In the prefaces to his later works, Collins would frequently argue that his interests as a novelist were not as deeply invested in the construction of plot as they were in the representation of character. His characterizations, however, have largely been dismissed by critics as superficial and conventionalized, while his plots have been praised as original, intricate, and compelling. But perhaps Collins's more significant contribution to the history of the novel is, true to his own claims, in the area of character-more specifically, in his replacement of the ideologically laden notion of Victorian moral «character» with the more socially determined conception of Victorian 'identity.' Indeed, as intricate as Collins's plots are in his best work, they remain the more highly conventionalized features of it. The plots invariably make use of the same set of materials: some secret from the past (the protagonist's illegitimacy, a lover's deception, a father's fraud) comes to light and reshapes the protagonist's place in the present in shocking ways, demanding a reconciliation with these distressing new circumstances and an acceptance of some new identity. But the agencies involved both in concealing the secret and in disclosing it are almost always some conspiracy of law and medicine. Those professions also act as the crucial authorities through whom a person can establish and sustain his or her new identity in society. Such authorities, then, essentially replace the notion of a free and natural-born «person» or an autonomous moral «character» with that of a legally constituted social 'identity,' something a person is neither born to nor in control of choosing. Identity, construed as a social invention in this way, is literally composed and executed by these professional figures and is subject to their monitoring and control. If the Great Exhibition of 1851 stood as a monument to the transformation of the 1848 spirit of class revolution into the spectacle of middle-class commerce and commodities, the sensation novel of the 1860s reads like an account of the transformation of archaic aristocratic privilege into a cult of modern professional expertise.
This very process of transformation is the basis of one of Collins's greatest sensation novels, No Name (1862–1863), which directly followed the publication of The Woman in White. Here, because of a legal technicality and a question about a dying man's medical condition, Andrew Vanstone's two daughters are declared illegitimate and are consequently disinherited, making them, literally, 'Nobody's Children' under the law, legally entitled to bear 'no name.' It is this legal condition of being without an identity that is the essential condition in all -492- these novels and the pretext upon which professional authority characteristically reasserts itself to rescue and reassign identity to the dispossessed figures within them. And yet, remarkably, in a world where no one seems to be who they claim to be, the lawyers and doctors are presented-in this novel as they almost invariably are throughout the entire genre-as straightforward and direct authorities whose testimony can be counted upon and whose unfailing energies strive to bring civil law together with 'natural law.' Nevertheless, they invariably institute a regime in which identity is conceived as a role imposed upon the subject by themselves, as representatives of the best interests of the culture.
As an actor himself and as a victim of repressive domestic laws, Collins may have perceived that in the culture in which he lived character was best understood as a role given to someone and scripted by another. Collins's long friendship and collaboration with Dickens began when Wilkie was cast as an actor in a Bulwer Lytton play produced by Dickens, and he always maintained a vital interest in the theatrical versions of his own novels. When Collins defended his treatment of character in the novels, he often appealed to the similarities he saw between the novel and the play, which two genres he regarded as 'twin sisters in the family of Fiction.' It is appropriate, therefore, that in No Name Vanstone's daughter Magdalen is not only the central body upon which the discourses of the law and medicine become focused and the sister who embraces and seeks to overcome her legal status as a nobody with no name, but she is also a very talented actress. Consistent with the conventions of the sensation novel, however, while her natural acting talent shows her capable of uncanny «appropriations» of others' «identities» in her elaborate effort to reclaim her own «natural» identity, Magdalen's attempt at autonomy fails while her more passive and conventional sister (who puts faith in her legal counsel's mediations on her behalf) succeeds in recovering the same inheritance the law had denied them both. Here, as in many sensation novels, the double identity is not just a hoax perpetrated by a person upon the world, it is also a confusion perpetrated by the world upon a person. These are plots in which a villain may be double-dealing, but where just as often the protagonist is also acting out two (or more) identities unawares, where «character» is being scripted by social forces from the outside rather than being generated from within.
The transformation of character from a natural inheritance into a legal construction takes place consistently not only in Wilkie Collins's -493- novels but in the work of many of his counterparts in sensation fiction as well. In some of the most popular sensation novels of the 1860s a lawyer may even play the part of the heroic protagonist rather than simply a powerful background figure in the machinations of the plot as he does in The Woman in White or The Dead Secret. This is the case in Mrs. Henry Wood's immensely popular East Lynne (1861) and in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1861–1862) as well. In East Lynne, a successful young lawyer named Mr. Carlyle purchases the valuable old estate of East Lynne from the dissolute and bankrupt Earl of Mount Severn, William Vane. Carlyle marries the Earl's daughter, defeats another aristocratic scoundrel in a parliamentary election, and brings his opponent's double identity and his criminal past to light as well. In Lady Audley's Secret, another lawyer, this time the aimless gentleman Robert Audley, takes on the role of private investigator to look into the disappearance of the wife of his friend George Talboys, and then seeks to explain the subsequent mysterious vanishing of George Talboys himself. The lawyer eventually discovers that his own aunt, Lady Audley, who recently married his uncle, Sir Michael Audley, is the missing wife of his missing friend. She has, the young lawyer finds out, forsaken her husband (when he sought his fortune in the colonies), abandoned their child, created a new identity for herself as a governess, married Audley's uncle, and finally murdered her first husband to preserve the secret of her past and to defend her newfound wealth and status.
At the center of this plot of criminal discovery is, once more, the deeper plot of a woman's identity-that of Lady Audley-an identity over which, characteristically, a professional man takes charge. When Robert confronts his aunt with the results of his investigation and presents her with the evidence he has gathered, he threatens her with the power of a legal procedure that will unequivocally determine her identity for her: 'I will gather together the witnesses who shall swear to your identity, and at peril of any shame to myself and those I love, I will bring upon you the just and awful punishment of your crime.' When Lady Audley is forced to confess that crime, she also claims to suffer from insanity, a condition she claims to have inherited from her mother, who died in an asylum, herself a victim of the madness inherited in turn from her mother. When she does so, Lady Audley perceptively represents herself as an effect of these two professional discursive regimes. To deal with what the novel presents as the woman's situation in the world of professional male discourse, the lawyer in this text (naturally) enlists -494- the services of a medical man: 'I will appeal to the experience of this Dr. Mosgrave,' he thought; 'physicians and lawyers are the confessors of this prosaic nineteenth century. Surely he will be able to help me.' These secular priests of professionalism diagnose and adjudicate her future as they have her past, consigning Lady Audley to an asylum, where, like her mother before her, she finally dies, out of sight. The combined authority of the law office and the asylum conspire once again to tell the woman's story for her, to expose her life as a dark «secret» and to contain her dangerous identity in a space (and a text) where she will no longer threaten the lives (and wealth) of men. This characteristic scene of the professionally extorted confession-medicalized and legalized as it is here-and the resultant confinement of the confessing subject for care may be seen as assisting in the construction of a social machinery for producing a very specialized kind of truth, a machinery which Michel Foucault has described in The History of Sexuality as fundamental to the emergence of bourgeois capitalist society in the nineteenth century.
The gendering of this pattern of professional male discipline and containment as it is imposed upon female subjects in these novels is an important part of that machinery, and it is elaborately responsive to the complicated sexual politics at work during the period in which the novels were written. Set not only in the general context of the Second Reform Act's extension of political representation in England but also against the more specific background of such developments as the passage in 1857 of the first of a chain of divorce acts called the Matrimonial Causes Acts, the introduction into Parliament of a women's suffrage bill for the first time in 1869, and the enactment into law of the Married Women's Property Acts in 1870 and 1882, sensation fiction has been read by modern feminist critics as part of a growing protest surrounding the larger issue of female political empowerment. Alternatively, the genre may also be seen as part of a rearguard defense by a realigned and newly professionalized patriarchy attempting to solidify its power against that protest. Indeed, the remarkable popularity and controversy the novels generated suggest that their appeal was due at once to the subversive notions they contained and to the ultimately conservative effects of their plots' conclusions. The double message these texts often signaled on such subjects implies that these alternative readings are more mutually reinforcing than they are contradictory, and that the novels forged in the popular arena another Victorian -495- «compromise» between the reformist and repressive
