The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction

Mapping the Victorian Sensation Novel: Some Recent and Future Trends

“…This interest in class relations and disintegrating or shifting class identities forms the part of an influential article by Jonathan Loesberg, who situates the genre in the context of the contemporary debate over the 1867 Reform Bill. 31 The Woman in White -often hailed as the genre's founding text -is regularly cited as a key example of the democratic impulse behind the genre. The basis of the plot is the threat to a wealthy young woman's (Laura Fairlie's) sanity, property and life posed by her scheming husband, Sir Percival Glyde and his obese, sinister side-kick Count Fosco, who get her locked up in a lunatic asylum.…”

Storms of Tears. Emotion Metaphors and the Construction of Gender in East Lynne

“…As a genre, sensation fiction is however ideologically unstable, and its main representatives in the 1860s – Ellen Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins – can all be understood as both radical and conventional, according to Jonathan Loesberg (1986, 136, n. 6). Ellen Wood, in particular, is characterised by a ‘subversive conventionality’ in Loesberg’s view (p. 136, n. 6), which suggests that her novels should be marked by thematic uncertainty.…”

“…Ungovernable emotion becomes a sign of the collapse of the aristocracy and its inability to adapt to the middle‐class values of good behaviour, dignity and self‐control. Emphasising the class dimension, Jonathan Loesberg connects East Lynne to the debates that preceded the Second Reform Act (1867), as ‘manifestations of the same ideological responses that formed the structure of Victorian discussions of parliamentary reform in the late 1850s and 1860s’ (Loesberg 1986, 116). Maunder presents a similar argument by connecting the novel to debates about aristocratic degeneration and the need to impart a new set of ‘bourgeois codes of domestic, economic and moral behaviour’ (Maunder 2004, 62).…”

“…Maunder presents a similar argument by connecting the novel to debates about aristocratic degeneration and the need to impart a new set of ‘bourgeois codes of domestic, economic and moral behaviour’ (Maunder 2004, 62). The novel thus addresses changing class structures by illustrating the waning power of the aristocracy and the emerging power of the middle class, as well as by expressing class ambivalence and the ‘fear of a loss of social identity as a result of the merging of the classes’ (Loesberg 1986, 117). Lady Isabel symbolises the loss of clear class demarcations through her liminal position as the aristocratic wife of a middle‐class lawyer.…”

“…Both Loesberg and Maunder reject, or problematise, feminist interpretations of the novel by emphasising the ideological ambiguity of the text (Loesberg 1986, 136, n. 6) or by questioning its subversive potential (Maunder 2004, 61). If the novel is instead placed in the context of the debates about the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) and the domain of the discourse (Hanks 2004, 265) is redefined as the importance of emotion for nineteenth‐century gender models, a feminist dimension is introduced.…”