the culture. Henry James maintained that the works of Wilkie Collins shouldn_t even be referred to as 'sensation novels,' but the complexity of their design and content led him to conclude that Collins's novels 'are not so much works of art as works of science.' Indeed, in the great sequence of novels Collins published in the 1860s, beginning with The Woman in White and extending through No Name, Armadale, and The Moonstone, science becomes an increasingly powerful master discourse in resolving the 'questions of identity' at the heart of the plots. In The Moonstone-regarded by many as Collins's greatest work, and, coincidentally, as the work in which he moved from writing in the sensation mode to inventing the modern detective novel-the medical man Ezra Jennings manages to succeed where even the detective Sergeant Cuff and the legal advisor Mr. Bruff both fail. As the author of a controversial theoretical text on the functioning of the nervous system and as an expert on the physiological basis of mental operations, Jennings proposes the 'bold experiment' that reveals to the protagonist, Franklin Blake, that he has committed a crime unconsciously, under the influence of certain drugs and as a result of certain physiological drives and nervous impulses. In explaining to Blake the 'physiological principle' of how the body often controls the will, Jennings refers Blake to the work of prominent Victorian scientists. The physician forces Blake to admit that his body operated independently of his will in leading him to commit a theft while asleep, and to confess at last, 'I did it without my own knowledge.' Finally, in defense of his proposed course of action to provide proof of this theory, Jennings establishes his authority when he boldly proclaims, 'Science sanctions my proposal.'
Science is the sanctioning discourse in The Moonstone, superseding even that of the law. What begins as the most political of Collins's novels (investigating the criminal implications of a plundering colonial policy in British India) ends by being the most scientific (shifting the focus of the investigation from international politics to the precise physiological conditions that led to Blake's theft of the diamond). But this was science with powerful political implications. Consistent with the claims of an emerging Victorian science that adumbrated various materialist theories of gender and personality, The Moonstone maintained that the identity of the inner self and the final causes of behavior are ultimately -500- subject to physiological determinants rather than reflective of social and historical conditions. Victorian science would also maintain, similarly, that women were physiologically predisposed to the sort of 'nervous hysteria' and «mania» we see manifested, diagnosed, and contained in Lady Audley's Secret and The Woman in White. Just as the controversial new theories of an emerging science called criminal anthropology were beginning to hypothesize a physiologically determined criminal type, the first full-length detective novel in English explains criminal behavior in pathological terms, as a biological rather than a sociological problem, calling for medical intervention rather than social reform. «Science» reveals this truth most explicitly to the protagonist in The Moonstone when Franklin Blake realizes, thanks to the 'bold experiment' Jennings performs on Blake's body, that we must 'become objects of inquiry to ourselves' and to the watchful eyes of science.
In her largely appreciative essay on The Woman in White, Mrs. Oliphant cautioned that the real danger of sensation fiction was not so much in what the genre was in itself, but in what it was likely to lead to: 'What Mr. Wilkie Collins has done with delicate care and laborious reticence, his followers will attempt without any such discretion. We have already had specimens, as many as are desirable, of what the detective policeman can do for the enlivenment of literature: and it is into the hands of the literary Detective that this school of story-telling must inevitably fall at last.' Mrs. Oliphant's prediction about the inevitable progression from sensation novel to detective fiction proved to be true. It was a progression, however, that Collins effected all by himself. The detective novel is, of course, the logical conclusion to a genre preoccupied with establishing the identity of a shadowy personality, with uncovering criminal activity, with explaining a secret from the past. But more importantly, the detective novel, with its validation of a professional hero who acquires the right to impose an identity on an unwilling suspect, fulfills the pattern of the professional appropriation of identity through the discourses of law and science, a pattern we have seen already sketched in some detail in the sensation novel. The 'science of detection' as it was invented and implemented by the famous literary duo of Holmes and Watson two decades after The Moonstone appeared, is the fruit of that juridical-medical collaboration, and it also extends the process of «materializing» personal identity begun in the sensation school. As sensation novelists construed personal identity in terms of authenticating legal documents, the detective novelist trans-501- lated identity into material evidence of the criminal's body-the incriminating footprint, the photograph, the strand of hair, the shape of the ear. Along with the numerous literary detectives that followed them, the private investigators, lawyers, and doctors of sensation fiction contributed to and popularized the production of an elaborate bureaucratic system of archives that could establish, monitor, and control personal identity by the use of official documents, which translated the body into the textual form of fingerprints, mug shots, physiological statistics, and medical histories.
This attention to rendering the secrets of the human body into a body of documentary evidence is not the only feature inherited by the detective novelist from the sensation novelist. The Moonstone is also a revealing transitional text between the two subgenres in its more explicit treatment of the problems of empire. To be sure, there had been colonial subplots in many of The Moonstone's predecessors-Walter Hartright's adventures in South America in The Woman in White, Allan Armadale's birth and childhood in the West Indies in Armadale, George Talboys's fortune hunting in Australia in Lady Audley's Secret, and Andrew Vanstone's ill-fated military occupation of Quebec in No Name, to mention just a few. The secrets concealed within the private life of the family that so preoccupied these novels often could be traced back to some repressed trouble springing from colonial expansion, an issue that lurked in the background of the plot as a site where exotic and dangerous passions were cultivated. But in the object of the moonstone itself and in his direct treatment of the violent theft of the gem from India, Collins made the suppressed crime of imperial plunder at least symbolically central in The Moonstone rather than relegating it to the marginalized position it had occupied in his earlier sensation novels. In tales like 'The Speckled Band,' 'The Boscombe Valley Mystery,' 'The Crooked Man,' The Sign of Four, and many others, Arthur Conan Doyle would make the issue of imperial guilt and contamination a trademark of the British detective story at the turn of the century. The meeting and collaboration of Doctor Watson and Sherlock Holmes itself was only occasioned, after all, by Watson's return to England from Afghanistan where he had been wounded in the Afghan wars while serving as medical officer for the occupying British Army. When he lists the strongest areas of speciality in Holmes's considerable but selective knowledge, Watson should not have marveled that the master detective's knowledge of 'sensation literature' was so 'immense.' In -502- addition to heralding the extension of what Hobsbawm calls the 'Age of Capital' into the worldwide markets of the 'Age of Empire' for England and the other European powers as well, the literary development the Holmes phenomenon represents also suggests how the commercialization of the human subject, as it was documented in the sensation novel, was only a prelude to its more radical exploration and colonization, both at home and abroad. That process would not only be demonstrated quite effectively in the detective stories of Doyle, but also in the adventure stories written by figures like Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad.
But detective fiction is not the only reincarnation of the sensation novel that appeared in the latter years of the nineteenth century. The sensation around sensation fiction may have largely disappeared in the 1870s, due in part to broader cultural trends in the 1870s like the general return of consensus around the orthodoxies that had been under attack in the 1860s, and in part to more specific circumstances like the decline of Wilkie Collins's health and his move toward writing reformist fiction later in his life. However, many of the conventions of the sensation novel (and some of its controversy) were very vigorously sustained in a new form in the melodramatic naturalism of Thomas Hardy. Hardy's interest in the powerful role of physical drives and impulses in human behavior, in the inevitable and destructive exposure of the repressed secret of the past, and in the degree to which circumstances shape personal fates can be traced directly to the sensation novel. These emphases oppose the traditions of psychological and social realism as practiced by George Eliot, Henry James, and, to a lesser degree, Dickens and Trollope. The work of these novelists generally aimed at preserving the psychological and moral integrity of the character, necessarily diminishing the power of the forces that delimit subjectivity and determine moral choice. While there are certainly secrets and crimes in the plots of Eliot's novels, for example, such events are directed at moving the reader to contemplate the degree to which a character like Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss or Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch has submitted herself to the drift of circumstances rather than acted responsibly and consciously. While Eliot is interested in the limiting «conditions» that constrain modern life, the real «mystery» to be investigated in her work is the moral question of how severely or with how much compassion we can judge Gwendolen Harleth's or Mr. Bulstrode's crimes-whether, indeed, they really, deliberately committed a crime or not. -503-
For Hardy, as for the sensation novelists who preceded him, the focus is not upon the ethical complexities of rational choice or whether or not a crime has taken place, but upon the pressure of forces-biological, sociological, professional-that relentlessly push a person like Tess into an intolerable situation, or, like Jude, gradually just wear
