Creating character

Theories of nature and nurture in Victorian sensation fiction

Helena Ifill

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526126597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

This book explores the ways in which the two leading sensation authors of the 1860s, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, engaged with nineteenth-century ideas about personality formation and the extent to which it can be influenced either by the subject or by others. Innovative readings of seven sensation novels explore how they employ and challenge Victorian theories of heredity, degeneration, inherent constitution, education, upbringing and social circumstance. Far from presenting a reductive depiction of 'nature' versus 'nurture', Braddon and Collins show the creation of character to be a complex interplay of internal and external factors. Drawing on material ranging from medical textbooks, to sociological treatises, to popular periodicals, Creating character shows how sensation authors situated themselves at the intersections of established and developing, conservative and radical, learned and sensationalist thought about how identity could be made and modified.

Part I

Self-control, willpower and monomania

1

Basil and No Name

I have not thought it either politic or necessary, while adhering to realities, to adhere to every-day realities only … Those extraordinary accidents and events which happen to few men, seemed to me to be as legitimate materials for fiction to work with … as the ordinary accidents and events which may, and do, happen to us all.¹

(Wilkie Collins, dedicatory letter, Basil, 1862 [1852])

A defensive tone is apparent in Collins’s dedicatory letter to his second published novel, Basil: A Story of Modern Life (1852), as he goes to some lengths to assert that while he hopes to ‘fix’ his readers’ interest by depicting events ‘beyond his own experience’, he is still ‘adhering to realities’ (p. 4, emphasis in original). However, Collins’s critics were not convinced by his claims to veracity. While Charles Dickens tactfully suggested that ‘the probabilities here and there require a little more respect than you are disposed to shew them’, professional reviewers were more scathing, often provoked by what they perceived to be an immoral content in this novel of seduction and adultery.² The Westminster Review, for example, insisted that Basil offered ‘scenes of fury and passion, such as, happily, real life seldom affords’.³

It is certainly true that many of the characters in Basil display behaviour that is rarely to be found in daily life. One of the most extreme characters is Robert Mannion, who blames the eponymous narrator for marrying Mannion’s employer’s daughter, Margaret, whom Mannion had previously intended to be ‘my wife, my mistress, my servant, which I choose’ (p. 189). Furthermore, Basil’s father was the ‘patron’ of Mannion’s father and allowed him to be hanged for forging his signature, an event Mannion believes initiated his own exclusion from respectable society (p. 182). In retaliation, Mannion first consummates his illicit relationship with Margaret (in Basil’s hearing), and then vows to persecute Basil by following him to the ends of the earth, systematically destroying any social standing he may manage to achieve. In what reads as a near parodic reversal of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, a novel that Collins knew and enjoyed as a young man⁴) Mannion, already psychologically a “monster”, and now hideously disfigured from a confrontation with Basil, chases his prey as far as the Cornish coast before shaking a threatening fist at Basil from the edge of a cliff, accidentally losing his balance, and plunging to his death.⁵ From his thirst for revenge and impure intentions towards a young woman, to his final and fatal menacing gesture, Mannion seems a classic melodramatic villain.

To find elements of melodrama in an early sensation novel is not surprising; the mid-Victorian theatre was ‘dominated by melodrama’,⁶ and, as Winifred Hughes has clearly demonstrated, sensation novelists ‘shamelessly exploited the familiar stereotypes of popular melodrama’, even though they abandoned the dramatic form’s ‘moral certainty’.⁷ Collins, who himself took part in a number of amateur theatrical events alongside Dickens, and went on to write melodramatic adaptations of his own works, explicitly asserts in his dedication to Basil that ‘the Novel and the Play are twin-sisters in the family of Fiction’, which means that the ‘Novel-writer is privileged to excite’ the same ‘strong and deep emotions’ as the ‘Play-writer’ (p. 4). Yet acknowledging that Basil draws on a genre characterised by elements that include ‘strong emotionalism’, ‘extreme states’ and ‘inflated and extravagant expression’ does not encourage the sense that Collins has adhered to realities.⁸ The Westminster Review clearly did not see Mannion as a realistic character, and dismissed him as a villain ‘gifted with a fiend-like perseverance, which, happily for mankind, does not exist’, and went on to explain that ‘man becomes weary, after a time, of one passion, or one pursuit, and the less principle he has to bind him to a straight course, the more does he diverge into fresh paths’ (anon., ‘Progress of fiction’, p. 373). However, Hughes also identifies an eagerness on the part of sensation authors to ‘provide some justification for the erratic behaviour of their murderers, bigamists, and adulteresses’ in order to be seen to represent some form of reality; this means they are

driven to exploit the irrational elements of the psyche, the obscure and unreasonable motivations that in the twentieth century are associated with the subconscious … Evil or antisocial action is no longer the direct result and expression of evil character, as in conventional melodrama, but derives from combinations of circumstance, weakness, insanity, impulse, “sensation” at its most basic.

(Hughes, p. 58)

Mannion, importantly for this discussion, is diagnosed by a doctor as a ‘dangerous monomaniac’ (p. 223), and he is ‘fiend-like’ precisely because he is incapable of becoming ‘weary’ of the fixed idea that has taken over his consciousness – his desire for revenge against Basil.⁹ This use of a medically and publicly recognised condition, as well as the inclusion of a letter that explains the unfortunate combination of events that causes it, is one of the ways in which Collins attempts to ‘adhere to … realities’.¹⁰

Basil is a repentant memoir supplemented with letters by other characters, which is an early example of Collins’s use of multiple narrative forms and narrators, a format he would develop most fully in The Woman in White (1860). After being hospitalised by Basil, who discovers his affair with Margaret and crushes his face into a freshly macadamised road, Mannion sends Basil a letter that reveals his true identity and purpose, and reveals his monomania; this is the focus of the first part of this chapter. However, Basil himself is also depicted in terms of early-nineteenth-century medical theories that emphasised the detrimental results of unrestrained passions; psychological peculiarities are shown to be determined by social and biological influences, but also the characters’ disinclination to attempt to exert self-control. Basil as a whole displays a more symbiotic relationship among Victorian medical theories, sensation fiction and melodrama than Hughes suggests: as well as drawing on the conventions of melodrama, Collins presents, through his depiction of monomania, new ways of creating the ‘strong and deep emotions’ that are associated with the genre. In this way Collins engineers a situation in which characters are at once more “realistic” and participate in their own self-perpetuating melodrama.

Basil is a novel of delusion and impeded perception, in which characters act imprudently under the dictates of their own unreliable emotions. In No Name, contrastingly, a number of sharp-eyed, clear-headed characters plot and counterplot in pursuit of the Vanstone fortune. Magdalen Vanstone is one of these competitors – clever, resourceful and perceptive. Like Mannion, Magdalen is invested with many of the attributes of a monomaniac that are the result of recognisable emotions: grief at the death of her parents, shock at the discovery that she and her sister are illegitimate, and anger at the fact that their fortune is passed on to the next legal relative. The novel follows her transformation from a charismatic, charming young lady, into a brooding, scheming villainess, and finally into a redeemed and rewarded heroine. In his preface, Collins claims that he intended to depict ‘the struggle of a human creature, under those opposing influences of Good and Evil, which we have all felt, which we have all known’.¹¹ In sensational form the circumstances Magdalen finds herself in, and her responses to them, take her beyond the likely experience of No Name’s general readership, and we once again find Collins ‘adhering to realities’ that are not of the ‘every-day’ variety in his portrayal of monomaniacal drives. Nevertheless, he hoped to fulfil his desire of making Magdalen ‘a pathetic character … by a resolute adherence, throughout, to the truth as it is in Nature’ (p. xxvii), and as the following reading of Magdalen shows, he has taken pains to portray the psychological and environmental determining factors that influence her behaviour during the course of the novel.

Magdalen is presented to the reader by an omniscient narrator who often describes her thoughts and feelings with compassion; Collins obviously wanted to generate reader sympathy for her through understanding of her emotional state (even when she is most alienated from the world). This is in contrast to Mannion, whose explanatory letter may allow us to view him with sympathy (Heller, p. 75), but who is far too much of a stage villain really to feel for. Moreover, Mannion’s desires, dominant idea and morality coincide: he hates Basil, desires revenge upon him and cares nothing about the moral consequences; in fact, his monomaniacal delusion leads him to believe that he is destined to destroy his enemy. Although Magdalen’s fixed idea gives her unwavering drive and focus, she experiences inner conflict over her actions; she wants the fortune and is monomaniacally driven to win it, but despises the dishonest lengths she must go to in order to be victorious. Through this revelation of what Graham Law and Andrew Maunder call ‘Magdalen’s embattled psychology’ Collins introduces two issues for speculation that receive more direct and exploratory attention than in Basil: the extent to which nurture and circumstance may influence the basic nature of an individual, and the difficulty of achieving self-control.¹² It is perhaps telling that Collins chose to revise Basil at much the same time as he was writing No Name; themes and mental states that are used for sensational effect in the earlier novel become issues for more sustained and nuanced consideration in the more mature and lengthy work.

While Basil is mainly informed by early Victorian theories about the sway of the passions, No Name, written a decade later, engages with mid-Victorian psycho-physiological theories of the relationship between the will and the emotions. This is not to say that there is a sudden change in the way that doctors, scientists and philosophers viewed character development; texts and ideas build on and feed into each other, often resulting in a change of tone or focus more than a brand-new theory. The mid-century theories discussed here in relation to No Name asserted (like much earlier thinking on the subject) that the cultivation of the willpower was the most important means of achieving self-determination, but they were also increasingly wary of the fact that achieving the necessary level of cultivation was dependent on a number of internal and external factors that the individual may be unable to control in the first place.

The second half of this chapter looks at how Collins’s depiction of Magdalen does not just reflect, but reflects upon, these notions of character formation, and conveys his own belief that individuals have inbuilt capacities for good and evil. No Name is one of the sensation novels that has most often been read by scholars as revealing the constructed nature of gender and class identities, because of Magdalen’s vacillating social status and adoption of disguises of figures occupying different social groups (including a governess and a servant). In discussing No Name’s ‘engagement with the “Woman Question”’, Law and Maunder argue that Magdalen ‘negotiates and reacts against a set of ideologies that are simultaneously constructs and very real for her’ (pp. 87–8). Jenny Bourne Taylor similarly observes that ‘what No Name reveals above all is the impossibility of representing a coherent female subjectivity, a “true nature”’ (p. 134). For this discussion, however, it is important to differentiate between Collins’s portrayal of gender as a role, socially created and performed by individuals, and the assertion in his work that there are ‘forces of inborn and inbred disposition’ (No Name, p. 116) within people (regardless of gender) that may be enhanced or suppressed, but cannot be fundamentally modified, and that will work with circumstance to dictate behaviour.

Hughes accurately observes that Magdalen’s moral struggle ‘never seriously affects the realm of action’, but her further assertion that the ‘real challenge is not to the heroine’s virtue, but to her intelligence and daring’ does not sufficiently allow for the pages that Collins devotes to the inner conflict among different facets of Magdalen’s personality (p. 145). In fact, as H. F. Chorley claimed in his (largely unfavourable) review of the novel, Magdalen is ‘virtually, the book’, and her story shows the ease with which potentially “good” people can fall victim, unawares, to both circumstance and their own lesser natures.¹³

The depiction of Magdalen’s internal conflict may make the reader more inclined to pity her, but also raises questions about personal agency and responsibility; indeed, as we shall see, several Victorian reviewers were very disinclined to feel anything but contempt for her. Medical and popular articles about insanity, criminality and deviant behaviour expressed ongoing concern about the difficulties of assigning responsibility and blame if the vulnerable and precarious status of self-control was acknowledged. No Name explores these issues by making Magdalen clearly aware of the impropriety and immorality of what she is doing, but by also making it unclear to what extent she is unable, or unwilling, to stop herself; this lack of clarity echoes some of the paradoxes of Victorian theories of willpower that will be explored in this chapter. By comparing these two novels, we can see how Collins becomes increasingly interested in concerns of character formation, and uses the condition of monomania to explore issues of self-control and the difficulties of deciding when, why and how we should feel sympathy for people who do “bad things”.

‘I cannot leave you if I would’: (self-)delusion and unruly passions in Basil

In one of the key works that brought monomania to the English medical (and subsequently popular) imagination, J. E. D. Esquirol described monomania in the following way:

the intellectual disorder is confined to a single object, or a limited number of objects. The patients seize upon a false principle, which they pursue without deviating from logical reasonings, and from which they deduce legitimate consequences, which modify their affections, and the acts of their will. Aside from this partial delirium, they think, reason and act, like other men. Illusions, hallucinations, vicious associations of ideas, false and strange convictions, are at the basis of this delirium.¹⁴

Although in the later nineteenth century monomania was mainly associated in the public mind with obsession, the presence of a particular delusion that influences subsequent behaviour was, as Esquirol’s definition suggests, the key feature of early medical definitions. The presence of delusion is important in Collins’s portrayal of Mannion because, despite having carefully plotted Basil’s downfall for some time, it is only after his encounte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Self-control, willpower and monomania
• Part II Heredity and degeneration
• Part III Education, environment and circumstance
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index