Transimperial Negotiations and Cultural Anxieties from the Sensation Novel to the Adventure Story

The sensation novels of the 1860s expressed the anxieties of the age, challenged realism, and sought to revive wonder. Within the transformations of modernity, these novels were read and exchanged across the British Empire. Sensation fiction mixed romance and realism and its sensational elements reflected modern tensions and concerns. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret probed the sources of violence, the cultural measures of sanity, and underscored the transgressions of an oppressed female figure in her search for freedom. Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White likewise challenged cultural certainties, as he observed the expanding popular reading audience. The rise of the adventure story within the imperial designs of colonization expressed a sense of mystery and an encounter with otherness that is interrogated here.

Playing Cute: Sensation Villainy and the Aesthetics of Small Things in The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret

In Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), Sianne Ngai defines ‘cute’ as an aesthetic ‘preoccupation with small, easy to handle things . . . an aesthetic that celebrates the diminutive and the vulnerable’. Although Ngai identifies the cute as a predominantly twentieth-century phenomenon, and one which is inextricably bound up with the mass-market commodification, even eroticization and fetishization of the cute object or person, it is difficult to imagine a literary character more enamoured with ‘small things’ – from tiny, sugary confections to his menagerie of pet mice – than Wilkie Collins’s Count Fosco, or a character who so perfectly conforms to the definition of the cute commodity itself as ‘appealing specifically . . . for protection and care’ than the ‘childish, helpless, babyfied’ Lucy Audley in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). This article reads Count Fosco and Lady Audley through the characteristics of cuteness to better understand the aesthetic and economic dynamics of their villainy, and to establish for the twentieth-century phenomenon of cuteness identified by Ngai a discernible genealogy in the specific conjunction of print culture, theatricality, commodification, and physical sensation that we now recognize as the sensation fiction of the 1860s.

Portrait of Women in Victorian Novels

This article examines the representation of three female characters in three Victorian novels. These three novels are Bleak house, Ruth, and Lady Audley’s Secret. This work is, in fact, a study of how women were viewed in Victorian novels which actually depicted the Victorian society. The society of that time was male-dominated that tried to rule over women unfairly and made them as submissive as possible in order to handle them easily according to their selfish tastes. If women in Victorian society followed the expectations of men thoroughly, they were called angel-in-the-house; if not, they were labeled with negative labels like fallen-woman or mad-woman. This article tries to go through the characters of Esther Summerson, Ruth, and Lady Audley who appeared in the three aforementioned novels respectively in order to prove that the Victorian Society, which was represented in the novels of that period, was a harshly male-dominated society that ruled over women with bitter patriarchy.

KONTRUKSI KEGILAAN DALAM NOVEL LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET KARYA MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON

ABSTRAKPermasalahan permasalahan mengenai kegilaan sering menjadi tema para penulis sastra. Tema ini juga banyak hadir di karya sastra pada era Victoria. Para penulis besar menghadirkan narasi mengenai para perempuan yang berstrategi untuk menghindari budaya patriarti, namun tidak ingin dijebloskan ke dalam suaka. Hal ini juga terjadi pada karakter utama dalam novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) karya Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Lucy Graham tumbuh dalam kemiskinan, ia sangat peduli dengan peningkatan status sosial dan keuangannya. Fakta bahwa ibunya dilembagakan karena kegilaan juga telah menghantui Lucy sepanjang waktu. Dia menikahi orang-orang kaya seperti George Talboys dan Robert Audley, namun berakhir dengan budaya patriarki yang sangat keras yang mana membawanya pada kegilaan. Dengan demikian, penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui bagaimana tokoh Lucy dikontruksi menjadi “orang gila” dalam pandangan masyarakat Victoria. Untuk menjawab permasalahan penelitian, penulis menggunakan analisis tekstual sebagai metode penelitiannya. Teori yang digunakan untuk membantu analisis yakni perspektif yang diusulkan oleh Foucault mengenai kontruksi kegilaan yang terjadi pada subjek. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa tindakan yang manipulatif serta culas yang dilakukan oleh Lucy dinilai sebagai suatu kegilaan dan tidak sesuai dengan norma serta nilai pada era tersebut. Pada akhirnya ia pun dimasukan ke dalam rumah sakit jiwa dan meninggal di dalamnya.