Introduction

The past no longer belongs only to those who once lived in it; the past belongs to those who claim it, and are willing to explore it, and to infuse it with meaning for those who are alive today. The past belongs to us, because we are the ones who need it. (Atwood, 1998, p. 1516)

In his post-2000 appraisal of British fiction, Rod Mengham points out: “It is one of the central paradoxes of contemporary British fiction that much of it—much of the best of it—is concerned with other times and places” (2003, p. 1). Historical fiction comes on top of those fictional works. In order to redeem the past, authors seek to crave a connection with it and mine the depths of its many enigmas, a difficult task which is even more difficult to construe when the writer is a woman. Patriarchal institutions have long hegemonized history from a gendered and biased perspective. As women look back upon the past, they realize that their history has been built upon absence, silence, melancholy and loss, and has hardly been veraciously recorded. Writing in the 21st century, they re-vision such recordings, and their fiction grows into a kind of self-fashioning, not only as writers but also as historical agents. They position themselves in history through their works, which mark their gendered intervention into the genre. Their postmodern reconceptualization of history is their enunciation of filling in historical gaps and canvasing new debates about women, non-whites, poor classes, and non-binary individuals, and emerges as a teleological narrative of becoming through re-engagement with the past.

Atwood’s words in the epigraph embody a brilliant example of this female approach to history featured in contemporary fiction as she avers that ‘the past belongs to us.’ Set in Victorian Canada, her much acclaimed Alias Grace (1996), inspired by a true story, traces Grace Marks, convicted with co-murdering her master and his housekeeper, as she narrates her story to Dr. Simon Jordan. Unable to recall the murder clearly, Grace’s guilt remains an unanswered question and engulfs her story in several mysterious episodes that reflect the complexities of her mind and allows Atwood to explore themes related to memory, madness, truth, gender and class in a 19th century setting. A similar endeavor in historical fiction that focuses on the dynamics of retelling a life story while manipulating the listeners and leaving them incapable of passing a judgement on the narrator is Sara Collins’ debut novel The confessions of Frannie Langton (2019). Set in Jamaica and London in the 1820s, the novel is a neo-slave historical novel par excellence. In it, Collins shapes and reshapes several subgenres of historical fiction such as gothic fiction, historical romance, and historical mystery. In an obvious analogy with Atwood’s work, Collins’ protagonist is facing a trial based on the accusation of killing her master and mistress. She also narrates her life story in the form of confessions to her lawyer as she endeavors to remember what happened on the night of the murder. I attempt to explore the dynamics of remembering and forgetting in Frannie’s mind while she tells her story. I specifically investigate three subgenres of historical fiction, namely, the gothic topography of the narrative, the whodunits of the crime and the historical romance as presented in a neo-slave novel. Through adhering to and changing some of the writing techniques of those three subgenres, Collins prompts her readers to question whether Frannie is telling the truth or even delivering an authoritative voice, allowing them to establish a speculative engagement with the genre in a post-2000 context. Collins’ approach emphasizes her re-vision and re-reconceptualization of historical fiction and registers an alternate mode of dealing with history, underscoring her negotiation of race, class and gender in the 19th century. In order to do that, I start by examining women’s position in the palimpsest of historical fiction, with special emphasis on black Caribbean women writers. Then, I move on to examine the three subgenres of historical fiction starting with the gothic, then the murder story and, lastly, the lesbian romance.

Herstory of history

Historical fiction broaches myriad questions. Looking back at the past, what is the writer after? Condemning it? Understanding what happened? Is it an act of remembrance? A gesture of nostalgia? Seeking to learn lessons? Expressing repressed traumas? Healing wounds? Coming to terms with the present reality? To answer these questions, it is quintessential to know the position that the writer of historical fiction resides in. Jonathan Goldberg points out that history is written “as prediction and as retrospection. The history that will be is, after all, as much how we recount what happened as how we project a future; the history that will be is, inevitably, a history of the present, that divided site that must look both ways at once” (1996, pp. 4–5). The writer is equally investigating the present when looking back at the past while also trying to envisage the future. Radical historical transformations have certainly shaped the present, rendering it impossible to understand the latter without understanding the former. Maintaining a distance in time and space creates room for detachment and an objective stance for the novelist from which to re-visit and re-create history. History is re-told and re-inscribed to establish a reconstructed reality and open a dialogue between the past and the present.

History has almost exclusively been written by winners and men. Ann Forfreedom states that “[f]rom Herodotus’ to Will Durant’s histories, the main characters, the main viewpoints and interests, have all been male” (1972, p. 1). The same exclusion is conspicuous in historical fiction. Although this genre targeted female readership predominantly when it first emerged in the 19th century, early critics dismissed most of the works that were written by women. Diana Wallace notes how Georg Lukács did not discuss any novel written by a woman while laying the critical foundations of the historical novel. She argues that women have been radically excluded from historical fiction as their works have been dismissed as “‘unhistorical,’ ‘factually inaccurate,’ or ‘merely irrelevant’ according to a male-defined model” (2005, p. 15). Modern historical fiction by women is their writing back to this sexist exclusion. They re-articulate history and bring to the center women who have been forced into the periphery of human existence. Their novels are their interjection into previous unfair and inaccurate depictions of women to challenge their topoi of representation, stressing again and again that the personal is political. Through their revisionist perspective, their novels reclaim the past to understand the present and map the future.

The historicity of women’s narratives gains more dimensions when race and class are added to gender. Toni Morrison sees it as a site of memory for black women; and the process of writing it as “a kind of literary archeology: On the basis of some information and a little bit of guess work you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply” (1995, p. 92). In their journey into the past, black women writers encounter a tangled web of racism, sexism, and classism in addition to slavery. They strive to plum hidden truths, dismantle false historical realities, and forge their heuristic revelations about the past. Black Caribbean women even stumble upon more obstacles in this journey. Michael Dash believes that “[t]he Caribbean is the realm of the unspeakable,” where writers undertake the task of bringing their subjects into existence (1989, p. xii). Caribbean history, being marred by ruptures, violence, colonization, and displacement, materializes as an unorthodox terrain that Edouard Glissant calls nonhistory:

Our historical consciousness could not be deposited gradually and continuously like sediment, as it were, as happened with those peoples who have frequently produced a totalitarian philosophy of history, for instance European peoples, but came together in the context of shock, contraction, painful negation, and explosive forces. This dislocation of the continuum, and the inability of the collective consciousness to absorb it all, characterize what I call a nonhistory. (1989, pp. 61–62)

The consequences of losing this “totalitarian history” are evident in obliterating the collective memory of the Caribbeans. Writers have to reconceptualize, renegotiate, and reimagine the past amid ontological and epistemological lacunae since “[h]istory is fissured by histories; they relentlessly toss aside those who have not had the time to see themselves through a tangle of lianas” (Glissant, 1989, p. 230). Caribbeans need to dig deeper to find their history and re-present it. Women writers are no exception to this rule as Caroline Rody describes, “the great repressed that haunts the region’s literature. To rewrite Caribbean history is to rehearse a primal rupture, a deep ‘wound’ to collective memory” (2001, p. 109). However, women have more unresolved tensions to reconcile in the Caribbean historical discourse that stem from gender, submission, resistance, sexuality, and survival. Their historical fiction thus tells of the infinite sufferings they had to endure throughout the ages.

Historical fiction implies a mnemonic process that embraces remembering and forgetting. Remembering is a retreat to live memories, whereas the past is absent in forgetting. Remembering goes beyond reiterating, it includes a reconstruction of the past and an attempt to comprehend it through finding and founding meaning. Memories are not merely recounted but rather interrogated to decipher the conundrums of the past and to scrutinize the truth of one’s dreams, frustrations, beliefs and conflicts. However, memories are not always readily accessible. Looking in retrospect, one wavers between the compulsion to remember and the desire to forget. When trauma is part of those memories, forgetting is selected as a self-defense mechanism that offers release and freedom. In this case, forgetting results not from a lack of memories but from bearing the burden of too many oppressive memories that one strives to escape. Forgetting is usually seen as erasing memories or losing them. Nonetheless, forgetting can indicate keeping memories hidden in one’s consciousness to be restored at crucial moments. The dialectics of remembering and forgetting constructs the historical narrative and informs its structure. Being distanced from the past in time and place allows a wishful re-appropriating of it by creating an imaginative power over time through deliberate remembering and deliberate forgetting. Both processes eventually offer a kind of self-disclosure. Writers of historical fiction feature that process, and Collins places her protagonist at that locus. The novel opens with forgetting and closes with remembering, and in between Frannie experiences both processes while trying to exorcize the demons of her past, come to terms with her present, and retrieve her story as it truly happened.

A gothic neo-slave narrative

Frannie is originally a Jamaican slave who was involved in some dubious experiments with Mr. Langton, her white owner and father, and was later given to the Benhams. She has a love affair with her eccentric mistress and a tenuous relationship with her master. Madame soon becomes bored with Frannie and tries to return to Oladuah Cambridge, aka Laddie Lightning, the black boxer who was raised in her house and dismissed because of the rumors about their relationship. Frannie is fired and starts working as a prostitute to escape starvation, yet she is summoned back to the house to learn that Madame is with Laddie’s child. Benham wants her to take the baby after its birth and disappear. Before leaving for the country, he orders his wife to give a soirée, during which Frannie is seen fulminating against him in public. That night, the Benhams are murdered, and Frannie is charged with killing both. As it turns out, Madame committed suicide, but Frannie did kill Benham, and she is sent to be executed.

Collins knits and knots a tapestry of various subgenres of historical fiction as she re-visits the Victorian age. Frannie emphasizes that her tale is not a version of the typical slave narratives that trace their slave protagonist from the plantation following up their escape until they attain freedom: “No doubt you think this will be one of those slave histories, all sugared over with misery and despair. But who’d want to read one of those? No, this is my account of myself and my own life” (Collins, 2019, p. 8). According to Ashraf Rushdy, writing a neo-slave narrative is “part of the strategy of revisionist striving for canonicity” (1999, p. 10). Neo-slave narratives emerge as an expository discourse on the traumas of slavery by depicting vast psychological landscapes of loss and redeeming the past by giving voice to the voiceless. The historiographical illustration of slavery highlights the socio-political conjunctures of both the past and the present. They “immediately raise questions about the connection between slavery and postmodern black identity between the moment when the first slave narratives were produced and the moment the Neo-slave narratives appeared” (Rushdy, 1999, p. 22). Those narratives played a crucial role in paving the way for constructing a black subjectivity, which bears the historical burden of the master-slave binary. Collins delineates the power dynamics on the Jamaican plantation, ironically called Paradise, with Phibbah, who is Langton’s housekeeper and who eventually turns out to be Frannie’s mother. She advises the young girl as follows: “You going learn. We not the ones ask the questions, we the ones answer them. And the answer always yes” (Collins, 2019, p. 16). Langton’s wife can only see Jamaica as a place to kill Europeans, to which Phibbah answers, “[i]f it killing you, what is doing to us?” (Collins, 2019, p. 19).Footnote 1 Frannie is subject to physical violence, being whipped and forced to swallow up the pages of a book. Nonetheless, slavery retains a different hold on her as she recalls how abolitionists “only concern themselves with flesh and bone, as if those are the only things that suffer. As if minds don’t” (Collins, 2019, p. 70). Limiting the perspective to physical abuse is reductionist. London welcomes Frannie as a hub of racism in which “some people look at a black and see only a savage, the same way some people will look at arsenic and see only poison” (Collins, 2019, p. 92). In her new setting, the violence is ontological rather than physical. While penning down her confessions, Frannie displays utmost clarity in remembering once only: “How well I remember stepping off the ship at the West India docks, like the shock of stepping into a river, cold water coming over your head” (Collins, 2019, p. 102). This is the moment when she tastes the forbidden fruit of freedom, a moment that can never sink into oblivion, even if it proves to be false later.

Neo-slave narratives roam freely in gothic realms, owing to the frightful experiences they delineate. As Maisha Wester argues, “[t]he very life of a slave is […] inevitably a gothic existence” (2012, p. 35). Morbidity, horror, physical violence, sexual abuse, and repression, all being quite gothic, are amongst the founding pillars of the slavery institution. The gothic correspondingly features in postcolonial discourse as a tool to retrieve a past of dreads stemming from colonialism. The Caribbean setting, in particular, offers a plethora of gothic specters, such as voodoo conjuring, black sorcery, Obeah practices, spells, fetishes, and cannibalism, among other peculiar rituals. Moreover, Lizabeth Gilbert emphasizes that the Caribbeans initially learned about themselves through nineteenth-century European gothic fiction that drew them as grotesque creatures, and through a history that presented their homeland as an uncanny site of unfamiliar terrors (2002, p. 233). Hence, in their gothic literature, the Caribbeans respond to this colonial discourse that has long justified colonialism under the pretext of their savagery and inferiority. The gothic is thus their weapon against their nonhistory. As Gilbert avers, “[t]his dialogue with the Gothic continues in present-day Caribbean writing, especially the writing by women” (2002, p. 254). Reimagining a gruesome history of transgression, otherness, and disquiet implies utilizing the horrific methodologies that the gothic incorporates.

Collins uses the gothic in her novel and creates Frannie’s haunting trauma that is shrouded in fear and mystery. Anita Raghunath clarifies that gothic literature intersects with race and racial otherness and introduces “elements of transgression through the inclusion of exotic Others. These characters operated as convenient symbols/tropes of degeneracy and barbarism and provided elements of horror that were understood—without the need for extensive explanation” (2016, p. 538). She argues that, although the gothic creates room for the racial Other, it still depicts it negatively. Collins alludes to typical gothic practices on the plantation where “all bush medicine is obeah” (Collins, 2019, p. 350). Even Langton resorts to “a dose of obeah” when he fails to get money after his arrival on the plantation as Phibbah tells Frannie, and inexplicably ends up having it (Collins, 2019, p. 30). However, Collins’ gothic is more concerned with the abject. In addition to retaining the gothic’s sinister elements, the abject gives it another psychological dimension. According to Julia Kristeva, “[t]here looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects” (1982, p. 1). The abject is what is exonerated and thrown off into unfamiliar spaces that encompass fear and desire, fear of annihilation and desire to return to primal states. Both incongruous feelings find their best embodiment in the figure of the monster, such as Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula. Those monsters represent a vile Otherness from us, albeit within us; they are our oxymoronic familiar alien. Kristeva explains further how “[i]t is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us” (1982, p. 4). We seek it and shun it simultaneously as it destabilizes conventional dichotomies and blurs several boundaries.

Collins subverts the stereotypical gothic by making the white characters, not the black ones, its main source, namely, Langton and Benham. She moves away from obeah and voodoo to re-vision the maniac scientific research that was conducted by whites to justify slavery. Langton’s experiments on slaves seek to prove that their limited intelligence, being a different species from whites, makes them fit for nothing but slavery. He takes full liberty with their bodies with his conviction that “[b]lacks don’t feel pain” (Collins, 2019, p. 335). For Langton, all blacks are grotesque, anomalous, pre-civilized savages, and this justifies that he descends steadily to the nadir in his brutal experiments: “He used his own slaves for his experiments. Only the dead ones, at first, for he said the dead can’t complain. But neither can slaves. Soon he decided there was more to learn about living men from living skin. He used fire, pierced their skin with small knives, even the soles of their feet, had vices fastened to their skulls, cut them open awake, sewed them up after they’d fainted” (Collins, 2019, p. 322). Left empty-handed with all his trials, Langton decides to experiment on a “white nigger” or an albino in response to the “craze for albinos in the middle of the last century. A four-year-old white Negro had been exhibited in the Paris expositions in 1744, at the Académie Royale des Sciences,” and “Langton might have seen it as his chance to prove that skin colour, and the other national characteristics, are innate rather than superficial. If the albino were like all other blacks, he would be black in the inner parts as well” (Collins, 2019, p. 232). Before he kills the albino, Frannie decides to burn down the coach-house, where all those experiments are conducted, and return the baby to his mother, putting an end to Langton’s scientific aspirations altogether.

Frannie has been Langton’s scribe and assistant in his experiments, but she has also been his abject. She stands for the part in himself that must be separated; for what disrupts his norms, being his mulatta illegitimate daughter and the witness to all his atrocities. Kristeva argues that the abject is “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (1982, p. 4). In London, Langton is more repelled by her, he is sullen and feels ashamed of being seen in public with her: “Each time I came too close, forgetting to slow my pace to his, he snapped his teeth. ‘Keep some space between us, girl’” (Collins, 2019, p. 67). Her presence fosters a sense of exposure, for she could see through his vulnerabilities and failures; Frannie concurs: “I knew what he wanted before he wanted it” (Collins, 2019, p. 63). Langton is unable to handle such intimacy with her. He feels threatened when his quintessential boundaries are fluid, and the distinction between self and other is hazy. He subconsciously throws her off as his abject when he gives her as a gift to Mr. Benham, to whom Frannie also acts as an abject.

Although, away from the plantation, it is no longer the master-slave binary, the mantra of race, class, gender, and sexuality makes Frannie a signifier of alterity for Benham. The life of the abject, according to Kristeva, is based on “exclusion [,…] articulated by negation and its modalities, transgression, denial, and repudiation” (1982, p. 6). Those are the qualities Benham endows upon Frannie. However, she symbolizes his fear, being the outcome of his moral degeneracy, and his desire for the knowledge she possesses. Benham is introduced in the narrative as “[t]he finest mind in all of England” (Collins, 2019, p. 87), but Frannie knows things that he does not; she knows what Langton did in his wild experiments, and she knows what Madame does behind his back. Frannie’s presence in his house conjures an impending silent doom as he remarks, “I want truth. She wants silence” (Collins, 2019, p. 114). Her presence also poses a crisis of un-differentiation since he acknowledges “both truth and silence smother guilt” (Collins, 2019, p. 114). According to Kristeva, “abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it—on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger” (1982, p. 10). Frannie embodies this danger for Benham. He sees monstrosity in her black skin: “He shouted. Called me a thief, a savage” (Collins, 2019, p. 358). However, in her, he equally sees his own monstrosity, ambiguities and contradictions. He sees his encouragement in conducting Langton’s brutal research, as he recalls, “it was on my advice that he first thought to measure internal cranial capacity, not just the angles and planes every other bump-reader concerns himself with. I suggested he could do it by using mercury, or shot, to gain an accurate reading of internal volume” (Collins, 2019, p. 110). He sees his hate, prejudice, and unspeakable traits, such as brutally abusing a black prostitute in the brothel she worked at for some time, and that Frannie knows about all of these. In his journal entries that document their conversations, he writes, “NOT INTENDED FOR PUBLICATION” (Collins, 2019, p. 108); he relegates her to the realm of the abject. Nonetheless, the abject is never fully expelled but only placed at the margins, where it constantly challenges one’s sense of self. Frannie is fired and then brought back to accomplish her mission. Whereas Langton creates her biologically, Benham creates her intellectually. Like Dr. Frankenstein, he pays the price for it, and he is eventually destroyed by his own creation.

The deeds of Langton and Benham are Frannie’s gothic abject and source of fear. They educate her to test their epistemological assumptions about blacks. As she tells Madame: “He and Mr Benham made a wager. They’d find a black and train him up. Discover the limits of his intelligence” (Collins, 2019, p. 321). The coach-house experiments grow to become Frannie’s gothic and haunting trauma, a repressed that always returns. She becomes one of the “traumatized heroes who have lost the very psychic structures that allow them access to their own experiences,” as Steven Bruhum describes (2002, p. 269). She struggles to forget, not to remember. After reaching London, she resolves: “I’d told myself I would forget Paradise, and everything that had happened there. Scrape it off and cast it aside, gone like slave speech, like slave manners. Make myself new” (Collins, 2019, p. 63). However, the past persists in the present and memories of Paradise cast a heavy shadow upon her new life in London. Frannie strives to obliterate her memories and resorts to silence when Benham asks about the coach house. Yet, those memories are there, and they are immaculate inside her mind: “Now, when all I want is for memory to betray me, to tell me lies, I scoop into it and find nothing but unvarnished truth” (Collins, 2019, p. 40). She experiences fear of Langton, Benham, and memories connected with them. Kristeva explains that “fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confronts that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject” (1982, p. 6). However, Frannie refrains from discourse. Silence is her way of shielding herself from the truth, not only from Benham. She spurns the gothic monster they created inside her. During her trial, she understands that others “might see me as the savage, but didn’t Benham and Langton pull me into their own dark corners? Wasn’t it them who tried to make an animal of me first?” (Collins, 2019, p. 93). Frannie delves into her darkest recesses and realizes that this is their own making; she discovers what Teresa Goddu calls “[t]he Gothic hand of slavery” (2014, p. 79) that dehumanizes her and degrades her morality.

What Langton and Benham do to Frannie is, by all means, a crime. According to Kristeva, “[a]ny crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject” (1982, p. 4). Frannie expels their criminal behavior, being her gothic abject, by refusing to articulate her horrific memories in the coach-house. She holds those memories from herself and the reader till the end of her trial when she finally cracks down and discloses her gothic recollections:

You might think it was just a matter of one cut after another, like slicing a loaf, but you need all manner of tools to open a man. Scalpels, yes, but also bone-saws and scissors and double-blunt hooks. Forceps and blowpipes and needles. Knives for brains and knives for cartilages and knives for bones. Kept in a wooden chest the Surgeon bought from a ship’s doctor, fastened with two brass clasps and lined in velvet, like a rich man’s coffin. Like a set of dinner forks. Ivory handles. (Collins, 2019, p. 322)

The details she mentions point to the fact that those memories have been residing inside her in what Kristeva calls “a land of oblivion, that is constantly remembered” (1982, p. 8). Nevertheless, casting off her abject becomes too compelling psychologically for her to break free from the grip of her persistent memories: “I lived in terror of closing my eyes. Whenever I did, there was the coach-house” (Collins, 2019, p. 258). Whereas Langton is defeated by his failure and his poor health that kills him, Benham remains her menacing abject when he almost forces her to take Madam’s baby. She only achieves ultimate expulsion by murdering him. The gothicism in his murder does not simply stem from stabbing him with a pair of scissors and shedding his blood. Frannie kills him at a scary moment when the center cannot hold, things fall apart in her world, and she decides to stop any further intrusion upon her sense of self or allow him to oppress her again through his criminal deeds. She kills him at a gothic moment.

A sensation Victorian mystery

George Orwell believes that “[o]ur great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been roughly between 1850 and 1925” (1965, p. 9). Murder occupies a conspicuous position in Victorian history, which gave rise to writing whodunits and mystery fiction and to the popularity of the sensation novel. Mystery fiction is tightly woven with the gothic. Both are preoccupied with presenting macabre ambiances, transgressions, human malevolence, the uncanny, corpses, unresolved crimes, taboos, and dark psychic worlds. Bruce Murphy describes mysteries as “the secular form of the gothic” (1999, p. 213) to differentiate them from horror writing, which is rooted in religion. He notes that, in addition to its gothic shades, mystery fiction lays the emphasis on human weaknesses depicting characters who are seduced by their beckoning, albeit mostly illicit, desires, dragging them to crime, and sometimes even murder. Mystery fiction gains its popularity from its “horrified fascination with the fallen figure” (Murphy, 1999, p. 247). Such a figure provided a cathartic experience of psychological projection to many seemingly upright Victorians by giving them an opportunity to accuse the fallen of their own sins. The Victorian sensation novel incorporated mystery and the gothic while focusing on criminality. According to Sercan Öztekin, those fictions reflected “Victorian ambivalent attitudes about crime and scandals because these kinds of stories both frightened and amazed the Victorians” (2020, p. 53). The elements of elusive secrecy and suspense echoed the angsts of the Victorian age that resulted from the inhibitive social restrictions and rigidly conservative norms.

Collins reexamines the Victorian sensation novel and deploys several of its techniques. In sensation fiction, criminality moved out of eighteenth-century gothic castles with their claustrophobic enclosures to middle- and upper-class domestic settings; and crime was presented as part of everyday life. The novels relied on the then scandals and New Gate fiction. Laurence Talairach-Vielmas points out how those novels featured “murder, bigamy, or adultery” (2007, p. 3), which were castigated as capital sins in Victorian mores. Moreover, they often implicated their characters in drug addiction, which was associated primarily “with middle class women dosing themselves with opiate-laden patent medicines,” as Janet Brodie and Marc Redfield explain (2002, p. 3). Collins keeps those conventions. Madame is prescribed laudanum for medical reasons; nonetheless, she exceeds the dose, becomes an addict, and invites Frannie to join her. Her drug consumption becomes her means of disjunction and escape from the social decorum that determines and restrains her reality. As she explains to Frannie, “I suppose most people think it must be dark and wicked. Pure pleasure. But it is more… the absence of pain” (Collins, 2019, p. 167). Madame’s pain is physical and emotional; being ensnared in a loveless marriage and discovering that Benham’s brother is the one who owns all the family money. She experiences what Daniel Renshaw calls “the implicit brutality of the domestic sphere in Victorian life, […] which was recognised and legitimised by the legal system established to set out the boundaries of violent male control in marriage” (2022, p. 96). Her degeneration into addiction points to her severe anxieties and psychological tensions arising from her tenuous and oppressive relationship with Benham. Taking laudanum, she feeds the monster inside that exigently threatens him and hazards jeopardy to his name. In his interrogations of Frannie, Benham explicitly inquires: “How much laudanum, how often” (Collins, 2019, p. 214) to ensure that she does not exceed the limits to obviate making her a subject of social gossip. As Sarah Frühwirth clarifies, drug addiction in the Victorian era was not only about the loss of self-control but also “loss of social control” (2020, p. 85). Madame’s addiction grows into a constant menace to Benham, who must keep it at bay and save his reputation at any cost, which further taints their marriage with very dark colors.

Madame’s addiction and lack of self-restraint give reigns to her sexual inclinations. Addiction liberates her by subverting rigid boundaries. According to Frühwirth, “drugs cut across ethnic, gender and social boundaries” (2020, p. 82) which shakes the ground beneath the harsh lines of race and gender; Madame’s lovers are both black, and they are male and female. Frühwirth explains further that “drug habituation was frequently conceived as a form of self-enslavement” for it “metaphorically undermined the boundary between master and servant” (2020, p. 82). Madame condescends socially in her love affairs as she conflates many self-borders with Laddie and Frannie, who are both introduced in her household as black servants. She unleashes her repressed sexual desires and expatiates her sensual exigencies that Benham deprives her of. She forges her sexual agency through adultery and lesbianism, which become her means of vengeance for Benham’s oppressions. Sex articulates her rage and allows her to become deviant and defiant. However, this does not entail Madame’s freedom; she remains too vulnerable to swim against the tide. She fully understands her Victorian situatedness and the cruelty of Benham’s censure. Her sexual audacity with Laddie and Frannie must be hushed up. She explains to Frannie, “[i]f my scandals stay quiet, he does not care. But the minute he decided that I am an embarrassment… again, he requires me to contain myself in my rooms. Let things blow away. Or—how do you say?—blow over. He spies on me so he can know what measures to take, when” (Collins, 2019, p. 283). Conceiving a black child with Laddie can destroy Benham’s reputation since “everyone will see his shame” (Collins, 2019, p. 284). Madame, despite all her endeavors at rebellion, knows her limits. Her addiction might offer her a breath of freedom, but only on a temporary basis. She is cornered after being forced to give up her baby, and she speculates what Benham has in store: “He said he would divorce me. I had no choice” (Collins, 2019, p. 279). Laudanum is all she has left and, after having a miscarriage because of it, she is left eventually with no choice but to commit suicide; laudanum fails to help her out this time, so she takes arsenic instead.

Sensation novels introduced women criminals whose shocking behavior appalled the readers. The Victorians drew “connections between criminal trials of real women and emerging medical theories of psychosomatic female pathology,” says Mangham (2007, p. 3). They drafted theories on cases in which women were accused of extreme violence and based their actions upon what was believed to be inherent pathological bodily processes. Furthermore, women were seen as victims of the hormonal fluctuations of their menstrual cycles that hampered their self-discipline. Mangham emphasizes that, “according to some medical witnesses, many violent women had tried to fight the urge to commit crime but, because of the pressures of their psychosomatic organizations, had lost the battle. Despite the fact that they knew they were doing wrong, such women, the medics argued, could not resist the criminal impulse” (2007, p. 13). The destructive tendencies of criminal women were conjoined with fierce female sexual desires, which thrust them further to commit crimes. Frannie is one of those women, and her initial appearance in the narrative is at the Old Bailey facing trial for two murders. The uproar in the court confirms the Victorian ideas on a female criminal, as Frannie notes: “My trial starts the way my life did: a squall of elbows and shoving and spit” (Collins, 2019, p. 3). Collins adheres to the rules of the genre since crime is intrinsic to sensation fiction, especially when it involves the scandals of the Benhams’ murders. In court, Frannie observes, “[i]t seems all of London is here, but then murder is the story this city likes best. All of them swollen into the same mood, all of them in a stir about the ‘sensation excited by these most ferocious murders’” (Collins, 2019, p. 3). The trial and the story behind it are sensational enough to make a sensation novel.

Though depicted as a criminal, Collins does not paint Frannie’s character with a brush of psychological hysteria or within a pathological framework, which was the case in Victorian fiction. As the narrative develops, it becomes clear that Frannie is not inherently criminal but rather a criminalized character. She is an outcast wherever she is. On the plantation, she is taken into the master’s house where “[h]ouse-niggers were the one thing they all hated worse than cane” (Collins, 2019, p. 22), and in London, she is the black servant in a white household, “[o]nce a house girl, for ever a whore” (Collins, 2019, p. 118). She is displaced psychologically, mentally and physically. The power mechanisms in her world crush her, and even literacy is not a blessing as she says, “[s]ometimes I picture all that reading and writing as something packed inside me. Dangerous as gunpowder. Where has it got me, in the end?” (Collins, 2019, p. 68). At the brothel, Frannie joins the Victorian netherworld. This episode stigmatizes her and is later exploited by Benham in his final offer to take Madame’s black baby, reminding her: “Why do you think I allowed you back, knowing where you’ve been?” (Collins, 2019, p. 278). In her last scene with Benham, Frannie is ripe for crime. Her act of murder is self-defense, fueled by jealousy, anger, humiliation, and the delusional feeling induced by laudanum. Everything is pushing her to kill him. She suffers from further alienation, insecurity, and rejection during her trial owing to her race. Lynda Hart concurs that, in the 19th century, “empirical data unfailingly verify that women of color are much more likely to be marked as criminals than white women” (1994, p. ix). Frannie is not only confined within the walls of the prison cell, she is equally incarcerated in the racist gaze of everyone in court, for whom she is not merely marked as a killer but as “[t]he Mulatta Murderess” (Collins, 2019, p. 20). She is a culpable suspect just because she is black. Mrs. Linux, the Benhams’ housekeeper, gives a testimony against her that is not based on concrete evidence but on Frannie’s race, “[a]ll we knew about her was that she came from that barbarous place. Savagery is a cruel nursemaid, I said to him, and cruel nursemaids rear cruel infants” (Collins, 2019, p. 94). She is charged with alleged savagery, as much as she is charged with murder. In such a world, hers is a no-exit situation.

Collins pays homage to the whodunit plot construction, in which there is a steady disclosure of hidden secrets and an ultimate revelation of the committed crime. According to Tzvetan Todorov, the whodunit presents a duality since it contains “not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation” (1966, p. 295). He explains, “[t]he first story, that of the crime, ends before the second begins. But what happens in the second? Not much. The characters of this second story, the story of the investigation, do not act, they learn” (1966, p. 259). Collins re-writes the two stories with subtle technical differences by choosing the rhetorical trope of confession to tell Frannie’s story, in which the present is muddled by the past all the time, and her narrative is riddled with ambiguities. The two stories merge at points at which Frannie tries to remember, as much as the reader tries to speculate, and her lawyer tries to decipher the enigmatic murders and save her. The confessional narrative limits everything to Frannie’s perspective, who asserts, “I’ve always wanted to tell my story” (Collins, 2019, p. 11), which she does according to her rules.

Northrop Frye defines confessions as “fictional autobiography” which attempts to retrieve the past to reach self-understanding and hence self-acceptance (1957, p. 307). By the end of a confession, mysteries are unraveled and questions are answered. As Frye argues, a confession looks back upon the time from “what Mills calls ‘a mental history’ of a single character” and consults memory to document crucial and definitive incidents that took place in that history (1957, p. 308). A confession should not alter the truth if its narrator truly wishes to be released from the weight of the guilt borne, deliver a message, or seek redemption. Collins gives a different version. Frannie’s confessions are cloaked in confusion; she presents herself as an unreliable narrator grappling with her memory, which plays tricks upon her all the time. At the beginning of her narrative, she wonders: “they want me to confess. But how can I confess what I don’t believe I’ve done?” (Collins, 2019, p. 2). Confessions usually introduce a mediator with the task of assisting the narrator in reaching the truth. Whodunits use the same technique as Francisco Pérez points to “the presence of a companion whose mission is to clarify any points of confusion. The companions are the protagonists’ as much as the readers’ allies, as they ask the questions the reader might ask and press the detective to explain their thought process” (2021, p. 18). Yet, Frannie does not allow this in her confessions, confirming: “That story is one only I can tell” (Collins, 2019, p. 8). The space given to her lawyer is thus limited to his urgings for her to remember what might save her life. Her psychological interior reflects the intricacies of remembering and forgetting, where she mediates the past to re-write her present.

The entire confession is in the hands of Frannie and her conflated memories, pondering how a mind “can make a Hell of Heaven and a Heaven of Hell. How does it do that? By remembering, or forgetting?” (Collins, 2019, p. 6). Frannie claims that she is a victim of her memory and assures her lawyer that it is beyond her control to give him what he wants: “How can I give you what I do not have? Remembering is a thing that happens or doesn’t” (Collins, 2019, p. 7). She tries to maintain the chronology of the events unless certain recollections intrude upon her process of remembering, emphasizing that “[i]t’s hard to tell a remembered story in a straight line” (Collins, 2019, p. 154). Yet she deliberately tells her story in chunks. Early in the narrative, she states, “I saw things in that coach-house that I can’t stop seeing now. But worse than the things I saw are the things I did” (Collins, 2019, p. 47). It is only near the end of her trial that she discloses the crimes committed there in a frenzy: “I was his scribe, but I was worse. I did worse. I opened bodies. Many of them. I confess it. I confess” (Collins, 2019, p. 323). She bears the weight of guilt for this crime solely. She twists the truth and blames it on her memory with Benham by refusing to give him the answers he seeks about the plantation experiments and justifies it to herself: “I told myself I wasn’t lying, but rather telling only half the truth” (Collins, 2019, p. 117). Frannie willfully withholds crucial information from her lawyer under the pretext of forgetting; nonetheless, she gives clues in her incomplete confessions about Benham’s murder when she writes, “[w]hen I think of her, it’s with the kind of love that makes murder seem a lie. But I could have killed him” (Collins, 2019, p. 226). Finally, when she tells the truth to her lawyer, it turns out she never lost those memories of the murder details: “Memory, clear, cold. Where it has always been. Benham’s face. He’s shouting. I’m shouting too. His face twists in front of me. The scissors twist. My hands” (Collins, 2019, p. 345). Frannie’s confessions do not follow the typical scheme of regret, revelation, and redemption, and in her ultimate confession, the crime is certain, but the guilt is not.

Queering the historical romance

The novel opens with Frannie’s declaration: “I never would have done what they say I’ve done, to Madame, because I loved her” (Collins, 2019, p. 2). Collins presents the historical romance subgenre in a lesbian context. Historical romances usually depict heterosexual relationships. Lisa Fletcher emphasizes that “[h]istorical fictions of heterosexual love […] participate in the establishment and maintenance of prevailing ideas about the links between sex, gender, and sexuality” (2008, p. 15). Therefore, non-normative relationships were discarded or excluded, leaving behind countless untold stories. Collins does not abide by this regnant discourse of heterosexualizing history by featuring a woman as an object of a man’s desires and by drawing love between two women as the focus of her narrative. Paulina Palmer clarifies, “the introduction of an erotic female relationship has the effect of critiquing and destabilizing heterosexist values by problematizing a dualistic approach to gender” (1999, p. 6). It stitches another pattern in understanding the past and makes room for gay lovers to prove their very existence against tides of erasure. Collins further complicates this romance by incorporating race, for the love triangle includes two black characters and a white one. Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien argue that, although there is hardly any consensus over the relationship between race and sex, an “‘essentialist’ view of sexuality is in fact based on the prevailing Western concept of sexuality which already contains racism” (1988, p. 106). In their lesbian affair, many lines are trespassed in terms of race and class, and being set in Victorian times, the public and private spheres of their relationship are more rigid, which poses additional restrictions upon Frannie in her odyssey of remembering and forgetting.

The historical romance in the novel captures the juncture point between the exotic Caribbean and the eccentric French. Both emerge as peripheral figures that reflect transgressions and apprehensions disrupting the Victorian ethos. Madame “was widely known—no doubt as a nod to her French racine—was notorious as much for her eccentric behaviour as for her ravishing good looks” (Collins, 2019, p. 101). She is self-centered and oppressed by Benham, even if she manages to flout social conventions at times. However, she takes a realistic approach to her relationship with Frannie. She decides to turn her from a servant into a secretary so that she can sleep in her room and accompany her. As Frannie notes: “And what do two women do in a room of their own? Isn’t this the question that troubles my accusers most? Such an easy thing to hide in plain sight—a lady and her abigail—all eyes looking the wrong way” (Collins, 2019, p. 147). Frannie, however, lacks Madame’s understanding of social pacts. She over-romanticizes their relationship, “[c]ome, my love, come with me, come what may. Isn’t that how they’d have it in a novel or a romance?” (Collins, 2019, p. 277). Love blinds Frannie to Madame’s swinging moods, especially when she revives her interest in Laddie. Unlike the typical delineation of love relations in historical romances, it is Madame who pursues him, and Frannie is left out to burn with jealousy.

Collins’ queering of the historical romance gives her an opportunity to draw a non-conventional love triangle. According to René Girard, we mimic what others desire, which establishes many rivalries and triggers brutal violence. He argues that such triangular constellations include a desiring subject, a mediator who precipitates this desire, and a desired object. He further clarifies that “the impulse toward the object of desire is ultimately an impulse toward the mediator” (1965, p. 10). The subject eventually is not keen on having the object but rather on becoming this mediator. Based on such mimetic desires, Girard examines several works that depict typical love triangles in which two white, straight men compete over a woman. His theory is critiqued and developed by Eve Sedgwick, who draws our attention to the absence of homosexual relationships in his triangles. However, Sedgwick discards lesbianism altogether and focuses solely on men’s erotic desires for each other. Homosocial doctrines have been destabilized by homophobia, hence men use women to mediate their relations in order to maintain the patriarchal institution. Sedgwick argues that “the apparent simplicity—the unity—of the continuum between women loving women and women promoting the interests of women extending over the erotic, social, familial, economic, and political realms would not be so striking if it were not in strong contrast to the arrangement among males” (1985, p. 3). Female bonding is more familiar and acceptable, thus rendering the issue of lesbianism much milder since it does not threaten the hegemonic discourse of patriarchy or homosociality. Her erotic triangles hence leave a critical lacuna that completely discards women loving women.

Collins’ erotic triad brings the female desire to the center. She draws what Terry Castle calls “the lesbian counterplot,” which is “a kind of dismantling or displacement of the male homosocial triangle itself” (1993, p. 82). In such a counterplot, emphasis is laid upon two women who embark on the trajectory of a different kind of bonding that grows into sexual desire. Frannie understands the unbridgeable gulf between her and Madame, pondering that “[t]he likes of her expect nothing but curtsies from the likes of me” (Collins, 2019, p. 97). She strives to resist her desire since she knows that it can never be satiated and that “this kind of wanting is nothing but begging” (Collins, 2019, p. 166). She goes through what Patricia Juliana Smith describes as the lesbian panic being “the disruptive action or reaction that occurs when a character […] is either unable or unwilling to confront or reveal her own lesbianism or lesbian desire” (1997, p. 2). Owing to the manifest inequality between them, Madame is the one who must take the initiative: “She pulled me to her, breast to breast, leaned us against the splayed tree trunk, made her thumb a lever on my lip. ‘Open.’ My mouth parted wide as the lake, and she kissed me on my lips” (Collins, 2019, p. 174). In spite of their physical intimacy and Frannie’s true love for Madame, she is hardly an autonomous sexual being in this affair. She is left at the mercy of Madame’s whimsical moods and hedonistic pleasures, and she finds herself residing in a greyish zone of confusion wondering: “had I been answering her as lover or as maid” (Collins, 2019, p. 180). Smith argues that, even after acknowledging same-sex desire and giving rise to lesbian consciousness, “while it would follow that lesbianism would perforce involve the formation of female sexual subjectivity, the realization of their desire is not, […], a liberatory move” (1997, p. 6). Frannie does not attain liberty, the hierarchy is maintained, and the performativity of desire must be kept under the seal of secrecy. Frannie declares, “[w]e are friends, then we are not. That is her world. I will never belong” (Collins, 2019, p. 171). She feels more oppressed when Madame decides to bring Laddie back into her orbit, hence moving from a dyadic to a triangular relation, in which Frannie finds herself pushed into a liminal positionality.

Unlike the usual love triangles, Frannie is trapped in a triad in which rivalry is one-sided; she is the only one trying to fight for her love and win Madame back. Laddie, on the contrary, does not fall under the spell of Madame, knowing that “Meg’s been spoiled, you see. She’ll only return the affections of those who spoil her in return. And only for a time” (Collins, 2019, p. 206). Laddie sees through Madame’s nature and understands that she is a bored white woman who seeks attention. Madame sends Frannie with a letter to him, to which he replies: “To the Devil with her. Tell your mistress some niggers happy to make themselves into a bit of sport for bored bluestockings” (Collins, 2019, p. 211). He can only see whites as his oppressors, but he decides to outwit them by playing the part of the meek trickster in which he gives the show that entertains them in the boxing ring and in his speeches. Frannie attacks him for his indecent talk on Madame: “You not better than anybody else. White men pay you a sovereign a time to hammer your nose in. You monkey up speeches. White ladies paw at you like some cat” (Collins, 2019, p. 212). Laddie does not deny, nor does he mind it, as long as he emerges as a winner and ends up with what he wants. He harbors hate and remains too vindictive to love or forgive his oppressors. He explains to Frannie that, unless he ruthlessly guards his interests, he will be defeated for when black boys like him grow up: “They toss you out! With the night-soil. Into the shit bucket. Not even the mercy of a bullet to the head” (Collins, 2019, p. 211). He retains his down-to-earth stance towards his position as a black man in nineteenth-century England, and he accuses Frannie of not being any better: “I have the same nose, little mulatta… but mine sniffs out a woman who’s sold herself” (Collins, 2019, p. 212). After all, they have both undertaken the holy mission of pleasing whites.

In the discursive construction of the female\female\male configuration, Laddie maps patriarchal power relations with both Frannie and Madame. He refuses to reply to Madame’s letter, and when he does, he tells her explicitly: “I was not bored enough to answer. Now I am,” and sets up the expected gender-based hierarchy when he assures her: “I won’t meet you simply because you command it” (Collins, 2019, p. 238). Even when they meet, Madame reports the encounter to Frannie, saying, “[w]hen I went to see him, it was as if there was something in him that wanted to wound me” (Collins, 2019, p. 275). He impregnates her and disappears, leaving her to face Benham and suffer the consequences alone. Laddie has successfully taken his revenge on the Benhams; it is not just the adultery, it is also the scandalous threat of having a black baby. He exercises the same power over Frannie by arousing her jealousy. She notices this from the beginning: “The trouble wasn’t the way he looked at her. It was the way she looked at him” (Collins, 2019, p. 206). Frannie is the only one in this triangle who is truly in love. She is left as prey to her thoughts and speculations as she sees Madame moving away from her. She is helpless and hopeless and feels enraged. Out of jealousy, she tells on her to Benham, and their relationship becomes “sadistic in equal measure,” as Lewi Mondal argues (2020, p. 293). Frannie is defeated even in her betrayal, as Madame fires her, and she ends up wondering, “why is it that fucking is always our story, and love is always theirs?” (Collins, 2019, p. 164). Her story only held love from her side, not from theirs.

Frannie’s memory during the process of remembering and forgetting her romance is blurred by laudanum. At the very beginning of her confession, Frannie remembers her love declaring that “this is a story of love, not just murder” (Collins, 2019, p. 8). She struggles to remember the night of the murder because “[w]hat frightens me is dying believing that it was me who killed her” (Collins, 2019, p. 5). Laudanum makes her memory delusional, not only to her physical surroundings but also to Madame’s true nature. It turns her memory into a locus of confusion with porous boundaries, as she writes with a pen that is not there and goes into the garden looking for a baby and realizes that “[l]audanum stripped me of memory, as well as shame” (Collins, 2019, p. 219). After being fired, Frannie gains a clear vision: “Without laudanum, my mind was awake, and raging. And remembering” (Collins, 2019, p. 245). Frannie recollects what Benham and Langton did to her and understands that “the white man has stronger magic” and more wicked ways (Collins, 2019, p. 323). She chooses to discard memories of both, and forgetting becomes her protective shield against suffering. However, there is always a rupture in her forgetting because “Madame was a door that wouldn’t stay closed” (Collins, 2019, p. 259). Her past with Madame is not just a time but rather a space where she reconstitutes her self boundaries. Their erotic experience does not liberate Frannie, still it provides an avenue for the truth about herself to be stored in: “I fell asleep wishing Madame could see me as I’d been. Not the maid, not the house-girl, but Frannie the scribe. […] The Frannie who read Milton and Mr Defoe. Reading, thinking, writing” (Collins, 2019, p. 107). When she returns to the Benhams, she gains access to laudanum again. On the night of the murder, she is in delirium when she fights with her master and stabs him. Upon her arrest, she suffers from memory disintegration, and she is truly unable to recall what happened with Madame and how she died. Frannie forgets everything related to Madame’s murder; however, she never forgets her love for her, which echoes resonantly in the narrative as her swansong.

The Victorian allure

“The Victorians are still with us. This is not a whimsical statement,” avers Wilson (2003, p. 1). The factual residues of Victorian history still linger and open new horizons for writers’ imagination to retrieve and recreate those times. Historical fiction emphasizes that as much as the past shapes the present, the present reshapes the past by drawing on continuities and discontinuities with it. Writing in the 21st century, postmodern authors of historical fiction re-produce Victorian texts and genres from their own perspectives. According to Linda Hutcheon, “postmodernism is a fundamentally contradictory enterprise: its art forms […] at once use and abuse, install and then destabilize conventions in parodic ways, self-consciously pointing both to their own inherent paradoxes and provisionally, of course, to their critical or ironic re-reading of the art of the past” (1989, p. 23). Such writers build up their postmodern works that both sustain and disrupt the previous representations of Victorian history. Hutcheon explains that, in those works, “the past as referent is not bracketed or effaced, […], it is incorporated or modified, given new and different life and meaning” (1989, p. 24). They pour new wine into old bottles producing a unique and different taste. Collins, a black British author, re-visits the Victorian milieus and offers her hermeneutics of the era as seen through the eyes of a black lesbian slave who has long been cast into the shadows of Victorian fiction, or at best, given a typical slave narrative from bondage to freedom. She avoids what Gabriella Friedman calls “sentimental historicizing” of neo-slave narratives, which “results, often inadvertently, in preserving rather than disrupting a violent national infrastructure” by trying to evoke sympathy for the slave (2021, p. 117). Collins does not fall into that trap and draws Frannie’s character in a different light. Her construction of black subjectivity falls outside this stereotypical context as Frannie starts as a slave, then a servant, then a prostitute and finally a killer. Her agency is established through reading, writing, homosexual love and revengeful murder as her story is revised, recreated and further expanded to show a different side of the historical coin.

Collins renegotiates the power nexus in the foundations of the nineteenth-century world order with its rigid hierarchies, racial injustice, scientific manias, moralistic constructions, gender roles, and sexual repression. The lesbian relation that she features endorses her position as a postmodern author who exposes Victorian hypocrisy, double standards, falsity, violence, and the price paid for any endeavor at transgression. Although Frannie and Madame end up tragically oppressed and othered, the prohibited paradigm of lesbianism poses a challenge to the male gaze and shakes the ground beneath phallic power. Collins makes more room for the female gaze with which both characters refuse to comply with the Victorian heterosexual norm, especially when their relationship is disclosed in Frannie’s trial. The historiographical mystery equally gives Collins an opportunity to ventriloquize the past without falling for an essentialized reading of it. Frannie, as a fringe figure, is not the diabolical killer delineated in Victorian crime fiction who kills because of psychological perversion, urban corruption, or abject poverty. She never shows remorse over killing Benham as well, which does not render her story as a typical one of crime and redemption. The crimes of Langton and Benham are not the emblematic ones coming from the Victorian underworld either. Collins features crimes that probe into the psychological depths of her characters, reflecting their inherent evil and human vulnerability stemming from blind jealousy in the case of Frannie, or fanatic approach to science and trespassing over the very humanity of blacks in the case of Langton and Benham.

Invoking the Victorian is invoking a repository of gothic sensations. The Victorian gothic transcended the familiar, explored the supernatural, infused terror and horror, and examined the indefinite possibilities life might offer. However, Collins re-appropriates the genre because the gothic in her novel mainly stems from the abject. She brings three major characters in a hate, rather than a love triangle in which each one abjectifies the other to the point of violence. The tension and the fear are set against a background of the psychological wars those characters wage against one another while grappling with feelings of fear and desire. She re-visits the Victorian grand narratives of gothic, whodunit, slave-narrative, historical romance, she adheres to some tropes and subverts others to showcase the dilemma of being a border-violator, black, lesbian slave haunted by her past traumas and shackled by her present injustices. Her past and present join hands ultimately to make her lugubriously guilty, detrimentally determined, and emotionally unfulfilled until she reaches the last step on her way to the gallows.