scholarly journals Alternative Visions Of Crime And Community In Wilkie Collins' The Woman In White And The Moonstone

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Pennington
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
To Come ◽  
Police Detective ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Detective Genre

When T. S. Eliot described Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) as the “first and greatest of English detective novels” (413), he could not have predicted the number of writers who would take issue with his brief phrase. While some have embraced Eliot’s adjectives (Bisla; Hennelly), others have critiqued the “first” and “greatest” descriptors, identifying Collins’ predecessors (Duncan; Klimaszewski), and contemporaries who offer The Moonstone some competition for the title of “greatest” (Smillie; Thomas). Still others have taken issue with defining the novel as “English,” due to its anti-Imperialist critiques (Narayan; Roy). Following in the footsteps of scholars such as Tamar Heller and D. A. Miller, the descriptor I choose to trouble in this essay is “detective.” Though The Moonstone inarguably contains a detective character, and a complex mystery that is indeed solved through detection, I argue that, especially when viewed in conjunction with Collins’ earlier novel The Woman in White (1859), Collins should be understood not as establishing the conventions of the detective novel to come, but as working against the tide of a developing genre which became increasingly police- and law-focused. Rather than valorizing the police detective or reifying the justness of the legal system, these novels articulate a vision of crime and justice outside of the boundaries of law and policing, one markedly different from the “detective” genre Eliot credits Collins with founding.

scholarly journals Alternative Visions Of Crime And Community In Wilkie Collins' The Woman In White And The Moonstone

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Pennington
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
To Come ◽  
Police Detective ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Detective Genre

When T. S. Eliot described Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) as the “first and greatest of English detective novels” (413), he could not have predicted the number of writers who would take issue with his brief phrase. While some have embraced Eliot’s adjectives (Bisla; Hennelly), others have critiqued the “first” and “greatest” descriptors, identifying Collins’ predecessors (Duncan; Klimaszewski), and contemporaries who offer The Moonstone some competition for the title of “greatest” (Smillie; Thomas). Still others have taken issue with defining the novel as “English,” due to its anti-Imperialist critiques (Narayan; Roy). Following in the footsteps of scholars such as Tamar Heller and D. A. Miller, the descriptor I choose to trouble in this essay is “detective.” Though The Moonstone inarguably contains a detective character, and a complex mystery that is indeed solved through detection, I argue that, especially when viewed in conjunction with Collins’ earlier novel The Woman in White (1859), Collins should be understood not as establishing the conventions of the detective novel to come, but as working against the tide of a developing genre which became increasingly police- and law-focused. Rather than valorizing the police detective or reifying the justness of the legal system, these novels articulate a vision of crime and justice outside of the boundaries of law and policing, one markedly different from the “detective” genre Eliot credits Collins with founding.

Man and Wife

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilkie Collins
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Country House ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Marriage Laws ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Status Of Women

This time the fiction is founded upon facts' stated Wilkie Collins in his Preface to Man and Wife (1870). Many Victorian writers responded to contemporary debates on the rights and the legal status of women, and here Collins questions the deeply inequitable marriage laws of his day. Man and Wife examines the plight of a woman who, promised marriage by one man, comes to believe that she may inadvertently have gone through a form of marriage with his friend, as recognized by the archaic laws of Scotland and Ireland. From this starting-point Collins develops a radical critique of the values and conventions of Victorian society. Collins had already developed a reputation as the master of the 'sensation novel', and Man and Wife is as fast moving and unpredictable as The Moonstone and The Woman in White. During the novel the atmosphere grows increasingly sinister as the setting moves from a country house to a London suburb and a world of confinement, plotting, and murder.

Multiple Narratives & Relative Truths: a Study ofThe Ring and the Book, The Woman in White, andThe Moonstone

1982 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 143-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue Lonoff
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Other ◽  
Robert Browning ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
The Moonstone

Across the span of a single decade, Robert Browning and Wilkie Collins published, respectively, a poem and two novels with similarly innovative structures. All three works are multiple narratives; that is, they are narrated by several of their characters who function both as actors and witnesses. All three were immediately popular, and all three continue to be regarded as major achievements of their audiors.The Woman in White, serialized inAll the Year Roundfrom 1859 to 1860, quickly became the talk of London and remained so preeminent among Collins's novels that in his will he requested as his epitaph, “author ofThe Woman in Whiteand other works of fiction.”The Ring and the Book, begun in 1864 and inspired by a source that Browning found in 1860, was issued in four volumes, two in 1868 and two in 1869. LikeThe Woman in White, it was widely discussed and admired, exalting Browning's reputation even among readers who had earlier been critical.The Moonstone, begun in 1867 and published serially inAll the Year Roundduring 1868, was not initially as popular as the other two, although its publisher reported that “crowds of anxious readers” waited for the latest serial installments; but today it is Collins's most celebrated novel, often (though inaccurately) cited as the first detective novel in English.

“THESE VERBAL PUZZLES”: WILKIE COLLINS, NEWSPAPER ENIGMAS, AND THE VICTORIAN READER AS SOLVER

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-314
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Variety ◽  
The Third ◽  
Short Survey ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Moonstone

In 1861, in a reviewof Wilkie Collins'sThe Woman in White, a critic for theSpectatorcomplained that, “We are threatened with a new variety of the sensation novel … the whole interest of which consists in the gradual unraveling of some carefully prepared enigma” (“The Enigma Novel” 20). He was hardly the only reviewer to use a vocabulary of “puzzlement” or “enigma” when discussing Collins's work. Whether we look to an earlier review ofThe Woman in Whiteto find Collins faulted as “not a great novelist … the fascination which he exercises … [is] that he is a good constructor. Each of his stories is a puzzle, the key to which is not handed to us till the third volume” (Rev. ofThe Woman in White249) – or whether we turn to a critic ofThe Moonstone, who found Collins and his latest production “[un]worthy”: “We are no especial admirers of the department of art to which he has devoted himself, any more than we are of double acrostics or anagrams, or any of the many kinds of puzzles on which it pleases some minds to exercise their ingenuity” (Page, ed. 171–72) – we come up against the fact that Collins's novels, and especially his sensation novels, were sometimes known as “enigma novels” in the Victorian period. We can see too that this was not necessarily intended as a complimentary label. Indeed, though our own contemporary tendency has been to employ this particular moniker in a more neutral, descriptive register – to denote simply some fictions' reliance on mystery – we quickly find that Victorian reviewers were not so dispassionate in their usage. Instead, tracking names like “conundrum novel” or “enigma novel,” and terms like “puzzle,” “enigma,” and even “anagram,” shows that Collins's critics often used such phrases to index some of the same kinds of problems or concerns they more familiarly described with a rhetoric of “sensation.” A short survey suggests that their language of “puzzles” and “enigmas,” like their language of shocks and nerves, expressed disappointment at Collins's tendency to create anticlimaxes (the novel fizzles when the “puzzle” is solved); his emphasis on plot – or “carefully prepared enigma[s]” – over character; and his potential to render readers amoral and passive – patient attendants of solutions (“the key to which is not handed to us”) – rather than creatively engaged thinkers or moral questers. A simple nickname would seem to be a damning label indeed, on fuller survey.

The Moonstone

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilkie Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Country House ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Moonstone

‘Who, in the name of wonder, had taken the Moonstone out of Miss Rachel's drawer?’ A celebrated Indian yellow diamond is first stolen from India, then vanishes from a Yorkshire country house. Who took it? And where is it now? A dramatist as well as a novelist, Wilkie Collins gives to each of his narratorsa household servant, a detective, a lawyer, a cloth-eared Evangelical, a dying medical manvibrant identities as they separately tell the part of the story that concerns themselves. One of the great triumphs of nineteenth-century sensation fiction, The Moonstone tells of a mystery that for page after page becomes more, not less inexplicable. Collins's novel of addictions is itself addictive, moving through a sequence of startling revelations towards the final disclosure of the truth. Entranced with double lives, with men and women who only know part of the story, Collins weaves their narratives into a web of suspense. The Moonstone is a text that grows imaginatively out of the secrets that the unconventional Collins was obliged to keep as he wrote the novel.

THE PERSISTENCE OF THE BRAHMIN PRIESTS IN WILKIE COLLINS'STHE MOONSTONE

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 783-800
Author(s):  
Niketa G. Narayan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Underlying Assumption ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The Family ◽  
English Society ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
The Impact

When T. S. Eliotfamously called Wilkie Collins's 1868 novelThe Moonstone“the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels” (The Moonstone1966, v), the implication, presumably, was that the “detectives” are the hero Franklin Blake and other English characters who carry out the detective function, such as the family lawyer, Mr. Bruff. In addition to a detective story, the novel has been read variously as imperialist, anti-imperialist, a narrative invested with economic undertones, and as an exploration of gift theory, among others. In all these iterations, however, the underlying assumption has been that the only real “detectives” in the novel are the English characters; it is they who solve the theft of the diamond and work to police it. The Brahmin priests, whose pursuit of the diamond parallels that of the English, have generally been viewed as peripheral to the main narrative; a marginal acknowledgement of the impact that India, in its various facets, had upon nineteenth-century English society. Vicki Corkran Willey calls the priests, tongue-in-cheek, “‘villains’. . . working in tandem with two other imported troublemakers – [John] Herncastle's stolen diamond and the drug, opium” (226). Timothy L. Carens describes them as practicing “dutiful self-renunciation” (246) in their search for the diamond, implying that passivity is inherent in such dutifulness, and Jenny Bourne Taylor suggests they are important only because of their use of “[c]lairvoyance [which] is projected on to them as a form of romantic fascination, [and] which they then internalize and represent” (193). Critics are in general agreement, then, that the priests are not central to the novel, and their involvement in the solving of the crime is minimal. The present essay will refute this perspective and argue that, in fact, the Brahmin priests are central to the narrative and far more active (and effective) policing agents than the English characters.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ABNORMAL BODY INTHE MOONSTONE

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 483-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Mossman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
The Other ◽  
Original Text ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Cross Fertilization

Wilkie Collins'sThe Moonstoneis anovel constructed through the repeated representation of the abnormal body. ReadingThe Moonstonein critical terms has traditionally required a primary engagement with form. The work has been defined as a foundational narrative in the genre of crime and detection and at the same time read as a narrative located within the context of the immensely popular group of sensation novels that dominate the Victorian literary marketplace through the middle and the second half of the nineteenth century. T. S. Eliot is one of the first readers to define one end of this paradigm, reading the novel as an original text in the genre of detective fiction, and famously saying thatThe Moonstoneis “the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels” (xii). On the other end of the paradigm, the novel's formal workings are again often cited as a larger example, and even triumph, of Victorian sensation fiction – melodramatic narratives built, according to Winifred Hughes and the more recent Derridean readings by Patrick Brantlinger and others, around a discursive cross-fertilization of romanticism, gothicism, and realism.

THE WOMAN IN WHITE AND GRAPHIC SEX

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 287-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. McKelvy
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Relative Poverty ◽  
Legal Procedure ◽  
The Law ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
Present Argument ◽  
Historical Moment

WALTER HARTRIGHT, THE primary narrator of The Woman in White (1859–60), commences the novel with a declaration – “This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve” – followed by a complaint that relative poverty drove that “story” out of the courts because “the machinery of the Law” relies so heavily on “the lubricating influences of oil of gold” (5). Despite this beginning, the novel's concern with legal procedure is playfully opportunistic. Here Hartright grumbles about the Law's avaricious practice, but Collins will make a lawyer, Mr Wansborough, the key agent in Hartright's enrichment and social elevation. By contrast the novel is deeply engaged with its own historical moment as a time when creative endeavors of all kinds were being transformed by the laws of machinery. And thus it is the vehicle for Collins's metaphorical legal system – the creaking and covetous machine – that points to my present argument: that The Woman in White is English literature's first industrialized kunstlerroman, a portrait of the artist which seeks to reconcile representation and reproduction by equating modern modes of illustration with the primal goals of biological creation.

The Many Pasts of Detective Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Thomas Leitch
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Public History ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The Many

Building on Tzvetan Todorov's observation that the detective novel ‘contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’, this essay argues that detective novels display a remarkably wide range of attitudes toward the several pasts they represent: the pasts of the crime, the community, the criminal, the detective, and public history. It traces a series of defining shifts in these attitudes through the evolution of five distinct subgenres of detective fiction: exploits of a Great Detective like Sherlock Holmes, Golden Age whodunits that pose as intellectual puzzles to be solved, hardboiled stories that invoke a distant past that the present both breaks with and echoes, police procedurals that unfold in an indefinitely extended present, and historical mysteries that nostalgically fetishize the past. It concludes with a brief consideration of genre readers’ own ambivalent phenomenological investment in the past, present, and future each detective story projects.

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