III - Sensing Bodies: Negotiating the Body and Identity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Aurora Floyd and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone

Summary

In a scathing thirty-four-page 1863 review of twenty-four novels from a new popular genre, philosopher and literary critic Henry Mansel recorded the physical sensations these novels produced: the stories ‘carry the whole nervous system by steam,’ he says, and they may even have the unintentional effect of producing a ‘sensation in the palate and throat which is the premonitory symptom of nausea’ (487). His disgust responds to the genre's blend of scandalous plots (bigamy, murder, suicide, forgery, adultery, lunacy, illegitimate birth, conspiracies, and secret wills) with domestic characters and settings (respectable families from middle-class homes). In addition to listing the stories’ effects on the individual reader's body, Mansel argues that the novels also reflect the health of the social body:

Regarding these works merely as an efflorescence, as an eruption indicative of the state of health of the body in which they appear, the existence of an impure or a silly crop of novels, and the fact that they are eagerly read, are by no means favourable symptoms of the conditions of the body of society. (512)

Known as ‘sensation fiction,’ this genre caused a sensation in the literary and medical worlds alike. An 1863 article in the Medical Critic and Psychological Journal described the genre as a biological, psychological, and social problem, resulting from ‘a strong desire for “sensations”’ found in ‘the nature of the human mind’ of people whose time is insufficiently occupied (‘Sensation Novels’ 515). A month later, a second article in the same journal suggested that the novels’ ‘morbid exaggeration of feeling’ and ‘tendency to confound vice and virtue’ could lead to increased suicide in England (‘Baits for Suicide’ 594); thus, the article exhorted, ‘it is well that we should mark to what these principles may lead, and what are the patterns held up for imitation’ (597). These and other Victorian responses to sensation fiction explicitly linked morality and psychology to the body—in particular, to the bodily and mental sensations that such novels produced.

Just as sensation fiction supposedly produced physical sensations in the reader, so bodily instability was the genre's structural and thematic lodestone. Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859–60), the novel that spurred the trend of sensation fiction,2 manifests this bodily focus in the extreme.