of lawless genius or violent horrors of crime.' This, Mrs. Oliphant claims, is the distinguishing feature of the new genre initiated by Wilkie Collins: it shocks and thrills us with the ordi-483- nary workings of ordinary life. This new kind of novel makes the disturbing discovery that the deepest mystery in the family is the «mechanism» that forms the family itself. As Henry James would put it three years later in an article on Mary Elizabeth Braddon, 'to Mr. Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.'
From the time the sensation novel was first identified as a distinct genre, literary historians have continued to treat it as a hybrid form, even a monstrous invention. It was a genre that attempted, with varying success, to blend the commonplace settings and characters from realistic and domestic fiction with the extremities of passion and plot from the Romantic and Gothic traditions. As is often the case with popular literature, this genre produces the effect of making the strange seem ordinary, much as the «higher» forms of art, in the analysis popularized by the Russian formalists, make the ordinary seem strange. But even Mrs. Oliphant's essay implicitly recognizes that the sensation novel was more than a purely literary experiment of this kind. It was also a direct response to the historical moment in which it arose, a moment she traces to the second Great Exhibition of 1862. That exhibition, she acknowledges, was but a pale imitation of the first grand spectacle of commerce and consumerism held at the Crystal Palace in 1851. While in 1851 the world was 'lost in self-admiration,' Mrs. Oliphant argued, 'it is a changed world in which we are standing' in the England of 1862. To recover the thrill and spectacle of that earlier age, she says, America staged a bloody civil war to serve as 'the grandest expedient for procuring a new sensation.' In a somewhat less extreme reaction to these circumstances, England staged the sensation novel. There, she might have said had she explored the analogy further, the «mechanism» of ordinary life replaces the machinery of industry as a source of wonder and amazement, and the commodities of 'common human agents' substitute for the spectacle of manufactured products once proudly exhibited in the hallways of the Crystal Palace. Thus the sensation novel is not, as it is generally regarded, a literature concerned primarily with the drama of thrilling events or with working out intricate plot lines. Rather, it is a literature that displays, during a time of cultural crisis, the social transformation of human agency into a commercial entity-into merchandise. In important ways, the sensation novel was the 'Great Exhibition' of the 1860s. Considered in this light, it was also a serious and subversive art form. Sensation novels made vis-484- ible and narratable the complex set of forces involved in a fundamental historical shift that reshaped English culture between 1848 and the end of the 1860s, and they traced the imprint of those forces on the nerves and bodies of ordinary characters and common readers alike.
Wilkie Collins's Woman in White (1859–1860) is the text most frequently regarded as inaugurating the genre of sensation fiction, and one of the novel's several narrators makes it a point to place its crucial events in the context of the Great Exhibition. 'The year which I am now writing was the year of the famous Crystal Palace Exhibition in Hyde Park,' says its middle-class hero, Walter Hartright. 'Foreigners in unusually large numbers had arrived already, and were still arriving in England. Men were among us by hundreds whom the ceaseless distrustfulness of their governments had followed privately, by means of appointed agents, to our shores.' It is not only the invasion of foreigners that is of concern here, but the invasion of suspicious foreign influences-specifically, the anarchistic impulses that fueled the revolutions of 1848 in Europe. That threat is vividly personified in the novel's larger-than-life villain, Count Fosco, who is ultimately exposed as a member of a secret anarchist organization based in Italy. The juxtaposition of the economic spectacle of the Crystal Palace with the political intrigues involving imported agents from the revolutionary movements of 1848 in this passage forms a striking image of the very historical transformation with which the sensation novel is centrally concerned. If the British industrial revolution succeeded where the European political revolutions failed, it did so not by replacing the dictatorship of the aristocracy with the dictatorship of the proletariat but by investing a new kind of authority in a new class of 'professionals.' The sensation novel tells the story of that political displacement. In a manner very different from that of the historical novel, the industrial novel, or the domestic novel that preceded it, the sensation novel dramatizes the realignment of political forces that redefined the means by which people understood their own identities in the society. This interpretation of the genre's significance may partially explain why a literature considered so negligible should also spark so much heated controversy in the culture, and why the life span of so popular an art form should be confined to a period slightly longer than a single decade.
Like most sensation novels, The Woman in White is first and foremost a novel preoccupied with mistaken identities and class status. Sir -485- Percival Glyde is not really the baronet he claims to be, since he was born a bastard and is therefore not the true heir to his title or his estate. Nor is Anne Catherick, whom he has falsely imprisoned in an asylum, really the servant-woman she seems to be. She is in fact Percival's presumed-dead wife, Lady Glyde, Laura Fairlie, who eerily resembles the real Anne and who, along with her body double, has been the object of a plot set in motion by Sir Percival that 'involved nothing less than the complete transformation of two separate identities.' Also true to type, the machinations of this plot consistently represent personal identity in the dual form of a commodity to be owned and a legal dispute to be resolved. 'The one question to consider,' the novel's male protagonist claims, 'was whether I was justified or not in possessing myself the means of establishing Laura's identity at the cost of allowing the scoundrel who had robbed her of it to escape with impunity.' Laura Fairlie's identity has been stolen from her by the fraudulent aristocrat Sir Percival Glyde in order to preserve the secret of his own illegal imposture and to maintain the inheritance he has also stolen by falsely marrying her. The economic and legal struggle over the «question» of personal identity is portrayed here, as it often is in such novels, in gendered terms-as a man's justified «possession» of some feminized property which has been unjustly «robbed» by another man. The intrigue of class identity and economic fortune at the center of the novel is complemented by an intrigue of sexual identity at its margins-in the person of the «masculine» Marian Holcombe and in the rather «feminine» Walter Hartright as well.
The «Preamble» to The Woman in White blends all of these concerns, identifying the text as the story of a man and a woman-a story, however, that will intentionally imitate the form of a legal brief. Because 'the Law' is 'the preengaged servant of the long purse,' and therefore cannot be 'depended upon to
The narrator who frames the text in these legal terms is, in fact, the novel's male protagonist, Walter Hartright. He also acts as the text's editor, assembling his narrative along with those of a number of others in such a way that the whole forms a pseudolegal deposition. Hartright designs the text to resemble a legal document, then, while he makes use of a number of genuine legal documents-birth certificates, baptismal accounts, marriage licenses, death certificates, medical records, and so on-to resolve the several 'questions of identity' the story raises. Mr. Kyrle, one of the principal lawyers in the novel, also turns out to be one of the principal actors in this quest for documentary evidence, indispensable in Walter Hartright's attempt to solve the riddle of Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick and that of Percival Glyde as well. 'Questions of identity,' the solicitor affirms, 'where instances of personal resemblance are concerned, are, in themselves, the hardest of all questions to settle-the hardest, even when they are free from the complications which beset the case we are now discussing.' As the undercover professional heroes of the novel, the solicitors Kyrle and Gilmore act to facilitate the settling of those questions by validating the documents that count as evidence of an authentic identity and declaring the truth of who persons really are. Like the physicians who maintain the asylum in which Laura and Anne are kept as prisoners, the lawyers frame the terms in which 'questions of identity' can be asked and answered. Over the course of the novel, therefore, the romantic hero of the novel not only transforms himself from a drawing master into an illustrator for a newspaper, but he also transforms himself into an amateur attorney and private investigator in his quest to «establish» and «possess» the identity of the woman he loves. Hartright can only legally do so, however, once he first establishes her 'as my Wife,' a development which conveniently also enables his own son (with his own name) to become the heir of the contested patriarchal inheritance. In effect, the middle-class Hartright does legally and honestly what the villainous aristocratic poseurs, Sir Percival Glyde and Count Fosco, do surreptitiously and illegally: he assumes authority over and establishes the identity of his wife, making a considerable financial profit in the course of doing so.