impulses within the culture.
From this perspective Mary Grice, the strange and beautiful woman at the center of Collins's Hide and Seek (1854), offers a key female figure for the entire genre. She springs from mysterious origins, and her secret past becomes the screen upon which the other characters in the novel project their fantasies. Perhaps her most suggestive attribute is that she is deaf and dumb, a situation she responds to by carrying a slate around with her for people literally to write their desires upon. Without a last name, without a history, without a voice to express herself, she is the blank slate of the novel, a field for the enterprises of a series of men to be realized within and inscribed upon. As an artist's model called «Madonna» by her admirers, she is the idealized female mystery to be solved, the secret that all men seek to know or seek to maintain as a secret, the body in question to be identified for those who are so fascinated by her. Finally, she becomes the key to the history of those men who are so intrigued by her, exposing them and their secret selves for who they really are as well. This demure and responsive «Madonna» also represents the companion figure to the aggressive and self-asserting «Magdalen» of the later No Name, where, as in many sensation novels, the two visions of Victorian femininity-the idealized virgin and the devious siren-will be placed side by side as alternative female types, one to be only mildly respected but rewarded and the other to be marveled over and yet chastened.
Despite the fact that strong and assertive women generally fared badly in sensation novels (or perhaps because of it), the prevailing assumption was that this was literature written for a largely female audience. Much of the contemporary criticism about the corrosive moral effects of sensation novels also expressed an anxiety about their influence over the young ladies who read them in such great numbers. But women were not only the most avid readers of these novels, they were among the most important writers of them as well. To the more than fifty novels written by Mrs. Wood alone and to the some eighty authored by Miss Braddon must be added those by less famous authors like Ouida, Florence Wilford, and Mrs. Grey. Across the considerable range of quality and seriousness such an impressive number of novels manifested, most of them can be aligned with either conservative or subversive forces in addressing the 'woman question' of mid-nineteenth-centuryEngland. These texts may also be interpreted either as -496- warnings about the dangers of breaking out of the conventional and compliant role that women were expected to play in the culture on the one hand, or, on the other, as models of resistance that critique the Victorian paradigm of the domesticated 'angel in the house,' exposing the «house» as nothing less than an asylum in disguise and revealing the «angel» to be an artificial ideal of patriarchal control imposed upon women with ideas. This latter reading affiliates sensation fiction with what feminist critics have identified as the 'female Gothic' strain in the novel, the radical subgenre of Gothic fiction that dramatizes (as does a text like Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights) a tale of domestic female victimization in which daughters seek out substitutes for a lost or dead mother figure.
But there were many male readers and writers of sensation novels as well, and in a number of the texts authored both by men and by women, the subject upon whom the forces of a professional elite are focused is a man. Basil: A Story of Modern Life (1852) is the first novel Collins wrote in the sensation mode, and in it the protagonist is the well-meaning son of an effete gentleman, deceived and betrayed by the middle-class family into which he has secretly married. The text is written in the voice of the son and finally submitted to the doctor who nursed him back to health after the mental breakdown he suffered at the end of the fateful year during which he discovered his wife's infidelity and the plot of extortion and revenge in which he had been entangled. Just as The Woman in White emulates a legal document, Basil takes the form of a medical file. Also like its more impressive successor, Basil offers itself as a confessional document subjecting its protagonist's identity to the critical gaze of professional eyes. Later, in Armadale, one of Collins's most effective novels of the 1860s, a medical asylum is used once again to confine a protagonist, this time the naive and well-intentioned heir Allan Armadale. The Sanatorium of the charlatan and criminal Dr. LeDoux is a medical establishment designed for the treatment of nervous diseases in women, but it becomes the scene of the imprisonment and attempted murder of Armadale (and of his double and namesake) by the devious plotter Lydia Gwilt, who has contrived the plan as part of her conspiracy of greed and revenge against the Armadale family. When her own plot to acquire the Armadale estate by manipulating medical and legal records is revealed, however, Lydia finally submits herself to the poison gas she had intended for the man she presumably married and tried to kill. -497-
The pattern of exercising the power of professional expertise over the bodies of human subjects applies to men as well as to women in these novels. Considered together with the frequent confusion of gender roles in these plots, it forms a pattern that demands a more complex reading of the gender politics involved in these texts. What Collins and the other sensation novelists may be interpreted as doing here is extending the process of «feminizing» the middle-class Victorian subject, a process that critics like Nancy Armstrong have observed in the domestic novel of the 1840s and 1850s. While the domestic novel may have generated cultural authority for certain internalized, «feminine» attributes, the sensation novel elicits their disciplining from the outside. This genre not only authorized a professional discourse in deploying that disciplinary procedure, it helped to create the very clients that would sustain these professional classes and, by the end of the century, would bring into being a systematic science to diagnose and explain those clients. As both a scientific and a professional practice, psychoanalysis theorized and sought to treat as symptoms in its patients the very «symptoms» manifested in the plot of the typical sensation novel-the enduring and explosive forces of repressed secrets from the past-usually about sex-that become written upon the mind and body of the therapeutic subject, interrupt the «normal» development of adult sexual identity, and call for professional intervention and interpretation.
Remarkably, the accession to power of a professional class in these novels is consistently valorized and rarely critiqued in the novels themselves. In Hard Cash, Reade condemns the abuse of the asylum system just as in The Law and the Lady or Man and Wife Collins protests against the justice of certain laws governing marriage and divorce. But these reformist tendencies are confined in Collins to the later works, and are generally regarded now as departures from the sensation mode or as markers of a decline in literary quality. Even those later «purpose» novels do not register the kind of wholesale critique of the professional establishment we see in Dickens's
The most serious critique of such figures may be that presented by the anarchistic villain of The Woman in White, Count Fosco. Neither a doctor nor a lawyer himself, he nonetheless demonstrates and exposes the corruptive uses of both professional discourses. Fosco exploits his scientific knowledge in diagnosing the medical condition of Lady Glyde and Laura Fairlie, in administering drugs to them to control their behavior and memory, and in confining them in the medical asylum as he plots to exchange the two women's identities. Medicine is really the manipulation of the science of chemistry, he claims, and both essentially operate as systems of control: 'Mind, they say, rules the world. But what rules the mind? The body (follow me closely here) lies at the mercy of the most omnipotent of all potentates-the Chemist.' Fosco pronounces with equal cynicism on the law, describing it as nothing more, or less, than a powerful, discursive trick, as mere manipulative 'clap-trap_: 'The machinery it has set up for the detection of crime is miserably ineffective-and yet only invent a moral epigram, saying that it works well, and you blind everybody to its blunders for that moment.' As an anarchist, however, passing himself off as an aristocrat committed to 'defending the true aristocracy,' Fosco finds his authority diminished by his association with an older political consciousness, that of the revolutionary period. In fact, it is the more sympathetic and responsible lawyers and physicians who express the reformed state of political affairs in these novels and are consistently granted the authority to speak the critical language of political reform. It is the solicitor Gilmore, in The Woman in White, who is accused by his partner of having radical views because of his unprejudiced commitment to justice for all regardless of station, just as the physician in The Dead Secret is the one who espouses the «republican» repudiation of aristocratic privilege. Their control over the discourses of power even entitles these professional figures to function as the voices of resistance and critique in the culture at the same time as they assume the very privilege and power they seem to condemn.
The elevation of professional figures of juridical control to a position of largely unchallenged authority in these novels responds to political anxieties present in England during the 1860s, when the prosperity of the 1850s and the attendant abatement of class conflict was threatened by economic recession and the possibly destabilizing effects of the Sec-499- ond Reform Act. But as the growing importance of the medical professional in these novels attests, the sensation novel engages the force of profound scientific as well as political and legal developments in
