In The Woman in White, the medical asylum and the law office are the centers of the immense power that is wielded over persons in the novel. Both places work to confine human subjects within a set of dis-487- courses and documents that determine their identities. As the editor and compiler of the text that makes up the novel, Hartright serves the interests of these two discursive fields. He constructs a text resembling a legal document to tell a story of the power of legal documents in resolving 'questions of identity.' He enlists the force of both legal and medical establishments in order to expose the truth long silenced within the walls of an asylum and to resolve 'the hardest of all questions to settle': those questions involving authentic identity as they are linked to genuine class status. The bodies of the apparently working-class Anne and the gentlewoman Laura, which cannot otherwise be distinguished from one another, are identified solely on the basis of the legal and medical documents Hartright produces. He also takes the necessary «precautions» which 'enabled the coroner and jury to settle the question of identity' of Percival Glyde as well. Ironically, however, in this novel that presents itself as an imitation of a juridical document, the fictionality of such authority is also suggested. When the already altered crucial record of Percival's birth is burned in the chapel in which his own body is also consumed, the same fire that destroyed his body destroyed the legal evidence that could confirm-or disprove-his fraud. The identity of his unrecognizable corpse can only be substantiated, therefore, by still another «document» found on the body-the watch upon which Percival's initials have been engraved. The «mechanism» of identification that carries authority in this text, it is implied here, is subject to and inscribed by the artificial machinery of time. What a man finally achieves in this novel, in fact, is what the woman must endure: the authority to establish an identity for herself-an activity that complements and perfects the intentions of the legal establishment it serves.
The plot of the typical sensation novel commonly follows this same pattern. It makes manifest the decline of the old gentry in the person of a fraudulent aristocrat (like the pretender Percival Glyde) or a weak and ineffectual one (like Laura's ailing uncle Frederick Fairlie). The plot registers the vacuum of power created by such figures and identifies the heirs to the vacated seats of their power and influence. The professional classes, represented by a set of stock characters in the sensation novel-the assiduous lawyer and the capable physician-establish themselves in (and by way of) these texts as the new aristocracy, the true elite. The lawyers are the ever-present advisors who interpret and manipulate the laws that establish the limits of personal freedom, negotiate between contending class interests, and define and legitimate the -488- status of individuals. The doctors monitor the person's health, diagnosing and prescribing the proper care and management of body and mind, often making the crucial determination of whether the person in question is dead or alive, of sound mind and body or in need of confinement, capable of acting autonomously or in need of an executor to act on his or her behalf. These social agents come to replace any notion of natural political endowment or biological inheritance as the determining facts in a person's autonomous 'identity,' redefining the self as a legal construction and a medical case rather than a member of a social class or even of a family. In these novels, the authority of culture reasserts itself against nature at the moment when the idea of natural rights seemed to have established a new era for the liberation of persons that would lead to the collapse of patriarchy: sensation fiction shows patriarchy merely being reconfigured in the form of professionalism. While the illicit secrets and sensational effects of this kind of literature may provoke a thrill to the reader's pulse, bring a chill to the spine, or even capture the attention in an addictive way, they also register more impressively how much power certain legitimate cultural forces exercise over the bodies and minds of its readers every day.
Despite the widely recognized status of The Woman in White as the first great novel of its kind, most of Collins's earlier writing in the 1850s was also written in the sensation mode, and it just as clearly dramatizes the pattern of social transformation he developed with more sophistication in the 1860s. The Dead Secret (1857) is one of the most accomplished and provocative of these predecessors. Like The Woman in White, The Dead Secret solves a mystery of personal identity through the mediation and substantiation of legal and medical authority. It chronicles the discovery by Rosamond Treverton Frankland of the fact that she is not the daughter of the old wealthy family she had assumed herself to be, but was born secretly to one of her mother's servants, Sarah Leeson. Her father is not really Captain Treverton, 'the eldest male representative of an old Cornish family,' but a laborer who died in a mining accident before she was born. The novel begins with Mrs. Treverton on her deathbed writing a confession of these facts to her husband, or rather dictating the confession to her personal maid Sarah, the real mother of their child. The dying penitent forces Sarah to write down these facts and to agree not to remove the confession from the house or destroy it without first showing it to Captain Treverton. This document becomes the elusive dead secret of the novel's title, surrepti-489- tiously hidden away in the house, left undiscovered by the deceived daughter Rosamond (and by the reader) until near the end of the text, after Rosamond has been married to Leonard Frankland (her blind childhood sweetheart) and has given birth to a child of her own. The plotting of the narrative plays upon the reader's curiosity about the substance of this secret document, Rosamond's shocking discovery of her illegitimacy, and her response to the practical consequences of being disinherited as a result of it. The drama culminates in another sentimental deathbed scene just before Sarah Leeson dies, a scene in which Rosamond melodramatically accepts the menial servant as her real mother.
While on the surface this novel once again deals with the inevitable discovery of the secret sexual sin of the past as it crosses the shifting lines of class identity, the more profound achievement of the text is Collins's continued exploration of personal identity as a contested ground between apparent biological «facts» on the one hand and legal and medical expertise on the other. The underlying anxiety about class subversion is manifested less in the account of the cross-class dressing by Mrs. Treverton and Sarah Leeson when they exchange identities to perpetrate the fraud of Rosamond's birth than it is in the assertion of authority over both gentility and commoner alike by the legitimate and seemingly benign practices of the doctors and lawyers in the text. This appropriation of power once again signals the rise of these professionals as the culture's new ruling class, whose authority is rooted not in the force of tradition or birthright but in the power of professional discourse. The men of the old aristocracy remain literally and figuratively blind or dead in the novel, as their «true» status can only be constructed for them by the dictates of the proper legal and medical authorities to whom they repeatedly submit themselves. 'It is impossible to proceed without seeking advice immediately,' Rosamond's husband warns in characteristic fashion. 'The lawyer who always managed Captain Treverton's affairs, and who now manages ours, is the proper person to direct us in instituting a search, and to assist us, if necessary, in making the restitution.' This extension of patriarchal authority into the professions is even more urgently exercised upon the women in the novel, of course, for whom biological facts about maternity are established legally only with the 'substantiated documentation' of the lawyers and the scientifically informed approval of the doctors who watch over them. -490-
Here, maternity is as much a legal fiction as paternity. Both are literally only worth the paper they are written on.
The dramatization of this fundamental transition is perhaps the novel's most important accomplishment: the biological mother is replaced by the figure of the doctor and the patriarchal father is supplanted by the figure of the lawyer. The novel begins and ends with the death of a female parent, the first being the 'false mother' of Rosamond Treverton and the last being her 'true mother.' But the determination of false and true depends entirely upon the discovery and legal confirmation of the deadly secret document that was dictated by the false mother to the true one, a text whose authority is then replaced by yet another document, which the lawyers declare that Sarah Leeson must endorse in order to authenticate herself as Rosamond's «true» mother. That authenticating document can only be signed with the permission and sanction of the doctor who oversees the care of Sarah's body and who takes complete responsibility for it. He dictates the terms upon which any interview and signing can take place, controlling who will conduct the interview and how and when it will occur. The doctor and the lawyer, in turn, reject the evidentiary value of another letter, which details the truth of Sarah Leeson's giving birth to Rosamond, because, it would seem, they had no hand in producing it. In a demonstration of professional control over the authenticity of self-assertion, that letter is first 'critically dissected paragraph by paragraph' as if it were a diseased body under the doctor's surgical knife. It is then 'carefully annotated by the doctor, for the purpose of extricating all the facts that it contained from the mass of unmeaning words,' this time as if it were a legal deposition to be presented in court. The letter is subsequently submitted to the family solicitor, who 'argued from his professional point of view against regarding the letter, taken by itself, as a genuine document,' and against accepting it as «evidence» of Rosamond's 'real parentage.' Finally, the solicitor insists on the production of yet another 'written declaration' which he will approve, and which will establish with certainty Rosamond's true identity. Together, the doctor and lawyer involve themselves in a textual reconception and rewriting of Rosamond's past that seems to supersede in importance the biological facts of her birth and the dead secret of her mother's 'viva voce' confession, rendering the identity of her parents or her true class status relatively inconsequential by comparison. -491-
