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

3. Affect is a Contract

How then does the reader's identification with No Name's active, masochistic heroine work? Affect is the control a novel exerts over its reader-the means by which the reader's emotions and sympathies are "produced, regulated and controlled" by the text. To be an educated reader is to be trained to respond correctly to affective cues. Reading the novel implies a tacit agreement to identify with the protagonist, and if the protagonist transgresses and suffers the punishment for that transgression, then so does the reader.8 Magdalen is not the murderous femme fatale we love to hate, but a loveable heroine whose sins disturb us and cause us pain, just as they disturb and pain her, and whose punishment we both dread and expect, just as she dreads and expects it. Thus, in No Name, the only way to avoid the pain of identification is to stop reading, thereby breaking the contract between text and reader.

In the novel, the reader's suspense is produced (and painfully sustained) by frozen scenes of anticipation, like the one quoted at the beginning of this article, that contemplate the still imminent punishment which Magdalen (again and again) agrees to bring upon herself. In one of her first uses of her power to suffer, Magdalen insists, despite repeated pleas from her sister and her friends not to do so, on seeing the letter from her uncle which gives the final refusal of the sisters' claim to any of the inheritance:

"May I see it?"

Mr. Pendril hesitated, and looked uneasily from Magdalen to Miss Garth, and from Miss Garth back again to Magdalen.

"Pray oblige me by not pressing your request," he said. "It is surely enough that you know the result of the instructions. Why should you agitate yourself to no purpose by reading them? They are expressed so cruelly; they show such abominable want of feeling, that I really cannot prevail upon myself to let you see them."

"I am sensible of your kindness, Mr. Pendril, in wishing to spare me pain. But I can bear pain; I promise to distress nobody. Will you excuse me if I repeat my request?"

She held out her hand-the soft, white, virgin hand that had touched nothing to soil it or harden it yet. (152-53)

This scene works on two levels at once-addressing both Magdalen's and the reader's masochism. The interchange is expressed unequivocally in terms of both contract law and sexual defilement. The exchange between Pendril and Magdalen, like the one quoted at the beginning of the article, enacts the ceremony of the verbal contract described by Henry Maine: "Now, if we reflect for a moment, we shall see that this obligation to put the promise interrogatively ... by effectually breaking the tenor of the conversation, prevents the attention from wandering over a dangerous pledge" (273). For the reader this scene invokes the contract in that it highlights precisely the "dangerous pledge" we make if we agree to identify with Magdalen-that we will be forced to experience over and over her assertion of the choice to suffer-and it reaffirms that we are willing to identify with her anyway. The passage provides the reader with the pain/pleasure of reading an intensely suspenseful and overwrought scene in which Magdalen's will and capacity to suffer are showcased ("I can bear pain").