Laurence Talairach-Vielmas - Moulding The Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (2007)

MOULDING THE FEMALE BODY IN
VICTORIAN FAIRY TALES AND

SENSATION NOVELS
For Eric and Margaux
Moulding the Female Body in
Victorian Fairy Tales and
Sensation Novels
LAURENCE TALAIRACH-VIELMAS
University of Toulouse-Le Mirail, France
© Laurence Talairach-Vielmas 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence
Moulding the female body in Victorian fairy tales and sensation novels
1. Women in literature 2. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism 3. Fairy
tales – Great Britain – History and criticism 4. Fantasy fiction, English – History and
criticism 5. Children’s stories, English – History and criticism 6. Popular literature – Great
Britain – History and criticism 7. Femininity in literature 8. Body, Human, in literature
I. Title
823.8’099287
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence.
Moulding the female body in Victorian fairy tales and sensation novels / by Laurence
Talairach-Vielmas.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-6034-7 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7546-6034-6 (alk. paper)
1. Women in literature. 2. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 3.
Fairy tales—Great Britain—History and criticism. 4. Fantasy fiction, English—History and
criticism. 5. Children’s stories, English—History and criticism. 6. Popular literature—Great
Britain—History and criticism. 7. Femininity in literature. 8. Body, Human, in literature.
I. Title.
PR878.W6T36 2007
823’.8099287—dc22
2007010451
ISBN: 978-0-7546-6034-7
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.
Contents
List of illustrations vi
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction Femininity through the Looking-Glass 1

1 ‘That that is, is’: The Bondage of Stories in Jean Ingelow’s
Mopsa the Fairy (1869) 17
2 MacDonald’s Fallen Angel in ‘The Light Princess’ (1864) 33
3 Drawing ‘Muchnesses’ in Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) 49
4 Taming the Female Body in Juliana Horatia Ewing’s
‘Amelia and the Dwarfs’ (1870) and Christina Rossetti’s
Speaking Likenesses (1874) 67
5 A Journey through the Crystal Palace: Rhoda Broughton’s
Politics of Plate-Glass in Not Wisely But Too Well (1867) 89
6 Investigating Books of Beauties in Charles Dickens’s
Bleak House (1853) and M.E. Braddon’s
Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) 113
7 Shaping the Female Consumer in Wilkie Collins’s
No Name (1862) 133
8 Rachel Leverson and the London Beauty Salon:
Female Aestheticism and Criminality in Wilkie Collins’s
Armadale (1864) 147
9 Wilkie Collins’s Modern Snow White:
Arsenic Consumption and Ghastly Complexions in
The Law and the Lady (1875) 159
Conclusion 173
Bibliography 177
Index 185
List of Illustrations
1.1 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Maids of Elfen Mere, 1855. From William
Allingham, ‘The Maids of Elfen Mere’, in The Music Master:
A Love Story and Two Series of Day and Night Songs
(London: Routledge, 1855). By permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library. 22
4.1 Arthur Hugues, ‘The Apple of Discord’, 1874. From Christina Rossetti,
Speaking Likenesses (London: Macmillan, 1874).
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. 75
4.2 William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott, 1866–1905.

74 1/8 x 57 7/8 inches. Oil on canvas.
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. The Ella Gallup
Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund. 76
4.3 John Tenniel, ‘Alice and the Pack of Cards’, 1866. From Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. By permission of the Syndics of
4.4 Arthur Hugues, ‘The Meal’, 1874. From Christina Rossetti,

Speaking Likenesses (London: Macmillan, 1874). By permission
of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. 78
4.5 Arthur Hugues, ‘Flora and the Children in the Enchanted Room’,
1874. From Christina Rossetti, Speaking Likenesses
(London: Macmillan, 1874). By permission of the Syndics of
Acknowledgements
Preliminary versions of chapters 7, 8, and 9 first appeared in the following publications:

‘Victorian Sensational Shoppers: Representations of Transgressive Femininity in
Wilkie Collins’s No Name’, Victorian Review (The Journal of Victorian Studies
Association of Western Canada) 31/2 (2005): 56–78; ‘Madame Leverson’s Enamel:
Fatal Secrets of Victorian Sensational Mirrors’, Wilkie Collins Society Journal 6
(2003): 3–18; ‘Behind the Scenes of Women’s Beauty Parlours: From Gothicism to
Sensationalism’, Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies 6 (2003): 124–40. I am
grateful to the editors of these journals for permission to use the material here.
In the process of writing Moulding the Female Body, many colleagues and
friends helped me with their critical advice and their suggestions about materials to
use. I am particularly indebted to Michael Hollington, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Ellen
Levy, and Paul Seabright for their general encouragement as well as their comments
that helped shape my manuscript. Many thanks to Jean-Pierre Daraux for sharing
with me his knowledge of nineteenth-century fashion. I would also like to thank my
editor, Ann Donahue, for believing in this project and the anonymous reader whose
suggestions improved my book. My deepest thanks go to my husband who provided
loving support at every stage of this project. It is with love that I dedicate this book
to him and our daughter.
‘But if you take away my voice’, said the little
mermaid, ‘what will I have left?’
‘Your lovely figure’, said the witch, ‘your graceful
movements, and your expressive eyes. With those you
can easily enchant a human heart … Well, where’s
your courage? Put out your little tongue and let me
cut it off as my payment. Then you can have your
powerful potion.’
The Little Mermaid, Hans Christian Andersen.
Miss Flora M’Flimsey, of Madison Square,

Has made three separate journeys to Paris,
And her father assures me, each time she was there,
That she and her friend Mrs. Harris
(Not the lady whose name is so famous in history,
But plain Mrs H., without romance or mystery)
Spent six consecutive weeks without stopping,
In one continuous round of shopping;
Shopping alone, and shopping together,
At all hours of the day, and in all sorts of weather;
For all manner of things that a woman can put
On the crown of her head or the sole of her foot,
Or wrap round her shoulders, or fit round her waist,
Or that can be sewed on, or pinned on, or laced,
Or tied on with a string, or stitched on with a bow,
In front or behind, above or below:
For bonnets, mantillas, capes, collars, and shawls;
Dresses for breakfasts, and dinners, and balls;
Dresses to sit in, and stand in, and walk in;
Dresses to dance in, and flirt in, and talk in;
Dresses in which to do nothing at all;
Dresses for winter, spring, summer, and fall;
All of them different in color and pattern,
Silk, muslin, and lace, crape, velvet, and satin,
Brocade, and broadcloth, and other material, quite
as expensive and much more ethereal;
In short, for all things that could ever be thought of,
Or milliner, modiste, or tradesman be bought of,
From ten-thousand-francs robes to twenty-sous frills;
In all quarters of Paris, and to every store,
While M’Flimsey in vain stormed, scolded, and swore,
They footed the streets, and he footed the bills.
Nothing To Wear: An Episode of City Life, New York: Harpers, 1857.

Introduction
Femininity through the Looking-Glass
Once Upon a Time…
It is not always easy for readers of Victorian literature to find their way among
the literary genres which fuelled the period. In the second half of the nineteenth
century, the development of print technology and the expansion of the reading
public opened a huge market for fiction. Literary works abounded, and their
diversity can sometimes seem overwhelming. And yet, securing clear-cut boundaries
between genres was essential for the Victorians who classified, ordered, and ranked
compulsively. If Anthony Trollope claimed that ‘[a]mong English novels of the
present day, and among English novelists … [t]here are sensational novels and anti-
sensational, sensational novelists and anti-sensational’,1 this study intends to add
Victorian experimental fairy tales and fantasies as further foils to Victorian realism.
Like sensation novels, Victorian fairy tales and fantasies strongly diverged from
mainstream realism, thereby giving a new perspective on everyday reality. Through
their distortions of the real, fairy tales, fantasies, and sensation novels illuminated
modes of representation particularly significant to the construction of femininity
which this book investigates.
This book analyzes Victorian fairy tales and fantasies alongside sensation novels
because sensation fiction shares a lot more with fairy tales than meets the eye. As
a matter of fact, when I first sought to get a taste of Victorian popular literature by
opening a sensation novel, I was not simply surprised by the modernity of the criminal
plots compared to more canonical works of domestic realism. Though thrilled by
the daring female protagonists asserting their independence (or at least, trying to),
what struck me most was rather the extent to which the writers of sensation novels
seemed to revise old plot-patterns where traces of fairy tales peppered the modern
scenarios. Of course, the use of fairy tales was widespread in Victorian fiction. From
William Makepeace Thackeray to Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, from the
Brontë sisters to George Eliot, nearly all Victorian novelists alluded to fairy worlds.
Fairy-tale motifs enabled writers to enhance their heroines’ beauty, and above all to
encode a patriarchal ideology: as in fairy tales, the conventional happy endings of
mainstream literature demanded that the heroines be married and securely locked up
in their homes. Yet sensation novelists, precisely like Victorian fairy-tale writers and
fantasists, seemed to debunk traditional tales and to rework narrative archetypes to
launch their plots. Appearing at the height of the trend towards realism, sensation
novels upset literary expectations with modern criminal plots featuring improper
1 Anthony Trollope, Autobiography (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1883), vol. 2, 41.

2 Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels
heroines, as we shall see.2 But because their plots most often focus on female
protagonists trying to rise in society through advantageous marriages, sensation
novels again and again rehearse versions of Cinderella, Snow White, or Sleeping
Beauty, thoroughly revised for the sake of frisson. Indeed, if—for the heroines, at
least—the closures of the stories are inevitably bleaker than the ‘happily-ever-after’
motto of fairy tales, sensation novels, nonetheless, hinge upon the idea that finding
the right suitor is the aim of the quest, and they, therefore, foreground marriage in
the same way as fairy tales do. As significant instances, the seminal sensation novels,
Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–1860), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady
Audley’s Secret (1861–1862), or Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861), all contain
a fairy story beneath their criminal plots.
Collins’s The Woman in White recounts the story of Anne Catherick, who escapes
from a lunatic asylum where she has been incarcerated by Sir Percival Glyde for
fear she might reveal his illegitimacy and prevent his marriage to the heiress Laura
Fairlie—in fact, Anne’s half-sister. When Anne dies, Laura is confined in the asylum
under Anne’s name, and the hero, Walter Hartright, must solve the mystery of the
woman in white to save Laura, that is, to prove her identity before he marries her.
Though typically sensational, the plot, seen from another perspective, is saturated
with the language of fairy tales. When Hartright first meets the woman in white, the
realistic text shifts into romance: as he helps her flee the men who are trying to bring
her back to the asylum, the dream-like atmosphere fashions the woman into a strange,
distressed damsel and turns Hartright into a golden-hearted knight. Cinderella-
like, the mysterious Anne Catherick, dressed in white by some godmother whose
tombstone she keeps cleaning, haunts the text, making the narrative hover between
fairy tale and Gothic romance. Is Anne Catherick a Victorian Cinderella, disinherited
and cruelly abused by Glyde, or is she simply another fallen woman driven insane
by her wanderings in the streets? Interestingly, after Anne Catherick’s death, the text
continues to play upon fairy-tale motifs. The amnesia and long slumber of Laura
Fairlie (with Anne Catherick’s name) while she is incarcerated in a lunatic asylum
also seem to tell a sort of Sleeping Beauty tale, orchestrated by Count Fosco, the
Gothic villain, who, like a modern Merlin, knows how to petrify the body after death
so as to preserve it, as hard as marble, to the end of time.
While marriage is the fulcrum of Collins’s plot and the aim of Hartright’s quest, it
is also the focus of the opening of Lady Audley’s Secret. Abandoned by her husband,
George Talboys, who has gone to Australia to seek his fortune, Lady Audley—or
rather, Helen Talboys—starts afresh as a junior teacher by pasting a new name (‘Lucy
Graham’) on her bonnet-box. She is soon hired as a governess and meets Sir Michael
Audley, who falls in love with the pretty young woman and marries her. When the
new Lady Audley hears about her first husband’s return to England, she publishes
the news of her death in the Times and buries a consumptive working-class girl under
2 For a definition of the sensation novel, see Patrick Brantlinger, ‘What is “Sensational”
about the “Sensation Novel”’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 37 (1982): 1–28; Lyn Pykett, The
‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London:
Routledge, 1992), and The Sensation Novel: from The Woman in White to The Moonstone
(Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994).
Femininity through the Looking-Glass 3
her own name. But as fate will have it, George Talboys happens to see the portrait of
the new Lady Audley and realizes he has been deceived. To get rid of her annoying
first husband, Lady Audley pushes him down a well, and his friend, Robert Audley
(Lady Audley’s nephew), decides to play the part of the detective and sort out the
mystery of George Talboys’s disappearance. Lady Audley next attempts to murder
Robert Audley by setting fire to the inn in which he is sleeping. Ironically, he escapes
unscathed and reveals her bigamy—not her attempted murders—to her husband. In
conclusion, Robert Audley takes Lady Audley to a Belgian sanatorium and locks her
up under a false name amongst madwomen, while her first husband miraculously
reappears. All is well that ends well, it seems, as Robert and his bride can now enjoy
the company of George, and the narrator informs us of Lady Audley’s death.
However, Braddon’s prototypical sensation novel also bears traces of the fairy tale
right from the beginning, which does not square with Lady Audley’s nephew’s idea
of social order. The novel opens on the story of the mysterious governess, ‘admired
of all who come within the reach of her spells’,3 as E.S. Dallas, the Times literary
critic, put it. With her unknown past, her innocent beauty, and her modesty, Lucy
Graham does resemble Cinderella: by marrying Sir Michael Audley, she goes from
poverty to riches and enjoys the luxuries of her fairy palace. In addition, instead of
depicting her heroine as a doll playing her part in a doll’s house, Braddon fashions
the stereotype of the Victorian angel as a domestic fairy, and the novel’s constant
hammering of the heroine’s fairy beauty in her enchanted castle gives a touch of
magic to the narrative—the better to reveal the heroine’s criminality.
Though Braddon seems to use a fairy-tale backdrop ironically in order to
illuminate her heroine’s transgressions, in Wood’s East Lynne the use of fairy-tale
motifs is more melodramatic. At the beginning of the novel, the heroine, Isabel
Vane, goes from riches to poverty after her father’s death. She is nearly compelled
to marry Archibald Carlyle while enamoured of Sir Francis Levison. Eventually,
she deserts her husband to go abroad with her lover who soon abandons her. After
being disfigured in a train crash, she returns to England and works unrecognized as
governess to her own children, while Archibald Carlyle marries again. Once again,
beneath its sensational trimmings, the story also recounts the fate of a beautiful
princess. From the beginning, Isabel is persecuted not by her stepmother but by
her aunt, who is jealous of her beauty and beats her before petrifying her through
marriage. Isabel is forced to marry a bourgeois and, hence, to lead the boring life
of a proper middle-class wife and mother. She is then brought to a castle, excluded
from the world, and once again subjected to another wicked queen—her husband’s
sister, Cornelia. Tied to her property, endlessly walking around her garden while her
husband works outside, Isabel suffers from the restraining atmosphere of her crystal
casket and is soon tempted by a glimmering and aristocratic lover—which launches
the novel’s adultery plot.
In these three archetypical sensation novels, the fairy-tale motifs act as a
haunting presence behind tales of murder, bigamy, or adultery. Even Wilkie Collins’s
detective story The Moonstone (1868) is subtitled ‘A Romance’, and features
a minor character, Rosanna Spearman, a deformed maid in love with her master,
3 E.S. Dallas, ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’, The Times (18 November 1862): 8.
who dreams of climbing the social ladder and marrying the hero. Her magic dress,
however, is but a poor stained nightdress which belongs to the hero and symbolically
suggests that the latter has spent the night with a far most beautiful princess. Often
ironic, sometimes tragic, touches of the marvellous, in fact, not merely point to the
mystery of the female protagonists; they also foreground the discrepancy between
the fairy-tale universe and the harsh reality of Victorian society, thereby frequently
conveying the issue of women’s lack of identity and their fragile economic position
in society. The use of fairy-tale motifs in sensation novels is, hence, poles apart from
the allusions to fairy tales generally encountered in mainstream Victorian literature.
Collins’s, Braddon’s, and Wood’s heroines all illustrate women’s difficult position
in a patriarchal society and their social and financial dependence on men. Therefore,
the search for the appropriate husband becomes, as in fairy tales, the one and only
solution for women in search of security—turning the fairy-tale scenario into a
literary short-cut.
However, the aim of this study is not stricto sensu to underline the extent to
which the sensation novel borrows from fairy tales. If the study of later sensation
novels, such as Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely But Too Well (1862), Wilkie Collins’s
No Name (1862), Armadale (1864), or The Law and the Lady (1875) will enable
me to trace the tales of Little Red Ridinghood, Snow White, or Bluebeard, this book
intends rather to show how similar sensation novels and Victorian fantasies and fairy
tales were in the way they foregrounded and often reworked cultural and social
issues. Indeed, in the same way as sensation novels upset the literary establishment
by the modernity of their plots, featuring as heroines, as Henry James put it,
‘English [gentlewomen] of the current year, familiar with the use of the railway
and the telegraph’,4 Victorian experimental fairy tales and fantasies also revamped
traditional fairy tales to offer new reflections on their fast-changing society. While
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a case in point, many other
fairy-tales and fantasies were brand new stories made from old ones, with narratives
which absorbed modernity in a sensational way. As Nancy Armstrong argues,
for instance, Lewis Carroll’s Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole is a significant
‘moment in the history of desire’,5 reflecting female consumerism in ways novels had
never done before. In the fairy tales and fantasies I shall focus on, Jean Ingelow’s,
George MacDonald’s, Juliana Horatia Ewing’s, or Christina Rossetti’s heroines all
seem to be fairly rooted in their society, and the authors play upon the links between
the real and the fantastic to revise the dusty tales which wise Mother Goose used to
tell. As we shall see, both genres work from within their culture to expose sharply
current practices and modern fashions. Woman’s social and economic position in
society is reworked through heroines who provide us with powerful images of the
construction of femininity, placing particular emphasis on the female body, its shape
and meaning, especially when viewed through the lens of consumer culture.
4 Henry James, ‘Miss Braddon’, The Nation (9–11–1865), reprinted in Notes and
Reviews (Cambridge, MA: Dunster House, 1921), 112–13.
5 Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography (London; Cambridge, Ma:
Harvard University Press, [1999] 2002), 223.
Consumer Culture in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels
‘Pretty things to sell, very cheap, very cheap . . . stay-laces of all colours’.
‘Little Snow White’, the Brothers Grimm.
As Snow White’s wicked stepmother’s irresistible offer illustrates, what we generally

learn as children through fairy tales is that all princesses are beautiful and may even
try to improve their beauty. In fact, their beauty is their wealth—quite literally, since
being beautiful enables them to win a prince and a fortune. Hence, what fairy tales
foreground is the idea that femininity is closely linked to aestheticization, and that
beauty is a feminine virtue which needs to be cultivated. Whether it be Psyche enticed
by Proserpine’s beauty cream or Snow White lured by the wicked Queen’s gaudy
stay-laces, these female characters all exemplify how much their own fate depends
on their physical appearance, on their power to construct a self which matches male
expectations.
Similarly, ideal femininity in the Victorian period was often gauged by its
relationship to the world of beauty and fashion. When I first came across Lewis
Carroll’s photograph of Irene MacDonald, ‘It won’t come smooth’ (July 1863), I
was fascinated by the picture of this little girl refusing to brush her hair and to hold
the mirror up to her face to check her appearance (see cover illustration). Is she not
blaming us for the moment of physical torture which awaits her as she attempts to
unmat her tangled and wavy hair? The picture hovers in uncertainty—poised between
revolt and suffering—with the female body placed at the heart of the photograph’s
concerns. As she seemingly frowns on the onlooker, the little girl asserts her refusal
to be moulded to the pattern of docile femininity, just as her matted mane refuses
to be plaited and tamed. This ideal little girl whom Victorian gentlemen idolized
and who refuses here to sit still and learn her lesson in ‘beautification’, tells us a lot
about the notion of femininity in the Victorian period. In particular, the photograph
questions femininity, hovering here between assertion and objectification. The brush
and the mirror frame the little girl’s femininity as a body which must be moulded
and smoothed, which probably demands training and suffering, and which, once
perfected, will perhaps give this little girl the keys to conquest.
What Carroll’s photograph reveals, in essence, is that—far removed from
Coventry Patmore’s notion of the ‘natural’ Angel in the House and yet simultaneously
growing out of and nurtured by it—the Victorian feminine ideal was poised over
contradictory discourses which the rise of capitalism brought to climactic excess.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain’s population nearly doubled,
growing from 20.8 million in 1851 to 26.1 million in 1871. The trade figures revealed
its economic growth, with imports worth £100 million in 1851 and £370 million in
1874 and exports increasing from £197 million to £297 million in the same period.
For over twenty years, free trade prevailed and the market soared. Competition being
scarce until the 1870s, British goods sold over the world, and Britain’s gross national
income expanded from £523.3 million in 1851 to £916.6 million in 1871. Undeniably,
Britain was the richest country in the world; everybody was getting richer, although
the economic boom obviously benefited the rising middle-class mostly. As Britain
was changing into an industrial urban economy, drapers’ shops metamorphosed into
multistoried department stores: the first London department store, Whiteley’s, opened
in Bayswater in 1863, just a few months after the opening of the London underground.
While the East End housed thousands of workers in unsanitary conditions, the West
End became a place for female pleasure, and shopping became a feminine activity.
The development of the metropolis, therefore, rewrote gender constructions. The
Angel gradually left her safe haven, stepped outside the house unchaperoned, and
travelled to the urban centre, her shopping excursions upsetting traditional gendered
spheres. No longer solely seen as a child-rearing figure, the ideal wife was reshaped
into a perfect lady, ‘ornamental, leisured, and expensive.’6 As a result, constantly
reified, extolled as an art curio connoting the wealth of its owner, the fashionably
corseted Victorian woman was also girdled by discourses at pains to define her. In the
streets or in women’s magazines, advertisements aimed at women and constructed
women as desiring and consuming subjects. In so doing, they simultaneously led
them to become merchandise themselves—thereby confining them within a role as
reflectors of male power, exhibiting their fathers’ or husbands’ economic success.
Victorian fairy tales and sensation novels explore this insolubly paradoxical
terrain, where women oscillate between subject and object. Heroines—seemingly
confined under glass like so many sleeping princesses—radiate with artificiality,
whether they have pricked their fingers on spindles, applied cream to their faces, or
tried on corsets. In the fairy tales and fantasies of the period, the tropes of female
beauty metamorphose into a variety of images advertising the female body. Feminine
representation, caught within a commodity culture saturated with advertisements
and dominated by representation, transforms feminine identity into a literary exhibit
where the woman’s body is only figured in sets of similes. Traditional fairy tales
most often play with language; they literalize metaphors and metonymies and
change words into objects and creatures. Through their reworking of traditional
tales, Victorian experimental fairy tales and fantasies play with words in order to
stress the instability of signs. No longer fixed and becoming ambiguous, signs seem
to float free, culminating in nonsense: as Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty tells Alice
in Through the Looking-Glass, ‘When I use a word, … it means just what I choose
it to mean … [t]he question is … which is to be master—that’s all.’ In addition, as
Victorian fairy tales and fantasies question the links between words and images,
they make explicit how representation changed with the rise of a material culture. In
particular, they show the extent to which representation reveals Victorian ideology,
signposting how, I contend, female representation and the construction of femininity
is mastered by a patriarchal rhetoric which confines and changes the female bodies.
Because this study of fairy tales and fantasies will deal with language, relevant
to my discussion will be Thomas Richards’s approach to commodity culture and his
contention that the capitalist system generated ‘a dominant form of representation
… consolidating its hold over England not only economically but semiotically.’7 As I
argue, through their play with words and their nonsense, the fairy tales and fantasies
6 Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 20.
7 Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and
Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 3.
recall the world of Victorian advertising and the way in which advertisements used
language to transform the real into ‘a fantastic realm in which things think, act,
speak, fall, fly, evolve’.8 In this way, as the metaphors the narratives debunk convey
ideologies of femininity and sexual politics, they form a bridge between the literary
world and Victorian consumer culture.
In the sensation novels, on the other hand, the clichés of the feminine ideal which
Victorian fairy-tale writers and fantasists deconstruct become visual signs aimed
at captivating the beholder. While fairy-tale writers and fantasists merely place
shopping malls in the background of their narratives as in Jean Ingelow’s Mopsa
the Fairy, or play with commodities which come alive, as in Christina Rossetti’s
Speaking Likenesses, sensation novels are fully anchored in commercial culture, and
the construction of prescriptive femininity appears as a series of accessories, of goods
available at the counter and displayed behind shop windows. The novels, featuring
female customers, highlight femininity as a creation, and ‘woman’ becomes a living
representation. Like commodities, characterized by their ‘plasticity’,9 the sensational
female characters are duplicitous and treacherous, and suggest the discrepancy
between appearance and reality.
Moreover, whether subtly or more pointedly challenging gender constructions,
Victorian fairy tales and sensation fiction alike do not just enhance woman’s
artificiality. They also feature fallen or criminal femininity, and their heroines not
only defy the commandments of decorum but question as well the set of conventions
which frames femininity. On the one hand, children’s literature often plays upon
innocent-looking heroines wandering off the tracks of propriety, bringing to light
how easily adorable little girls can fall down wells. On the other hand, sensation
novels feature blue-eyed and light-haired female protagonists as some of the most
dangerous sensational female villainesses and show their readers how women may
use beauty as a mask—thereby revising stereotypical representations of feminine
evil as defined by criminal anthropology. In fact, sensationalism’s own specific
literary trait is precisely its focus on unblemished criminal female bodies which must
be traced and tracked down. Hence, both genres particularly fashion the Victorian
woman as always simultaneously angel and demon, beauty and beast, undercutting
feminine stereotypes traditionally associated with passivity and victimization.
From its origins, the sensation novel has always been seen as deeply anchored
in commodity culture. Its publication in instalments led the literary establishment to
fear that literature was becoming, as the contemporary critic Henry Mansel put it,
‘so many yards of printed stuff, sensation-pattern to be ready by the beginning of
the season’ seeking to match ‘the fashions of the current season’.10 More disquieting
still was the fear that sensation fiction might metamorphose women into addicts and
endanger the nation with waves of female readers unable to check their bodies and
to restrain their desires. Creating uncontrollable consumers from all social classes,
the sensation novel was constructed from the beginning as merchandise likely to
spread sensation mania everywhere about the country. In addition, as I have just
8 Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 11.

10 Henry Mansel, ‘Sensation Novels,’ Quarterly Review 113 (1863): 481–514, 483.
suggested, material culture seeps into these novels. Like the unbound picture-quarto
which Wilkie Collins depicted when he attempted to define how popular literature
attracted its readers, ‘set[ting] itself up obtrusively in the window, and insist[ing]
on being looked at by everybody’,11 sensational heroines dexterously manipulate
commodities and deliberately turn themselves into objects so as to appear the most
appealing goods on the marriage market.
Likewise, in Victorian fairy tales and fantasies, the emphasis is upon moulding,
shaping, or framing the female body. Most of the fairy narratives of the period register
fears concerning the management of female appetites and feature heroines eager to
consume goods. In George MacDonald’s ‘The Light Princess’ and Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the idea of thinness prevails in the construction of
the feminine ideal the tales deflate. While the light princess is too light, Alice learns
to control her body shape through eating the proper amount of food. She discovers
that sweetness has less to do with eating treacle than with abiding by the laws of
a literary cliché. Similarly, in Juliana Horatia Ewing’s ‘Amelia and the Dwarfs’,
Amelia brings to light what being ‘dear’ for a woman means and learns how to use
her body to achieve freedom. In these three examples, the little girls are educated into
femininity while the tales simultaneously underline the extent to which femininity is
artificial. From mere figures of speech, the woman’s body is turned into a fiction, a
tale promoted by society which little girls learn by rote from the moment they listen
to fairy tales.
For this reason, this study will start with an exploration of some Victorian
fairy tales and fantasies as a springboard into sensation fiction. The way in which
the fairy tales and the fantasies undermine the literary clichés which are meant to
frame prescriptive femininity will be regarded as a first stage in the construction,
deconstruction, or reconstruction of femininity this book examines. Each of the
following chapters will take the female body as its point of departure. Analyzing
the construction of femininity at mid-century, they will bring to light how the mid-
Victorian woman’s body registered the tensions of the period and revealed woman’s
position in society. The first chapters will deal with stories—stories which seem to
bind the female body and which, by implication, foreground the extent to which
‘woman’ is bound to representational processes.
Chapter 1, concerning Jean Ingelow’s Mopsa the Fairy (1869), deals with
women’s writing and the fairy-tale tradition of the female storyteller. The chapter
traces how this female tradition was recuperated by male writers in the nineteenth
century, leading women to be confined in male-defined scenarios. The story in which
Mopsa is incarcerated—the fairy queen she is doomed to become—typifies the ways
in which signs and letters construct femininity. Feminine construction appears to be
literally woven into the text, as the narrative spins tales that demonstrate the extent to
which woman is bound to textual representation. As Ingelow sets apart the male and
female realms, she revealingly associates masculinity with a capitalist system and
femininity with language: in the masculine world, consumption enslaves women; in
the feminine universe, female stories enchant men. Thus, Ingelow seemingly offers
11 Wilkie Collins, ‘The Unknown Public’, My Miscellanies (London: Samson & Low,
1863), 170–71.
women a voice of their own away from the alienating power of consumer culture.
This power, however, is soon undercut when Mopsa realizes that she can but repeat
old stories and cannot alter her fate. Freedom is illusory, and Mopsa remains the
creation of a male character who quickly dismisses her from his thoughts.
The image of woman as a male literary creation or as a reflection of male power will
then be investigated further in chapters 2, 3, and 4, which focus on representational
processes and study how figures of speech give shape to the ideal female body
promoted by patriarchal society. George MacDonald’s ‘The Light Princess’ (1864),
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Juliana Horatia Ewing’s
‘Amelia and the Dwarfs’ (1870), and Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses (1874)
will follow chronologically, all offering their readers and their characters stories
dealing with the construction of femininity. They will address alternatively what
being ‘light’, being ‘sweet’ or being ‘dear’ meant for a woman—that is, literally.
Indeed, in these fairy tales and fantasies, the tropes which define femininity bind or
chastise the female body until the heroines fit the feminine ideal. With commercial
culture and threatening commodities—which may be poisoned or changed into cruel
boys pricking and scratching the female body—always lurking in the background
of the narratives, the tales underline how women’s appetites must be controlled,
and teach the little girls how to mould themselves in conformity with dominant
representations of ideal femininity. The hints at contemporary medical issues and
practices which inform the tales, moreover, will provide significant examples of the
links between woman’s biological and social constructions, thereby revealing the
extent to which science acted as a means to figure woman in discourse.
Fashioned as a modern adaptation of Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, George
MacDonald’s ‘The Light Princess’ reveals how figures of speech frame women.
The Victorian cult of the angel-woman conceived ideal femininity as comprising
qualities above all of lightness, but also of passivity and even saintliness. As the
title of MacDonald’s tale suggests, feminine lightness conjures up the cliché of the
disembodied, ethereal Victorian ideal which haunts nineteenth-century fiction as an
illusory model to which women were taught to aspire. Yet, MacDonald’s princess
hardly tames her appetite and gradually stands as a rebellious representation of
female desire. Moreover, because MacDonald’s weightless princess defies the laws
of nature, she engages debate with the idea of woman as essentially governed by
nature, as well as the discourses this idea generates. As the narrative punningly
unveils the various interpretations of the word ‘light’, MacDonald’s princess is
constantly aligned with duplicitous images: whether light-haired or light-heired,
standing for gold and preciousness like most princesses, or for their opposite,
the princess dramatizes the paradox of Victorian gender definitions and becomes
a living image physically staging the danger of emulating a fleshly trope. Thus,
chapter 2 looks at the way MacDonald re-uses Victorian tropes and gives flesh to a
rhetorical image. In this way, I attempt to demonstrate how MacDonald’s tale tames
the fleshly sign which disrupts the fairy tale and prevents conventional closure:
the experiments—ranging from physical torture to scholarly education—the light
princess undergoes—which all aim to subdue her unruly body so that the princess
may regain her gravity and marry—offer a relevant perspective on the construction
of the feminine body, merging physiological and representational concerns.
The medical discourse which informs MacDonald’s fairy tale will be explored
further in chapters 3 and 4, which also feature female ill-health and medical
surveillance. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland contains a ‘secret
kept from all the rest’, which the final trial attempts to investigate and which chapter
3 reveals. Alice, as a representation of the mid-Victorian female consumer, struggles
against her appetite. Moreover, as has long been emphasized by feminist criticism,
one of the most significant features of Carroll’s narrative is the way Carroll’s little girl
changes physically. However, I contend that Alice’s body changing is no evidence
of her gaining empowerment. Alice’s voyage into womanhood is rather a journey
into powerlessness. All through the tale, medical control prevails: the more Alice
grows, shrinks, is deformed, the more the exhibition of her body phrases her own
self-effacement. The codes, texts, and lessons Alice recites gradually suppress her
corporeality. As she drinks and eats, grows and shrinks, Alice discovers a series of
codes which partakes of the construction of proper femininity. Worse, the food she
finds in Wonderland systematically seems to punish her acts of self-assertion, as if
the luring treats which peppered her adventures were devised to tame her appetite
from within. In fact, throughout her journey underground, the little girl’s fantasy
reveals a disciplinary regime which administers and turns the female body into a
text, fragmenting it into parts that match Victorian propriety. Carroll’s play with
words and images—his blurring of the boundaries between female biology and
feminine propriety with ‘sweet’ little girls, his probing of the instability of gender
identities through a little girl’s ramblings in a wonderland teeming with commodities
become alive—thus figures as a significant instance of the changes in representation
which marked the period and transformed women into a series of signs which could
be bought and consumed. Hence the ultimate trial, which stages the masquerade of
the signs that Alice deciphers, the very signs which, she has learnt, construct her
identity and her self.
Chapter 4 then turns to fairy tales and fantasies written by Victorian women
writers in the 1870s, such as Juliana Horatia Ewing and Christina Rossetti. By tapping
into female folklore and reworking the figure of the female teller, both Ewing and
Rossetti foreground the maiming aspects of language, thereby bringing into play
the tensions involved in feminine representation. Like Carroll’s fantasy, Ewing’s
‘Amelia and the Dwarfs’ presents another little girl who falls down into the earth
and experiences a journey through femininity underground, while her double falls ill
above ground. But Amelia interestingly knows more about femininity than her elders,
and her acute sense of taste—as she can tell a fake from an original—positions her
as an interesting female figure likely to rewrite the construction of femininity which
fairy tales are meant to promote. For Ewing’s heroine is literally a very ‘dear’ little
girl who turns woman’s objectification on its head: as the stereoscopic construction
of the fairy tale lays bare the links between the social and biological constructions
of woman, Amelia’s journey underground teaches her that being ‘dear’ for a woman
consists in manipulating one’s body to one’s own ends and never revealing one’s
own nature. Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses, on the other hand, like Jean
Ingelow’s Mopsa the Fairy, both echoes and inverts some of the issues of Carroll’s
Alice, proposing female characters violently handled and wounded by merciless
boys. Rossetti’s heroines can hardly taste the treats which Alice indulges in. On the
contrary, the world they discover through the looking-glass is a nightmarish universe
where little girls must curb their appetites and let the cruel inhabitants of such fairy
worlds crystallize them beneath plate-glass windows. Affiliated with jewels, they
become ‘precious’ little things that can be exhibited and praised.
From the study of representational processes in Ingelow’s, MacDonald’s, and
Carroll’s narratives, chapter 4, therefore, gradually moves towards more visual motifs,
which I shall analyze further in the second part of this study, focusing on sensation
novels. No longer constructed solely from tropes, femininity in sensation fiction
becomes linked to the production of images, and clichés are, in a way, visualized.
The glimpses of commodity culture, which inform the Victorian fairy tales and
fantasies analyzed in the first part of this study, become vital to the plots of sensation
novels in which most of the female characters fabricate new identities. The chapters
dealing with the sensation novel will be roughly chronological. The study will start
with Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely But Too Well (1862) because Broughton situates
her plot in 1851. In Broughton’s novel, the glass coffins which generally frame
fairy-tale princesses become a series of glasshouses, culminating with the use of
the Crystal Palace. As the epitome of consumer culture, Paxton’s Crystal Palace is a
good example of the relationship between femininity and modern culture. Moreover,
Broughton’s novel provides a significant bridge between the worlds of Victorian
fairy tales and that of the sensation novel, as the heroine, associated with flowers and
showcased in glasshouses, is also presented as a Victorian Little Red Ridinghood.
Featuring a female character who can hardly contain her desire, Broughton’s novel
explores discourses on femininity which Dickens, Braddon, and Collins investigate
further through female characters turning themselves into fashionable images and
art curios. As chapter 5 underlines, Broughton metamorphoses the Crystal Palace
into an image of incontinent desire and organic disease. She constructs her heroine
both as an avid consumer and as a commodity. While Broughton thus confuses
woman’s biological and social constructions, like Victorian fairy tales and fantasies,
her consumer backdrop proposes an interesting survey of feminine construction,
thoroughly revising the cultural signposts of her age.
The femininity of the metropolis that Broughton’s novel illustrates will be
analyzed further in chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9, which will then follow chronologically,
focusing on Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady
Audley’s Secret (1861–1862), Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1862), Armadale (1864),
and The Law and the Lady (1875). If Victorian fairy tales and fantasies do not always
suggest that their female characters will experience bliss through marriage, Dickens’s,
Braddon’s, and Collins’s plots represent marriage as a market and foreground women
who skilfully turn themselves into objects to be looked at, thereby showing women’s
subversive use of their own aestheticization. In all these novels, the female characters
make up their own stories as they make up their own bodies, using the modern
tools provided by consumer society. Thus, the detectives must learn to control the
fashion-addicts and to read through the artifices of the feminine ideal. The heroines
appear dangerously malleable, illusory figures whom modernity has transformed
into ‘phantasmagorias’, in Walter Benjamin’s words, pictures luring the onlooker
with the promise of stability and yet constantly hinting at their potential duplicity
as social fictions. Therefore, these chapters explore more thoroughly the impact
of consumer society on constructions of femininity as epitomized by the Crystal
Palace exhibition and emphasize how the workings of feminine representation in
sensation novels reflect a consumer society thriving on artificiality, on beauty aids,
and miraculous cosmetics. The latter are used to fashion an illusory and malleable
woman constructed by and through the signs she consumes and through the products
she applies to her body.
In fact, the novels seek to discover whether feminine identity resides in an act
of consumption which permits the construction of feminine autonomy and self-
definition, or whether the female consumer enters a system in which she is inevitably
subordinated to the male market—to the male appraising gaze—and which turns
female representation into a series of empty signs. Investigating the liberating and
indoctrinating power of consumption in a society based on male domination and
feminine subordination, Victorian sensation novels envisage the double bind that
inheres in feminine consumption.12
In chapter 6, femininity is seen as part of a modern visual culture where posters,
photographs, and paintings act as investigative techniques which trace the female
protagonists’ journeys into crime. Dickens’s Bleak House—sometimes seen as
the first sensation novel—and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret
both play upon heroines emulating the feminine ideal and enticing onlookers. But
Lady Audley and Lady Dedlock are social fictions. In these novels the detectives
must read and decipher the construction of the modern ‘lady’, the perfect face that
outsmarts the codes of physiognomy. As I contend, the sensational body, when
not overtly branded by sin, is, nonetheless, marked by the forces of modern life.
Because the heroines appear as fashionable artefacts designed for visual stimulation,
female aestheticization must be investigated. The detective plots examine the world
of women’s fashion, merging Victorian taxonomy with glossy representations of
British Beauties. Associated with the motif of the fashion plate, reduced to a two-
dimensional image, the sinful and shameful woman can no longer evade the policing
gaze of Victorian authorities.
Chapter 6 offers comparative discussions of Dickens’s and Braddon’s use
of fashion plates as visual instruments used to foreground modes of feminine
representation. Bleak House features a female character who ostensibly exists only
through the reports of the ‘fashionable intelligence’, which prints her whereabouts
and records the traces of her body in black ink. As the novel tries to unveil the past of
Lady Dedlock, the main clue becomes a copperplate in which Lady Dedlock appears
as one of the British Beauties. Hence, chapter 6 investigates the rhetoric of Lady
Dedlock’s photographic portrait to study how Dickens conveys the construction of
criminal femininity through modern techniques of mass-production. On the other
hand, Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret plays upon the proliferation of copies of
the fair domestic angel, ranging from the glowing Pre-Raphaelite portrait of Lady
Audley to her emaciated, working-class replica buried in the churchyard. Yet this
chapter especially investigates a specific clue central to the detective plot: in addition
12 Hilary Radner brings to light this double bind in her study of the female shopper
in Shopping Around: Feminine Culture and the Pursuit of Pleasure (New York and London:
Routledge, 1995).
to analyzing the series of visual doubles the narrative is hinged upon, I examine the
faded photographs in a book of beauties which contains the incriminating clue for
which the detective is looking. Therefore, I demonstrate how, far more subversively
than in Dickens’s Bleak House, Lady Audley’s criminality is to be discovered among
visual clues, paintings, and posters, which all signal how female aestheticization and
commodification marked the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century
and moulded a picture of femininity denied by mainstream realism.
Chapter 7 focuses on Wilkie Collins’s No Name—perhaps one of the sensation
novels which best depicts Victorian society at mid-century—and the way in which,
with the expansion of the middle-class market, women were increasingly targeted
by advertisements. Enticed into buying, the novel seems to claim, women were
lured into revamping themselves to match the ideals promulgated by the market.
If cosmetics were less overtly advertised than quack medicines and cure-alls, both
were largely aimed at female consumers, suggesting that their own transformation
into the perfect lady was possible with the acquisition of beauty creams, hair lotions,
or fashionable corsets. Because they appeared to enable women to engage in self-
definition, creams, tinctures, and pills inevitably seemed to breed female duplicity.
As I argue, this idea forms the linchpin of Collins’s novels. Chapter 7 particularly
shows how the sensational narrative foregrounds and exposes the construction of
the Victorian female consumer. While the heroine masquerades at all times, using
cosmetics to dissimulate incriminating marks and indiscriminately playing parts on
stage as in real life, a minor character, Mrs. Wragge, embodies the gullible female
customer. But Collins’s portrait of his shopping addict is ambivalent. From being
a compulsive buyer, Mrs. Wragge eventually ends up on her husband’s patent
medicine’s wrapping paper. Depicted in an advertisement for ‘The Pill’, and thus
turned into a commodity herself, Mrs. Wragge unconsciously probes the extent to
which cosmetics and pills really empowered women by enabling them to secure
self-definition. As an ultimate form of containment, Captain Wragge’s wondrous
Pill seems to display the yoke of Victorian patriarchal aesthetics: by conflating the
fields of cosmetics and (quack) medicine, Wragge’s Pill reveals the moralizing and
indoctrinating tales which Victorian society promoted. Hence, chapter 7 underlines
the extent to which Collins’s character’s journey from consumer to commodity
reveals Collins’s viewpoint on modern constructions of femininity.
Chapter 8, on Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, continues the discussion of the preceding
chapter. In Armadale the figure of the actress once again haunts the stage of Victorian
domesticity. Yet the heroine’s construction is even more grounded on a transgressive
use of cosmetics. Lydia Gwilt bears a resemblance to Madeleine Smith, who was
accused of murder and who claimed to have bought arsenic for cosmetic purposes.
Moreover, Gwilt’s closest adviser is Mrs. Oldershaw, a minor character modelled on
Rachel Leverson, famous for her miraculous cosmetics and charged with fraud. While
the novel uses Snow White and the figure of the vain Queen as a discreet subtext, the
text also plays on contemporary allusions to real cases in which cosmetics were used
both as a fatal weapon and as a typically feminine accessory to beautify the female
complexion and to conceal disgraceful age marks. The boudoir functions as the wing
of the Victorian stage and becomes the locus of murderous plots. However, Lydia
Gwilt does not need make-up to charm males. Interestingly, the character seems to
denounce the artificiality of cosmetics. She simply uses the mirror as a technical
adviser in her criminal plots, a tool designed to inspire her when she devises her new
parts. The protagonist’s ambiguous position, simultaneously very close to Madeleine
Smith and seemingly very different in her refusal to use cosmetics, is fraught with
meaning. Gwilt gradually appears as a reflecting surface exposing the abuses of a
society which constructs women as dangerous fakes, while also demanding that they
should appear what they are and be what they appear. Thus, chapter 8 uses Collins’s
novel as a good example of sensationalism’s critique of a consumer society which
bases female identity on disguise and artificiality. Analyzing the links between
Armadale and nineteenth-century women’s magazines, which advised their female
customers on the new cosmetics available on the market, I demonstrate how Collins
foregrounds Victorian ideology and voices female rebellion. This eventually leads
me to question the validity of Wilkie Collins’s perspective. Ostensibly denouncing
a culture promoting women as dangerous artefacts and threatening copies of the
feminine ideal, Collins makes cosmetics appear as a double-edged female weapon
meant to fool men and entrap them into marriage, but also, paradoxically, as a deadly
substance likely to imprison women in a vicious circle where they may eventually
lose touch with their own identity.
Chapter 9 prolongs the conclusion of the preceding chapter regarding Collins’s
views on cosmetics and the issue of female commodification. However this
time, Collins’s sensationalism flirts even more with Gothic effects. In this late
novel, Collins strongly relies on stereotypical Gothic imagery to cast light on the
construction of the ideal complexion of the artificial angel cherished by Victorian
patriarchal culture. In fact, The Law and the Lady overtly foregrounds the dangers
of commodified femininity. As a typical detective novel—gradually departing from
sensationalism to merge with detective fiction—the novel, nevertheless, assembles
standard Gothic devices in order to build up the tension to a dramatic climax: Has
the heroine married a criminal? Is he going to murder her as he murdered his first
wife? Significantly, Collins’s novel relies on Gothic clichés not merely to shortcut
the mystery of the male protagonist as another murderous Gothic villain, but also
to investigate the construction of feminine identity within patriarchal society. As a
new version of Bluebeard and female curiosity, The Law and the Lady plays upon
embedded secrets and texts which the heroine must decode to clear her husband
of the crime and, thereby, to define her own identity. Gradually, the text leads us
into a macabre world where cosmetics play the part of the villain. For the criminal
weapon is no less than arsenic, the domestic poison Victorian women would absorb
to improve their complexions. Hence, chapter 9 analyzes how sensationalism’s
representation of femininity relies on the Gothic as a narrative matrix. As I argue,
feminine identity in Collins’s novel is reflected through modernized Gothic devices:
old trunks concealing manuscripts become toilet-cases with secret compartments
which hide beauty products. Hence, Collins’s modern Gothic, I contend, sheds new
light on Victorian feminine practices the better to denounce them. Having examined
Victorian women’s practices with regard to arsenic consumption and the construction
of the female complexion, chapter 9 thus explores how beauty accessories regulate
and sculpt femininity and are used as vehicles through which to manage the female
body.
From examples of little girls being literally and physically moulded to the pattern
of ideal femininity in Victorian fairy tales and fantasies to sensational heroines
turning themselves into attractive objects to seduce men, this study embarks on an
expedition through the looking-glass, into a realm where women debunk definitions
of femininity privileged by men, and illuminates the changes which the rise of
consumer culture entailed in the construction of ideal femininity.
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Chapter One
‘That that is, is’

The Bondage of Stories in
Jean Ingelow’s Mopsa The Fairy (1869)
‘That that is, is; and when it is, that is the reason that it is.’1
Weaving the Threads of Feminine Representation
As illustrated by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland whose final

trial shows Alice trying to hold the pen which might enable her to rewrite her self,
patriarchal Western culture forbids women the pen. Standing as a representation of
power ‘made flesh’,2 the literary text is fathered, in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s
terms, by ‘an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like
his penis’3—hence, the impossibility for woman to bring it to being. In the field of fairy
tales, however, the story of women’s struggle for the pen is a long battle. Before the
nineteenth century, folk tales and fairy tales were a feminine province. Oral folklore
was passed on from old women of low status to little girls, from nurses to children,
with the recurrent figure of Mother Goose, as the ‘typical purveyor of old wives’
tales.’4 Both grotesque and wise, sententious and foolish, Mother Goose focused
her stories on young women, hinging the plots most significantly on the particular
event which governs woman’s life: marriage. The figure of the teller thus shaped
the fairy-tale mode as a repository of female experience and of female viewpoint.
Regarded as a marginal genre associated with the lower classes, with oral lore and
unofficial culture, primitive knowledge, it gave women the opportunity to phrase
their experience, even if, as Marina Warner suggests, this body of stories figuring
1 Jean Ingelow, Mopsa the Fairy [1869], in Nina Auerbach, U.C. Knoepflmacher
(eds), Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers (Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 215–316, 300. Subsequent references
to this edition will be given in the text.
2 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press,
[1978] 1984), 6.
3 Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 6.
4 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
(London: Vintage, [1994] 1995), 79.
wicked stepmothers and disobedient heroines ‘defame[d] them … profoundly.’5
Moreover, as Mother Goose’s stories gradually invaded dominant culture in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth century, being retold by précieuses, this aboriginal
female wisdom left the margin to settle in salons and voice women’s power.6 By
means of narrators holding the threads of complex and intricate stories and deciding
the characters’ fate, or through female characters casting spells and playing with
language, women could voice their discontent and abandon the confining working-
class model of the fairy-tale teller for the more glamorous figure of the fairy-tale
woman writer.
But women did not long remain the ‘guardians of language’, in Warner’s words.7
Mother Goose was soon recaptured by male writers and collectors eager to give their
stories a touch of authenticity. In this way, the feminine territory of the fairy tale was
gradually colonized.8 When the Brothers Grimm refashioned fairy tales in the 1830s,
they manifestly instilled dominant (male) social standards in children’s narratives
so as to educate and police children.9 Hence their framing of the tales as cautionary
or exemplary tales where women are either idiots, or cruelly punished for their
sins, from being starved to being dismembered.10 The brutality of the punishments
inflicted on female characters in early nineteenth-century tales11 demonstrates the
influence of patriarchal ideology on the tales’ morality: on the literary battlefield,
5 Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 209–10.

6 As Marina Warner explains, eighteenth-century précieuses revisited the oral
folk traditions to voice women’s power but radically changed the image of Mother Goose.
Far from the traditional old crones, they were high-class female writers revolting against
the dominant culture and protesting against the double standard. Their denunciation of the
marital institution and their praise of celibacy rendered them strongly subversive (see From
the Beast to the Blonde). Similarly, E.W. Harries emphasizes the figure of the female teller
as an educated woman and refuses ‘the association of the fairy tales with the primitive, with
the folk, and with the oral tradition’ (Twice upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of
the Fairy Tale [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], 24). Significantly, eighteenth-
century précieuses’ tales foregrounded their ‘timeliness’, to quote Harries’s expression, and
were ‘consciously invented as a complex and ironic comment on the historical moment in
which they were produced’ (Twice, 24).
7 Harries, Twice, 170.
8 See Auerbach, Knoepflmacher (eds), Forbidden Journeys, 7.
9 See Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for
Children and the Process of Civilization (London: Heinemann, 1983), 28.
10 Most of the Brothers Grimm’s tales punish sinful female characters by crushing
them or tearing them into pieces. In ‘Clever Elsie’, Elsie must prove that she is clever enough
to marry, but she also proves idle, and her husband punishes her by making her believe she
is not Elsie; she runs away and is never seen again. In ‘Frau Trude’, the disobedient girl is
turned into a block of wood and thrown into the hearth to burn. ‘Fitcher’s Bird’ is a version of
Bluebeard in which two sisters, led by their curiosity, are killed and cut into pieces until the
third sister gathers their body pieces and reanimates them.
11 See Maria Tatar, Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
‘That that is, is’ 19
women were beating a retreat, and their narratives hardly sounded as militant as
those of their foremothers.12
In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, not only did fairy tales
blossom in England—while they had been so far distrusted by a Puritan culture
praising reason and condemning imaginative genres—but they also ostensibly
reworked the ideological indoctrination of children that traditional tales, like those
by Perrault or the Brothers Grimm, aimed at. The bourgeois codes of conduct which
mark the tales of the Brothers Grimm and later those of Hans Christian Andersen
were revised in the second half of the nineteenth century when the discourse of the
1860s experimental fairy tales and fantasies denounced the norms and manners of
society in a radical way. Turning morality upside down, the Victorian fairy tales
welcomed their readers through the looking-glass, and the fairy tale became a
potentially subversive territory whose links with Victorian reality were strengthened
the better to voice protests against the dominant culture. Because the innocence
of Victorian children remained unquestioned, subversion was more likely to go
uncensored in children’s literature after 1860,13 and fairy tales could thus easily
become double-edged. They could either feature the romantic scenario awaiting
the heroine or subversively expose the preset plot-pattern which denies the heroine
freedom both literally and textually. Often hovering between romance and reality,
poised between fairy realms and domestic realism, Victorian fairy tales and fantasies
manifestly bridged a significant gap between two alien lands, emphasizing fairy
ideals in order to underline the inadequacy of the fairy-tale mode in the exploration
of women’s lives and predicaments in patriarchal society.
As suggested, when the eighteenth-century French conteuses took up the pen
in aristocratic salons and reworked their female ancestors’ story-telling into an
aesthetic literary activity, they ambiguously positioned themselves between low and
high culture, simultaneously drawing on a female literary subculture and stealing
a male prerogative. Mediating ‘between the male artist and the Unknown’,14 these
women writers of fairy tales epitomized the figure of the woman writer, excluded
from culture, and which Gilbert and Gubar construe as ‘an embodiment of just
those extremes of mysterious and intransigent Otherness.’15 Because they precisely
dealt with fantasy’s dark underworlds, inhabited by goblins and witches, they could
explore from their own viewpoint the male images on the surface of the glass which
imprison women as angelic or monstrous extremes, through clichés binding both
12 Jack Zipes terms this colonization a ‘patriarchalization [of] matriarchal mythology’

(Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, 7). However, it is interesting to note, following
U.C. Knoepflmacher, that mid-Victorian fantasies rarely feature powerful patriarchs, as the
examples of the King of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or the White and Red
Kings in Through the Looking-Glass suggest. On the other hand, if, as Knoepflmacher argues,
‘the matriarchs in these same fantasies are usually endowed with extraordinary powers’, their
power remains yet illusory. See U.C. Knoepflmacher, Ventures into Childland: Victorians,
Fairy Tales, and Femininity (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998),
16.
female characters and women writers. By snatching up the male pen, they could
rewrite the female body, foreground female power, or denounce tales precast by
masculine preference.
This idea is even more significant for Victorian fairy-tale writers and fantasists
writing against the backdrop of Darwinian theories of biological and cultural
evolution. Featuring heroines fighting against their own bestial greed, their own
otherness, Victorian fairy-tale writers and fantasists probed the texture of women’s
literature even deeper. Their underworlds tackled Otherness through heroines and
texts dangerously hovering on the outskirts of the dominant culture and provided
a relevant means of penetrating the looking-glass of the dominant realistic order.
Indeed, while the fairy tales of the 1860s and 1870s aimed to undercut the dominant
culture, Victorian women fairy-tale writers and fantasists particularly underlined the
constraining processes that inhered in the preset plot-patterns of such tales and which
haunted Victorian narratives more generally, as ideal case scenarios. If the prevalent
association of women and children throughout the nineteenth century did not make
it easier for women writers to write fantasies, the wilder romances of women fantasy
writers of the 1860s and 1870s testified to the idea that women writers—unlike
most contemporary male writers—hardly sought to stunt their heroines’ growth in
childhood.16 On the contrary, fairy tales and fantasies were a means of pointing out
their own situation and of debunking and revisiting the clichés and stereotypes that
served to further their definition as passive angels crystallized in glass coffins and
palaces. Making explicit how tales concealed a ‘harshly realistic core’17 beneath their
fairy surface, women writers used wonders in order to move along a continuum
between the real and the fantastic. Throughout the narratives, the real and the fantastic
fuel one another, and fairy tales cloak women’s harsh reality in order to enable women
to investigate their own construction from a distance. Women’s reappropriation of a
genre fraught with patriarchal and normative constructs casts, therefore, new light
on Victorian reality, redefining reality through fairy tales and fantasies hovering
between antagonistic realms, but never really severed from reality.
Textually speaking, in most of the fairy tales and fantasies of the era, the links
between fantasy and Victorian reality are often operated through some modern
revisiting of the clichés which conventionally frame woman. In Carroll’s Alice, as
we shall see, the prevalence of signification problems in the fantasy world posits
signs and letters as key figures standing between the real and the magic realm,
turning the latter into an experimental place in which to envision the workings of
representational codes. As female identity stems from tropes such as, for instance,
sweet little girls who literally feed on treacle and become sweet, as cards are numbers,
or even, in Tenniel’s illustration, as the hatter proudly wears a hat of his own making
which figures its price, the heroine discovers that her self is made up of such signs.
As we shall see, slowly becoming semioticized, Alice’s journey through language is
also a journey through consumer culture until she finally becomes commodified as
fragile ware in Through the Looking-Glass: ‘Lass, handle with care.’ The very glass
metaphor incarcerates her into a cliché, both literary and visual, as shall be seen

17 Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, xvii.
in chapter 5. For Victorian women fantasists, on the other hand, if such modernity
sometimes underlies the narratives, their use of the fairy-tale mode generally plays
less with such defamiliarizing processes than it questions the way in which an
originally feminine genre can define female writing and feminine identity. While
hints at consumer culture are discreetly encoded, their exploration of signs and
letters is embedded in a general discourse on representation which underlines the
limits of female creativity and freedom and heightens woman’s incarceration by
literary devices.
Indeed, Victorian women fantasists frequently revisit representations of female
literary activity by drawing on the fairy-tale mode and revivify the tradition of the old
storyteller or female weaver in order to examine how women’s plots pictured woman.
Rather than offering an alternative version of reality, their use of fantasy functions
as a means of exploring the genre’s representational tools and of ‘repossess[ing]
an imaginative tradition they regard as their own.’18 In fact, by reappropriating a
feminine mode of writing, fairy-tale women writers lay bare their own viewpoint on
traditional modes of feminine representation and propose a bleak picture of fantasy’s
potential power where woman can hardly escape male-defined images.
Jean Ingelow (1820–1897) was a Victorian writer, praised and promoted by
John Ruskin, who published her first work anonymously (A Rhyming Chronicle
of Thoughts and Feelings) in 1850. Though she was modest and self-effaced, her
fame was sealed with the success of her first volume of poems, published in 1863,
followed by The Story of Doom and Other Poems in 1867; her last volume of poems
was published in 1885. Ingelow could write both novels for adults (Allerton and
Dreux [1851], Off the Skelligs [1872], Fated to be Free [1875], Sarah de Bergener
[1879], John Jerome [1886]) and juvenile literature. Her children’s fiction, Studies
for Stories (1864), Stories Told to a Child (1865), and A Sister’s Bye-Hours (1868)
are collections of her contributions to the evangelical Youth’s Magazine under the
pseudonym of ‘Orris.’ If her poems contain little feminism, her fiction features
women trying to break free from a patriarchal society ruled by laws unfair to women.
In Sarah de Bergener, Hannah Dill inherits money from her uncle and decides to
use it to free herself from her husband, a convicted criminal, to whom the money
legally belongs. In another significant instance, Mopsa the Fairy, Ingelow clearly
reworks Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: a boy finds fairies, one
of whom, Mopsa, is to become a queen. The fantasy then traces Mopsa’s journey
from innocence to experience: Ingelow’s heroine, ruling over her kingdom, seems
fated to yield to some scripture sentencing her to grow into a woman. In fact, Mopsa
experiences the construction of femininity as a literary journey where tales are
woven and femininity is elaborated on skeins. Confined within stories, Mopsa is
imprisoned by enchanted words. Revealingly, these words which enslave women
are bound to material culture and pinpoint the links between feminine representation
and Victorian consumer society.
18 Knoepflmacher, Ventures into Childland, 31.

1.1 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Maids of Elfen Mere, 1855. From William
Allingham, ‘The Maids of Elfen Mere’, in The Music Master: A Love Story and
Two Series of Day and Night Songs (London: Routledge, 1855).
Ingelow’s Fairyland and the Marketplace
In his illustration for William Allingham’s poem ‘The Maids of Elfen Mere’ (1855),
Dante Gabriel Rossetti brings into play unexplored aspects of the narrative and
foregrounds the invisible threads which fuel many a fairy tale and upon which
Ingelow’s Mopsa the Fairy draws. Indeed, in ‘The Maids of Elfen Mere’ three
enchanting fairies spin and sing every night and vanish once the clock strikes eleven.
Bewitched and enamoured, a young man puts the clock back one night so that the
fairies may remain longer. But at eleven, the three fairies melt into the lake, leaving
but three blood stains. Unlike Allingham, instead of positioning the three fairies as
victims of man’s desire and letting their bodies melt away, Rossetti chooses to play
upon the etymology of the word ‘fairy’ to represent the women as powerful and
potentially threatening.
Originally, the word ‘fairy’ derives from a Latin feminine word, fata, a variant
of fatum (fate), itself referring to a goddess of destiny and literally meaning that
which is spoken.19 Fairies can thus both tell the past and the future. Interestingly, in
Rossetti’s illustration, the three fairies are fashioned as three tall women mesmerized
by the spindles they are holding. As a representation of the threefold nature of time—
the past, already wound around the spindle, the present, illustrated by the thread
drawn between their fingers, and the future twined on the distaff20—Rossetti’s fairies
metamorphose into Fates as the young man, sitting on the floor, looks away from
their medusa-like gaze. Rossetti’s illustration of women holding the thread of life
illuminates the power inherent in women’s spinning, whether literally or figuratively
spinning stories as Mother Goose. Female stories act like scriptures and become a
dangerous activity where man is cast out of the realm of female imagination.
The image of women as tellers and foretellers detaining power abounds all
through the Victorian era. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting of his entranced wife in
Beata Beatrix (1864), envisioning her own death and hovering between the realms
of the living and the dead, is a stunning mid-century representation of woman as
seer or sybil. Metamorphosing from victim to powerful queen, as Nina Auerbach
suggests, woman ‘shak[es] off the idiom of victimization’21 to exhibit matriarchal
power. At the opening of George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), the hero discovers
a tiny woman in his father’s old secretary. Drawn by the perfection of her shape, he
attempts to touch her. However, she introduces herself as his grandmother. Being
two hundred and thirty-seven years old, she derides him for not knowing about his
great-grandmothers. Because he refuses to believe in fairyland, she sends him into
a fairy country where women and embedded tales direct his journey. Similarly in
Mopsa the Fairy, Ingelow contrasts the male and female imagination, having an
unimaginative hero entering a realm ruled by female stories. While the narrative is
framed by the hero’s nurse reading a storybook and the hero’s mother closing the
tale with a ballad, the narrative falls into two parts. The first part recounts Jack’s
19 See Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 14–15.

20 Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 15.
21 Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 39.
journey once he has found four tiny fairies in a nest. Positioned as a hero protecting
his magical creatures, Jack visits several countries, flying to these fairy lands on
an albatross named ‘Jenny’ whose name he must remember if he wants to return to
the real world. But Jack’s fantastic venture hardly alienates the young boy. In most
of the lands he discovers, markets welcome him and illustrate his autonomy as the
hero who masters the economy. Jack has money, learns to handle it in countries
where the worth of real money varies, bargains with the male sellers and buys wares,
from gingerbread and stockings to a slave—carefully avoiding buying or accepting
anything from women. Jack’s fantasy sphere remains thoroughly male-dominated,
with capitalism as the ruling economy. If Jack’s money is shown to have no intrinsic
value, it, nonetheless, figures as a sign of power typically linked to the male
protagonist. Once he buys a female slave and frees her from the market economy,
however, he enters a Fairyland where golden coins have been replaced by golden
threads and stories are woven by enchanting fairies. One of his fairies, Mopsa, then
becomes the heroine in the second part of the narrative. She grows and learns her
letters so that she may tell stories in her turn, while Jack is slowly cast off from the
female realm and sent back to reality.
Ingelow’s two worlds clearly align capitalism with masculinity and foreground
women as victims of the capitalist order. Women can be bought and sold and are
part of an exchange scheme they cannot control. In his discussion of consumption
in his 1844 manuscript ‘On Money’, Marx uses the figure of the whore as one of
his multiple and shifting metaphors. Aligning money and prostitution, Marx implies
that the power which inheres in money is ultimately male. As Elizabeth K. Helsinger
contends, Marx’s text suggests that what women have to fear ‘is not (or not just)
the alienated power of money, but the efforts of men to reappropriate that power
by buying women.’22 Likewise, in Ingelow’s fantasy, as soon as women appear as
agents of consumption, they risk being purchased, showing the extent to which
consumption, even if highlighted as a feminine activity, remains ultimately controlled
by men. The female consumer thus reflects male power, and the marketplace but
stages woman’s powerlessness. The feminine world, on the other hand, is governed
by language. Female words give shape to a new reality, a realm in which man is
powerless and dependent. Like Rossetti’s illustration, Ingelow’s fantasy world
hinges on the association between fairies and fate as it cuts man from the fantasy
world and fashions a seemingly powerful and exclusively feminine sphere. Ingelow
foregrounds woman as both holding the thread of the future and subjected to precast
texts. All abiding by the tautological motto ‘That that is, is; and when it is, that is
the reason that it is’ (300), Ingelow’s fairies experience simultaneous power and
victimization. Their stories bewitch and affirm women’s power, but they also phrase
binding and maiming words which adumbrate woman’s predicament and preclude
escape. The female alternative world appears then as an illusory attempt to offer
woman a story of her own and words to define her own being.
22 Elizabeth K. Helsinger, ‘Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina

Rossetti’s ‘‘Goblin Market”’, in Joseph Bristow (ed.), Victorian Women Poets: Emily Brontë,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti (Houndsmill, Basingstoke, and London:
Macmillan, 1995), 189–222, 207.
In Ingelow’s fantasy world, therefore, women spin stories and record time. As their
mouths shape words, their bodies register the past, the present, and hold the keys to
the future. Yet such power is debunked from the beginning by a series of hints which
sap woman’s ability to spin time—and thus stories. To revive the tradition of the old
storyteller, Ingelow’s fantasy world is situated in a mythic past, ‘long ago’ (270),
long before Jack was born and long before civilization started. Having travelled back
in time, Jack discovers a realm where time seems to be inverted and bodily ageing
reversed. Horses grow young again once they die in the real world; the Fairy Queen
first appears to Jack as an old woman and slowly gets younger and more beautiful.
But the flexibility of time, archetypal of the marvellous, is quickly subjected to a
more realistic order. In one of the countries Jack visits, women’s bodies literally
embody time. They are ironically fashioned like clocks and compared to goods sold
on the market. Affiliated with commodities, the women have holes at the back of their
heads designed to wind them up while their pulses have been replaced by a ticking
noise.23 The woman’s mechanized bodies, thus reified and captured by the capitalist
economy, signal their powerlessness: they are unable to handle time in the same
way as they are incapable of turning the keys at the back of their own heads to stay
alive. The women’s capacity to manage time is, therefore, in vain. It foreshadows
the narrative’s main concern: as a revision of Carroll’s Alice, recounting a little girl’s
inexorable growth into womanhood, Ingelow’s tale tackles Mopsa’s growth into
a fairy queen and registers her physical changes from a tiny fairy kept in Jack’s
pocket to a woman who physically and mentally outgrows the childish boy. Hence,
as her body is physically marked by the passing of time, visually growing older in a
realm where physical ageing is turned upside down, Mopsa’s journey through time
is dramatized and projected onto her physical metamorphoses.
The tale’s emphasis on the female body’s painful growth is, in addition, made
explicit through numerous scenes where the body is cut, distorted, dismembered, or
changes shape. From the beginning, Jack risks having a hole bored in his head, like
the clock-like women. Moreover, other figures of physical mangling are interspersed
throughout the narrative. The fairies’ heads are pecked off and their eyes risk being
picked out by greedy ravens; parrots’ heads are pulled off to reveal fairies, people’s
legs are cut off, dogs seem to gnaw people’s feet, wings are bitten off and grow
again, and people must shrink if taller than the queen. All in all, Ingelow’s Fairyland
is a dangerous country where physical experiences prevail, and where Mopsa is to
outgrow the one-foot-one fairies: she must leave the protective male who has kissed
her and crystallized her into a child-like fairy wearing a white frock and blue sack.
Denying the male fairy-tale scenario which locks the woman forever into a child-
like state, this Fairyland foregrounds the female body’s growth and even ultimately
expels the male from a female land. Revealingly, Ingelow conceives female growth
as tied to another scenario: a script where words morph and maim and act as so
many sentences on the female body. If Mopsa is to be educated into femininity, she
23 Ingelow may be referring here to Pierre Jacquet-Droz (1721–1790), a Swiss-born

watchmaker who designed and built animated dolls, in order to help his firm sell watches and
mechanical birds. His most famous automatas, the Draughtsman, the Musicienne, and the
Writer, were presented in 1774.
not only needs to behave properly as she grows up, to stop eating with her fingers,
wiping wine with her white frock, and daubing her face with buttered muffins. She
also needs to learn her letters, that is, to learn the ‘fatal F’ which is in the name
of Old Mother Fate, and which cannot be taken out of the alphabet (268). Thus,
female education is a linguistic journey where words shape the female body. The
performative power of words pervades indeed the fantasy realm where things are
to be what they are named and ‘words [are] everything’ (301), and where the Fairy
Queen’s stories—and later Mopsa’s stories—bewitch listeners and put them to sleep.
Ostensibly dangerous and exhibiting female power, words are, nonetheless, double-
edged. The spells they cast on listeners are binding words likely to incarcerate the
tellers in their turn.
As a matter of fact, the female stories throughout the narrative all recount
women’s confinement within male-dominated systems. When Jack first meets the
Fairy Queen, she appears as a slave sold on the market by a cruel master who is
unsatisfied with her work. The master-slave relationship is superseded by the
economic system to which the woman is tied. Constructed in terms of utility (‘that’s
a useful body enough’ [251]), fashioned as a commodity bought and discarded at
will, the woman cannot be freed from her master unless the buyer offers his most
valuable coin. Ingelow’s consumer backdrop illuminates women’s enslavement by
featuring women as prisoners of male economy, as likely to suffer or to be struck by
those who have the money as the slave-woman’s master exemplifies. Furthermore,
when Jack buys the slave-woman, her commodification is dramatized by her fairy
metamorphosis. Jack’s money buys her a comb and a ribbon, and she uses the beauty
accessories to perform her painful changes. With tears in her eyes, her golden hair
covers her entirely, as a living representation of the coin that has bought her, and
the magical elements typically linked to femininity turn into so many weapons
incarcerating woman within the male market.
Ironically, Jack first seems to be the victim of the women he meets at the markets
he visits. Everywhere about the fantasy world, eerily abandoned markets full of stalls
exhibiting toys, baskets, fruits, butter, or vegetables entice the passer-by who must
resist consumer temptation. As Jack manages to control his desire and does not steal
any goods, he meets the slave-woman who has stolen and thrown away his socks and
proposes the new ones she is making instead. At another market abounding in clocks
and musical boxes, swords and dirks, splendid silks and small carpets, a fairy disguised
as a gipsy woman, who sells fairies, sings a song which triggers consumer desire and
must not be listened to. If Ingelow seems here to rework Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin
Market’, published seven years before, which features a gullible female customer
who cannot resist the goblin’s cries and turns her body into a marketable commodity
by selling one of her locks in order to taste the goblins’ fruits,24 her fantasy does not
simply invert Rossetti’s poem. In fact, the women are dangerous because they are
themselves already enslaved to the male economic system: Jack must not accept
the old woman’s socks since the slave-woman, being part of the market economy,
will then own the feet that wear her socks. If women’s voices or goods seem to
24 Like Mopsa the Fairy, ‘Goblin Market’ engages with the changing definition of
femininity when viewed from the standpoint of a booming consumer society. As suggested,
Laura can only taste the goblins’ fruits by selling one of her locks. In exchanging one of her body
parts, Laura turns her body into a marketable commodity: her golden hair becomes a golden
coin, enslaving the heroine to the goblins’ economic system. Revealingly, Rossetti reworks
the clichés of ideal femininity (the heroines’ golden hair or pearl-like tears) to expose them
as so many signs of objectification, literalizing in a way the similes of feminine preciousness.
Gold—the cornerstone of heroine description in Victorian fiction, metonymically standing
for ideal femininity—is here subversively disclosed as being its society’s leading principle,
incarnating, in Shoshana Felman’s words, ‘the economic principle of substitution and
replacement, the very principle of endless circulation of screening substitutes and their blind
fetishization’ (Shoshana Felman, What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference
[Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993], 61). Thus, in exposing the clichés
of heroine description, Rossetti not only reveals femininity as an empty signifier, but as a
signifier that can only signify by being inscribed within Victorian economics, that is, within
a system whereby the feminine identity is subsumed under the male authority and the female
body acts as the key to the woman’s entrance into the male system of exchange. Even more
subversively, Rossetti furthers the literalization of her heroine in emblematic verses which
figure Laura’s stretched neck when she steps on the marketplace and is lured by the goblins’
cry. Paradoxically, stereotypical images of feminine grace, purity, or passivity (the swan, the
lily, the vessel) merge with the visualization of the heroine’s unrestrained desire; the more she
stretches her neck, the more the similes multiply on top of one another (‘like’):
Laura stretched her gleaming neck
Like a rush-impedded swan,
Like a lily from the back,
Like a moonlit poplar branch,
Like a vessel at the launch
When its last restraint is gone.
Laura’s towering neck, visualized by the vertical form shaped by the ‘likes’, thus
simultaneously figures the pitfall to which her desire may lead her. Interestingly, the more the
poem literally builds up Laura’s desire in stereotypical Victorian similes, the more Laura falls
into objectification and commodification: the vertical towering of similes visually changes her
body into an object, a valuable commodity, as if she literally embodied the tropes of desire.
She has become what she desired and is now part of the market economy. In addition, the
woman’s body is not only fictionalized by the language of representation but further rendered
chimerical by the products it consumes: once on the market, the fallen heroine’s moral decay
is crystallized on her bodily appearance. Her thin grey hair testifies to the illusory beauty of
the woman who succumbs to the lure of consumption, to the illusory pleasure of consumption
itself.
entice Jack to consume, women are therefore more dangerously imprisoned by the
capitalist economy. Unlike the male hero, women cannot resist the call of desire.
More significantly than the tale of the enslaved Fairy Queen, the story of the apple-
woman Jack encounters registers the way the market economy locks women up. As
a seller sitting at her stand with apples, cherries and nuts, the apple-woman—a real
woman—remains confined in Fairyland because of her addiction to consumption:
she refuses to give up her life of comfort where she can have everything she wishes
for and return to poverty in the real world. Bound to a world of endless consumption,
the apple-woman makes explicit how Ingelow’s Fairyland is hinged upon a capitalist
spiral: female songs and wares threaten to enchain consumers while the women are
themselves enchained to the economic system.
If Ingelow illustrates here the danger that men encounter with female consumers,
she also underlines how such stories of female enslavement act as so many
punishments. While the apple-woman is compelled to abandon her children in the
real world for the sake of luxury, the Fairy Queen, who wanted to see the world and
entered a tall tower in a town away from her own country, has been punished for her
search for independence and turned into a slave while her people were sent to sleep.
Ingelow revises here the patriarchal order ruling the tale of Sleeping Beauty. The
princess is not crystallized through sleep, like her people, but through slavery. In this
way, the changes in the scenario rewrite feminine powerlessness into an economic
subservience to the male market. While Sleeping Beauty cannot wake up without the
prince’s kiss, the Fairy Queen cannot be freed from the market until a man buys her.
As the story suggests, then, women are held prisoner by the charming promises of
material culture, realizing that, like the tower which was nothing but water enchanted
into the likeness of stone, such promises act like spells depriving them of their
freedom. Moreover, Ingelow subtly hints at the way in which the rise of material
culture marches hand-in-hand with the development of new forms of representation
grounded in the beguiling power of language. The Fairy Queen’s story illustrates
how potential consumers, dazzled by enchanted water, are lured into consuming
signs rather than objects, an idea furthered in the second part of the fantasy, where
the world of beguiling images is replaced by a land where words prevail.
Spinning Stories: Women’s Fatal Words
When the narrative leaves the masculine realm of capitalism, Sleeping Beauty’s
dangerous spindle seems to turn into a weapon which women handle deftly. As the
second part of the narrative underlines, the old woman’s knitting of socks, which
might have enslaved Jack to the capitalist economy, metamorphoses into a weaving
of stories where, this time, the female imagination is likely to bewitch man. To free
the Fairy Queen from the male economy, Jack must think of something he likes
better than his half-crown. He chooses a piece of the Queen’s silken robe, which
she has made with the ribbon she bought. The Fairy Queen then leads Jack into
Fairyland on a boat, which can only be towed by fairies holding silken threads and
which ‘looked no stronger than the silk that ladies sew with’ (258).
The image of the thread woven into a robe or towed into the Fairyland behind the
purple mountains marks the second part of the plot where fays, fables, and fate chime
and women tell fatal stories. But their stories, linked to female attire through the
silken thread, open onto a glimmering world where appearances can be deceptive. In
this female world, only lady fairies welcome Jack (Jack’s only male fairy, Jovinian,
suddenly vanishes), and Jack forgets the name of Jenny, the female albatross which
had taken him into fairyland, as soon as he hears the queen’s first story. Confined
in the female world because of his linguistic amnesia and mesmerized by female
words, Jack travels through an underground cavern leading to Fairyland through a
little round window of blue and yellow and green glass. The image of the cave to
mark the entrance to Fairyland posits the fantasy world as an exclusively female
world. In their influential feminist study of women’s writing, Gilbert and Gubar
highlight the significance of the cave as a female place which both signals woman’s
power and woman’s plight. The cave, as a representation of women’s ‘metaphorical
access to the dark knowledge’ is a ‘cave of power’ where the Weaver Woman weaves
destiny.25 Simultaneously, the cave is the very illustration of how woman’s ‘cave-
shaped anatomy is her destiny’,26 that is, of how the cave imprisons more than it
empowers woman.
The second part of the fantasy explores this paradox. Having gone through
the coloured glass, the narrative takes an inverse run and leaves the male market
economy for an underground world ruled by the female mind. Indeed, while the
Fairy Queen tells Jack about her punishment, her powerful words ironically invert
the scenario of Sleeping Beauty and send listeners to sleep. Moreover, the Fairy
Queen’s stories do not recount what has happened but what is going to happen.
Signposting female power, her words, ruled by the fierce tautology of ‘That that is,
is’, nevertheless feature the inescapability of fate for Mopsa. The stories of the future
tell of Mopsa’s inevitable growth and unavoidable confinement in another story. As
Mopsa’s name enters the Fairy Queen’s story, Mopsa enters confining scriptures.
Her growth is paralleled with her entrance into a precast scenario: the more she
grows, the more she is turned into a character. As the Fairy Queen’s story tells,
since Mopsa is to become a Fairy Queen, she must leave this Fairyland for another
Fairyland where ‘it is fated that Mopsa is to reign’ (281). And this Fairyland is itself
defined through stories. A rumour says that in that country ‘they shut up their queen
in a great castle, and cover her with a veil, and never let the sun shine on her’ (282).
Recounting the past and/or foretelling the future, the story within the Fairy Queen’s
story adumbrates Mopsa’s gradual imprisonment in a series of stories like so many
concentric circles.
Mopsa must, therefore, leave the protection of the patronizing male for a female
realm defined by woven stories. As she gets ready for her journey, Mopsa revealingly
pulls a silken thread from Jack’s purse and stretches it into a cloak. Like the Fairy
Queen who uses Jack’s money to buy a ribbon which she stretches into a robe,
Mopsa turns the male purse into a feminine weaving activity. Inevitably, Mopsa’s
dependence on the hero’s purse foreshadows her imprisonment, like all the other

women turned victim of capitalism. The female thread offers but an illusory glimpse
of autonomy. Mopsa has learned her letters; she knows that the words her mouth
will shape only construct her self in semiotic terms, binding her to an artificial—
imaginary—world while Jack will return to reality. As Mopsa attempts to flee her
fate and break free from the text which maps her future, she runs away with Jack
to try and find a better country. Unfortunately, like Alice in Through the Looking-
Glass, it takes all the running she can do to remain in the same place, and no matter
how fast her boat goes, the Queen and the crowd of fairies, walking along the river
bank, always keep to the same pace. Worse, her boat seems to bring her to the place
from which she thinks she is fleeing. In one of the countries she visits, the rocks are
shaped like girls with distaffs, ironically weaving the thread of Mopsa’s fate as the
stone people advise her to run to the land above the purple mountains. As a hardly
revised version of the Fairy Queen’s land behind the purple mountains, Mopsa runs
to the country from which she was trying to escape and walks into the castle where
she is to be locked up. She enters a hall topped with a great dome and ‘filled with
windows of coloured glass [casting] down blue and golden and rosy reflections’
(294) only to be shut in. As the story of the shut-up queen is reenacted in the hall,
its architecture plays upon reflections and refractions, transforming Mopsa into a
likeness of the Fairy Queen and doubling Jack as well with a mirror reflection of
himself, which is to replace him.
In this world of doubles from which women cannot escape, Mopsa is crowned with
Jack’s silver coin, which melts in her hand and turns into a wand, seemingly putting
an end to the male economy, to the world of reality, and inscribing the new Queen
within an imaginary world. Like her double, Mopsa starts telling stories which ‘do
not begin at the beginning’ (302). But the growth of Mopsa’s imagination, alongside
that of her body, which is now as tall as Jack’s, is no sign of her empowerment. On
the contrary, it records other binding narratives featuring other female weavers. Her
story recounts how the three Fates—the black fairy who teaches how to spin, the
brown fairy who gives counsel, and the white fairy who remains silent—punished
the inhabitants by changing them into does and driving away into reeds all the men,
except for the boy-king. Mopsa’s legend foretells her own fate, fusing past and future
and charting once more the inescapability of woman’s fate. While Mopsa leads Jack
to the place where the men are confined so that he may free them, Mopsa’s physical
pain when crowned and her mournfulness during the feast indicate her awareness
of the sacrifices that growing up into a queen demand: as she will be confined in
her fairyland and separated from Jack who is to be cast out of her imaginary realm,
Mopsa exemplifies how the fantastic world is shaped by maiming stories whose
words lock up and crystallize women. Finally, like her likeness, the Fairy Queen,
who sends people to sleep and inverts the spell that was cast onto her people, Mopsa
reverses the narrative of Sleeping Beauty; she kisses Jack, who is then driven away
by reeds growing up between him and the castle, after which he must fly back to
reality. The female character remains on her own, as if shackled to the linguistic
world.
Jack flies back home and soon forgets about his marvellous adventures; Mopsa
promises she will never forget him. Her memory acts as a figurative representation
of the female stories ingrained in little girls’ minds and passed from generations of
women to generations of women. If Ingelow’s women ultimately rule over a land
from which men are excluded or if Jack’s mother’s ballad, which closes the fantasy,
portrays a lady shepherd who does not moan for the absent male, Ingelow’s tale,
nonetheless, foregrounds the crippling potential of precast stories incarcerating
heroines linguistically and literally. Subjected to the letter F—which marks fairies,
fables and fate—Mopsa remains immured in her castle where a woolen carpet
decorated with a giant M awaited her, while the female stories which have peppered
her adventures shape female education into a narrative of captivity.
Unlike Rossetti’s threatening Fates spinning and singing mesmerizing songs,
Ingelow’s tale foregrounds the binding stories that women are told and tell, thereby
linking the construction of femininity to dangerous and deadly words from which
women are never given the chance to escape. More significantly still, by drawing
parallels between language and the masculine sphere of the market, Ingelow makes
explicit how women are shaped by male-defined forms of representation they vainly
believe they can master: the thread of female creativity can only fashion robes and
cloaks, which fetter women and enslave them. Ingelow’s bleak portrait of modernity,
where women are bound to the market and taken prisoner in towers made of enchanted
water, like so many multistoried department stores, offers women no chance of
independence or salvation—unlike Christina Rossetti’s Laura in ‘Goblin Market.’
Hence, Ingelow’s fantasy denounces the mesmerizing words on which commodity
culture thrives, making women false promises of freedom. In George MacDonald’s
‘The Light Princess’, on the other hand, such male-preferred angelic images of ideal
femininity are humorously investigated, while the unrepressed female consumer is
subjected to medical inspection.
Chapter Two
MacDonald’s Fallen Angel in

‘The Light Princess’ (1864)
‘I think’, said Mrs Armstrong, ‘since criticism is the order of the evening, and Mr Smith
is so kind as not to mind it, that he makes the king and queen too silly. It takes away from
the reality.’ …‘The reality of a fairy-tale?’ said Mrs Cathcart, as if asking a question of
herself.1
George MacDonald (1824–1905) remains famous for his long children’s fantasies,
such as At the Back of the North Wind (1868–1869), The Princess and the Goblin
(1870–1871), and The Princess and Curdie (1877). Yet MacDonald did not publish
his first book for children before 1867: Dealing with the Fairies, a collection of
fairy tales including ‘The Light Princess.’ Revealingly, because it featured sexual
attraction, ‘The Light Princess’, written in 1862 and illustrated by Arthur Hughes,
failed to attract any publisher. MacDonald then first published his tale in a novel
for adults, Adela Cathcart (1864), in which stories are told to a young girl. Adela
Cathcart hinges upon the interplay between the audience and the narrator, thereby
providing a significant viewpoint on discourses on representation. Like Ingelow’s
fantasy, the novel probes female literary creativity and freedom, and investigates
literary devices. More particularly, as stories mark MacDonald’s narrative, they frame
the female body and act as a sort of medicine likely to cure unruly physiology.
The growth of the heroine into womanhood depends on the tales she will be told.
Adela Cathcart is constructed as a realistic frame-narrative containing a series of
embedded stories all intended to heal the heroine, Adela, who is gradually declining
and suffers from an illness of the spirit. Her large and sleepy eyes, her pale and thin
face, and her ghostlike appearance make of her a stereotypical nineteenth-century
consumptive woman—a picture of morbidity which arouses male desire. Fasting
and wasting, seeking the repose of sleep, Adela is a figure of death-in-life. Her case,
not surprisingly, is feminized, associated with the ‘girls of her age’ (64). Moreover,
if her illness is spiritual, it is also deemed to stem from a disruption of bodily fluids:
her heart does not pulse fast enough, and her life seems to gradually withdraw itself,
‘ebbing back as it were to its source’ (64), as if ‘the tide of life’ (65) refused to flow
again. Obviously, Adela is suffering from her very femininity, ideally constructed as
ethereal and debilitated, but also biologically defined by flows. More than simply
idealized, her consumption is then—paradoxically—also viewed as an expression
of her ‘discontent’, being fed but ‘the husks which the swine eat’ (67). The doctor’s
1 George MacDonald, Adela Cathcart, 3 vols (Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press,

[1864] 2001–2003), 85. Subsequent references to this edition will be given in the text.
food-metaphor posits the relevance of the female body throughout the novel and
adumbrates the way in which the embedded stories are devised to mirror aspects
of Adela’s own physiology so that the heroine may gain experience about herself
and her femininity and ultimately marry. Ironically enough, drawing links between
Adela’s mind and body, the male characters then seek to cure Adela by telling her
stories, by feeding her words instead of medicines.
The relationship between women and the medical profession in the second half
of the nineteenth century has often been discussed, pointing particularly to the way
in which Victorian medical texts defined middle-class women as frail, unstable,
and governed by their reproductive functions. As the studies of gynaecology and
psychiatry developed, women’s reproductive functions were increasingly associated
with an array of nervous disorders which justified medical surveillance. As John
Elliotson’s Human Physiology (1840), J.G. Millingen’s Mind and Matter, Illustrated
by Considerations on Heredity, Insanity, and the Influence of Temperament in the
Development of the Passions (1847), or Henry Maudsley’s writings on insanity
typify, foregrounding woman’s periodical predisposition to hysteria from the onset of
puberty,2 woman’s ‘biological straitjacket’ was ‘man-made’, to quote Anne Digby.3
Among the medical texts of the 1860s, Maudsley’s work is a significant instance
of the assumptions concerning woman’s nature which quickly anchored woman’s
social construction in biology. Mid-nineteenth-century medicine, informed by
evolutionary science, gave shape to prescriptive ideologies of femininity which
bound women to their bodies. In ‘Sex in Mind and in Education’, published in
1874 in The Fortnightly Review, Maudsley sums up and simplifies his theories on
the female mind for the literary journal, clearly separating the male and the female
organizations. He envisions human physiology in terms of vital resources, implying
that if spent in one direction, such resources will lack in another. Hence his fear that
if young girls draw too much on their mental resources through intellectual work,
the morbid development of their reproductive functions will entail ‘pallor, lassitude,
debility, sleeplessness, headache, neuralgia, and then worse ills.’4 In Maudsley’s
terms, woman should pay attention ‘to the periodical tides of her organization’,5
for the consequences of ‘an imperfectly developed reproductive system … are
also mental.’6 Criticizing John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women (1869),
which denounces the artificiality of the nature of woman, Maudsley reasserts sexual
differences and makes explicit the relationship between the development of woman’s
reproductive system and the threat of insanity which enforced women’s subjugation
2 John Elliotson, Human Physiology (London: Longmans, 1840); J.G. Millingen,

Mind and Matter, Illustrated by Considerations on Heredity, Insanity, and the Influence of
Temperament in the Development of the Passions (London: H. Hurst, 1847); Henry Maudsley,
The Physiology and Pathology of Mind [1867] (London: Macmillan, 1868).
3 Anne Digby, ‘Women’s Biological Straitjacket’, in Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall
(eds), Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth
Century (London: Routledge, 1989), 192–220.
4 Henry Maudsley, ‘Sex in Mind and in Education’, The Fortnightly Review, 15 (Jan-
June 1874): 466–83, 474.
5 Maudsley, ‘ Sex in Mind’, 475.
6 Maudsley, ‘Sex in Mind’, 477.
MacDonald’s Fallen Angel in ‘The Light Princess’ (1864) 35
throughout the second half of the nineteenth century: ‘Their nerves-centres being in
a state of greater instability, by periodical functions, they will be the more easily and
the more seriously deranged.’7 As Maudsley has it, ‘Men have the right to make the
most of their powers, to develop them to the utmost, and to strive for, and if possible
gain and hold, the position in which they shall have the freest play.’8 The practices
of clitoridectomy (excision of the clitoris) and later oophorectomy (removal of the
ovaries to cure insanity)—respectively invented by Isaac Baker Brown and Robert
Battey—accompanied the emergence of modern gynaecology and typified the role
mid-nineteenth-century medicine played in the definition of woman. Woman’s
sexual organs determined her psychology and could be read like a face. The use
of the knife in surgical treatment, asserting male authority over the weak feminine
psychology, aimed to ‘shape and control the uterine cavity’,9 supposedly ensuring the
curing of women’s psychological disorders.10 Likewise, doctors constantly advised
women—not being of the same type of mental development as men—not to injure
their health by too much intellectual strain, thereby perfectly securing gender spheres
and controlling female autonomy. Nor should women eat ‘indigestible food, danc[e]
in warm rooms’11 or expose themselves to cold, claimed John Burns, Professor of
Midwifery in Glasgow, highlighting the anxieties raised by the female body, a body
which mid-Victorian medicine particularly strove to harness and tame.
The medical discourse which permeates Adela Cathcart resonates with such
considerations regarding woman’s frailty and the irritability of the female system once
woman’s periodical functions are established. Since Adela’s ‘mental atrophy’ is due
to the fact that ‘she cannot digest the food provided to her’ (137), the novel addresses
the physical consequences of the social construction of femininity on several levels.
According to Victorian ‘anorexic logic’,12 in Leslie Heywood’s terminology, Adela
must be fed with stories—mental food, ‘because she feels no repugnance to it, and
can digest and assimilate, as well as swallow it’ (137). Significantly, the tales almost
all feature ill and ill-treated heroines, thereby engaging with the female body and
revisiting the codes of feminine representation which are gradually killing Adela.
‘The Bells, A Sketch in Pen and Ink’ records the predicament of a hyper-sensitive
epileptic orphan who eventually finds refuge from cruelty in death; ‘My Uncle Peter’
foregrounds the ordeals of Little Christmas, a Victorian Cinderella who is starved
and beaten; ‘The Cruel Painter’ deals with a painter’s daughter whose father kills
his models and who, therefore, may be killed by art in her turn. In the first tale,

9 G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward
Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper, 1976), 110.
10 For more on surgical practices, see Barker-Benfield’s The Horrors of the Half-
Known Life. Barker-Benfield explains, however, that unlike American and Scottish
gynaecologists, English gynaecologists regarded the practices of the incision of the cervix
and os as ‘butcherous’ (111).
11 John Burns, The Principles of Midwifery including Diseases of Women, 2nd ed.,
(London, 1811), 100–101, quoted in Digby, ‘Women’s Biological Straitjacket’, 197.
12 Leslie Heywood, Dedication to Hunger (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996), xvii.
‘The Light Princess’, the Swanspond (Adela’s house) becomes a lake on which a
light princess enjoys swimming. Redolent of the swan-maiden tales of folklore, the
figure of the swan aligns the princess of the tale with other Undines, Melusinas, and
Lamias. It thus brings into play issues of female power and sexuality and potentially
questions women’s lack of freedom. In MacDonald’s tale, the swan-princess is not
only disobedient, but swims on a polluted site where she may fall and sin at will.
Yet MacDonald interweaves the folkloric figure with the Victorian cliché of the
‘light woman’, that epitomizes ideal femininity, by casting a spell of lightness on
his princess. The magic spell, as a representation of woman frozen into perfection,
illustrates MacDonald’s attempt at crystallizing his princess. But the ‘light princess’
is, in fact, a female linguistic creation, and the living trope hardly accepts the
maiming aspects of language and undermines representational processes. Ironically,
however, she falls ill and regains gravity at the end of the tale, having taught Adela,
through the looking-glass of the fairy-tale mode, how to grow up and be aware of the
contradictions of which she, as a woman, is made.
MacDonald’s Light Princess and Female Lightness in Victorian Culture
‘The Light Princess’ was the first of MacDonald’s fairy tales and was designed both
for children and adults. Fashioned as a modern adaptation of Sleeping Beauty or
Snow White, it is ‘A Fairy-Tale WITHOUT Fairies’, giving a twist to Perrault’s
tales right from the start. In fact, being something more than just a fairy tale, ‘The
Light Princess’ engages with modes of framing femininity and turns the metonymies
which define moral femininity into monstrous signs. The fairy tale then becomes
a fantasy in which readers can decipher and interpret the codes that shape gender
categories—though defamiliarized and seen from an uncanny perspective. As the
title of MacDonald’s tale suggests, feminine lightness conjures up the cliché of the
disembodied, ethereal Victorian ideal which haunts nineteenth-century fiction as
an illusory model to which women were taught to aspire. The cult of the angel-
woman, dramatized by Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House, conceived the
feminine ideal as a saint-like, passive, and ‘light’ woman. In the Victorian period, the
prevailing focus on female weightlessness bound woman’s sexual purity to her lack
of corporeality.13 By downplaying their own carnal appetites, women hushed their
own physicality, and this behavioural management testified to their own spirituality.
These heavenly creatures fed on air ironically corporealized Victorian gender
ideology, which constructed women as self-disciplined beings, well-trained in food
restriction and physical repression.
While in Victorian culture the emphasis on woman’s ‘lightness’ encapsulated
prescriptive ideologies of femininity, on the fashion scene, woman’s behavioural
management was reflected in the ideal hourglass female figure: a tiny waist,
an ample bosom, and large hips, which enhanced femininity by foregrounding
woman’s weakness. Confining the body and crushing the waist (to the point of
13 See Anna Krugovoy Silver, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
frequently altering the shape of organs and bones), fashionable stays restricted
movement and constricted the lungs, thereby entailing breathlessness and often
causing consumption. Furthermore, preventing the ingestion of food, stay laces
created many starving women. Revealingly, eating disorders were related to (or
aggravated by) the wearing of corsetry. Consequently, corsetry was closely linked
to the debilitated feminine ideal: while chlorosis and neurasthenia were more often
than not traced to the wearing of corsetry, the trendy laces fabricated ethereal beings
which visually matched Patmore’s angel. Both typified woman’s ‘well disciplined
mind and well regulated feelings’,14 as the fashionable stays framed both body and
mind to shape unruly female flesh and mind to the precepts of Victorian ideology.
For instance, maternity corsetry was devised to make invisible the ostensible signs
of pregnancy, and juvenile corsets, especially between 1860 and 1880, partook of
the socialization of children, becoming compulsory by the middle of the nineteenth
century. Marking even children’s culture, as corseted dolls appeared between 1850
and 1900, stay laces were thus fraught with moral properties and show how the
urge to erase female corporeality was also part of children’s disciplining process.
However, just like Patmore’s ambiguous divide between flesh and spirit, stay laces,
if they created diaphanous chlorotic subjects, also caused uterine disorders, from
amenorrhoea to prolapsed uterus.15 In so doing, they drew attention precisely to
the women’s biological functions they sought to efface, magnifying, in this way,
the century’s debates and contradictory ideas regarding femininity. As suggested,
idealized as pure, chaste and spiritual, ignorant of physical drives, woman was also
biologically defined, designed for and through her maternal functions and thus under
the influence of matter. The ‘light’ woman, as a medical construct, as a literary, or as
a visual cliché, was, therefore, an unstable figure nurtured by the period’s antithetical
constructions of femininity.
As underlined, in the realistic narrative, Adela encapsulates the paradoxes of
genteel femininity. The signs of prescriptive femininity are charted on her consumptive
body, and the very same signs, tied to the onset of her periodical functions, are
simultaneously read as evidence of her insubordination and rebelliousness. The
doctors’ inaccurate reading of Adela’s symptoms is then revealingly debunked in
the embedded fairy tale, which focuses on the way the female body is governed
by tropes which men strive to define and control: the wasting and fasting female
character anamorphoses into a ‘light’ princess, and the tale not only puns on female
lightness but also corporalizes and literalizes ‘moral gravitation’ by staging a female
character who has been deprived of her physical ‘gravitation.’
When the prince hears about the princess’s story, his merging of lightness with
invisibility and immateriality turns the holy trinity of the feminine ideal on its head,
reworking ethereal enthrallment into a morbid living-dead creature:
In his wanderings he had come across some reports about our princess; but as everybody
said she was bewitched, he never dreamed that she could bewitch him. For what indeed
14 Leigh Summers, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset (Oxford and
New York: Berg, 2001), 5.
15 For a history of the corset, see Summers, Bound to Please.
could a prince do with a princess that had lost her gravity. Who could tell what she might
not lose next? She might lose her visibility, or her tangibility; or, in short, the power of
making impressions upon the radical sensorium; so that he should never be able to tell
whether she was dead or alive. (31–2)
The fear that the princess may fail to make ‘impressions upon the radical sensorium’
reveals that female lightness as a social construct aims at suppressing all traces of
sexuality likely to arouse male desire. Ironically, however, the princess’s lightness
is simultaneously and unquestioningly literal and figurative, physical and moral,
reactivating the trope of female weightlessness to expose its potential drifts. As a
matter of fact, Gilbert and Gubar’s contention that patriarchal societies have reduced
women to ‘mere properties, to characters and images imprisoned in male texts
because generated solely … by male expectations and designs’16 may be traced in the
tale. The king’s irritation at being ‘ill-used’ (74) by his infertile queen who cannot
provide him with a scion and who regards her maternal duty humourously as a ‘joke’
(74), launches the narrative’s thwarting of rhetorical expectations. Subversively
enough, punning becomes an unconscious female activity, and the female weavers
recreate and play with the words which bind them to patriarchal ideology.
Indeed, fed only on bread and honey or on ‘two turkey eggs, and three anchovies’
(83), the good and patient queen embodies virtuous and virginal femininity so well
that she can hardly bear children and symbolically gives birth to a ghost-like airy
baby girl as a grotesque double of herself. In fact, her light creation cloaks linguistic
fertility beneath her physical innocence and biological sterility: the king is sentenced
to having a living trope as a daughter. His ‘light’ princess reworks the cliché of
ideal femininity and turns the cliché of the ethereal woman, ‘floating … like … a
dandelion seed’ (81) into a figure of rebellion which transgresses natural, physical
and her own society’s laws. Furthermore, because MacDonald’s weightless princess
defies the laws of nature, she lays bare the definition of the ‘natural’ woman. While at
the beginning of the nineteenth century the virtuous feminine ideal was the virginal
‘keeper of the soul’,17 deprived of sexual urges and metaphorically disembodied,
with the advances of science and medicine, as suggested earlier, the notion of
‘natural’ femininity shifted towards female biology. From the 1860s onwards,
scientific discoveries resurrected ‘[woman’s] ancient mythological associations with
fertility’,18 and the gentler sex gradually came to be more and more associated with
the earth mother. Alongside being figured as flower or tree passively rooted in the
earthly womb, another significant personification of nature was that of the weightless
woman floating in the air and submitting to the breeze.19 Inevitably such a figure of
[1978] 1984), 12.
17 Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle
Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 84.
18 Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 84.
19 As Bram Dijkstra puts it: ‘To float in the air was the eroticized alternative to
Ophelia’s watery voyage. Woman’s weightlessness was still a sign of her willing—or
helpless—submission, still allowed the male to remain uninvolved, still permitted him to
the weightless woman brought to light the era’s contradictory views of womanhood.
It tightened her links with the earth mother as woman gave way to the call of nature
that carried her on its breezes and simultaneously prevented ‘any sort of sustained
bodily contact with a woman who is lighter than air.’20
MacDonald interestingly furthers such an ambivalent body/mind dichotomy in
his portrait of a light-bodied and light-minded woman. His weightless and helpless
princess floats passively in the air while physically defying males and ambiguously
articulating physicality and spirituality. As the narrative unveils and puns on the
various interpretations of the word ‘light’, the princess seems to impersonate the
tropes of duplicity. Whether light-haired or light-heired, standing for gold and
preciousness like most princesses21 or for their opposite, the princess dramatizes the
paradoxical Victorian definition of gender and becomes a living image of rhetoric
physically staging the danger of emulating a fleshly trope.
Troping Prescriptive Ideologies of Femininity
The role given to representational tropes in MacDonald’s tale recalls the significance
of cliché in character description in Victorian literature. Clichéd rhetoric was
part and parcel of the Victorian frame of mind, conveying Victorian ideology in
narratives of all sorts, whether fantastic or realistic, fictional or nonfictional, from
advice manuals to political, economic, or scientific essays. The Victorian age, Nina
Auerbach has suggested, was indeed ‘essentially mythic, though it trie[d] to be
scientific, moral and “real.”’22 Saturated with dusty icons, dead metaphors, legends,
and myths, Victorian representation betrays at all times the doxa of its culture. In
Victorian fiction, moreover, the rhetoric of feminine description aimed at erasing
the female body through endless series of metonymies, litanies of body parts that
annihilated the heroine’s physicality. As Helena Michie contends, the descriptions
of the female body reflect contemporary ideology: female bodies appear only to
disappear, female flesh vanishes behind tropes and figures that contain improper
corporeality.23 Through the codes of physiognomy, through the use of dead metaphors
and synecdoches, from the prototypical heroine’s golden hair to her cloudless blue
eyes, feminine representation laces up bodies, and Victorian realism, in particular,
reads as ‘a mapping of sign upon sign’,24 as Susan Stewart contends, following the
maintain his voyeur’s distance from this creature of nature, this creature that was nature, who
both fascinated and frightened him. So he made her tumble like a brown leaf through the air,
using her identity as nature personified as his excuse for making her do so’; 88–9.
20 Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 90.
21 That the princess should be blond is even more dysphoric because both her parents
are dark-haired.
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 1.
23 See Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1987] 1989).
24 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir,
the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 4.
French structuralist Roland Barthes in his depiction of realism as a weaving of codes.
Both absent and present, the female body recedes into an overproduction of signs.
Hence, the more the body steps onto the stage and the more it becomes visible,
the more it vanishes under a series of codes which manages and suppresses its
physicality. The process of representation acts as a disciplinary regime which
administers and turns the female body into a text, fragmenting it into parts which fit
Victorian propriety. Codification entails control of the body, erasure of physicality
and conformity to Victorian patriarchal aesthetics. Constantly flirting with ‘cover-
up’,25 representation—like a tight corset or a large crinoline—promises a body
which it effaces beneath visual signs and social codes. Seen through the lens of
materialism, moreover, the construction of woman as a series of signs calls to mind
the rise of commodity fetishism. Simultaneously empty and invested with the power
to arouse male desire, female body parts seem to be worshipped precisely because
they are mere signs. As we shall see, MacDonald’s light princess, deflating the
construction of woman as pure artifice, shows male characters striving to drain the
female character of her personal meaning in order to fill her with a sense they can
master. In showing how the light princess’s meaning must ultimately come from men,
MacDonald constructs male reading in fetishistic terms. Following Roland Barthes’s
argument, which posits that ‘being analytical, language can come to grips with the
body only if it cuts it up’,26 I shall underline how Barthes’s image of a chopped off
body is actually what MacDonald’s, like many other mid-Victorian tales, hinges
on. If plays on the chopped off body both figuratively and literally inform Carroll’s
Alice more than any other tale, MacDonald’s narrative—by literalizing rhetorical
processes, showing how metonymies can cut a body up and, like a Cheshire cat,
make parts stand for wholes—overtly inscribes the body in language and points out
the workings of representational tools.
Revealingly, the word ‘cliché’ itself is a reminder of the link with the printing
industry and its newly born techniques of reproduction, and is thus an even better
figure to convey the stamping and spreading of nineteenth-century cultural values.27
Moreover, clichés can only be the offspring of societies ruled by dichotomies where
the Same constantly competes with and is set apart from some Other. The cliché is
an icon of belonging and a figure of discrimination. In clichéd rhetoric, meaning
comes out of difference.28 During the Victorian period, with its obsessive fears of
democratization and class contamination, the systematic quest towards categorization
and dichotomies shaped the Victorian frame of mind. In particular, with growing
anxieties regarding the nature of the ‘feminine’ and the Woman Question, feminine
types were above all subjected to such antinomies in order to secure potentially
slippery boundaries. Yet, as far as feminine description is concerned, the cliché
seems to be poised over paradoxical considerations. The wide circulation of clichéd
25 Michie, The Flesh Made Word, 78.

26 Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill &
Wang, 1976), 27.
27 See Ruth Amossy and Elisheva Rosen, Les Discours du cliché (Paris : CDU/
SEDES, 1982).
28 Amossy and Rosen, Les Discours du cliché, 7.
description in Victorian fiction participates in a reassuring normalizing process: it
illustrates the idea of femininity as sameness, as predictability and obedience to fixed
patterns and prescribed roles, ‘purg[ing] the deviant woman from representability
[and] erasing the potential for adventure.’29 In addition, the set of stereotypical codes
ruling over feminine definition even furthers the normative function of clichéd
prose: clichéd description not only entails homogenization but also turns into
parrot-like utterance, foregrounding a tale woven by invisible ideological threads,
commandments engraved in stone, naturalized and unquestioned, that heroines and
little girls repeat and rehearse, hardly knowing what they say but feeling it to be
right.
By implication, clichés, as mass-produced articles tightly connected to the rise of
consumer culture, may also be strongly ambiguous: dealing with cliché also implies
dealing with duality. In fact, at the same time as it imposes its firm ideological mark
and asserts a fixed meaning, the cliché is robbed of its sense. A cliché is an empty
sign: it simultaneously implies truth and artificiality—thereby undermining its own
construction of reality. As a product of industrial society, as cheap reproduction, the
cliché is soulless, meaningless, a mere photographic negative which seems to have
gone through the looking-glass of language where the laws between signifier and
signified have been upset and the signifier floats free. Its endless circulation, to use
Walter Benjamin’s image, inevitably and irrevocably blurs vision, cuts off the sign
from its meaning, and transforms certainties into unreliable concepts. The cliché,
consequently, becomes a dangerous empty sign, which may be used and usurped,
which may exhibit its own artificial threads and act as a subversive cloak. Worse,
perhaps, as a product of industrial society combined with availability and low cost,
the cliché becomes dangerously close to the female Other and potentially figures
as a monstrous sign of impropriety. In his humourous trial of Victorian modes of
feminine representation, MacDonald explores precisely this ambivalence.
MacDonald’s angel is a monstrous, levitating princess who has changed the
illusory ideal into a burlesque and threatening female character. Becoming a three-
dimensional, oxymoronic figure, which refuses to conform to laws, she derides
the rhetoric of feminine description. In MacDonald’s tale, the bodiless angel
is dramatized and satirized, imposing her monstrous body and displaying the
representational conventions of the time. MacDonald’s self-centred and narcissistic
princess is simultaneously an offspring of the forces of nature and totally severed
from the earth; she is both body and mind; she refuses to remain in the sphere that
is allotted to her and seemingly matches ideals of incorporality and insubstantiality.
Woman’s nature, therefore, lies at the heart of a tale which questions the rhetoric of
feminine representation. Women cannot ‘bear’ lightness, as the Queen unconsciously
puns again, and their bodies, which are made up of patriarchal tropes, engender
creations as duplicitous as ‘woman’ can be. Such plurivalence of ‘woman’ is
discussed throughout the narrative. While the king sees the advantages of being
light-hearted, light-footed, light-handed and light-bodied, the queen defines her
daughter as a light-fingered, light-minded and light-haired/heired woman. The
gendering of female weightlessness brings to light Victorian patriarchal ideology.

The king uses metonymy to praise the stereotypical female body parts and to erase
all the more the woman’s corporeality: whether the princess be light-hearted, light-
footed, light-handed or light-bodied, the traces of dangerous female sexuality have
been obliterated by ethereality, and the rhetoric, cutting up the female body, secures
gendered positions of male domination and female subordination. The very same
trope of the light-footed princess gains significance later on in the tale when the
prince is aroused by such a stainless foot and decides to be hired as shoeblack so
that he may kiss the princess’s virginal shoes. The queen, on the other hand, does not
turn her daughter’s representation into a series of metonymies which fragment her
body into fetishized parts the better to deny its materiality. In the woman’s view, the
princess’s physical assets matter less than her unmarriageability, her stupidity and
laziness, that is, the uselessness of the stereotype of the weak-willed and silly blond
angel that patriarchal ideology extols. Bound to utilitarian society, the invaluable
princess is but an alluring poster making false promises to gullible princes.
However, if the queen feels guilty for her linguistic creations (‘she knew she was
guilty, or, what was much the same, knew that he thought so’ [85]), she is quickly
erased to make room for her monstrous double, one who does not simply handle words
but can also step on the stage and act. Princess Makemnoit is, indeed, one of those
weaving fairies—or rather, witches—whose stories are powerful enough to change
fate. She keeps muttering ‘awful words’ (113) and spreads her dangerous creative
energies throughout the tale. In fact, monstrous female creation is what the narrative
is about since the light princess was bewitched by her aunt in a revised version
of the christening of Sleeping Beauty. Princess Makemnoit is the queen’s Other,
shamelessly venting her discontent and enacting her anger. As opposed to the queen,
Makemnoit is unmarried and so is neither dependent on male designs nor confined in
any male text. On the contrary, she is literally out of patriarchal scriptures: the king
has forgotten her in writing his will and forgets her again in writing his invitations
for the christening. Excluded from male scripts, Princess Makemnoit becomes a
powerful plot-maker and name-giver as she baptizes the king’s daughter the ‘Light
Princess.’ She is, moreover, the only character in the text who is given a name.30 By
contrast, the nameless queen remains physically undefined, merely compared to the
more fertile queens of the neighbourhood, and—notwithstanding her unconscious
punning—simply ‘sorry’ or ‘very nice.’ The king, impatient, cross and nearly ill-
tempered, embodies virile strength, regardless of his small size. Unlike the other
characters, Makemnoit is thus named and also physically—physiognomically—
defined. Her intelligence is mapped out on her large forehead which ‘projected over
[her face] like a precipice’ (76). For Makemnoit is well read and knows how to
play with preset texts. Despising ‘all the modes we read of in history’ (76), she can
exhibit female creativity by inventing her own formulas and turning what sounds
like ‘some foolish nursery rhyme’ (77) into an image of her own making, a creation
of her own. Creativity is even charted on her body, which disrupts legibility. Her
wrinkles are no sign of sterility. On the contrary, the fleshly ripples mirror her
30 This idea is underlined by U.C. Knoepflmacher in his Ventures into Childland:

Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 135.
boundless imagination. Her face, ‘as full of wrinkles as a pat of butter’ (76), is as
likely to assimilate different faces as the metaphor incorporates food. Makemnoit
is a monstrous creator, and her malleable body shows her metamorphic capacity, as
her eyes flash blue, yellow, green, or pink, engendering new plots as she would give
birth to ever new creatures.
More interestingly still, Makemnoit (‘Make ’em know it’) is a fleshly incarnation
of some kind of female knowledge: she knows the ‘laws of gravitation’ which bind
the princess to the earth and can ‘abrogate those laws in a moment’ (79). Of course,
Makemnoit’s anger at having been forgotten by the king and her levitation plot, which
condemns the princess to lightness, read as a female condemnation of the clichés
that define femininity. By literalizing the cliché of ideal femininity, Makemnoit
turns it into an artificial sign which can, in the lapse of a nursery rhyme, be turned
into just its opposite. Showing the reversibility of the cliché, Makemnoit turns the
tables of male law back on themselves, and exposes the ridicule of crystallizing
women in weightlessness. This is why Makemnoit’s creation is not sterile through
crystallization. The princess evades physical laws as much as she subverts rhetorical
definitions; her unruly levitating body threatens to rewrite normative scripts in a
transgressive way.
Indeed, the cliché Makemnoit has given birth to is ripe with contradictions: ‘[T]he
most complete knowledge of the laws of nature would have been unserviceable in her
case; for it was impossible to classify her. She was a fifth ponderable body, sharing
all the properties of the ponderable’ (95). Contravening all either/or dichotomies, the
princess is as light as she is plump, dreaming to ‘hail sugar-plums, and snow whipped
cream’ (92) from the sky. Likewise, she looks both unearthly and improperly fleshly:
she is not only greedy, but she also innocently and subversively handles repulsive
toads/frog princes and even kisses her pages at will. Through her carnal appetites
and irrepressible desire, the light princess resists sterile, normative and rhetorical
categorizations. Furthermore, in the same way as she refuses to abide by the king’s
orders, she refuses to align her representation with metaphorization: when her father
asks her to phrase her wishes, his ‘what do you feel like’ is instantly derided. The
princess puns on the ambivalence of ‘like’ and denounces ‘like’ as a potentially
crippling word: ‘Like nothing at all, that I know of’ (91).
Femininity, Crime and Punishment: Disciplining Fleshly Signs
The light princess is to be cured from being both too unearthly and too fleshly. Because
she has disrupted a dead metaphor and revivified the image of the ethereal angel, the
cliché must regain its linguistic two-dimensionality and lose its corporeality. As one
of the physicians has it:
Her proclivity to her true sphere destroys all the natural influence which this orb would
otherwise possess over her corporeal frame. She cares for nothing here. There is no relation
between her and this world … She must therefore be taught, by the sternest compulsion, to
take an interest in the earth as the earth. (93; emphasis mine)
Severed from the world as she has severed the word from its meaning, the princess
who has turned the tropes of ideal femininity into impropriety must be reeducated.
The woman’s rebellious and unlawful body must be corrected. Because the narrative
lingers on the meaning of femininity in its most ambivalent aspects, the duality at
the core of the text leads the tale towards its most significant pun, associating the
female character with an antagonistic figure likewise ‘ungoverned by laws.’31 As
if seen through a looking-glass that inverts everything, MacDonald’s princess’s
transgressive weightlessness and lack of gravity, which paradoxically spare her
from the potential sin of fallenness, must be chastised. The princess cannot fall,
either literally or metaphorically—she cannot, for instance, ‘fall in love’—, and
her unfallen state becomes a sign of impropriety in this respect.32 As the metaphor
becomes literal, therefore, the tale becomes even more subversive, seeing fallenness
as the cure to the princess’s physical ‘anomalies’ (94) or ‘infirmity’ (92)33: ‘Perhaps
the best thing for the princess would have been falling in love’ (95). Her education
or cure into the ways of feminine propriety is thus directed towards healing her body,
paradoxically to castigate her unfallen body that subversively enacts the rhetorical
laws that usually frame prescribed femininity.
One solution to performing the heroine’s moral training consists in making her
learn everything about the earth, ‘its animal history; its mineral history; its social
history; its scientific history; its literary history; its musical history; its artistical
history; above all, its metaphysical history’ (93). But the theory contravenes gender
precepts directed towards woman’s ignorance to too great an extent for it to ensure
her subservience to the male order. Obedience is soon caught in the web of dominant
scientific or medical dictates aiming to police her body instead. As a matter of fact,
one of the metaphysicians anchors improper femininity in physiology and pathology,
reading her infirmity as a heart malfunction, as a disorderly circulation of blood
which foregrounds the woman’s pathological/unruly biology. Beneath the cliché of
the heart, woman’s organic fluids activate the narrative’s connotations:
From some cause or other, of no importance to our inquiry, the motion of her heart has
been reversed. That remarkable combination of the suction and the force-pump works the
wrong way—I mean in the case of the unfortunate princess: it draws in where it should
force out, and forces out where it should draw in. The offices of the auricles and the
31 Sally Mitchell, The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class, and Women’s Reading, 1835–
1880 (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981), introduction,
quoted in Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, 150.
32 The princess’s pride is also a significant feminine sin for which she must be
punished. As Maria Tatar underlines, ‘Arrogance, haughtiness, and pride—whatever the
name, it runs in the blood of most royal fairy-tale women and motivates a plot that relentlessly
degrades women and declares them to be social misfits until they have positioned themselves
as wives in subordinate roles to husbands’ (Maria Tatar, Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and
the Culture of Childhood [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], 105).
33 Ironically, Knoepflmacher suggests, MacDonald uses morbidezza to define the
princess’s sad laughter (a term used by Italian painters to represent softness and delicacy),
probably confusing the term with morbidity. U.C. Knoepflmacher (ed.), George MacDonald,
The Complete Fairy Tales (London: Penguin, 1999), 344.
ventricles are subverted. The blood is sent forth by the veins, and returns by the arteries.
Consequently it is running the wrong way through all her corporeal organism—lungs and
all … My proposal for the cure is this:—Phlebotomize, until she is reduced to the last
point of safety … When she is reduced to a state of perfect asphyxy, apply a ligature to her
left ankle, drawing it as tight as the bone will bear. Apply, at the same moment, another of
equal tension around the right wrist. By means of plates constructed for the purpose, place
the other foot and hand under the receivers of two air-pumps. Exhaust the receivers. (94)
Reminiscent of Adela’s physical state in the frame-narrative, the princess’s

physiology brings to light concerns suppressed in the realistic narrative. Just as the
doctors try to decode and cure Adela’s maturing body, the princess must be reframed
by the medical practitioners who are trying to secure her meaning/femininity. The
female body, seen as a machine, is conceived in physiological terms which recall
Victorian anxieties with regard to woman’s periodical functions. What the physician’s
diagnosis uncovers is that the woman’s flaw stems from her flows, and metaphorically
designates woman’s biological construction—and, hence, female sexuality—as
the root of the problem. So the cure amounts to suppressing the subversive germs:
phlebotomy implies emptying the woman of her femininity, dispossessing her of
meaning and identity, turning the active and passionate woman into some bloodless
and sexless ghostlike invalid, an empty sign whose sense the physician masters.
Revealingly, the phlebotomized princess will then appear consumptive, and should
she die under the weight of such instruments of torture, ‘she would yet die in doing
our duty’ (94). The doctors’ prescription, therefore, displays how the medicalization
of womanhood is indissociable from woman’s social construction.
To be saved, besides, MacDonald’s princess must undergo a whole series of
chastisements that act as moral management. If the king refuses such corporal
punishment and she escapes being bur[ied] alive for three years (98), the tale yet
displays other forms of physical chastisements in a similar vein: she is bound by
‘some twenty silken cords fastened to as many parts of her dress, and held by twenty
noblemen’ (97), or has to cry to let those transgressive fluids out of her body and gets
‘an awful whipping’ (98) for going into hysterics instead of weeping and is nearly
drowned by the prince who attempts to save her. All these punishments function as
so many scientific experiments on the female body. They point towards the cliché of
the wasting woman as an emblem of female martyrdom in patriarchal society, and
they foreground the centrality of scientific dictates in gender scripts.
Moreover, these suggested cures—or chastisements—make explicit how
Makemnoit’s play with patriarchal metaphors destined to cloak the female body
have dangerously enhanced its physicality, and its biology. The resort to blood or
tears points out female fluids as the barometers of woman’s irregularity. The initial
christening then takes on new hues: from a rhetorical spell which turns the tropes
entrapping woman back on themselves, it becomes the locus of flesh-and-bone female
creation, with the water which has been ‘employed as a means of conveying the
injury’ (95) as a subversive, amniotic fluid. For later on, the lake where the princess
gives way to her passion for swimming and where she paradoxically becomes ‘better
behaved and more beautiful’ (96), more modest and maidenly (109), is revamped
into an image of aggressive female sexuality which seeks to erase men from the
female site by sucking them under. The motif of the lake and the transformation of
the light princess into a swan-maiden calls to mind the controversial debates over
the swan-maiden tales in the second half of the nineteenth century. Reinterpreted
by anthropologists probing female sexuality and the place of woman in marriage,34
swan-maiden tales, featuring hybrid creatures both feminine and beastly, contained
hints at matriarchy and matrilineality, which suggested female superiority.35 As
exemplified by Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, furthermore, in which
the little mermaid drinks a magic potion which fashions her into a voiceless artefact,
swan-maiden tales significantly explored woman’s power to construct her self. Here,
as MacDonald’s Makemnoit makes clear, men should not control representation, and
the construction of femininity should solely be a female creation which places, once
again, the female body in the foreground.
Indeed, when the princess eventually meets her prince and learns how to ‘[fall] in’
the water with him (103), Makemnoit counterplots the male romance, which threatens
to soil her creation, and will next entrap the princess in marriage. Makemnoit’s fertile
imagination devises another plot to empty the female site and wreck the princess’s
union—that is, the patriarch’s victory. As U.C. Knoepflmacher argues, she ‘acts out
a travesty of the maternal.’36 She metamorphoses ‘into a phallic mother’,37 and gives
birth to a gigantic White Snake of Darkness whom she kisses and winds around her
body and whose mouth she attaches to the cavern’s roof to suck down the lake. As a
murderous nurturing monster mother, Makemnoit successfully changes her sister-in-
law’s turkey eggs and anchovies into freakish images of female physicality, biology
and fertility. While she cancels and erases all the symbols traditionally associated
with femininity, drying up lakes and streams, casting spells on the moon and starving
tearless babies, Makemnoit epitomizes dangerous femininity, handling masculine
and feminine roles, creating and destroying her own creations in order to counteract
all patriarchal scriptures.38
Thus, her fertility fuels the rhetoric she debunks. If patriarchal tropes attempt to
erase the female body, if patriarchal politics starve it, MacDonald’s tale shows that
female creativity can rework tropes into ripe images and reassert the corporeality of
34 As Carole G. Silver explains, the 1880s fascination with the marriage of fairies
marched hand-in-hand with contemporary debates on matrimony, as the 1857 Matrimonial
Causes Acts and the 1870 and 1882 Married Women’s Property Acts illustrated. While they
highlighted the nature of woman, the swan-maiden tales were fraught with anxieties regarding
gender relations and played upon the condition of women in marriage. See Carole G. Silver,
Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 93.
35 See Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples, 95.
38 Makemnoit strongly resembles the sea witch in Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.
Around the witch’s house, made of human bones, the trees look like serpents, and water
snakes roll in the mud. The witch is not only linked to bodily decay; she also figures as a
representation of biological corruption. Interestingly, Makemnoit also heralds MacDonald’s
Lilith (Lilith, 1895) whose kingdom is a realm of death since she has stolen the ‘water of life.’
Her bestial nature, in addition, underlines the threat that female sexuality represented.
the female body. At the end of MacDonald’s tale, Makemnoit ironically seemingly
purifies her creation by drying up the feminine and fallen liquid which provides
the princess’s nourishment. Emptying the princess from within, Makemnoit
mirrors the scientists seeking to phlebotomize the heroine. The princess’s sudden
neurasthenia seems to reconstruct her as a stereotypical female invalid, the wasting
woman who enthralled the nineteenth century. In fact, as a mirror image of Adela,
who is dying in the frame-narrative, the princess serves to phrase those ‘gaps in
realism’39 which, Helena Michie argues, are corporalized through female physical
symptoms in Victorian narratives. Through the inverted mirror-image, MacDonald’s
tale foregrounds the ambiguity beneath the image of the consumptive woman. For
the fading princess’s physical exhaustion, far from just reconstructing her as the
Victorian passive invalid, articulates, just like Adela in the frame narrative, the
female character’s unfulfilled desires.
Interestingly, unlike her mother’s starving herself with anchovies, the light
princess’s fasting and wasting body refuses to be fed by anything but the muddy
lake-water festering with crawling eels, ‘drying [herself] up … first to mud, then
to madness and death’ (115). Turning proper anchovies into sexually-encoded
eels as miniature versions of her aunt’s snake, the tale reworks shapes as it revises
tropes. The princess’s experience from greed and agency to starvation, passivity
and insanity simultaneously traces her awakening to her own desires and urges as
well the need to restrain them. In fact, the light princess also learns how lightness—
proper femininity—implies self-denial. While the text trades on unfulfilled, female
desires, the end heightens woman’s self-abnegating duties. Humorously enough, the
self-sacrificial prince proposes to drown by staunching the flow so that the princess
may go on swimming in her lake and continue indulging in her whims. But, realizing
her own selfishness, the princess eventually saves him, inverting Sleeping Beauty’s
kissing scene and suddenly falling on the floor and crying in a fit of passion. Having
cried her lot and suppressed her own desires, she recovers gravity and is fit to marry
and bear children in her turn, ‘crushed’ (127) as she feels by the weight of gravity—
and of her new womanly responsibilities.40
In the frame-narrative, moreover, listening to the tale recording woman’s education
into self-abnegation, Adela, from a passive and wasting invalid, becomes feverish and
hysterical, rude, and self-assertive, as she gradually falls in love with the doctor who
prescribed her the story-telling cure. As they both feel their physical urges denied,
the light princess and Adela foreground the metaphorical instrumentality of disease
for sketching women’s desires. Their consumption is no sign of their matching
the neurasthenic stereotype: their physical decay expresses, on the contrary, their
sexual needs, which Adela acknowledges through stories mirroring her situation.
Consequently, as female consumption and feminine lightness are seen through the
prisms of medical discourse and literary clichés, MacDonald lays bare the rhetoric

40 The way the light princess is crushed by the weight of gravity is very similar to
Andersen’s Little Mermaid’s physical pain when she walks on her new legs as if she were
treading on sharp knives and needles. Significantly, both characters save men and lose their
freedom/life in the process.
which frames woman’s place in society, and explores the words that capture the
female body in its ideological meshes. Physically punished or cured, MacDonald’s
duplicitous female body exposes its society’s normative constructs. Hovering
between antagonistic types of femininity, his light princess is finally schooled in
the precepts of femininity, safely policed by scientific laws and indoctrinated into
propriety.
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the fantasy also plays with the female mind and body
and engages the debate between woman’s nature and the centrality of medical
dictates. Throughout the tale the little girl is subjected to educational lessons and
disciplinary power, with an ultimate and archaic threat looming on the horizon: that
of being held in chains, like the accused Knave in the last scene, and beheaded by
the furious Queen. However, if ‘Off with her head’ is the sentence that closes Alice’s
adventures in Wonderland before she awakes, the narrative also plays upon far more
subtle strategies of control, seeking to police the greedy little girl’s body and to
frame her mind for every departure from decorous behaviour. Alice’s disciplinary
regime is gradually internalized, making her body malleable while her mind strives
to decode the ciphers of Wonderland so as to obey its codes.
Chapter Three
Drawing ‘Muchnesses’ in
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland (1865)
‘Well, it’s no use your talking about waking him’, says Tweedledum, ‘when you’re only
one of the things in his dream. You know very well you’re not real.’ (Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1871).
Like MacDonald’s Adela Cathcart, Lewis Carroll’s narrative hovers between fantasy
and reality and plays on the slippery boundaries which distinguish the child’s territory
from the adult’s. Such a slippage between fairy tale and reality is mostly conveyed
through a multiplicity of framing and structuring stories in a way far more confusing
than MacDonald’s embedded stories. Alice reads as a series of embedded narratives
which keep slipping at that point at which one believes the journey through texts has
come to an end. Worlds and texts merge in the same way as words and sounds hardly
manage to fix meaning. As Alice falls down the well, certainties are destabilized and
reshuffled. Alice does not know where she is or who she is, whom or what to believe.
Most significantly, she may also wonder in what kind of story she has suddenly been
entrapped or to whose dream she belongs.
Revealingly, like the Fairy Queen in Mopsa the Fairy, Alice’s ramblings in
Wonderland away from the safety of her home call to mind the ambulatory figure
of the modern female consumer walking the fashionable districts of the capital and
being lured by the dazzling commodities exhibited in shop windows. In addition,
like Ingelow’s female characters enslaved to the male market, Carroll’s heroine
finds herself imprisoned by her own desire, a desire she must tame by learning to
control her image. The female body must be taught how to abide by visual codes,
which Alice deciphers along her textual voyage. As Carroll’s fantastic adventure
plays upon feminine ‘sweetness’, food becomes trope, which reshapes and tames
the female body.
Carroll’s heroine is, indeed, a greedy little girl who tastes drinks and cakes as
soon as she falls into Wonderland, and she can even more easily be construed as a
version of the modern female consumer because the narrative is punctuated by hints
at commodity culture. In fact, Carroll reconstructs the world of Victorian reality
through the looking-glass, and shows the changes in representation which marked
the second half of the nineteenth century through a little girl who only sees the
real as representations of the real. The narrative exhibits a female character keen
on images, who wishes for a book with pictures and is sent into a world fuelled
by images. On the one hand, Alice’s search for illustrated books demonstrates her
knowledge of children’s literature and informational literature.1 She frames the real
in terms of pictures when she compares the Dodo to a picture of Shakespeare, and she
knows a footman because of his livery and a judge because of his wig. But Alice’s
world is overdetermined by these images. When she imagines that ‘whenever you
go to the English coast, you find a number of bathing-machines in the sea, some
children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging-houses,
and behind them a railway station’,2 her construction of the real sounds like a travel
advertisement. And it is precisely her iconophilia which disrupts the system of
feminine representation the narrative probes: Alice’s shaping of the real in visual
terms turns objects into so many commodities—thereby enlightening the little girl’s
improper desire.
For Alice, images and objects are one and the same, and the language of
representation takes on agency, commanding Alice to eat and drink or letting words
betray her appetite as when she exchanges a sluggard for a lobster in the parody
of Isaac Watts’s poem. The prevalence of performative language in Wonderland
testifies to the idea that the distance between images and objects, like the gap
between words and bodies, is confused. As Nancy Armstrong argues, ‘[W]ords
and food exist in a curiously interchangeable relationship’ and ‘appetite disfigures
a girl’s speech as surely as it does her body.’3 The objectification and visualization
of words—such as when a ‘purpose’ metamorphoses into a ‘porpoise’, or ‘taught
us’ becomes a ‘tortoise’, a ‘tale’ becomes a ‘tail’, a ‘not’, a ‘knot’—do not simply
mime the recurrent literalization of metaphors in fairy tales. They illustrate, most
importantly, Alice’s unrestrained appetite which confuses ‘I see what I eat’ with ‘I
eat what I see.’ By turning reality into visual representations of the real, Alice denies
the gap between objects and images. Once visualized, objects become desirable and
may be consumed. This creeping of reality into the text is thus dangerous; it shatters
1 See Reichertz’s analysis of Carroll’s uses of earlier children’s literature (Ronald

Reichertz, The Making of the Alice Books: Lewis Carroll’s Uses of Earlier Children’s
Literature [Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997]). Reichertz draws parallels
between Alice’s search for a book with pictures and conventional informational literature, such
as Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s ‘Prospectus’ for Parley’s Magazine for Children and Youth
(1833). As Goodrich vindicated his informational work and denounced imaginative literature
in Recollections of a Lifetime, or Men and Things I Have Seen: In a Series of Familiar Letters
to a Friend, Historical, Biographical, Anecdotal, And Descriptive, vol. 2 (New York and
Auburn: Miller, Orton & Co., 1857), he claimed that his use of images were the ‘leading
principle of what seemed to [him] the true art of teaching children’ (308), considering ‘that
their first ideas are simple and single, and formed of images of things palpable to the senses;
and hence that these images are to form the staple of lessons to be communicated to them.
… Before I began to talk of a lion, I gave a picture of a lion—my object being, as you will
perceive, to have the child start with a distinct image of what I was about to give an account
of. Thus I secured his interest in the subject, and thus I was able to lead his understanding
forward in the path of knowledge’ (308–11).
2 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [1865], in Martin Gardner (ed.),
The Annotated Alice (London: Penguin, 2001), 21. Subsequent references to this edition will
be given in the text.
3 Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography (London, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, [1999] 2002), 224.
Drawing ‘Muchnesses’ in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 51
the protection of the word in a world which plays upon the ‘inescapable physical
presence of words.’4 Hence Alice’s education consists in re-establishing the distance
between words and images in order to mark the divide between words and bodies,
which she keeps denying. As Alice must understand, words should not deform the
female body; they should erase it instead. Or rather, words should turn the body into
a series of signs, everything remaining safely external, as when the aged man of
‘Haddocks’ Eyes’, in Through the Looking-Glass, transforms haddocks’ eyes into
waistcoat-buttons.
Once Upon a Time in Wonderland
That Alice is, in fact, experiencing a journey into femininity is made visible by the
structure of the tale: Carroll’s narrative seems to be designed as endless repetition.
If we take into consideration the prefatory verses, Alice is presented as a tale told to
three little girls: Prima, Secunda, and Tertia. Hence, it seems to be a once-upon-a-time
story or a dream that Alice and her sister—albeit in a different form5—experience in
turn. Thus, Alice seems to deal with the transmission of female knowledge or, rather,
with what is ingrained in the minds of little girls and passed on through generations of
women. Similarly, Jacqueline Labbé views the introductory poem as having already
happened, as framing the heroine in some past time, as if the narrative told a tale
‘that culture itself constantly replicates—that of growing up, being acculturated.’6
In fact, what this suggests is that if Alice in Through the Looking-Glass is afraid of
belonging to the king’s dream, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland she is already
confined by male texts. A male voice lurks behind the text and controls the female
voices. As the introductory poem features a male narrator and female listeners, the
tale functions as an educational story passed from one generation to the next and
teaching little girls the precepts of the age.
In the introductory frame, the three female characters activate their willing
suspension of disbelief as if to shatter illusion even before its creation: ‘In fancy
they pursue/The dream-child moving through a land of wonders wild and new …/
And half believe it true’ (7). A female fantasy world is fashioned to quench the
women’s thirst (‘And ever, as the story drained/The wells of fancy dry’ [7]), drying
up the ‘weary’ male teller—as vampires might. As in MacDonald’s tale, the female
body longs for some improper water, yearning for sinful drink from the well of
fallenness. But the metaphorization of story-telling as beverage for thirsty female
4 Irving Massey, The Gaping Pig: Literature and Metamorphosis (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1976), 89.
5 As Reichertz argues, ‘Alice’s sister re-experiences Alice’s dream as day-dream
by making allegorical connections between what is actually happening and what is being
dreamed’ (Reichertz, The Making of the Alice Books, 11). He adds that ‘the “dream-child” of
the introductory poem runs off to play after telling her dream to her sister and her sister tames
the dream to a day-dream that anticipates Alice’s control of story material as an adult story-
teller’ (18).
6 Jacqueline Labbé, ‘“Still She Haunts Me Phantomwise”: Gendering Alice’, The
Carrollian, 3 (Spring 1999): 19–29, 21.
bodies disrupts conventional expectations. The conflation of words with female
bodies contravenes the prescribed annihilation of female physicality, which Victorian
representational codes usually demand. This initial impropriety, in which language
becomes corporealized, shall quickly be contained: the tale might well be poisoned
and act as some sort of Victorian medicine seeking to mould improper bodies into
proper behaviour. In fact, we realize later on, fictional mirrors, like the dormouse’s
embedded story about the three little girls down the treacle well, entrap both Alice
and the three listeners in a reflection which foregrounds dominant scripts and erases
sinful/greedy female bodies.
Albeit humourously and through many ironic elements, Alice highlights
Victorian female education and indoctrination into propriety by incessantly drawing
links between an illusory fairy realm and the modern world. Close to the romance,7
the tale, nevertheless, swarms with allusions to Victorian reality: Wonderland
is characterized by decorum and real-life institutions, and it ends with a trial. In
its shift from romance to reality, the tale mirrors Alice’s maturity: the more she
grows, the more she enters the real world of domestic femininity and finds out about
her own identity, about her own meaning, and the way words and laws define her.
Wonderland’s legal system and the system of feminine representation mirror one
another; although Alice realizes at the end of the tale that a pack of cards is nothing
other than a pack of cards and no longer fears the Queen’s verdict ‘Off with her
head!’, she has discovered the maiming aspects of representation. Her quest is a
gendered quest during which Alice investigates types of feminine representation.
Trying to situate herself between the little girl and the woman, or between the chaste
angel and the fallen woman, she is physically positioned between duchesses and
pigs, March hares and mad hatters, greedy little girls and debilitated women. Hence,
because her quest for identity originates from linguistic slippages, her investigation
is not only a journey through language,8 but most of all, I argue, a journey through
representation. Representation, the codes which construct Alice’s gender identity
textually and literally, must be explored and meaning must be secured.
As has long been understood, one of the main characteristics of Wonderland is
that familiar and naturalized rhythms and patterns, conventional and ordinary words
and images are defamiliarized. Rehearsed texts acquire new and fresh meanings,
dry historical bits from lesson books literally dry dripping wet people, and bats
and cats may indifferently eat one another. Alice’s confusion as to whether cats eat
bats or bats eat cats could function as an introduction to Carroll’s exposition of
the workings of representation within a fantastic narrative. As Katherine Kearns
suggests, ‘[I]ncorporative, reality reveals itself as having an immense appetite: the
poet drinks absinthe and eats opium, and the madman drinks potassium bromide and
7 Gordon analyzes the mingling of romance and reality in Alice, underlining

the contradictory modes which map out the child’s journey through magical gardens and
courtrooms. See Jan B. Gordon, ‘The Alice Books and the Metaphors of Victorian Childhood’,
in Robert Phillips (ed.), Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Dreamchild as Seen through the
Critics’ Looking-Glasses, 1865–1971 (London: Penguin, 1971), 127–50, 138.
8 See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale,
edited by Constantin V. Boundas (London: The Athlone Press, 1990).
eats saltpeter, proving metonymy’s premise that you are what you eat, and you eat
what you are.’9 Reversed, distorted, or literalized in Wonderland, the machinations
of metonymy do not solely teach Alice how eating is literally about to define her
identity. Enclosed in this world and not knowing ‘how she [is] to get out again’
(12), the female self becomes shifty. As Wonderland shows how unstable meaning
can be, the tale also seems to suggest that the female self suffers from alienation
because ‘woman’ is grounded in artificial and unnatural precepts. What Alice
discovers, therefore, as shall be seen, is the instability of gender identities. Through
the use of nonsense, Carroll’s narrative brings to light the extent to which feminine
identity, when seen through the prism of commodity culture, solely stems from
representation.
Alice, indeed, typifies the extent to which the female body is tied to representation,
since Alice’s appetite, as Nancy Armstrong contends, is liable to mark or unmark
her gender, race, or class identity.10 For securing the little girl’s gender, race, and
class identity is the substance of the tale. From the very beginning, Alice refuses to
submit to the codes of feminine propriety. She refuses to sit still with her sister, bored
by her sister’s book, which contains neither pictures nor conversations, and she
refuses to make a daisy-chain, thereby disrupting the woman and flower alliance.11
Unable to check her desires, ‘burning with curiosity’ (11),12 Alice is driven by
impulse and falls down the well. As she enters the fantastic realm where objects and
mysterious creatures titillate her senses, Alice represents the dangers that women
run when roaming the streets in search of pleasure. The female consumer falls ‘right
through the earth’ (13) to a place where top and bottom are inverted and people are
‘antipathies’, in other words, unwanted castaways.13 In fact, thoughtless Alice14 has
gone through the gendered looking-glass of propriety. The world of desire she has
entered is a fleshly world where corporeal boundaries are unclear; whether cats eat
bats or bats eat cats, bodies melt into one another. The excessive body’s malleability
and mutability in Wonderland, suggesting that anything might be transformed into
9 Katherine Kearns, Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking-

Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 118.
10 Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography, 234.
11 Ironically enough, the little girl’s story will eventually be read as ‘pilgrim’s wither’d
wreath of flowers/Pluck’d in a far-off land’, as the prefatory verses suggest.
12 Maria Tatar analyzes how many tales play upon curiosity in children and link
curiosity with the original sin. In particular she studies the Grimms’ story ‘Mary’s Child.’
See Maria Tatar, Off with Their Heads: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992), 26–7.
13 Reichertz draws this parallel between the antipodes and Alice’s feeling of alienation:
‘[Alice] mispronounces the word “antipathies”, which is precisely what the antipodes introduce
in Wonderland, physical antipathies (opposites) that both amuse and confuse Alice, resulting
in a frequently plainful emotional antipathy’ (Reichertz, The Making of the Alice Books, 8).
14 The references to Alice’s rash mind are numerous in the first scene: she acts but
does not think. Hence her fall: it takes place instantly (‘flashed’) and gives her plenty of time
to think about it once it is too late. See Lynda Nead on the Victorian construction of the fallen
woman’s irreversible leap. Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in
Victorian Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, [1988] 1990).
anything else, is dangerous. Alice’s sinful step into the wonderful realm needs to be
corrected. Alice has reached the gardens of temptation with ‘beds of bright flowers’
(16) where locked doors and empty keyholes mark out her criminal journey’s dead
end: she is now aligned with the disobedient heroines of other fairy tales who have
wandered off the tracks of propriety into forests of sins.
As the fairy tale makes clear through Alice’s fall, therefore, female desire reveals
female biology. This idea is enhanced, moreover, through Alice’s food encounters.
In most Victorian writings, whether in novels, magazines or conduct books, food
always acted as a veiled metaphor for sexuality, most improper in the respectable
Victorian woman. For some doctors, eating could lead to sexual disorders or,
conversely, for men, impotence could be cured by eating appropriate food. Food
was even assigned a gender, with raw, spicy, meaty food essentially masculine while
tea was prevailingly feminine. Because of woman’s binary construction as sexual
and virginal, food marks the crossroads of woman’s double construction: delicate
appetites match proper and chaste femininity, while gluttony signals monstrosity.15
Through its constant references to eating or being eaten, Carroll’s narrative
intimates the dominant construction of woman as a body and the dangers of female
corporeality. In so doing, Carroll’s narrative seems to unravel against a medical
backdrop, which, as in MacDonald’s ‘The Light Princess’, aims to tame Alice’s
unruly flesh even before the little girl matures. Throughout the tale, the integrity of
the body is, indeed, constantly threatened: the body might literally be cut to pieces
or metaphorically severed off from its owner when identity falters.16 As Carroll’s
narrative reworks traditional fairy tales, like those of the Brothers Grimm, which
physically punish and chastise female sinners so that crime may be made visible
and deter little girls from being disobedient, lazy or greedy, Alice visualizes and
experiences punishment.17 She meets a Duchess who ‘beat[s] the baby when it
sneezes’ (64), and her adventures as a whole are framed by a crime-and-punishment
pattern. The tale opens on the heroine’s fall and closes on her judgement, retroactively
constructing the heroine as a fallen woman—that is, literally.
What Carroll’s narrative underlines, in addition, is how close the culture of
childhood and the world of woman are.18 The Victorian construction of woman as a
childlike creature situated near the bottom of the evolutionary scale naturally placed
15 See Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1987] 1989), 15–16. Significantly, as suggested in
chapter 2, as if to back up even more the gendering of food, Victorian aesthetics of thinness,
weakness, and pallor which praised fasting women, turned them into anorexics suffering from
amenorrhoea, the very mark of asexuality, which, Michie underlines, seemingly ‘purifie[d]
the body by obliterating signs of sexuality’ (21).
16 See Paul Schilder, ‘Psychoanalytic Remarks in Alice in Wonderland and Lewis
Carroll’, in Phillips, Aspects of Alice, 333–43.
17 Unlike the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales, Alice is no cautionary tale, but rather,
I argue, educational. As I shall demonstrate, her fate is, however, not that far from that of
‘children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts, and other unpleasant things, all
because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them’ (17).
18 For a study of the links between the culture of childhood and the definition of
woman, see Tatar, Off with Their Heads!.
women alongside children as agents of disobedience. Hence, both women and
children were easily ‘positioned as targets of disciplinary intervention that would
mould them for subservient roles.’19 Contrary to most feminist criticism which
generally interprets Alice in terms of female potency and posits that Alice’s fallen
body claims space and gains power,20 I therefore aim to demonstrate how Carroll’s
ostensible subversion of domestic ideology opens up onto a world of physical
cruelty and destruction, where woman is bound to patriarchal politics. In fact,
disciplinary punishment constantly monitors Alice’s potential deviances. As soon
as she opens a door and gives vent to her curiosity, Alice is granted an even smaller
place, incarcerated in ‘rat-hole[s]’ (15) and enticed with suggestively beautiful
flowers. Similarly, as soon as she demonstrates a will of her own and seeks to assert
power, she is subjugated to Wonderland’s laws. The hungrier she is, the taller she
seeks to become, the more she is made to feel the weight of discipline. A series of
unfulfilled desires seems to tame her improper urges. In a world where woman’s
body and identity are remodelled, enlarged the better to shrink, Alice constantly risks
disembodiment and bodily annihilation.
Following Labbé, who claims that Alice’s constant mutations ‘from small
to large to small in her Wonderlands shows her to be as accommodating a young
woman as any nineteenth-century gentleman could desire’,21 I would therefore like
to envisage Alice’s metamorphoses in terms of her body’s docile malleability in
order to point to the medical discourses which manipulate Alice’s undisciplined
body. Of course, the crime-and-punishment pattern at stake is in fact far more subtle,
far more naturalized in Alice than the Queen’s sentence suggests or than murderous
Bluebeards or dangerous wolves may intimate, threatening curious wives and
disobedient Red Ridinghoods. Neither beheaded nor eaten up, Alice’s body is soon
enmeshed within the web of scientific dictates that await Alice whenever she allows
herself uninhibited freedom. The recuperation of the female body by medical and
scientific verdicts traces the gender politics that dominated the period: the image of
food becomes linked with control, controlling or defining the deviant/proper female
body.
Curing the Female Body: Alice’s Medical Prescriptions
If today the Alice in Wonderland Syndrome may affect those who suffer from distortions
of perception, identity confusions, feelings of levitation or depersonalization,22
in Carroll’s narrative, Alice’s symptomatic body undergoes medical supervision
of a particular type. Bodily functions and references to the body in general were
most often shunned in nineteenth-century fairy tales designed for little girls’ moral
education. But Carroll’s heroine is, nonetheless, subjected to a significant amount
19 Tatar, Off with Their Heads!, 96.

20 See, in particular, Auerbach, ‘Falling Alice, Fallen Women, and Victorian Dream
Children.’
21 Labbé, ‘“Still She Haunts Me Phantomwise”: Gendering Alice’, 20.
22 See Sandor G. Bernstein, ‘The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, part III, or Medicine
Through the Looking-Glass, 2001’, The Carrollian, 7 (Spring 2001): 40–52.
of medical inspection. Her acculturation mainly consists in changing her body from
without and within, so that the disciplinary medical processes may physically coerce
her into docile behaviour at the precise moment when the little girl is experiencing
physical changes on her way to womanhood.
As a matter of fact, besides the scientific discourses and hints at evolutionary
theories which literary criticism has long deciphered behind Carroll’s fantasy, the tale
is peppered with potions, cakes, ointments, and references to medicines of all kinds,
from camomile to treacle. Obviously, power is masculine, scientific and rational—
which recalls the male teller of the prefatory verses as the one who orchestrates
the narrative. As Alice falls into the rabbit’s house, she seems to fall into a male
laboratory, decorated with maps and pictures, to be cured of her uncurbed desire and
of her fallen nature and educated to the precepts of Victorian ideology. As a matter
of fact, Alice’s first curative beverage immediately transforms her body and shrinks
her to punish her for seeking to enter the garden of passion. Significantly, she ‘go[es]
out altogether, like a candle’ (17) whose passionate flame the medicine snuffs out.23
The medicalization of the girl’s body pathologizes her instantly, changing her into
a ‘nervous’ patient (17)—a relevant stereotype of the time not unfrequently used to
label deviance.
Revealingly, Alice’s body changes and her increasing nervousness bring to
light mid-Victorian constructions of femininity. Alice simultaneously experiences
bodily and mental changes, both connected with the development of the female
reproductive system, as contemporary physiologists claimed. As already mentioned,
the instability of female physiology from the onset of puberty prevailed in the
works of physiologists like John Elliotson and later Henry Maudsley. Hence, while
pretending to heal the woman’s unruly body, the medical discipline affects Alice
with a specifically female malady, and limits her to the figure of the debilitated
and nervous woman. In this way, the narrative illustrates how medical discourse
contributed to woman’s social construction. As a matter of fact, once the medical
potion has kindled the fire within the passionate woman, Alice is taught how self-
containment, repression, and disembodiment mark the Victorian ideal: her body now
melted away, she suffers from an identity crisis and like a schizoid child, scolding
herself in the second person, mentions previous masochistic self-punishments.
Likewise, the cake displayed under glass she next eats, dutifully obeying the
performative label ‘EAT ME’, is once more entangled with a disciplinary regime.
Far from satisfying the child’s unruly appetites, eating is a conscientious activity:
Alice ‘set[s] to work [to] finish[–] off the cake’ [19]), ‘anxiously’ (18) wondering
about the results of the medicinal cake on her body. Obviously, the girl’s insatiable
curiosity or appetites are enhanced the better to be curbed by normative medicines,
in the same way as later, the aggressive, predatory woman who wants to set Dinah on
the rabbit and his friends to save herself from being burnt down in the rabbit’s house
is eventually physically chastised by pebbles, which turn into cakes and make her
shrink. The rabbit’s food, while it exposes the heroine’s physical appetite, punishes
23 The candle-flame metaphor is found again in the Tweedledum and Tweedledee

scene in Through the Looking-Glass.
her, lapidating and erasing the monstrous woman in order to shape the little girl back
into an inferior size.
Thus, Alice is constantly chastened by the rabbit’s food, potions, and even
instruments, the anxious white rabbit becoming a representation of the Victorian
physician faced with female unruliness. Invisibly, the narrative points towards the
way medicine manipulated women in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Whether fans, cakes, or drinks shrink or enlarge Alice, they never enable her to
satisfy her desires, either by reaching the key beckoning to her from the surface of the
transparent table or by entering the garden of flowers. This is why, contrary to Nina
Auerbach’s analysis which reads Alice’s growth as a subversive claim to room,24 I
would rather suggest that Alice’s changes in size always signal some external control
over her body. Whenever she shrinks or grows up, Alice feels powerless and alienated.
Worse, when she does grow in the rabbit’s house, her body is tortured to the point of
‘her neck … being broken’ (39), leading her to kneel, thereby figuratively stooping
under the weight of the male law. As for Ingelow’s Mopsa, painfully experiencing
growth, size is no sign of female potency in Carroll’s tale.
Hence, the tale foregrounds the parallels between female growth and female
powerlessness. The more Alice enters womanhood, the more her body is handled by
the objects scattered along her path, which reveal social prescriptions of femininity.
As the hints at contemporary medical discourses construct the little girl as a fragile
woman, as Alice’s changes in size trigger hysterical symptoms in her, the fairy tale
strengthens the links between pathology and discipline. Alice’s crying is, indeed,
always associated with self-discipline (‘you ought to be ashamed’ [21]). Her constant
self-castigation is, of course, in keeping with the period’s educational principles. The
‘psychological domino theory’ like that advanced by the educationalist Friedrich
Froebel prevailed in Victorian discipline and insisted on punishment’s effect of
multiplication: the more children are spanked or rebuked, the more they shed tears
and thus the more they feel guilty about their crime.25 Whether she wishes she had
not drunk so much nor cried so much, Alice is therefore increasingly educated into
punitive justice. With such a policing system ruling over the magic world, Alice
becomes more and more acquainted with the laws seeking to frame and punish
individuals. The pervading hysterical germs which manifestly affect the inhabitants
of Wonderland may well reveal their ideological foundations. Pathology and
physical manifestations are systematically tied to some code, some law that must not
be broken, some schedule that must be respected. The white rabbit’s nervousness,
which causes him to stray violently and scurry away, the cards’ anxiety, and the
mouse’s fear mark a fairy land fashioned as a giant court destined to imprint the
marks of its laws on its inhabitants.
For Alice, the codes and rules that she is looking for, ostensibly contaminated by
the inhabitants’ nervousness, appear to be tied to her domestication—to her framing
as a proper young mid-Victorian middle-class woman. In fact, acculturation is a
literary process, binding the female body to modes of representation that must not be
24 See Auerbach, ‘Falling Alice, Fallen Women, and Victorian Dream Children.’
25 See Jan B. Gordon, ‘The Alice Books and the Metaphors of Victorian Childhood’,
in Phillips, Aspects of Alice, 127–50, 142.
overlooked. As soon as Alice enters the Rabbit’s house, she becomes Mary Jane—a
euphemism for ‘servant girl’26—, and merges with the obedient and submissive female
figure, ‘in great fear [of being] turned out of the house before she had found the fan
and gloves’ (39), thereby literally becoming the sign. Significantly, her linguistic
subservience is instantly followed by her textualization. At the moment when she is
nearly crushed by the patriarchal order, she realizes she has been fictionalized as a
fairy-tale character. She has, thus, been turned into a stereotypical surface on which
to project ideals of control marking the female flesh. For Alice cannot change the
scenario, nor can she create her own character: ‘When I grow up, I’ll write one—but
I’m grown up now … at least there is no room to grow up anymore here’ (40).
This is why, as a character from a fairy tale, Alice fears she has been crystallized
as an eternal little girl who will have to learn lessons to the end of her life. Her
textualization partakes of the strategies of power at issue: objectified and subjected
to a text that was written to indoctrinate her into a precast role, Alice discovers the
script of feminine artificial construction.
Denying the scripts she must abide by, Alice vainly tries to use her body size
to rebel against female education and to turn the disciplining methods to her own
advantage. In that room, to Alice’s mind, her size prevents the opening of any book.
Yet, her fantasy of revolt and independence from patriarchal politics is soon turned
back upon itself: there is no room for any textbook because her own body has been
turned into a text where laws are inscribed and embodied in the rebellious little
girl. She is entrapped in a room literally and metaphorically incarcerating her body,
‘trembling’ despite her size, at the rabbit’s orders, forgetting indeed ‘that she was
now about a thousand times as large as the Rabbit, and had no reason to be afraid of
it’ (41). Like the other characters in Wonderland, she is becoming a sign, a role, a
gender. Whether tall or reduced to minimum size, Alice is made to feel the weight of
patriarchal discourse; power does not depend on size but on the codes defining her,
as a maid in Wonderland or as a woman in society.
Representation’s Maiming Processes: Alice’s Textual Framings
Alice’s adventures, by turning the heroine into a female figure which must be
punished, hold in store for her the fate of all the cards inhabiting Wonderland: the
body’s journey from three to two dimensions. Alice’s linguistic journey needs, thus,
to be explored, as Carroll’s heroine experiences language, and, more specifically,
representation. Questioning artificial and illusory lessons, deceitful appearances,
Wonderland opens onto Victorian social etiquette, testing its meaning and its codes
and disrupting its logic. In its journey amidst the invisible laws that rule society.
Alice foregrounds the paradoxical definition of woman, simultaneously mind
and body, ethereal and corporeal, fictional and real, flesh and trope. Therefore,
discipline is slowly internalized. As Alice’s body experiences physical changes and
is constantly under threat of being cut up, Carroll’s tale takes us into the world of
26 ‘Lady Jane’ was also a euphemism for vagina, which connects Alice’s anxiety with
her growth, and calls to mind, once again, contemporary conceptions of female adolescent
insanity.
feminine representation in order to probe the deadly aspects of metaphor. Carroll’s
mode of representation, furthermore, stands out through a constant play between
narrative worlds, leading the reader deeper and deeper into dream worlds and tales
and collapsing the frame-narrative the better to lay bare representation. Because
Alice’s quest is a dream, the little girl discovers, through embedded stories and texts,
the narratives by which she is fashioned, the words by which she is framed, and in
whose dream she belongs—lessons in deciphering the texts of which she, as a little
Victorian girl, is made and by which she must abide.
Alice, indeed, plays upon embedded stories which reveal Alice’s own framing.
Story-telling functions as a way of staging her own indoctrination into femininity,
that is, in fact, a way of narrating representation. The more Alice dreams and tries
to voice her desires, the more she seems to be told stories: the mouse’s tale, the
dormouse’s story, or the Mock Turtle’s narrative are so many textual layers Alice
experiences and which guide her along her quest for identity. As a matter of fact, the
fictional mirror-images or the likenesses she is faced with are well-versed in the art
of telling stories and handling words. When she encounters the mouse, she is told
her own story in a proleptic vignette dealing with victimization and powerlessness.
The mouse’s tail is meant to remind Alice of the tales/laws to which she is bound so
that she may grasp the extent to which her body is tailored by invisible scripts which
always hold punishment in store for disobedient little girls. As a matter of fact, the
mouse’s hysterical body, ‘quiver[ing] all over with fright’ (26), ‘bristling all over’,
‘trembling down to the end of its tail’ (27), and her ‘shrill, passionate voice’ (26)
adumbrate how Alice’s nervous and deformed body is to be contained by the legal
system which animates the story: in Wonderland, the body is literally stamped by the
laws that define individuals. As they shape the mouse’s tail, words are transformed
into beings while beings become signs, offshoots of dominant discourses which
foreground domination and submission.
When Alice arrives at the mad tea-party, her body is allowed ‘[n]o room’ (72).
While the conversation revolves around propriety issues (‘not very civil’, ‘to sit
down without being invited’, ‘should learn not to make personal remarks’, ‘rude’),
and a series of ‘don’ts’, language replaces the food and drink Alice is denied: as part
of this highly domestic picture, Alice must erase—cut off—her body while the scene
hovers between verbal violence and anxieties of physical dismemberment: the hatter
claims Alice’s hair ‘wants cutting.’ The mad male figure—which might perhaps be
read as an inverted reflection of the Victorian mental physiologist—leaves his knife
to handle language instead. In the same way as the text fashions its definition of
femininity through threatening to ‘cut up’ Alice’s body, in Barthesian terminology, the
scene engages with feminine representation via an embedded story which forbids the
female body substantial nourishment: instead of being fed sweets, Alice is told sweet
stories.27 Interestingly, the fairy tale she is told recounts the story of representation.
By playing upon the word ‘draw’, the tale lays bare feminine drawing/representation
27 Ronald R. Thomas sees the dormouse’s story as ‘a coded version of Alice’s dream’,
Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1990), 58.
and severs the hungry female body from the proper metaphor of woman as a sweet
little girl.
In fact, the story of the three girls living in a treacle well deals less with greedy
women giving way to their physical desires than with excessively sweet little girls:
language literalizes the stereotyped metaphor the better to incarcerate the girls
in clichés and obliterate the signs of their physicality. Ironically enough, female
sweetness, though denying the female body, makes the girls very ill. Thus, female
illness is shaped into a rhetorical figure which foregrounds female propriety: as
sick invalids, the three little girls now match Victorian gender expectations; they
correspond to the idealized consumptive woman, as exemplified by MacDonald’s
Adela Cathcart. In this way, because treacle is both a typically sweet ingredient
and a medicine,28 the series of double-entendres maps out the little girls’ journey
through representation from greedy little girls fed on treacle to debilitated sweet
women whose corporeality has been annihilated. Cured and killed, fed and erased,
the little girls experience the violence of the language of representation. As William
Empson observes, the treacle girls are ‘a pathetic example of a martyrdom to the
conventions’29: their living on treacle, and thereby their female refinement, constructs
them as ill and corpse-like subjects, like the butterfly living on weak tea in Through
the Looking-Glass.
Hence, the language of representation acts as medicine to improper female
bodies: treacle tricks the little girls into being cured of their greed/unrestrained bodily
desires in order to kill them, whether literally by making them sick or metaphorically
by crystallizing them in the dead metaphor of sweetness. Female education consists
in learning how to draw treacle or ‘muchnesses’—likenesses—and teaches little
girls to copy copies and to fashion female identity as an endless series of sweet
stereotypes.30 The well Alice has fallen into and is seemingly confined in and the
treacle well the sick little girls live in are much of a muchness, a mirror on which
to project Alice’s training into femininity. As a result, the whole scene, dealing
with domesticity and propriety, eating and drinking tea, is fraught with macabre
undertones.31 As a sweet stereotype, a faded copy, woman is bound to become a
two-dimensional image framed by patriarchal politics. The embedded story, as an
educational vignette, functions as the pictures from illustrated, informational books,
with the difference that, this time, Alice is taught about feminine representation.
Alice cannot escape her training into femininity. Her dream does not enable
her to escape reality and to enter a wonderland where she can give vent to her
appetites. On the contrary, the more she dreams, the more she hears stories of her
28 See Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice. Gardner also adds that ‘wells believed to
contain water of medicinal value were sometimes called “treacle wells”’ (81).
29 William Empson, ‘Alice in Wonderland: The Child as Swan’, Some Versions of the
Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935), in Phillips, Aspects of Alice, 400–33, 421.
30 Other scenes in the tale are also hinged upon such a copying activity. At the ultimate
trial, the jurors keep copying what is being said on their slates. Even when Alice steals the
pencil from Bill the lizard, the latter continues to write with his finger. Similarly, the knave is
accused of having imitated somebody else’s hand in writing the letter.
31 This idea is developed in Through the Looking-Glass with the the Bread-and-
butter-fly. In that scene high refinement depends on being fed on weak tea.
own literary framing and ideological containment. Stories dry the body and words
alienate, splitting up body and mind, and Alice, like the caterpillar, must experience
death in order to be reborn as a beautiful—proper—creature whose ephemereal
existence reflects woman’s weakness and death-in-life, as the figure of the butterfly
demonstrates in Through the Looking-Glass. Revealingly, the figure of the caterpillar
is not significant solely because it brings into play images of death and rebirth. When
Alice meets the caterpillar, in addition, he reads her mind as a book, seeing her as
a text and checking her knowledge of the texts that have crafted her. Constructed
as an instructor, he orders Alice to ‘keep [her] temper’ (51) and to get used to her
small size. In short, with his hallucinogenic mushroom and hookah, the caterpillar’s
clearsightedness stages the way culture inscribes ideology in individuals’ minds.
As Alice sounds deprived of her volitional powers, her will and judgement thus
suspended, she is changed into a sort of docile puppet whose mind is being monitored
by superior and invisible powers the better to construct docile automatic selves.
What the caterpillar scene reveals, moreover, are contemporary representations
of the female will. Simultaneously signifying wilfulness and volition, will was a key
instrument to naturalize and enforce woman’s powerless position. Caught within this
physiological discourse, the supposed weakness of the female will inevitably placed
women alongside animals and half-wits on the evolutionary scale.32 Revealingly,
the alterations that Alice makes in Robert Southey’s didactic poem, ‘The Old Man’s
Comforts and How He Gained Them’,33 if they still betray Alice’s appetite, also
reinforce the links between the little girl and ideologies of prescriptive femininity.
As a matter of fact, some of the changes in the poem display an obsession with the
image of the body which testify that these texts do not simply record how Alice’s
mind has been moulded by indoctrinating tales. They also exemplify how she has
been taught to mould her body to an ideal shape so as to abide by conventional codes
of representation. Wisdom is the keyword to the character’s well-being in the original
Father Williams, who has taken care to preserve his health throughout his life. But
when the words come out of Alice’s mouth, the eponymous hero is a brainless and
fat father who has used ointments to keep his limbs supple. The reference to an
ointment sold at ‘one shilling the box’ (52) recalls the fraudulent advertisements
of the time and foregrounds the world of female beauty. Thus, this example of
linguistic slippage shows how Alice regains the sense of her self by reciting scripts
dealing with femininity as representation, as performance, and, hence, as artificial.
Her body becomes surface, a series of codes which she knows she must consume
in order to match the expectations of feminine representation.34 It, therefore, comes
as no surprise that the piece of mushroom the caterpillar advises her to eat, one
32 See Jane Wood, Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 45.
33 Isaac Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs (1715) was a famous children’s book praising
obedience. Carroll alludes to it twice in Alice, thus setting up a realistic background to Alice’s
moral training. Maria Tatar underlines how Watts’s ‘Obedience to Parents’ figures death as the
systematic stage following disobedience (see Tatar, Off with Their Heads!, 26).
34 Alice learns an identical lesson in Through the Looking-Glass with the song
‘Haddocks’ Eyes’, where body parts become pieces of clothing. The whole song is interestingly
related to consumer culture and even features a hair restorer: Rowland’s Macassar-Oil.
side making her grow taller, the other making her grow smaller, shows how Alice
has improved in discriminating images from objects since she can now regulate her
appetite and control her body. As Armstrong argues, Alice gradually learns to ‘nibble
one side of a mushroom or another, in hopes of stabilizing the body that appetite
repeatedly disfigures.’35 In so doing, she regulates and controls her image.
Such links between female aesthetics and representation are actually to be found
in other embedded tales or recited verse. If Alice’s recitations recall traditional
folk tales blaming woman for being deceitful and associating her with artifice,36
here the discourse denounces Victorian ideology and its modes of representation
more generally. The world of female fashion haunts, in fact, the narrative. Tenniel’s
illustrations of Alice were known to follow the current fashion, and Carroll’s
correspondence with his illustrators revealed the attention he paid to his female
characters’ physical appearance.37 For example, Carroll was known to have rejected
the idea of Alice wearing a crinoline,38 and he had asked Tenniel to change the tubular
balloon-rings for a more fashionable period dress.39 Moreover, if Alice’s porkpie hat
in Through the Looking-Glass was manifestly reminiscent of the little girl’s hat in
Millais’s My First Sermon (1863) it was also, alongside her striped socks, an obvious
reference to contemporary fashion.40
The links with the world of female fashion are not solely visible in the
illustrations. They appear as well within the embedded narratives. The story of
the Mock Turtle, for example, furthers the deconstruction of representations of
femininity. Still linked to food and appetite, since a Mock Turtle is ‘the thing Mock
Turtle Soup is made from’ (98), the Mock Turtle reveals yet another gap between
body and image. Indeed, the Mock Turtle embodies female education and feminine
representation. While the Mock Turtle, always crying, epitomizes woman’s sensitive
nature, her story traces how education turns ‘real Turtle[s]’ into Mock Turtles, that is,
35 Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography, 223–4.

36 Tatar mentions Basile’s ‘She Bear’ as a particularly relevant folk tale which accuses
woman of using deception and artifice. See Tatar, Off with Their Heads!, 112–13.
37 For more on Carroll’s collaboration with his illustrators, see Morton N. Cohen and
Edward Wakeling, (eds), Lewis Carroll & His Illustrators: Collaborations & Correspondence,
1865–1898 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2003).
38 Carroll hated crinolines, high heels, and high-shouldered sleeves. In Harry Furniss’s
two-volume autobiography, The Confessions of a Caricaturist (New York and London: Harper
and Brothers, 1902), Furniss recalls Carroll’s condemnation of his drawing of Sylvie for Sylvie
and Bruno: ‘Could you cut off those high shoulders from her sleeves? Why should we pay any
deference to a hideous fashion that will be extinct in a year hence? Next to the unapprochable
ugliness of “crinoline”, I think these high-shouldered sleeves are the worst things invented
for ladies in our time. Imagine how horrified they would be if one of their daughters were
really shaped like that!’ (quoted in Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno [introduction by Martin
Gardner, New York: Dover, 1988], xxv). Interestingly, Furniss stresses how Carroll kept
using the phrase ‘cut out’, suggesting ‘dressmaking’ and typifying Carroll’s obsession with
his character’s dresses (xxiii-xxiv).
39 Rodney Engen, Sir John Tenniel: Alice’s White Knight (Aldershot: Scolar Press,
1991), 89.
40 See Michael Hancher, The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books (Athens,
Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 94.
how turtles turn their bodies into sets of codes which match male expectations. The
Turtles are taught Reeling, Writhing, Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, Derision,
Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils. By pinpointing physical activities,
whether they intimate dancing (reeling, writhing, stretching), singing (‘drawling’),
fainting, or improving physical appearances, the pupils are ultimately educated into
becoming mock turtles, fakes, copies, imitations—that is, in moulding their bodies
in conformity with stock-in-trade images. Similarly, the ensuing Lobster-Quadrille
furthers the significance of the body, now dancing. But very quickly, Alice replaces
the physical activity by the story of her own adventures, reciting again the poems
that have come gone wrong and trying new ones which come differently as well and
are marked, as already underlined, by Alice’s appetite. Hints at physical appearance
pepper the script, once more turning the body’s physicality into an exhibition of
codes: the lobster is worried about his brown tan, sugars his hair, trims his belt
and his buttons, and turns out his toes. Likewise, the whiting looks after boots and
shoes. In this way, while the sluggard’s song turns the tale of Sleeping Beauty into
one of idleness, the Lobster changes the idle princess into educated, vain seafood.
Hence, the Mock Turtle and the Lobster-Quadrille episodes signal the extent to
which women’s obsession with their appearance fashions them into artefacts and
stereotypes, which, in fact, deprive them of their corporeality and erase their bodies
by turning them into texts. Thus shaped as icons, women become two-dimensional
images framed by some normative script which they have been trained to rehearse
from childhood.
Therefore, as Alice tries to find rules to understand the political economy of
Wonderland and to live harmoniously with its inhabitants, what she discovers is,
in fact, her own policing, as if the creatures she encountered were as many mirrors
of her self. The little girl’s surveillance acts as some panoptical process aiming to
shape her mind. The narrative, interspersing references to optical devices as the
motif of the telescope exemplifies, traces nineteenth-century theories of perception
from subjective to objective observation. Perspective is reshuffled, and the optical
markers point out the eye/I’s subjection to a panoptical power that ‘transform[s]
the whole social body into a field of perception.’41 The shutting-up telescope, for
example, is simultaneously an image of one’s own limited field of vision and of
one’s enlarged availability to sight. Alice becomes associated with the visible as she
becomes subjected to the gaze of others, locked up in a room surrounded by doors,
which will not open and which will ensure her education. Her eye/I, her body and
identity, her perception and definition are shaped by the lens of ideology.42 She is
looking for a text, a ‘book of rules for shutting up people like telescopes’ (16), but
her own being is being mapped out and monitored.
41 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison ( Trans. Allen
Lane, London: Penguin, [1975] 1991), 214.
42 In Through the Looking-Glass, the motif of the telescope appears again when Alice
is on the train, travelling the wrong way, and the Guard looks at her. Obviously, the lens
(whether telescope, microscope or opera lens) is in the hands of the normative agent, and
Alice, like a fallen woman, is on the wrong side of the tracks.
As Alice’s sense of the real—and therefore of her own reality—is increasingly
constructed in semiotic terms, Alice is textualized and fuses with the clichéd
characters of the embedded stories.43 Alice enters the language of representation,
and words and body merge when her words extend with her body (‘curiouser and
curiouser’ [20]). As Deleuze suggests, underlining how Alice’s greed is eventually
turned back on itself, ‘to eat words … is exactly the opposite: in this case, we raise
the operation of bodies up to the surface of language. We bring bodies to the surface,
as we deprive them of their former depth, even if we place the entire language
through this challenge in a situation of risk.’44 Alice’s urge to turn the real into images
expressing her own desire is thus vain. The real appears as a system of representation
where words shape the self into copies likely to tame, incarcerate and erase the
female body by turning it into ‘muchnesses.’ Objects become clichés, visual signs
which keep displacing meaning elsewhere, as when Alice, in Through the Looking-
Glass, tries to stop the commodities from shifting from one shelf to the next and
from changing shape in the Sheep’s shop.
Thus, Alice experiences a dominant form of representation which originated, as
Richards argues, with the rise of material culture.45 Carroll’s constant textualizations
show how embedded stories turn reality into fictions and objects and characters into
codes. As Alice grows in Wonderland, the ostensibly syllogical logics of Wonderland
magnify Alice’s visual construction of reality through metonymies which construct
the real via displacement. By dint of displacing objects into images, Alice eventually
displaces her own self, becomes literally alienated, her head and her body being
severed off and her appetite gradually tamed. Like the treacle girls, she is fed and
cured the better to be erased. Consequently, the dangers of physical annihilation or
of poisoning that Alice faces represent, in fact, the danger of shifting from three
dimensions to two dimensions. That is, it represents the danger of losing one’s own
fleshly body and being turned into one of those flat cards Alice encounters whose
identity is written on their chest. Whether Alice’s body is enlarged or reduced,
whether right and left, top and bottom are inverted, the body undergoes manipulations
and distortions in all its dimensions to stage its fitting some conventional Victorian
mould. Flattened, framed, and crystallized into some domestic ideal, Alice is
gradually turned into a sign, a clichéd and ideal little girl. However, like the cards
lying flat on their faces before the Queen to prevent her from reading their identity,
their bowing to the conventions encloses subversive potentialities: the cliché is a
reversible and empty sign, holding multiple possibilities.
43 In the same way, when she becomes a telescope, she is not solely objectified but
is also changed into a metaphor. As Reichertz explains, the image of the telescope may be
redolent of Carroll’s former use of telescopes in his parodies of moral didactic material in
The Rectory Magazine (1848–1850). For example, Carroll’s essay ‘Twaddle on Telescopes’
never deals with telescopes. It plays instead upon the trope of expansion to illustrate how the
magazine is likely to expand the reader’s mind (Reichertz, The Making of the Alice Books,
28–9).
44 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 24.
If Alice eventually takes the pencil in the final trial and starts growing larger
again, she, nonetheless, screams at the threatening cards ‘flying down upon her’
(129) before waking up. The tale still hesitates between writing and being written,
and Alice’s ultimate impotence testifies to the narrative’s conservative undercurrents.
For the pencil never enables her to enact her desire: like the cards subjected to the
Queen’s fury, Alice can neither master her fate nor voice her wishes, nor can she eat
the treacle tarts that looked so good. Hence, that ‘she liked them best,/ … must ever
be/ A secret kept from all the rest’ (127), and Alice must be starved for the sake of
propriety.
From MacDonald’s image of the wasting female body to Carroll’s starving heroine
who is tempted by food she cannot consume, our journey takes us now into other
underground worlds where the heroines are increasingly associated with the visible
and subjected to the gaze of others. Juliana Horatia Ewing and Christina Rossetti,
following Jean Ingelow, rewrite Carroll’s fantasy, drawing particular attention to the
links between medical discourse and modern feminine construction, and anchoring
their narratives into Victorian commodity culture.
Chapter Four
Taming the Female Body in

Juliana Horatia Ewing’s ‘Amelia and
the Dwarfs’ (1870) and Christina Rossetti’s
Speaking Likenesses (1874)
If Lewis Carroll’s Alice finally learns to objectify herself by repressing her desire
to consume food in order to become sweet, fairy-tale women writers of the 1870s
revisited Carroll’s fantasy to highlight more sarcastically and more pessimistically
the construction of the feminine ideal. In Juliana Horatia Ewing’s ‘Amelia and the
Dwarfs’ (1870) and Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses (1874), the heroines
follow in Alice’s footsteps: they fall underground into worlds designed to teach
them how to behave. The fairylands, however, do not provide them with alternative
versions of reality. They simply reflect their own natures, which Amelia must learn
to tame in Ewing’s tale, and which Rossetti’s heroines have long repressed. Their
fantastic journeys confirm that achieving ideal femininity implies denying one’s
desires and appearing as good as gold.
Juliana Horatia Ewing (1841–1885), also known as ‘Mrs. Gatty’, was the
daughter of the reverend Alfred Gatty and Margaret Scott, who wrote children’s
books (Aunt Judy’s Tales [1859], Aunt Judy’s Letters [1862]), and edited the sixpenny
monthly Aunt Judy’s Magazine from 1866, which Juliana Horatia coedited with her
sister, from 1874 to 1876, after their mother’s death. In the 1870s and 1880s, Ewing
was among Britain’s most popular children’s writers, and her works were praised
by Tennyson, Ruskin, and Ingelow. Her stories, collected as Mrs Overtheway’s
Remembrances (1869), The Brownies and Other Tales (1870) and Lob Lie-by-the-
Fire, and Other Tales (1873), appeared both in Charlotte Yonge’s Monthly Packet
and in Aunt Judy’s Magazine. Her longer works include A Flat-Iron for a Farthing
(1872), Six to Sixteen (1875), Jan of the Windmill (1876), and We and the World
(1881). With the publication and success of Jackanapes (1879) and Lætus Sorte
Mêa (1882)—reprinted as The Story of a Short Life (1885)—, both patriotic stories
featuring soldier heroes, Ewing’s literary reputation was established. The former
was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and illustrated by
Randolph Caldecott. Ewing’s works are generally not didactic; her experimental fairy
tales, in particular, contain social criticism and illustrate Ewing’s sharp perception
of her fast-changing society. In most of them, fantasy acts as a means to refract the
bleak aspects of women’s lives, as in ‘Christmas Crackers’, in which a young widow
dreams that she is married to Bluebeard, who threatens her life by waving a scimitar
over her head.
Ewing’s ‘Amelia and the Dwarfs’ is a relevant example in this study of feminine
representation, for it re-uses matriarchal mythology by tapping into female folklore
and rewriting an Irish fairy tale. Ewing’s tale indeed revisits ‘Wee Meg Barnileg and
the Fairies’, the story of a wilful little girl who is policed into keeping her tongue
still and domesticated into dutiful and self-abnegating femininity. Ewing literally
foregrounds her indebtedness to her female ancestors’ story-telling. The story comes
from the narrator’s godmother’s grandmother’s grandmother, and the matrilineal
line of story-tellers is deemed to ensure the morality of the tale, for ‘a tale without a
moral [is] like a nut without a kernel.’1 Yet, Ewing’s changes in the original scenario
rewrite her foremothers’ didacticism into an ambiguous narrative which turns female
writing into a reading of the codes of domestication. Proper femininity flirts with
pretence and deceit while the morality of the tale sounds ironical.
‘Amelia and the Dwarfs’ recounts the story of a disobedient little girl who is
sent on an underground journey with dwarfs who cure her of her misbehaviour.
Featuring dwarfs and aligning the heroine with beastly creatures, the tale explores
the nature of woman further than Ingelow’s female characters, unable to control
their desire, or than MacDonald’s and Carroll’s greedy heroines. In fact, Ewing’s
revisiting of primitive culture recalls how the incursion of fairies into nineteenth-
century reality was not solely a literary phenomenon. Throughout the nineteenth
century, fairies were interpreted as the creations of a primitive human culture.
Little by little, Darwin’s theories of biological evolution drifted towards discourses
on cultural evolution, and folklore was seen as a significant material revealing
primitive thinking and man’s development. Hence, fairy lore consisted in animist
interpretations of the world, as Sir Edward Burnet Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871)
and George W. Cox’s An Introduction to the Comparative Science of Mythology
and Folklore (1881) and numerous other works by ethnological and anthropological
folklorists seemed to claim. The folklorists’ attempts at rationalizing fairies, elves
and gnomes—from the eighteenth century throughout the nineteenth century and
climaxing at the fin de siècle—clearly posits the linkages between tales of fairies
and Victorian normative ideology. The understanding of otherwordly creatures
was closely related to the well-being of the nation, and the folklorists’ discourses
resonated with racial and imperial implications.2 If fairy lore gained significance with
colonial expansion, the discovery of the African pygmies in the 1870s, Carole Silver
posits, ‘became the living physical support for the “pygmy theory” of fairy origins
and the most likely and visible proof of the prehistoric existence of fairies.’3 At the
end of the nineteenth century, George Laurence Gomme, in his English Traditional
Lore (1885) and Ethnology in Folklore (1892), and E.S. Hartland, in his Mythology
and Folktales (1900)—both in turn presidents of the Folk-Lore Society founded in
1 Juliana Horatia Ewing, ‘Amelia and the Dwarfs’ [1870], in Nina Auerbach and U.C.
Knoepflmacher, Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 105–27, 105. Subsequent
references to this edition will be given in the text.
2 See Carole G. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian
Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
3 Silver, Strange and Secret People, 50.
Taming the Female Body in ‘Amelia and the Dwarfs’ and Speaking Likenesses 69
1878—maintained that understanding less developed peoples was a necessary step
in managing those primitive races of mankind.
Yet, paradoxically enough, undersized creatures, whether pygmies in central
Africa or dwarfs in England (costovertabral, achondroplastic, or microcephalics)
were instantly ‘remythified’4 and were believed to have preternatural powers.
Hence, as specimens exhibited in the ethnological department of the Crystal Palace,
clinically investigated, scientifically ranged along the evolutionary chain, they were
simultaneously turned into images of monstrous and uninhibited power and greed,
uncivilized creatures capable of upsetting society’s status quo. Poised between the
real and the imaginary, these otherwordly and primitive creatures hid themselves
on the outskirt of civilized realms and threatened to abduct the Victorians’ children
to improve their species.5 Both explained and remythified, clarified and obscured,
fairies, when imported into literature, could thus easily partake of the creation of
what Rosemary Jackson terms ‘paraxis’: the ‘spectral region of the fantastic’ where
nothing is real nor unreal and where the ‘underside’ of the ‘dominant “realistic”
order’,6 suddenly resurfaces. The underground creatures, hovering between the visible
and the invisible, could suddenly defamiliarize reality and subvert its constructs.
Consequently, Ewing’s reworking of a twofold structural framework is fraught
with meaning and sheds new light on the nature of woman that Victorian fairy tales
and fantasies explored. While Ewing’s heroine falls underground and experiences a
series of educational trials, her double remains in the world of reality. The stereoscopic
narrative constructs the real and the fantastic worlds as inverted reflections of one
another. But Ewing has a real woman inhabit the fairy world, instead of the fairy
woman in the original tale and, therefore, blurs the divide between the two worlds.
The presence of the slave woman adds jarring notes to the tale and merges the
fantastic realm and the world of reality, hinting at woman’s confinement in prescribed
definitions, as shall be seen.
At first sight, the tale’s crime-and-punishment pattern and its stress on the
heroine’s process of socialization and domestication highlight the moralizing tone
of the fantastic experience. Like Carroll’s Alice, Ewing’s heroine falls underground.
Furthermore, both narratives seem bent upon emphasizing their heroine’s domestic
competence, in the vein of traditional fairy tales, such as Snow White, for instance.
After all, Alice must learn to behave in conversations and to rehearse codes of
conduct, to look after a baby in a kitchen or to attend tea—all activities pointing to
feminine duties and customs of social etiquette. What she learns from her domestic
chores is that, as the example of the baby illustrates, the body that grunts and evades
Victorian decorum is soon cast off and changes species. Hence Alice’s education in
self-control. As she learns to tame her appetite, Alice also learns how to shape her
self in accordance with the middle-class codes of femininity and to behave herself,
literally and physically. On the other hand, Amelia is a strong-willed and intelligent
little girl who makes her parents’ lives a nightmare and must be acculturated to

6 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge,
[1981] 1995), 19, 25, 25.
decorous femininity. Disorderly, disobedient, ill-mannered, rude, and dirty, Amelia
breaks knick-knacks and intrudes upon conversations, tears and smears her clothes,
consumes unlimited food, gimcracks, words, and frocks with a destructive energy
and insatiable appetite that need to be disciplined.
Like Carroll’s tale, Ewing’s narrative develops against the backdrop of Victorian
consumer culture. But while Carroll’s heroine’s training in femininity appeared
to mould her self in conformity with dominant models, Ewing’s female character
is aestheticized from the start. Amelia’s unruliness seems to result from her own
construction as a ‘very dear’ (109) exhibit which her proud parents take ‘every
opportunity of showing’ to their friends (106). As a rebellious response to her
commodification, the little girl becomes a living representation of such pricelessness
by smashing to pieces her mother’s friends’ artworks. Deconstructing in this way the
figure of the dear little girl, Amelia becomes an image of female revolt. Moreover,
she becomes expert at testing the worth of the commodities in the houses she visits
or at denouncing the fakes or flawed objects. From the bird in the glass cage to
the new carpet, or the box covered with chintz passing for a real ottoman, Amelia
uncovers appearances in a world where feminine propriety is made up of layers of
costumes and codes. In a similar way, the tears and smears on her clothes function as
so many tears and smears in the fabric of feminine identity: far from being smooth
and seamless, docile and domesticated, Amelia is a miniature version of female fury,
and her uninhibited appetite typifies her as a female Other threatening the feminine
ideal.
Ewing highlights feminine impropriety by showing a body that refuses to submit
to language just as it cannot be constrained, rents clothes, fingers everything, handles
valuables and feels them with its fingertips, leans heavily against people, and climbs
on their knees. Denying corporeal erasure and woman’s proper selflessness, Amelia
intrudes upon people physically and verbally, spies on secrets and threatens to disclose
private conversations. Hence, because she violates the Victorian representational
and social codes, the little girl is cast off and changes species by being sent on
an underground journey with smutty and violent dwarfs who revel at night. There,
Amelia’s unruliness is projected onto the hideous and grimy bodies entranced by
the moon. Yet, Ewing’s underworld does not seem to be a carnivalesque descent
into a bestial or erotic realm. Amelia’s body is to be chastised and policed, and the
tale foregrounds her physical suffering when the dwarfs ‘[pinch] her funny-bone’
and ‘[tread] on her heels’ (113) or ‘poke her in the ribs’ (116). As they make her
obey orders and teach her to wash and mend her dirty linen until her back aches
and her hands and arms grow wrinkled and sore with rubbing, Amelia is educated
into obedience and industry, privation and suffering, being even starved and merely
given the scraps from her own wasted food. Trained by a real woman, one of the
dwarfs’ servants, Amelia learns about woman’s servitude and self-abnegation. The
slave woman, replacing the fairy woman in the original tale, tightens the links
between the two worlds. As in the world of reality, the underground world becomes a
confining feminine sphere where Amelia’s proper femininity is hinged upon holding
conversations, having an eye for the value of curios, eating lightly, and paying
attention to her clothes. Revealingly, her socialization and domestication make her
desirable: ‘But now you are such a willing, handy, and civil little thing, and so pretty
and graceful that they will want to keep you altogether [and] make a pet of you in
the end’ (118)—enhancing the very objectification against which the unruly child
seemed first to rebel.
The better to highlight how Amelia’s descent underground aims to tame the
uncivilized child who counters hegemonic definitions of ideal femininity, Ewing
makes another change in the original scenario. While Amelia remains underground, a
stock—not a changeling, as in the folk tale—has replaced her in the world of reality.
A stock is a shape that can assume a living form. The term, interestingly, can also be
used for a wooden idol. The stock that replaces Amelia is two-faced: to underground
people, the hairy imp has ‘a face like the oldest and most grotesque of apes’ (115);
to human beings, it looks exactly like Amelia. On the one hand, therefore, the figure
of the stock draws on Darwinian theory to illustrate Amelia’s unruliness as a sign of
her regression into a primitive state. But on the other hand, as the figure of the stock
can ironically also stand for an idol or sacred image, it recalls the commodification
of the dear little girl exhibited by her parents.
The ambivalent meanings conveyed by Ewing’s change, both revealing woman’s
beastly nature and constructing her as an image—thereby enhancing woman’s
artificiality—, lay bare the paradoxical nature of woman. Merging with the figure of
the stock, Amelia’s body epitomizes contradictions, being both apish and idolized
as a curio. The stock, thus, significantly conveys the Victorian contradictions
fuelling the construction of woman in corporeal and ethereal terms which Amelia
encapsulates as an undomesticated little girl. Hence the stock’s compulsory medical
treatment aboveground: like Alice’s treacle girls, the stock is cured with ‘pills’,
‘powders’, ‘lotions’, and ‘embrocations’, ‘so many bottles of medicine’, in order
to heal Amelia from her figurative hairiness, fleshliness or otherness. Drawing on
the normative constructs framing the consumptive female body, like MacDonald’s
‘Light Princess’, the prescriptions manifestly kill Amelia as an appropriate cure to
female unruliness. Amelia’s double is about to be buried alive while Amelia slavishly
works underground. In this way, Ewing’s stereoscopic construction of Amelia’s
socialization parallels Amelia’s corporal punishment underground and the stock’s
medical treatment aboveground, both aiming to turn Amelia into a more docile
and physically paler woman (126)—thus, subversively laying bare how medical
discourse cures social impropriety more than physical illness.
Furthermore, Ewing underlines the limits of such a treatment through a twist of
plot underground, which she explores further than the original tale does. Amelia’s
desirability underground suddenly drifts towards sexual appeal when Amelia starts
dancing and teaches the dwarfs how to dance. Cunningly dancing instead of working
and letting the dwarf mend her gimcracks, like the Brothers Grimm’s Rumpelstiltskin
who helps the girl weave in exchange for her baby, Amelia bewitches the dwarf
eager to hold her body and dance with her—thereby realizing the possibilities
which playing with her body may offer. As Ewing suggests, domestication not only
breeds deceit but turns the female body into a weapon to ensnare male partners.
Therefore, counteracting self-erasure and bodily annihilation, Amelia’s adventures
underground proceed in reverse. Ewing’s imagery even associates Amelia with fatal
female figures when the dwarf dresses her up with a hat of touchwood so that she
may pass for a will-o’-the wisp—a preternatural creature which emanates from the
combustion of rotting organisms. Linking femininity and death and associating the
heroine with representations of dangerous femmes fatales, the underground world
functions as the inverted reflection of Amelia’s death-in-life aboveground. The
tale’s stereoscopic construction, thus, exposes woman’s treacherous and duplicitous
nature by conflating contradictory images of womanhood: the femme fatale and the
consumptive maiden are one and the same. Moreover, as an ultimate distortion of the
traditional tale which promises the reformed female character marriage and children,
Ewing mocks the hideous dwarf’s proposal to be ‘partners now and partners always’
(124) and never turns him into a Prince Charming. Amelia remains autonomous and
independent, having learnt how much her power resulted from manipulating her
body in the right way.
In this way, Amelia’s adventures teach her how to turn domestication to her
advantage. Advised by the real woman, Amelia falls into a world which does not
tame her unruly nature but cloaks it beneath layers of codes of conduct. When she
eventually outwits the dwarfs by following the servant’s advice to look for a four-
leaf clover as the key to her journey back home, she seemingly returns home as
an improved and well-behaved woman, and her adventures appear as a feverish
delirium. As in Alice’s case, all was but a dream. The dwarfs’ wry grimaces were
but the ‘wry face’ one makes when swallowing medicine, Amelia and the dwarfs’
dancing was but the medicine that needs ‘To be well shaken before taken’, and
her starving was the light nourishing diet the doctor prescribed. Yet, by reflecting
Amelia’s self-conscious training of her sexual appetites and aggressivity, the dream
pattern contrasts prescribed femininity and proscribed femininity the better to
confuse them. Like those ‘who have been with the “Little People”’, Amelia is now
‘unusually clever’ (127). She has read domestication as a text that one learns by
rote and can successfully recite. Self-censorship is a self-administered process with
medical science as a normative discourse to be swallowed, while Amelia’s hairy,
greedy, and smutty self is dressed up as a clean and polished little girl.
Ewing’s reworking of matriarchal mythology, therefore, brings to light its
disciplining and constraining features. But her changes in the scenario ironically
liberate the untamed energies concealed in the subtexts of the primitive narrative:
clever and resourceful, the heroine has been trained into femininity the better to
handle male-preferred definitions of femininity. In so doing, Ewing outwits Carroll’s
patriarchal discourse, and fashions, in Knoepflmacher’s terms, another anti-Alice.7
Being now a ‘very dear’ Amelia to the letter, Ewing’s heroine can emulate the ideal
woman’s pricelessness and appear as a harmless trope to her gullible parents.
If Ewing’s tale probes the dangers of woman’s objectification with a heroine
who learns how to manipulate her body through her journey underground, Rossetti’s
Speaking Likenesses, on the other hand, offers a far bleaker picture of female
education where the female body is affiliated with commodities and exhibited in
crystal caskets. The links between Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses and Carroll’s Alice
have long been noticed, and Rossetti herself admitted that she had been inspired
by Carroll’s tale. But Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses turns Carroll’s experimental
7 U.C. Knoepflmacher, Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and

Femininity (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 32–3.
fantasy into a moral discourse. Here, fantasy is not given a chance to thrive, minds
are not allowed to wander on imaginary journeys. Unlike her contemporaries, who
use the allegorical dimension of the tales to explore their moralizing power, Rossetti
proceeds in reverse. Morality is here for its own sake, pointing to three heroines who
are educated into repression and almost punished before falling. In Rossetti’s world,
therefore, the fairy mirror flashes back the dark reality.
Literally speaking, contrary to Carroll’s Wonderland, Rossetti’s Nowhere does
not seem to contain any wonder. As the female narrator plays with metaphors to
turn flowers into bells (‘bell flowers rang without clappers’8) at the beginning of
the tale, she suggests that ‘more wonderful matters’ (329) are coming. Yet very
little does come, and the didacticism of the tale cancels the subversive potential of
fantasy. Speaking Likenesses is, in fact, a series of three tales,9 each one echoing
the other through a network of identical motifs, and each departing further and
further from underground worlds. In addition, within the stories themselves, the
self, the construction of the self and the reflection of the self through mirror images
(likenesses) frame the fantasy territory as a land of alienation and point to the female
body as the core of alienation: the heroines’ magnified bodies are expelled from
comfortable domestic reality so as to experience their own alienation. In Rossetti’s
tales, the self is multiplied to excess and two-dimensional images of the self are
projected everywhere, imprisoning the self into a multiplicity of identical reflections.
Significantly enough, this journey into the self is first and foremost an educational
tale training little girls into accepting their lot.
To start with, like Ewing, Rossetti revives the tradition of the old female
storyteller who tells stories ‘from the sad knowledge of [her] old experience’ (326)
while the audience is literally and industriously sewing, drawing, darning, and
knitting. Literally and metaphorically, the text is being woven. Fantasy is feminine
and profoundly domestic with the aunt as a modern version of the fairy spinning fate.
As the stories unfold, the reel is passed on from listener to listener. The audience
must keep sewing, adding threads to their work while the aunt spins her tale and
knits unwatched. As a disembodied voice, the teller vanishes behind the ‘wonders’
(346) she has promised her audience. Moreover, featuring storytelling as a feminine
8 Christina Rossetti, Speaking Likenesses (1874), in Jan Marsh (ed.), Poems and
Prose (London: Everyman, [1994] 2001), 325–52, 329. Subsequent references to this edition
will be given in the text.
9 In many of her fictional works, Christina Rossetti interweaves three tales, mostly
intermingling the experiences of three little girls. In Maude (1849–1850), Maude wants to
become a poet, Magdalen becomes a nun, and Mary a wife. In Family Correspondence, three
girls correspond, Angela-Maria, daughter of an Italian political refugee who struggles to handle
the English language and successfully writes verses, her vain English cousin Emma, solely
interested in her appearance, and Clorinda Knight, a devoted and pious bride-to-be. Likewise,
in Hero (1865), Hero becomes Princess Lily and Melice Rapta, and the tale displays three
different women’s lives; Commonplace (1868–1869) traces the lives of three sisters. Anna
Krugovoy Silver sees Rossetti’s use of the figure three as a Christian sign; see Anna Krugovoy
Silver, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 136–70.
form of ‘craftsmanship’,10 the female creation is materialized by the endless thread
which sews the parts of the stories together. This cliché reminds us, of course, of
the structure of fairy tales, which, Marina Warner contends, ‘with their repetitions,
reprises, elaboration and minutiae, replicates the thread and fabric of one of women’s
principal labours—the making of textiles from the wool or the flax to the finished
bolt of cloth.’11 In Rossetti’s tale, whenever a new story begins, traces from the older
stories appear, forming a palimpsest which changes repetition into creation. In the
first story, ‘Flora’, one of the little girls tells the story of the frog who ‘did not know
how to boil the kettle’ (329). The frog becomes the starting point of the following
story, ‘Edith’, which recounts the embedded tale the audience did not hear. In the last
narrative, ‘Maggie’, the first and second characters’ dolls are sold at Maggie’s aunt’s
shop, and Maggie, along her journey, encounters the children from the first narrative
as well as the family from the second narrative having their planned gipsy party in
the forest. Motifs from the margins are reworked and developed into new stories.
While the audience is sewing in the frame-narrative, the embedded stories slip from
one narrative to the next, embedding other stories in their turn whose threads will
be used to fashion new stories further on. Female creation is in this way endlessly
recreating itself, recalling seventeenth-century conteuses’ ‘Chinese-box or Russian-
doll structure’12 whose literary embeddings were devised to cast new light on the
narrative frames.
However, if the aunt insists at times on her own power at making stories,
foregrounding their fictional quality as mere ‘make-believe’ (332), some of the
stories within the embedded stories seem to live a life of their own. The aunt, denying
‘imaginative control over stories of her own invention’,13 refuses to acknowledge
her fictional weaving: she claims not to know Susan’s story of the frog who could
not boil the kettle, and she lets the story of the gipsy feast continue and develop
in the third narrative while she has closed the story in the second narrative. Being
‘hostile to the fantastic and the extraordinary’,14 as Auerbach and Knoepflmacher
underline, the aunt strives to seal and close the stories she invents, condemning
fantasy by foregrounding the allegorical and moralizing dimension of the tales, in
the vein of Mrs Teachum, Sarah Fielding’s governess in The Governess, or Little
Female Academy (1749), who warns her pupils against fairy tales and dismisses the
magical elements of the story.15 Hence, female creation soon turns into a nightmarish
refraction of the little girls’ own bleak reality.
10 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (ed.); Harry

Zohn, trans. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 83–110, 91. Of course, Benjamin explains
that storytelling was used to accompany work for men too.
11 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
(London: Vintage [1994] 1995), 23.
12 Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Twice upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of
the Fairy Tale (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 107.
13 Auerbach and Knoepflmacher, Forbidden Journeys, 319.
15 Sarah Fielding’s novel contains embedded fairy tales, which are told by the children
and which the governess systematically rephrases in moral terms.
4.1 Arthur Hugues, ‘The Apple of Discord’, 1874. From Christina Rossetti,
Speaking Likenesses (London: Macmillan, 1874).
4.2 William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott, 1866–1905. 74 1/8 x 57 7/8 inches.
Oil on canvas.
4.3 John Tenniel, ‘Alice and the Pack of Cards’, 1866. From Lewis Carroll, Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland.
4.4 Arthur Hugues, ‘The Meal’, 1874. From Christina Rossetti, Speaking
Likenesses (London: Macmillan, 1874).
Indeed, being overtly didactic, and at times even informational,16 the frame-
narrative lays bare the artificial threads of wonderlands cloaking little girls’ domestic
reality. The Land of Nowhere might well be the Land of Somewhere with which
the little girls are familiar. This may be the reason why the first embedded story
eventually appears as no fairy tale but as the domestic story of Flora who is punished
for letting her birthday party degenerate. As a punishment, she falls asleep and is
imprisoned in the Land of Nowhere where a furious queen rules over the party and
children play sadistic games.
Like Alice, Flora is a middle-class, fair-haired, and blue-eyed little girl, a striking
likeness of Alice’s as Arthur Hughes’s illustrations intimate. Yet Rossetti did not
just copy the male invention. Rossetti’s heroine is never allowed to taste magic
mushrooms or drink poisonous beverages or even the sugar-plums she has been
offered for her birthday. Strongly reminiscent of Sarah Fielding’s didactic novel in
which the children fight over an apple as an allegorical representation of discord,
Rossetti’s tale, unlike Carroll’s fairy tale, makes it explicit that language cannot gain
corporeality.
16 Numerous passages recall informational literature: the mention of acoustics or of

aborigines (342), the mole arranging sticks (343), as well as the fact that toads often live
inside stones, provide scientific and biological information.
Rossetti’s effacement of her heroine’s corporeality is fraught with meaning
and reworks the little girl from a feminine standpoint. Unlike Carroll’s little girl
irrevocably and visually turning into a woman, Rossetti’s eight-year-old heroine is
shaped only through a series of clichés, such as her ‘plump and pink’ cheeks (325),
her light hair, her ‘little red lips’ (325), and her ‘blue and merry’ eyes (325).17 In fact,
the heroine’s body is displaced on the illustrations. Interestingly, Arthur Hughes’s
illustration of the Apple of Discord foregrounds the female body which Rossetti’s
narrative erases. The personification of the bone of contention as a gigantic woman,
the illustration seems to suggest, merges Flora’s hunger and anger. Flora’s desires
are magnified and uninhibited while remaining safely projected onto an allegorical
representation of herself.
Hughes’s Pre-Raphaelite play on woman’s hair bears an uncanny resemblance
to famous representations of female passion, foregrounding a colossal masculine
female body and using hair as a sign of unruliness. As in Holman Hunt’s illustration
of Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1857), the female character’s frown and her
medusa-like hair projected as a weapon typifies Hughes’s reliance on stereotypical
visual codes. In Tennyson’s poem, the Lady of Shalott, who weaves her tapestry and
looks at the outside reality through her mirror, suddenly renounces her dream world
and shatters her own world of artistic creativity when Lancelot passes by. But as
Kathy Alexis Psomiades contends, once she denies her own weaving, she no longer
produces but becomes art: ‘Her art is forgotten; Lancelot’s comment refers only
to her body: “She has a lovely face.”’18 Changed into a surface as ‘glassy’ as ‘the
glassy surface of the mirror’,19 metamorphosed into an art object, the Lady of Shalott
loses control of the thread and of the mirror, which ‘crack[s] from side to side.’ The
private world of creation vanishes and the Lady, now available to Lancelot’s gaze
and to the public sphere of the marketplace, Psomiades suggests, is imprisoned by
her own tapestry. Thus caught in the threads, she dies. The image of the threads
of feminine creativity encircling woman may be found in other illustrations and
fictions recording the dangers of woman’s unrepressed imagination and uninhibited
energies. Interestingly enough, Michael Hancher compares Hunt’s illustration with
Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice.20 Being a dream, Alice figures as a representation of
a little girl’s imagination. At the end of her journey, as Alice is struggling with the
pack of cards threatening her and encircling her like a mirror frame, she shatters her
own creation and breaks the magic mirror by realizing that her enemies are but a
pack of cards—which sends her back to reality.
On the other hand, while Christina Rossetti’s narrative similarly plays with
woman’s objectification and incarceration by glass surfaces, her choice of illustration
of female energy appears to signal a reversal in the pattern. The representation of the
17 And yet, the tale deals with female beauty: was the Apple of Discord not sent with
the message ‘For the fairest’?
18 Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British
Aestheticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 26.
19 Psomiades, Beauty’s Body, 26.
20 See Michael Hancher, The Tenniel Illustrations to the ‘Alice’ Books (Athens, Ohio:
Ohio State University Press, 1985).
Apple of Discord as a furious woman precedes Flora’s dream. Thus, her improper
energy is visualized in the world of domestic reality and her fantasy world will be
bent upon crushing her overpowering and towering body. The glass motif, which
appears as well in Rossetti’s narrative, frames the character in her fairyland and
marks her alienation and lack of control. Through the motif of the dream, elements of
Flora’s reality are reworked into nightmarish objects: her story-book full of pictures
becomes a room where her own image is multiplied all over the place. Not merely
turned into a representation, she is also turned into a commodity and becomes the
pincushion she has been offered. Her box of sugar-plums is magnified into thousands
of tantalizing dainties she cannot touch. Her doll, named Flora as well, becomes a
monstrous double, and even her writing-case is metamorphosed into a cruel boy
whose quills prick and scratch her. Hence, all her presents become monstrous parts
of her body or are turned against her body. The hints at commodity culture turn
into a nightmarish vision where the female body becomes the target. Not merely
disparaging female imagination by revealing horrific visions, the Land of Nowhere
is, moreover, hinged on the relationship between the female body and space. Once
in the fantastic world, the threatening female body leaning forward on Hughes’s
illustration becomes the angry Queen’s, while Flora’s body is now stooping, cowed
by the unleashed energies she faces in the Land of Nowhere.
But if the Queen acts as Flora’s monstrous reflection who rules over the party and
indulges in food, Flora’s journey furthers her physical self-effacement. The tasteful
‘lofty’ apartment which Flora has entered is comfortably furnished (329), with
stuffed armchairs, pillows on sofas, footstools ‘glid[ing] about’, telescope tables
flattening like the rest when room is needed, photographs and pictures all around
the room and ceilings and walls ‘lined throughout with looking-glasses’ (330). The
decoration mirrors, Auerbach and Knoepflmacher contend, ‘the cosy consumerism
of Rossetti’s England, whose technology—displayed in rich profusion at the Great
Exhibition of 1851—promised a paradise of domestic comfort to aggressive middle-
class spectators who were far from domesticated themselves.’21 Yet this comfortable
realm is but a delusion, an enticing picture luring Flora into thinking that the land
she has entered gives her free room to move about the place or to master her own
vision of herself in the glass (‘she thought it quite delightful, and took a long look
at her little self full length’ [330]). Victorian materialism and consumer culture can
but bind and enslave the female body with unreal images and ideals. Unlike Alice
who denies the gap between images and objects, eats what she sees and sees what
she eats, Flora is instantly framed by optical gadgetry, by pictures on the wall or
reflecting surfaces, lenses, or gazes. Her body does not shut up like a telescope, like
Alice’s, but is caught in the lens and reshaped in photographic terms. In this way,
the more Alice seemingly controls her body, the more Flora’s becomes appropriable,
as though the commodified world she had entered changed her instantly into one of
those commodities which may be bought, sold, or read on its surface. Through her
journey in the land of Nowhere, therefore, Flora goes through the looking-glass of
consumption: as she is violently exposed to commodity culture, she experiences the
erosion of the boundaries of her self.

Interestingly, Rossetti reworks Carroll’s parodies of didactic literature into
nightmarish refractions of reality. The image of the tea-tray appears in Alice as a
parody of Jane Taylor’s poem ‘The Star’ which praises utilitarianism; useless, the
tea-tray replaces the diamond-like star in the sky. Here, the tea-tray is part of the
consumer picture of domesticity. Similarly, the telescope is in Alice, as has been
underlined, a parody of moral didactic material which Carroll published in The
Rectory Magazine (1848–1850).22 Here, the trope of the telescope is once again part
of the decoration (‘telescope tables’[330]) and bound to material culture. In this way,
Flora cannot experience physical changes like Alice: her own physical space is being
controlled from without. Like the teller who refuses to be looked at or the music
played from behind a screen’ (330), Flora seems to be disembodied. Furthermore,
she is imprisoned in a room where even the door has vanished and is lost ‘amongst
the multitude of mirrors’ (331) which reflect the Queen. There is no way in, no way
out; things, like the invisible orchestra, seem to have lost their origins; everything
appears to have been framed and crystallized. As she can observe her fifty million-
fold face projected all over the room, ‘flushed and angry’ (331), Flora tries to smile
to control her displayed image. But she cannot control the slippage of her self. The
female self which is exhibited and multiplied no longer belongs to her; the mirror
marks her alienation and dispossession of her own self/image. Her self is engulfed
by ‘reflections of reflections of reflections’ (332). Her mass-produced and displayed
image no longer belongs to her but to the staring boys and girls in the room.
Marina Warner reads women’s fairy stories as a journey ‘from the terrifying
encounter with Otherness, to its acceptance.’23 Most frequently, she argues, the
central narrative figures a fear contest. If Warner is referring here to ‘the phantasm
of the male Other’,24 Rossetti’s fairy tale does not feature the other but the same as
a source of anxiety: Flora experiences the duplication of her self into a flat picture.
Massively reproduced, Flora resembles her own doll Flora, which she has been
offered for her birthday and which ‘must have cost pounds and pounds’ (327). She
has become the inanimate object patriarchal culture extols and who refuses to be
seen eating ‘with so many eyes upon her’ (331) as a way of controlling her image.
Hence, the Queen, as a double of herself, commands her not to touch her food while
a hundred thousand children stuff themselves. The monstrous body of the Queen
is not a simple representation of Flora’s anger and hunger but also represents the
self-destructive forces which education into female propriety have instilled in Flora.
Physical chastisement through food deprivation or utter violence is the form of self-
laceration which Flora undergoes as the scenes shift from eating scenes to sadistic
games where children stick pins into each other and make cuts in bodies, rub off
Flora’s skin, swing her violently round, cut their own fingers, slap and box each
other’s ears, drag, prick, scratch, and so on.
22 Ronald Reichertz, The Making of the Alice Books: Lewis Carroll’s Uses of Earlier
Children’s Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, [1997] 2000), 28.
4.5 Arthur Hugues, ‘Flora and the Children in the Enchanted Room’, 1874.
From Christina Rossetti, Speaking Likenesses (London: Macmillan,
1874).
During the meals, Flora remains a beholder watching the children eating:
[S]he was reduced to look hungrily on while the rest of the company feasted, and while
successive dainties placed themselves before her and retired untasted. Cold turkey,
lobster salad, stewed mushrooms, raspberry tart, cream cheese, a bumper of champagne,
a méringue, a strawberry ice, sugared pine apple, some greengages: it may have been
quite as well for her that she did not feel at liberty to eat such a mixture: yet it was none
the less tantalizing to watch so many good things come and go without taking even one
taste, and to see all her companions stuffing without limit. Several of the boys seemed to
think nothing of a whole turkey at a time: and the Queen consumed with her own mouth
and of sweets alone one quart of strawberry ice, three pine apples, two melons, a score of
méringues, and about four dozen sticks of angelica, as Flora counted. (335)
Unlike Alice, who constantly turns images into treats and indulges in food, Flora
remains passive, a stranger to the party. Neither in reality nor in fairyland is she
given a chance to enact her greed. In the same way as she is framed as a picture,
as a reflection in the mirror, she remains alienated from the eating scenes. And this
alienation is enhanced by the narrator’s moralistic comment, warning against the
dangers of eating too much.
Her physical needs being increasingly denied, Flora’s body becomes more and
more appropriable, as the games seem to illuminate. The games are overtly gendered,
defining Flora as the prey in the first game (Hunt the Pincushion, which consists in
sticking pins into the weakest player until you catch and swing her). While the girls’
bodies are uncannily alike, the boys’ are shaped as ‘prickly quills’, ‘facetted at sharp
angles’, or have hooks (332). Weapons stick out of their bodies. Deformation is
masculine and monstrous. But Flora must also fight her own likenesses. Struggling
against the girls who attack her in Hunt the Pincushion, she witnesses her own
passivity in Self-Help where boys depend on their own physical resources25 and
girls are the victims of men’s cruelty (‘the boys were players, the girls were played’
[334]).
Visually similar, as Hugues’s illustration suggests, the girls are also physiologically
bound. They are constructed in terms of secretion, fluidity, malleability, or lack of
shape, ‘exud[ing] a sticky fluid’ or ‘slimy and slipp[ing] through the hands’ (332).
Even if potentially subversive, the malleable female body is no sign of woman’s
metamorphic powers. As in Carroll’s Alice, the female characters exemplify how
the development of woman’s biological functions is immediately recuperated by
ideologies of femininity which enforce women’s powerlessness. For the girls’ fluidity
echoes Flora’s loss of self, as her image escapes her control and is multiplied in her
likenesses. Humorously enough, Hughes uses hair as a point of female weakness, by
depicting Hooks’ ‘attached captives’ (334) hooked by their hair. With far more cruelty
than in Carroll’s Alice, Flora is pricked, scratched, and threatened with pins, her frock
is slit, the captives are dragged: the female body is assaulted, sadistically determined
from without, violated, and penetrated. The physical violence enacted towards the
female body eventually reshapes Flora as an ethereal being: when ultimately swung
25 The objectification of the boys’ bodies, becoming ironers, porters, or engravers

according to their body shapes, is reminiscent of Wonderland’s logic.
round by the Queen, Flora falls ‘lightly’ (334) on the floor, recalling MacDonald’s
light princess. Her harmless fall stems thus less from the comfortable surroundings,
with the carpet growing ‘to such a depth of velvet pile below her’ (334), than from
her body’s weightlessness: starvation and chastisement have hollowed out her flesh.
Unlike Alice, whose fall launches her adventures in Wonderland, here the fall puts an
end to the cruel game: starved and violated, disembodied and showing forbearance
(‘she bore it like a philosopher’ [334]), Flora is ready for the ultimate game.
In the third game, the children all build identical glass houses:
Yet, despite this amount of variety, every house built bore a marked resemblance to its
neighbour: colours varied, architecture agreed. Four walls, no roof, no upper floor; such
was each house: and it needed neither window nor staircase.
All this building occupied a long time, and little by little a very gay effect indeed was
produced. Not merely were the glass blocks of beautiful tints; so that while some houses
glowed like masses of ruby, and others shone like enormous chrysolites or sapphires,
others again showed the milkiness and fiery spark of a hundred opals, or glimmered like
moonstone: but the playground was lighted up, high, low, and on all sides, with coloured
lamps. Picture to yourselves golden twinkling lamps like stars high overhead, bluish
twinking lamps like glowworms down almost to the ground; lamps like illuminated
peaches, apples, apricots, plums, hung about with the profusion of a most fruitful orchard.
Should we not all have liked to be there with Flora, even if supper was the forfeit? (336)
More like shop windows than houses, without openings, the glass houses are mainly
framing architecture, ‘all slippery with smoothness’ (336), meant to display their
inhabitants and crystallize them beneath the jewel metaphor.26 Like a seamless,
colourful and transparent prison, the glass house metaphorizes the construction of
femininity the game is hinged upon, and furthers the framing of the heroine that
the opening’s mirror scene initiated. This time, Flora is not solely reflected on the
surface of the glass but confined within the glass structure. As a literal representation
of woman’s incarceration within glass tropes, Rossetti’s crystal prisons align jewel
metaphors with horrific images of imprisonment. Compared with jewels, adorned
with lamps that look like fruits but are not edible, the glass houses are mostly a
demonstration of linguistic activity, multiplying comparisons and metaphors the
better to erase woman’s physicality. Significantly, the house does not even contain
cupboards or any larder, and the ‘forfeit’ of feminine construction is indeed supper,
as the aunt suggests.
Forbidden food and imprisoned in a crystal house, Flora, who is immured with
the Queen, observes the other female prisoners’ complexions turn ‘livid’ (337). The
female characters, worried about not being beautiful, bind the glass motif to female
aestheticization and recall traditional crystallized princesses. But ironically enough,
female aestheticization is this time associated with disease and probably death: the
colour of glass imprints the jaundice on Slime’s face (337). Furthermore, both the
Queen and Flora suddenly lose their voice: while the Queen’s words are ‘weak’ (337),
26 Christina Rossetti often plays upon the alliance between woman and jewel. In Hero
(1865), the ambitious heroine wishes to become the supreme object of admiration, and she is
turned for some time into the Koh-i-noor diamond.
Flora implores the Queen not to hurl the first stone and shatter the edifice—in vain.
The children start hurling stones at the glass houses, and Rossetti uses the glass house
as a metaphor to teach Flora that people who live in glass houses should not throw
stones. Clinging ‘with all her weight’ to the Queen’s arm (338), Flora suddenly fuses
with the Queen’s body in the glimpse of time during which her repressed violence
can be enacted. But Flora is not allowed to wield power long—albeit indirectly: as
soon as the Queen breaks the glass palace, Flora wakes up, probably frightened by
such a mad act of self-assertion. Rossetti denies her female character control, and
Flora can but witness her own lack of power and self-alienation.
In the following tales, Rossetti continues her journey into the female self through
other speaking likenesses. Edith and Maggie follow Flora. However, while the
atmosphere gradually changes and fantasy vanishes little by little, the heroines
encounter the same characters. If the repetitions weave the narratives together, they
suggest that the echoes are identical ordeals, which the little girls must cope with
and successfully manage, albeit seen through three different lenses. The second
tale, ‘Edith’, is another story of female domestication since Edith decides that she
is wise enough to boil a kettle in the wood. In fact, the narrative is one of ‘domestic
incompetence’27: Edith does not manage to light the fire and there is no water in
the kettle.28 Counteracting conventional experimental journeys when heroines,
like Snow White, come out of the forest as trained housewives, ‘Maggie’ furthers
twists of plot with a narrative the wonders of which are mere speaking animals.
Furthermore, unlike conventional fairy tales or Victorian fantasies, these speaking
animals are no magical help to Edith. Not a single element in the tale turns out to
be magical. The only ‘wonder’ is that the dog, the cat, and the cockatoo do not eat
the aborigines Edith meets in the wood (mere squirrels, wood pigeons, moles, toads,
hedgehogs, and foxes). The tale’s crude materialism and moralism (bellows even
answer ‘far better than the squirrel’s tail’ [344] to light the fire) dismiss all magic
from the narrative. Even the fox’s tail is used to brush Edith’s dirty frock but does
not prevent the fire from going out. In this way, the aborigines function as an ironical
hint at conventions where frogs are never turned into charming princes.
In fact, the aborigines are more a metafictional than a structural device. The
frog, as the metonymical representation of the embedded story in Flora’s narrative,
shows the speaker’s talent at spinning tales, at fashioning one story from the threads
of another. As a marginal motif, the frog is reworked into another pattern. As an
endlessly revisited device, it encapsulates women’s fantasy-making the better to
undercut it. As one of the aborigines, the frog is a marker of aboriginal lore and
primitive culture which aligns woman with the figure of the uneducated teller (‘the
creatures born and bred there generation after generation’ [342]). Inhabiting the
forest as ‘Edith’ inhabits ‘Flora’’s narrative, it figures as a landmark of fantasy in
the middle of a trilogy where wonders and magic are dispelled from the narrative.

28 Anna Krugovoy Silver interprets Edith’s refusal to eat the grapes both as a proper
denial of appetite and as a sign of her lack of Christian love. For Silver, Rossetti uses grapes
to symbolize Christian faith and the wine of the Eucharist; Silver, Victorian Literature and the
Anorexic Body, 162–3.
By being of no help to Edith, giving her useless advice or seemingly standing as
an informational device to teach little girls about how fire needs oxygen to light
or how toads live in stones, the motif of the frog seems to foreground the limits of
fantasy. The feminine art of creation is thus dismissed in favour of didacticism—or
charitable sewing for the deserving poor.
Having cancelled fantasy in the middle narrative, Rossetti next focuses on
woman’s self-abnegation in an ‘allegory of dying.’29 This shift from fantasy to
allegory gradually changes the viewpoint on the female body. From a story which
reworks Carroll’s Alice and displays a female body crystallized, framed and effaced,
Rossetti shifts to Christian self-abnegation. Seen from this perspective, Rossetti’s
trilogy appears as inseparable: the middle tale operates the shift from fantasy to
allegory, laying bare narratorial intentions and paving the way for the moral message
which the aunt intends to deliver. If Edith resists the tempting grapes in the forest
or simply lists the food the cook is preparing for the gipsy party, the third tale,
‘Maggie’, features a starving girl who plays Little Red Ridinghood to carry ‘a pound
of vanilla chocolate, a beautiful bouncing ball, and two dozen crackers’ (347) to
forgetful customers on Christmas evening. As it opens at Maggie’s aunt’s busy
shop during ‘rag[ing] business’ (346) before the Christian celebration, the narrative
contrasts consumption and deprivation with Maggie as the unprivileged orphan.
This time, therefore, consumer culture is featured as a foil to Christianity. Like Alice,
Maggie falls at the beginning of the tale, hurting the back of her head as she slips
on ice, thenceforth ‘commenc[ing] her marvellous adventures’ (p. 348). Once again,
Maggie’s journey through the forest hardly provides any wonder. Her marvellous
adventures consist in resisting temptation and, unlike Little Red Ridinghood,
making haste to bring her basket of food to the doctor’s house. Once again, the tale
revisits former motifs to weave this new plot. First Maggie is lured into playing
Hunt the Pincushion or Self-Help with the children from Flora’s narrative. Then she
is tempted to eat what she is carrying and meets hungry creatures: the wood pigeons
from ‘Edith’, a tabby cat carrying in his mouth a tabby kitten or a real boy defined
by only one feature—a wide mouth—and who begs for some food. The close links
between the kitten—as a revision of Carroll’s Cheshire cat—and man illuminates
what Maggie might become if she gives way to her greed and appetite.30 Lastly, sleep
overcomes her as she walks by the gipsy party from Maggie’s narrative ‘all yawning
in nightcaps or dropping asleep’ (351); but Maggie successfully manages to bring
her basket to ungrateful customers. Hungry, famished, cold and exhausted, Maggie
continues her journey without giving way to her temptations and is rewarded by a
pigeon, a kitten and a puppy whom she warms up and feeds at the end of the story.
Hence, from a fantasy tale featuring fantastic temptations to an allegory, Speaking
Likenesses illustrates, in Auerbach and Knoepflmacher’s terms, ‘the death of desire,
and [maybe] death itself’ (322). While the female characters are alienated from their
own bodies, femininity appears as a training in self-denial. Unlike Carroll’s treacle

30 As Silver suggests, the boy’s mouth is also a sign of aggressive sexuality, which
‘emphasizes the connection between gluttony and lust’ already probed in ‘Flora’ with alternate
scenes of eating and sadistic games; Silver, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body, 165.
girls, who, as stereotypes of feminine sweetness, literally feed on treacle, Rossetti’s
three heroines show how female education violently involves body annihilation. If
we read Rossetti’s tales as narratives in line with traditional Christian standards,
with female greed as a metaphor for the greed and materialism of Victorian England,
as in the highly didactic tales of the 1840s for children, such Christian goodness
is, nonetheless, expressed by means of female bodies. Shaped and framed as an
allegorical land, the female bodies Rossetti portrays illuminate how woman’s
corporeality is systematically erased in discourses, especially when the narratives
unravel against a consumer backdrop.
With far more cruelty than MacDonald and Carroll, Rossetti thus hushes female
desire. In fact, as she strives to contain female bodies, Christina Rossetti does what
the aunt does herself. She remains invisibly on the margin containing stories of female
appetite and continually pushes desire and corporeality further away into series of
embedded stories where the female body gradually vanishes. Woman remains on
the margins within and without the stories, weaving tales she refuses to control as
she would refuse to acknowledge her own figure in the carpet, her own shape on the
tapestry. Shattering her own imaginary world, like the Lady of Shalott, the woman
writer is doomed to get entangled in the threads of her own creation, her body laced
up and moulded by representational codes she no longer controls.
From Flora, confined within her crystal prison, to Maggie, who cannot taste the
food her aunt sells, Rossetti’s consumer background exemplifies woman’s double
bind, caught between the image of the unrestrained consumer and the commodity.
While Victorian fairy tales and fantasies choose to erase woman’s physicality,
sensation novels, on the other hand, propose a new version of the construction of
femininity to show the subversive potential that inheres in the turning of woman into
a commodity. Using the glass motif, they question the patriarchal discourse fuelling
the princess crystallized in glass. Hardly able to conceal the mysteries of femininity
or to cloak female passion, glass will mirror the era’s contradictions. Placed in glass
cases, the female body resists crystallization, and the mystery of woman’s nature
keeps haunting the tales.
Chapter Five
A Journey through the Crystal Palace

Rhoda Broughton’s Politics of Plate-Glass in
Not Wisely But Too Well (1867)
What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing—the result of
forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others … in the case of
women, a hot-house … cultivation has always been carried on of some of the capabilities
of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their masters. (John Stuart Mill, On the
Subjection of Women, 1869)
As Christina Rossetti’s Flora illustrates, embodying the goddess of flowers or

personifying nature’s power in producing flowers, Victorian fairy tales and fantasies
probed the relationship between woman and nature and the definition of the ‘nature’ of
woman even when—and, perhaps, especially when—confined in a glasshouse. As has
been seen in the preceding chapters, whether they float in the air or fall underground,
the female bodies metamorphose. Revealingly, such metamorphoses are frequently
recuperated by medical discourse or framed by physiological considerations,
implicitly constructing women as unstable, mysterious, and potentially dangerous
creatures. The fact that fairy tales often depict women’s metamorphoses from little
girls to wives and mothers may explain why many a Victorian rewriting of traditional
fairy tales used the form in order to express anxieties concerning woman’s nature.
As a visual example, Lewis Carroll’s photograph, Agnes Grace Weld as Little Red
Ridinghood (1857), shows the little girl dressed up as the heroine of the fairy tale.
Significantly, her body merges with the ivy in the background as if she were part of
the natural environment. In fact, Carroll’s use of the fairy tale reveals the ways in
which Perrault’s tale was readapted to Victorian reality and Victorian concerns.
Indeed, Carroll’s model frowns and gazes threateningly at the photographer.
She thereby inverts the stereotype of the innocent little girl erring away from the
path of proper femininity to pick up flowers in the forest and who is devoured by a
hungry wolf. Reversing gender types, Carroll’s Ridinghood is the wolf, potentially
emasculating the male photographer by mesmerizing him with her Medusa-like
gaze. The danger is not male but female. Worse, it is naturally in woman as the
little girl’s alliance with the leaves in the background seems to suggest. But Carroll
does not simply invert the tale. Interestingly, the twist to the fairy tale enables him
to explore the narrative’s sexual charge, and to project his own fears regarding
woman’s sexuality: her devouring desire, which the camera cannot frame. Likewise,
the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed numerous works of art suddenly
turning the innocent world of childhood into an erotic land.1 The child’s uninhibited
energies became an apt surface on which to project fears concerning woman’s nature.
Although framed by childish innocence, the advances in physiology, as suggested,
posited woman’s subservience to her organic functions—her aggressive sexuality.
Inevitably, the rise of consumer culture, enhancing female desire and inviting
women to hide themselves behind creams, powders, and fashionable clothes,
magnified the extent to which the nature of woman was hinged upon contradictions.
As I argue, in Victorian sensation novels these contradictions are best illustrated.
As the second part of this study underlines, sensation novels rework the physical
or rhetorical manipulations of female bodies which underlie Victorian fairy tales
and fantasies. While Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely But Too Well offers reflections
on female desire and consumerism, paralleling her heroine’s passion with exotic
diseases contaminating the city and pointing to the uncontrollable nature of woman,
in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and M.E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret the
female characters’ weak physiology seems to result from the heroines’ contact
with urban life, as they travel to and fro, buy trendy dresses and curios and fashion
artificial selves to outwit the detectives. In a similar way, Wilkie Collins’s No Name,
Armadale and The Law and the Lady underline the way cosmetics resonate with
ideologies of domesticity, which tied woman to her body. In these novels, female
desire, female diseases, and even female insanity act as so many symptoms of
material culture, and the female characters, described as voracious consumers,
aptly handle male-preferred definitions of femininity. As they all question women’s
latitude in the construction of femininity, the sensation novels offer us a significant
insight into mid-Victorian feminine practices and the way women could counteract
the medical discourses which subordinated them to their physiology.
Glasshouses and Ideologies of Prescriptive Femininity
While John Stuart Mill used the glasshouse as a metaphor to convey the artificiality
of the ‘nature of women’ in On the Subjection of Woman (1869), in The Ethics of
the Dust (1866), Ruskin used science to highlight his views of woman’s role and
identity. Furthering the definition of ideal femininity which he had started in Sesame
and Lilies and the Political Economy of Art (1865), Ruskin associates woman with
physical phenomena. The Ethics of the Dust features an old lecturer teaching ‘little
housewives’ ten lessons concerning crystallization. The choice of crystal to teach
girls about femininity betrays the ideological dimension of the lecturer’s lesson. The
transparent crystal officiates as a glass panel refracting the ideal image of femininity
to which the lecturer seeks to acculturate the little girls. Revealingly, the lecturer
chooses the fairy tale mode or the dream mode to teach them a moral lesson where
myth and reality merge, with crystal standing at the crossroads of the two worlds.
Like the treacle-girls in Carroll’s Alice whose eating polices them into sweet-
tempered and proper children, the lecture is believed to ‘involve some reference to
1 See Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle

Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
A Journey through the Crystal Palace 91
sugar-candy’2 in order to lure the gullible little girls. Very soon, the group of girls is
conflated with the image of ‘a lovely group of rosy sugar-candy, arranged by atomic
forces’, and the little girls ‘have certainly been crystallizing without knowing it’ (21).
Educating the girls into becoming orderly and fighting against their ‘compulsion
to [get] out of order’ (23), the lecturer uses science as a significant discourse to
indoctrinate the girls into their woman’s roles. If the making of crystal resembles a
dream or a fairy tale with a fairy controlling architecture, Ruskin’s use of invisible
beings fashions female education into an ideological lesson where normative scripts
are silently woven into a tale to which the girls hungrily listen.
Significantly, the lecturer constantly strengthens the relationship between his
tale (or dream) and the group of girls listening to him. By personifying them into
crystals, Ruskin brings to the fore the tropes framing ideal femininity, namely,
orderliness and purity: ‘[C]rystals have a limited, though a stern, code of morals;
and their essential virtues are but two;—the first is to be pure, and the second to be
well-shaped’ (83). Obviously, orderliness is not solely the image of ‘sweet ordering’
that Ruskin posits in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, but is here centred on the female body.
In the same way as the little girls organize themselves into crystals to listen to the
lecture, their association with crystals turns them into malleable bodies, which start
in a liquid state and crystallize gradually.
Ironically, the conflation of the crystals with the female body brings about the
most significant ambivalence of the lecture. As one of the girls asks whether purity
implies transparency, the lecturer argues that the female body’s transparency, giving
access to what lies beneath the skin, from the jawbones, cartilage and ‘jagged sutures
of the skalp’ to the ‘daily processes of nourishment and decay’ (97) or even diseases,
might reveal itself as totally germane to purity. Hence, woman’s biological processes
must be concealed, and woman’s duty lies in improving outer beauty to cloak such
‘sickness’ (98). Inevitably, therefore, Ruskin constructs woman’s prevailing role as
ornamental, advising the little girls always to ‘dress [themselves] beautifully’ (136)
and to ‘make diamonds of [themselves]’ (62) so as to conceal what lies beneath their
skin. Artificiality thus mars the portraits of the feminine ideal. This idea becomes
even more significant when the lecturer calls up the world of fashion and asks the
girls to position themselves and make a figure, their crinolines ‘[standing] … for
rough crystalline surface’, in order to make ‘a polished crystal of [themselves]’ (43).
Moulding and gendering the female body, the crinoline foregrounds femininity as
illusory and turns the image of the pure woman into a chimera, pointing out further
the contradictions in Ruskin’s discourse.
The latter are strengthened, in addition, when Ruskin draws on the image of the
crystal as a rose fluor, conflating thereby images of pure womanhood with woman’s
soiled mortal biology. The association of the girls with a rose fluor conjures up
the etymological meaning of the word ‘fluor’, that is, menstrual flow.3 Because it
2 John Ruskin, The Ethics of the Dust: Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the
Elements of Crystallization (London: The Waverley Book Company [1866] c. 1900), 21.
Subsequent references to this edition will be given in the text.
3 See Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in
Victorian Culture (Athens, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 133.
obviously connotes menstrual blood and implies the maturation of the little girls,
Ruskin’s comparison ironically brings forth even more the biological construction
of the little girls he so much wants to erase.
Worse, perhaps, his mythic goddess Neith, ‘a real benevolent fairy, in a bright
brick-red gown’ (24) who presides over architecture, posits femininity as powerful.
Hence, in the same way as his fairy controls architecture, woman shapes her body.
This feminine engagement in construction and self-construction in Ruskin’s Ethics
of the Dust appears, therefore, as dangerously double-edged, and Ruskin’s example
may be used as a typically ambiguous example of the construction of crystal at mid-
century, as it adumbrates how the relationship between the female body and glass
partook of woman’s commodification—sometimes to transgressive ends.
Indeed, Ruskin’s Ethics of the Dust is relevant to this discussion in the way in
which it brings to light oppositions which collapse through the prism of crystal and
calls to mind the shifting interpretations revolving around Paxton’s Crystal Palace—
the epitome of commodity culture—throughout the second half of the nineteenth
century. Poised between the magic world of fairy tales and the marvellous realm
of consumer culture, Paxton’s Crystal Palace constantly fluctuates between the
metaphorical and the material worlds. For instance, Dickens compared the Crystal
Palace with a Fairyland inhabited by gnomes and fairies, his description illustrating
the paradoxes upon which the glasshouse was hinged and which this chapter
investigates:
The magician is right; but as Beauty’s chamber was guarded by griffins, and all
enchanted castles are defended by dragons, so is Fairyland guarded by gnomes; blue,
and uncompromising. One occupies the little crypt on either side of the door by which
visitors are admitted to Fairyland in crystal. To judge from the costumes of these gnomes
you would take them to be plain constables of the Metropolitan Police; but, my word for
it, they have all the gnomical etceteras beneath their uniform and oilskin. The entrance
to Fairyland is not effected by rubbing a lamp, or clapping the hands three times, or by
exclaiming ‘Open Sesame’; but, as a concession to the non-magical tendencies of some
of the visitors, a commutation is accepted in the shape of five shillings current money of
the realm.4
Dickens’s example typifies the Victorians’ love for miniaturization in which things
are safely encased and enclosed and observed from behind the glass. After all, were
women not idealized as dolls, as David Copperfield’s Dora exemplified? However,
in the fairy tales of the 1860s and 1870s, the miniaturized wax-doll woman was
subjected to irony, as Mary de Morgan’s ‘A Toy Princess’ (1877) illustrates.5 In
the tale, an old fairy exchanges the princess for a toy in a kingdom where women
are consumptive and die because they cannot voice their own desires. To save the
princess from her deadly fate, the fairy buys a toy princess in a shop. Merely saying
4 Charles Dickens, ‘Fairyland in ’Fifty-Four’, Household Words, 193 (3 Dec. 1853):

313.
5 Mary de Morgan, ‘A Toy Princess’ (1877), reprinted in Jack Zipes (ed.), Victorian
Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves (New York and London: Methuen, 1987),
163–74.
‘If you please’ and ‘No, thank you’, the toy princess is praised all over the kingdom,
and she ironically eventually replaces the real princess, even after the plot is revealed.
As a significant example of woman’s commodification, de Morgan’s princess
underlines how the doll-like woman purveyed Victorian ideals of femininity, which
‘real’ women could hardly reach. Moreover, when imprisoned in a deadly Crystal
Palace,6 the crystallized woman corresponds even more to that impossible ideal, as
the Brothers Grimm’s ‘The Glass Coffin’ demonstrates.
As a matter of fact, the conservative and patriarchal discourse which underlies
the Brothers Grimm’s tales seems a significant starting point to try and emphasize
the ideology which the glasshouse conveyed in the second half of the nineteenth
century. In ‘The Glass Coffin’, glass is not only associated with death, but above all
with femininity. ‘The Glass Coffin’ is the story of a count’s daughter who exclusively
lives with her brother and has made a vow never to marry. A stranger comes one
night and asks for shelter. The heroine hears his fairy music and is struck dumb. Not
only deprived of a voice and of a language, she is also unprotected from the male
invader whose music gives him access to all the rooms, unfastening and unbolting
the doors to her chamber. Refusing to marry him, the girl is then punished for her
pride. She is buried alive in an underground cave, locked up in a glass coffin and
sent to sleep while her castle and belongings are enclosed in a second glass chest.
Obviously crystallizing the virgin’s body, the glass coffin secures the woman’s purity.
As it confuses sleep and death, the glass coffin then becomes a powerful patriarchal
symbol: it ensures male control over the rebellious woman and transforms the latter
into an objectified icon of femininity for ever available to the male gaze. Fortunately,
a tailor’s apprentice finds the count’s daughter. As if walking on a chessboard, he
walks on one of the polished square stones and sinks into the depths of the case,
where vases of transparent glass and a glass chest dazzle him and where the beautiful
heroine lies asleep ‘wrapped in her long fair hair as in a precious mantle’, with a
ribbon for unique dress. Freed from the constraints of the glass coffin, she eventually
marries the tailor. Yet she never really regains her voice. She speaks and tells her
story, but her voice remains contained by the main narrative. The story-within-the-
story pattern of the tale encloses the woman’s voice once more in another glass
structure, while her husband, as a tailor, will certainly make sure the body of his
bride is properly clothed.
The crystallization of the angelic female figure is one of the most significant
clichés of the Victorian period, as well as one of the most contested ones. The motif
of glass is found over and over again in Victorian narratives, whether as glass cases
or as mirrors. Tightly connected to constructions of reality, glass fuels feminine
representation.7 Indeed, when glass figures in Victorian narratives, it appears typically
6 The presence of Crystal Palaces in fairy tales can be spotted before the nineteenth
century. In the seventeenth century, Henriette-Julie de Murat’s ‘Le Palais de la vengeance’
features lovers imprisoned in a delightful crystal palace, in which they want for nothing;
however, they soon become bored with their own happiness (see Marina Warner, From the
Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Vintage, [1994] 1995), 282).
7 Significantly, Victorian ladies’ advice books contained many intructions on the
management of glass cases of all sizes, as Margaret Flanders Darby notes (See Margaret
linked to female characters and bespeaks modes of representation of the female self.
Either highlighting the character’s iconic beauty or disclosing, on the contrary, the
heroine’s double face, it marks important stages in the plots which typify the extent
to which mid-century narratives probed hegemonic constructions of femininity.
Glass, mirrors and transparent—crystal—surfaces as a whole were not, however,
mere fictional motifs in Victorian Britain. Transparency is frequently seen as a key
word in the second half of the nineteenth century. It stamps the period from an
artistic, economic, and political viewpoint. In fact, glass resonates with Victorian
ideology. It reflects and refracts, reveals and exposes, displays and flaunts. While
Victorian realism prides itself on telling nothing but the truth and constructs fiction
as a mirror-like image of its society, the female characters that realism portrays are
meant to be as diaphanous as the glass coffins princesses peacefully rest in in fairy
tales. On the artistic scene, Mme Tussaud’s waxworks exhibition or Edward Burne-
Jones’s Briar Rose series epitomizes the Victorians’ fascination with female bodies
crystallized in sleep and immobility and offered to the viewer’s gaze as if captured
behind transparent panels. Obviously, transparent glass not only reverberates the
female body’s purity, but also precludes the body’s slipping out of the frame or the
Flanders Darby, ‘Joseph Paxton’s Water Lily’, in Michel Conan (ed.), Bourgeois and
Aristocratic Cultural Encounters in Garden Art, 1550–1850 (Washington DC: Dumbarton
Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2002), 255–83, 281). In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s
‘Behind the White Brick’ (1879), glass is used as a motif which contains the female voice.
In Burnett’s tale, the heroine, Jem, travels up the chimney and enters a magic realm behind
the white brick. There, she meets her favourite princess, just come out of the book Jem’s aunt
has thrown down the fireplace to punish Jem for her idle reading. Her embedded adventure
enables her to visit a house and to encounter Santa Klaus and his staff, making dolls for
dutiful little girls. The prevalence of female obedience in the embedded world Jem has entered
constructs Fairyland as a normative space. Moreover, unlike greedy and aggressive heroines,
Jem remains quiet and polite, even doubting the reality of the fantastic world. While Santa
Klaus utters moralizing sermons to Jem’s angry baby sister and rewards charitable girls who
look after crippled dolls with fair-haired and blue-eyed dolls, Jem next faces her own improper
feelings which she instantly learns to tone down and suppress. Not only does her journey
above ground not enable her to phrase her repressed desires, but the latter seem to be literally
contained in the fairy world. Indeed, in one of the rooms of the building, the Wish Room,
Jem visualizes her past wishes. Desires are animated and miniaturized, and safely maintained
under glass shades. Through the motif of the glass, female impropriety is thus exposed as a
means to experience guilt and favour redemption: Jem sees her aunt with her mouth stitched
up, and instantly wishes to undo her own wish. Not merely commodified as ‘article[s]’ (174)
and aligned with the other toys made in the previous room, desires are exhibited the better to
be denied. In this fairy world anger is given no room and rebellious tinges are quickly swept
away, while the fantastic venture frames the heroine in her turn as a doll-like dutiful girl—a
gem for her family. Figuratively crystallized into an icon of feminine preciousness after her
journey up the chimney, Jem then seemingly continues the line of Jemimas, bearing the same
name as her mother’s beloved sister. In the meantime, her baby sister remains crying in her
crib, suspiciously unattended by the thoroughly reformed Jem. Frances Hodgson Burnett,
‘Behind the White Brick’ [1879], reprinted in Nina Auerbach and U.C. Knoepflmacher,
Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, (1992), 164–76.
case. Figuratively, then, glass aptly articulates Victorian decorum and social precepts.
Woman, when confined in glass, Nina Auerbach maintains, is ‘dead and self-less in
her glass coffin, she is an object, to be displayed and desired, patriarchy’s marble
“opus”, … [a]n “it”, a possession … an idealized image of herself, a woman in a
portrait.’8 As it suppresses ‘woman’s energy’,9 and turns woman into an artefact, the
coffin in which Snow White lies erases ‘the impure state of mutability and decay’,10
as Elizabeth Bronfen argues, thereby repressing nature by changing the female body
into a cultural icon.
On the other hand, as the mediation of glass metamorphoses fleshly bodies into
portraits and idealized images, glass appears to be culturally embedded within mid-
century industrial Britain. Used massively in constructions after the abolition of the
glass tax in 1845, and especially used by retailers for their display windows, glass
also calls to mind the exhibition of enticing commodities and the whole world of
images on which the Victorian visual culture thrived. As a giant glass illustration of
Victorian consumer culture, Paxton’s Crystal Palace refracts the period as marked
by the era of the commodity which, Thomas Richards argues, ‘became … the
centerpiece of everyday life, the focal point of all representation, the dead center of
the modern world.’11 With the advent of the commodity as ‘the master fiction around
which society organized and condensed its cultural life and political ideology’,12
therefore, representation changed. Since dazzling images replaced objects, the
turning of commodities into so many ideal images behind the glass panels altered the
meaning of the real. Like Paxton’s building, designed to make ‘ordinary glass look
like crystal’ with ‘the shape of a greenhouse look[ing] like the outline of a palace’,13
the real suddenly appeared as potentially illusory. The eye could be deceived, and
the dozens of artificial arms, hands, feet, legs, eyes exhibited and safely protected
behind barriers and ropes precluding touch,14 typified the beginning of an era haunted
by chimeras. Hence, from a sign of containment, glass was suddenly turned into a
figure associated with deception, a motif tied to consumption and desire. Fashioned
as a protective shield safely crystallizing female bodies, it could turn these bodies
into phantasmagorias. The viewer could be trapped in his turn just as he believed he
controlled the beautiful sight.
The deceptive nature of glass is often visible when mirrors are used to purvey
reflections on feminine representation. In Gubar and Gilbert’s feminist interpretation
MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 41.
9 Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, 42.
10 Elizabeth Bronfen, Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 99.
14 As Richards explains, ‘The organizers of the Exhibition had done their best to bring
people as close as possible to things without actually allowing them to touch what they saw;
some barrier, a counter or a rope or a policeman, always intervened to assert the inviolability
of the object’; The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 32.
of Snow White, the magic looking-glass is a cultural weapon that enforces patriarchal
sentences on women and locks them up in ‘crystal prisons.’15 The Queen’s obsession
with her own reflection suggests less the woman’s self-absorption and narcissicism
than it discloses the King’s appraising gaze. As Gubar and Gilbert posit, ‘His,
surely, is the voice of the looking-glass, the patriarchal voice of judgment that
rules the Queen’s—and every woman’s—self-evaluation.’16 Yet, by producing two-
dimensional images, the looking-glass also provides a significant means to investigate
the relationship between femininity and/as (chimerical) representation.
George MacDonald’s ‘The Woman in the Mirror’ (1858) features a woman
confined in glass. It both underlines how the male gaze frames the female reflection
and how women can break their crystal cages. In MacDonald’s tale an old woman
casts a spell on a princess who constantly makes use of her mirror. She steals the
mirror and freezes the marble-like princess with ‘the loveliness of death … upon
her face.’17 While the princess slowly dies, her mirror is bought and sold, and passes
from man to man, leaving her at their mercy. For her reflection is imprisoned in the
glass, condemned to be gazed at by male lookers-on. When Cosmo buys the magic
mirror and hangs it in his room, the reflection instantly turns his surroundings into a
‘representation’, lifting the room ‘out of the region of fact into the realm of art’ (242).
As the mediation of glass transforms the real into an ideal image, the princess, dressed
all in white, suddenly enters the reflected room as an icon of beauty. Metamorphosed
into an artefact by the glass, the princess’s body is ‘moulded’ (245) to perfection,
from her feet to her hands, all beautiful parts standing as ‘an index to the whole’
(245). The fetishistic cutting up of her ideal body into parts frames the reflected
female body, which, moreover, slumbers on the couch as soon as it enters Cosmo’s
room. Ideally passive, like a Sleeping Beauty, offered to the gaze of the mesmerized
hero, the bewitched, reflected woman bewitches the owners of the glass.
However, trapped by the glass, the princess is enslaved by the patriarchal
discourse which defines and controls her reflection. As she moves from house to
house and from owner to owner, her body is displaced from painting to painting and
is constantly reframed. Furthermore, Cosmo soon turns the mirror into a glasshouse
when he starts decorating his room into a rich boudoir so that the lady might blend
even more with the setting. There she lives and sleeps at night, and vanishes in the
morning. Revealingly, the more Cosmo constructs her as a commodity by adorning
his crystal cage, the more sadness and wanness mark the beautiful face. Unable to
choose her setting and unable to phrase her despair, the melancholy female reflection
epitomizes objectification and subservience to the male order.
[1978] 1984), 36–7.
17 George MacDonald, ‘The Woman in the Mirror’ in Brian Stableford (ed.), The
Dedalus Book of British Fantasy: The Nineteenth Century (Sawtry: Dedalus Ltd., 1991),
238–58, 257. Subsequent references to this edition will be given in the text. The tale is part of
MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858); it is one of the embedded stories which the hero reads in the
palace of the fairy queen.
One day, as Cosmo’s love turns into passion and as desire to touch the female
body consumes him, the Pygmalion hero seeks to turn the female artefact into a
fleshly body and to compel the lady to walk out of the mirror. But once Cosmo finds
a spell to turn his aesthetic picture into a real woman and the princess leaves the
ideal realm of reflection to enter the real, the woman in the mirror not only gains a
body but also a voice to beg Cosmo to break the glass and to set her free. Eventually,
Cosmo shatters her crystal prison and liberates the princess. Yet the hero dies, having
broken the male fantasy the glass was made of and being doomed never to threaten
the idealized reflection by possessing a real fleshly woman.
At stake with the motif of glass in MacDonald’s tale is thence also the image
of woman no longer as object, but—simultaneously—as subject. To the extent
that, Gilbert and Gubar argue, ‘[t]o be caught and trapped in a mirror … is to be
driven inward, obsessively studying self-images as if seeking a viable self’,18
glass becomes a repository of feminine power. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings
featuring self-absorbed women typify the threat posed by the narcissistic woman. In
Fazio’s Mistress (1863) and Lady Lilith (1864–), the women’s self-construction into
artefacts becomes dangerous: mesmerized by their own reflection, they play with
their hair, Medusa-like, and turn their bodies into objects of desire that they master.
This ambiguous oscillation between woman’s construction as an object and/or as
a subject was cultivated throughout the second half of the century, and tensions
systematically underlie representations of women either trapped in mirrors or in glass
cages. Consequently, the more woman is framed—or the more she frames herself—
the more she might be empowered. As a set of signs which constructs her into an art
object, woman, J.B. Bullen argues, paradoxically becomes ‘all body.’19 The process
of self-effacement is turned back on itself: codification leads to corporeality. Thus,
the glass motif is not solely designed to enforce woman’s self-commodification
but may also display how woman might break the crystal surface and subversively
engage in self-construction.
This ambiguity about glass is the starting point of Isobel Armstrong’s study of
transparency. As she argues, ‘readings of glass converge and conflict’20: glass can
reflect and safely frame, but when associated with mass-production, glass can also
shatter reflection and produce ‘mirage[s]’ of the self.21 Glass, throughout the second
half of the nineteenth century, appears to dovetail modes of feminine construction
and representation, as well as to bring to light many contradictions. The changes
in feminine representation at mid-century were closely linked to the motif of glass
which, with the example of the Crystal Palace, revealed the period as marked by
exhibition and likely perceptual delusion. Tightly associated with femininity, since
it contained thousands of desiring female consumers, the Crystal Palace stamped the

19 J.B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and
Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 137.
20 Isobel Armstrong, ‘Transparency: Towards a Poetics of Glass in the Nineteenth-
Century’, in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow (eds), Cultural Babbage. Technology, Time
and Invention (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, [1996] 1997), 123–48, 123.
21 Armstrong, ‘Transparency’, 124.
literature of the following decades in a radical way, as novels probed the nature of
womanhood and the construction of femininity. Desire and passion lurked underneath
the glassy feminine ideal, which dissimulated itself beneath layers of fashionable
clothes the better to hide the disgraceful organic impulses Ruskin so much advised
his little girls to conceal.
For example, in her 1868 reworking of Cinderella, Anne Thackeray Ritchie uses
glass architecture as a significant metaphor to revise the construction of femininity
extolled by conventional fairy tales.22 The fairy-tale scenario is torn apart to let in the
world of consumer culture: Cinderella’s script of social ascension is metamorphosed
into a journey through milliners’shops. Indeed, while the stepmother and stepdaughters
are shaped into icons of fashion, the heroine is dressed up by a fairy godmother who
even stops at a shop in the Brompton road on her way to the Crystal Palace to buy
the princess a bonnet. The giant crystal building marks the narrative’s preoccupation
with female aestheticization, taking part in the heroine’s visual metamorphosis and
in her construction as a prototypical princess likely to attract the prince’s attention.
The glasshouse becomes the magic place where the prince and princess meet and
fall in love, as the princess exhibits her series of brand new dresses and accessories.
However, not only dazzled by her own fashionable appearance, the heroine is
also ‘tipsy with delight’ (116), as she walks with her Prince Charming through the
various exotic courts of the ‘great wonderful fairy Palace’ (116), teeming with glitter,
perfumes, statues, and Indian figures, or as she sits under palm trees. Hence, Ritchie’s
revision of the fairy tale not only modernizes Cinderella, but slightly changes as
well the meaning of the Victorian glass building. This time, the Crystal Palace does
not incarcerate the female character. On the contrary, if it first aestheticizes her
and subjects her to the male gaze, it next encapsulates the heroine’s soaring desire,
thereby mirroring female passion through the lens of Victorian consumer culture.
In this way, if the heroine remains bound to the fairy-tale scenario, her body seems,
nevertheless, to have slipped through the glass.
Interestingly, the Crystal Palace visually stands in the background of the
sensational literature of the 1860s,23 famous for its unconventional and improper
heroines. Because the sensation novel was linked to a new form of transparency,
suddenly uncovering the secrets of the middle classes and laying bare illicit practices,
it undermined the so-called transparency of realism, rendering opaque what was so far
deemed to be the truth. Indeed, sensation fiction, as the contemporary critics termed
the new literary genre, appeared at the height of the realistic mode, disrupting literary
expectations and marring nineteenth-century propriety. From a social and literary
viewpoint, sensation fiction was a product of its time, an offspring of a consumer
22 Anne Thackeray Ritchie, ‘Cinderella’ (1868), reprinted in Jack Zipes (ed.), Victorian
Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves (New York and London: Methuen, 1987),
101–26. Subsequent references to this edition will be given in the text.
23 As shall be seen, the Crystal Palace forms the backbone of Rhoda Broughton’s
Not Wisely But Too Well. In addition, the motif is found as well in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale
(1864) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1863) and The Doctor’s Wife (1864).
It is usually a place where the characters entertain themselves or which they visit with their
children. Nonetheless, as a figurative element, it anchors the novels in British consumer
culture and illuminates the world of money, which sensational heroines so much foreground.
culture much concerned with the dichotomy between appearance and reality. When
sensational journalism was thriving, printing daily cases of atrocious murders or
adulteries committed by the most respectacle citizens, the sensation novelists scraped
away the veneer of the so-called propriety of the middle classes by making bountiful
use of ‘such mysteries that every now and then fill the newspapers’,24 as Dallas puts
it. The world of sensation fiction, though ostensibly faithful to the representation
of the modern world in which it was set, seemed to suggest, or rather to claim,
according to a contemporary critic, that ‘a mystery sleeps in our cradles; fearful
errors lurk in our nuptial couch; [and] fiends sit down with us at table.’25 Indeed, half
way between fiction and reality, subverting the antagonism between high art, low art
or even journalism, this ‘abomination of the age—as the Archbishop of York termed
it in a sermon26—contaminated, virus-like, all social classes, rendering servants and
mistresses feverish with desire, and threatening with degeneration its avid female
readership.
The link between sensationalism and unruly female physiology—whether the
sensations of the genre were thought to affect the characters or the readers—has
been analyzed by Jenny Bourne Taylor as a way of ‘articulat[ing] anxiety about
imminent cultural decline by referring to an image of an implicitly “feminine” body
that was at once its product and metonymic model.’27 The image of the female body
as a reflecting device is particularly relevant to this chapter which explores Not
Wisely But Too Well, a novel by Rhoda Broughton in which her heroine’s body charts
Britain’s cultural decline and subtly associates it with the rise of commodity culture.
While her female protagonist delights in being turned into an artefact and displayed
before men, she appears at pain to control her desire and to tame her body. Visualized
behind glass panels, Broughton’s heroine therefore stages the paradoxical situation
of the modern Victorian woman, simultaneously constructed as material exhibited
in display windows and as a desiring subject attracted by enticing commodities.
As her body hovers between crystallization and mutability, Broughton’s heroine
investigates the nature of femininity by disrupting the cultural signposts of her age.
Rhoda Broughton was a writer deemed to belong to the group of sensation novelists
less through her plots than through her frank and passionate heroines. In most of her
novels, the female protagonists vainly seek to tone down their fleshly desires, thereby
matching a contemporary critic’s definition of the genre as characterized by ‘the utter
unrestraint in which the heroines of this order are allowed to expiate and develop
their impulsive, stormy, passionate character.’28 Not Wisely But Too Well recounts the
story of Broughton’s sensational heroine, Kate Chester, seduced by a mock prince,
Dare Stamer, who is married and, nonetheless, urges Kate to flee conventionality and
24 E.S. Dallas, ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’, The Times (18 Nov. 1862): 8.
25 [anon], ‘Our Novels. The Sensation School’, Temple Bar, 29 (July 1870): 410–24,
422.
26 Quoted by W.F. Rae, ‘Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon’, North British Review,
43 (1865): 180–204, 203.
27 Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation
Narrative and Nineteenth Century Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988), 4.
28 [anon], ‘Our Female Sensation Novelists’, Christian Remembrancer, 46 (July
1863): 209–36, 353.
elope with him. Motherless, Kate hardly listens to the advice of her sister Maggie.
She frequently leaves the house, comes back late or lies to her uncle and aunt—
ineffectual guardians of the improper young woman. Kate is a prototypical sensation
heroine ‘of a nature susceptible to outward influences; to anything that spoke to
the senses.’29 The novel often depicts her physical reactions. Kate does not merely
blush, ‘quiver’ or ‘tremble’ (61) as more conventional heroines would do, but she
also experiences ‘her blood [going] through her veins with a quicker rush’ (340).
As blood physiologically metaphorizes the young woman’s sensations, it merges
with the diseased outside environment. Once Dare has kissed her in a greenhouse
suffused with exotic scents and colours, Kate is sure that her lover will marry her.
But he tells her about his marriage, and Kate decides to give him up. She then goes
to London. There, she visits the sick and poor and feeds them with evangelical tracts.
In so doing, she visualizes, in fact, her own unruliness. Her improper urges appear to
be displaced onto the degenerate females she encounters. One day, however, when
Kate leaves the pauper district of Queenstown to spend a day in the Crystal Palace,
she walks into Dare in the company of one of his mistresses; he lures her again into
following him on the road to fallen womanhood. Kate agrees and promises to come
back the next day. However, her friend, James Stanley, discovers the young woman’s
plan and convinces her not to join Dare. Kate then decides to devote her whole
time to looking after the sick and poor, even when contagious diseases contaminate
the district she visits. In the meantime, her sister flirts with her cousin, desperately
hoping that he will propose to her and forget about Kate—whom he, of course, finds
much more attractive than the conventional and proper Maggie.
Shifting the novel’s sensation scenes from glass constructions to London’s pauper
districts, Broughton charts sensations and exhibits the female body’s veins and
arteries in a metaphorical way which resonates with modern anxieties. As a matter
of fact, Broughton’s narrative, recording the story of a—nearly—fallen woman,
constructs Kate from the start as one of Dare’s mistresses, hence, as one of the
commodities he can pick and choose and discard at will. The reader knows at once
that Dare collects mistresses, as do most of the characters in the novel. Yet Kate’s
irrepressible feelings for her lover fashion her into a desiring subject. Broughton
thus investigates the construction of female desire by setting her narrative against
a consumer backdrop: as Kate enters the marketplace, she embarks on a dangerous
venture where she constantly shifts between the positions of desiring subject and
desired object.
Behind Glass Panels: Displaying the Sensational Heroine
From the beginning of the novel, Broughton sets her story in places ‘crammed to
overflowing with shopkeepers’ (6) and where the commodities displayed in ‘the
window of the librarian, stationer and toy-merchant, stare calmly all day long at the
one drab crinoline swinging sportively in the breeze outside the door of the mercer,
29 Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely But Too Well (Dover: Alan Sutton, [1867] 1993),
340. Subsequent references to this edition will be given in the text.
grocer, and ironmonger opposite’ (7). If the reference to the crinoline situates the story
in the fifties, shop windows and advertising placards are interspersed throughout the
setting, and Kate does not escape the influence of material culture. As soon as she is
described, the narrator turns her body into a string of items (‘Now for an inventory
of her few charms’ [8]) which attract men’s gaze not once but two, three, or four
times. While her body is thus presented through the male appraising gaze, Kate
becomes merchandise in the same way as the narrator introduces the heroine through
her portrait hung in his mental ‘secret picture-gallery’ (5) in his foreword. However,
wondering, like Keats, if ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’ (1) or if ‘beauty is a
fading flower’ (2), the narrator pinpoints the paradox on which the novel hinges:
Kate’s beauty is both aligned with that of material objects and with fleshliness.
Broughton’s female world, hence, becomes a realm of instability where pictures
move and seem fleshly, where certainties collapse, and stereotypical representations
of femininity are undermined.
When Broughton’s heroine is physically depicted, Broughton furthers her
deconstruction of mythical beauty by refusing to frame Kate as a cultural icon and
by undercutting the clichés of heroine description:
Not a beauty, this young woman. She would cut but a sorry figure amongst a set of
straight-featured, lily and rose fair ones. A great deal, though no miraculous quantity, of
bright hair; bright, without a speck of gold near it. Neither wholly red nor wholly brown,
were those well-plaited locks. Brown was, of the two, their predominant hue, with just a
dash of red to keep them warm and a-glow. They would have been easily matched out of
the dead leafy treasures that autumn scatters in a dank wood. Very, very low down, faultily
low, some good judges said, they grew on a fairly white brow and thence went off, crisply,
fuzzily, in a most unaffected wave. Big green eyes, rather deeply put in; not peculiarly
luminous or eloquent, on ordinary occasions; rather soft, not very … A small turn-up nose,
much animadverted on by contemporary girls … Well, it did defy all rules, certainly, but
then it never got red. Cheeks pale, not very apt at blushing prettily; mouth came under
the head of the wide, full-lipped, smiling, but with a good deal of lurking gravity, and
an immensity of latent, undeveloped passion in some of the curves it fell into. Laughing
innocent lips that seemed to expect life to be one long pleasant jest. Such as this face was,
it was nicely set on a warm, round throat, like a pillar (only that a pillar is cold), as unlike
a swan’s as one thing could be unlike another. (9–10)
Broughton’s physiognomical portrait matches sensationalism’s expectations,

proposing a sensuous heroine and promising passionate experiences.30 Unlike
30 Kate’s physiognomical portrait illustrates how, from the 1850s to the 1870s,
physiognomy altered the codes of heroine description. As Jeanne Fahnestock explains,
inventories appeared, creating so many means of luring readers with fleshly promise: the
heroine’s body was seemingly no longer invisible; fragmented into a series of parts, it was
exhibited and exposed, the better to be evaluated, classified and perhaps sanctioned. Irregularity,
as Jeanne Fahnestock has shown, goes with tasty and spicy character, like a secret code to
intimate the heroine’s passionate and sensuous nature. See Jeanne Fahnestock, ‘The Heroine of
Irregular Features: Physiognomy and Conventions of Heroine Description’, Victorian Studies,
24 [Spring 1981]: 325–50). Broughton’s linguistic excess, moreover, debunking conventional
heroine description, also underlines sensationalism’s unregulated reproduction, which Susan
Braddon’s Lucy Audley whose face is as smooth and innocent-looking as that of a
child, Kate’s character is legible and her propensity to fall marks her body, from her
low brow to her large eyes or wide mouth. None of her characteristics figures the
Victorian angel. On the contrary, Kate is fleshly and round, and her ‘dead-leaf hair’
launches the series of natural comparisons that the plot draws on.
In fact, whether Kate blushes and turns from ‘an unpainted garden lily into the
gaudiest of gaudy peonies’ (23) or whether she is crowned with poppies, Kate is
always dangerously associated with nature. Broughton in particular uses the flower
metaphor to place and displace her heroine along the yardstick of proper femininity,
ultimately aligning Kate with representations of ‘other’ passionate women defined
by current social, cultural, and scientific discourses. Interestingly, Not Wisely But
Too Well reads as a revisiting of Little Red Ridinghood. The fairy tale frequently
punctuates the plot and systematically foreshadows the appearance of the lover Dare,
the flowers that Kate plucks paving the way for the representation of her possible
deflowering. As the ‘flower of Dunblane’ (17) strives to curb her excessive desires,
Broughton uses the flower metaphor as a reflector of the heroine’s corporeality and
maturing sexuality. Yet, paradoxically, the flowers denote both Kate’s natural and
artificial femininity—suggesting in this way the links between the two. For Kate
also ‘do[es] her best to foil nature’ (24). Before meeting Dare, she puts headgear,
bracelets, and brooches on to please her lover, and appears ‘adorned as a flower-
filleted victim’ (24). Revealingly, her self-construction instantly subjects her to her
lover and adumbrates her fall.
Similarly, Broughton chooses both natural and civilized places for her lovers’
meetings. The first scene in the forest, where Dare takes one of the poppies Kate
is wearing in her hair, is followed by a second scene where the countryside gives
way to the artificial world of cultivated flowers. Kate, compared to ‘a Circassian
slave at the market of Constantinople’ (96), is systematically linked to a world of
consumption where the woman is at the mercy of the male economy: Dare, ‘affecting
airs of ownership which felt uncommonly pleasant’ (97), asks Kate to put on her hat
so that her skin may not be tanned. As Dare kisses her in the greenhouse, moreover,
the flowers build up an exotic atmosphere, and the damp and the fragrance of the
Eastern species oppress the senses. Unabashed by the kiss, the flowers exhibit their
colours in an enticing striptease, ‘fold after fold’ (98) and, like so many Cleopatras in
their baths, turn the greenhouse into a harem and Kate into one of ‘Titian’s Venuses’
whose flesh is as ‘rose-veined’ (98) as the leaves of the flowers:
And how marvelously pleasant it was when they were fairly inside that “box where sweets
compacted lie”; how almost oppressive, overpowering, the fragrance of the warm damp
atmosphere, where a thousand sweet smells strove perpetually for the mastery! There,
side by side, gathered from the far east and the far west, blossomed and reigned Nature’s
most regal flower-daughters. Gorgeous, stately flowers, that had hitherto revealed their
Bernstein analyzes as ‘a consequence of disorderly appetites threatening to undermine an

established social order’ (Susan David Bernstein, ‘Dirty Reading: Sensation Fiction, Women,
and Primitivism’, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 36/2 [1994]: 213–41,
216–17). Within and without the text, desire, hunger, thirst, and organic sensations punctuate
the narrative.
passionate hearts, fold after fold, to the fainting air of some cloudless, rainless, brazen
tropic sky, now poured forth all their sweets, put on their brilliant apparel, under our
watery, sickly sunbeams. There great dark leaves, moss-green, rose-veined, drooped
heavy with their own weight; there crimsons and scarlets burned and flamed, imperial,
with a depth and intensity of colour which our dear, pale-faced northern flowers never
dreamed of putting on. What of man’s devising can be more intoxicating than one of these
temples dedicated to rich odours and brave tints? (98)
The aesthetic reference which displaces Kate’s passionate body brings about the
contradiction the rest of the novel will further. Behind the glass panels, Kate is both
objectified and constructed as a desiring subject, and the scene brings into play the
radical possibilities of the greenhouse to expose the female character’s passion.
Far from the figure of glass containing the female body, Broughton’s conservatory
disrupts the image of control inherent in glass constructions where Western culture
masters exotic nature and frames colonial subjects. If the motif of the conservatory
is a clichéd ‘locale … for sexual seduction’,31 as it stands midway between the house
and the garden, here, the profusion of stately imperial flowers clearly mastering
space foregrounds disorder as the ruling economy, while the erotic display of
reclining crimson flowers refracts the heroine’s sensuality in a subversive figurative
representation of female corporeality. The glasshouse thus visually aligns Kate with
the Eastern other, turning the greenhouse into a site which breeds unruliness. In this
way, taking Kate further away from prescribed femininity, the greenhouse prolongs
Broughton’s deconstruction of the crystallized female body for a more physiological
representation of femininity.
On the other hand, Broughton’s association of her heroine with exotic flowers is
the first stage in the relationship between orientalism and consumerism which the
novel emphasizes. The links between female desire and exoticism which Broughton
heightens here anticipate the motif of the Crystal Palace she uses further on and her
perspective on female consumption. Indeed, Broughton’s greenhouse encapsulates
the links between modernity, orientalism, and consumerism, which, for instance,
George Augustus Sala’s later construction of the metropolis underlined, shaping
London as a sensual Eastern marketplace, which commodified female shoppers. His
depiction of Westbourne Grove as an ‘open-air Bezesteen’ where ‘sultana-valides
from Lancaster gate, and khantoms from Porchester-terrace … Gulnare on her
Arab steed, [and] Gulboyaz … from the bath, from the sweet waters of Asia’ were
shopping, while ‘John the footman change[d] into guardian of the harem’,32 equated
London with images of the Orient which defined feminine consumption in exotic
terms. Likewise, Broughton’s conservatory does not just register the way Kate’s
emotions escape control, but reconstructs her heroine’s nature through exotic images
later to be associated with the image of the female shopper.
The history of the link between glasshouses and imperial motives started before
mid-century. As early as 1817, John Claudius Loudon considered using glasshouse
31 Darby, ‘Joseph Paxton’s Water Lily’, 277.

32 George Augustus Sala, ‘Young London’, Daily Telegraph (June 2, 1879): 5, in
Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping For Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 21.
design to showcase exotic people alongside exotic plants and animals.33 More
significantly still, if today Joseph Paxton remains famous for his Crystal Palace, few
people know that the head gardener to the sixth Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth in
Derbyshire was the first man in England to bring the ‘hothouse lily’ (the Amazonian
water lily) into flower in November 1849. Designed by Paxton to house and protect
his Victoria amazonica (also known as Victoria regia), the glasshouse was first a lily
house, fraught with ambivalent and often contradictory meanings. Because Paxton
nurtured his water lily and saw it grow with surprising vigor to such an enormous size
that it became hard for him to manage it, the hothouse lily interestingly epitomized
power, a force which both ‘reminded England of nature’s potential capacity to
overwhelm all human enterprise’34 and which was also—paradoxically—linked
to femininity. Victoria regia, both vulnerable and bearing the name of the mighty
empress, metaphorizing power and technology at the same time as feminine delicacy,
furthered the association of genteel femininity with flowers while it simultaneously
encapsulated the ‘mysteries of nature, and probably also masculine anxiety about
woman’s reproductive power and the need to control it.’35
Both domesticated and powerful, Paxton’s ‘hothouse lily’ rapidly became a
metaphor conveying mid-Victorian cultural values. It represented the ideal Victorian
woman, controlled, confined and delicately nurtured, and the ‘hothouse lily’ metaphor
was appropriated by ideologies of domesticity and sexual politics, pervading art and
literature. Like Paxton’s hothouse lily, Broughton’s heroine, depicted as a ‘little fresh
lily’ (31), showcased in glasshouses and in search of her ‘habitat’ (158), constructs
her femininity in natural and artificial terms. While she controls her appearance
or is visualized as an artwork, her association with exotic flowers illustrates the
difficulty of figuring female desire and of framing the ‘nature’ of woman. Behind the
glass panels, she oscillates between the metaphorical and the material, and her body
vibrates with the contradictions which fuelled the glass motif in the second half of
the nineteenth century.
Kate’s commodification in the greenhouse, moreover, furthers her own self-
construction: when Dare suggests that she elope with him, she wonders why ‘he
wanted to steal her for his wife, instead of asking her as a costly gift from those
who had the keeping of her’ (121). The female self is shaped in terms derived from
the market and can be stolen. If Kate refuses to live the life of a fallen woman and
abandons her lover, her objectification is nonetheless enhanced throughout the novel.
She next leaves for London in order to atone for her uncontrollable desire through
charity work. But there she fashions herself even more into an object, choosing
postures meant to display her body and to arouse male desire, from sitting on a rug,
‘aware, or half aware, of how well this recumbent attitude displayed … that lithe
waving little figure’ (197) to posing like Cleopatra in some picture she remembers
(199). Her friend James and her cousin George fall madly in love with her, while
Kate pursues her redemptive journey.
33 For a history of the glasshouse, see Darby, ‘Joseph Paxton’s Water Lily’, 258.
Kate’s Journey in the Slums of London: A Lady’s ‘Vain Show’
Once in the capital after an appropriate brain-fever, Kate’s femininity is even more
tied to the world of fashion: ‘Kate cared still about her appearance … [a]pparently,
quite as much as ever … The furzy hair is swept off behind the round ears in just
as elaborate burnished plaits as ever; none of the small adornments are wanting’
(133). With her cousins, who delight in amateur dressmaking and talk all day long
of ruches, vandykes, and where to get the best hats, Kate ‘pick[s] up … some slight
hint’ (152) to ‘decorate’ herself. While George wonders whether her chignon is real
or fake, Kate continues her ‘vain show’ (164) and decides to become a charity worker
and to visit the sick and poor. Kate’s errand of mercy reinforces her construction as
a commodity. Kate is wearing a crinoline, which was in fashion from the fifties
to the mid-sixties. Proudly exhibiting the dome of sprung steel which outlined the
fashionable woman, Kate not only wears the first industrial fashion, but also the first
universal fashion, worn by women from all social classes. Known to give freedom
to the legs, to reduce the weight of petticoats that women had to carry before the
invention of the crinoline, and to attract voyeurs’ attention, Kate’s trendy attire paves
the way for her transgression: she is about to walk alone through the city, to merge
with the working classes and to turn into the female Other.
Thus, if Kate does not roam the West End but seems to walk further and further
away from the commercial area, across the marketplace and past the draper’s,
grocer’s, and butcher’s shops into the slums of Queenstown, her roaming through
the city in fashionable attire, nevertheless, calls to mind the rise of department stores
and the development of London’s West End, where women more and more walked
the Victorian streets. For Kate increasingly constructs herself as an object to be
looked at. Kate is worried that the ‘big philanthropic-looking basket … rather [takes]
away the fashionableness of her appearance’ (164). After her day’s work, she makes
her appearance in the marketplace where her cousin George, patiently gazing at the
bookseller’s or the pastrycook’s windows to catch anything ‘worth looking at’ (221),
is waiting to take in ‘the object [his gaze] desired’ (203).
On her first day of walking through the slums of Queenstown, moreover,
Kate imagines that she is going to end ‘[r]obbed and murdered’, and appear in a
‘[p]aragraph in the police-reports: Found, the body of a young woman, apparently
about twenty-one years of age, genteelly dressed, fair, plump, red-haired’ (166).
Kate’s reference to sensational journalism underlines the extent to which her body
has now become even more available. Very few women could at mid-century carry
out investigations in the London slums, and most of the studies concerning poverty
and sanitation were commissioned by the government and were placed exclusively
in the hands of male professionals.36 In fact, as a ‘woman in public’, to quote Judith
36 The narrator ironically compares Kate with social investigators when she asks the
names and ages of the children of the women she visits (171). The presence of women in
such slums as observers seems to have been more frequent at the end of the century than
at mid-century, their wanderings away from home being then constructed as an extension
of their domestic duties. See Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women,
Representation and the City (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 207, and
Walkowitz’s terms, Kate becomes an equivocal figure, ‘both endangered and a
source of danger.’37 Unlike men, indeed, women could not roam the streets without
risking misinterpretation. The flâneuse—as an offspring of consumer culture tied to
the commercial development of London’s West End—could not possibly exist, since
women, as soon as they stepped out of the private sphere, were turned into objects
of the gaze.38
Interestingly, Kate is then literally dressed as a Victorian Red Ridinghood, with a
basket, a red cloak, a crinoline, and feathers. Acting as a sort of moralizing vignette,
the literary reference furthers the fashionable woman’s wandering off the tracks of
propriety. While the narrative unveils the narrow and black streets, Kate seems to
sink lower and lower into sin, instead of cleansing herself from desire:
Quickly she passed along, down the road, by the side of which the river swept, spanned
further down by the old bridge clear, swept along with its barges, and its myriad
diamonds—calm, and smiling, and cold. Then on and on, into Queenstown; along its
frost-bound streets … Then down a street not so broad or so well paved, or so well
endowed with gas, as the one we have left—a street that leads off, away from the market-
place, down into the black undesirable parts of the town. You do not often meet any of
the beau monde of Queenstown there; indeed they show their good taste in keeping out of
it, at least as far as their bodily comfort is concerned, for there are very often very nasty
smells there—nondescript compound sort of smells, that defy description or analysis …
Down a narrow brick passage, with old placards stuck all over it, she passes—down into
the region of back slums and alleys, where the sun has far too good taste to show his grand
kingly face. (165–6)
Broughton’s use of urban space to reflect her heroine’s nature as she falls down the
sewers of desire illustrates the ideological charge conveyed by mid-century’s urban
metamorphosis. In the slums Kate visits, the houses only exhibit windows whose
broken panes mark the place as open to invasion and contamination in the same
way as the bodies of the inhabitants host germs and are distorted by unregulated
procreation. In this realm of rampant sexuality, a woman, defined through what
she wears (‘a walking hoax, a bundle of rags made up into a faint resemblance
of the female shape’ [168]), has given birth to seven or eight ‘goblin-faced’ (169)
children. Elsewhere, an old lady with ‘swollen, debased features’ (173) is visibly
putrefying. The female models Kate encounters clearly partake of her journey
through femininity. The dirt, the smells, the deformed and decaying female bodies
relate the unsanitary living conditions to the female body’s sexuality, drawing on
the assimilation of the woman’s body to the ‘waste-clogged social body.’39 Thus,
Kate’s journey underground exchanges flower-metaphors of desire for flesh-and-
bone female bodies, fleshly bodies gnawed by illness and sexuality, deformed by
death or procreation. Through the feminizing of the unclean and ill-furnished houses,
Judith Walkowitz on Victorian female philanthropists (City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of

Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago, [1992] 1998).
37 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 21.
38 For more concerning the flâneuse, see Rappaport, Shopping For Pleasure, 116.
39 Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 76.
Broughton’s ‘anatomical realism’, in Poovey’s terms, exposes a social body on the
verge of degeneration.
Hence, if the nasty smells first seemed the reverse of the conservatory’s scents,
they here become synonymous: both reflect Kate’s degenerate physiology and
unregulated desire, bridging the gap between the exotic greenhouse and the dark
pauper districts. As Broughton metaphorizes the dark nature of woman, she merges
her commodified female character with the shapeless female bodies of London’s
East End—the latter being frequently viewed as exotic women.40 In fact, Jill Matus
argues, the factory realm was often seen as ‘the equivalent of another climate and
geographical location, an intemperate zone [while] female workers [were] seen as
if they were members of a different race or tribe … like dark women in tropical
climates, whose sexuality is represented as reflecting a depraved and uncivilised
condition.’41 And, indeed, Kate wonders how she could be ‘of the very same genus
and species’ (168).
While the text merges images of sexual transgression and biological degeneracy,
other boundaries seem to melt. Like the deformed and uncontained bodies she
encounters, space suddenly becomes blurred: Kate gets lost in the area where all the
streets look like one another. Kate’s gender and social transgression, as a middle-class
woman walking along the dirty streets, is spatially exposed. Like Carroll’s Alice, Kate
has literally gone through the looking-glass of propriety as she notices that one of the
letters on a building is ‘turned the wrong way’ (179). Later on, on a public-house,
a pair of keys symbolizes Kate’s entrance into openness and transgression. Kate,
‘in all the glory of her crinoline and her feathers’ (168), her coat ‘falling round her,
in its warm scarlet folds’ (174), becomes more and more visible and appropriable.
Now ‘sadly noticeable’ (181), she is hailed as a prostitute by men who propose ‘a
ha’penny for [her] crinoline’ (181). Terrified, Kate runs away, ironically dropping
her basket of tracts in the gutter. She then runs into James, her spiritual doctor, whom
she instantly contaminates with her transgressive germs. Interestingly, falling madly
in love with the sensual charity worker, James accuses Kate of haunting him as a
vision with her photograph and of ‘poisoning him’ (184) with her notes, as if they
had ‘cholera, typhus, and small-pox lurk[ing] in every fold of them’ (219). Once
again, her photograph associates Kate with the world of images, and the tropes of
disease bind Kate’s nature to the type of women with whom she has been in contact.
Simultaneously associated with artificiality and with nature, Kate oscillates between
contradictory images of womanhood, while the folds of her notes are redolent of the
folds of her coat or those of the flowers in the greenhouse, teasing the onlooker and
intoxicating him.
40 The inhabitants of the East End were often metaphorized as exotic plants. While
glasshouses showed men manipulating exotic species bred in moist environments and
threatening to contaminate their British peers, Paxton planned to use his glass construction to
improve the houses of the poor, thereby clearly aligning the inhabitants of the East End with
exotic species. See Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 29.
41 Jill L. Matus, Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and
Maternity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 66.
Moreover, Kate’s desire, represented as a series of contagious diseases by James,
seems to march hand-in-hand with the fevers that contaminate the city and against
which Kate seems to be immunized. The fever which contaminates ‘the reeking
crowded courts and alleys’ is compared to ‘a tropical plant’ (286), and associated
with ‘gaps and hiatuses’ and ‘vacant spaces’ (312), not merely recalling the
greenhouse but also the poor houses open to aggression. Broughton’s metaphorical
network not only once more links the greenhouse to the slums, but it also collapses
the boundary between germ contamination and sexual taint. In fact, the contagious,
invisible germs seem to result from Kate’s last temptation, right after she has visited
the Crystal Palace.
Disease and Desire in the Crystal Palace: Fashioning Modern Femininity
When Broughton’s Little Red Ridinghood leaves the pauper districts for the giant
and transparent Crystal Palace where she is to meet the wolf’s ‘grand eyes’ (247),
her desire cannot be contained by the panoptical panels which encapsulate Victorian
ideology. From her dome-shaped crinoline of sprung steel which attracts coalheavers
and bargees, therefore, the novel shifts to a glass dome which encapsulates its visual
culture. Broughton defines the Crystal Palace as a place where visitors stare ‘at
everything that [is] to be stared at’ (234). Positing the gaze as the ruling master of
the place, Broughton prepares the meeting between Kate and Dare: desire grows
unrestrained in the Palace, which typifies British materialism and was designed to
drive visitors to distraction. In the same way as unseen viruses circulate through the
city, Kate’s passion flows unframed and uncurbed by normative structures. Female
germs pervade the capital, ironically bred within glasshouses. Like the hothouse lily’s
growth to an enormous size, Kate’s desire rises, hardly held by bigger and bigger
glasshouses, and hence climaxing with the Crystal Palace. Broughton’s allusions to
Little Red Ridinghood, moreover, validate the novel’s exploration of the nature of
woman, associating it with the emergence of commercial culture through the motif of
the Crystal Palace. Broughton’s Crystal Palace is fashioned as a forest where modern
civilization has gone wild and wolves lurk to beguile young women—or do they?
Like Lewis Carroll’s photograph, Agnes Grace Weld as Little Red Ridinghood, the
text shapes woman as both victim and predator, as both consumed and consuming,
and Broughton uses the glass palace to illustrate her heroine’s unruly flesh and
untamed sensuality.
Broughton’s use of the palace as a metaphor for her ‘lily’ is sustained by the
history of the design of Paxton’s glass architecture. The Crystal Palace was inspired
by Paxton’s experiments with the hothouse lily and his creations of bigger and
bigger greenhouses to house his exotic flower: the water lily’s leaf structure with its
‘cantilevers which radiate from the centre … with large bottom flanges and very thin
middle ribs, and with cross girders between each pair to keep the middle ribs from
buckling’42 directly informed the cast iron and glass building which grew, lily-like,
42 Transactions of the Royal Society of Art, 57 (1850–51) cited in Darby, ‘Joseph

Paxton’s Water Lily’, 273.
to an enormous size. Not just radiating with the exotic connotations attached to the
hothouse lily, Paxton’s glass construction, moreover, conceived visitors as so many
plants needing light, heat and ventilation in careful proportions.43 Furthermore, the
1851 Great Exhibition was divided into four sections: raw materials, machinery,
manufactures and fine arts. While the western part of the building contained the
exhibits from Britain, the eastern part hosted exhibits from foreign countries,
arranged according to their latitudes (the countries nearest to the equator were placed
nearest the central transept).
Echoing the greenhouse scene of the beginning of the novel, Kate revealingly
wanders away from her friends into the Exotic Court, seeking warmth. The flowers’
luxuriance recalls how botanical discourse frequently associated cultivated flowers
with degeneration,44 and the large and lascivious plants, ‘bathing their feet in the
still water’ (238), hint at the stereotypical idle and overweight body of the unchaste
woman, adumbrating Kate’s next transgression. For Kate soon leaves the room for
the Venuses and Apollo’s Court. Among the statues, as she is gauging the beauty of
the marble male bodies around her, Kate notices Dare’s ‘cast chest’ (241) and large
shoulders. Kate’s sudden surge of passion for her lover is then culturally reframed.
Broughton shapes her heroine’s desire as marked by consumer society, and uses the
Crystal Palace as a site epitomizing the cult of the commodity and the era of enticing
images. Positioned as an avid consumer, Kate reverses gender roles and gazes at
the male as an object of desire, thereby resembling what Susan Bernstein terms
the ‘madame monster of the marketplace, the woman dazzled by her desires for …
sensual pleasures.’45 As a matter of fact, often seen as a place teeming with women’s
fantasies and unregulated desires, the Crystal Palace ironically disrupted woman’s
objectification. The ‘ladies under glass’, as Andrew Miller suggests, were so many
fairy-tale princesses suddenly come to life and threatening men who perpetually
strove to reassert their objectification.46 Playing upon the modern cultural icon,
Broughton thus projects female desire onto the displayed male body parts aligned
with the other works of art and constructed in terms of consumption.
But Broughton quickly casts her consumer as a victim of the male capitalist
order. Interestingly, as soon as Dare touches Kate, for fear she might only be ‘some
phantom’ and ‘to take her to himself in the old possessive way’ (243), the female
body is suddenly metamorphosed: ‘He took her two hands in his, and they stood
looking at one another silently for what seemed a thousand pulse-beats, her face
gradually paling—paling to the whiteness of one that has been a whole day dead’
(254). Set into pace by the blood metaphor, Kate’s desire merges physiology with the
cultural environment. Kate is, in fact, turning into one of the surrounding dizzying
commodities, ‘tumbling off their pedestals, and dancing up and down’ (243). Far
from fainting or dying, Kate becomes ‘as pale as the statued Venus’ (243), ‘as white
43 See Darby, ‘Joseph Paxton’s Water Lily’, 274.

44 Matus, Unstable Bodies, 78.
45 Bernstein, ‘Dirty Reading: Sensation Fiction, Women, and Primitivism’, 217.
46 See Andrew H. Miller, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian
Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 66–8.
as snow’ with ‘dark marks’ under her eyes, looking thence ‘six times as tormentingly
bewitching as ever’ 248).
Aligned with the exhibited statues, Broughton’s heroine recalls the popularity of
Greco-Roman statuary not only in art but also in advertising, where even a corseted
Venus de Milo was circulated from the 1860s.47 Moreover, as Dare leads her to a
mirror on the wall in a corner of the court, and they argue as to Kate’s beauty, her
framed face on the crystal surface furthers Kate’s commodification: ‘What! you care
about your beauty still, do you, Kate? … [T]hat’s more like the wicked, vain, little
flirt I used to know in the old dead-and-gone days’ (248). Thus, the male touch
and gaze seemingly crystallize the female body in the glass palace into a deathlike
icon of beauty, as the reversed version of the decaying female bodies of the slums,
gnawed by uncontrolled sexuality.
Therefore, freeing the female consumer’s desire and freezing the female body
into a morbid picture, Broughton’s construction of the Crystal Palace traces how
the woman who enters the marketplace risks at once being turned into a commodity.
While Kate’s ghastly flesh simultaneously typifies the passion gnawing at her and
shapes her as a debilitated icon of femininity, while the narrator wonders if ‘a thing
of beauty is a joy for ever’ (1) or a ‘fading flower’ (2), Broughton offers a new
vision of femininity which brings to light contradictions. Finally, because she is
systematically portrayed within glasshouses and she escapes the male embrace,
deliberately renouncing the man who ‘was another woman’s property’ (243) and
whom she cannot have, the pale and ghostly female consumer appears as a spectral
image, a phantasmagoria maddening the male character and vanishing whenever he
expects to possess her. Breaking all kinds of frames, fuelled by her visual culture but
counteracting crystallization, commodified and eroticized, the uncurbed and slippery
heroine exposes modern femininity through a new glass which both foregrounds the
heroine’s corporeality and anchors the character in a modern culture where bodies
and images interweave and become confused when displayed behind transparent
panels.
If Kate once more flees the ‘deflowered’ Palace, in Walter Benjamin’s
terminology,48 she finally finds refuge in another glasshouse which frames her as an
ultimate fatal image of desire. Indeed, at Kate’s sister’s wedding ball, in the bourgeois
area of London, Kate is found once again in a conservatory while Dare is dying in
the next room, dangerously injured by a cart accident while he was trying to see
her again. When she hears the news, she runs towards him, and he dies in her arms,
refusing to repent for his sinful life, and asking Kate to bury with him the poppy he
once stole from her head. The buried poppy seals the sensational love story, and the
heroine—unfed by the male gaze—soon dies, too.
47 See Leigh Summers, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset (Oxford
and New York: Berg, 2001), 187–9. Summers gives the examples of Sewell’s Rival corset
featuring a corseted Venus de Milo (1884), Drew’s inimitable A La Grecque corsets or Roxy
Caplin (1866).
48 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland, Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, [1972] 2002),
150.
In this way, Broughton’s linking of femininity with the production of images and
the rise of consumer culture typifies the subversive possibilities that inhered in the
construction of the modern woman. As shall be seen, such possibilities are far more
highlighted in the sensation novels to which I shall now turn. In sensation fiction,
the female characters go shopping; they buy dresses and make-up, they collect
curios as they collect men. The modernity of the sensational plots lies in the way
the novels play with the changes that mass consumer culture entailed, especially as
it transformed women into household purchasers, thereby disrupting gender roles.
For women not only created their wardrobes, but were also in charge of decorating
the home. If husbands could have the final word by setting limits of expenditure,
women—and advertisers—could use their physiological sensitivity as evidence of
higher understanding of taste.49 As women exercised some free choice, this new
economic control was exploited by sensation writers. While consumer culture
suggested that buying enabled women to engage in self-construction—and, therefore,
self-definition—the sensation novels use the very same argument as subversive plot
devices to turn commodified female characters into dangerous actresses. Playing
upon femininity as a masquerade, sensation novels embed their narratives within
a capitalist society where the construction of ‘woman’ depends upon the market
economy.
49 For more on women as emerging consumers, see Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming
Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994), 33–4.
Chapter Six
Investigating Books of Beauties in

Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853)
and M.E. Braddon’s
Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
If Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely But Too Well emphasizes the visibility of her heroine
and uses the 1851 Great Exhibition as a significant locus for modern femininity,
Dickens’s Bleak House and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret play
even more on visual motifs, using, in particular, books of beauties to fashion their
plots. In the second half of the nineteenth century, society ‘beauties’ embodied a new
kind of femininity and their portraits were circulated, appearing in shop windows, on
cartes de visite, and even as advertisements selling products.1 Aligning the beauties’
bodies with purchasable works of art, books of beauties turned women into so many
images seducing viewers.
Unlike Mrs. Henry Wood’s disfigured heroine in East Lynne (1861), the sensational
plots of Dickens’s Bleak House and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret
play upon seamless beauties. In both novels, the heroines embody the feminine
ideal to perfection, and femininity appears as a series of visual codes. To uncover
their secrets, the detectives must read and decipher the construction of the modern
‘lady’, the perfect face that outsmarts the codes of physiognomy. Significantly,
their sensational bodies, though not overtly branded by sin, are, nonetheless,
marked by the forces of modern life. Both novels use London as a backdrop, and
the construction of femininity appears linked to an array of technological changes
related to the emergence of mass consumer culture. As they depict female characters
changing places and feature modern means of transportation, the novels construct
their heroines from a neurological standpoint and show the extent to which urban life
and modernity exhausts the senses through overstimulation. As a matter of fact, in the
second half of the nineteenth century, modern experience often entailed physiological
consequences. As a result, increasing nervous stimulation and subjecting the
individual ‘to a barrage of impressions, shocks and jolts’,2 the metropolis could but
enhance woman’s weak physiology. If Lady Dedlock is physically marked by the
1 See Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping For Pleasure: Women in the Making of
London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 185.
2 Ben Singer, ‘Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism’, in
Leo Charney, Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley:
The University of California Press, 1995), 72–99, 73.
pressures of urban life, Lady Audley, who travels by train to outwit the detective, is
eventually revealed as insane. In this way, the novels’ use of female physiology is
tied to the description of the characters as female shoppers journeying to and from
the capital.
Moreover, both novels recall the advertising craze which marked the mid-
Victorian period by clearly emphasizing modernity as a visual experience. As the
number of visual stimuli increased on the walls of the capital through advertisements
and posters, or as optical inventions played with images which surprised or deceived
the viewer, like the stereoscope, the phenakitoscope, or the thaumatrope,3 the
multiple visual experiences of urban life were reworked as sensational plot devices.
Because Dickens’s and Braddon’s heroines appear as fashionable artefacts designed
for visual stimulation, the novels investigate female aestheticization: fashion plates
and mirrors must be looked into, and placards, posters and paintings must cooperate
as so many assistants in the technology of representation which, Michel Foucault
argues, defines the modern city. In these novels, the detective plots examine the
world of women’s fashion, changing Lavater’s illustrations of types of human
beings4 into glossy representations of beauty. The heroines fuse with the realm of
images, copies, and prints, and the fashionable ladies, like any criminal under the
lens of forensic science, are subjected to inspection. Interestingly, therefore, the
3 The stereoscope combined pictures taken from two points of view into a single
image, creating the illusion of depth; the phenakitoscope was made of a disk with figures
representing different stages of motion which, once whirled quickly, created the illusion of
motion; in the thaumatrope a card is also whirled rapidly so that the designs of its opposite
faces make a single picture.
4 In the 1850s, the technological innovation of photography clearly marked the era
of physiognomy and other (pseudo) sciences focused on reading and categorizing the human
body, climaxing with Francis Galton’s Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development
(1883) and Finger Prints (1892), Havelock Ellis’s The Criminal (1890), or Max Nordau’s
Degeneration (1893) at the end of the century (see Ronald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and
the Rise of Forensic Science [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999]). Originally, the
foundations of physiognomy had been laid by Aristotle’s treatise De Physiognoma. Aristotle’s
approach to physiognomy was grounded on the premise that the human and animal kingdoms
shared features whereby animals’ temperamental features could exemplify man’s. Hence,
from Aristotle to Charles Le Brun’s drawings in the seventeenth century or the works of James
Parsons (‘Human Physiognomy Explain’d: in the Crounian Lectures on Muscular Motion for
the year MDCCXLVI’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 44 (1747): 1–82),
John Cross (An Attempt to Establish Physiognomy upon Scientific Principles (London, 1817)
and Charles Bell (Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting [London: George Bell
& Sons, 1806]) in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the close links between man
and animal underpinned scientific explorations of human character traits. However, it is with
Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy; for the Promotion of the Knowledge and
the Love of Mankind (1789–1793) that physiognomy started heading towards systematization.
Lavater’s attempts at founding human types were the very first stage of a journey steeped in
evolutionary biology, with Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals (1872) as a particularly relevant late nineteenth-century illustration of the furtherance
of physiognomic theses (see Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in
Nineteenth-Century Culture [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001]).
Investigating Books of Beauties in Bleak House and Lady Audley’s Secret 115
more the heroines are sensually displayed, the more their images seem to phrase
their independence and social success, the more they are subjected to the policing
gaze of the Victorian authorities. Modes of reproduction of female beauty are turned
upon themselves to frame woman more than to enable her to secure self-definition
and gain autonomy. The copy unveils woman, the poster denounces her crime and
surfaces of reproduction as a whole expose the women’s guilt in black characters,
ingraining the female characters in a visual culture where the mass-produced images
of the wax-doll beauties are turned into incriminating clues.
The Fatal Reflections of Lady Dedlock
Bleak House is often seen as the novel which launched sensation fiction, probably
through the character of Lady Dedlock, a fallen woman who has achieved an
aristocratic marriage and passes for an icon of fashion and a paragon of respectability.
Her physical features never betray any moral imperfection. Her fine face and elegant
figure are all that the reader is allowed to see, and Lady Dedlock’s body merely exists
through the reports of the ‘fashionable intelligence’,5 which prints her whereabouts
and records the traces of her body in black ink. As a synonym of ‘news’, the term
‘intelligence’ anchors Dickens’s novel in a society paced by the printing industry.
Like the printing industry, frequently alluded to, the fashionable intelligence acts
as a form of social machinery which produces and publishes the signifiers of social
identity. As a matter of fact, throughout the novel, printing, writing, and copying
texts are the activities that define and legitimize identity. The printing press in
particular, tightly connected with the Chancery Court, becomes the recurrent pattern
bridging the gap between writing and identity. Esther Summerson, the illegitimate
child of Lady Dedlock, needs to recover her past to claim her rights. Her unknown
father, Captain Hawdon (otherwise known as Nemo, meaning ‘No One’), is a law-
writer. Thus, copying and defining identity are interwoven in a novel aiming to fill
up the nameless daughter’s mysterious blank past and to disclose her fallen mother’s
secret. In a world which threatens to ‘chalk … [the secret] upon the walls and cr[y]
it in the streets’ (604), the printing press plays a leading part. Identifying the female
criminal among the bundles and heaps of other papers depends on deciphering the
codes which have mapped out the woman’s sinful past as though her story were
displayed upon the walls of the city and competed with the multiple billboards and
advertisements in the streets. As shall be seen, precisely the advances of modern
technology, and more specifically the rise of photography with its mass-produced
images, brands Lady Dedlock and leads to her fall.
Lady Dedlock’s transgression is first intimated by her physical relationship with
modernity. In that time of rapid circulation, the female character keeps travelling
between London, Chesney Wold, and abroad.6 Revealingly, she constantly bears
signs of exhaustion. On the one hand, her frenetic moves reflect her subversive
5 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1853] 1996).
6 ‘My lady Dedlock is restless, very restless. The astonished fashionable intelligence
hardly knows where to have her. To-day, she is at Chesney Wold; yesterday, she was at her
passage from one social class to another. On the other hand, her morbid physiology
hints at her own crime. Her hectic travelling suggests unchecked blood circulation, as
a figurative representation of her transgressive sexuality. But modern transportation
and her society’s throbbing rhythm are not the only markers of inner depravity. If
both the fashionable intelligence and the London Metropolitan Police chase Lady
Dedlock, the investigation leads us as well to Nemo’s room above Mr Krook’s
shop. Krook’s shop is ‘a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law’ (61). His
windows exhibit side-by-side ladies’ hair and ink bottles. At the time, lower-class
women could make considerable money by selling their hair. Here, the commodified
ladies’ hair, which is to be turned into wigs, highlights the period’s reliance on
artificial aids to fashion appearances. In addition, it also recounts the working-class
woman’s improper wanderings out of the domestic hearth and into the public world
of consumer culture. Behind the glazed windows, as morbid testimonies of female
beauty, corpse-like female body parts seem to be ranged and displayed as if waiting
for their sentence. The motif of ink functions as a metonymical representation of
the law likely to rewrite, bespatter, or expunge the female goods. Tied to the world
of shopping and fashion,7 the ink exemplifies how female identity remains at all
times under legal supervision. Even if the traces of Esther’s past have been ‘blotted
out’ (254), her fallen mother’s sin can be traced through her relationship with the
world of fashion. So, in this modern investigation, fashion and the law appear to act
in collusion, with Krook’s shop as a revised version of the Court of Chancery and
fashion tools marking out the detective’s journey through Lady Dedlock’s past.
As a matter of fact, Lady Dedlock’s secret flashes first of all upon the surface
of an uncanny mirror, the emblem of woman’s vanity as well as a significant site of
reproduction: her face appears ‘like a broken glass’ (268) to her illegitimate daughter,
in which the latter seems to see ‘scraps of old remembrances’ (268). Strangely alike,
mother and child are copies of one another, and Esther’s mind, as sensitive as a sheet
of photographic paper, recollects ‘pictures of [herself]’ (274) each time her eyes
focus on her mother’s face. Copies, prints, and reflections both define the world of
female beauty and pepper the investigation. While they seem to intimate woman’s
subversive escape from stable identity, woman’s intimacy with the public sphere and
her transgression of the Victorian sexual double standard, references to reproduction
also uncover Bleak House’s widespread panoptical machinery. Lady Dedlock’s
ubiquitous image, which haunts the characters, reflects less her multiple faces than it
metaphorizes her own unchecked reproduction. Mechanical reproduction displaces
and replaces unruly biological reproduction. Even the mirrors in the house function
as photographic plates and associate faces with mass-produced images hitting the
house in town; to-morrow, she may be abroad, for anything the fashionable intelligence can
with confidence predict’ (234).
7 The law is strongly associated with fashion, appearance, and artificiality: Young
Smallweed is a ‘town-made article’ (292) and ‘his first long-clothes were made from a blue
bag’ (294), the blue bag being designed to carry both legal papers and clothes.
surface of the glass.8 The smooth and two-dimensional image of the beautiful Lady
Dedlock, hence, paradoxically becomes a clue to her fallen nature.
Reduction to a two-dimensional image is, indeed, what awaits the two female
protagonists throughout Esther’s discovery of her own past. For instance, Esther’s
‘image is imprinted on [Guppy’s] art’ (429); when the latter sees Lady Dedlock’s
portrait, he becomes convinced that he has already seen a copy of it.9 Guppy then
launches the issue of authenticity and wanders about the house ‘as if he were
looking everywhere for Lady Dedlock again’ (102). The figures of the lawyer and
the curator intermingle: tracing other copies or finding the original lies at the core of
the narrative, leading the reader into a world of replicas of British beauties. In fact,
whether Guppy recognizes Esther or a copy of the portrait remains interestingly
ambiguous. Either possibility—the reproduction of Lady Dedlock’s portrait or
the superimposition of the painting of Lady Dedlock and Esther’s image—shows
how motifs of reproduction frame and define female identity. Captured by such
modern/mental images, the guilty mother can thereafter be compared, evaluated,
analyzed, in the same way as mug shots used for criminal identification were used
for incriminating culprits.10 Once fixed by the photographic paper, identity is, thus,
open to public surveillance. In this case, Lady Dedlock’s criminal identity will be
captured by two-dimensional emblems of femininity: the copper-plate engravings
of British Beauties.
If male collectors are plentiful in the novel—starting with Mr Krook who
buys everything without ever selling anything—it is Mr Weevle and Mr Jobling’s
8 ‘All the mirrors in the house are brought into action now: many of them after a
long blank. They reflect handsome faces, simpering faces, youthful faces, faces of threescore-
and-ten that will not submit to be old; the entire collection of faces that have come to pass a
January week or two at Chesney Wold and which the fashionable intelligence, a mighty hunter
before the Lord, hunts with a keen scent’ (172). The mirrors also play a significant role when
Inspector Bucket conducts his search through Lady Dedlock’s apartments: ‘[I]n the inner
apartment, where Mr Bucket last night made his secret perquisition, the traces of her dresses
and her ornaments, even the mirrors accustomed to reflect them when they were a portion of
herself, have a desolate and vacant air’ (823). The link between the mirrors and the female
criminal body is underlined by the reference to the ‘trace’, which belongs to the detective
province.
9 The theme of the copy can be noticed in the presentation of the portrait itself which
‘throws a broad bend-sinister of light’ (166).
10 See Ronald R. Thomas’s study: ‘[T]he camera found one of its very first social
applications in the scientific analysis and identification of criminals. In the same year that
the pioneering daguerreotypist Mathew Brady began taking his famous portraits of eminent
Americans (1846), he was also commissioned to provide photographs of criminals from a New
York prison as illustrations for an American edition of an English textbook on criminology,
Marmaduke Sampson’s Rationale of Crime and its Appropriate Treatment. As early as the
1850s, the decade in which Brady would publish his Gallery of Illustrious Americans, the
New York Police Department was already employing photography to assemble a somewhat
less illustrious “Rogues’ Gallery” to alert the public to the identity of known criminals in
their midst.’ Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, 114–15. We will
find an echo of this in Bleak House since the Gallery of British Beauty hosts the portrait of a
criminal.
collection of British Beauties, like detachable fashion-plates illustrating women’s
magazines, which triggers off the detective plot:
But what Mr Weevle prizes most, of all his few possessions …, is a choice collection
of copper-plate impressions from that truly national work, The Divinities of Albion, or
Galaxy of British Beauty, representing the ladies of title and fashion in every variety of
smirk that art, combined with capital, is capable of producing. With these magnificent
portraits, unworthily confined in a band-box during his seclusion among the market-
gardens, he decorates his apartment; and as the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty wears
every variety of fancy-dress, plays every variety of musical instrument, fondles every
variety of dog, ogles every variety of prospect, and is backed up by every variety of
flower-pot and balustrade, the result is very imposing. (305)
Lady Dedlock is featured on one of the copper-plates exhibited on Mr. Weevle’s

mantlepiece or safely concealed in a box designed to store hats. She stands ‘on
a terrace, with a pedestal upon the terrace, and a vase upon the pedestal, and her
shawl upon the vase, and a prodigious piece of fur upon the shawl, and her arm on
the prodigious piece of fur, and a bracelet on her arm’ (470). Such collections of
‘Beauties’ sprang directly from the advances of print technology and were often
photographic reproductions of the portraits of fashionable ladies.11 Here, if the portrait
is a reproduction of the painting in Chesney Wold’s drawing-room, Lady Dedlock is
standing on her own terrace, that is, ‘the Ghost’s Walk.’12 Thus, the spectral double
has escaped the private domestic realm in the same way as Lady Dedlock has evaded
her society’s codes and transgressed the social order. The rise of mass-production,
Margaret Beetham argues, ‘moved the portrait of the aristocratic lady from the wall
of her home into different contexts where its meaning was radically altered.’13 And
this radical change forms indeed the backbone of the plot. Taken out of context, the
picture seems to be now addressed to a middle-class audience. It is fraught with status
symbols that connote the wealth of the model. Its display of luxurious items crowded
together turns the portrait into a publicity image suggesting to potential consumers
that their own transformation into the perfect lady is possible with the acquisition
of expensive goods. Furthermore, by extension of the luxury products, the woman
is aligned with all commodities. As a result, objectified by the accumulation of
accessories, rendered ‘ornamental’ (751), Lady Dedlock’s body seemingly vanishes.
Femininity is turned into a collage of curios designed to construct the perfect lady as
a mere surface, as a series of ciphers of fashion.
On the other hand, if the image (or rather, the narrative description of the image)
displaces physical representation to zoom in on side accessories until it reaches
an ultimate close-up on her arm, it, nonetheless, tantalizes all the more the reader/
11 See Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, 136; Margaret
Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–
1914 (London: Routledge, 1996), 38–9.
12 Interestingly, Sir Leicester Dedlock has always refused permission to reproduce his
wife’s portrait (101). The engraving, spectral and independent, defying spatial boundaries and
patriarchal order, mirrors the story of Sir Morbury Dedlock’s beautiful wife who was lamed
by her husband and whose ghost, with a vengeance, continues to haunt Chesney Wold.
13 Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own?, 39.
viewer by featuring the absent body as the image’s focal point. As Lady Dedlock’s
arm is the most significant element at the end of the chain of accessories, her body
is the missing link in the reading of the picture. The lure is more suggestive than the
actual display. The body becomes a ‘blind field’, in Roland Barthes’s terminology,
which ‘takes the spectator outside its frame [onto] a kind of subtle beyond.’14
Seen from that perspective, simultaneously visible and invisible, Lady Dedlock’s
body suddenly comes forth as a potentially sexual body. This idea is backed up by
Margaret Beetham’s argument which underlines that such plates ‘located femininity
as object in a sexual dynamic where the gaze was assumed to be male.’15 Thus, even
when designed for a female readership, the mass-produced female body is desirable
and inherently licentious. As a matter of fact, Lady Dedlock’s corporeal essence
stems from the visual correspondence with the ‘prodigious’ piece of fur. Peter
Brooks’s analysis of the various strategies of inscribing the body without naming
it reads clothes as a reversed image or ‘imprint’ of the body. Yet, here, the piece
of fur does not merely ‘mark the passage of the body from non-representationality
into writing.’16 The metonymy is, in fact, gradually literalized. Being a piece of fur,
it becomes the sign of the body and its referent. It materializes the invisible body.
The female body, eroticized by the animal fur, is marked by wild and beastly tinges
and revealed as being instinctively bestial. The beast has been turned into an object
of social use or a trendy exhibit, but is still lurking, possibly untamed. Hence, when
Barthes claims that ‘society is concerned to tame the Photograph’,17 in Bleak House,
watchful professional eyes try to detect the sensuous model looming beneath Lady
Dedlock’s picture, the unchaste and sexually promiscuous woman of the London
streets, trading her body as Lady Dedlock ostentatiously advertises fashionable
curios.
Consequently, as Ronald R. Thomas rightly argues, the circulation of Lady
Dedlock’s image in the world of mass-production and mass-consumption changes
her portrait into a mug shot, ‘a wanted poster that silently announces her ignoble
past.’18 From sign of aristocracy, the image comes to display the fallen heroine’s
social and criminal—or, rather, sexual—identities. Despite the invisible body, the
heroine’s criminal features transpire in the accessories, writing Lady Dedlock’s
unruly physiology. This is why, once he holds the criminal female body ‘in [his] hand’
(589), Guppy can indulge in ‘forensic lunacy’ (589). As it fabricates the fashionable
lady, the engraving simultaneously fabricates the social order: the artistic machinery
imprisons the guilty woman in the meshes of a consumer culture where the displayed
female body is subjected to the male policing gaze.
After the death of Tulkinghorn, however, representations of women are even more
exposed to forensic scrutiny. The murder points to Lady Dedlock as the main culprit.
14 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard

Howard (London: Vintage, [1980] 2000), 57–9.
16 See Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 45–6.
17 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 117.
18 Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, 136.
The murderess is, in fact, a woman whose physical description perfectly matches the
physiognomical theories of the criminal type. Hortense is a ‘she-Wolf imperfectly
tamed’ (171), a ‘tigress’ (773), and embodies beastly womanhood at its worst with
her ‘feline mouth’, large jaws and prominent skull (171). The monitoring male gaze,
featured by Inspector Bucket’s ‘unlimited number of eyes’ (335), once again turns
female bodies into texts the better to read their criminality. Bucket is a surveyor of
bodies, a disciplining camera which captures bodies in its lenses the better to ‘take
[their] portrait[s]’ (328). His relations with some members of the Royal Academy
signal his considerable expertise in profiling. His gaze instantly cuts out people’s
figures into heights and widths.19 Bucket reads Hortense at once and incriminates
her by confusing her with the ink and paper she has used to forge a letter denouncing
Lady Dedlock as the murderess. Hence, because Hortense’s criminality brands her
acts as it marks her face, Bucket reads her as he has read her letter.
For her part, Lady Dedlock, even if she is not guilty of the crime, remains in
Bucket’s field of vision. As an ultimate revised version of her portrait, Lady Dedlock’s
criminal body seems to be pinned upon the walls of her own house, at the top of the
stairs, represented in a reward-bill concerning the murder. The degrading poster, which
has invaded the Dedlocks’ private domestic hearth, mirrors the female protagonist’s
tainted body. If her own house has been turned into a police department, her own
body is now a series of signs, a series of letters that prints out her guilt and exposes it.
Tracked down and threatened with the revelation of her sexual secret to her husband,
Lady Dedlock must flee her own house to die and avoid disgracing her husband. Her
body is eventually projected onto the mouldering walls of Limehouse—the place
where drowned corpses were identified—where the poster ‘FOUND DROWNED’
(803) seems to foretell her own end. Associated with cultural representations of
fallen womanhood, such as George F. Watts’s Found Drowned (1848) or Augustus
Leopold Egg’s Past and Present (1858), Dickens’s female character casts light upon
the morbid aspects of Victorian panoptical surveillance while simultaneously linking
it with the spectacle of femininity. The era of exhibition praising female bodies
appears as a time of endless sensational exposure where beautiful women who have
attempted to deceive the policing gaze to conceal their past are hung upon the walls
of shame.
Decoding Lady Audley’s Portraits
In the same way as Dickens’s Bleak House plays upon mass-produced images and
shows the detective trying to turn the female body into a series of signs he can read,
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861–1862) explores Victorian
representations of femininity and foregrounds woman’s commodification.20 As female
body parts mark the investigation, the hand or hair of the heroine becoming enmeshed
within a criminal narrative, the sensation novel turns the Victorian tools of heroine
19 ‘“Why, you’re six foot two, I suppose?’ says Mr Bucket … “Was you ever modelled
now?” Mr. Bucket asks, conveying the impression of an artist in the turn of his eye and head’
(750).
20 For a summary of the plot, see introduction.
description into so many slippery tropes. Because Lucy Audley does not really exist,
the parts of her body the detective analyzes—from her feathery hair to her azure
eyes—become empty tropes, dead metaphors which literally signal Helen Talboys’s
faked death. Simultaneously absent and present, the fraudulent female character
recedes into an overproduction of visual signs aimed at captivating the beholder
and foregrounding femininity as chimerical image. Like George MacDonald’s ‘light’
princess, Lewis Carroll’s ‘sweet’ little girls, or Rhoda Broughton’s ‘lily’, Braddon
debunks literary stereotypes: by associating the Victorian ‘angel’ with the world of
commodity culture, Braddon deflates the icon of ideal femininity in order to disclose
the artificiality of the nature of woman.
As we have suggested, Braddon’s novel rewrites Cinderella through a heroine
whose marriage at the opening of the narrative enables her to go from rags to riches.
Like Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s modern Cinderella, wandering in the Crystal Palace,
Lady Audley appears as another Cinderella in her fairy palace. The profusion of
objects, from ‘[d]rinking cups of gold and ivory’ to ‘cabinets of buhl and porcelain
… statuettes of Parian marble and biscuit china … cabinet pictures and gilded
mirrors, [and] shimmering satin and diaphanous lace’ (295), fashions Audley Court
into another Crystal Palace, enchanting the onlooker with dazzling commodities. Of
course, the works of art and costly curios exhibited in Audley Court are as transient
as fashion, as Lady Audley discovers at the end of her journey when she has to leave
her collection of knick-knacks behind her. Lady Audley herself soon vanishes as
well, becoming Madame Taylor when Robert takes her to the Belgian sanatorium.
The novel, playing upon the illusory nature of modernity, offers, like Audley Court,
a series of images, from tantalizing objects meant to trigger off desire to an artificial
heroine who plays the part of the domestic fairy and conceals her unruly nature
behind dresses, laces, and shimmering satin.
The first image that the reader encounters is Lady Audley’s portrait, which sets
the suspense of the narrative apace. Designed in a Pre-Raphaelite style, the painted
Lady Audley becomes a passionate and sensuous creature, which strongly contrasts
with the childish angel the text had so far presented. From the beginning of the
novel, therefore, diverging copies of the female character suggest a stereoscopic
apprehension of her. Ironically enough, the style of the painting hints at forensic
science: Pre-Raphaelitism was famous for its reliance on physiognomical and
phrenological theories and was very often close to photography in its blunt portrayal
of human features.21 With its photographic realism Pre-Raphaelitism was hyper-
21 Pre-Raphaelitism’s photographic realism and focus on microscopic details have

often been pointed out. In her essay on photography, Elizabeth Eastlake underlines how
photography’s realism was close to the practice of physiognomy: ‘It is now more than fifteen
years ago that specimens of a new and mysterious art were first exhibited to our wondering
gaze … The heads were not above an inch long, they were little more than patches of broad
light and shade, they showed no attempt to idealize or soften the harnesses and accidents of a
rather rugged style of physiognomy—on the contrary, the eyes were decidedly contracted, the
mouths expanded, and the lines and wrinkles intensified.’ Elizabeth Eastlake, ‘Photography’,
Quarterly Review, 101 (April 1857): 442–66, 442. After her marriage to George, Lady Audley
conceals the portrait of herself at her father’s precisely to avoid being identified. The link
between photography and Pre-Raphaelitism is underlined in Lady Audley’s Secret: ‘If Mr.
realism, able, as Sir Michael Audley’s daughter thinks, to uncover details invisible to
the eye.22 Hence, right from the beginning, Lady Audley shows how mobile signifiers
of femininity may be, likely to change according to perspective as they change with
new trends.
The construction of modern femininity which Braddon highlights is even more
subversive as Braddon’s heroine, as her ultimate confession suggests, has been
indoctrinated into the feminine ideal to far too great an extent. In fact, what drives
the heroine off the tracks is her acceptance of a feminine script which asserts that
woman has neither power nor the financial means to live if unmarried:
I had learned that which in some indefinite manner or other every schoolgirl learns
sooner or later—I learned that my ultimate fate in life depended upon my marriage, and
I concluded that if I was indeed prettier than my schoolfellows, I ought to marry better
than any of them.23
As feminist criticism has long noted, Lady Audley’s initial transgression—her

bigamy—bears hardly any trace of uncurbed sexuality. Braddon, on the contrary,
underlines woman’s economic subservience to man. She pinpoints throughout the
novel how much the path to marriage depends on choosing the right accessories that
will match the feminine ideal and ensure attractiveness. Creating a heroine who is
herself made up of bits and pieces, Braddon portrays her collecting curios rather than
men, and exchanges extended and sensuous depictions of her heroine’s possessions
for any sexually charged subtext. As the novel demonstrates at the end, depicting
the heroine packing all her belongings before being sent away, woman’s economic
position is tightly linked with consumer culture. The more the heroine seems to
accumulate signifiers of wealth, the more the novel discloses her fragile position in a
male-dominated society where the common law denied women any claim to fortune.
As Deborah Wynne argues, the profusion of commodities in the novel is revealingly
in inverted proportion to the lack of real property. And Braddon illuminates the
temporariness of such possessions by hinging the plot upon the relationship between
temporary possessions and the fluidity of feminine identity.24 Feminine identity and
femininity are thus defined in relation to consumerism and firmly rooted in mid-
century Britain. As a matter of fact, while costly curios and golden jewellery adorn
her apartments, Lady Audley parades in sables ‘that cost sixty guineas’ (106) and even
ultimately wraps herself in an Indian shawl worth a hundred guineas before leaving
her husband’s house so as not to be deprived of such a costly treasure. If she is seen
Holman Hunt could have peeped into the pretty boudoir, I think the picture would have been
photographed upon his brain to be reproduced by and by upon a bishop’s half-length for the
glorification of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood’ (294–5).
22 As Alicia Audley says, ‘I think that sometimes a painter is in a manner inspired, and
is able to see, through the normal expression of the face, another expression that is equally
part of it, though not to be perceived by common eyes’ (71).
23 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
[1862] 1987), 350. Subsequent references to this edition will be given in the text.
24 Deborah Wynne, ‘Lavish Spendings: Things in Lady Audley’s Secret.’ Unpublished
paper. BAVS Conference, ‘Victorian Sensations’, Keele University, 2–4 September, 2004.
but once coming back from shopping with her step-daughter, she, nonetheless, uses
a milliner’s terrific bill as an excuse to travel to London and to search the detective’s
rooms in order to steal an incriminating clue.
Interestingly, the detective’s quest seems to be directed towards investigating
femininity more than towards conceiving a solution to the mystery of George
Talboys’s disappearance. As soon as the detective misses his friend, he at once
appears to seek more to unveil the identity of his beautiful aunt—with whom he
admits he is falling in love—than to find the missing corpse. In fact, throughout the
novel, Robert Audley’s inquiry maps out a construction of femininity based on a
fragile reproduction of stereotypes which the guilty woman has learned to handle
carefully. As we follow Lady Audley’s desperate attempt to conceal her identity, a
succession of carbon copies leads us into a feminine space grounded on frauds and
forgeries.
At the beginning of the novel, the plot is centred on the fair-haired, blue-eyed
governess with whom Sir Michael Audley falls in love almost at first sight. The
heroine perfectly embodies the domestic ideal. Her proper femininity is displayed
through a series of Victorian clichés. Lady Audley emulates all the codes defining
the Angel in the House; half-woman, half-flower or bird, she nurtures purity and
innocence through her relationship with nature. Hardly an earthly creature (‘she was
something too beautiful for earth, or earthly uses, and … to approach her was to walk
in a higher atmosphere and to breathe purer air’ [57]), the intoxicating fairy25 defies
spatial as well as temporal frames when the text verges onto atemporal expressions
to praise her accomplishments (‘the sweetest girl that ever lived’ [6]). The ‘natural’
woman ‘trip[s] lightly’ (76) on the stereotyped prose of the novel, gathering clichés
here and there and applying them to perfection. Lady Audley appears to be a character
made more of words than of flesh, and her dazzling stereotyped body—with her face
shining ‘like a sunbeam’ (5), her ‘rosy lips’, her ‘delicate nose’ (52)—hysterically
accumulates images which present a view of the protagonist as a highly literary
representation of ideal womanhood.26
25 Lady Audley’s ‘fairy’ accessories are interspersed throughout the narrative. She
has a ‘fairy-like boudoir’ (29), a ‘fairy-like bonnet’ (56), a pair of ‘fairy-like … scissors’ (77),
and even ‘fairy-like embroidery’ (294). Revealingly, as Rappaport contends, such fairy-like
language was very often found in advertisements and thus tied to the world of fashion. See
Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping For Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 186.
26 ‘The innocence and candour of an infant beamed in Lady Audley’s fair face, and
shone out of her large and liquid blue eyes. The rosy lips, the delicate nose, the profusion of fair
ringlets, all contributed to preserve to her beauty the character of extreme youth and freshness.
She owned to twenty years of age, but it was hard to believe her more than seventeen. Her
fragile figure, which she loved to dress in heavy velvets and stiff rustling silks, till she looked
like a child tricked out for a masquerade, was a girlish as if she had but just left the nursery.
All her amusements were childish. She hated reading, or study of any kind, and loved society;
rather than be alone she would admit Phoebe Marks into her confidence, and loll on one of
the sofas in her luxurious dressing-room, discussing a new costume for some coming dinner
party, or sit chattering to the girl, with her jewel box beside her, upon the satin cushions, and
The impossibility of a dangerous angel, of a fake angel, is what motivates the
detective narrative more than any other image. Revealingly, as soon as Robert Audley
realizes Lady Audley’s deception and her play on the cliché of the angel, aesthetic
figures pepper his discourse on fraudulent femininity:
The interior of this luxurious bed-chamber might have made a striking picture for an
artist’s pencil … Lucy Audley, with her disordered hair in a pale haze of yellow gold
about her thoughtful face, the flowing lines of the soft muslin dressing-gown falling in
straight folds to her feet, and clasped at the waist by a narrow circlet of agate links, might
have served as a model for a mediæval saint, in one of the tiny chapels hidden away in
the nooks and corners of a grey old cathedral, unchanged by Reformation or Cromwell
… (215–16)
Hovering between the Madonna and Mary Magdalene, the golden-haired heroine is
crystallized by the metatrope the better to slip out of the frame. Robert’s imagined
picture changes Audley Court into a gallery and transforms the woman into a perverse
aesthetic composition: as she walks from her private apartments to the other parts
of the house, Lady Audley seems to lose weight and become paler, applying clichés
as she would add layers of paint to a canvas to change the ferocious femme fatale
into a domestic angel. To reach the truth, Robert must, therefore, learn to decipher
how Lady Audley has constructed a femininity whose perfection is as fake as the
metaphorical and stereotyped prose which fashions her seamless image.
For Lady Audley is first and foremost an aesthetic composition. At the beginning
of the narrative, suspense is grounded in delaying the meeting between the heroine
and her first husband. Lady Audley is systematically absent, ironically disembodied.
The only means of meeting her is through visiting her private apartment and casting
a glance at her unfinished portrait. Presented as a picture, Lady Audley’s body
vanishes behind representation. When Robert Audley and George Talboys forcibly
enter Lady Audley’s dressing room and her boudoir through a secret passage to cast
an eye on her unfinished portrait, the heroine’s ideal femininity seems more and
more artificial, and the prevailing disorder gradually resembles the dressing room
of some actress.27 Moreover, the portrait of the heroine triggers suspense as Robert
wonders whether the painted copy is faithful to the original model:
Her crimson dress, exaggerated like all the rest in this strange picture, hung about her
in folds that looked like flames, her fair hair peeping out of the lurid mass of colour, as
if out of a raging furnace. Indeed, the crimson dress, the sunshine on the face, the red
gold gleaming in the yellow hair, the ripe scarlet of the pouting lips, the glowing colours
of each accessory of the minutely-painted background, all combined the render the first
effect of the painting by no means an agreeable one. (71)
Sir Michael’s presents spread out in her lap, while she counted and admired her treasures’
(52–3).
27 ‘[T]he whole of her glittering toilette apparatus lay about on the marble dressing-
table … Two or three handsome dresses lay in a heap upon the ground, and the open doors of
a wardrobe revealed the treasures within’ (69).
As already suggested, through the motif of the painting, the text ostensibly
displays the new face of the heroine: the light and childish angel in the house vanishes
to reveal the devilish creature dissimulated under heavy folds. Significantly, such a
play on stereotypically antagonistic icons of femininity is what actually shapes the
detective plot. On the surface, the portrait of the other Lady Audley leads to George’s
disappearance since it marks the moment when he realizes his wife’s deception.
Moreover, it raises the readers’ doubts regarding the real nature of the paragon of the
domestic ideal who inhabits Audley Court, and so conveys the detective atmosphere.
But perhaps more meaningfully, the confrontation of two models of femininity
ultimately highlights the issue of the original and the fake, seemingly associating
woman with an aesthetic composition, whether she officiates as the perfect Madonna
or whether the canvas exposes the witchcraft of womanhood.
In fact, the composition of the room itself intimates that Lady Audley is just
a copy of the feminine ideal. The position of the painting, ‘in the centre of the
octagonal chamber’ and with ‘a faithful reproduction of the pictured walls’ (69) as
a background, plays upon a multiplication of surfaces. As a result, framed by eight
walls and numerous surrounding canvases, Lady Audley’s femininity tends to be
linked with an endless series of surfaces. In this way, the portrait of the heroine is
put in perspective, embedded within an aesthetic mise en abyme which lays bare
the motif: as the painting tends to be conceived as a surface, the painted character
suggests more and more that the heroine might be but another reproduction. So,
besides uncovering Lady Audley’s ferocious nature, the motif of the double also
offers clues as to the heroine’s definition of the perfect lady. The idea of the
construction of femininity as a plain carbon copy is even literally suggested by the
description of the style of the painting, since the disturbing aspect of the Angel in the
House appears to be based on the tension between uniqueness and copy. The portrait
is both a faithful representation of the female character and a ‘cop[y] [of some]
quaint medieval monstrosit[y]’ (71). The repetition of a clichéd model seems to be
what alters the beauty of the woman and discloses a new aspect of her personality.
While the portrait is ‘so like’ (70), the pictorial references that may have influenced
the painter render it ‘unlike’ (70), entailing an effect of repulsion on the part of the
beholder.
In addition, the issue of authenticity is even furthered by the works of art
themselves. Positioned among Claudes, Poussins, and Wouvermans, Lady Audley’s
portrait rivals other valuable works of art. But the model on the canvas appears to
become more valuable than the artist’s signature. The painter is unnamed, merely
influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite mode, and the artist’s anonymity makes the picture
appear as mere reproducible art. As an example of mass-production, the painting
thereby anchors the female character in a capitalist culture which praises woman as
one of its most precious objects and classes her as a valuable commodity. However,
the missing name of the artist also adds to the ambiguity of the unfaithful portrait:
placing an unattributed work of art among famous paintings might be a sign of
forgery, and the painting which tries to compete with Claudes with its more colourful
hues (‘whose less brilliant hues were killed by the vivid colouring of the modern
artist’ [215]) may well be a fake, a grotesque and exaggerated imitation of the Pre-
Raphaelite style.
Consequently, as a major clue, the Pre-Raphaelite painting frames the text’s
representation of womanhood, proposing a vision of femininity both defined as a
surface and as a potential fake, a carbon copy well bred in the art of mixing colours.
And the motif of the copy is, in fact, enhanced whenever the female character is
shown in her surroundings, constantly projected onto surfaces which objectify her
and construct femininity as an artefact resulting from mass-production. For instance,
in Lady Audley’s boudoir, the setting of the mirrors is meant to reinforce woman’s
aesthetic objectification:
[T]he looking-glasses, cunningly placed at angles and opposite corners by an artistic

upholsterer, multiplied my lady’s image, and in that image reflected the most beautiful
object in the enchanted chamber. (294)
Presented thus in her bedroom, Lady Audley appears as a commodified doll.28 In the
same way as the portrait draws subtle links between femininity and mass-production,
therefore, here the female work of art is suddenly turned into a cheap imitation. And
this transformation is precisely the leading fraud Robert must denounce, by learning
to decode surfaces and to read appearances to probe their mysterious depths: ‘I will
read her as I have read her before. She shall know how useless her artifices are with
me’ (217). Hence, as the plot starts with reading a Pre-Raphaelite painting—a work
of art heavily relying on decoding29—Robert’s investigation is furthered by a lesson
in reading, as if femininity could only be read from its surface. Significantly, the
association of the female character with a democratic technology of reproduction
gradually uncovers Lady Audley’s former class affiliation and thereby her identity.
The socioeconomic connotations of the artistic machinery imprison the guilty woman
in the meshes of a consumer culture where the displayed female body is subjected
to the policing male gaze.
For the female body is what Robert is about to anatomize. Katherine Kearns’s
approach to realism posits that realism’s quest for seamlessness stands out as the
main feature of the genre. Gaps, holes, and fissures are horrifying sights, which
realistic narratives seek to deny.30 In a similar way, Lady Audley’s Secret deals with
the detective’s struggle to fit ‘the hideous whole’ (161), to make up a seamless realistic
narrative where the female body parts will no longer be threatening and where
these detached incriminating parts which tell a sensational story will be silenced
and contained. Changing the detective into a male anatomist, Braddon’s detective
matches the stereotype of the sadist Kearns reads in realistic narratives, being ‘the
28 Revealingly, the choice of illustrations for the serial publication of the novel in
The London Magazine also underlines this point. Lucy Audley, depicted in rich and detailed
surroundings, wears a different outfit on each illustration. Either wearing indoor garments, an
evening dress, or an afternoon dress, the female character also wears fashionable accessories,
such as a handkerchief, a scarf, a muff, or a shawl. The dress details position the heroine not
only as a leisured fashionable lady, but also as a costly curio.
29 The Pre-Raphaelites were famous for their use of details and accessories which
constructed their paintings as coded stories.
30 See Katherine Kearns, Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking-
Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
realist taken to his furthest extreme’31: ‘If the word is made flesh in realism, it is flesh
that may be anatomical, flayed to reveal its component parts.’32
And the investigation does collect female body parts. Among the female parts
which frame stereotypical images of Victorian femininity, hair plays an ambivalent
part, simultaneously metonymizing the domestic angel and marking the stages of the
investigation. As a matter of fact, throughout the novel, hair both signals the Madonna
and the devilish femme fatale, whether its golden glitter roots the character in the
stereotype of the household angel—connoting purity as a halo circling the head of a
saint—or whether its murderous tangled curls turn it into a major incriminating proof.
As though the plot were grounded on denouncing the cliché more than anything else,
Lady Audley’s hair gradually comes to embody female fraud. The very first clue
Robert finds is a lock of hair, which he compares with the one that had been given
to George after his wife’s death and to George’s own description of his wife’s hair.33
The hair both conveys the cliché of the angel and directs the investigation.34 For
George Talboys’ initial portrait of his wife as a Madonna finds an ironic counterpart
when Robert discovers ‘a fat book in a faded gilt and crimson cover’ (159) in which
the curly lock of hair matches George’s depiction. The book’s colours seem to be
hinged upon the two icons of femininity the text sets off in contrast: the golden
halo of the Madonna versus the crimson dress and the glowing accessories of the
‘beautiful fiend’ (71) in the Pre-Raphaelite portrait. Yet, as an anamorphosis of the
Madonna icon, the book is an annual of 1845, hence, a book of beauty exhibiting
women’s looks and appearances and praising woman’s aesthetic conception35:
The copper-plate engravings of lovely ladies who had flourished in that day were yellow
and spotted with mildew; the costumes grotesque and outlandish; the simpering beauties
faded and common-place. (158)
Robert’s comment on the engravings debunks the book’s exposition of femininity

as a fashionable artefact. On the other hand, unlike the models, the ageless symbol
31 Kearns, Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism, 169.

32 Kearns, Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism, 166.
33 In George’s letter, the description of his wife is focused on her hair as the sign of
her purity and innocence: ‘Her eyes are as blue and as clear as the skies on a bright summer’s
day, and her hair falls about her face like the pale golden halo you see around the head of a
Madonna in an Italian picture’ (261). Similarly, the lock of hair Robert finds is ‘a bright ring of
golden hair, of that hue which is so rarely seen upon the head of a child,—a sunny lock which
curled as naturally as the tendril of a vine; and was very opposite in texture, if not different in
hue, to the soft, smooth tress which the landlady at Ventnor had given to George Talboys after
his wife’s death’ (158–9).
34 The hair as a detective motif is significant from the very beginning, especially when
Lady Audley’s maid discovers a lock of baby’s hair in a secret drawer and starts blackmailing
her mistress.
35 The annuals were decorative books designed for the drawing room table, and
were, thus, as commodified as the models pictured in them. Furthermore, the construction
of femininity in books of beauties were close to Pre-Raphaelite representations of women.
Women’s bodies were usually heavily draped, and hence far from the domestic woman’s daily
appearance. See Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own?, 39.
of femininity which Robert discovers in the book of beauty—Lady Audley’s lock
of hair—still unstained by the passing of time, appears to fix the female character
in a more ‘natural’ femininity. But Robert’s following discovery in between two
blank leaves stuck together—perhaps by the heroine—sharply undermines the
contrast. The three written paragraphs testifying to the succession of owners do
not simply partake in Robert’s investigation; they also reveal some aspects of the
narrative’s exploration of the contradictions of the construction of womanhood. The
first owner, Ann Bince, was offered the book as a ‘reward for habits of order, and
for obedience to the authorities of Camford-house seminary, Torquay’ (159). The
jarring contrast between the copperplate engravings which construct woman as an
ostentatious commodity and the dedication praising Bince’s virtues, her orderliness
and obedience to the codes of Victorian domesticity, lays bare the fragility of the
Queen of the Hearth. Ideal womanhood seems to be based on unstable and sometimes
paradoxical concepts. As the example highlights, the proper woman may at any time
be mistaken for the actress posing for a magazine. The signature of the domestic
ideal and the female bodies exhibited in the annual are eerily paralleled, and Bince,
as the embodiment of the domestic angel, suddenly appears as a grotesque product
fashioned by her society, a depthless and glossy copy publicized by Victorian
ideology.
That Bince should afterwards have offered the book of beauty to Helen Maldon
is ironically charged, since the latter is soon to change her name and perform the
part of an unmarried junior teacher. Hence, Lady Audley’s acting is traced through
Helen Maldon’s signature in a book of beauty: the lock of hair, which used to foster
the woman’s natural femininity, suddenly looks more like a wig, and the model of
the domestic ideal fuses with that of the actress. Furthermore, as the third dedication
draws links between Helen Maldon and Helen Talboys, Helen Maldon’s signature
betrays Lady Audley’s real identity and uncovers her artful body. Robert recognizes
the female character’s handwriting whose characters, as he had before explained,
seem to mimic the lines of their owner’s physical features:
I think that if I had never seen your aunt, I should know what she was like by this slip
of paper. Yes, here it all is—the feathery, gold-shot, flaxen curls, the pencilled eyebrows,
the tiny straight nose, the winning childish smile, all to be guessed in these graceful up-
strokes and down-strokes. (64)
By associating the two handwritings, Robert reconstructs the absent female body.
The body pieces he collects—whether the heroine’s hair or, figuratively, her hand—
enable him to draw a verbal portrait. The lawyer has found equivalents of the
photograph or of the copperplates, other texts which inscribe the body and break it
into parts, from the nose to the eyebrows, like Bertillon’s mug shots. Therefore, Lady
Audley, hiding under an assumed name, is recognizable through the measurements
of her body, implied in her own handwriting. The ink reveals the guilty body and
maps out her indelible criminal identity. Embedded within the book of beauty, the
commodity woman is now placed within an archive of female bodies, subjected to
observation and identification. Constructed as a surface, Lady Audley is ready to be
fixed and rewritten once Robert has filled up the ‘blank[s]’ of her life (222)—before
eventually imposing his own signature by giving her a new name when he takes her
to a Belgian sanatorium.
The better to mark female forgery, Robert’s quest is constantly backed up by a
series of identical motifs which haunt the places in which Lady Audley has lived.
In the first place Robert visits, he finds the second link in the chain of evidence, that
is, the link between Helen Talboys and Lucy Graham. At Mrs. Vincent’s, the room
presents a ‘green-baize-covered card-table … adorned with gaudily-bound annuals
or books of beauty, placed at right angles’ (233). While the books of beauty recall
the idea of femininity as a cultural construct, as an artistic exhibit, they also remind
us of the mirrors in Lady Audley’s room, similarly placed at angles and fashioned
to objectify the female character. As a matter of fact, Lucy Graham is depicted as
having been ‘only ornamental; a person to be shown off to visitors, and to play
fantasias on the drawing-room piano’ (236). Robert’s discovery appears to square
with the female character: her body seems to be reproduced and exposed in all the
books that decorate the place, and she is as objectified as a decorative curio as she
was in her own room or on the Pre-Raphaelite canvas.
Moreover, if the card table obviously suggests the notion of play and hints at
Lady Audley’s game of hide-and-seek, it is also significant for its green baize, the
very same material which covered the heroine’s unfinished portrait. As the portrait
revealed a new aspect of the female character concealed beneath layers of material,
Robert peels off part of the truth when he is shown Lucy Graham’s former bonnet-
box on which railway labels as well as her names are pasted. Willing to investigate
what lies beneath appearances, Robert takes off the surface label to discover Lucy
Graham’s real name, that is, ‘Helen Talboys’, pasted on the underlying label. Once
again, the woman’s handwriting appears to supply evidence, this time on a bonnet-
box, a container of women’s costumes. Modernity then brands the female criminal:
the label, as a revised version of the book which goes from owner to owner, travels
from country to country, circulates frenetically and always marks the female body
which the men seek to fix. In the same way as the book of beauties, the bonnet-box
posits womanhood at the centre of modern circulation and modernity.
Having traced Lady Audley’s journey to Lucy Graham and Helen Talboys, Robert
then goes to Wildernsea where George first met his wife. Once again, the same motif
of the green baize welcomes him as he enters Mrs Barkamb’s house:
Mrs Barkamb retired to a table in the window on which stood an old-fashioned mahogany
desk lined with green baize, and suffering from a plethora of documents, which oozed out
of it in every direction. Letters, receipts, bills, inventories, and tax-papers were mingled
in hopeless confusion; and amongst these Mrs Barkamb set to work to search for Captain
Maldon’s letter. (249)
Apparently obsessed by traces of female handwriting, Robert seeks incriminating

proof this time in the form of a letter. But Robert’s lesson in reading through the
Victorian codes of womanhood may depend more on his deciphering the meaning
of the baize covering the accountancy desk. As the Pre-Raphaelite painting did, the
place whispers the alliance between woman and money: the clue is to be found
among a series of bills and receipts, which again imposes a vision of woman as a
piece of valuable goods. So, the letter he finds there—explaining why Helen Talboys
decided to leave her father to try to start a new life of her own—interweaves the
woman’s handwriting with money.36 The hand Robert recognizes roots the female
character in a consumer culture where woman, in a way, sells her body in marriage.
When Robert finally sets off to ‘to discover the history of the woman who lies
buried in Ventnor churchyard’ (251), the last stage of his investigation not only backs
up his hypotheses regarding Lady Audley’s real identity and reveals the woman’s
wicked artifices, but also kills once and for all the image of the domestic angel
the heroine has been abusing. For among all Lady Audley’s copies, whether as a
Renaissance Madonna, as a Mary Magdalene, as a Pre-Raphaelite femme fatale, or
even as a glorified curio lost amid other luxuries, the heroine’s ultimate replica is
mostly significant in the ambivalent meanings it conveys. Matilda, the working-class
girl who has been buried in Helen Talboys’ grave, displays the novel’s subversion of
Patmore’s Angel in the House in its most acute spectacle.
As a common stereotype of the time, the consumptive Matilda embodies
womanhood in its most fragile aspects, recalling the Victorian fascination for
emaciated female bodies. Thus, Matilda corresponds to the image of the household
angel Lady Audley needs to fake her death. Like Lady Audley’s body which remains
invisible, hidden in gauze and dissimulated under stereotypical prose, Matilda’s
body is only ‘fair and slender’ (357), a description which satisfies the heroine, since
it encapsulates the requirements of the domestic ideal: ‘[H]er description, carelessly
given, might tally enough with my own; though she bore no shadow of resemblance
to me, except in these two particulars’ (357). As a metonymical representation of
the domestic angel, the blond hair becomes this time overtly caught in the web of
a murder plot. The heroine’s staging of her death might, therefore, be seen as her
killing of a literary/cultural construct so as to reconstruct artificially it according to
her own ambitious desires.
Indeed, as seen from a social point of view, Matilda’s consumption, along with
her mother’s eagerness for money (‘I bought the mother, who was poor and greedy,
and who for a gift of money … consented to submit to anything I wished’ [357]) cast
new tinges on the clichéd fair angel. Her working-class background, which strongly
connects her with Lady Audley, undermines her construction as a feminine ideal by
adding sexual tints to her illness. Through Matilda’s illness, the reader is reminded
of nineteenth-century debates on prostitution and the attempts to check and constrain
the prostitutes’ sexual diseases as underlined by the Contagious Diseases Acts of
the 1860s. Hence, the Victorian angel suddenly shifts from a metaphor which
conveys the social construction of prescriptive femininity to a metaphor purveying
woman’s biological construction. Stained by allusions to a rampant sexuality, the
dead metaphor of the domestic angel is this time denounced and literally buried.
In Braddon’s exposure of female imposture, angels are made up of so many
contradictions that distinguishing the lady from the working-class maid becomes
36 A brief survey of Lady Audley’s confession shows the extent to which each of the
stages of her life is related to money and to her struggle to gain financial security (‘I loved him
very well … as long as his money lasted’ [352]; ‘I had to work hard for my living’ [353], and
so on).
difficult, and Braddon’s play with stereotypes hence reveals the artificiality of the
nature of woman.
Finally, as the novel discloses Lady Audley’s ultimate secret—her madness—
the female character is taken to a Belgian sanatorium, where the ‘flame’ of her
passionate nature will be secured in ‘a great structure of iron and glass’ (386), and
where women become mere shadows ‘pac[ing] perpetually backwards and forwards
before the window’ (386). Like a medical Crystal Palace, the sanatorium crystallizes
transgressive womanhood and changes female exhibition into male physiological
observation. The link between detection and science strengthens the construction
of the sensational investigation as a quest in measuring and comparing: beauty is
evaluated in terms of pathological traces so as to check Lady Audley’s evasion
through space and time out of Victorian normative precepts. Putting an end to Lady
Audley’s circulation, the asylum epitomizes woman’s panoptical surveillance,
transcribing the criminal body into something legible where the features of guilt—
the mad circulation of blood in the heroine’s veins—are physiological.
Revealingly, the spectacle of femininity, floridly illustrated and exhibited on
the fashion plates, finds a shadowy black and white counterpart. The shadow of
the woman Lady Audley first sees wears ‘a fantastic head-dress’ (386), once again
binding Lady Audley to the world of consumer culture and suggesting that her
excessive consumption of clothes, curios, and men has eventually unsettled her weak
physiology. While Lady Audley mistakes costly mirrors for ‘wretched mockeries of
burnished tin’ (389), the closure of the novel debunks the artificiality of the nature of
woman, whether woman fashions herself as an artwork or whether woman is figured
by medical discourse and labeled insane. Lady Audley’s embodiment of the domestic
ideal, her Machiavellian paraphernalia of femininity, may thus bring into focus a
whole society’s anxieties more than merely seeking to punish a woman’s greed.
Throughout the novel, the domestic angels seem framed by Victorian diktats which
construct an uncanny, illusory, and most ambiguous ideal. Make-up and dresses only
lead those who shape their appearance according to their society’s models to fall
into the trap of forgery. As a matter of fact, just before the heroine’s confession, the
narrator intrudes upon the narrative to denounce a commodity culture promoting
counterfeits of all kinds and changing women into ‘actresse[s]’, ‘arch trickster[s]’
and ‘all-accomplished deceiver[s]’ (256) as Robert Audley would have it. Ironically
enough, the image of Matilda filters through Braddon’s denunciation of a society
where the feminine ideal can be bought and sold, concealing working-class origins
beneath layers of powder:
Amongst all privileged spies, a lady’s-maid has the highest privileges … She has a
hundred methods for the finding out of her mistress’s secrets … That well-bred attendant
knows how to interpret the most obscure diagnoses of all mental diseases that can afflict
her mistress, she knows when the ivory complexion is bought and paid for—when the
pearly teeth are foreign substances fashioned by the dentist—when the glossy plaits are
the relics of the dead, rather than the property of the living; and she knows other and more
sacred secrets than these. She knows when the sweet smile is more false than Madame
Levison’s enamel, and far less enduring—when the words that issue from between the
gates of borrowed pearl are more disguised and painted than the lips which helped to
shape them. (336)
Reminiscent of the ladies’ hair displayed behind the windows of Krook’s shop,
Lady Audley’s glossy plaits were, indeed, the relics of the dead as they were the relics
of a stereotype debunked by Braddon’s sensational plot. From a literary cliché, the
Madonna’s hair becomes a transgressive working-class fashion accessory. Turning
tropes into visual signs, as if inspired by Rachel Levison’s beauty advice, Lady
Audley has literally applied her society’s clichés to wrap and cover her ambitions.
Far from Wilkie Collins’s representation of imposture in The Woman in White, where
illegitimate baronets forge legal texts, in Braddon’s novel, the woman holds the pen
and brush to make up ‘pencilled eyebrows’ (64) and to rewrite her own story, copying
stereotypes the better to point out her society’s ideological constructs. Yet, Lady
Audley’s flawed replicas may eventually deliver a more ambivalent message than
simply thrill the readers’ nerves with sensational stories: abiding by the Victorian
ideological codes of womanhood—as the eponymous heroine demonstrates in her
struggle to gain a position—may also have amounted to impersonating an impossible
ideal.
In Wilkie Collins’s novels, the erotic visibility of Dickens’s and Braddon’s
heroines, exhibited in books of beauty, paintings or posters, becomes even more
tied to commodities. Through hints at their susceptibility to advertising, Collins
constructs his female characters as female shoppers, and leads us into the construction
of modern femininity. In the streets of the metropolis, while Victorian women roam
the city in their fashionable garments, with their sleeve openings growing larger
and their skirts expanding, Collins’s female protagonists hide their crimes beneath
creams and powders.
Chapter Seven
Shaping the Female Consumer in

Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1862)
You go to the tea-shop, and get your moist sugar. You take it on the understanding that it
is moist sugar. But it isn’t anything of the sort. It’s a compound of adulterations made up
to look like sugar. You shut your eyes to that awkward fact, and swallow your adulterated
mess in various articles of food … You go to the marriage-shop, and get a wife. You take
her on the understanding—let us say—that she has lovely yellow hair, that she has an
exquisite complexion, that her figure is the perfection of plumpness, and that she is just
tall enough to carry the plumpness off. You bring her home; and you discover that it’s
the old story of the sugar again. You wife is an adulterated article. Her lovely yellow hair
is—dye. Her exquisite skin is pearl powder. Her plumpness is—padding. And three inches
of her height are—in the boot-maker’s heels. Shut your eyes and swallow your adulterated
wife as you swallow your adulterated sugar—and, I tell you again, you are one of the few
men who can try the marriage experiment with a fair chance of success.1
As Sir Patrick argues in Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife (1870), the Victorian
marketplace in the 1860s was an ambiguous semiotic site where appearances hardly
ever matched reality.2 As a booming consumer society, Britain was revamped into
a theatrum mundi inhabited by performing actors and actresses concealed beneath
masks and costumes. In an era of shows and exhibitions, shop windows displayed
the latest fashionable products, which guaranteed the transformation of the plainest
woman into the perfect lady. Sir Patrick’s ‘adulterated wife’ may well indeed have
just come out of one of the many beauty salons selling miraculous cosmetics and
promising that their clients would be ‘Beautiful for Ever.’ Quack nostrums were
publicized everywhere. Dr James’s Pills for the Complexion promised women
ethereal beauty, while Parr’s Life Pills even claimed to grant eternal life. Madame
Rachel sold her ‘Arabian Bath’, her ‘Magnetic Rock Dew Water of Sahara’, her
Arabian perfume mouth wash, and other creams, soaps, hair washes, elixirs, or
ointments. While enamelling the face and removing wrinkles, Madame Rachel, also
known as ‘Sarah Rachel Leverson’ (or ‘Levison’), professed to make women look
young again, though at an extortionate price.3
1 Wilkie Collins, Man and Wife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1870] 1995),
94–5.
2 Adulterative practices were common throughout the nineteenth century due to lack
of state regulation, and dangerous additives were introduced in all kinds of products, from
beer to dairy products and of course in drugs; see Richard Altick, The Presence of the Present:
Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel (Athens, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1991).
3 See [anon], ‘Madame Rachel’, Notes and Queries, 8/6 (1894): 322–4; and Altick,
The Presence of the Present, 540–45.
As a sensational example of the widespread objectification of the female body
throughout the nineteenth century, Madame Rachel’s practices and her products
allow us a clear insight into the constitution of the female self as a ‘commodity
spectacle’,4 shaped by corsets, trendy hairstyles, and pills of all sorts. Rachel’s career
started shortly after 1859, when she was stricken with fever and had to shave off her
locks. One of the doctors of King’s College Hospital gave her a lotion to make her
hair grow again rapidly and furnished her as well with the recipe. This particular
product helped her commercial career on New Bond Street where she opened a shop
in the 1860s. Her first attempt as an enameller was undercapitalized and sent her to
Whitecross Street Prison for debt. But she was again in business in 1862 and had
become very successful by 1863, as her shop-front and pamphlet ‘Beautiful for Ever’
attracted gullible female customers. Yet the effects of her miraculous rejuvenators
(mere mixtures of carbonate of lead, starch, Fuller’s earth, hydrochloric acid, and
distilled water) and baths of bran and water did not last. She was tried at the Old
Bailey in 1867 for swindling a client, undertaking to make her young again in order
for her to charm a nobleman. Not just a swindler, Rachel was also suspected of
providing a front for blackmailing and procuring and perhaps even of operating an
abortionist racket at her shop.
Madame Rachel’s fraudulent experiments with female bodies enable us to grasp
the changes in the construction of womanliness in the second half of the nineteenth
century. As Margaret Beetham argues, the new Victorian feminine ideal tended to be
more significantly ‘centred on appearance and dress’, thereby ‘threaten[ing] to rewrite
not only class distinctions but a definition of femininity in terms of the domestic and
the moral.’5 Consumer society had made dangerously fragile the clear ideological
line separating morally dubious female figures from ideally virtuous ones. In the
1860s the Victorian ideal was more and more self-made, seeking public exhibition,
therefore far less ‘natural’ and, as a result, more likely to verge on waywardness.
In this way, Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House came hazardously close to the
equivocal figure of the actress or even the blatant figure of the prostitute.
Hence, in the second half of the nineteenth century, female fashion, female role-
play, and female sexuality mingled, fusing polarized versions of femininity. Because
she simultaneously matched the expectations of Victorian gender ideology and was
potentially subversive, the figure of the fashionable Victorian lady thus gradually
became an apt means to question traditional gender definitions. As already seen in
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, the figure seems, indeed, to have
inspired many a sensation novel. Most sensation heroines are well-versed in the art of
masquerading and use make-up and dresses to entice men or fool detectives, passing
for ladies to conceal working-class origins. It is because Wilkie Collins’s No Name
(1862) and Armadale (1864) set parts of their plots in London and feature female
shoppers that the two novels particularly stand out. Whether the female shoppers are
gullible customers buying trendy clothes or scheming actresses choosing costumes

Spectacle, 1851–1914 (London: Verso, 1990), 196.
5 Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the
Woman’s Domestic Magazine, 1800–1914 (London, New York: Routledge, 1996), 78.
Shaping the Female Consumer in Wilkie Collins’s No Name 135
is the focal point of this chapter, which compares two female characters in No Name,
Magdalen Vanstone and Mrs. Wragge, each obsessed with her appearance.
As I shall develop in the following chapters, sensation novels, by featuring
actresses or female characters playing parts, heighten the paradoxical construction of
womanhood, so perfectly illustrated by the actress herself, simultaneously embodying
feminine beauty and female fashion while transgressing woman’s sphere by stepping
out onto the working/public stage. In her study of Victorian actresses, Tracy Davies
analyzes how Victorian actresses, stigmatized by their public exposure and by their
sexual desirability, violated traditional standards and yet matched to perfection
the expectations of womanliness.6 Davies’s records of actresses’ expenditure on
wardrobe testifies to the bond between actresses and the world of fashion, which
inevitably marked the actress as ‘a social adventuress, flaunting her beauty to accrue
influence and wealth’, like the demi-mondaine or the prostitute.7 The actress thus
encapsulated controversial views defining womanhood and, hence, constituted a
significant ground on which to launch mystery stories.
‘Paint, and No Paint’: The Female Body’s Figurability
Because Wilkie Collins’s No Name features a professional actress whose use of

cosmetics and talents in mimicry on and off stage eventually lead her to the polluted
and contagious slums of London, Collins’s narrative is particularly relevant to this
study. Magdalen Vanstone is an actress, and she plays her parts both on the stage and
in real life, using paints and cosmetics to age her face and alter her complexion while
wigs, bonnets, and padded cloaks disfigure her body. Interestingly enough, an article
entitled ‘Paint, and No Paint’, which was published alongside the instalments of
No Name in All the Year Round on August 9, 1862, shows the period’s anxiety with
regard to women’s use of make-up. Cosmetics were not denounced solely because
of their association with women of low virtue, professional acting or duplicitous
and criminal femininity. Victorian domestic angels could at all times fall prey to
the enticing products. Etiquette books dealing with female beauty warned against
the danger of corrupting the body with such artificial and poisonous products. As a
particularly relevant example, Mrs. A. Walker’s Female Beauty defined cosmetics
from a scientific standpoint,8 denouncing first, the threat cosmetics represented by
6 Tracy Davies, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian

Culture (London, New York: Routledge, 1991), 105.
7 Davies, Actresses as Working Women, 32, 85.
8 Mrs. A. Walker, Female Beauty as Preserved and Improved by Regimen, Cleanliness
and Dress (London: Thomas Hurst, 1837). It is highly probable, as Robyn Cooper explains,
that the book was written by Alexander Walker himself. Walker was a Scottish physiologist
famous for his essay Beauty: Illustrated Chiefly by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in
Woman (1837). As Cooper argues, that he should have published a book under his name while
his wife and his son published two other books might be read as his own choice to direct the
books to particularly intended audiences. Robyn Cooper, ‘Victorian Discourses on Women
and Beauty: The Alexander Walker Texts’, Gender and History, 5/1 (Spring 1993): 34–55,
35.
penetrating the body via ‘chaps or fissures’, ‘through the pores into the circulating
fluids, in the same manner as by the stomach’, second, how they ‘[obstructed]
the pores’ and diminished perspiration ‘to the injury of the health.’9 Similarly, the
editor’s advice which appeared in the ‘Englishwoman’s Conversazione’ in The
Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine hardly advocated the use of beauty aids. When
the magazine was relaunched in 1860, with more space for fashion and advertising—
thereby encouraging women to improve their appearance—the masculine editorial
voice highlighted the dangers of cosmetics, hair dyes, and other fashionable tools.
For instance, in 1862, the editor warned his female readers that ‘the ingredients of
which the dyes are composed are far from being free from danger … Composed as
they are of very active remedies, they … arrest the natural secretion.’10
As these examples suggest, cosmetics weaken woman’s body both from within
and without and, hence, map out the female body as a territory open to invasion
and contamination. In so doing, they reverberate with the dominant discourse that
subordinated woman to her physiology.11 The idea of ‘cleanliness’ which runs through
Mrs. A. Walker’s advice book results, perhaps, less from external than internal
supervision, turning the female body, with its fluids and secretions, into a version
of the industrial city’s drains and sewers circulating human waste. Revealingly, the
article ‘Paint, and No Paint’ posits this association between make-up and waste:
it denounces blush, made with alloxan, a chemical substance derived from the
fœtal membranes of animals, together with other examples of recycled refuse that
fashionable women use.12 Cosmetics then clearly partake of the whole discourse on

and Dress, 36, 25, 37.
10 The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 5 (1862): 240.
11 Even though Robyn Cooper sets Alexander Walker’s Beauty apart from Mrs. A.
Walker’s Female Beauty as Preserved and Improved by Regimen, Cleanliness and Dress,
claiming that the latter ‘is very much women’s writing in that it contains nothing that purports
to be scientific’ (Cooper, ‘Victorian Discourses on Women and Beauty: The Alexander Walker
Texts’, 46), I would argue that the beauty manual, despite its intended female audience, does
reverberate with the current physiological debates which constructed woman in biological
terms. For instance, that Mrs. A. Walker’s book should merely focus on woman’s perspiration
as an example of female secretions does not totally erase woman’s sexual constitution: the
ambiguous rhetoric of the period, in the formulation of advertisements, for example, as Sally
Shuttleworth suggests in her study of abortifacients, testifies to the significance of encoded
messages and underlying texts. See Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Female Circulation: Medical
Discourse and Popular Advertising in the Mid-Victorian Era’, Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox
Keller, Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (London
and New York: Routledge, 1990), 47–68, 50.
12 Deborah Wynne’s study of the interaction between serialized sensation novels
and the articles in the magazines in which they were published develops this point. Wynne
argues that the publication of this article along with No Name, at the moment when Magdalen
hesitates about putting make-up on her face, throws light on the growing use of make-up not
only in the theatre but among respectable young ladies whose apparently natural beauty is as
artificial as that of the actress. Deborah Wynne, The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family
Magazine (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 109–10.
woman’s scientific containment with a medical terminology dependent upon images
of refuse and pollution as physiological gauges to female (im)propriety.
Significantly, Collins’s novel weaves the figure of the contagious actress together
with that of the shopping-addict, showing the readers the world of female fashion
through various lenses. No Name recounts the story of Magdalen Vanstone, who
discovers her own illegitimacy after her parents’ deaths. Left penniless since her
father’s fortune is inherited by her uncle, Magdalen goes on the stage while her
sister decides for a more ‘proper’ career as a governess. Magdalen then meets
Captain Wragge, who becomes her personal manager and whose half-witted wife
is a shopping-addict. After her uncle’s death, Magdalen appeals in vain to his son,
Noel Vanstone, and then decides to recover her fortune by marrying him. With Mr.
Wragge as an accomplice, Magdalen becomes acquainted with Noel and successfully
marries him. However, her husband, warned by his suspicious housekeeper Mrs.
Lecount that his wife is planning to murder him in order to inherit his fortune, alters
his will, adding a secret trust before he dies. Magdalen investigates to discover the
beneficiary of the secret trust, but fails, eventually falling ill in London where she is
rescued by Captain Kirke who nurses her and marries her. Meanwhile, her sister has
unknowingly married the real heir.
Magdalen, who, as nobody’s daughter, is also nameless, is both a social void
and a representational blank, a signifier lacking a signified. In this way, Magdalen’s
enterprise in acting on and off stage aims to ‘externalize [her] figurability’,13 in
Hilary Radner’s terms, hence grounding female identity on make-up and beauty
accessories. Using ‘a whole collection of cosmetics’,14 to look older and embody
Miss Garth and ensnare her cousin, to conceal her two little moles with a Black
Eye and dissimulate her identity, or to fashion her various parts on stage, Magdalen
shapes her person as an endlessly reconstructible self, showing how feminine culture
and its beauty aids empower women to achieve multiple identity and to engage
in a process of self-representation that patriarchal society usually forbids. On the
other hand, if Magdalen’s desperate plotting to retrieve her fortune resides in her
talents as an actress off stage and conjures up the whole paraphernalia of costumes
and cosmetics, her identity, nevertheless, remains enmeshed with the ambivalent
figure of the actress in Victorian consumer culture, that is, that of a commodified
being providing amusement for financial contribution and gratifying her consumers’
desires.
As a matter of fact, Collins’s novel further probes how the actress’s ambivalent
engagement with the world of fashion both enables self-construction (hence self-
definition) and enslaves the woman to the market economy. Magdalen’s show is
devised as a form of entertainment (it is actually called the ‘Entertainment’) and is
based on the exhibition of the female body, ‘her personal appearance settl[ing] the
question of her reception before she opened her lips’ (242). Using the ‘self-advertising
13 Hilary Radner, Shopping Around: Feminine Culture and the Pursuit of Pleasure
(New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 178.
14 Wilkie Collins, No Name (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1862] 1986), 411.
vehicle of the stage’, in Davies’s terms,15 Magdalen experiences the extent to which
self-definition and independence are gained paradoxically at the price of self-
commodification and—inevitably—of self-fictionalization. Magdalen is, indeed,
commodified three times as an actress; she not only becomes an entertainment, but
also the marketable commodity of Captain Wragge (229)—who, moreover, swindles
her—and a set of bills advertising her show and her body.16 When she vanishes
to become an actress, Magdalen becomes advertised on a reward bill, her identity
being framed by two marks: the mark on her underclothing (‘Magdalen Vanstone’)
and the mark on her neck (two little moles). The female character’s identity thus
stems from signs on the surface of her body and lies in representation, in letters on
her underclothing or in dots on her body which may be erased, as when she masks
her moles with a Black Eye. Secondly, on Captain Wragge’s handbill advertising the
show, Magdalen’s identity lies in metarepresentation, as Captain Wragge’s chronicle
underlines:
My gifted relative has made her first appearance in public, and has laid the foundation
of our future fortune. On the first night, the attendance was larger than I had ventured to
hope. The novelty of an evening’s entertainment, conducted from beginning to end by the
unaided exertions of a young lady (see advertisement) roused the public curiosity, and the
seats were moderately well filled. (241) (emphasis mine)
The bill not only announces the actress’s dramatic performance, but also lays bare
its own artificiality. When Wragge recommends that the reader have a look at the
advertisement to understand what the show is about, the fictional handbill, which
has no reality in the text and is naturally nowhere to be found, mirrors Magdalen’s
own artificiality—her body is a series of fictions read and written in economic terms.
The commodification and fictionalization of the female character reveal Captain
Wragge’s power in managing transgressive femininity, in controlling Magdalen’s
finances and economic weight, and in pulling the strings of Magdalen’s fictional
characters as her personal stage manager, in the same way as he manages his wife,
changes her identity, kills and resuscitates her at will, convincing her that she is ‘dead
and buried in London’ (328) so that she may not give her identity away. In short,
Wragge is the patriarch incarnate, devising fictions and maintaining women under
his control, exactly as Victorian consumer society weaves fictions of the domestic
ideal to such an extent that feminine identity becomes a feminine representation, a
layout in a fashion magazine, a caption in an advertisement, or a set of elusive signs
all pointing towards a feminine ideal, as Mrs. Wragge exemplifies.
15 Davies, Actresses as Working Women, 71.

16 The commodification of woman is of primary importance since the unravelling
of the plot depends on influencing Magdalen’s uncle (Michael Vanstone) who proudly
collects curios he has bargained for—his own housekeeper Mrs. Lecount being a particularly
significant ‘bargain’ (283).
Wilkie Collins’s Shopping-Addict: Picturing the Female Shopper
As a matter of fact, the actress’s double bind between autonomy and subservience
to the male appraising gaze and direction is echoed in her manager’s wife, Mrs.
Wragge, a shopping-addict who revisits feminine representation on her own terms.
Mrs. Wragge is a slow-witted, ‘constitutionally torpid’ (203) giantess of six feet
three (202) whose ‘large, smooth, white round face—like a moon—[is] encircled by
a cap and green ribbons; and dimly irradiated by eyes of mild and faded blue, which
looked straightforward into vacancy’ (202). As an image of feminine meekness and
gentleness, of submission and self-abnegation, Mrs. Wragge’s freedom of expression
or self-assertion is, in fact, inversely proportional to her height. Mrs. Wragge actually
embodies Victorian womanhood in its most crippling aspects, being objectified from
the very first (‘its hands’, ‘its knees’, ‘its upper extremity’ [202]) and subjected to her
heartless husband’s manic sense of order.
Matilda Wragge when unmarried was a waitress at Darch’s Dining-Rooms,
mostly trying to record the gentlemen’s endless orders, to the point of forgetting her
own name in the process. When she married Captain Wragge, one of her customers,
Mrs. Wragge not only lost her name, but also her fortune (‘He took care of me and
my money. I’m here, the money’s gone’ [206]) and her independence. Furthermore,
Matilda’s inaccurate use of language, her confusion in the meaning of words, and
her frequent grasping of words in their literal sense, typify the narrative’s patriarchal
discourse which deprives woman of a name, of a voice, and even of a language.
Thus legally, economically, and linguistically dependent on her husband/customer
and condemned to submit to his rules, Mrs. Wragge is a grotesque embodiment of
the stereotypical Victorian wife. Interestingly, her body somatically encodes her
prescribed role as an obedient servant: the constant buzzing in her head results
from unceasing male orders at the restaurant, like a neurotic textbook, by which
she abides and from which she suffers. Similarly, her cookery book, which, Deidre
David argues, stands for the male-authorized texts or laws that dictate woman’s
role,17 becomes her secular bible containing the scriptures of patriarchy, which the
slow-witted woman mentally rehearses so as to perform her part in the kitchen,18 in
the same way as she later reads for hours the directions for her Oriental Cashmere
Robe before venturing to put the scissors into the stuff (379).
Yet, if Mrs. Wragge’s identity is dependent on and manipulated by her roguish
husband, her representation contradicts her definition as an ideal wife devoting her
whole time to her husband, as his personal barber, hairdresser, nail-clipper or cook
(206). Mrs. Wragge is as tall as she seems contained by her husband’s despotic
discipline, as physically crooked as she is morally innocent, as economically
17 Deidre David, ‘Rewriting the Male Plot in Wilkie Collins’ No Name: Captain
Wragge Orders an Omelette and Mrs. Wragge Goes into Custody’, Barbara Leah Harman,
Susan Meyer (eds), The New Nineteenth Century: Feminist Readings of Underread Victorian
Fiction (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 33–44, 41.
18 ‘Was she still self-isolated from her husband’s deluge of words? Perfectly self-
isolated. She had advanced the imaginary omelette to the last stage of culinary progress; and
she was now rehearsing the final operation of turning it over–with the palm of her hand to
represent the dish, and the cookery-book to impersonate the frying-pan’ (214).
valuable as she appears outmoded and valueless, like some kind of antique curio,
with ‘tarnished’ clothes, ‘dingy old gloves’, ‘faded blue’ eyes, and a ‘tattered book’
in her lap (202). The dutiful and obedient housewife whose body is not designed
to step into the public sphere is, therefore, shaped as the reverse of the actress, the
epitome of female beauty. And yet, Mrs. Wragge’s obsession with female fashion
and her addiction to shopping rework such a construction of feminine identity,
problematizing the figure of the Victorian female consumer.
Indeed, Mrs. Wragge’s addiction to shopping and female appearance connects
her to the model of the actress, commodified and exhibited on a stage, engaged
in self-representation.19 This ambivalent and paradoxical picture of the domestic
angel suddenly turned into a ‘voracious consumer’ enticed by her own image was
in fact an essential aspect of Victorian culture, as Lori Anne Loeb underlines.20 But
Collins’s portrait of feminine consumption is here brought to excess. Mrs. Wragge
is a fashion-victim, excited at the idea of buying, out of her self whenever she hears
the words ‘shop’ and ‘parcel’ (206) and losing ‘all control over herself immediately’
(206). Looking at her ‘Things’ makes her happy, defines her female counterparts,
and binds her to a community of women. From objectification as a decorative dusty
antique curio in her husband’s house, Mrs. Wragge as a consumer becomes an image
of unrestrained desire. Defining herself and her sense of femininity as an interplay
with commodities, Matilda reveals the construction of the female self as hinged
upon the market economy. In addition, the act of buying itself is what enables her
to escape her husband’s authority and to indulge in her own pleasures: ‘“I do so like
shopping”, pleaded the poor creature, “and I get so little of it now!”’ (234). Shopping
deconstructs the obedient domestic woman who religiously reads her cookery-book
as she would go through the script of prescribed femininity: ‘No cookery-book …
No Buzzing in my head! No captain to shave to-morrow! I’m all down at heels; my
cap’s on one side; and nobody bawls at me. My heart alive, here is a holiday and
no mistake!’ (262). Matilda Wragge’s abandonment of her cookery-book—hence of
the male-authorized text—is always associated with her consumption and fashion-
addiction. When she finally gives up trying to make an omelette, the result is ‘not
19 This link is, in fact, highlighted in a particular scene at the beginning of the
novel in which Magdalen takes part in amateur theatricals. Here, acting, like shopping, is
foregrounded as an activity hinged upon the reconstruction of the female figure. In the same
way as shopping is involved in manipulating consumer products to construct a feminine
self that matches the advertisements’ images, acting implies exhibiting female body parts to
subject them to an external authority. The example of the ‘stout lady with the wig’ (58) who
resigns her part because she has overheard unpleasant comments on her hair and her figure is
a blatant example of how acting is involved in an exhibition, construction, and reconstruction
of the female self tantamount to that of the female consumer—both being fictions. In both
cases, the woman’s worth resides in her body. Here, the wig as a beauty aid that testifies to
the reconstruction of the character’s self, acts as a pivotal motif between the worlds of acting
and consumerism. The wig both serves to disguise the bald-headed character as a younger
character and to reverse the process of ageing by reconstructing herself as a younger (and
more desirable) woman.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), vii-viii.
nice’, but instantly contrasted with her own appearance: she wears a ‘voluminous
brown holland wrapper, with a limp cape, and a trimming of dingy pink ribbons’
(223), which makes her conversation drift into varieties of wrappers and blot out
the unsuccessful cooking episode—that is, male direction. As a physical release
from the constraints of her wifely role, then, shopping appears to be constructed
in subversive terms, enabling the woman to engage in autonomy away from the
fetters of patriarchy. Consumption is Mrs. Wragge’s outlet, the reverse of her daily
discipline, the province of physical freedom and self-reconstruction.
The advertisements and the cookery-book, therefore, function as polarized texts,
as female and male scripts whose reading frees or indoctrinates the female character.
In spite of the brainwashing power of the catch phrases, the female consumer, as if
autonomous, reads, chooses, and buys from advertising leaflets. Reading sharpens
her organic instinctual impulses for food and drink (263), exerts to excess her
mental faculties when faced with her own field of possibilities and choices, with the
exhilarating effect of independence and physical release:
‘Let’s see; where did I leave off? Try Finch’s feeding bottle for Infants. No! there’s a cross
against that: the cross means I don’t want it. Comfort in the Field. Buckler’s Indestructible
Hunting Breeches. Oh dear, dear! I’ve lost the place. No, I haven’t. Here it is; here’s my
mark against it. Elegant Cashmere Robes; strictly oriental, very grand, reduced to one
pound, nineteen, and sixpence. Be in time. Only three left. Only three! Oh, do lend us the
money and let’s go and get one!’ (264)
When Matilda eventually takes her ‘light reading’ to bed and falls asleep, ‘lulled
by the narcotic influence of annotating circulars’ (263), the drug-like action of the
circulars seems to have penetrated and poisoned the submissive wife’s physiology
now mesmerized by the advertisements’ tone as by her own sense of power.
Reading the female consumer as an image of woman which circumvents male
order and bodily discipline may help us to understand why the dingy and disordered
physical appearance of ‘the worst dressed woman [her husband] ever set eyes on’ (345)
testifies less to her failure to identify with the models of feminine beauty advertised
in the leaflets than to her own physical refusal to be moulded on the pattern. For
however hard she might try to make her clothes fit her, they always hang over her
bosom ‘like a sack’, ‘never com[e] right’, ‘draggl[e] in front, and [cock] up behind’
(460). In fact, Mrs. Wragge is ‘too big for the pattern’ (461) of ideal femininity. Her
appearance is thus a model of feminine self-assertion, distorting and deforming the
pattern to the shape of her own body and refusing, in her husband’s words, ‘to mould
her personal appearance into harmony with the eternal laws of symmetry and order’
(310), to shape her body to the disciplining frame of fashionable corsets and trendy
bodices. Her body is resistant, refuses normalization, collapsing even the boundaries
between femininity and masculinity through its gigantic size. The image of the
shopping addict is, therefore, what frames Collins’s subversive feminine portrait,
what literalizes Mrs. Wragge’s transgressive aspects, what physically exposes the
female character’s potential for rebellion.
As a result, by engaging with feminine culture, Mrs. Wragge subversively does
not turn her control of her self into another disciplining practice which reinforces
patriarchal discourse.21 On the contrary, by engaging with the way Victorian mass
culture constructs (and reads) femininity in terms of codified appearance, and thus
as a surface, Mrs. Wragge, who reads and decodes life literally, as she reads her
cookery-book, turns the figurability of the female body back on itself. She is not
so much acted upon and objectified or constructed as a surface as she is acting and,
therefore, unconsciously subverting the discourse of artifice that her ‘monstrous’
body debunks. The ‘things’ that she buys and which are designed to construct the
fashionable lady through a series of metonymies partake in fact of the monstrous.
Susan Stewart’s concept of the gigantic as ‘a severing of synecdoche from its referent,
or whole’22 is perfectly exemplified in Collins’s novel. The gigantic, Stewart argues,
entails ‘partial vision’, thereby ‘prohibit[ing] closure of the object.’23 Collins’s giant
consumer, hence, metamorphoses the construction of the feminine ideal as a contained
subject framed by metonymical representation. The tropes of femininity that Mrs.
Wragge consumes can but magnify the tropes of her own monstrosity: what looks
nice, what is constructed as nice and what is bought for its beauty, are illusory tropes
which Mrs. Wragge’s body turns into grotesque signifiers. From a ‘natural’ monster,
Mrs. Wragge becomes a cultural freak, fashioned through unlimited consumption of
metonymies and synecdoches which her body undercuts.
Interestingly enough, the body against which she measures her own to make her
dress is Magdalen’s, the perfectly shaped, feminine body which patriarchal culture
cherishes (460). But Mrs. Wragge can neither identify with that body nor with the
images Victorian mass culture exhibits for female consumers and which they may
eventually mistake for their own selves: her ‘consumer-produced body’, to quote
Radner’s words,24 is her own, and no form of authority can contain it nor can any
shirt, skirt or shoe normalize it. In the same way as the cookery-book led to an
omelette that was ‘not nice’, the directions for the Oriental Cashmere Robe, adapted
to be modelled on Magdalen’s bosom (460), do not lead to conclusive results either.
Mrs. Wragge’s will to appropriate the other luring her on the advertising leaflet, to
merge with an idealized representation of femininity clad in cashmere, is debunked
by the very Orientalism of the object. Being herself Other, Mrs. Wragge cannot unify
her self with that other she desires and with whom she identifies. She is ‘along’ and
‘across’ half too big (461), miles away from the physical patterns of the proper-sized
western woman. This acknowledgment makes her head buzz again, as another form
of authority directing woman’s identity and appearance.
21 Ironically enough, this is not what her husband believes as he lets her deal with
her newly acquired goods as a new form of discipline, being ‘very tidy’ and ‘keeping to [her]
own corner’ (350): ‘Mrs. Wragge has learnt her lesson … and is rewarded by my permission
to sit at work in her own room. I sanction her new fancy for dressmaking because it is sure to
absorb all her attention, and to keep her at home. There is no fear of her finishing the Oriental
Robe in a hurry—for there is no mistake in the process of making it which she is not certain to
commit. She will sit incubating her gown—pardon the expression—like a hen over an addled
egg’ (356).
22 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir,
the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 69.
23 Stewart, On Longing, 89.
24 Radner, Shopping Around, 60.
Consequently, through the portrait of the unrestrained consumer as a ‘sinful
creature’ (304), Collins collapses the binary opposition between the female
consumer and the Victorian actress, both engaged in self-definition, both denying the
patriarchal scripts that enforce their submission to the male order. But perhaps more
surprisingly, Collins’s image of the female consumer even suspends for a time the
heroine’s transgressiveness. Matilda and Magdalen change parts, showing both how
the meek and submissive woman conceals a self-assertive and potentially dangerous
Other and how the threatening actress abides by the demands of patriarchy with a
body that matches patriarchy’s ideal. Mrs. Wragge’s consumption never means to
shape her into, in Radner’s words, ‘an object-to-be-looked-at’25 but always figures
her as a potentially unruly body that needs to be policed. Never does she seek to
construct herself as the object of the masculine gaze, as opposed to Magdalen.
For Mrs. Wragge, consumption changes self-control—the Victorian doctrine of
containment—into just its opposite: a lack of control of the self in her unrestrained
consumptive acts and in her unframeable body which disrupts her vain attempts at
fashioning the feminine ideal.
It is therefore because shopping is viewed in subversive terms that when
Mrs. Wragge comes back home after a whole day shopping, with ‘a pile of small
parcels hugged up in her arms’ (302) and bumps into Magdalen disguised as her
old governess Miss Garth and wearing a grey wig, false eyebrows, make-up to
change her complexion, reddened eyelids, and a padded cloak (267–9), Mrs. Wragge
interprets the vanishing apparition as a supernatural warning, as ‘a judgment on [her]
for having been down at heel in half of the shops in London, first with one shoe and
then with the other’ (304). The piling of artificial aids and cosmetics on Magdalen, as
a caricature of the fashion-addict, acts as a distorted mirror of herself. As soon as the
fictional Miss Garth vanishes and Magdalen regains her appearance, the association
of the made-up and padded woman with a spectre reveals the transgressive aspects of
female consumerism: haunted by patriarchy’s laws, the female consumer experiences
guilt. While the motif of the ghost metaphorizes Magdalen’s namelessness and lack of
identity, for Matilda, the ‘Ghost’ makes her head buzz again, as another embodiment
of the spectral authoritative texts that fashion Victorian gender ideology.
Collins’s Patent Medicine: Framing the Female Body
However, as is most often the case in Collins’s novels, the closure of the story
reasserts male supremacy over female transgressiveness, using medical discourse as
a way of enforcing gender relationships. Obsessed with disciplining and training his
wife into female propriety and subservience to male law, Captain Wragge chooses to
control his wife, no longer from outside but from within, metaphorically (chemically)
inoculating her with the principles of patriarchy and thereby securing his control
over his slippery and disorderly wife. This shift in Captain Wragge’s control of
his wife is to be paralleled with the punishment of Magdalen, who has failed in
her entreprise to regain her fortune and is dangerously ill at the end of the novel.
25 Radner, Shopping Around, 56.

Hence, both female characters are cured from within through a proper containment
of feminine unruliness. Indeed, when Captain Wragge visits Magdalen after her
illness in the poorest districts of London, he has become a successful businessman
through investing his wife’s inheritance in advertising26 and buying drugs and pill-
boxes on credit. His wife is now associated with a pill, her valuable body being
turned into a text, fictionalized and part of the market economy. The pill he sells is
a compound of three strong purgatives: aloes, scammony, and gamboge. Focusing
on the public stomach, the better to master the minds of his gullible customers,
Captain Wragge’s pill purges, purifies, and removes complaints and diseases. As
a particularly significant proof of the efficacy of his pill, Mrs. Wragge’s portrait
features on all the advertisements, saying: ‘Before she took the Pill, you might have
blown this patient away with a feather. Look at her now!!!’ (711).
Half way between the fields of cosmetics and medicine,27 both praising the
woman’s blooming and healthy appearance, Captain Wragge’s Pill revisits the whole
discourse on cosmetics the novel has been revolving around, but now from from
a scientific viewpoint. Sold by chemists, perfumers, or quacks, patent medicine
often claimed to purify the body from within the better to remove pimples and
improve the complexion.28 They could, therefore, target make-up consumers, who
26 Captain Wragge’s practices provide a typical example of the widespread use of

advertisements in the quack-medicine trade: ‘They can’t get rid of me and my Pill—they
must take us. There is not a single form of appeal in the whole range of human advertisement,
which I am not making to the unfortunate public at this moment. Hire the last new novel—
there I am, inside the boards of the book. Send for the last new Song—the instant you open the
leaves, I drop out of it. Take a cab—I fly in at the window, in red. Buy a box of tooth-powder
at the chemist’s—I wrap it up for you, in blue … The place in which my Pill is made, is an
advertisement in itself. I have got one of the largest shops in London’ (710–11).
27 The world of cosmetics and medicine are both associated with feminine subversion,
as when Mrs. Lecount, who has read through Magdalen’s disguise and make-up, advises her
to try the Golden Ointment for her eye affliction (295). Obviously, there were no really clear-
cut boundaries between the ingredients used in cosmetics and in nostrums. As a particularly
significant example, Madame Rachel’s first husband was an apothecary’s assistant from whom
she learnt how to prepare cosmetics containing arsenic, white lead and antimony. See Kellow
Chesney, The Victorian Underworld: A Fascinating Re-creation (London: Penguin, [1970]
1989), 280.
28 The patent medicine men were all the charlatan-physicians who made pills,
tinctures, or potions of all sorts and asked for a government patent to keep their trade secrets
(see Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 169). After the Apothecaries
Act of 1815, which specified that qualified apothecaries should be in possession of a licence
issued by the Society of Apothecaries (involving courses, experience, and examination),
general practitioners still complained about unfair competition from unqualified druggists
and quacks. One of these unqualified druggists and quacks, Downward reminds us of the lack
of governmental regulation of medical practice and the sharp division within the profession.
Eventually, the Medical Act of 1858 created a single public register for all legally recognized
practitioners. It then became illegal for those who were not on the Medical Register to claim
to be medical practitioners, although they could still legally practice healing (see Roy Porter,
Disease, Medicine and Society in England, 1550–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, [1987] 1999), 47–8).
were, in Walker’s words, ‘troubled with an oily or scaly skin, red spots, pimples, or
extreme paleness’29 or gullible patent medicine consumers. Hence, cosmetics and
pseudoscientific cure-alls both aimed at improving appearances, metamorphosing the
body into a commodity, and ‘reducing selfhood to a series of acts of consumption’,
as Thomas Richards argues.30 Professing to cure consumption, wasting, flushes
alongside pimples, boils, carbuncles, erysipelas, and redness or roughness of the
skin, patent medicine had the scientific and authoritative status cosmetics lacked,
turning beauty care into a medically supervised act and changing improper cosmetics
applications into properly medicalized beautifying commodities. Revealingly,
instead of masking ungracious deformities, pills often claimed to regulate those
inflammations, dilatations, expansions, and disruptions of invisible fluids beneath the
surface of the skin which ruined the complexion. Moreover, as Sally Shuttleworth
contends in her reading of Victorian medical advertising, contemporary discourses
on cleansing similarly revolved around the regulation of blood circulation and
potential obstructions. Obstructions were, according to Shuttleworth, seen as a sign
of sexual perversity, ‘causing pollution and implosion throughout the entire mental,
emotional, and physiological economy.’31 What contemporary advertisements
reveal, indeed, is the extent to which the thematics of ‘removal’ prevailed. If the
Holloway company advises to combine its pills and its ointment, one purifying the
body from within, the other, rubbed over the back and chest, healing from without,
Kaye’s Worsdell’s Vegetable Restorative Pills ‘strike at the root of disease, and, by
destroying the cause, remove the effect’, while Frampton’s Pill of Health, ‘removing
all obstructions’ is sure to cure headaches and give a ‘healthy, juvenile bloom of the
complexion’ to women in search of beauty.32
Obviously, Captain Wragge’s Pill is similarly hinged upon such politics of
circulation since the pill triples the doses of purgatives and closely resembles such
pills of the period as Morison’s Pills, which used vegetable laxatives to purify bad
blood, denounced by Morison as the source of all disease.33 Even Captain Wragge’s
shop exemplifies the Victorian obsession with circulation, positing transparency and
visibility as its main tenets with ‘plate-glass’ windows (711), thereby emphasizing
the product’s participation in surveillance and control. Therefore, through his Pill,
Captain Wragge now administers his wife from within, removing the roots of female
subversion via medical supervision. Handled by her husband and the medical
discourse he sells, Collins’s female consumer—like MacDonald’s ‘light’ princess,

and Dress, 24.
31 Shuttleworth, ‘Female Circulation: Medical Discourse and Popular Advertising in
the Mid-Victorian Era’, 60.
32 Advertisements for cosmetics had similar claims. Madame Rachel’s Magnetic Rock
Dew Water claimed to ‘restore the colour to grey hair apparently by renewing the circulation in
its capillary tubes, the cessation of which causes greyness’, and thence to give ‘the appearance
of youth to persons of considerable antiquity’ (quoted in Chesney, The Victorian Underworld,
281).
33 See Roy Porter, Quacks: Fakers and Charlatans in English Medicine (Tempus:
Stroud, [1989] 2001), 201.
Carroll’s ‘sweet’ heroine, Ewing’s ‘dear’ little girl, and Braddon’s mad collector—is
thus framed and controlled.
Yet, albeit normalized and commodified, fictionalized by the patent’s fraudulous
claims, exhibited as the reference model, Mrs. Wragge metamorphoses the bird-like,
weightless domestic ideal into a six-foot-three giantess, who is not only healthy but
strong and masculine. Far from promulgating the image of the perfect lady, Matilda
Wragge’s otherness recalls, in fact, some Victorian advertisements in which, Thomas
Richards explains, ‘exotic and illegal sounding drugs … allowed consumers to reverse
socially accepted values.’34 In this way, inviting female consumers to identify with
her, Mrs. Wragge is not solely read and inscribed—crystallized—on the wrappers, as
Deidre David arguably suggests, but resists her husband’s scientific control to some
extent, revealing once more the liberating aspects of feminine culture and female
consumerism, figuring as the monstrous body that subverts patriarchy and which
female consumers can buy and appropriate. Moreover, such subversive aspects
of the commodified female character with her portrait in ‘red, blue, and yellow’
(715) are enhanced even further as her husband provides her with ‘a few thousand
impressions’ (715) she is sure to lose and scatter along the streets of London.
If her lack of containment is turned to profit by her husband, Matilda Wragge does
‘drop her self about perpetually’ (715) across London, letting her monstrous image
circulate, from the middle-class districts to the working-class slums, unconsciously
contaminating the city with her transgressive germs. Hence, at the end of the novel,
the female shopper has outsmarted the actress in her subversion of the Victorian
status quo and shopping figures as a dangerous activity likely to fashion unruly
women.
34 Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 203–4.

Chapter Eight
Rachel Leverson and the

London Beauty Salon
Female Aestheticism and Criminality in
Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (1864)
Perhaps more subversively than No Name, Wilkie Collins’s Armadale prolongs some
of the ambiguities of No Name by literally fusing the figure of the Victorian lady with
that of the scheming actress. Published a few years after No Name, Armadale seems to
expose the Victorian underworld of feminine construction, using the fairy tale Snow
White and the figure of the narcissitic Queen to offer its readers an insight into the
looking-glass of femininity. Indeed, Collins’s play with woman’s commodification
is brought a step further since the readers are granted access to the backstage of
feminine construction where the epitome of womanliness and the socially inferior
actress become one and the same. By displaying Lydia Gwilt’s correspondence with
her personal adviser, Mrs. Oldershaw, who is modelled on Rachel Leverson, as well
as Lydia Gwilt’s own diary to which she confides her future murderous plots and her
multiple identities, Armadale proposes a survey of duplicitous female practices.
Armadale is a complex interweaving of stories. The novel opens with a prologue
in which Allan Armadale bequeaths to his son the story of his past, how his namesake
married his promised wife under an alias with the help of a maid who imitated
Armadale’s signature, and how he killed him out of revenge. In the second generation,
the sons of the two Allan Armadales have the same names as their fathers, but the
son of the prologue hides his identity under the pseudonym ‘Ozias Midwinter.’ The
two namesakes become friends, and suddenly the young maid, now a beautiful and
fascinating young woman, reappears to try and gain Armadale’s fortune. Being the
only surviving character from the first generation, Lydia Gwilt, as she now calls
herself, triggers again the murder plot as soon as Midwinter feels that she might be
the woman his father had told him to avoid. Besides, as fate will have it, Allan seems
to have a premonitory dream in which the shadow of a Machiavellian woman draws
more and more suspicious attention to the female protagonist. Gwilt’s success in her
mercenary project thus depends on concealing her links with the first generation, and
the main incriminating detail liable to give her away is naturally her age.
Interestingly, Collins’s heroine bears a resemblance to Madeleine Smith,1 who
was accused of poisoning her lover by putting arsenic in his food and claimed to
1 The recurrence of allusions to the case of Madeleine Smith in Collins’s novels

testifies to the links between sensation fiction and contemporary news to which Richard Altick
have bought arsenic to use in a face-wash for her complexion. In this way, the
contemporary reference to Smith’s sensational trial typifies the extent to which
Collins’s novel intended to blur the boundaries between contradictory constructions
of womanhood. In the 1850s, the murder cases of Marie Lafarge and Euphémie
Lacoste in France, and of Madeleine Smith in Britain, all involved arsenic, thus
locating criminality in typically feminine cosmetic practices.2 As I shall develop
further in the following chapter, the consumption of arsenic was prevalent in the
Victorian period. It was used to improve one’s appearance, giving full and rounded
shapes and a blooming complexion and could be found in many tonics.3 In the
same way as Smith, Lacoste used a cure-all, Fowler’s Solution, a mixture of oil of
lavender, cinnamon, and arsenic. Significantly, modes of female education and of
training in ‘fine ladyism’ often came into question during the trials.4 Such practices
were often denounced for teaching girls deception so as to remain competitive in the
marriage market. Smith was an avid reader of women’s magazines and knew how
to emulate the stereotype of the respectable and dutiful schoolgirl. In her liaison
with L’Angelier, while she was engaged to marry a more socially suitable party,
she was deliberately ‘acting out a romantic drama with herself in the leading role.’5
Even in the courtroom, Smith’s skills in role-playing could be read in her display of
ladylike manners, her ‘fashionable clothes’, and her ‘most attractive appearance’,6
which impressed the jury and almost cleared her of the murder: Smith’s physical
appearance acted as visual evidence of her innocence, leading to the equivocal
verdict of ‘Not Proven.’
As Collins’s novel resonates with sensational Victorian trials, women’s
appearances become the leitmotiv of the detective-narrative, and the criminal
woman, whose looks deceive and charm the beholder, takes us once again into the
artful world of pretence and acting. Three main accessories appear fundamental
to the creation or recreation of women’s beauty: cosmetics, clothes and mirrors.
If cosmetics overtly point at feminine duplicitous practices, clothes and mirrors
undermine more radically the construction of femininity. The glass in particular,
as a site of surveillance which shapes and controls the image of woman as surface
and prevents her escape, quickly comes to encompass a criminal and spectacular
femininity. As already suggested through the study of the ambivalent meanings of
glass, the favourite accomplice of female aestheticization simultaneously frames and
reveals the fraud, turning the domestic boudoir into a secret room behind the scenes
or a perverse beauty parlour designed to fashion femmes fatales. Confined within
draws attention in The Presence of the Present. In Armadale, Lydia Gwilt’s trial overtly draws
on Smith’s. The references to Madame Rachel and her beauty parlour advance the comparison,
as I shall underline.
2 See Mary S. Hartman, Victorian Murderesses: A True History of Thirteen
Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes (London: Robson
Books, 1977).
3 See ‘The Narcotics We Indulge In’, unsigned article, Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine, 74 (Dec. 1853): 678–95, 687–90.
4 Hartman, Victorian Murderesses, 57.
5 Hartman, Victorian Murderesses, 65.
6 Unsigned article on the trial of Madeleine Smith, Spectator, 30 (1857): 27.
Rachel Leverson and the London Beauty Salon 149
the frame of her looking-glass—like Rhoda Broughton’s Kate Chester visualized in
glasshouses—Collins’s female protagonist epitomizes the contradictions inherent in
the construction of modern femininity.
Fashioning the Commodity Woman: Women’s Magazines’ Advice and

Armadale’s Fashion-victims
As is most often the case with Collins’s fiction, the thematics of Armadale are
mediated through minor characters. In No Name Mrs. Wragge serves as the naive
fashion-victim who takes advertising leaflets to bed and becomes hysterical whenever
she hears the word ‘shop.’ In Armadale the character of a jealous middle-class wife
whose looks have faded humorously presents the dangers of the changing definition
of womanliness. Mrs. Milroy, vainly trying to look younger by applying thick layers
of make-up or using fashionable frills and flounces to reshape her femininity, acts
as a foil to the heroine while anchoring the character of Lydia Gwilt in a consumer
culture obsessed with women’s looks and appearance:
It was the face of a woman who had once been handsome, and who was still, so far as
years went, in the prime of her life … The utter wreck of her beauty was made a wreck
horrible to behold, by her desperate efforts to conceal the sight of it from her own eyes,
from the eyes of her husband and child, from the eyes of even the doctor who attended
her, and whose business it was to penetrate to the truth. Her head, from which the greater
part of her hair had fallen off, would have been less shocking to see than the hideously
youthful wig, by which she tried to hide the loss. No deterioration of her complexion, no
wrinkling of her skin, could have been so dreadful to look at as the rouge that lay thick
on her cheeks, and the white enamel plastered on her forehead. The delicate lace, and
the bright trimming on her dressing-gown, the ribbons in her cap, and the rings on her
bony fingers, all intended to draw the eye away from the change that had passed over
her, directed the eye to it on the contrary … An illustrated book of the fashions, in which
women were represented exhibiting their finery by means of the free use of their limbs,
lay on the bed from which she had not moved for years, without being lifted by her nurse.
A hand-glass was placed with the book so that she could reach it easily.7
Contributing to the novel’s debate on the definition of femininity that the

plot draws upon, this scene manifestly denounces Mrs. Milroy for her grotesque
masquerade and turns the sacrosanct Victorian hearth into a stage. Ironically enough,
the caricature of the woman who has overused make-up and costume seems to
underscore the slippery borderline between the respectable middle-class mother and
the Girl of the Period, ‘who dies her hair and paints her face, whose sole aim is
unbounded luxury and whose dress is the chief object of such thought and intellect
as she possesses.’8 Nonetheless, Collins’s debunking of female self-fashioning does
not simply show how the private domestic world overlaps with the modern public
world of sensuous female exhibitions. More importantly, it exposes the underside of
7 Wilkie Collins, Armadale (London: Penguin Classics, [1864] 1995), 311–12.

8 E. Linton, ‘The Girl of the Period’, Saturday Review, 25 (1868): 339–44, 339–40.
woman’s objectification. Mrs. Milroy’s use of cosmetics to improve her appearance
is turned back upon itself, showing the reverse side of women’s attempts at self-
definition. The more Mrs. Milroy tries to control her reflection, the more her image
slips and cracks. Hence, as this example suggests, instead of empowering women,
their aestheticization and objectification may sometimes yield power to others rather
than enabling them to wield it themselves.
Collins’s play on cosmetics in Armadale is thus two-fold. Simultaneously
blurring and enhancing the divide betwen the natural and the artful woman, cosmetics
can invisibly ensure woman’s subservience to the male order. With its portrait of
a domestic invalid, confined in bed and magnifying female passivity, Armadale
highlights cosmetics as both dangerous weapons and policing tools. In a novel where
the naturally beautiful heroine relies on a beauty specialist to stage her theatrical
parts, Collins uses cosmetics and fashion to investigate and challenge the heroine’s
claims to self-definition.
Unlike Mrs. Milroy, who fails to hide the ravages of time, Lydia Gwilt knows
how to ‘trad[e] on [her] good looks’ (435), and manipulates female attractions to
her advantage. Gwilt is a genuine female villainess, a plotting actress whose sole
ambition in life is to secure financial independence through marriage. Like Braddon’s
Lucy Audley, Lydia Gwilt wears dresses as so many stage costumes and plays with
her mirror to exhibit her sensuality. In addition, as already suggested, the narrative
depends on Gwilt’s concealment of her age, since her true identity must remain
unknown if she is to make a fortune by marrying one of the two Allan Armadales.
Yet, interestingly enough, although modelled on Madeleine Smith, Collins’s
heroine is unwilling to follow the advice of her accomplice to apply cosmetics.
Gwilt’s refusal to use beauty aids is significant in that it retraces some of the
contradictions which dominated the period and mostly appeared in women’s
advice books and magazines. As we have already underlined, the growing success
of women’s magazines in the 1860s, as exemplified by the relaunch of the The
Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in a larger format (as well as the appearance
of The Queen in 1861 and The Young Englishwoman in 1864),9 albeit encouraging
women to mould themselves in conformity with current fashions through advertising
and colour plates, seemed, however, reluctant to promote the use of make-up and
other artificial remedies. Gwilt’s arguments with her beauty advisor, hence, highlight
the very same tensions which underlay women’s magazines, thereby questioning the
construction of modern femininity.
Far more subversively than in No Name, Armadale reveals the art of woman’s
masquerade. As a matter of fact, Armadale’s most striking feature lies in the way the
novel displays female correspondence as a means to denounce role-playing. The first
appearance of the heroine is managed by means of an exchange of letters between
herself and Mrs. Oldershaw in which the two characters share their plans. Through
feminine writing, the construction of femininity is disclosed, with the beauty parlour
and the female boudoir as main loci of fraud. Drawing ambiguous links between the
private domestic sphere and the public commercial site, the novel conflates female
9 See Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the
Woman’s Domestic Magazine, 1800–1914 (London, New York: Routledge, 1996), 71.
theatricality and impersonation with female appearance and its improvement: the
domestic woman becomes both fashionable artefact and skilled actress.
The confusion of spheres is in fact triggered by Collins’s allusions to Madame
Rachel. Mrs. Oldershaw, writing her letters from her beauty parlour, the Ladies’
Toilette Repository, imparts a transgressive feminine fragrance to the narrative.
While Oldershaw, like Rachel Leverson, hides disgraceful wrinkles, ‘making up
battered old faces and worn-out old figures to look like new’ (160), the narrative
connects women’s looks with female treachery. For even before Lydia Gwilt has
appeared, Oldershaw’s letter mentions Lydia’s plan of marrying Armadale to
gain his fortune and promises her success if she follows a few pieces of advice to
improve her appearance. Thus, the correspondence between the two women sets
up a space where daring female advice can be requested and given. That the advice
should particularly revolve around the themes of clothes and make-up reinforces the
relevance of Oldershaw’s salon in the detective narrative. Dresses and creams are
turned into criminal accomplices contrived to mould femininity:
If you follow my advice about dressing, and use one or two of my applications privately,
I guarantee to put you back three years more. I will forfeit all the money I shall have to
advance to you in this matter, if, when I have ground you young again in my wonderful
mill, you look more than seven-and-twenty in any man’s eyes living—except, of course,
when you wake anxious in the small hours of the morning; and then, my dear, you will be
old and ugly in the retirement of your own room, and it won’t matter. (160–1)
While Oldershaw exposes female duplicity by widening the dramatic gap between
public appearances and private reality, her hyperbolic rhetoric (‘I guarantee’, ‘I will
forfeit all the money I have’) or striking metaphorical images (‘I have ground you
young again in my wonderful mill’) also sound explicitly theatrical. As in the women’s
magazines of the time, artful femininity is here publicized as both subversive and
normative: the ideal woman appears as a fraud but remains under the supervision of
the beauty adviser—she is objectified and ‘presumed to be the object of male desire’,
as Margaret Beetham underlines.10 Designed by cosmetics and dresses, the female
body is forged and framed by Oldershaw’s advice, reduced to pearl powder and
commodified as an artwork. Obviously, Oldershaw is here drawing on the medieval
image of The Mill of Old Wives, which, with the rise of cosmetic surgery, became
widely circulated in the nineteenth century.11 In such illustrations, toothless old crones
were ‘fed into the mill, ground and whittled, until they re-emerge[d] whole and young
and vigorous and amorous—again.’12 Seen from this perspective, Gwilt—who has
been invisible so far—is shaped as a female magazine reader: she is given a voice

11 See Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
(London: Vintage, [1994] 1995), 43.
12 Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 43–4. Interestingly enough, Warner links
the image of The Mill of Old Wives to the work of Lustucru’s hammer. Lustucru, ‘Le Médecin
céphalique’, or Skull Doctor, ‘forged new heads for women brought to him by their menfolk—
husbands, chiefly—in order to make them into properly docile wives’ (27). The association
is quite relevant to this discussion as I later on compare Oldershaw’s beauty salon with Dr.
and may write to the editor, but Oldershaw’s letter fashions her as a commodified
woman who exists, in part, by and through the cosmetics and dresses she buys.
The characterization of Oldershaw and the significance of her salon in the criminal
narrative simultaneously signal Gwilt’s duplicitous power and potential villainy and
limit her chances of success. The arsenal of female villainy frames as it transforms
woman, changing her into a puppet in the hands of the beauty specialist.13
As a matter of fact, Gwilt’s indirect presentation as a commodified doll is
sustained later on in the text when Bashwood’s son recounts Gwilt’s story. Her past
becomes a discourse of fashion:
Miss Gwilt’s story begins … in the market-place at Thorpe Ambrose. One day, something
like a quarter of a century ago, a travelling quack-doctor, who dealt in perfumery as well
as medicines, came to the town, with his cart, and exhibited, as a living excellence of
his washes and hair-oils and so on, a pretty little girl, with a beautiful complexion and
wonderful hair. His name was Oldershaw. He had a wife, who helped him in the perfumery
part of his business, and who carried it on by herself after his death. (520–1)
Connected to the marketplace as she is to a woman who sells beauty products,

Lydia Gwilt exhibits the deceitful aspects of femininity. Even if the quack doctor’s
miraculous washes and hair-oils have never been tried on the naturally beautiful
young girl, Gwilt is defined against the backdrop of consumer discourse and makes
explicit womanliness as a fiction and woman as a born actress. Fashioned as a
spectacle, as a commodity produced by art and chemistry, she becomes a walking
advertisement. Victorian advertisements linked consumer culture with the sham lady
playing parts.14 According to Lori Ann Loeb, if ‘advertisements were thought to
advance fraudulent claims; to promote products of poor quality’, they also reflected
the social ideal: ‘The advertisement suggested that with the acquisition of creams
to whiten the complexion, fringes to improve the coiffure, and corsets to mold the
female figure it was possible to create the illusion of the “perfect lady”, a beacon of
Downward’s sanatorium. The worlds of female beauty and medicine are never far apart in
Collins’s novels and both aim at policing the female body.
13 It is with irony that the masculine editorial voice of the ‘Englishwoman’s
Conversazione’ in The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine advises his readers to apply
directly to Madame Rachel: ‘Not greatly approving ladies enamelling their faces, and
thinking it not far from ridiculous, we have not entered into the mysteries of this art, and do
not pretend to give any information on the subject. Besides, would it not be presumptuous
to try and divine for a moment the secrets of the celebrated Madame Rachel? We would
recommend you to apply to this great artiste; but, before being operated on, counsel you
to make some arrangement as to pecuniary consideration, or you may find yourself in an
awkward predicament, as did a certain lady not very long since, through not having a proper
understanding. Enamelling is an expensive process, and, as the French say, “The game is not
worth the candle”—even a wax enamelled one’; The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 5
(1862): 288.
14 Note how Oldershaw is also expert at spotting advertisements, which may suggest
her own relationship with them: ‘I take in The Times regularly; and you may trust my wary
eye not to miss the right advertisement’ (168).
Victorian affluence.’15 Once again, the fraudulent and the ideal are superimposed,
and the advertised female body is structured like a poster: a mere surface ruled by a
set of visual codes.
As usual with sensation fiction, however, Gwilt’s portrait constantly blurs the
line between natural and artificial femininity, suggesting that the natural version can
be even more dangerous when it matches artfully constructed models. Loeb argues
that the advertisers’ models copied ‘artists who intended to construct a view of the
antique world in which the aspiring middle class could see themselves reflected’16—
artists such as Frederic Leighton or Lawrence Alma-Tadema, for example. In a
similar way, Gwilt is described as a classical goddess:
This woman’s forehead was low, upright and broad towards the temples; … her eyes …
were of that purely blue colour, without a tinge in it of grey or green, so often presented to
our admiration in pictures and books, so rarely met with in the living face … The lines of
this woman’s nose bent neither outward nor inward: it was the straight delicately moulded
nose … of the ancient statues and busts … Her chin, round and dimpled, was pure of the
slightest blemish in every part of it, and perfectly in line with her forehead to the end.
(277)
Whether Collins is referring to fashion magazines is unclear, but Gwilt’s taintless

body meets the demands of their codes of advertising. By refusing to betray
inner depravity, her outward classical perfection enables her to evade all kinds of
physiognomical or phrenological readings. The enigma of her image is precisely that
it is so naturally smooth and unblemished that it points more to the world of make-
believe and advertising than to unconstructed femininity. For Gwilt systematically
refuses to let cosmetics control her image: ‘Keep your odious powders and paints
and washes for the spotted shoulders of your customers; not one of them shall touch
my skin, I promise you’ (162). Ambiguously positioned at the heart of a consumer
culture but denying the scripts of feminine cosmetology, Gwilt attempts to secure
her identity and her autonomy, plotting her financial independence with the help of
her mirror only. Used in a grotesque vignette, the glass becomes the leitmotiv of the
murderous plot. Indeed, while Lydia Gwilt condemns the artificiality of cosmetics,
the mirror is turned into a technical adviser in her criminal plots, a tool designed
to inspire her when she devises her new roles. Instead of framing and controlling
a reflection of woman, the panoptical motif, which supposedly symbolizes the
surveillance of woman, reveals criminal depths and spectacular stories whose parts
the heroine will soon willingly incarnate.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 10.
16 Loeb, Consuming Angels, 35.
Lydia Gwilt’s Murderous Accomplice: The Voice of the Magic Glass
Armadale … gives for its heroine a woman fouler than the refuse of the streets, who
has lived to the ripe age of thirty-five, and through the horrors of forgery, murder, theft,
bigamy, gaol, and attempted suicide, without any trace being left on her beauty.17
Armadale shocked contemporary critics by dissociating physical features from moral

character, thus allowing cosmetics and costumes that conceal female sins to fulfill
a subversive function. Throughout the novel, indeed, dresses give pace to the plot,
functioning as disguises that confuse the investigators and inspire deception. Gwilt’s
first plan consists in exchanging her dress with that of Oldershaw’s maid to escape
Mr. Brock who is trying to identify her. Then, Gwilt’s idly going through her dresses
leads her to reread some old letters and furnishes her with her next scheme (444).
But dresses can also incriminate. Towards the end of the novel, when Gwilt goes to
the milliner’s to kill time by trying on her summer dress, the dress gives Gwilt away,
since Scotland Yard detectives trace her to the shop: ‘The cleverest women lose the
use of their wits in nine cases out of ten, where there’s a new dress in the case—and
even Miss Gwilt was rash enough to go back’ (518). Similarly, Mrs. Milroy, in trying
to discover Gwilt’s identity, bribes her maid with clothes (318). Gwilt’s refusal to
use make-up and her apparently genuine beauty are also double-edged. Setting his
story against a background of beauty salons, Collins confuses the natural and the
artful woman, revealing the woman without make-up as ‘the worse woman morally’
(313)—a paradox which is largely conveyed by the ambivalent motif of the mirror.
Throughout the novel, the mirror simultaneously fashions sham femininity and
incarcerates womanhood in an ideal two-dimensional image. It fixes and disrupts
categories, suggesting that the beautiful reflection may be severed from its original.
In this way, the glass appears to serve the same function as make-up, polishing faces
into seamless surfaces and hinting at artifice. While Oldershaw promotes make-up
and lures credulous female customers to buy her wares, Gwilt blindly turns the glass
into a criminal adviser which prompts her to commit sins.
‘Am I handsome enough today?’ she asks (428), like the Wicked Stepmother in
Snow White. Hinting at the fairy tale, Gwilt uses her mirror both to reflect her beauty
and check the advances of the passing of time and to imagine new stories: ‘I must
go and ask my glass how I look. I must rouse my invention, and make up my little
domestic romance’ (489). As in the fairy tale, the mirror becomes the site which
encapsulates treacherous female nature, inspiring Gwilt with new plots and reflecting
woman as an actress staging the scenes of her life. Inviting female display, the mirror
also enhances the objectification of Gwilt’s body. Revealingly, Collins’s reliance on
the traditional tale illuminates the extent to which mid-Victorian reworkings of fairy
tales served as a means to reflect contemporary issues and anxieties, especially when
they hinged upon the construction of femininity.
Relevant to my discussion here is the feminist reading of the Wicked Stepmother
and the mirror’s voice by Gubar and Gilbert.18 Arguing that the Queen both abides
17 Unsigned review of Wilkie Collins, Armadale, Spectator, 39 (1866): 638–40, 639.

by and tries to escape the patriarchal voice of the mirror, Gubar and Gilbert read her
as an actress, subject to the stage-manager’s directions yet eager to stage her own
independence, playing deceptive parts and inventing new means to murder Snow
White. Ironically, the Queen’s anxiety over her own loss of physical attractiveness
is displaced onto Snow White, her mirror image, with the murder plot reflecting
Snow White’s ‘training’ in femininity before marriage. The very plots the Queen
invents—especially the poisoned comb, the suffocating set of tight laces, and the
poisoned apple cooked in a secret kitchen—all turn out to be feminine weapons in
the arsenal of female cosmetics. Thus, the wicked actress, like a Madame Rachel
who adds arsenic to her lotions, in fact merely reenacts the controlled male scripts
she wanted to wipe off the surface of the glass: Snow White is crystallized by the
glass coffin, murdered by her own aestheticization.
In Armadale, however, Gwilt does not seek to murder Snow White (that is,
another version of herself). Unlike the Queen, she projects the sadistic voice of the
mirror onto the two male protagonists and plots to kill the two Armadales. She will
marry Midwinter under his real name, kill Allan to claim his fortune, and then break
Midwinter’s heart by denying she is his wife. Hence, Gwilt intends to undermine the
patriarchal ideology expressed by the voice in the mirror. However, like the Wicked
Stepmother in Snow White, Gwilt is led to multiply her plots. Her three vain attempts
at murder convey a message about femininity which Gwilt refuses to hear.
First, in a revised version of the poisoned apple plot, Gwilt tries to poison Armadale
by pouring a dose of arsenic into his brandy. The scene is fraught with references
to the case of Madeleine Smith. Given Gwilt’s relationship with Oldershaw, who
supplies her with laudanum, we may speculate that the arsenic she uses comes from
Oldershaw’s beauty parlour, drawing an even stronger parallel between Gwilt and
the alleged murderess. But as fate would have it, Armadale is allergic to brandy
and faints before swallowing it. Gwilt’s trick casts doubt on her innocence when
Midwinter recognizes one of the murder scenes from Allan’s dream: ‘I saw her touch
the Shadow of the Man with one hand, and give him a glass with the other. He took the
glass, and handed it to me. At the moment when I put it to my lips, a deadly faintness
came over me’ (563). Not only does Midwinter’s hand hold the poisoned glass, but
the dream manuscript also intimates the heroine’s guilt: she becomes the Shadow of
the Woman in Allan’s prophetic dream, as if the male text had captured the shape of
her body and engraved it on the paper. Like the mirror in Snow White, which fixes
female beauty and frames femininity the better to enforce patriarchy’s sentences, the
dream manuscript traps the murderess, coercing woman’s subservience and hinting
at her inevitable failure in a male-dominated world.
Having failed in her poisoning plan, Gwilt then asks her former lover Manuel
to board Armadale’s ship and drown him. Once again, her criminal plot depends
on male hands and is bound to fail, all the more so because it merely reenacts the
fathers’ murder scene a generation before. The woman’s murderous design can never
be achieved; she cannot hold the pen to write the end of the story. Male texts only
serve to capture Gwilt, dictating and imposing her fate and silencing her voice.
After putting on her ‘widow’s costume from head to foot’ (594) in order to play
[1978] 1984), 38–40.

‘[her] new character’ (594), and turning to the glass to check the effect, Gwilt hears
that Armadale has escaped unscathed. While the glass marks the woman’s failure
as a plotter, the arch-actress still cannot decipher the male narrative located in the
mirror. As if mesmerized by her own reflection and too confidently convinced of
her seductive powers, she blindly devises her ultimate plot: to trap Armadale in Dr.
Downward’s (or Le Doux’s) sanatorium—an institution meant to cure neurasthenic
female patients—and use one of the doctor’s gases to murder Armadale while he
sleeps.
The attempted murder in the sanatorium is the most telling one since it encapsulates
the patriarchal precepts Gwilt has tried to evade and that keep haunting her. Gwilt
intends to turn Downward’s disciplinary establishment to her advantage, using the
doctor to kill Armadale. The glass once more inspires her (619), and Downward
agrees to give her his aid on condition that she stay in his sanatorium ‘in the character
of a Patient’ (618) and impersonate his ‘First Inmate’ (636).
Downward’s establishment hosts female patients suffering from ‘shattered
nerves—domestic anxiety’ (636). The sanatorium uncannily recalls Oldershaw’s
beauty parlour,19 since both impose Victorian gender ideologies in the guise of
improving women’s bodies or curing them of their ailments. But as in No Name,
fashioning and framing the female body is ultimately in the hands of the medical
profession. If women were in part enabled to engage in an artful masquerade while
invisibly enacting patriarchal scripts in Oldershaw’s salon, they are unambiguously
and unquestioningly monitored in Downward’s sanatorium. Its panoptical architecture
carefully separates every room from the next and every floor from the one above;
the rooms can all be observed, opened and oxygenated by the quack physician.
Poisons and gases are used to heal the patients. Like Oldershaw’s cosmetics which
‘grind’ female flesh, Downward’s poisons subdue unruly womanhood;20 and
pseudochemistry even more powerfully controls the definition of woman.
19 In Pimlico, Oldershaw’s salon and Downward’s office are part of the same building,
and the suggestion that Downward may have been an abortionist strengthens his links with
Madame Rachel’s fictional twin: ‘At one side was the shop-door, having more red curtains
behind the glazed part of it, and bearing a brass plate on the wooden part of it, inscribed
with the name of “Oldershaw.” On the other side was a private door, with a bell marked
Professional; and another brass plate, indicating a medical occupant on this side of the house,
for the name on it was “Doctor Downward.” If even brick and mortar spoke yet, the brick
and mortar here said plainly, “We have got our secrets inside, and we mean to keep them”’
(340). As I have underlined in the preceding chapter with the example of Frampton’s Pill (like
many other pills, claiming to renew menstruation and thus acting as abortifacients), cosmetics
and medicines addressed to the female body all hinted at female sexuality (see Roy Porter,
Quacks: Fakers and Charlatans in English Medicine [Tempus: Stroud, [1989] 2001], 132).
20 The world of free-market medicine tended to be associated with sexually improper
behaviour. Some patches and cure-alls (most containing arsenic, which was also believed to
be an aphrodisiac) were meant to conceal or cure venereal infections (see Hartman, Victorian
Murderesses, 40; Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650–
1900 [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001], 78). Humorously enough, Oldershaw’s former
name, Mrs. Mandeville, may recall Bernard Mandeville and his Treatise on the Hypochondriak
and Hysteric Diseases (1730), in which he encouraged sexual fulfilment.
Mirroring Oldershaw and her enamelling establishment, Downward, the
stereotypical Victorian quack, foregrounds medicine as a stage show ruled by a
market economy. His sanatorium, smelling of ‘damp plaster and new varnish’ (587),
is a monstrous product of capitalism, advertised during his ‘Visitors’ day[s]’ (635)
and attracting ‘spectators’ (635). In his Dispensary, where he prepares such mixtures
as ‘Our Stout Friend’, Downward displays the placebo-drugs preferred by quack
doctors. Supposedly, ‘Our Stout Friend’ is a harmless liquid which produces a
poisonous gas when brought into contact with a ‘certain common mineral Substance’
(642). But Collins undermines any belief in the efficacy of Downward’s well-
advertised and well-labelled product when the narrative depicts him changing the
contents of the flask and filling the bottle with water and ‘certain chemical liquids’
(632) to create a ‘carefully-coloured imitation’ (642). With his dubious nostrums,
Downward thus appears a male version of the cosmetics dealer, enticing gullible
women with wondrous products and promises of escape from domesticity, the better
to mould them in accordance with Victorian gender ideologies.
In Armadale, both the beauty parlour and the medical establishment highlight the
dangers of woman’s aestheticization and commodification. Tempted by the promise
of subversive power or, more modestly, by proposed days of rest away from the
demands of domesticity, women constantly come under the yoke of patriarchy. Efforts
to improve or heal the female body thus imprint the marks of patriarchal ideology
upon it. A ‘commodity spectacle’, the female body is constantly subjected to social
scrutiny. The fatalistic structure of Collins’s plot functions as a warning against
female waywardness in a male-dominated society. Like Jean Ingelow’s Mopsa,
Gwilt has been captured within precast scenarios ‘dreamt’ by men and can but abide
by their dictates and enact woman’s prescribed roles. Consequently, Gwilt’s criminal
experiments in chemistry are bound to fail. Gwilt is, in fact, naively led to obey
the doctor’s orders, since Downward has already prepared the deadly fumigation
with which she will try to kill Armadale. Far from escaping the patriarchal voice
of the mirror, Gwilt signs her own death warrant by choosing the sanatorium as her
last murder scene. Midwinter and Armadale have exchanged rooms, and the deadly
fumes she lets out through the funnel are killing the man she loves. Her last role is
the most melodramatic of all; Gwilt saves Midwinter before locking herself up in
the poisoned room. Crystallized for ever in one of Downward’s cells, perhaps now
designed for exhibition along with the doctor’s other ‘glass jars, in which shapeless
dead creatures of a dead white colour [float] in yellow liquid’ (588), Gwilt dies.
The plot invokes the whole paraphernalia of female duplicity, then, the better to
underline its limits: the female actress is, after all, the victim of fate, or rather, a mere
puppet in the hands of patriarchy.
Using typically sensational motifs and the theme of female treachery, Collins’s
novel investigates the construction of femininity from within its spectacular society.
Yet, more than underlining feminist claims, Collins’s discourse seems darkened
by the fatalistic nature of the plot. Whether women visit the beauty parlour, or the
milliner, or even the doctor, the male gaze distinguishes the actress from the lady
even as the female characters collapse the difference between the two. A few years
later, Collins again examines the commodification of women and its consequences,
in a novel in which an ugly woman commits suicide through an overdose of arsenic.
With woman’s complexion as the main motif of The Law and the Lady (1875),
Collins once more shows us the dangers that await women within the looking-glass
of Victorian domesticity. However, he treats the question of male responsibility for
these perils with more ambiguity than he does in Armadale, reaching the verdict of
‘Not Proven.’
Chapter Nine
Wilkie Collins’s Modern Snow White

Arsenic Consumption and Ghastly Complexions in
The Law and the Lady (1875)
In The Law and the Lady, Collins continues his critique of woman’s commodification,
going even further this time in his flirtation with the Gothic. Although there is
no echo of the motif of the double in Armadale, female shadows haunt The Law
and the Lady, turning the heroine’s investigation into her husband’s past into a
Radcliffean quest into femininity. If Mrs. Milroy figured as a grotesque picture of the
commodified woman in Armadale, in The Law and the Lady a plain female character
anxious about her personal appearance lays the foundations of the plot. Interestingly,
Collins strongly relies on stereotypical Gothic imagery and gives a morbid tinge
to the ideal complexion of the Victorian angel. Like Bluebeard’s wives, Collins’s
female characters experience male cruelty and strive to transform themselves to
please men—even when the remedies are lethal. While the novel’s main secret lies
in a dead woman’s toilet case among her cosmetics, the deciphering of the enigma
involves decoding the signs of femininity as so many incriminating clues paving the
way for the truth.
Wilkie Collins’s Marital Gothic
With its focus on a daring female detective, Collins’s The Law and the Lady matches
Michelle Massé’s definition of ‘marital Gothic’,1 a typical nineteenth-century use of
the Gothic in which the story starts where eighteenth-century Gothic left off. Indeed,
while Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe closed their narratives with a wedding
as a mark of restored order, nineteenth-century Gothic starts when ‘[p]erfect love
supposedly has cast out fear [and] yet horror returns in the new home of the couple,
conjured up by renewed denial of the heroine’s identity and autonomy.’2 Collins’s
novel opens on a marriage ceremony with the final words of the Protestant marriage
service in The Book of Common Prayer, which posit the wife’s subservience to the will
of her husband: ‘the holy women … being in subjection unto their own husbands.’3
1 Michelle A. Massé, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 20–29.
2 Massé, In the Name of Love, 20.
3 Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady (Ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, [1875] 1992), 7. Subsequent references to this edition will be given in the
text.
Once the vows have been pronounced, the heroine, Valeria Brinton, ominously signs
her married name (Woodville) instead of her maiden one. As such, then, the novel
presents a plot revolving around female identity through marriage, thereby recalling
prototypical Gothic tales which explore women’s nightmarish domestic lives. In
Radcliffe’s stories, the naive female character usually falls prey to a male villain
and experiences the violence of a male-dominated world.4 Metaphors of entrapment
and literal imprisonment frame the heroine’s experience through powerlessness.
Fleenor’s definition of ‘female Gothic’, which encapsulates and redefines Ellen
Moers’s initial coining of the term,5 claims that such Gothic is grounded on the
patriarchal paradigm that ‘the woman is motherless, defective, and defined by a male
God.’6 The self-divided heroine is a ‘reflection of patriarchal values’, and her quest
frequently leads her to investigate ‘whether she is anything but reflection.’7 Such
feminist views posit that, even if the threats jeopardizing the life of the heroine are
often dispelled by the end of the novel, the plots foreground female victimization in
order to dramatize woman’s self-abnegating role within patriarchy. Anne Williams
also traces the ‘Gothic myth’ in the patriarchal family, with Lacan’s ‘Law of the
Father’ as the leading principle of the cultural order. As a staple of Gothic structure,
Williams uses the tale of Bluebeard, featuring the villain’s crimes in secret chambers
and seeking to castigate its curious heroine. By trying to affirm male power, the
tale exposes significant structures of cultural power, limiting woman’s freedom and
dramatizing man’s superior position.8 As Williams puts it, ‘sexual “difference” is
indeed the “key” to the secrets of the patriarchal power structure.’9
4 See Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for

Women (London: Routledge, [1982] 1990).
5 Ellen Moers, ‘Female Gothic’, Literary Women (London: The Women’s Press
Limited, 1978), 90–110. Moers’s definition only takes into consideration Gothic narratives
written by women. Her point is that female Gothic triggers physiological dread meant to
express fears related to childbirth. Fleenor enlarges her definition by focusing on the patriarchal
paradigm inherent in all Gothic narratives by women. In her study of Wilkie Collins and the
Female Gothic, Tamar Heller argues that Collins uses the Female Gothic formula both to
express female victimization and to intimate potential feminine subversion. As we will see,
her analysis of marginalized women as images of female empowerment corresponds more to
the female figures evoked in Anne Williams’s definition of the male Gothic. See Tamar Heller,
Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic (Yale: Yale University Press, 1992).
6 Juliann E. Fleenor (ed.), The Female Gothic (London: Eden Press, 1983), 11.
7 Fleenor, The Female Gothic, 12.
8 Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), 43.
9 Williams, Art of Darkness, 43. Williams sets the tale as a framework to Gothic
narratives but later on associates it with the Male Gothic tradition. Indeed, her study
distinguishes two gender-orientated formulas, Male Gothic and Female Gothic (which do not
necessarily depend on the authors’ gender). In the Male Gothic, the plots are tragic, ending
with the hero’s death and aiming at eradicating the woman whose transgressive sexuality
endangers the patriarchal order. A sexual perversity that seeks to destroy the woman’s virtue is
also a recurrent plot device. In the Female Gothic, which deals with terror more than horror, the
patriarchal assumptions are rewritten from a woman’s viewpoint so as to offer the heroine the
opportunity to ‘affirm … “feminine” strength’ (138). Willliams denounces feminist analyses
Wilkie Collins’s Modern Snow White 161
As a matter of fact, the tale of Bluebeard seems to be part and parcel of Collins’s
novel. As seen through Collins’s reworking of Snow White in Armadale, his use
of fairy tales generally figures as a means to probe contemporary ideologies
of femininity. Multiple hints at Bluebeard inform the narrative which plays on
the heroine’s curiosity and describes her prying into her husband’s affairs, her
transgression of feminine propriety as she enters an exclusively male sphere, that of
the law. Indeed, the novel deals with a woman investigating her husband’s legal past,
his own trial for murdering his wife, with a verdict of ‘Not Proven.’ More than just
illustrating patriarchal power and female powerlessness, the tale makes visible the
construction of woman: as she encounters the female ghosts of the past, Valeria must
face reflections of her own self. Hence, Collins’s revisiting of the traditional fairy
tale acts as a literary shortcut to explore the situation and nature of woman. Like
Flora in Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses whose self is projected everywhere
in the land of ‘Nowhere’ and whose body is sadistically pricked by boys, Valeria
experiences a dangerous journey through femininity where her own self is refracted
in the female characters she meets along her path. The relationship between the
husband’s trial and the female protagonist’s own legal situation as a wife seems to
be the issue at stake, as if woman’s condition in marriage could only be embedded in
plots dealing with male criminality. If The Law and the Lady is grounded on a series
of secrets, it does not, however, rely on Gothic clichés merely to shortcut the mystery
of the male protagonist as another murderous Gothic villain, but rather to investigate
the construction of female identity within patriarchal society, within ‘the law’ that
establishes woman’s place in Victorian society. As a new version of Bluebeard
and female curiosity, The Law and the Lady leads the reader into a world peopled
with mysterious female figures, enigmatic ‘ladies’, whose decoding depends on
deciphering the revised buried manuscript. The husband’s trial, embedded within the
main plot, is itself made up of a series of other texts, among which is the husband’s
diary. Beneath this textual palimpsest lies the secret of the first Mrs. Macallan’s
death, the story of a woman who puts an end to her life when she discovers her
husband’s affection for Helena Beauly, an icon of femininity. Valeria’s investigation,
therefore, goes beyond the typical quests of Gothic heroines who strive to solve male
mysteries before being united to the perfect suitor. Here the Gothic villain and Prince
Charming are one and the same, both tainted by ostensible murderous impulses and
digging graves for their future brides so as to imprison them in a macabre marital
institution. As though the detective story was meant to prepare Valeria for her new
role as a wife and mother, the Gothic motifs that frame the investigation hint at the
darker aspects of Victorian wedlock.
Indeed, the narrative rewrites the Radcliffean plot of domestic victimization: the
mysterious lame husband, now self-sacrificial and fragile (‘I must make the sacrifice’
of Gothic fiction which often base their interpretations on plots of female victimization and
demonization belonging to the Male Gothic tradition and which fail to take into account the
positive aspects of the heroine’s identity quest. Contrary to feminist critics, Williams objects
to seeing passivity and dependence as ‘signs of weakness’ (139). I shall further underline the
extent to which her definition of the Female Gothic really offers the woman a satisfactory
identity quest.
[20]; ‘you don’t know how I have been tortured’ [35]),10 now laughing unnaturally as
a coarse villain, captures his wife with his fishing-rod, the bride at once sees herself
in terms of alienation, as a mere reflection in the looking-glass already severed from
its origin, and the bleak wedding is soon tainted by secrecy which casts a ‘shadow’
(37) on the relationship. Caught up in the marital institution, bound to an enigmatic
husband, Valeria experiences clichéd hysterical symptoms: she becomes ‘nervous’
(23), ‘irritable’ (23), restless and uneasy, suspecting danger. Going through her
husband’s personal belongings, she discovers a secret compartment in his toilet case
containing, along with ‘bottles and pots and brushes and combs [and] perfumes and
pomatums’ (24), his mother’s picture. This first female version triggers the detective
plot: it not only intertwines cosmetics with femininity, setting the mother’s portrait
against the backdrop of beauty products, but it also foreshadows the meeting of
Valeria and her mother-in-law. When Valeria meets Eustace’s mother, Mrs. Macallan,
the latter understands that her son has married Valeria under an assumed name and
warns Valeria of her ominous fate. Then, as a stereotypical Gothic heroine, Valeria,
locked up in her own bedroom and starting at the sound of knocks (38), refuses to
listen to her husband’s orders to ‘control [her] curiosity’ (54):
‘Listen to this’, he said. ‘What I am now going to say to you, I say for the first, and last,
time. Valeria! if you ever discover what I am now keeping from your knowledge—from
that moment you live a life of torture; your tranquillity is gone. Your days will be days of
terror; your nights will be full of horrid dreams—through no fault of mine, mind! through
no fault of mine!’ (54)
The text, therefore, roots the marital relationship in an atmosphere of male violence:
should Valeria seek the keys to the secret door of knowledge, then her life will turn
into a nightmare for having disobeyed her husband’s orders. In fact, her quest for
knowledge is about to multiply versions of her own self. As suggested, manifest
allusions to Bluebeard recur regularly throughout the text: because the marriage
in the past appears to be embedded in the marriage in the present, the new bride
needs to investigate the secrets of her husband’s first marriage to save her own.
As in Bluebeard, the way in which the past comes to shape the present displays a
picture of women’s lives in marriage as endless repetition, as sterile and oppressive
reproduction. Valeria’s quest, consequently, consists in investigating a social structure
more than an individual event. The fate of Eustace’s first wife mirrors her own fate
as it reflects the fate of all women.
Like other feminists who identify ‘matrophobia’ in Gothic fiction and read
the heroine’s quest as a desire to stop the mother’s fate from being visited upon
the daughter, Michelle Massé locates Gothic anxieties in such fears of repetition.
According to her, suppression of identity is the trauma at the core of marital Gothic,
marring the past, tainting the present, and threatening the future.11 Valeria is thus
10 Like the other men in the novel, Eustace has a feminine constitution, being ill,
weak, or depressed whenever he has to face an ordeal. He falls ill after his first wife’s death
and suffers from physical and nervous symptoms throughout Valeria’s investigation.
11 Massé, In the Name of Love, 18. Massé studies how the heroine’s marriage is
but a shift from a despotic father to the husband as a surrogate father figure. The heroine’s
deciphering and vicariously experiencing the loss of identity her ‘foremothers’ have
suffered from, thereby decoding her own trauma. Her nervous body maps out her
own quest into the fibres of femininity. Hence, she faints when she reads of Sara
Macallan’s end. In a novel which presents femininity as a gallery of likenesses,
Valeria is threatened with becoming one of the seven beheaded wives of Bluebeard,
undifferentiated and following the same deadly path. For the heroine uncannily
resembles all the other women, as if her identity could not be dissociated from the
other female figures of the novel. Valeria reminds Major Fitz-David of Madame
Mirliflore because of her ‘prodigious tenacity of purpose’ (69), she has the same
‘carriage of the head’ (84) as one lady, and ‘the same creamy paleness’ (194) as
another. Most importantly, her figure seems a replica of Sara Macallan’s (215), a
‘reflection of the dead and gone’ (218), which enables her to get acquainted with
Sara’s unrequited lover Dexter. ‘Deadly iteration’, in Delamotte’s terms,12 continually
illustrates Valeria’s feeling of entrapment in the marital institution and signals her
portentous doom.
Valeria’s epistemological quest becomes, therefore, less male-orientated than
female-orientated. Her own reflections in various looking-glasses orchestrate her
investigation: if she looks at herself at the beginning of the novel, comparing her
hair to the Venus de’ Medici’s, she also checks her image before visiting every single
male witness throughout her investigation. As shall be seen, as her reflection marks
her subscription to male standards of feminine beauty—and, therefore, her subjection
to the male appraising gaze—it gradually foregrounds Valeria’s own alienation.
Seemingly, her urge to check her reflection fashions her into a double of Eustace’s
first wife, who ‘never wearied of looking at herself in [the] glass’ (132). Moreover,
it adumbrates as well the series of frames and reflections which Valeria is about to
encounter. All through her quest, Valeria must learn to read images of alternative
selves which have been embedded in stories, themselves carefully intertwined
within buildings, hidden in drawers and secret rooms, which all contain the secret of
femininity, the mystery of woman’s condition in mid-nineteenth-century England.
As in Gothic novels, the architecture paves the way for the discovery of the truth,
and Valeria must walk along the ‘gallery of the past’ (15) to decode the houses that
have embodied the mystery of femininity. Interestingly, investigating Gothic locales
and reflecting devices, Valeria is gradually led to face her own framing: the portraits
and images of women or the buried female corpses reflect versions of femininity that
are parts of herself. As her own boundaries flow into other female versions, Valeria
struggles to contain her own self and to secure the key to her own identity.
Fearful Symmetries: Reflections and Replications
The first stage in Valeria’s investigation consists in visiting Major Fitz-David,

Eustace’s reference when he proposed to Valeria. Because Valeria’s ‘whole future
trauma thus results from her realization that her suppression of identity is rooted in her male-
dominated culture.
12 Eugenia C. Delamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century
Gothic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 93.
[depends] upon the effect [she] produce[s] on Fitz-David at first sight’ (55),
enhancing her femininity is the first of Valeria’s tasks. Ambiguously close to the
morally dubious woman, she is dressed and brushed, while make-up and pearl powder
endow her skin with ‘a false fairness’, giving a ‘false colour’ to her cheeks and a
‘false brightness’ (57) to her eyes. Cosmetics go hand-in-hand with masquerading.
Pearl-powder, as a chambermaid argues, acting on woman’s complexion, is the most
important tool to accomplish woman’s metamorphosis. Far from being natural,
femininity is, therefore, foregrounded as a subversive act, linked to the world of
pretence and, ironically, here associated with the working-classes. Hence Valeria
‘step[s] out of [her] own character’ (57–9) and enters Fitz-David’s stage. Cosmetics,
indeed, literally give Valeria the key to Fitz-David’s house. The latter, a womanizer
surrounded by beautiful mistresses, agrees to lend her keys to search the room so that
she may find out the truth about her husband’s secret by herself, and he may remain
guiltless of revealing the truth.
Like the husband, the Major hovers between versions of the male villain and
the feminized man, a sacrificial ‘lamb’ (70) scarred on the head by female power,
submissively kneeling before Valeria (71). Yet, as a revised version of Bluebeard,
Fitz-David observes her from behind semiclosed doors, following her search in
the study. Like Bluebeard’s wife’s investigation, Valeria’s survey of the furniture
directs the investigation towards a search into replicas of the female self. The motif
of the double is the pattern around which the decoration of the room is constructed:
two shorter walls, two card-tables, two china bowls, two little chairs, two corners,
two antique upright cabinets in buhl, two bronze reproductions of the Venus Milo
and the Venus Callipyge (76–7). Playing with antagonistic versions of femininity,13
this claustrophobic world of endless replications, of ‘twin landmarks’ (82), is,
nevertheless, upset by the presence of a single vase on one of the shelves of the
bookcase. The vase exhibits two medallions, one representing a woman’s head, ‘a
nymph, or a goddess’, the other a man’s head ‘also treated in the classical style’
(81). Having observed Fitz-David’s portraits of ladies, Valeria unlocks the two
cupboards under the bookcase, themselves made up of two compartments. There,
Valeria’s nerves play strange tricks on her as she starts trembling and shuddering at
the ‘oppressive’ (85) silence or ‘the creaking of a man’s boots, descending the stairs’
(85). Valeria’s excitability and lack of self-control give an uncanny dimension to her
next discovery. Among Fitz-David’s costly curiosities, a ‘gorgeously-bound book
[of] blue velvet, with clasps of silver worked in the beautiful arabesque patterns,
and with a lock of the same precious metal to protect the book from prying eyes’
(86) stirs her curiosity, and ‘[b]eing a woman, [she] open[s] the book, without a
moment’s hesitation’ (87). The discovery is, of course, tantamount to the revelation
of Bluebeard’s wife when she enters the forbidden room. The strangely unclasped
book hosts a series of female remains, locks of hair that are so many reminders of
the Major’s former mistresses:
13 The two Greek statues embody antagonistic notions of femininity. As Jenny Bourne
Taylor notes, the Melos Venus stands for pure classical feminine beauty while the narcissistic
Callipygian Venus is sexually provocative. J.B. Taylor, in Wilkie Collins, The Law and the
Lady, 421–2.
And what did these highly ornamented pages contain? To my unutterable amazement
and disgust, they contained locks of hair let neatly into the centre of each page—with
inscriptions beneath, which proved them to be love-tokens from various ladies, who had
touched the Major’s susceptible heart at different periods of his life. The inscriptions were
written in other languages besides English; but they appeared to be equally devoted to the
same curious purpose—namely, to reminding the Major of the dates at which his various
attachments had come to an untimely end. Thus, the first page exhibited a lock of the
slightest flaxen hair, with these lines beneath: ‘My adored Madeline. Eternal constancy.
Alas: July 22nd, 1839!’ The next page was adorned by a darker shade of hair, with a
French inscription under it: ‘Clémence. Idole de mon âme. Toujours fidèle. Hélas: 2me
Avril, 1840!’ A lock of red hair followed … More shades of hair, and more inscriptions
followed … (87)
The ‘untimely end[s]’ of the major’s attachments are redolent of the untimely deaths
of Bluebeard’s wives and foreshadow Valeria’s discovery. In this morbid gallery
of fetishized women, Valeria finds a small photograph, which slips from the last
blank pages, showing her husband with an ugly woman wearing a wedding ring.
On the back of the picture, she can read: ‘To major Fitz-David with two vases.’ The
reference to the two vases reminds her of the single vase on the bookshelf displaying
the faces of a man and a woman. As we learn later, the missing double was broken by
the Major’s future prima-donna in a fit of jealousy. When the prima-donna explains
to Valeria that she was reading a book about trials and threw it at the female face on
the vase because the woman was said to look like her rival Lady Clarinda, she not
only gives Valeria the key to the mystery but enhances as well the horror of female
duplication. The obsessive images of repetition and doubling lead Valeria to realize
her own loss of identity. In this world where every single woman resembles another,
Valeria discovers that her husband has already been married and that he was tried for
poisoning his first wife.
As a Victorian Gothic plot device, the trial report (hidden between the bookcase
and the wall) functions as the recovered manuscript enclosing the crimes of the
past. The trial investigates what lies beneath Eustace’s gentleman-like demeanour:
he married Sara (who was desperately in love with him) to spare her the shame of
fallenness, while he was in love with another woman. But his physical neglect of
his wife is synonymous with marital violence: Eustace appears as a ‘cold-blooded
brute’, and one of the female witnesses ‘would [prefer being] actually beaten, like
the women among the lower orders, than be treated with [such] polite neglect and
contempt’ (159). Thus, the husband oscillates between the figure of the victim,
‘fettered to a woman with whom [he] has not a single feeling in common’ (161),
and that of the Gothic villain physically repelled by his wife and seeking to get rid
of her. The ambivalent narrative consequently hovers between a female Gothic plot,
intimating feminist discourse, and a male Gothic narrative, playing with images of
the monstrous woman. The ambiguous ‘spectre of the poisoned woman’ (112) may
warn Valeria of her fate as Eustace’s wife or haunt the feminized male with her
poisonous sexuality. Deciphering the ghost’s encoded meaning leads Valeria to the
most Gothic realm of the novel when she visits Miserrimus Dexter who was in love
with the deceased and, in the Major’s fashion, cut off one of Sara Macallan’s locks as
a souvenir. Using female body parts as keepsakes, Dexter introduces the detective to
his Palace where Valeria must find the missing key to prove her husband’s innocence
or guilt.
Still drawing on the tale of Bluebeard to further Valeria’s quest into gender
relations, the scenes in the Palace fashion a significant Gothic subtext. Miserrimus
Dexter is a deformed and mad cripple, ‘literally the half of a man … absolutely
deprived of the lower limbs’ (173) and yet with a handsome and harmonious face.
The grotesque character is a patchwork of womanly and manly features which blur
gender distinctions. Like the other ambivalent males of the novel, the hypochondriac
and hypersensitive Dexter suffers from female nervous ailments, while his misnamed
companion, Ariel, is a manly version of the submissive wife, ‘a creature half alive;
an imperfectly-developed animal in shapeless form, clad in a man’s pilot jacket, and
treading in a man’s heavy laced boots; with nothing but an old red flannel petticoat,
and a broken comb in her frowsy flaxen hair, to tell us that she was a woman’ (210).
Ariel is her master’s slave, illustrating the ‘mute obedience of a trained animal’
(213), crouching on the rug and demanding to be punished and beaten (302) or
letting herself be her master’s puppet, with strings around her wrists which Dexter
may cruelly and violently pull whenever she reaches out for a cake (326).14 Dexter
manipulates Ariel as he handles paint brushes. As a result, Ariel is safely contained
by the painter’s artistry, appearing as a comic illustration of feminine representation
gone mad. The couple live in a modern adaptation of the Gothic castle, an ancient
house in a dirty, dreary, and maze-like northern suburb of London, littered with
boards, bricks, and broken crockery. On the walls of Dexter’s derelict ‘monument of
the picturesque and the beautiful’ (203), his own horrific ‘daubs’ (229) show bloody
corpses, disembowelled horses, dissected cats, and tortured, skinned, or roasting
saints. In the kitchen, hidden behind closed curtains, photographs representing
‘the various forms of madness taken from the life’ (247) and plaster casts of the
heads of famous murderers are exhibited. Similarly, gendering Dexter’s crime and
punishment display, a ‘frightful little skeleton of a woman [hangs] in a cupboard,
behind a glazed door’, with the line ‘Behold the scaffolding on which beauty is
built’ (247). Displayed behind transparent panels, beauty now replaces curiosity as
a feminine sin: the woman is caught in the ideology of a culture which constructs
her through vanity and objectifies her as a work of art. Alienated and reified, like the
mechanized Ariel, woman is punished for her potential vanity, and Dexter ‘hold[s]
the key’ (211) to the skeleton’s cupboard: in his looking-glass Palace, Dexter inverts
gender roles and Ariel endlessly combs, brushes, oils, and perfumes her master.
However, such a ‘missing key’ (305) is the key to the solution. The whole plot
revolves around missing keys, and Valeria, like Bluebeard’s wife or Alice in Carroll’s
fantasy, must realize that in this male-dominated world women have no key. As a
matter of fact, the keys that give pace to the narrative metaphorize the boundaries
of the female self that Valeria is investigating. The secret consists in discovering the
missing key in Sara’s room, the key opening the door to the secret of woman’s beauty
aids. In the same way as Dexter holds the key to the female skeleton behind the
glass, he kept the key to Sara’s bedroom. The crystallized female corpse functions,
14 Dexter also shows at times signs of masochism which render his role even more
ambiguous: ‘Make me suffer for it. Take a stick and beat me. Tie me down to a chair’ (240).
therefore, as a symbolical miniature that Valeria must decode. The glass panels
behind which the female skeleton is exhibited do not fashion any Crystal Palace:
the utopian fantasies conveyed by glass structures are now but representations of
woman’s macabre crystallization. The construction of female beauty, designed to
efface the mysterious nature of woman and to show her smooth and artificial body,
becomes morbid. If the glass panels imprint the jaundice on Slime’s face in Rossetti’s
Speaking Likenesses, here, the female body is only figured as a set of bones. And
this symbolical representation of the construction of femininity must be read as a
clue to solve the mystery of Sara Macallan’s death. For Sara gave Dexter the key
to her room (so that he might have free access to her bedroom and/or lock her in
from the outside) in exchange for the keys to her husband’s locked diary kept in a
locked drawer. The typical Gothic motifs of the room that may be locked/unlocked
from the outside or of doubly locked male secrets foreground the notion that women
merely have the keys opening the door to an understanding of male sexuality: rape
metaphors intimate male sexual secrets, and while Dexter may give way to his
scopophilic drives, Eustace’s diary reveals ‘dangerous domestic secrets’ (401), that
is, his physical loathing of his wife and his desire for Helena Beauly.
Yet, perhaps more than viewing Eustace’s secrets in sexual terms, we might see
the secret concealed in his diary as a textual secret—his judgement on female beauty.
What Eustace’s diary records is how far his plain wife is from the icon of beauty he
admires. The textual play on Helena Beauly’s name (Beauly/beauty) shapes the icon
of beauty as the embodiment of an illusory discourse on femininity which Helena
knows how to rehearse, exactly as she knows how to play parts when she goes to a
masked ball without anybody’s knowing. Helena Beauly is literally beautiful, hence,
a living representation, an enticing image of the feminine ideal. Comparing herself to
that fiction, as she would identify herself with an advertising model, Sara runs every
risk and suffers every pain to improve her complexion and try to match the ideal in
vain, as Eustace’s mother declares during the trial (168). Feminine representation is
deadly, and this is what Valeria deciphers through reading the signs of femininity the
narrative scatters behind glass doors and in toilet cases.
Probing the discourses which lie behind the glass, Valeria’s quest into femininity
leads her further and further towards texts buried ‘deeper and deeper’ (364). In fact,
the key to the mystery is concealed in a Gothic intertext. To entertain Ariel, Dexter
tells her an Italian romance set in the fifteenth century in the dark vaulted chamber
of a castle where Cunegonda and Damoride plan to poison Lady Angelica. As he
devises the story to make Valeria suspect Mrs. Beauly and her maid of poisoning Sara
Macallan, Dexter unconsciously intersperses ‘faint and fragmentary recollections of
a past time at Gleninch’ (344) which betray him: having access to Sara’s bedroom,
Dexter found in a waste paper basket his wife’s letter in which she confessed her
plan to commit suicide. Testifying to the male silencing of the woman’s voice,
Dexter’s suppression of Sara’s letter leads Valeria to look for the dead woman’s
buried manuscript. Changing Gleninch into a ‘dreary and dreadful’ (287) place, ‘as
gloomily heavy in effect as a prison’ (286), the narrative leads Valeria’s quest to a
dust-heap, where among torn hats, fragments of rotten old boots, and frowsy rags
(288), the pieces of the wife’s confession, like a dismembered female corpse, must
be unburied and reconstructed. The bourgeois mansion evolves into an oppressively
haunted dwelling where Valeria must unveil secret patriarchal truths.
The Plain Woman’s Buried Manuscript
From first to last, poor creature, she kept her secret; just as she would have kept her secret,
if she had worn false hair, or if she had been indebted to the dentist for her teeth. And there
you see her husband, in peril of his life, because a woman acted like a woman—as your
wives, Gentlemen of the Jury, would, in a similar position, act towards You. (181)
As Anne Williams demonstrates, if Gothic tales are always about patriarchy, the tale
of Bluebeard, in its exploration of female victimization, belongs to the male Gothic
tradition, to narratives aimed at suppressing the female voice and the female body, to
narratives which foreground a male perspective on woman’s roles, duties, and fate.
On the other hand, in the female Gothic tradition, Williams places tales which ‘offer
… the possibility of expressing a speaking subject at least partly outside the Law
of the Father’,15 and where gender relations are mutually transforming: the end of
the tale foregrounds a self-fulfilled heroine in a blissful match. Williams’s argument
therefore moves away from feminist analyses which see the helpless Radcliffean
heroine’s quest in terms of passivity and dependence. On the contrary, Williams
points to the myth of Psyche16 as a recurrent backdrop to female Gothic, providing
an alternative scenario to Bluebeard. As Williams explains, Psyche, as curious as
Bluebeard’s wife, nevertheless, submits to Aphrodite’s tasks and acknowledges the
power of others, finding a satisfying quest in the accomplishment of which she gains
a place in the cultural system and ‘realizes’ her self in marriage by being turned into
a goddess and a mother.17 Therefore, female curiosity, the desire to see the forbidden
male secret, successfully changes the Beast back into the Prince.
Psyche’s quest for happiness may be relevant in analyzing Collins’s novel.
Interestingly, one of Psyche’s tasks consists in bringing back a box of Persephone’s
beauty ointment from the underworld, which Psyche applies to her face for fear she
might no longer be attractive, before falling into a deep sleep. Like Psyche, Valeria
applies pearl powder to her face before going to Major Fitz-David’s where she falls
into some nightmarish netherworld in which husbands are tried for murdering their
wives.18 Psyche’s anxiety about her appearance and her attempt to turn herself into
an object of desire to please Eros reveal how the female body, whether assaulted
15 Williams, Art of Darkness, 175.

16 As Aphrodite had ordered that Psyche be exposed on a rock and die, Eros rescues
her and takes her to his palace. He visits her every night, but she must not look at him. Driven
by curiosity, Psyche lights her lamp one night, but she drops hot oil on his shoulder. Eros
wakes up and flies away in wrath. Aphrodite then gives Psyche four tasks to perform. Psyche,
depressed and pregnant with Eros’s child, is helped in all her tasks, until Eros saves her again
in her last labour, marries her, and transforms her into a goddess.
17 Williams, Art of Darkness, 158.
18 The idea of Valeria in a trance at Fitz-David’s is sustained by the fact that the
Major’s future prima-donna is singing Bellini’s La Somnambula (1831), where, as J.B. Taylor
notes, the heroine’s sleepwalking acts as a test of her virtue (421).
or embellished, is part and parcel of many a Gothic framework.19 Beyond general
claims that Gothic may empower or victimize women, be subversive or indoctrinate,
the construction of the female self often lies at the heart of Gothic anxieties, as
if defining and/or disciplining woman’s body was Gothic’s dominant discourse.
Psyche’s objectification gives her the key to the cultural order, since Eros rescues
Psyche once she has turned herself into a work of art. In Collins’s novel, scenes
centred on women’s looks give rhythm to the investigation, regularly emphasizing
fears concerning the female body. In their exploration of the nature of feminine
identity, both Sara and Valeria have recourse to the use of cosmetics. But the wives
appear as inverted mirror images, and the novel’s dramatic play with woman’s use
of cosmetics and self-aestheticization seems to disclose two Gothic traditions, one
manifestly more masculine and violent, offering women only deadly ends, the other
seemingly more feminine, leading to a self-satisfying quest. With the female body
spanning the gap between male and female Gothic, Collins’s double narrative gives
us the key to envisaging what really separates Psyche from Bluebeard’s wife.
Indeed, the whole narrative is based on texts tackling the issue of the construction
of femininity, probing the secrets of woman’s toilet and analyzing feminine role-
play. As a striking alternative to the Gothic inquiry into the deceitful villain, the
investigation tries to decipher Sara Macallan’s elusive character or exposes the
disguises of Mrs. Beauly who leaves Gleninch at night to attend a masked ball.
Femininity is on trial, and women are constantly subjected to the reader’s gaze in a
novel which, ironically enough, reworks and inverts Madeleine Smith’s trial.20 While
the husband’s diary dwells on his physical repulsion for his wife, the trial discusses
Sara’s lack of attractiveness, the reasons why she should have used arsenic, her
reading of the Styrian practices of arsenic eating, and her conversations with Mrs.
Beauly on artificial means of improving the complexion. If white arsenic was known
as a violent poison in large doses, it was used as a tonic in minute doses.21 It was
particularly known to be largely used in Hungary by young women to enhance their
charm, giving ‘blooming complexions, and a full, rounded, healthy appearance.’22
As it ‘pad[ded] and plump[ed] out’23 the body, arsenic acted as any other beauty aid
and was denounced for creating an illusory appearance aimed at attracting men, as
a contemporary critic contends: ‘From the influence of … arsenic, no heart seems
secure; by their assistance, no affection unattainable. The wise woman whom the
charmless female of the East consults, administers to the desired one a philter, which
deceives his imagination, cheats him into the belief that charms exist and attractive
19 I am not contending here that the Greek myth is Gothic, of course. My interpretation
simply follows Anne Williams’s use of the myth in her exploration of the Gothic.
20 As we have seen, Eustace’s trial is a reversal of Smith’s: like her letters, his diary
is read out in court; the excuses used to obtain the arsenic are identical and the verdict is the
same.
21 Many other cosmetics, beauty washes, and unguents were known to contain
poisonous substances. Lead, mercury, or even bismuth existed in beauty products Victorian
women used every day.
22 ‘The Narcotics We Indulge In, Part II’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 74 (Dec.
1853): 678–95, 688.
23 ‘The Narcotics’, 689.
beauty where there are none, and defrauds him of a love which, with the truth before
him, he would never have yielded.’24
So the evidence presented in the trial revolves around femininity, and the
Gothic male secret becomes a woman’s secret dealing with cosmetic applications.
Furthermore, the female secret of arsenic intake is literally embedded in a
stereotypical Gothic network: like some skeleton hidden in wood panelling, the
main clue (the bottle containing arsenic) is dissimulated in the woman’s dressing
case’s ‘private repository, concealed in the place between the outer wood and the
lining’ (177). Woman’s attractiveness and objectification thus lie at the core of the
text, whether Sara is ‘an object of loathing’ (388) seeking to secure her husband’s
desire or an object of desire. Pleasing her husband and attracting the male gaze is,
indeed, what Sara plans as she swallows the arsenic, taking a double dose whenever
her husband fails to look at her. As if Sara could enhance her physical attractiveness
through death, as if the poison could highlight and beautify the female body on a
macabre stage, Sara’s death becomes an excessive demonstration of the damages
of patriarchal aesthetics, constructing beauty in a cosmetic tomb, like Snow White
sleeping in her glass coffin.25 Through her death, Sara tries literally to become
the ‘angel’ (298) Dexter saw in her, impersonating domestic perfection in vain by
digesting the illusory tropes of ideal womanhood that the poison has promoted.
However, Collins’s depressed Psyche soon evolves into a prototypically male
Gothic, transgressive, female figure. The wife’s obsession with her appearance
upsets the fragile divide separating the innocent and natural woman from the vain and
sexually assertive one. Instead of transforming Sara into the feminine ideal, her use
of cosmetics gradually appears to reflect her improper appetites. Like Bluebeard’s
blood-stained key, Sara’s body is tainted by male sexuality: her husband’s secret ink
has changed the chimerical and desirable domestic angel into an ‘avenging spirit’
(396) who oversteps all boundaries and whose mutilated pieces Valeria ‘disinter[s]
from their foul tomb’ (396). The smelly ‘unsightly mound’ (378) of the dust-heap
acts as a symbolic burial mound hosting the remains of the unattractive, even
repulsive, wife. For Sara’s letter and her corpse fuse to display a macabre picture of
24 ‘The Narcotics’, 689. I envisage here arsenic as a beauty product aiming to improve
woman’s attractiveness, thus matching the expectations of womanliness. Yet, even if at the
time body plumpness and rosy cheeks were praised in women, beauty manuals favoured pale,
bloodless models verging on sickness—which were seen as pure, virginal, and self-contained.
In most Victorian novels, plump and healthy women are frequently sexually assertive women.
In The Law and the Lady, through the motif of arsenic, Collins inverts expectations, making
the pale, sick, and ghost-like woman an embodiment of ugliness. Collins’s example is not
paradoxical, however. Interestingly enough, as the article ‘The Narcotics We Indulge In’
emphasizes, the withdrawal symptoms associated with arsenic consumption entailed ‘anxiety
about [one’s] own person, deranged digestion, loss of appetite, a feeling of overloading in the
stomach’—symptoms very similar to anorexia nervosa and which demonstrate how arsenic
consumption did not so much enhance woman’s physicality as it displayed a regulated and
disciplined body (688).
25 For a study of Snow White as an example of woman’s aestheticization, see Sandra M.
Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-
Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, [1979] 1984), 36–42.
femininity. In the same way as Sara elicited repulsion in her husband, her disunited
writing provokes horror in Valeria: ‘I shrink from touching it, or looking at it’ (411).
Sara Macallan’s fragmented letter reveals the unspeakable: treated as refuse, as some
shameful repressed material, Sara’s words reflect the patriarchal ideology which
fashions women as morally ambiguous commodities. Indeed, associated with the
dust-heap, woman is not only shaped as a valuable (the lawyer sees the monetary
value of the heap [78]), but she is also associated with forgery and hence artificiality:
the professional who manipulates the paper is an expert in cases of forgery (379). In
this way, the woman’s remains both typify Sara’s urge to match male expectations
and point to the figure of the woman of easy virtue. Buried under the household
refuse, Sara’s manuscript thus reveals the backstage of femininity in a far more
macabre way than Collins had done so far. As the novel closes on a deadly realm of
bodily decay and putrefaction, femininity literally falls apart.
Displaced onto a search for a lost manuscript, the narrative thus erases the
improper female body, leaving just the signs ‘woman’ is made of to question the
Victorian process of feminine construction. The husband is no longer the criminal,
and the text gets rid of the indecent woman through suicide. Cosmetic applications,
therefore, mask the text’s secrets, barely suggesting Sara’s vain struggle with
contradictory images of ideal womanhood. As the male detectives attempt to
collect and unite the scattered pieces of Sara’s letter, splitting them into two ‘so as
to artificially make a blank side’ (380), Sara’s body is rewritten by the detectives
who fill in the illegible passages before ultimately sealing them. At the end of the
inquiry, Sara’s buried self, her unrequited and foul desire concealed in refuse, is
finally silenced once more by her husband who leaves her secret sealed as a legacy
to his son.26 Wilkie Collins’s use of the Gothic mode throughout his novel engages,
therefore, the Victorian constructions of femininity. As he ambiguously plays with a
female character who strives to conform to her society’s scripts and uncannily verges
on monstrosity, Collins conflates and confuses male and female formulas. Even in
the most private female boudoir, the omnipotent Law of the Father erases the lady’s
identity, tracing the letters of some Gothic scenario where woman must obey man’s
rules. This is the truth Valeria learns in her fight for her identity, as she recovers her
place as a wife and mother. Gothic markers, hence, capture woman’s sociological
construction in their meshes, turning the freshly enamelled Victorian lady into a
monstrous, selfless ghost.
26 It will be remembered that all the personal items of the deceased were also sealed
for the investigation (143).
Conclusion
AN APROPOS SOLILOQUY
By a Girl of the Period.
To dye, or not to dye, that is the question:—

‘Whether ’tis nobler in the mind, to suffer’
Th’ outrageous colour of Dame Nature Born,
The very ‘head and front of my offending’
Against the fist of chameleon Fashion,
Or Summon Art to aid me? Shall I end
This heart-ache by the ‘hazard of a dye’
That Fashion dooms my hair to?—Dye:—a wash:—
No more:—Poison, perhaps? ay, that’s the rub
To bring paralysis […].1
As has been seen throughout this journey into mid-Victorian constructions of

femininity, Victorian fairy tales, fantasies, and sensation novels, whether rewriting
traditional folk tales or rehearsing versions of Cinderella, Snow White, Little Red
Ridinghood, or Bluebeard, investigate the way women were led to conform to and
to mould themselves in accordance with the dominant representations, ultimately
questioning the possibility for woman to be anything but reflection, as Collins’s The
Law and the Lady underlines. In all these narratives, the female body is projected
onto reflecting surfaces or haunted by doubles. As Mopsa discovers a world of
doubles women cannot escape in Ingelow’s Mopsa the Fairy, as Alice learns to draw
‘muchnesses’ in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, or as Flora visualizes
the slippage of the female self when her image is reflected everywhere in Rossetti’s
Speaking Likenesses, the female characters experience their own powerlessness in
fantastic realms where male figures handle their bodies and seek to construct them as
ethereal beings, as light women forbidden food and confined within glass structures.
In the sensation novels, copies of the feminine ideal also mark the narratives. From
Dickens’s Lady Dedlock and Braddon’s Lady Audley to Collins’s female protagonists,
the novels constantly construct the female body as a surface or as an image which the
female characters try to manipulate. Typifying the extent to which Victorian reality
was increasingly becoming elusive, chimerical, and, inevitably, malleable, Victorian
fairy tales and sensation novels alike provide us with a significant insight into the
construction of femininity. Resonating with artificiality, bound to representation and
moulded, as by a corset, to fit into a male-preferred pattern—while they threaten
to refuse to be made rigid—their heroines highlight the tensions inhering in the
definition of mid-century femininity.
1 ‘An Apropos Soliloquy’, Tomahawk 4 (1869): 46, in E.K. Helsinger, Robin

Lauterbach Sheets, and William Veeder. (eds), The Woman Question: Society and Literature
in Britain and America, 1837–1883 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 115.
Revealingly, what the female characters from Victorian fairy tales and sensation
novels illustrate is precisely the relationship between objects and images which
dominates the second half of the nineteenth century. Lady Audley and Lady
Dedlock, betrayed by their portraits, Wilkie Collins’s female protagonists, playing
with their reflections in the mirror, the fairy-tale heroines, locked up in glass palaces
and crystallized as images, or Carroll’s Alice fighting against her compulsion to
confuse images and objects, all bring to light the fragile foundations of femininity at
a time when photography seemingly asserted authenticity and could simultaneously
trick the viewer by disrupting the relationship between image and object. Hence, the
detective narratives seek to reunite bodies and images in order to secure categories
of femininity. Robert Audley or Inspector Bucket, trying to fix images and to frame
bodies, to capture improper women through photographic techniques or to draw a
reassuring picture, a seamless whole, magnify such a separation between object and
image. Furthermore, their urge to fashion mug shots (whether literal or figurative)
recalls all the better how the photograph can only be, as Roland Barthes contends, an
‘emanation of the referent’, an ‘ectoplasm of “what-had-been.”’2
Foregrounding the links between femininity, representation, and death—or
perhaps, the death of representation when dealing with femininity—the play of these
narratives with Victorian visual culture heralds later fiction, which also subverted the
legibility of visual representation of the female body. As a late Victorian example of
a narrative hinged upon the construction of the feminine ideal, George du Maurier’s
Trilby (1894) could thematize this issue. Trilby illustrates, indeed, the extent to which
the Victorian woman was, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century,
increasingly confined by representational codes while her body was more and more
subjected to aestheticization.3 When Trilby came out, its popularity revealed a craze
for woman’s codification, not just in literature, but in society as a whole: like Wilkie
Collins’s woman in white over thirty years before, the novel launched a Trilby mania,
and women dressed themselves like Du Maurier’s female character, wearing Trilby
slippers, hats, and coats.
Du Maurier’s novel recounts the story of an independent and self-assertive model
turned into an opera singer when mesmerized. Mesmerism, as a technique whereby
man can objectify and fix the female body as image, partakes of the construction of
the heroine as an icon of femininity. However, physically chastised by her music
master, who strikes her on the fingers when she fails to please his artistic expectations,
Trilby—or rather, Trilbys—exemplifies the contradictions fuelling the feminine ideal
all through the period. As the male artists of the novel try to elucidate the identity
and clear the mystery of the real Trilby, analyzing Trilby’s multiple photographs
exhibited in the windows of the Stereoscopic Company in all sizes and costumes,
they bring into play how notions of the feminine are grounded in artificiality and,
hence, are potentially threatening.
2 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard

Howard (London: Vintage, [1980] 2000), 80, 87. Barthes’s study of photography constructs
the photograph as a reminder of what is dead and what is going to die (96).
3 George Du Maurier, Trilby (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, [1894]
1998). Subsequent references to this edition will be given in the text.
Conclusion 175
Both angel and siren, Trilby is obsessively appropriated and commodified by the
male artists of the novel, so that the dangerous sexuality of the model may be kept at
bay and safely secured as under a sheet of plate-glass—like her fetishized left foot
painted on the studio’s wall by Little Billy and crystallized in glass by the landlord.
Trilby is, indeed, aestheticized from the start, cut up into idolized body parts. Her
feet, ‘such as one only sees in pictures and statues’ (15) are reproduced and turned
into art by the painters. While her body is thus turned into alabaster feet sold at
Brucciani’s, photographs or paintings sold at Christie’s, Trilby is gradually changed
into a young lady and learns how to behave herself. Growing more emaciated as the
plot develops, becoming more and more beautiful as the bones on her face show
forth until her death, her reification, of course, climaxes when she is mesmerized
by Svengali. Her thin face and haggard expression perfectly typify the ideal of
passivity the Victorians extolled. Almost inevitably, when hypnotized by Svengali’s
photograph after her master’s death, Trilby is eventually killed by the male artist
who has worked her too hard.
However, Trilby’s journey through aestheticization also reveals significant
tensions. Because the male characters of the novel constantly battle for mastery and
possession of the female body, Trilby falls apart and becomes double. On the one
hand, Little Billy’s Trilby is an angel of paradise looking ‘like the Madonna’ (297)
and, ironically, believed to be the real Trilby. On the other hand, Svengali’s Trilby is
the sleeping Trilby or the dead Trilby, the Other, ‘an unconscious Trilby of marble
… un écho, un simulacre’ (298). For the more passive she becomes under the control
of the music master who mesmerizes her, the more artificial her body appears. Her
thick light brown hair ‘tied behind and flowing all down her back to nearly her knees,
like those ladies in hairdressers’ shops who sit with their backs to the plate-glass
window to advertise the merits of some particular hair-wash’ (209), her rouged lips
and cheeks and her pearl-powdered face magnify the feminine ideal she embodies
as an artificial construct. As if photographed, she is turned into a flat surface. The
men, obsessed by her body parts, change her into a series of codes which highlights
her beauty. Hence, Trilby revealingly remains unreal throughout. Because her
identity—as an angel or as a living-dead—systematically stems from representation,
Trilby is continually a dangerous fiction. Ironically enough, moreover, in spite of
her constant objectification, her body, though cut into pieces, seems even ‘taller and
stouter, and her shoulders broader and more drooping’ (222) when she steps onto the
stage and sings.4 As if rebelling against the bounds which tie her to representation,
Trilby’s body thus contravenes the male artists’ attempts to control her and subtly
discards the codes of representation which strive to shape her body to perfection and
to change her self into a safely framed image.
Like Trilby, the female characters which have been examined throughout this
study hover between convention and rebellion, just like the narratives span the bridge
between fantasy and reality. While Victorian fairy tales and fantasies rework ready-
made codes and clichés, and denounce language as a maiming tool constraining
women, sensation novels feature women’s aestheticization textually and literally,
4 See Nina Auerbach on Trilby’s body. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The
Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 18–20.
playing with stereotypes and constructing the female bodies as illusory and shaped
in conformity with dominant models. Fashioning themselves into artificial queens,
the female characters trace woman’s journey from a pawn to a queen, thereby
deconstructing femininity. Showing how the ‘nature’ of woman changed with the
emergence of consumer culture and could hardly be contained by glass panels,
Victorian fairy tales, fantasies and sensation novels offer a reflection on feminine
construction which splits and cracks, bursts into pieces, asking the readers to put
together the pieces of the puzzle. However, although the female characters attempt
to counteract male-preferred definitions of ideal femininity, nearly all of them are,
nonetheless, destined to death, taking to their tombs the mysteries and contradictions
of femininity and sometimes leaving only an angelic foot crystallized in glass as a
souvenir of woman’s ambiguous perfection.
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Index
abduction 133 Brontës, The 1

actresses 13, 131, 133–4, 137–40, 143, 146, Broughton, Rhoda 4, 11, 99–111, 113, 121,
147, 150–51 149
as professionals 136n12, 137 Not Wisely But Too Well 4, 11, 99–111,
adulteration 69 113, 121, 149
advertising 6–7, 13, 50, 61, 101, 110, 113– Brown, Isaac Baker 35
14, 118, 123n25, 132, 133, 136, 138, Burne-Jones, Edward 94
140n19, 141, 144–6, 150, 152–3 Burnett, Frances Hodgson 94n7
Alice in Wonderland syndrome 55 ‘Behind the White Brick’ 94n7
All the Year Round 135 Burns, John 35
Allingham, William 23
‘The Maids of Elfen Mere’ 23 Caldecott, Randolph 67
Alma-Tadema, Lawrence 153 capitalism 6, 8, 24, 27, 29
amenorrhoea 37, 54n15 Carroll, Lewis 4–6, 8–11, 17, 20–21, 25, 40,
Angel in the House, the 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 20, 36, 48, 49–65, 67–9, 72–3, 78–9, 81,
37, 42, 52, 121, 123, 125, 127, 128, 83, 86, 87, 89, 90, 107–8, 121, 146,
130, 134, 159 166, 173–4
anorexia nervosa 35, 54n15, 170n24 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 4,
Andersen, Hans Christian 19, 46, 47n40 8–10, 17, 19n12, 20–21, 25, 40, 48,
Little Mermaid 46, 47n40 49–65, 67, 69, 71–2, 78, 83–4, 86,
Apothecaries Act 144n28 90, 107, 121, 146, 160, 173–4
arsenic 14, 144n27, 148, 155, 156n20, 157, Through the Looking-Glass 6, 19n12,
169–70 20, 29, 49, 51, 56n23, 60–64
Aunt Judy’s Magazine 67 ‘It won’t come smooth’ 5
Sylvie and Bruno 62n38
Barthes, Roland 40, 59, 119, 174 Agnes Grace Weld as Little Red
Basile 62n36 Ridinghood 89, 108
Battey, Robert 35 cartes de visite 113
beauty aids 12–14, 90, 131–2, 133, 135–7, chlorosis 37
149–50, 152, 166; see also corsets Cinderella 2–3, 35, 98, 121, 173
and cosmetics clitoridectomy 35
Beeton, Samuel 152n13; see also Collins, Wilkie 2–4, 11, 13–14, 90, 98n22,
Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine 132, 133–173, 174
Benjamin, Walter 11, 41, 74n10, 110 Armadale 4, 11, 13, 90, 98n22, 134,
Bertillon, Alphonse, see mug shots 147–58, 159, 161, 174
Bluebeard 4, 14, 18n10, 55, 67, 159–70, 173 The Law and the Lady 4, 11, 14, 90,
books of beauties 12, 113, 117–18, 127–9, 158, 159–71, 174
132 Man and Wife 133
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 2–4, 11–13, 90, The Moonstone 3–4
113–15, 120–32, 134, 146, 150, 173 No Name 4, 11, 13, 90, 133–46, 147,
Aurora Floyd 98n22 150, 156
The Doctor’s Wife 98n22 The Woman in White 2, 132, 174
Lady Audley’s Secret 2–3, 11–13, 90, commodity fetishism 40
113–15, 120–32, 134, 146, 150, complexion 14, 84, 145, 148, 152, 158,
173–4 159–71
consumer culture 6–7, 11–12, 14–15, 20–21, folklore 10, 17, 18n6, 36, 68
26n24, 28, 49, 53, 61n34, 64–5, 70, Folk-Lore Society 68–9
80, 90, 92, 98–9, 101, 106, 111, 113, folk tales 17, 62, 68–72
116, 119, 121–2, 125–6, 130–31, Fortnightly Review, The 34
133–4, 137, 149, 152, 176 Fowler’s Solution 148
corset 5–6, 13, 37, 40, 110, 134, 152, 173 French conteuses 19, 74
cosmetics 12–14, 90, 133, 135–7, 144–5, Furniss, Harry 62n38
148–54, 156–7, 164, 168–71
Cox, George W. 68 Galton, Francis 114n4
crinoline 40, 62, 91, 100–101, 105–8 Girl of the Period, the 149
Crystal Palace 11–12, 69, 92–3, 95, 97–98, glass 19–20, 84, 87, 92–5, 97, 102, 108,
100, 102, 104, 108–10, 121, 131, 167, 176
167 as mirror 14, 80–81, 83–4, 93–7, 114,
Contagious Diseases Acts 130 116–17, 126, 129, 148, 153–7, 163
glass coffin 11, 20, 93–5, 155, 170
Dallas, E.S. 3, 99 glasshouses 11, 20, 84–5, 87, 89, 90–93, 96,
Darwin, Charles 68, 114n4 98, 102, 104, 107–8, 110, 149
darwinism 20, 34, 68, 71 Gomme, George Laurence 68
department stores 6, 31, 105; see also Goodrich, Samuel Griswold 50n1
Whiteley’s Great Exhibition 80, 109, 113
Dickens, Charles 1, 11–13, 90, 92, 113–20, Grimm, Brothers 5, 18–19, 54, 71, 93
132, 173 ‘Clever Elsie’ 18n10
Bleak House 11–13, 90, 92, 113–20, ‘Fitcher’s Bird’ 18n10
132, 173–4 ‘Frau Trude’ 18n10
David Copperfield 92 ‘The Glass Coffin’ 93
dwarfs 69, 70–72 ‘Little Snow White’ 5
‘Mary’s Child’ 53n12
East End 6, 107 ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ 71
Eastlake, Elizabeth 121n21 gynaecology 34–5
Egg, Augustus Leopold 120
Eliot, George 1 Hartland, E.S. 68
Elliotson, John 34, 56 hothouse lily, see Victoria regia
Ellis, Havelock 114n4 hourglass figure 36
Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, The Hughes, Arthur 33, 75, 78, 78–9, 80, 82, 83
136, 150, 152n13 Hunt, Holman 76, 79, 122n21
Ewing, Juliana Horatia 4, 8–10, 65,
67–72, 146 Ingelow, Jean 4, 7, 8–9, 10, 17–31, 33, 57,
‘Amelia and the Dwarfs’ 8–10, 67–72, 65, 67–8, 157, 173
146 Mopsa the Fairy 7, 8–9, 10, 17–31, 49,
‘Christmas Crackers’ 67 57, 157, 173
Sarah de Bergener 21
fashion 12, 36, 62, 91, 98, 105, 121, 123n21,
134–7, 140, 150
fashion plates 12, 114, 118, 131, 149, 150; Jacquet-Droz, Pierre 25n23
see also women’s magazines James, Henry 4
Fates 23, 30
female consumer 6–7, 11–13, 24, 49, 53, 87, Lacoste, Euphémie 148
90, 97, 102, 111, 114, 118, 132, 134, Lady of Shalott, The 76, 79, 87
137, 139–43, 145–6, 154 Lafarge, Marie 148
Fielding, Sarah 74, 78 Lamia 36
flâneuse 106 Lavater, Johann Caspar 114
Index 187
Leighton, Frederic 153 Parley’s Magazine for Children and Youth
Leverson, Sarah Rachel (or Levison) 13, 50n1
131–2, 133–4, 144n27, 145n32, 147, patent medicine 13, 143–6; see also quack
151, 152n13, 155, 156n19 medicine
levitation 41, 43, 55 Patmore, Coventry 5, 36–7, 130, 134
lightness 9, 36–9, 41–4, 47 Paxton, Joseph 11, 92, 95, 104, 108–9
Little Red Ridinghood 4, 11, 55, 86, 89, 102, Perrault, Charles 19, 36, 89
106, 108, 173 physiognomy 12, 39, 42, 101n30, 113,
Linton, E.L. 149 114n4, 120–21, 153
London Magazine, The 126n28 phrenology 121, 153
Loudon, John Claudius 102 Précieuses 18; see also French conteuses
pregnancy 37
MacDonald, George 4, 8–9, 11, 23, 31, prolapsed uterus 37
33–48, 49, 51, 54, 60, 68, 71, 84, 87, Proserpine 5
96, 121, 145 Psyche 5, 168–70
Adela Cathcart 33–5, 37, 45, 47, 49, 60 Pygmies 68–9
At the Back of the North Wind 33
‘The Bells, A Sketch in Pen and Ink’ 35 quack medicine 13, 133, 152, 156–7; see
‘The Cruel Painter’ 35 also patent medicine
‘The Light Princess’ 8–9, 31, 33–48, 54, Queen, The 150
71, 84, 121, 145
Lilith 46n38 Radcliffe, Ann 159–61, 168
‘My Uncle Peter’ 35 Rectory Magazine, The 64n43, 81
Phantastes 23, 96n17 Ritchie, Anne Thackeray 98, 121
‘The Woman in the Mirror’ 96–7 Rossetti, Christina 4, 7, 9, 10–11, 26–7, 31,
MacDonald, Irene 5 65, 67, 72–87, 89, 161, 167, 173
Mandeville, Bernard 156n20 Commonplace 73n9
Mansel, Henry 7 Family Correspondence 73n9
Married Women’s Property Acts 46n34 Hero 84n26
Marx, Karl 24 ‘Goblin Market’ 26, 31
Matrimonial Causes Acts 46n34 Maude 73n9
Maudsley, Henry 34, 56 Speaking Likenesses 7, 9, 10–11, 67,
Maurier, George du 174–5 72–87, 161, 167, 173
Trilby 174–5 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 23, 24, 97
medicine 9–10, 13, 33–5, 38, 57, 144 Beata Beatrix 23
Melusina 36 Fazio’s Mistress 97
Mill, John Stuart 34, 89–90 Lady Lilith 97
Millais, John Everett 62 The Maids of Elfen Mere 22, 23
Millingen, J.G. 34 Rowland’s Macassar-Oil 61n34
Monthly Packet, The 67 Ruskin, John 21, 67, 90–92, 98
Morison’s Pills 145 The Ethics of the Dust 90–92
Morgan, Mary de 92–3 Sesame and Lilies and the Political
Mother Goose 4, 17–18, 23 Economy of Art 90–91
mug shots 117, 119, 128, 174
Murat, Henriette-Julie de 93n6
Sala, George Augustus 102
neurasthenia 37, 47 shopping malls 7; see also department stores
Nordau, Max 114n4 Sleeping Beauty 2, 9, 28–9, 36, 42, 47, 63,
96
oophorectomy 35 Smith, Madeleine 13–4, 147–8, 150, 155,
169
Snow White 2–5, 9, 13, 36, 69, 85, 95–6, Victoria regia (Victoria amazonica) 104
147, 154–7, 161, 170, 173
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge Walker, Alexander 135n8
67 Walker, Mrs. A. 135–6, 145
stay laces, see corset Walpole, Horace 159
Southey, Robert 61 Watts, George F. 120
surgery, see clitoridectomy and Watts, Isaac 50, 61
oophorectomy ‘Wee Meg Barnileg and the Fairies’ 68–72
cosmetic surgery 151 West End 6, 105–6
sybils (women as) 23 Whiteley’s 6; see also department stores and
swan-maidens 36, 46 shopping malls
women’s magazines 6, 14, 118, 148, 150–3
Taylor, Jane 81 Wood, Mrs Henry 2–4, 113
Tenniel, Sir John 20, 62, 77, 79 East Lynne 2–3, 113
Tennyson, Alfred Lord 67, 79
Thackeray, William Makepeace 1 Yonge, Charlotte 67
Trollope, Anthony 1 Young Englishwoman, The 150
Tussaud, Mme 94 Youth’s Magazine 21
Tylor, Edward Burnett 68
Undine 36

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas - Moulding The Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (2007)

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MOULDING THE FEMALE BODY IN

VICTORIAN FAIRY TALES AND

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Introduction Femininity through the Looking-Glass 1

4.2 William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott, 1866–1905.

4.4 Arthur Hugues, ‘The Meal’, 1874. From Christina Rossetti,

Preliminary versions of chapters 7, 8, and 9 ﬁrst appeared in the following publications:

The Little Mermaid, Hans Christian Andersen.

Miss Flora M’Flimsey, of Madison Square,

Nothing To Wear: An Episode of City Life, New York: Harpers, 1857.

Femininity through the Looking-Glass

Once Upon a Time…

1 Anthony Trollope, Autobiography (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1883), vol. 2, 41.

As Snow White’s wicked stepmother’s irresistible offer illustrates, what we generally

8 Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 11.

‘That that is, is’

Weaving the Threads of Feminine Representation

As illustrated by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland whose ﬁnal

5 Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 209–10.

12 Jack Zipes terms this colonization a ‘patriarchalization [of] matriarchal mythology’

16 See Auerbach, Knoepﬂmacher (eds), Forbidden Journeys, 1.

18 Knoepﬂmacher, Ventures into Childland, 31.

19 See Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 14–15.

22 Elizabeth K. Helsinger, ‘Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina

23 Ingelow may be referring here to Pierre Jacquet-Droz (1721–1790), a Swiss-born

Spinning Stories: Women’s Fatal Words

25 Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 94.

MacDonald’s Fallen Angel in

1 George MacDonald, Adela Cathcart, 3 vols (Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press,

2 John Elliotson, Human Physiology (London: Longmans, 1840); J.G. Millingen,

7 Maudsley, ‘Sex in Mind’, 473.

MacDonald’s Light Princess and Female Lightness in Victorian Culture

Troping Prescriptive Ideologies of Femininity

25 Michie, The Flesh Made Word, 78.

29 Michie, The Flesh Made Word, 89.

30 This idea is underlined by U.C. Knoepﬂmacher in his Ventures into Childland:

Femininity, Crime and Punishment: Disciplining Fleshly Signs

Reminiscent of Adela’s physical state in the frame-narrative, the princess’s

39 Michie, The Flesh Made Word, 28.

1 See Reichertz’s analysis of Carroll’s uses of earlier children’s literature (Ronald

Once Upon a Time in Wonderland

4 Irving Massey, The Gaping Pig: Literature and Metamorphosis (Berkeley:

7 Gordon analyzes the mingling of romance and reality in Alice, underlining

9 Katherine Kearns, Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking-

Curing the Female Body: Alice’s Medical Prescriptions

19 Tatar, Off with Their Heads!, 96.

23 The candle-ﬂame metaphor is found again in the Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Representation’s Maiming Processes: Alice’s Textual Framings

35 Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography, 223–4.

Taming the Female Body in

4 Silver, Strange and Secret People, 117.

7 U.C. Knoepﬂmacher, Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and

10 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (ed.); Harry

16 Numerous passages recall informational literature: the mention of acoustics or of

21 Auerbach and Knoepﬂmacher, Forbidden Journeys, 320.

25 The objectiﬁcation of the boys’ bodies, becoming ironers, porters, or engravers

27 Auerbach and Knoepﬂmacher, Forbidden Journeys, 321.