphere of the Selby family's social circle that Sara enacts her plots. Because he is occupying these domestic spaces as a friend first and detective second, Druce can intimately observe Sara's behavior and begin to unravel her schemes.

Throughout the serial illustrations, Browne conveys Druce's peripherality by typically picturing him fully or partially in shadow, often near the edge of the illustration frame or in the background, and with facial expressions and body language suggesting both concern and contemplation. In an illustration appearing in the first Sorceress installment, for example, Druce stands at the right edge of the frame, the lower half of his body hidden behind a wicker lawn chair and a portion of his arm extending out of the frame (figure 7). This interaction takes place on an outdoor balcony during a social function, and the centrality of the lawn chairs situates the scene in casual domesticity. Positioned outside the main gathering but behind the chairs, Druce and Edith Dallas do not belong entirely to either setting, instead occupying a liminal space between formality and informality. Their location and stances mirror the nature of their conversation, which is not simply a chat between friends and not exactly a professional consultation: as a friend, Druce has noticed Edith's altered mood and behavior, and as a detective, he questions Sara's influence over her. Readers, experiencing the story and its illustrations from Druce's point of view, are invited to share both Druce's immersion in a society heavily influenced by the consumerism Sara represents and his critical distance from that society.

While Druce's relaxed posture—leaning on the chair and standing close to Edith—evidences their congenial relationship and his familiar ease in this domestic space, Druce's peripheral position reminds the viewer of his second role, that of detective, in which he stands back from the action in order to observe and deliberate. He is almost entirely shadowed in the illustration, and he is angled away from the viewer and toward Edith. This peripherality further highlights Druce's liminal position: he is both a detective who recognizes the threat posed by Sara and a friend who is able to warn her victims. The image prompts us to reconsider point of view in the serial. Are readers to view Druce, invited into victims' homes but standing to the side as a peripheral and evaluative observer, as representing a Strand editorial voice who approves of and even facilitates this critique of consumer culture? Or ought readers to identify with Druce and understand him as a subversive model of astute cultural participation and resistance? Crucially, Druce is both: he is an observer of and participant in Victorian society, both embedded in a familiar social world and distanced by his informed perspective.

Although Druce and Sara each transgress the rules of polite society by entering domestic spaces for covert professional purposes, Druce's genuine beneficence toward and established friendship with Sara's potential victims complicates his intrusive, detecting gaze. Sara's deceptions are so insidious that Druce's friends rarely heed his warnings against her until Sara has exploited their private insecurities and shameful secrets. For example, Violet Bouverie of "The Bloodstone" dismisses Druce's repeated concerns, commenting, "Mr. Vandeleur . . . is a clever and interesting man, but were he to abuse Madame I should hate him. I could even hate you, Dixon,

Figure 7.

"Why are you afraid of her?" Illustration by Gordon Browne for "Madame Sara." Strand Magazine 24 (July–December 1902): 393.

when you speak as you are now doing."³⁵ In Violet's opinion, Druce has transgressed a social boundary by bringing his professional judgments into the private sphere of friendship. As a detective, he watches and analyzes his friends' lives from the shadows. Figure 7 showcases how this dynamic between Druce and his friends invites female Strand readers to consider their own complicated position. Edith, in contrast to Druce's peripherality, is centered in the frame, faced toward the viewer, and fully illuminated; she serves as the focal point for both Druce and the periodical reader. Browne thus invites readers into Druce's complex view of Sara's victims, alluding to the Strand's relationship with its women readers.

Intensifying this visual impact is the illustration's physical placement on the periodical page. Of the installment's nine illustrations, seven are framed by thin, rectangular borders that distinctly partition image from text. Another image, although unframed, is positioned at the center of the page with ample white space separating it from the text, which appears only above and below the illustration. Browne's depiction of Edith and Druce, in contrast, dominates the page; the illustration is significantly larger than the others, and the surrounding text snakes around it with narrow margins on all four sides. At this crucial moment in the plot, the eyes of both Druce and the Strand's readers are fixed on Edith's body as they seek the answer to the illustration's caption: "Why are you afraid of her?" (figure 7). Even as Druce's benevolent motive—to protect women from Sara, the embodiment of predatory beauty culture—conveys compassion for consumerism's female victims, his intrusive surveillance simultaneously dehumanizes Edith and makes a spectacle of her victimization. In this way, Druce replicates the stance of the Strand as it balances between dignifying its women readers and supporting the consumer narrative of its advertisers.

Meanwhile, an additional detective figure, Helen Sherwood—Sara's target in "The Face of the Abbot"—challenges the idea that all women are either passive potential victims or objects of pity to be rescued. In his depictions of Helen's detection efforts, Browne highlights her personal agency; the illustrations complement the letterpress by suggesting that only the female detective can be fully anti-consumerist, thwarting both the objectifying gazes of the male detective and dangerous incursions of consumer culture, as embodied by Sara. The illustrations prompt the Strand's women readers to consider their own position in relation to consumerism. Browne's depictions of the serial's detective figures explore oppositions of illumination and concealment, observing and being observed, and action and inaction; these patterns and their disruptions both reinforce and call into question who is complicit in consumer culture's victimization of women, and more subtly, they provide a model of resistance for female victims. The Strand's advertising pages present an objectifying view of women, and at the same time, certain contributions within the editorial content, including the Sorceress serial, subtly challenge this objectification. Women readers of the Strand thus experience the magazine as members of two distinct audiences: the participants in and objects of consumer culture, and the emerging New Women of the twentieth century who must learn to exercise critical self-awareness in relation to advertising culture.

The New Woman Detective

Whereas Druce's multifaceted perspective illuminates a male outsider's complex interaction with consumerism, Browne's depictions of Helen Sherwood present women with an alternative response to consumerism's visual assault. Helen, another old friend of Druce, is the object of Sara's schemes in "The Face of the Abbot." Her association with detection rather than victimization calls women to reject passivity as they encounter consumerist messages even in the pages of the Strand. To gain control of Helen's family fortune, Sara plots to frighten Helen into giving up her inheritance, a supposedly haunted estate in Portugal known as Castello Montego. Helen must live in the castle in order to receive her inheritance, and she insists on accompanying Druce to Portugal to dispel rumors of its haunting. Meade's text reveals that Helen holds unaccountable trust in Sara. Helen tells Druce that he misjudges Sara, who "has been a most kind friend" and "is, beyond doubt, the most unselfish woman I ever met."³⁶ In fact, Helen's resolve to travel to Portugal and carry out a personal investigation stems from a suggestion made by Sara herself, whose plan hinges upon Helen's descending into nervous hysteria when faced with the terrors of the haunted castle. Despite an error in judgment that leads her to initially misidentify her enemy, Helen nevertheless displays notable courage and determination in her resolution to follow through with Sara's advice. As she tells Druce, "I am only human, and a woman. I could not live at Castello Montego with this mystery unexplained; but I am willing to take every step—yes, every step, to find out the truth."³⁷ Even a New Woman can be led astray by the insidious stratagems of consumer culture, but Helen is unwilling to count herself a victim.

Browne's depictions of Helen further establish her as an unusually independent, decisive, and astute female character. Although Druce thinks highly of other women in the series and some display courage in eventually standing up to Sara, they nevertheless are often drawn as the stereotypical delicate and ornamental female, with submissive expressions, nervously clasped hands, and delicate, light-colored gowns.³⁸ They are focalized through Druce's marginal perspective, and the letterpress depicts them in a one-dimensional way. Browne uses the character of Helen to contradict this pattern, as captured in the illustration of her preparations to travel to Portugal (figure 8). While Druce is positioned slightly more in the foreground than Helen, he is, per usual, turned away while Helen is angled toward the viewer. Although Helen is looking up at Druce as he bends down to speak with her, her position is not one of subservience but instead accentuates her personal agency. Rather than posing in elegant anguish, Helen is pictured in action: she works on her knees to pack her trunk, defying Druce's opinions and making preparations to secure her own fortune. Her simple, dark-colored dress directs the reader's attention to her face rather than her form. Most significantly, she looks Druce directly in the eye, a definite contrast with Sara's other female victims, who are often depicted staring vacantly into the middle distance. Consequently, this illustration portrays Helen not as a passive victim of or participant in consumerism but rather as an active resistor of its objectifying gaze. Instead of wasting away as Sara's prey, Helen faces her with strength, dignity, and action.

Figure 8.

"'You must not scold me,' she said." Illustration by Gordon Browne for "The Face of the Abbot." Strand Magazine 24 (July–December 1902): 648.

Other images in "The Face of the Abbot" reinforce Helen's status as a woman of action. One illustration depicts the arrival at Castello Montego of Druce, Helen, and Helen's uncle De Castro. As the Portuguese caretaker, Gonsalves, speaks to the visitors from the open door, his figure is fully illuminated despite facing away from the light source (figure 9). Browne positions Helen and Druce together in the foreground of the frame but peripheral to the primary action of the scene. They are both partially shadowed and angled away from the viewer. Helen, wearing a sensible travelling dress, coat, and hat, mirrors Druce's posture: one hand in a coat pocket, leaning slightly back to scrutinize Gonsalves. She joins him in both the appearance and the role of the detective. Like Druce, Helen actively works to defeat Sara. Browne reinforces the significance of Helen's agency by showing no passive female victims in the illustrations for "The Face of the Abbot." Instead, both Helen and Druce turn their critical gaze upon Gonsalves, who is representative of Sara and thus of the consumerist point of view. Browne reorients the vantage point away from consumerism's exposure of women and turns the spotlight on the exposure of consumerism itself. Druce and Helen are positioned in a similar way in a later illustration that features the abbot as the illuminated focal point and shows Helen and Druce standing to the side of the frame looking up at him. While Druce's facial profile is partially visible and he raises one hand in surprise, Helen is turned completely away from the viewer, again dressed in plain, dark clothing. As the story's illustrations develop in sequence, Browne visualizes Helen's growing powers of detection by gradually showing less of her face: she observes rather than being observed. In the accompanying text, Druce reinforces this progression as he narrates his feeling of terror at seeing the ghostly face in the tower and Helen's contrasting composure: "'Call my uncle,' whispered Helen, and when I heard her voice I knew that the girl was more self-possessed than I was. 'Call him,' she said, 'loudly—at once.'"³⁹ Far from succumbing to hysteria in this critical moment, Helen grasps and acts on what must be done to draw out the culprit and the truth.

Helen's agency is fully realized in the story's final image, which reverses the previous illustrations' concealment of her face and positions her in a way that counters the portrayals of Sara's other victims (figure 10). In her ultimate decisive act, Helen has shot and killed the ghostly abbot figure, and this illustration captures Druce and Helen's discovery that the abbot is actually De Castro. Browne draws Druce in a startled and nonobservatory pose, darting toward the dead man. Helen is positioned in a similar area of the frame as other wronged women in the serial, but both her firm stance—shoulders thrown back, one hand still grasping a revolver—and her grim gaze distinguish her from them. For the first time, Browne depicts Helen's full body facing the viewer; from this angle, her structured coat broadens

Figure 9.

"A phlegmatic-looking man opened the door for us." Illustration by Gordon Browne for "The Face of the Abbot." Strand Magazine 24 (July–December 1902): 652.

her shoulders and conceals the curves of her cinched waist, giving her a more masculine yet still unthreatening form. Although Helen is the most illuminated of the three figures, the direction of her eyes and of Druce's lurching motion diverts the viewer's attention to De Castro's body in a shadowed corner. Helen is no longer the object of the detective's gaze or paternal benevolence; instead, she herself has seized the powers of observation and justice. Meade specifies in the text that it is Helen, after firing the fatal shot, who leads the way "rush[ing] up the winding stairs" to find the abbot's body, and it is Helen who ignores Druce's command to "go at once and find your uncle" and instead points out to him that the fallen abbot is actually her uncle in disguise.⁴⁰ Helen is not only capable of subduing her enemy and facing his corpse, but she is also a step ahead of the professional detective in solving the mystery.

Figure 10.

"Beneath the window lay a dark, huddled heap." Illustration by Gordon Browne for "The Face of the Abbot." Strand Magazine 24 (July–December 1902): 657.

Whereas Browne's representations of exposed, swooning women accentuate both the terrifying nature of Sara and the rationality of the detective throughout most of The Sorceress of the Strand, Helen Sherwood stands as an alternative model of femininity in the serial. This contrast is not to dismiss Sara's other victims as weak; indeed, without their terror and victimization to convey the gravity of the sorceress's crimes, Helen's defiance would lose much of its impact. Rather, Helen represents a new possibility: the resisting woman who faces a faceless evil, takes action, and exposes it. In this way, she is represented as a socially acceptable version of the New Woman: driven, determined, and decisive, but with her independence and stubbornness balanced by the presence of her chaperone Druce and her engagement to a respectable young man. Although Helen's appearance is proper and elegant, her clothing is not as ornamental or glamorous as that of her counterparts in other Sorceress installments. She assumes the role of the cultured, educated woman who takes care to dress neatly and appropriately, but her understated clothing allows her to be defined by her actions rather than by her appearance. While Meade's text gives Helen her action-minded personality, Browne's illustrations accentuate her strength as an individual and her equality with Druce in taking on the role of detective in her own mystery. By mirroring advertising's penetration of the domestic sphere and its appropriation of women's bodies, the illustrations embody and critique the threat of consumerism. However, by accentuating Helen Sherwood's resistance, they encourage the Strand's women readers to become critical, action-minded observers of a consumer culture that normalizes the state of being watched.

Conclusion

Brian Maidment remarks that "one of the pleasures of studying Victorian periodicals is encountering images that are conceived and shaped as physical expressions of a text rather than as accompaniments or explanations."⁴¹ While Maidment is referring to the physical placement of images on the periodical page, in the Sorceress illustrations this physical expression is multifold, encompassing not only elucidation of the periodical text and the wider cultural moment but also self-reflexive commentary on the periodical consumption experience itself. For the Strand's women readers, the magazine perpetuated consumer culture's objectification of their faces and bodies and its pressure for them to conform to ideals of youth and beauty. At the same time, the Sorceress serial and its illustrations complicated this consumerist narrative by constructing the woman reader/ consumer as holding the potential for resistance rather than victimization. This essay has examined how both Druce and Sara represent invasions into the domestic sphere and how Browne's illustrations clarify the distinctions between them. Their invasions are interrelated: while Sara's insidious presence in her clients' parlors mimics the pictorial advertisement's incursion into the homes of the late Victorian mass reading public, Druce's position in the illustrations reflects his protective yet objectifying role as both friend and detective. Druce and Sara look at victimized women with different intents—one benevolent, the other malicious—but they each exercise an intrusive gaze that objectifies women as mere victims. Yet significantly, Sara is not ultimately defeated by the serial's detectives, and she never faces traditional justice; instead, a ravenous wolf attacks and kills her. Cheryl Blake Price suggests that "Meade's notoriously unresolved endings," rather than adhering to the detective fiction formula of bringing restoration to the social order, "are directly related to her feminist project of using the female mad scientist to subvert male detection."⁴² Sara does escape both male and female detection, but instead of advancing a feminist narrative, her escape accentuates her villainy and the perniciousness of the consumer culture she represents. It is Helen to whom readers are invited to look for a model of subversion. Confronting the objectifying demands of consumerism requires New Women who will recognize consumerist rhetoric even within an innocuous environment such as the pages of the Strand.

Browne's illustrations foreground Helen Sherwood as this subversive response to consumerism's assault. Alison Hedley writes, "As dynamic interpretive environments, periodicals facilitated advertisers' strategic representations of mass culture, but they also presented opportunities for readers to respond to such strategies with subversive tactics."⁴³ Instead of submitting to being looked at, Helen turns a rational gaze upon her antagonist. For much of her story Helen herself is unaware that the enemy she is working to defeat is Sara, a woman she has long admired. In this respect, her enemy is invisible—disguised as a friend, confidant, and guide. Indeed, even after she discovers the truth, Helen does not achieve ultimate victory over Sara, who recovers from her momentary suppression and goes on to terrorize more women. I argue, however, that Sara's deception of Helen and her evasion of justice do not diminish the significance of Helen's actions but instead speak to the magnitude of the power of consumerism, embodied by Sara, over the lives and pocketbooks of late Victorian women. With the proliferation of illustrated advertising in popular magazines like the Strand, consumerism invaded women's homes, lives, and bodies. In exhibiting its permeation, Meade and Browne present a hopeful view of how women might interact with a new consumer culture they can subvert if not avoid. Madame Sara's covert domestic villainy prompts awareness of the vulnerabilities and responsibilities of the Strand's female readers as they navigate the fin de siècle's increasingly visual periodical culture. Following Helen's lead, these readers are invited to approach consumerism's advances with the rationality, initiative, and decisiveness of the New Woman.