Collins’s fiction often exposes the constructed nature of class and social identity by demonstrating how unstable such supposedly ’fixed’ identifiers are, most notably in The Woman in White and No Name.

This chapter continues the book’s analysis of sensation fiction to consider Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1862), with its actress antiheroine Magdalen, together with the memoirs of actresses as focal texts for examining wayward identification in a theatrical context. The figure of the actress dramatized the Victorian conception of female psychology as naturally fluid, apt to identify with and conform to the shapes of others’ personalities. While this supposedly made women better actresses, it also seemed to threaten the stability of the actress’s own “authentic” self. Charlotte Brontë’s immortalization of the actress Rachel as Vashti in Villette exemplifies this paradoxical perception of the era’s most prominent and powerful actresses as fragile vessels. While No Name spotlights the physical and psychic repercussions of Magdalen’s various dramatic roles, it never represents acting as the uncontrolled effluence of passion or even as self-forgetfulness. No Name casts its actress anti-heroine as a subject who is indestructible because of her imaginative mobility. She thus aligns with accounts of Victorian professional actresses who represent their identification with characters as a deliberate and habitual exercise instead of subjection through relinquishing agency.