Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture

257 Pages·2007·4.683 MB·English

by  Andrew Mangham (auth.)

Violent Women and Sensation Fiction
Also by Andrew Mangham
WILKIE COLLINS: Interdisciplinary Essays (editor)
Violent Women and
Sensation Fiction
Crime, Medicine and Victorian
Popular Culture
Andrew Mangham
Lecturer, School of English and American Literature, University of Reading
© Andrew Mangham 2007
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-0-230-54521-2
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First published 2007 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-36070-3 ISBN 978-0-230-28699-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230286993
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Transferred to Digital Printing in 2010.
For Emily, Rosie, Olivia, and Joseph
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgements x
Introduction 1
1 Explosive Materials: Legal, Medical, and Journalistic
Profiles of the Violent Woman 7
The body in the kitchen 7
Young women and adolescents: ‘The mad fury
of that lovely being’ 9
Motherhood I: Maternal maniacs 23
Motherhood II: Morbid influences 29
Female old age: Sick fancies 39
2 ‘The Terrible Chemistry of Nature’: The Road Murder
and Popular Fiction 49
‘The fussy activity about the nightdress of a school girl’ 49
Popular fictional representations 63
‘A tragedy of blood and tears’: Aurora Floyd 64
‘Smooth as polished crystal’: St. Martin’s Eve 71
‘Detective fever’: The Moonstone 79
3 ‘Frail Erections’: Exploiting Violent Women in the
Work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon 87
Poking the embers: The hysterical violence of young women 87
Unmotherly glances and sickly sentimentality: Dangerous
maternities 103
Uncultivated waste: Post-menopausal women 116
4 ‘Nest-Building Apes’: Female Follies and Bourgeois
Culture in the Novels of Mrs Henry Wood 126
A man of two wives/a man of two lives: Divided masculinity and
domestic ideology in East Lynne(1862) 129
‘Looking back’: The mother’s influence in Danesbury House(1860)
and Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles(1862) 137
‘The matrimonial lottery’: Choosing a good wife in
Lady Adelaide’s Oath(1867) 143
vii
viii Contents
‘Evil heritages’: Superstition and morbid heredity in
The Shadow of Ashlydyat(1864) 149
A moth in the upturned tumbler: The control and display
of passion in Verner’s Pride(1863) 158
5 Hidden Shadows: Dangerous Women and Obscure Diseases
in the Novels of Wilkie Collins 169
‘What could I do?’: The Woman in White(1860) 172
‘In a glass darkly’: No Name(1862) 182
‘The shadow of a woman’: Armadale(1866) 196
Conclusion 209
Notes 212
Bibliography 233
Index 242
List of Illustrations
4.1 Unknown artist, ‘Nest-Building Apes’, Once a Week,
19 July 1862, p. 112 128
ix
Acknowledgements
This book is based on a Ph.D. thesis I submitted at the University of Sheffield
in 2005. I was fortunate to have Sally Shuttleworth as supervisor. It was her
work which first interested me in the links between science and popular
fiction, and I am indebted to her for her kind, inspiring, and diligent help
with this project and many others besides. I also want to thank Janice
M. Allan. Her complex and insightful ideas on sensation fiction convinced
me to study the subject back in the 1990s. Since then she has become an
invaluable friend and mentor.
This book has benefited a great deal from the insightful comments of
Jenny Bourne Taylor, Neil Roberts, Angela Wright, Joseph Bristow, and the
anonymous reader at Palgrave Macmillan. I would also like to thank the
following people for answering inquiries and/or recommending sources:
Michael Flowers, Gabrielle Malcolm, Kate Mattacks, Jennifer Carnell,
Amanda Mordavsky Caleb, Janice Norwood, Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, and the
late Chris Willis. I would also like to thank the patient and helpful staff at
the following libraries: The British Library (including the Document Supply
Centre in Boston Spa), Sheffield City Library, The Harry Ransom Centre in
Texas, and the Special Collections and the Universities of Sheffield and
Leeds. This project was funded, in part, by the University of Sheffield and
the Arts and Humanities Research Council. For this I am very grateful.
I would like to thank the wonderful people who have made my work so
much easier by providing an intellectually inspiring network of friends.
These include Sarah ‘PB’ Bell, Anne-Marie Evans, Anne-Marie Beller, Greta
Depledge, Ana Maria Garcia Dominguez, Holly Furneaux, Tatiana Kontou,
and Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier. I would also like to acknowledge Gerry
Taylor’s very kind assistance with printing the manuscript.
Finally, I want to thank my family for being so understanding and patient.
It is to my parents that I owe the greatest debt of all. Their untiring and
unquestioning support has allowed all of my studies to be feasible and
enjoyable. They remain the most inspiring people in my life. I am
dedicating this book to the four little individuals who often found it diffi-
cult to understand the unsociable habits of my work. Because I wasn’t
always available to play, this book is for Emily, Rosie, Olivia, and Joseph.
x