A victim in search of a torturer: Reading masochism in Wilkie Collins's No Name

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2000 by Jones, Anna

"You planned this marriage of your own free will," pursued the captain, with the furtive look and the faltering voice of a man ill at ease. "It was your own idea-not mine. I won't have the responsibility laid on my shoulders-no! ...."

"Look at these," pursued Captain Wragge, holding up the envelopes. "If I turn these to the use for which they have been written, Mrs. Lecount's master will never receive Mrs. Lecount's letter. If I tear them up, he will know by tomorrow's post that you are the woman who visited him in Vauxhall Walk. Say the word! Shall I tear the envelopes up, or shall I put them back in my pocket?" ...

She raised her head; she lifted her hand and pointed steadily to the envelopes.

"Put them back," she said.

"Do you mean it?" he asked.

"I mean it." (474-75)

In this passage from Wilkie Collins's No Name, the swindler, Captain Wragge, questions the heroine Magdalen's resolve to go through with her marriage to her cousin (and foresworn enemy) Noel Vanstone. The letters that the Captain holds out protect her false identity. They also stand as the visible symbol of Magdalen's conflicted desires. To order Captain Wragge to destroy the letters would be to release herself from the miserable prospect of using a disguise she hates to marry a man she hates (probably a little less than the disguise itself). Yet, the marriage to despicable, degenerate Noel Vanstone is the culmination of all of Magdalen's plotting and efforts-to marry him is to realize her desires. This conversation-- like many others in the novel-underscores the fact that it is Magdalen's power to choose that determines the course of the plot (in both senses of the word). The question and answer format of the conversation enacts a verbal contract through which Magdalen reasserts her commitment to masochistic suffering.

I begin with this quote because it highlights precisely the reasons that No Name has been (and still is) problematic for sensation novel readers and critics. First, the novel makes the reader privy to all the secret plotting and machinations, so that the tension of the plot cannot hinge on unrevealed secrets or hidden motives and actions. It demands, instead, that the reader's suspenseful pleasure come from experiencing, in minute detail, the execution of a clandestine plot. Second, the protagonist Magdalen is neither an heroically noble and pure suffering heroine, nor a demonically conniving and evil villainess. Instead, the novel tries to present her as somewhere in between-a transgressive, guilty heroine, in constant and painful conflict with herself. These generic differences beg the question, what kind of reader is produced by No Name? The answer to this question very much depends how we conceive of the sensation reader. I want to make it clear that my argument does not depend on describing an imaginary reader's "response" to the novel, but in defining an "ideal" reader who is posited by the text itself. In large part my argument assumes a Victorian reading public.1 This is a public which one imagines as: first, well-versed in the ideology of separate spheres and the sanctity of the domestic sphere, but increasingly involved in questions of Woman's agency and rights; second, primed by widespread sensational journalism to expect hidden crimes in the domestic sphere; and third, well-- conditioned to respond to the affective stimuli of the sensation novel, yet deeply suspicious of the category of "sensation fiction" itself. Given these criteria, No Name paradoxically demands a reader who is well-disciplined and deviant-one who understands and accepts literary and social conventions, even as he or she is driven by the affective power of the novel to feel at odds with those conventions. Through its manipulation of the tropes of heroine (and villainess), plot, and sympathy, the novel forces the reader to examine individual agency in relation to the productive and regulatory mechanisms of disciplinary power.

1. Generic Knowledge

In 1982 when Patrick Brantlinger wrote "What is 'Sensational' about the 'Sensation Novel'?" he articulated the parameters of the genre thus:

The sensation novel was and is sensational partly because of content: it deals with crime, often murder as an outcome of adultery and sometimes of bigamy, in apparently proper, bourgeois, domestic settings ....

The best sensation novels are also, as Kathleen Tillotson points out, "novels with a secret," or sometimes several secrets, in which new narrative strategies were developed to tantalise the reader by withholding information rather than divulging it. (30)

Critics since Brantlinger have provided lucid and compelling accounts of how the "novel with a secret" functions in, to use Foucault's language, the production, regulation, and distribution of disciplinary power. D.A. Miller argues in The Novel and the Police that the very fictional representation of a mystery that must be discovered is in itself an exercise of a disciplinary power. He writes: "To the extent that the genre of the novel belongs to the disciplinary field that it portrays, our attention needs to go beyond the policing forces represented in the novel to focus on what Foucault might call the 'micro-politics' of novelistic convention" (21). Similarly, in Mixed Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich maintains that the sensation novel's display of (particularly female) excessive affect works as a mechanism for producing, regulating, and containing that excess. According to Cvetkovich: "The readers who are excited by the sensational lure of [the novels'] mysteries are provided with experiences of affect that are ultimately regulated and controlled" (7).