Hidden Shadows: Dangerous Women and Obscure Diseases in the Novels of Wilkie Collins

Abstract

Since the early 1980s many literary critics have held firmly to the assumption that Collins’s best-known works are subversive because they question the links between appearance and reality.¹ Yet, as my preceding chapters have aimed to show, if the main effect of Collins’s fiction was to reveal how hidden energies lurked beneath false appearances, his works could hardly claim to be subversive or innovative because the concept of ‘outward show’ not correlating with ‘inner realities’ was already a ubiquitous Victorian idea. Studies like Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic (1979) have established how such ideas were pivotal to nineteenth-century conceptualisations of femininity. As an example, William Black earnestly warned the male readers of Temple Bar against female flirts in 1869. ‘Let all men beware’, he ominously advised, of ‘the typical flirt — the vampire who lives upon the hearts of men. […] This terrible woman […] generally comes in the most innocent guise — generally that of a little, soft, bigeyed girl’.² Collins’s fiction was not unique in representing a non-correlative relationship between appearance and reality. Instead, it appears to have drawn upon a widespread concept that was often used to substantiate the era’s most oppressive gender norms as well as to question them. Modern studies that aim to demonstrate how Collins ‘lifts the veneer’ of nineteenth-century respectability thus reproduce a Victorian binary that, I argue, the author sought to exploit and unravel.