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

Through readings of the sensation novel like Miller's and Cvekovitch's, we have become proficient at uncovering the discursive significance of the sensation novel's mysterious woman whose secrets are systematically revealed and luridly detailed-simultaneously titillating with the spectacle of transgression and reassuring with the exercise of disciplinary power over that transgression. Within this framework, the detective (professional or lay) occupies the position of disciplinarian, and the possessor of the secret becomes the subject to be discovered, categorized, described, and maintained in a state of "compulsory visibility." Think, for example, of Lady Audley's Secret. Clearly, in this "novel with a secret" the reader's investment lies with the mechanisms of disciplinary power that can uncover and render legible the secret crimes of its murderous femme fatale. As critics like Anthea Trodd have noted, this investment produces an identificatory position that is implicitly if not explictly masculine. In other words, femininity is presented as the mysterious and sinister unknown, while masculinity occupies the position of empirical observation and truth-seeking.' Here the ultimate payoff for being subjected to what Brantlinger describes as "narrative strategies ... [which] tantalise the reader by withholding information rather than divulging it" is that one does, like Braddon's indefatigable detective Robert Audley, eventually uncover the secrets) of dangerous femininity.

Although it lacks dangerous femininity (unless, perhaps, one reads Count Fosco as effeminate), The Woman in White undertakes a very similar narrative project. In its "Preamble" Collins remarks: "As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now.... Thus, the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness-with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect" (1). Clearly, acting as the "judicial authority" in relation to the plot of a novel places the reader squarely on the side of institutional discipline and in a position to "render visible" the secrets of the novel. In The Woman in White, as in Lady Audley's Secret, the appeal lies in uncovering the mysteries of a convoluted plot in order to reveal a "direct and intelligible" truth.

Whereas this model works for a great many sensation novels, it fails to explain novels which rely on the reader's investment in keeping the secret. In No Name we find not a mystery to be solved, or a secret to be detected, but a detailed examination "behind the scenes" of a sinister plot. Because the plot is revealed at the outset to the reader, but not to the detective(s) within the novel, the reader's investment lies with the transgressor, the plotter, and not the detective. Without denying the pleasure that comes from occupying the position, alongside the detective, of voyeur and disciplinarian, No Name provides the reader with a very different textual pleasure-that of a masochistic identification with the hunted and ultimately disciplined transgressive subject. I don't mean to say that No Name is not a sensation novel (indeed, it fulfills all but one of Brantlinger's criteria). Neither do I want to claim that it is alone in its production of reader identification with a transgressive heroine. One thinks, for example, of Mary Braddon's Aurora Floyd, or even Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne in which the guilty woman is also the sympathetic heroine. Even so, I would argue that Aurora and Lady Isabel Vane, though transgressive and even, in Lady Isabel's case, masochistic, do not provide the same active, self-motivated models of femininity-they are not so deliberate in their pursuit of punishment; neither are they rewarded for their sins. For my purpose in this essay, however, answering the question of whether the novel does or does not fulfill the generic conventions of sensation fiction is less important than considering how it manipulates those conventions and to what purpose. As Raymond Williams cautions: