Discourse 14.1 (Winter 1991-92)

THEORETICAL STUDIES IN MEDIA AND CULTURE Domesticity at War Beatriz Colomina

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Going through the E/Motions: Gender, Postmodernism, and Affect in Television Studies Lynne Joyrich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Watch This Space: An Interview with Edward Soja Tara McPherson and Gareth Evans . . . . . .

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(En)countering Imperialist Nostalgia: The Indian Reburial Issue KathrynMilun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Strategies of "Misappearance" Christina von Braun (trans. Jamie Owen Daniel)

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The Madonna with Child, and Another Child, and Still Another Child ... : Sensationalism and the Dysfunction of Emotions Gloria-Jean Masciarotte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Voices of a Voice Jean-Francois Lyotard (bans. Georges Van Den Abbeele)

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Book Reviews Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law by Jane Gaines Mark Rose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I 4 6

The Mode of Infonnalion: Pos~structumlirmand Social Cwntext by Mark Poster James Schwoch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Sexual Subversions: ThreeFrench Feminists by Elizabeth Grosz Marilyn EdeLstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Consumer Culture and Postmodenism by Mike Featherstone SusanWillis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , 1 5 7 Feminism and Youth Culture:From Jackie toJust Seventeen by Angela McRobbie Tara McPherson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Subuersive Inkmt: Ghdq Politics, and the Avanl-Gar& by Susan Rubin Suleiman Elizabeth Francis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ,.:.: >;: .-..l.,,

Books Received

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Winter 1991-92

The Madonna with Child, and Another Child, and Still Another Child :Sensationalism and the Dysfunction of Emotions

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Gloria-Jean Masciarotte

The sensation novel, be it mere trash or something worse, is usually a tale of our own times. Proximity is. indeed, one great element of sensation. It is necessary to be near a mine to be blown up by its explosion; and a tale which aims at electrifying the nerves of the reader is never thoroughly effective unless the scene be laid in our own days and among the people we are in the habit of meeting. - "Sensation Novels" (1863) The tension of the { w o m a n ] in w h i t e ] } is not exactly pleasant, though cleverly produced. One wearies of it. . . . George Meredith (1860,51-52)

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Frequently in common critical practice, at our analytical wit's end, we lump all discourses of the emotions into one disparaging heap: "This book/movie/photograph/painting is melodramatic and sentimental and pornographic and sensationalist!" Often, Sensationalism acts as the exclamation point after a long list of critical expletives. if it means anything, the term means something worse than bad, something experienced that cannot be recuperated by acceptable, articulate aesthetics. The reasons

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for its position as the expletive of representation are many and varied. Let me list a few. First, Sensationalism smacks of loose exchange, cheap exchange, or commodity exchange, that is, its cultural value is determined in great part by the marketplace. Second, it is a gesture whose signification operates more in the realm of publicity instead of private reflection; in other words, its cultural value is based on a labor or interest that arises only in social relations, only in a surface, momentary, o r supplementary economy of affect. Third, its cultural interest fixes on the unprocessed, unmediated object, that is, the graphic or the lurid detail in a crisis situation. Literally, its discussion runs aground on the material detail that is untranslatable or uncollectible, structuring a paradoxical mimeticism that is too real. And, finally, the sensationalist text demands a response. Thus it seems a catalyst or a contagion which calls forth an unwilling o r inappropriate exhibitionistic airing of one's emotional and political laundry. This final complaint suggests that Sensationalism lures us into a material engagement or continued production with the issues it discusses and so, puts nothing to rest. Despite Sensationalism's coalition of contradictory distinctions (excessive, but empty; overly mechanical, but without structure; emotionally flat, but tireless tension), it demands to be taken into account because of its critical overuse which hounds the reception of some of our more popular current representational practices: talk shows (Oprah and Geraldo) , performance art (Karen Finley), T V movies of the week, the rise of genre movies and novels (horror), the shocking return to the figure in art (Eric Fischl and Cindy Sherman), and so on. Each of these critical problems with Sensationalism describes an object of bad taste, or should I say lack of taste. In this essay I want to explore the possibility that Sensationalism is a distinct aesthetic practice, sketching out its strategies of critical/emotional/narrative politics. Given its current critical ubiquity, it seems its only strategy is an obvious "indistinction." I will locate the term historically at the time when it was used to mark a distinct category of objects and response, and notjust a gap in the devolutionary hysteria of cultural analysis. First I will analyze the use of Sensationalism in mid-nineteenth-century England's aesthetic debates around the proper form and function of the Realist novel in order to identify its specific textual details and the terms of their cultural engagement; second, I will theorize the aesthetic shock or the hegemonic challenge of Sensationalism's practice with a detour through a curiously overlooked part of Freud's project; and finally, I will return to one of

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i those texts labeled Sensationalist in mid-nineteenth-century England - Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860) - to sketch out how it produces in the reader an engagement in nerve-wracking narrative strategies. I ask your patience with the laborious scope of this essay and its narrative. Part of the problem, at least part of my problem, with Sensationalism's elusive relationship to the critical apparatus is that its particular narrative pleasures are interrogatory and interruptive. Thus, Sensationalism problematizes and exacerbates the main operation of textual/cultural criticism which abstracts or reduces a primary object text by interrupting and interrogating its pleasure.' Sensationalism's coitus intmmptus structure puts an exponential spin on any critical activity. So, I hope you will see, that my return to origins that results in the multiplication of details, research into T h e Law that results in a fog of laws, and the widening nrovince of my investigation are themselves part of a SensaLionr -alist operationz.I am ahctim to my object.

I, "A Realist Terror" In the critical and popular press of nineteenth-century England, "Sensationalism" was described as "a matter of fact Romance," "a realist terror through precision of descriptive detail," "wild yet domestic," as a text that dwells on "the romantic side of familiar thingsweEven these brief critical comments emphasize Sensationalism's engagement with the Realist aesthetic.' It is also clear in these brief descriptions that Sensationalism has always been a category that blurs the boundaries of representation. One might point to this dogged tendency to contradict critical categorization as the first distinguishing feature of Sensationalism. However, that would miss the point of Sensationalism's differences and similarities from other popular culture texts and its "expletive" position in critical exchange. For example, some common definitions of Sensationalist texts are "matter of fact,'' "precision of descriptive detail," "domestic" focus, and stressing "familiar things." Given these specific textual practices, what is it that Sensationalism does with details and particular circumstances that calls for an aesthetic category different from Realism? How is it too domestic, or too precise, or too familiar? And yes, there are other popular narrative forms that "play on the senses," that is, Sentimentalism, Gothic, Melodrama, and so on. How is Sensationalism's appeal -.-- .- .Lnr. + h p r pfnrms, HOWis it too affective, L

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maudlin, horrifying, anxious? ~ h e s eparadoxical similarities construct Sensationalism more as an interventionist strategy and less a distinct category, that is, an undetermined gesture within the legal boundaries of other categories. I think the key to Sensationalism's different use of Realistic details and circumstances lies iq that "wearisome" tension mentioned by George Meredith. Whereas Realism's mimetic aesthetic is thought to bring its audience to a moment of reflected and consolidated vision (selT, other, society, transcendental, degraded) - an out-of-the-body experience so to speak - Sensationalism uses details, particulars, and social and historical circumstances to an enervating and nerve-wracking effect - a possession or territorializing of the ,body. This emotional dysfunction of Sensationalism is explained in The Oxford English Dictionary as having to d o with "a physical 'feeling' considered apart from the resulting perception of an object." Thus, Sensationalism's effect is not bound to a projected object, and therefore it has n o way of consolidating, closing down, displacing the narrative tension. The effect is a circuit without an outlet, and thus the energy must feed on itself. Sensationalism does not fix a subject among the details of its world because it refuses to consolidate the affective tension in or at the site of one object. In other words, the most disturbing fact of Sensationalism lies in what its name so clearly indexes: its appeal to the unending operation of the senses that does allow for the fixing of the necessary foreground and background, the gestalt of subjectivity. This "wearisome" process can also begin to explain Sensationalism's difference from the other popular categories that play on the senses including the Sentimental and the Gothic. In those other operations there isan object constructed that ends in a catharsis or a repression of tension - tears o r fear. There the construction of an object projected out of the circuit of affective tension contains and ends narrative tension, and restores a sense of balance (even if in the case of melodrama it is necessarily and frequently an illusion of balance). So, if the appropriate phrase for these other popular narrative forms is "play on the senses," in Sensationalism the appropriate phrase would be "operation of the senses" whereby the disavowal of a cathartic object goes far to explain the emphasis critics have put on its "mechanical" quality.4 In relation to this refusal to give over its process to a static object, the term "mechanical" slips into a Rube Goldberg-like spectacle where the working of the machine is the product itself. This spectacle of the mechanical

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for its own sake categorizes Sensationalism's operation of the senses as too much a signifying practice, or too indiscreet a one. This difference from other popular categories of representation that places Sensationalism o n the side of inappropriate or excessive affective and representational processes is an important one. In "Structures of Feeling" Raymond Williams makes a case for the critical and cultural uses of this kind of a process where he discusses the limits of Marxism and other cultural criticisms when addressing the "personal" or the subjective. He points out these excessive o r emergent feelings are the border struggle of the personal and the public, thus providing a place where (what Cornel West has called) the historical possibilities and probabilities of new antagonisms are expressed. Williams distinguishes "feelings" from ideological consciousness and formally held beliefs (and I would add distinguishes feelings from private emotions which are also already cultural categories) but constructs them as a subjective response still concerned with making meaning "over a range of formal assent with private dissent to the more nuanced interaction between selected and interpreted beliefs" (132). The word "feelings" bespeaks a more immediate connection to and collusions between the senses, the body, the subject. The space or feelings opened up by these cultural texts is experienced as "tension." Lt is this feeling of tension that comes up again and again in discussion of Sensationalism: the circuitry without end. Williams's repeated use of "tension" indicates a material effect of a mass culture text on subjectivity that cannot be objectified and processed producing a fixed category of aesthetics and morals. No one is hailed by a Sensationalist text. H e suggests that the tension represents a dissent between present laws and the structures of lived experience. In Williams's delineation of the dilatory cultural labor of tension and structures of feelings, one can read Sensationalism's expletive force as indicating a representational limit or a law confounded. Thus, the shock of Sensationalism is not so much a breaking of the law of representation as much as a muddling of the lines of the law. This definite relation to the law suggests that Sensationalism's textual lure does not work in the giddy play of pastiche or operate through the nihilist disregard for the boundaries and limits of meaning, but instead is grounded in the recognized limits of private and political representation. In its collecting and representing of the excesses of legal and political production of subjectivity in an individualistic capitalistic economy, one can identify and situate

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the meaning of Sensationalism's position as an aesthetic expletive: waste, trash, contagion.

A) The Dissective Operation From Thackeray on, critics have simultaneously celebrated and chastised Sensationalism for i n ezcessive display of "plotting," for its emphasis on the "mechanical" or "artificial" construction of the story, and consequently for its excessive manipulations of the feelings. The'excesses of Sensationalism are located o n the level of production or functions of meaning and not on the level of content. In an attempt to elaborate on the affective result of this mechanical quality, Charles Dickens, noting this operation in Wilkie Collins's novels, labeled it a "dissective" method. Dickens defined the "dissective" as an - --operation in which the consolidating logic of the individual character - the bildungsroman- is refused by a spiralling use of multiple voices: I seem to have noticed, here and there, that the great pains you take express themselves a trifle too much. But on turning to the book again, I find it difficult to take out an instance of this. It rather belongs to your habit of thought and manner of going about the work. Perhaps I express my meaning best when I say that the three people who write the narrative in these proofs have a DISSECTNE, property in common, which is essentially not theirs but yours; and that my own effort would be to strike more ofwhat is got that way out of them by collision with one another, and by the working of the story. I know that this is an admirable book, and that it grips the difficulties of the weekly portion and throws them in a masterly style. No one else could do it half so well. I have stopped in every chapter to notice some instance of ingenuity, or some happy turn of writing. (310-11) In this letter to Collins, Dickens backhandedly compliments him for three narrative effects that are markedly different from his own aesthetic rules. The first is Collins's too-obvious structuration: the story of The Woman i n White is not naturalized. The narrative devices are too painfully present. T h e second is that the novel's characters are not collaborative, that is, the effect of their presence is "dissective" and fragmentary on the story as a whole. They do not collide or collude in making a secure position for the reader. And finally, importantly, Dickens points out that the difference between Collins's strategy and his own lies in aestheticizing serialization: discrete installments 2re l l ~ f i r l -

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instead of episodes developing into a beginning, middle, and end. Dickens's uneasy admiration of Collins's work points out the troubling difference of Sensationalism for Realism. His comments locate the difference in The Woman in White's unsutured production, unbounded enunciation, and broken narrative line, all importantly located as a result of Collins's masterful aesthetic handling of the serialization form. Here the disclosure is not toward an ending, the non-narratable with the sign of the completed body, or the production at rest. Thus, the aesthetics of the story are deconstructed instead of composed, and the reader's emotions are challenged instead of channeled. In fact one might say that Collins's aestheticization of the novel's form of market production itself incorporated the readers' pleasure into the machinery. While Collins's obvious trademark was the use of overdetermined or multiple, discrete narratives to tell various parts of one story, he also dissects the logic of character 'and linear progressive history on the simple level of Realist description, as we see clearly in this excerpt from a section in The Woman in White that goes on for two pages, never resulting in a description per se: How can I describe her? How can I separate her from my own sensations, and from all that has happened in the later time? How can I see her again as she looked when my eyes first rested on her - as she should look, now, to the eyes that are about to see her in these pages? Among the sensations that crowded on me, when my eyes first looked upon her familiar sensations which we all know, which spring to life in most of our hearts, die again in so many, and renew their bright existence in so few- there was one that troubled and perplexed me; one that seemed strangely inconsistent and unaccountably out of place in Miss Fairlie's presence. . . . At one time it seemed like something wanting in her, at another, like something wanting in myself which hindered me from understanding her as I ought. The impression was always most strongest, in the most contradictory manner, when she looked at me . . . [a] sense of an incompleteness which it was impossible to discover. Something wanting, something wanting - and where it was, and what it was, I could not say.

(40-42) Here one's object is not separate from the vulgar operation of one's senses, nor can one's object secure the anxiety of that operation. In this passage, the description of the woman is given in terms of the operation of his senses, or more to the point, the

Winter 1991-92 operation of the stakes of her representation for his social position. Like the double logic of the fetish or misrecognition, the Sensationalist logic of the object as constitutive of the mechanics of the subject's gaze creates an impression of wantingin both the seer and the seen. If "she" does not exist apart from him, it is quite possible that "he" does not exist apart from the operation of seeing "her" ("the impression was always the most strongest, in the most con tradictorymanner, when she looked at me"). The narrator perceives that her "indistinction" suggests his o h "indi~tinction."~ Could this simple act of precise description, this looking around the mirror at its frame, its position, its architecture, be that which detonates Sensationalism's explosion? Could it be that what causes it to explode is that the individual is too near the machine of its own historical making? Thus, the aesthetic and emotional problem with Sensationalism's mechanical quality is not that its labored surface indicates poor construction. If one recalls George Meredith's reference to "weariness" and Anonymous's electrification of the nerves (quoted as epigraphs to this essay), it is clear that in refusing product and embracing production, Sensationalism refuses emotional abstraction or re-collection in tranquility. In a sense it refuses the cathedral effect of individualism by recalling the labor of constructing individualism. The spectator cannot expect closure, completion, composition, because the envisioning of the part erases the whole. Here is Sensationalism's nervewracking "architexture": the subject caught and consolidated in the spin of its own incompleteness, in the matrix or field of its own unsatisfying dependency. The continuing discomfort of Sensationalism subjects the subject to the material operation of its own re-presentation.

B) The Stunner's Story Is it mere coincidence that the Sensationalist process breaks down the Realist process around the details of feminine parts, the feminine in parts? In another contemporary review of Collins's novel is articulated clearly the problem of the material representations of the feminine as the specific detonator in Sensationalism's explosive or shocking privileging of the labor process, the tools of representation, and their antithetical relation to transcendental aesthetics: The Woman in White "is not a novel which evokes the better feelings of human nature; it does not go home to you; you acknowledge its artistic construction, but you feel the want of nature; it rouses your curiosity, it thrills

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your nerves, it fills you with admiration, contempt, indignation, hatred, but your softer feelings are seldom played upon. . . . That there is an inclination of over-minuteness we cannot deny, but Pre-Raphaelitism is in the ascendant" (Critic xxi, 233-34). The focus on fictional labor excites curiosity, but not the transcendental vision determined by the generic largesse of the species beyond difference ("the better feelings of human nature"). Significantly, the excerpt above ends by locating Sensationalism in the tradition of another nineteenth-century aesthetic practice - Pre-Raphaelitism. Though Pre-Raphaelitism's representation of "natural" detail to the point of defamiliarization is one of its aesthetic hallmarks, its larger and more popular cultural effects rested in its re-presentation of a specific kind of woman that became the site for a certain fashionable femininity from the mid-to-late-nineteenth century through the early modern period. In an essay on Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Religion of Beauty, nineteenth-century critic and poet F.W.H. Myers notes the cultural importance of these re-presented women: Much of Rossetti's art, in speech or colour, spends itself in the effort to communicate the incommunicable. It is toward "the vale of magical dark mysteries" that those grave lowhanging borrows are bent, and "vanished hours and hours eventual" brood in the remorseful gaze of Pandora, the yearning gaze of Persephone. The pictures that perplex us with their obvious incompleteness, their new and haunting beauty, are not the mere caprices of a richly-dowered but wandering spirit. Rather they may be called (and none the less so for their short-comings) the sacred pictures of a new religion; forms and faces which bear the same relation to that mystical worship of Beauty on which we have dealt so long, as the forms and faces of a Francia or a Leonardo. . . . It is chiefly in a series of women's faces that these ideas seek expression. (95) These women were decidedly different from the sentimentally Realistic women best defined by Coventry Patmore's term "Angel in the House." The Angel in the House was essentially, idealistically good. Her religious domesticity erased all traces of the marketplace and raised men to the undifferentiated seat at the right hand of God. The Pre-Raphaelite women were not so heavenly disembodied or so heavenly functional. Ford Maddox Ford, describing Elizabeth Siddel (the most representative of all the Pre-Raphaelite models), named these women "stunners."

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Ford meant it as a compliment: they were the perfect object of a "revolutionary" aesthetic project. They stopped the easy assumption of the bourgeois gaze, unsettling rather than composing the spectator. These stunners were heavier: more body but less differentiated sexual identity; a noted (if not actual) working-class o r trade-class (shop girls) identity but less distinct personal history. Griselda Pollock has noted that these different nineteenth-century representations of women "were defined across the opposition of the pure, womanly woman and the impure whore" (113). The combination of the heavenly femininity of the lady and the heavy sensuality of the laborer is the hairline trigger on the cultural explosive. The representations of this kind of woman were aesthetically shocking because they negated the oppositional and absolutist strategies of gender and class that secured the middle-class subject his transcendental subjectivity: leisured lady and working-class laborer; spirituality and sexuality; the masculine presence and the feminine absence. In a parallel aesthetic focus, Sensationalism centers its story around similarly overwhelming, engaging, but aesthetically troubling women. Sensationalism accomplishes this by the simple gesture of taking as its determinative subject the disclosure of an identity whose boundaries were still under social debate. In the novels, the women were frequently described - or rather incompletely described - through failed mirror scenes that refused the easy assumption of bourgeois, patriarchal, libidinal narcissism. The various spectators of these women punctuate their descriptions with words like "ugly" and "surprising." One of the most dramatic examples of this resonate disturbance is the description of Marian Halcombe, one of the heroines of The Woman in White, by Walter Hartright, the hero: I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed,yet not fat; her head set on her shoulderswith an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, itwas visiblyand delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments. . ..She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of

Discourse 14.1 expectation to see her face clearly. She felt the window- and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps - and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly! (25) In this scene one can see that Sensationalist use of femininity as the site of gender decenters generic individualism, and not simply its opposite, masculinity. In fact, Sensationalism retains the masculine presence, but as another gendered, marked subject. Could this be those ladies' "stunning" effect: the gendering of masculine as well as feminine subjectivity? But while there is a distinct parallel between the Pre-Raphaelite women and the Sensationalist "heroines," there is an important difference in their use of the feminine. Whereas the Pre-Raphaelite women reflected the masterful hand of the artist that simultaneously represented and erased her differences, the Sensationalist heroine refuses the gaze and its masterful labor. Sensationalism isvisually inarticulate. It produces against the grain of the specular, and so produces the stubbornly ugly. Sensationalism's feminine subject shocks or stuns the reader into further production. Its text never produces a static surface. These stunners do not partake nor do they incite the hysterical regime that silences the Symbolic. Esther Summerson, Marian Halcombe, Anne Catherick, and Lady Audley all write and/or speak their stories too well; the fact that they are fully engaged in a Symbolic economy manipulating others, or being manipulated by words and stories marks them as dangerous, even criminal.6 Sensationalism's feminine is never the singular individual whose ambiguity is its lack of personal or narrative perspective. Narratively, the stunner is presented as part of a very irritated family romance: for example, three simultaneously similar and different sisters (The Woman in White); the daughter of a simultaneously sane and insane mother married to a brother who is simultaneously like and unlike his sister who is being investigated for the supposed murder of her first husband by the nephew of her second husband who is "in love" with the woman, her first husband, and finally the first husband's sister (Lady Audlqri Secret); and so on. The identity of the Sensationalist feminine is in the imbrication of the neat family romance manifested as an exponentially increasing series of sibling and spousal ("ex" or "biblical") claims. This imbrication produces the supplementary energy, explosive historical specificity of the stunners. Her specificity of class and gender relations cannot be contained by the usual binary (Mom and me, or Dad and me) and tertiary

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(Mom and Dad and me) relationships of incest which are necessarily limited by patriarchal rule of hom (m)sexual exogamy and its consequential individualism. C) Incest Imploded This broadening of the lines, the stakes, and the anxiety of incest locates the real "ugliness" of the stunners in the fact that they aggravate the possibilities and plausibilities of the novel's plot at the site of the marriage choice (see N. Miller). The "love plots" collect around them and their siblings and/or charges, but they themselves are never quite chosen, or never chosen freely. Their complex visual lure generates the play of desire in a narrative of skewed expectations of class and gender. This interruption (not a failure) sends the narrative as a whole into a kind of shock resulting in more words rather than less. If the narrative is to continue, the sign of desire must be written, rewritten, abridged, edited, and even more. Here then is the detonator of Sensationalism's explosive handling of historical details: its grounding of narrative complications in those specific legalistic and legislative debates of bodies, desires, and identities. In keeping with its literal and detailed operation of its descriptive language, Sensationalism's preference for the extenuating or supplementary legal battles as a source of narrative complication and incident suggests that its inaterialism does not rest on the feminine body/desire per se, but on the embodiment of the feminine as product and supplement in the legalistic and legislative mechanics, operations, or arguments on subjectivity and citizenry. Many of the stories revolve quite literally around the site of the woman as plots spiral out from the following questions: given her familial position and choice in the marriage market, who or what is legally in line for the family privileges? if she is without inheritance and labor, how can a woman be defined in terms of class distinctions and privileges in a capitalist economy? does or can a woman have a history? if so does it define her as an individual or does it unsex her? These narrative questions have a specific legal parallel in the Parliamentary debates on changes in Divorce and Marriage Laws concerning the gendered distribution of property and children and in the debates concerning the redefinition of incest or consanguinity in the attempts to repeal the laws against Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister. In fact in Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold situates the threat to civilization and civil law itself in the popular investment in these issues that conflate gender, citizenship,

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desire, inheritance, and class. He interprets these specific discussions as threatening the effective coordination of the legal narratives of the State, subjectivity, and citizenship (72-88). The specific narrative engagement with these contemporary social fears and legal coordinates suggests that Sensationalism was concerned not only with the Law (the transcendent signifier of individual composition) but also with the flat surface of material exchange, the innumerable details of production, reproduction, and consumption that shiftily array the possibilities of desire and privilege along a deep surface, a thick flatness (see Anderson). In "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' inspired by Duel i n the Sun," Laura Mulvey rereads Vladimir Propp's discussion on the narrative determinacy of the heroine and marriage through her own rereading of Freud's discussion of sexual identity. Mulvey points out that in narrative the marriage choice is the choice about "an escapulation of power, and phallic attributes, in an individual who has to bow himself out of history," and "an individual impotence rewarded by political and financial power, which in the long run, in fact becomes history" (29).This choice acts as the final, closing ritual that ends the pleasure in the labor of the text as it fixes the indeterminacies of gender, class, and history. When determined by masculine desire, either side makes compositional aesthetic sense, and the body of the woman acts as the instrument to collect and cover the inherent ideological tensions set up in the choice. when determined by female desire, the narrative opens up the neat function "marriage" to ask "what next?" and "what does she want?" (32). Mulvey suggests that when the marriage choice is determined by the feminine subject it interrupts the single linear progression, becoming an investigation into the terms of sexuality and the sexual itself. Mulvey names this turn of narrative focus "melodramatic." I would agree with her discussion but use it to note that the difference in the Sensationalist use of the feminine subject is its continued narrative privilege of interruption and its narrative fetishization of every creak and crank of the social machinery. The melodramatic text explores the disruption of sexual desire on the individual body. The focus on the individual allows for the inevitable phallic fix resulting in some form of closure that is manifest most often in terms of the melancholiac or mourning position of the feminine subject whose desire - sexuality - is denied.'Sensationalism's fetishization ofsocial machinery insists that desire be traced and retraced beyond the individual body back and across along the social gestures that expose, claim, and

ow ever,

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even alienate the body away from private, individuated consolidation. Its continued emphasis on the process of investigation instead of the individual story are manifested as not only marriage choice but also the consequences of reproduction which enfold the individual body and its desires in a generational sweep or matrix of sociosexual congresses, that is, the choices of working-class mothers of upper-class daughters who were half sisters to "unclassed" sisters and/or to disinherited brothers, and who were or would become mothers themselves. Sensationalism goes beyond the scene of marriage into an investigation of the social and subjective implications of the marriage bed. This deep surfacing on the part of Sensationalism is also evident in the frequency with which "marriage choice" is presented in these novels as a compulsive, determinate act of ever-widening social exchange -sort of a crazed, absolutist exogamy - that leads to systemic, as well as individual criminality, poverty, disease, madness, death.

D) Engaged to the Law The shock of Sensationalism does not arise from its breaking the Law of representation, but instead from its obsessive engagement with the legal operation itself and the stories of the workaday operation of the laws governing marriage, inheritance, adultery, and so on. This obsession with legal entanglement forces desire away from individual demand and satisfaction, and into or against or among an endless circuit of legal technicalities and institutional norms. Sensationalism's ironic cast on the romance of the law is best shown in The Woman i n White where the raison d2tre of the text itself is Walter Hartright's desire to outmaneuver the court system by narrating a case that establishes the legal identity of his love and later his wife, Laura Fairlie. In the course of the novel, there is much and varied correspondence with lawyers, lawyers' agents, and legal representatives. And in this novel and others (East Lynne, for example, and Lady Audley s' Secret),the legal questions force the marriage choice and maternal labor into an interruptive and interrogatory relationship with public paternal exchange where children and siblings can be so much loose change. By connecting maternity to legal identity and the reproduction of citizenship, Sensationalism realigns the site of character and individuality, making them the anxious site of hegemonic operations of enunciation, that is, tools of representation and not its end products. The disrupting function of children and

Discourse 14.1 childbearing in the Sensation novel is key to its process of arraying the term "individual" along a surface operation. Children are not the consolidation of the paternal position, they are articulated immediately (in an Althusserian operation) as citizens of the state from birth. But in the Sensation novel, the reproduction of children involves issues of citizenry that frequently threaten the subjective heroics of the parents as they become mere coordinates in their children's interpellation, and the children for the parents. Therefore, while narrating the operation of interpellation, Sensationalism substitutes the compound question "How are you there?" for simple imperative, "Hey, you there" (Althusser 1'74). Often the initial, hidden "crime" that situates a given individual in a Sensation novel is nothing more than an inappropriate marriage, or lack thereof, in the form of a love match which produced an affectively, financially abandoned child. The children locate the real scene of the crime at which these marriages participated: the disruption, or possible disruption of the line of inheritance. Actual crimes ensue as a consequence of the coverup and investigation in order to secure the inheritance, but the original "crime" is often nothing more than the legally problematic structure of a previous union. In the three most celebrated Sensationalist novels - Lady Audley's Secret, East Lynne, and The Woman in White- marriage, money, and family all operate through the maternal line to resist the putting in place of the phallic signifier. In The Woman in White, for example, the narrative's motivating "crime" is the fact that Percival Glyde's parents forgot to get married before they died. They lived together, loved each other, but they just forgot to get married, thereby repositioning their son far down the line of cousins and nephews. It is as if in death their marital forgetfulness gives birth once again to Glyde, but in a different family and legal position. This systemic negligence is coupled with the clash of systems inherent in the figure of Laura Fairlie's father who promised the hand of his daughter (and heir) to a stranger to pay a personal debt of honor. This lapse in constancy sets the scene for the "crime." In order to legally acquire privileges, property, and title that should have been his (lost because of his parents' lapse), Glyde is motivated to make a desperate marriage of convenience to an heiress whose heart is betrothed to another. Thus, Sensationalism's material use of the broader configuration of the incestuous net and its subsequent irritation of the production of emotion and desire redefine the family as a historical assembly line of reproduction that is fueled by what Denise Reily has called

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the "volatility of these pitches of sexual oppositions and the many forms of political services in which they function" (13'7).

11. Obsessive Speculating I want to return to the nineteenthcentury critic and poet Myers's discussion of the new "religion" of women initiated by the Pre-Raphaelites in order to delineate the political implications of Sensationalism's affective relations resulting from its reading of maternity as narrative irritation, as social labor, and as the instrument of historical detail of gender and power relations. In his essay Myers places Rossetti's portraits of disturbing feminine beauty in line with Leonardo Da Vinci's worship of Mary (Mother of Christ), whose very secular representation is found in the mystic smile of the Mona Lisa. The implication of this connection for a historical understanding of femininity and Sensationalism's structures of feeling becomes clear if one looks at Freud's discussion of Leonardo. There Freud tries to come to terms with Leonardo's artistic talent, his obvious genius, and importantly for our purposes, the intersection of his affective impotence and his inability to complete paintings, which turned him toward scientific investigations. Freud's analysis of Leonardo is part of an important trajectory in his theoretics that is overlooked in the individualistic paradigm of psychoanalytic criticism which obsessively focuses on the Oedipal scenario. Freud's study of Leonardo involves an analysis of the function of reproduction, the mother's body, and the operation of the instinct for knowledge. In her essay "Sexuality and the Field of Vision," Jacqueline Rose reads Freud's essay as a discussion of the failure of Realist representational practice. Rose reads this failure as based on the inability to represent, or fix the details of sex, and so theorizes that sexuality muddles and troubles the line of vision. While I agree with much of this essay - in fact her notion of gender as a muddling of aesthetic axes underscores my own essay -I want to be critically picky and take up her use of the word "failure" in light of the issues surrounding nineteenth-century anxieties of production, subjectivity, and citizenship. Freud does not use the word in quite that way. He never discusses Leonardo's problem with the site of gender as "failure." More to the point, Freud writes this study to argue against the idea of aesthetic failure for reasons of either limited talent or overly ambitious aspirations.

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Discourse 14.1 If these reports of the way in which Leonardo worked are compared with the evidence of the extraordinarilynumerous sketches and studies which he left behind him and which exhibit every motif appearing in his paintings in a great variety of forms, we are bound totally to reject the idea that traits of hastiness and unsteadiness acquired the slightest influence over Leonardo's relation to his art. On the contrary, it is possible to observe a quite extraordinary profundity, a wealth of possibilities between which a decision can only be reached with hesitation, demands which can hardly be satisfied, and an inhibition in the actual execution which is not in fact to be explained even by the artist inevitably falling short of his ideal. ("Leonardo" 67-68)

Freud points out here that what has been seen as "failure" is more a symptom of "extraordinary profundity." Freud categorizes Leonardo's inability to complete projects as "obsessional," or "obsessive brooding," that is, more as a hesitation or an interruption in the task at hand than as a failure of production. Freud describes this interruption as a realigning of the psychical energy away from production and toward an investigation of the system of production. Freud rests his case against "failure" on the wealth of sketches that attend every Da Vinci painting. Articulated in the sketching itself are Leonardo's scientific explorations into problems of movement and space. Thus, the hesitations and the space between decisions are actually filled with a frenzied production. However, it is a surplus or supplementary production structured by investigation, instead of a consolidating or condensing production structured by re-presentation. Freud proves da Vinci productive in his failure by reading them as production that reproduces materials for further productions (more and more questions, enigmas . . .) instead of a production that completes the process in an object. Freud continues to make a case for the fullness of what seems absent when he connects Leonardo's obsession (or passion) for sketching and investigation to his repression of emotion, specifically in relation to erotic life. While there is much to discuss in Freud's essay relevant to the scope of my essay, I want to focus on Freud's discussion on the "absence of Leonardo's father" and on what he sees as Leonardo's socialization away from fixed production. Freud maps Leonardo's inability to finish projects and his repressed emotional life through a long, obsessive detour researching that riddle of reproduction - "Where do babies come from?"

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Given Freud's location of this riddle at the first knot of social and individual anxiety and private and public knowledge, it is not important that Leonardo or any child ever answers that riddle. What is important is the simultaneously exasperated and desperate tone of the investigative plaint. The most striking fact of this riddle is that it comes into play at the site of the feminine, the singular feminine, the singular feminine (re)producing, laboring. Of course, since it is a riddle, and so a linguistic response to the enigmatic, it is therefore within the Oedipal scene. But this articulation of the feminine in the shadow of the Law seems a space or a territory that resists its totalizing presence. The child articulates the enigma in response to "the threat to the bases of a child's existence offered by the discovery or the suspicion of the arrival of a new baby and the fear that he may, as a result of it, cease to be cared for and loved" (Freud, Three Essays 61). The anxiety that the enigma is articulated to contain is aroused by the potentially changing, definitely expanding function and labor of the mother, the child's Other. Freud's argument continues in such a way that Leonardo's repression disappears as does the word "failure." In Freud's theorization of the full absence, the overproductive middle space, Leonardo keeps the affective energy and channels it into scientific and investigative practice. Freud notes that the activity is not one of failure but obsessional brooding, thoughtfulness. Affect becomes thoughtfulness. The trace of the feeling replaces the force of the feeling. Leonardo's investigations are an integral part of the play of his emotions while simultaneously operating as an analysis of their place in cultural production: [Tlhat Leonardo spent the first years of his life alone with his mother, will have been of decisive influence in the formation of his inner life. An inevitable effect of this state of affairs was that the child -who was confronted in his life with one problem more than other children -began to brood on this riddle with special intensity, and so at a tender age become a researcher, tormented as he was by the great question of where babies come from and what the father has to do with their origin. It was a vague suspicion that his researches and the history of his childhood were connected in this way the first to investigate the problem of the flight of birds. . . . ("Leonardo" 92) Freud's description of the investigative and scientific process as one that contains "special intensity" and is tormenting may come as a surprise in a culture where the practice of the intellect

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is seen as reserved and cold. The Western opposition between emotion and intellect is not necessarily dissolved here because Freud makes it clear over and over again that this is a riddle, not just a question, and a riddle at the site of the feminine, not a question under the sway of the father. The importance of those details cannot be overlooked. The Sensationalist construction of maternity as social labor - sign of the mother's specific interpellative relations of class and gender and sign of the child's specific historical interpellation - significantly differentiates it from the melodramatic use of maternity which Mary Ann Doane has argued so clearly in "The Moving Image." There Doane shows how the maternal sign is constructed as epistemologically obvious, immediate, "natural." She points out that the melodramatic construction of maternity depends on the classically fixed positions of mother, father, and child which deny doubts, gaps, and invisibilities and turns on a will to transparency. The melodramatic work of the maternal constitutes an unmediated sign with its corresponding attributes of purity and presence. Thus in melodrama, maternity is positioned in opposition to the Symbolic register and subjectivity, privileging the excessively visible affect (it is not surprising that the popular names for melodrama are the "weepie" or "three-handkerchief movie") as that which recovers what is outside meaning. In other words, affect is in opposition to Symbolic signification. So in service of the melodramatic narrative, maternity promotes wholeness by bringing together affect and signification, by bridging the Semiotic and the Symbolic. Doane notes that the maternal melodrama displaces the violence done to the subject onto affect as the production of tears and so "cures" the subject of its own splitting. Sensationalism, in contrast, reconfigures maternity as the moment of subjective insecurity. In doing this it does not negate or supplant the law of the father; it offers the maternal as the supplementary production of patriarchy. As such, the maternal is then constructed in the Symbolic register as an unfixed signifier. The maternal is the site of research which absorbs the signs of visible affect and so resists even the suspicion of subjective closure. The maternal as a site of research in the Symbolic register and as the instigation for the development of knowledge (the child's first gesture away from the family and into the social world at large) is articulated by Freud himself in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexualily in the section titled the Riddle of the Sphinx. In "The Riddle of the Sphinx" - the riddle of the feminine body, the Other body, the different body- Freud delineates the

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child's shock at the expected birth of a second child, his changing relationship with the M/Other as she labors with another child, and the possible disappointing reinscription of his own place in the family romance as the factors which instigate the child's move from member of the family to citizen of the state. There the investigation of the riddle of maternity reinscribes the child's play of its desire into a labor of power-knowledge. 'The reconfiguration of the epistemological function of maternity by Sensationalism is manifest in the specific form of investigation noted by Freud - the riddle. According to The OxfordEnglishDictionary, a riddle is first and foremost a "problem" in the form of a question. It is something inexplicable in the ordinary system of logic and experience. If one looks to the second definition of a riddle - to cut separate, make holes, find flaws and criticize -it is clear that a riddle also involves a deconstructive curiosity that functions through a systemic analysis and re-coordination of the geography of knowledge and the topography of experience. Given this distinction, a riddle seems more contextual than a question. One could say it has more affinity to narrative practice than to the practice of logic or the scientific method. Similarly, the blurring of intellectual and emotional production at the generative body of the mother, the single woman, the Madonna, also addresses a "decomposition" or, simply stated, the "uncomposed," or the ugly. The sketch of the "ugly" or "de-composed" Madonna that Freud discusses is one of four visual aids in his analysis of Leonardo. The "ugly" sketch is in the first plate and is technically a cross-section of a standing couple during coitus where the female body is represented by only a cross-sectioned torso. In a 1919 footnote, Freud glosses the sketch with the description by a Da Vinci commentator, Rudolf Reitler, that points out all the anatomical and aesthetic errors in this "scientific" representation of gender. Some of the defects Reitler notes are: the part to whole representation of the gendered bodies; the wrinkled and worried look on the "feminine" head of wavy hair on a biologically correct "masculine" body; the flabbiness of the woman's breast and the absence of detail in the breast's excretory ducts; the lines of the uterus are "completely confused"; the confused gender of the legs and the feet; and finally the choice of the standing position itself ("Leonardo" '70-72). The sketch looks like a study of the nude traversed by the scientific eye resulting in a cross-section of the mechanics of copulation. Its "ugliness" or failed aesthetics turns on its investigation of the connections

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between the practice of sex and the labor of reproduction. The sketch's effect of systemicity was noted even by the complaining eye of Reitler: "But from his [Leonardo's] making the lactiferous duct extend still further downwards till it reaches the internal sex organs we may suspect that he was trying to represent the synchronization of the beginning of the secretion of milk and the end of pregnancy by means ofvisible anatomical connections as well" ("Leonardo" 71). The "ugliness" of this sketch not only hinges on its anatomical confusion of the gendered body, but on its "synchronization" of bodies during the sex act, pregnancy, a n d postpartum functions. Could it be that the unaesthetic is that which implicates individual desire in reproduction and production? Trying to locate the specific knot or shock at the root of Leonardo's emotional repression, Freud notes the absence of erotic phantasies and crude, obscene pictures that great artists take pleasure in giving vent to in their notebooks. Leonardo, Freud observes, produced "only some anatomical sketches of the internal female genitals, the position of the embryo in the womb and so on" ("Leonardo" 70). Perhaps it is this systemic ordering of the erotic with the productive body that exacerbates the arousal, the torment, and the intensity of investigation for the individual - an act that displaces or reconfigures one's own subjective position in the family romance. Freud locates Leonardo's investigation into the "ugly" material in the Mona Lisa and her enigmatic smile, and even more importantly in his St. Anne with Two Others, or, St. Anne with the Madonna and Child, dated from the same period. In it Freud sees the mystery of the smile laid bare. In the more famous Mona Lisa the smile is a sign of the wound; a fetish, while in the second painting the wound is depicted. In that second painting and in the studies for it, Mary sits in the lap of her mother (St. Anne), reaching for or trying to control/compose the Christ child who, sitting in Mary's lap, reaches for a lamb. What this painting re-presents is a composition of generational production and reproduction and their threat to the system of identity. The title of the painting - "St. Anne with Two Others" - indicates that the mother is the subject, and the child the other, implying quite clearly that the labor of maternity threatens the subjectivity of the child. The site of feminine labor denies the sign of the individual. Thus, the love of one's mother and mother's love become suspect and resistant to the explanation from within the Oedipal story: the mother who is not Other is a riddle.

Winter 1991-92 In this study Freud makes clear the different kind of production inherent inemotional dysfunction. But it is in Freud's own earlier work in this area of intellectual arousal and "the instinct for knowledge" where he articulates the subjective politics of these strategies which have implications for narrative practice. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud elaborates the production of an "unsutured" or permanently wounded subject - endlessly tense, irritated, tormented - that rises out of the threat of the laboring feminine, the threat of "free" instead of fixed production, the family as a machine out of control: At about the same time as the sexual life of children reaches its first peak, between the ages of three and five, they also begin to show signs of the activity which may be ascribed to the instinct for knowledge or research. This instinct cannot be counted among the elementary instinctual components, nor can it be classed as exclusively belonging to sexuality. Its activity corresponds on the one hand to sublimated manner of obtaining mastery, while on the other hand it makes use of the energy of scopophilia. Its relations to sexual life, however, are of particular importance, since we have learnt from psycho-analysis that the instinct for knowledge in children is attracted unexpectedly early and intensively to sexual problems and is in fact possibly first aroused by them. . . .And this history of the instinct's origin is in line with the fact that the first problem with which it deals is not the question of the distinction between the sexes but the riddle of where babies come from. (72) Freud notes that it is specifically the birth of a new baby, and not sexual difference, that spurs on the research. In other words, knowledge is produced as a way to alleviate the crises of the questions of existential difference and similarity: where do I come from, whom do I belong to, and who is this baby in relation to me and you? Freud later notes that curiosity is not a natural condition (here categorized as a secondary instinct); rather, it develops out of a strong impression, a shock to the system, it is a condition of crises management. Curiosity is a response to the external world, a collision with the external world (that is, a slap in the mouth). The answers to these questions, the asking of these questions, and the anxiety and the curiosity inscribed in these questions are the child's attempt to control the world outside itself. Knowledge is then the production of the material instance of the introduction of yet another body into the already problematic I/you exchange of the child and the mother. This

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attempt at inserting oneself into the seemingly uncontrollable re-production of representation becomes the production of oneself. Why doesn't this site of feminine production produce a linear narrative? Freud concludes by noting that these researches always end in failure, leaving permanent injury to the instinct for knowledge and a high degree of alienation in the child. For Freud, the first reason these inquiries fail is because the child never finds out about the fertilizing role of semen or the female sexual orifice. In fact, these questions lead to the questions of sexual difference, they are temporarily resolved by the binary oppositions of male/female. Sexual difference is no more stable than the re-positioning required by the reproduction of the unwanted sibling, but it does limit the coordinates. This scenario suggests that all further investigation and quests for knowledge are more or less part of the same researches. They are still about where d o I belong in the process of reproduction of self and other. They are all attempts on the part of the child to heal the injury and find its place in reproduction. And in fact, if later stories, stories that follow the knowledge of the penis and the vagina, are marked by this failure, they must also repeat the issues. Therefore, any attempt at asserting authority will problematize the misrecognition of individuation and so tell a story about the anxiety of reproduction/production of the self in a chaotic, mysteriously widening production system. Freud's second reason for the failure and the permanent injury to the instinct for knowledge is that the child is told stories that ring patently false given its level of knowledge about the body. Freud notes that these stories (or the lack of any stories) offered by the parents result in "a high degree of alienation of the child from the people in his environment who formerly enjoyed his complete confidence" (Three Essays 63). What is more interesting for my purposes is what Freud implies about these destructive, alienating stories: Many people can remember clearly what an intense interest they took during the prepubertal period in the question of where babies come from. The anatomical answers to the question were at the time very various: babies come out of the breast, or are cut out of the body, or the navel opens to let them through. . . . These earlier researches fell victim to repression long since, but all their findings were of a uniform nature: people get babies by eating some particular thing (as they do in fairy tales) and babies are born through the bowel like a discharge of faeces. (ThreeEssays 73)

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All the stories Freud lists are stories about the violation of the body and the confusion of bodily functions in the service of production of the self. These stories mark the feminine body and its labor as the site of polyrnorphously perverse and individually threatening activity. The self these stories inscribe is not anthropomorphic, they d o not support the bodily fiction of the ego. Freud implies that the problem with these stories is that they remind us of the animal kingdom, "especially of the cloaca" (Three Essays '73). I d o not think it's a blurring of species that troubles the childish investigator, unless it has a command of zoology that rivals its command of human biology. The frightening part of these stories is their challenge to the body's integrity (Freud chooses animals - invertebrates that use a single cavity for excretory, respiratory, and reproductive functions). Given this confusion, the positioning of oneself in relation to the feminine body and its production could hardly follow the ego's boundaries of time and space. The stories deconstruct any peace the child may have made with any earlier separation from this body. They constitute the source of babies as the source of the social self which is rendered an incomprehensible and out-of-control production. In fact these stories and investigations render the labor of the feminine body and its effect on the child's subjectivity as a natural disaster of industrial chaos: a sort of a viral Madonna paramecium. (The child's endless production of investigations and narratives as a strategy of control for the processes of production, reproduction, population, and citizenry recall those employed by Thomas Malthus, Henry Mayhew, and Friedrich Engels in their sociological voyeurism for public service.) This first attempt at narration, then, is a looking at the trace of the first cut on the maternal and the individual body as it is being re-enacted in full view of the child.s Here is the analytical moment that explains the constant critical slippage of the terms "graphic," "lurid," and "vulgar" into the category of Sensationalism. The graphic, lurid, vulgar instance is the shocking knowledge of sexual reproduction, maternal labor, and their threat to the child's early and false security promised by primary narcissism and his or her singular hold on the position of child and/or baby. While the operation of anxiety is endless and obvious, how does Sensationalism's shock function? Shock implies a stun, a stop of emotive response - an overdetermination (overload) of the system by the recognition of the complexity of the system. Later, Freud notes that the silence or the non-visibility of the response is not a failure or

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an absence of feeling; rather the holding back of affect is only subjecting it to "a process of reflection and consideration" ("Leonardo" 74). Curiosity is fueled by desire and emotion, but interrupts its productive machinery. The external threat calls forth an unchecked reproduction. Freud notes that the emotions are neurotically fixed in the gaps in the system and create questions without end. There is no catharsis, no clearly chosen object of desire, therefore no chance to read or articulate the emotion. It resists use value (sentimentalism) and repression (melodrama). Thus, the flatness of Sensationalism contrasts directly with the consolidation of emotion in melodrama. It arrays the individual in a fragmented shifting way, making s/he a nervous map, a cartography of tension that controls the world as it endlessly roams its surface.

111. "Mom-o-maniacal":Family Romance As Labor History I began to doubt whether my own faculties were not in danger of losing their balance. It seemed almost like a monomania to be tracing back everything, everything unexpected that was said, always to the same hidden source and the same sinister influence. -Walter Hartright, The Woman in White ( 6 9 )

How might "obsessive speculating" play itself out outside the arena of the sketchbook, the diary, the notebook, the personal query? How does systemic interrogation operate as a narrative trajectory that widens its surface of interest instead of tunnelling its perspective? The Woman in White clearly exemplifies Freud's theorization of the instinct for knowledge and the fullness of emotional reticence as a narrative of re-search. A critical reading of the entire novel (or even its perimeters) would result in an encyclopedic version of Roland Barthes's exercise on S/Z because the Sensational novel is already self-interrogating, consciously interruptive. It stars itself. In The Woman in White there are many instances of Sensationalism's interruption of the law of representation through the detail of feminine labor and the legal gestures of incestuous desire. But perhaps the most indicative is the novel's presentation and use of Anne Catherick's story. Therefore, please excuse my truncated focus as I discuss only the operation and the function of the specific story of the woman in

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white -Anne Catherick, the novel's ghostly servant of its own irritated storytelling. Anne Catherick - the idiot daughter of Mrs. Catherick, the serving girl of the Fairlie family - looks preternaturally like Laura, the legal daughter and heir apparent of the Fairlie family. Her preternatural likeness is the beginning of the mystery as is her obsession with interrupting the nuptial of her upper-class twin. She seems to have station-threatening information about the bride's intended, about the bride's mother, about her own mother, and just about almost anyone else who crosses her path. Despite the revolving voices of this story, Anne Catherick never tells her story. In fact, it is never told at all; it is only surmised after much research, collaboration, intersection, and close rereadings of a variety of texts. I will first focus on the effect of her determinate absence of story on the structure of the novel as a whole, and then on the way in which the absence is presented, read, and absorbed by the novel. With her obsession for white clothing - a fetish for the benevolent attention she received from the mother of Laura Fairlie -Anne Catherick is quite literally a woman in white. The significance of the whiteness is best understood as the prismatic point where all colors meet, just as all stories become Anne's story in a kaleidoscope of complicit histories with no stable center. Anne Catherick's random but obsessive appearance structures an intersection where stories do not add up, down, or sideways. Her presence in the stories of other people, and their coercion into her story, create a regressive movement back, a retracing and rewriting that is not quite a repetition. Walter Hartright, the novel's primary narrator, easily, if somewhat shamefacedly, names the operation of the narrative pull of the woman in white (this recalcitrantly supplementary detail) as s o m e t h i n g akin t o obsessive s p e c u l a t i n g . H e calls it "monomaniacal." At the site of Anne Catherick, the expected and the unexpected pose a threat that forces the story back to research the same site, back to trace the same source, back to mark and re-mark the surface coordinates. For example, Walter Hartright, the novel's middle-class knight in service of love's truth, keeps trying to tell his story in accordance with the traditional gestures of the bildungsroman. But each new detail, each surprising particular recalls his meeting with the woman in white, thus suggesting that nothing can be understood apart from her. Walter Hartright meets her on his way to the Fairlie estate to begin hisjob as a drawing-master and (somewhat unconsciously) to seek his fortune with one of the young Fairlie misses.

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Anne Catherick functions as the narrative's ghost bride, that is, structurally as Sensationalism's empty sign that sets in place a space of excessive or supplementary exchange rather than sets in motion an exchange of fixed and valuated objects. Anne Catherick's monomaniacal story skews the terms of the traditional narrative exchange of the marriage plots and puts them into analysis, unraveling its naturalization of the break between private desires and public demands. Her presence and its attenuating histories of feminine representation disable Walter Hartright's ability to write/speak his story of individual development. Confronted with the spiraling pull of Anne Catherick's story, Hartright is terrorized by the threatened loss of absolute narrative determinacy, so much so that what starts as a simple story of the fortunate love match of a second-generation drawing master begins to take on new proportions - or should I say portentousness. But to locate Anne Catherick as the detail that blocks Walter Hartright's story of individual development does not do justice to the interruptive and interrogatory effect of the feminine detail in Sensationalist narrative. The real interruptive position that Anne Catherick occupies is that of the third sister. She is the supplementary sibling that demands to be accounted for in the categories of woman, maternity, and paternity. Therefore, her presence makes oppositions of the ugly/beautiful sister, crazy/sane sister, and the maternal/paternal sister inoperative. Since her presence does not reproduce the existing relations of social production, she cracks the binary plot with an indifferent marking that denies phallic individualism. The traditional interpellation of the individuated subject where marriage erases the differences away under the sign of the family is now reordered by the presence of the excessive feminine. She is a product that refers back to no existing o r legally identifiable relation. In order to understand her value, her significance, the system needs to be realigned. Thus, her resemblances and her differences to the other sisters suggest alternative narrative possibilities around marriage and reproductive histories of differently marked women. Anne Catherick's "monomaniacal" effect is manifest as the "Flaubertian" work ethic that Barthes notes as marking the Realist novel with class anxiety, and is extended in this novel to include gender anxiety ( Writing 6466). First, the novel marks its own textual production in several ways. The story is told through a series of first person narratives marked as written (not spoken) testimonies from a list of speakers that include lawyers, half-sisters, illiterate serving girls, and even a tombstone. But then, those

Winter 1 991-92 testimonies are not presented transparently because each narrator edits, writes, rewrites, reads, and reads over their own site of enunciation. And finally, at least Walter Hartright (and frequently a second or third party leaves his or her hand on a text) rereads and edits everyone else's testimony. So, instead of once upon a time, here the reader gets a lot of copyediting, research, and pre-publication organization. The second way in which the novel significantly denies the integrity of each narrator's story is by presenting it in some way as incomplete, and not on the level of plot, but on the level of detail. Therefore, each story dovetails at odd moments with other stories, creating an unexpected space of narrative possibility. Perhaps the operation of Sensationalism's narrative fullness is best located in the production ofAnne Catherick's story, which is not produced as individual history, but as by-product of textual production, historical complicity, and historical legacy. The complicit relationship of narratives begins because she will only tell her story in relation to Laura's expectations, or Marian's expectations, or Mrs. Catherick's expectations, or Hartright's, or Glyde's. It is the re(as)semblance of her story to all these others, rather than her face to Laura's face, that indicates the feminine history is not determined by simple substitution. The re(as)semblance is more of a ghosting effect with one story always the possibility of the other. For example, Anne is put in an insane asylum by Glyde and escapes by enlisting the aid of Hartright, but dies by the cruel fate or fortune of her life. This plot is repeated as Laura, after Anne's death, is put in the asylum under Anne's name and escapes with the help of Hartright to foil Glyde's plan. Laura is presumed dead with the now dead Anne providing the body. The two stories repeat each other but then again do not. One woman's story is not her own, but neither is it conclusively anyone else's story. Actually it seems that it is everyone else's story. Anne Catherick's story also intersects with the story of Marian Halcombe - Laura Fairlie's maternal half-sister - as it reorganizes the maternal and paternal inheritances. Anne Catherick's story obviously intersects with Glyde's, Hartright's, and Mrs. Catherick's, but also with the dead Mr. Fairlie's and Mrs. Fairlie's. However, in each case, it does not add an explanation, it merely adds more story. There is a narrative excess in Anne Catherick's presence that brings little knowledge but much production. The interruption of the normal progression of Laura's marriage story (legal loss of identity) by Anne's story of illegitimacy (legal lack of identity) entangles the entire narrative in an investigation of the impossibility of anyone

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holding a stable, legal identity proven by time and in history. The imbrication these stories construct of loss of identity cannot be righted by any of the traditional narratives of becoming: love, marriage, labor, and birth. Anne Catherick's story is the story of failed production. This is the story of illegitimacy, the story without phallic mediation. Anne Catherick's "monomaniacal" narrative of intricate details and embedded operations of enunciation is decidedly a plot about plots. Its most characteristically Sensationalist gesture of interruption and interrogation comes in the actual presentation of her story's denouement. It is not presented transparently in narrative time, in a simple unfolding of the plot. Instead it is presented in the Chinese box-like structure of reading and rereading a letter from her mother (Mrs. Catherick) to Walter Hartright, a letter which he demanded as a means to get the goods o n the novel's villain, Sir Percival Glyde. Supposedly, Anne Catherick knew something criminally damaging about Glyde: that is why Glyde locked her up in an insane asylum. But Mrs. Catherick refuses to give Hartright the letter to use against Glyde. She will only deliver the letter after he has vanquished Glyde himself through the labor of his hands. In so refusing to give away her daughter's story, and her own, to Hartright to use against Glyde, she retraces her daughter's refusal to "tell her story" and "lift the veil." The secret of what Anne Catherick knew about Sir Percival Glyde is given to Hartright when Mrs. Catherick gets news of Glyde's death and when Hartright no longer needs it. This sets up a decidedly different exchange of value around the gender/genre of feminine stories. At first, like her daughter, Mrs. Catherick gives Hartright n o information, refusing to let her story be a tool in his phallic exchange of privilege with Glyde. She will not help him win his grudge by telling him "this, that, and the other about Sir Percival and myself' (449). Instead, she stands as seductively recalcitrant as her daughter - admitting a story, but not disclosing it. She gives Hartright an angry lecture about the revenge of "a woman of lost character" and pins down his less than attractive motives: using the "vulnerable position" of a woman with a story, with a history, for his own gains. In effect, she articulates clearly the misrecognition of the masculine I that assumes the feminine story is an incident in the tragic lives of men and so used as mere coin for phallic continuity. She recognizes that knowledge and stories are power, but that the power is with the speaker -male o r female. And as long as the speaker keeps the story, s/he is determinate.

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Since her story has no use value in the exchange of phallic power, it remains her story, her enunciation. It only has use value in creating a space for her position as speaker. As a story without value to Hartright's heroics, it skews the narrative away from the unfolding of the colossal battle between men, between husbands, by bringing it back to the "monomaniacal" story of Anne Catherick and her secret: On the next day, without any warning to me to expect him [Glyde], he came to the house. . . . Seeing my daughter in the room with me . . . he ordered her away. They neither of them liked each other; and he vented the ill-temper on her, which he was afraid to show to me. "Leave us," he said, looking at her over his shoulder. She looked back over her shoulder, and waited, as if she didn't care to go. "Do you hear?" he roared out; "leave the room." "Speak to me civilly," says she, getting red in the face. "Turn the idiot out," says he, looking my way. She had always had crazy notions of her own about her dignity; and the word, "idiot," upset her in a moment. Before I could interfere, she stepped up to him, in a fine passion. "Beg my pardon, directly," says she, "or I'll make worse for you. I'll let out your Secret! I can ruin you for life, if I choose to open my lips." My own words! -repeated exactly from what I had said the day before - repeated, in his presence, as if they had come from herself. I-Ie sat speechless, as white as the paper I am writing on, while I pushed her out of the room. . . . It ended, as you probably guess, by this time, in his insisting on securing his own safety by shutting her up. I tried to set things right. I told him that she had merely repeated like a parrot, the words she had heard me say, and that she knew no particulars whatever, because I had mentioned none. . . . [HI e would not believe me on my oath - he was absolutely certain I had betrayed the whole Secret. In short, he would hear of nothing but shutting her up. (497-98) What is clear in this final unfolding ofAnne Catherick's secret is that it is enfolded - that is, the facts are presented as a story in another person's history - as an incident in a re-vision rather than an original incident, a part of the plot. As the enunciative condition of the unfolding of Anne Catherick's story, her mother's letter emphasizes that Sensationalist subjectivity is not an individual ordering of a whole, but the systemic interpellation of a fragmented subject whose history is in the configurative and complicit site of enunciation of multiple laborers. Obviously,

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Anne Catherick's story is not her story alone, it is her mother's story too: the story of her mother's position as serving girl in the houses of the landed gentry. Anne Catherick's story is the story of the intersection of class and gender desires of her mother, of Glyde and his parents, and of course, of the Fairlies. These details reveal the reason for Sensationalism's shocking weariness - the endlessly complicit subject endlessly caught in a discordant coalition of enunciation. Curiously, Hartright's narrative skips over a detail that was significant for the plot's unfolding: the shocking fact that Anne Catherick's story, which organized all the other narratives, started from an empty threat, a mere parrot enunciation with no actual knowledge behind it. This should be surprising for the reader since getting Anne Catherick's story and silencing Anne Catherick's story determine most of the narrative expectations. It is the threat of her knowledge that interpellates all characters into her story because somehow their subjectivity is part of the crime that determines Anne Catherick's subjectivity. The immediate acceptance ofAnne Catherick's lack of a story suggests that by now the absence of facts or the absence of a secret do not erase the determinate production of Anne Catherick's story. Her parrot's knowledge suggests that there is not an individual plot in time with significant incidents, only the positioning and repositioning of the speaking subject. Narrative unfolding has been reorganized in such a way that the pursuit of knowledge becomes the activity that categorizes and creates subjects instead of the accumulation of knowledge. While the secret of Anne Catherick's knowledge is given in the text of the letter, the secret of her identity, that is, the secret of her resemblance to Laura and the Fairlie family, is not. Instead of revealed, the answer to the second secret is produced right in front of the reader's eyes through a process of rereading rewriting the text of Mrs. Catherick's letter and Hartright's earlier encounters with her. This embedded production of textuality finally lifts the sheet on Anne Catherick's haunting presence. We finally see what troubles Hartright so much in her look of close scrutiny. Content to have solved the mystery ofAnne Catherick's connection to Glyde, Hartright puts the letter away for future reference when time permits space for the unraveling of "the last mystery that still remained to baffle -the parentage of Anne Catherick, on the father's side" (501). Thus, the final unfolding of the resemblance is put off to another rereading, a later and third reading of Mrs. Catherick's letter. By now the traditional sense of plot - causal incidents

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developing to a full picture - has been lost altogether. The reader waits not for action and character, but for another glance at the letter, at the text. When Hartright does return to the letter at the suggestion of Mrs. Clements (Anne Catherick's governess), it causes him to solicit more letters to ascertain the movements of Glyde and the late Mr. Fairlie during the hunting season of 1826. H e produces the following rereading: Taken by itself, this statement was, perhaps of little positive value -but taken in connexion with certain facts, every one of which either Marian or I know to be true, it suggested on plain conclusion that was,to our minds irresistible.Knowing, now, that Mr. Phillip Fairlie had been at Varneck Hall in the autumn of eighteen hundred and twenty-six, and that Mrs. Catherick had been living there in service at the same time, we knew also: - first, that Anne had been born in June, eighteen hundred and twenty-seven; secondly, that she had always presented an extraordinary personal resemblance to Laura; and thirdly, that Laura herself was strikingly like her father. . . . In disposition entirely unlike his brother Frederick, he was the spoilt darling of society, especially of women . . . constitutionally lax in his principles, and notoriously thoughtless of moral obligations where women were concerned. Such were the facts we knew; such was the character of the man. Surely, the plain inference that follows needs no pointing out? (513) And it is never pointed out. Hartright follows the fact that "needs no pointing out" with an even more embedded a n d overwritten passage that analyzes Mrs. Catherick's character and wornen in general: Read in the new light which had now broken upon me, even Mrs. Catherick's letter,in despite of herself, rendered its mite of assistance towards strengthening the conclusion at which I had arrived. She had described Mrs. Fairlie (in writing to me) as "plain looking," and as having "entrapped the handsomest man in England into marrying her." Both assertions were gratuitously made, and both were false. Jealous dislike (which, in such a woman as Mrs. Catherick, would express itself in petty malice rather than not express itself at all) appeared to me to be the only assignable cause for the peculiar insolence of her reference to Mrs. Fairlie, under circumstances which did not necessitate any reference at all. (513-14)

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This passage filled with quotations, references to past texts, parentheses, and suppositions exemplifies the hyper-productive, excessive overwriting that replaces plot in the Sensationalist novel, the production that defies conclusions. The incremental repetition of the conclusive sentiment in the preceding passage - the first conclusion being "needs no pointing out"; the second, "which does not necessitate any reference at all" points out exactly how much the narrative has been skewed from the developmental plot. Direct facts and the casual accumulation of incidents have no place in the structure of suspicion, complicity, and feminine textuality. Mrs. Catherick's letter, like her daughter's --Anne Catherick's story- does not produce truth, only the opportunity to read more, write more, produce more and more stories about her, "despite herself." Thus, Anne Catherick's story is finally unfolded in silence, in suspicion, in suggestion, in an obsessive tracing back. The structural triumph of her shocking presence and its obsessive labor is marked clearly in the final scene of Collins's novel. Here, Anne is long dead, but the "monomaniacal" research that her presence initiated around the "issue" of a specific woman's history cannot be stopped. The sanity of Laura, her presumed paternal half-sister, has returned. Acting as a lawyer, Hartright has won back Laura's legal right to her name, title, and inheritance. And, finally the married couple have a boy child. According to the traditional paradigm of the family romance this should have been the end of the novel. Hartright has reproduced himself through his wife. He has mated with rights and privileges of his father-in-law and produced a secure heir. But the story goes on because their Sensationalist family romance refuses to limit itself to the necessary exogamy of patriarchal law. Hartright, Laura, and their boy child live with Marian - Laura's certain maternal half-sister/ Hartright's sister-in-law/the child's maternal aunt/and the novel's legal feminine double. This situation is not presented as a narratively cozy Other scene; Hartright tells the reader that he has been trying to remove Marian to a place of her own. With her sister married and delivered of a boy child, Marian becomes the redundant woman in the system of patriarchal exchange but inserts herself still in the circuitry of family desire with coin in the maternal economy that unites her to Laura. Claiming her part of the maternal inheritance, she disturbingly squares the family romance. Marian makes material the interruptive function of Anne's ghostly femininity by refusing to move to a room of her own and by aligning herself and her labor to her

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sister's emotional well-being and to the educational well-being of her sister's children. She will teach them to speak and "the first lesson they say to their father and mother shall be - We can't spare our aunt! " (579). Away in Paris on gentlemanly business, Hartright is called home suddenly. My wife and Marian were both upstairs. They had established themselves (by way of my complete amazement) in the little room which had once been assigned to me for a studio, when I was employed on Mr. Fairlie's drawings. O n the very chair which I used to occupy when I was at work, Marian was sitting now, with the child industriously sucking his coral upon her lap -while Laura was standing by the well-remembered drawing-table which is so often used. . . . [Marian] rose; and held up the child, kicking and crowing in her arms. "Do you know who this is, Walter?" she asked, with bright tears of happiness gathering in her eyes. "Even my bewilderment has its limits," [Hartright] replied. "I think1 can still answer for knowing my own child." "Child?" she exclaimed, with all her easy gaiety of old times. "Do you talk in that familiar manner of one of the landed gentry of England? Are you aware, when I present this illustrious baby to your notice, in whose presence you stand? Evidently not! Let me make two eminent personages known to o n e another: Mr. Walter Hartright - the Heir of Limmeridge. " (83-84)

Hartright becomes the outsider as he looks in at the room in which he once labored. His paternity excludes him from the triumph of maternal labor as this charming family tableau turns into a bewildering scene of parental misrecognition and disinheritance. The novel opens up again as the dash that separates the name of the father from the titled name of the son swiftly cuts our dutiful hero out of the picture of his own bildungsroman. The end of the bildungsroman should be a definitive move away from the labor that resulted in the production of the individual and his consolidation in the cultural order, a cure from plot and the labor of narrative. And the good marriage should fix all disruptions of class, race, and gender in the complimentary union of binary difference. But not in the Sensation novel. Its privileging of maternity as social labor explodes individual identity and arrays it as its proximate history. The reader, like Hartright, is left openmouthed as the picture realigns itself, revealing an unchecked threat to individual composition from feminine labor, produc-

Discourse 14.1 tion, reproduction: the spinster sister presumptively holds o n h e r lap t h e suckling child, now heir to the feminine line. T h e wife standing by h e r sister's side becomes less the man's wife a n d m o r e the son's mother, the mother's daughter, t h e sister's wife, a n d of course, the sister's sibling. I n its absolute endogamy of feminine exchange, this final perversion of the icon of Madonna with Child turns the perspective away from the construction of point of view in which the spectator's eye exercises its own I by framing a n d composing the image that looks o u t toward him. At the e n d of The W o m a n in White, t h e perspective turns inward, back toward the image into t h e infinite recession of its apparent repetition, catching the spectator in retracing the differences a n d researching the similarities. Thus, we are left emotionally dissatisfied, but engaged. We are left nervously trying to figure o u t how a n d where she, h e , they, it, a n d I, all fit in. We are left asking t h e riddle: "Where d o babies come from?"

Notes This essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the conference on Disccmrses of the Emotions held at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies in April 1990. Sensationalism's irritating economy of continued, supplementary production could lead to another organization of the critical operation in which the text is the occasion for a wider cultural investigation. For example, I think that Roland Barthes's work is sensationalist in its investigation of all the coordinates of textual production, including the coordinates of the critic. More recently, D.A. Miller's breathtaking article also moves into this territory and significantly takes off from an analysis of Sensationalism. These nineteenth-century comments were all taken from the most thorough study of the literary historical moment of British Sensation novels to date: Winifred Hughes, The Maniac i n the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s. Hughes herself continues the blurriness of this category in her own description of the Sensation novel (16). In fact, the emergence of the term "Sensationalism" to denigrate novels by Wilkie Collins, M.E. Braddon, and Mrs. Henry Wood, among others, and paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites for focusing too closely on details and description in the aesthetic debates of mid-nineteenthcentury England coincides tellingly with the consolidation of Realism as the high culture practice evident in the critical enthusiasm for the novels by George Eliot, Thackeray, and so on, as the site of thoughtful cultural reflection. See George Levine for a good discussion of the nineteenthcentury British establishment of "Realism" - once the

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bastardized form of representation - as the aesthetic medium best suited for the contemplation and examination of the political, social, moral, and religious constitution of men. Those critics who uphold Realism as truth (and mimesis as the operation of truth) must distinguish it from Sensationalism - the scandal or blurred text. This focus o n content has been the major, if not only, critical perspective on Sensationalism stemming from popular culture studies. Though popular culture analysis with its democratic spirit has brought more texts to analysis and has strengthened the links between literature and culture, often it tends to treat all texts as documents of the "real." It neglects to look into the syrnbolizingeffect of popular culture texts. While the Sensationalist genre itself acts fetishistically, hiding and exposing the crisis in Realist representation, most critics have not addressed the questions surrounding the operation of Sensationalism's challenge. The most interesting conservative critic of Sensationalism is Walter Kendrick, while the most important liberal critics are Winifred Hughs, U.C. Knoepflmacher, and Elaine Showalter. But in both cases the scandalous content is transformed into the socially acceptable and the novels are seen as devices supporting the reflective representation of truth. The embarrassment and guilty pleasure are exorcised on the level of criticism in this displacement of form into content. In ignoring the guilty pleasure, these explanations have repressed or avoided the issues of "plotting," "mechanics," and textual strategies. Sensationalism's complicit relationship of subject and object is also clearly seen in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audlty's Secret, first published in serial installments in the London periodicals Robin Goodfellow (Sept. 1861) and continued in Sixpany Magazine (Mar. 1862). In Charles Dickens's Bkak House (1852) - his self-proclaimed experiment in the Sensationist narrative - Esther Summerson tells the story along with an overly omniscient narrator and so situates herself as the only first-person, feminine narrator in Dickens's canon; Marian Halcombe and Anne Catherick - the two stunners of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White - write, read, and correspond with the novel's heroes and villains while their pretty and easily-marriageable sister stands silent; and in Braddon's Lady Audlty 's Secret, Lady Audley's final recourse to madness, which invalidates her responsibility for a career of marriage manipulation, is read by the doctor as understandable self-preservation in a system that would send her to jail or back to an unloving husband. See Mary Ann Doane for an excellent discussion of the inevitable connection of the feminine position and mourning in melodrama, and Naomi Schor for a discussion of Realism's articulation of the bond between the feminine and mourning.

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While Freud denies that this first investigation, this first ordering, this first curiosity, is about the distinction between the sexes and that it cannot be "classed as exclusively belonging to sexuality," in a later edition of Three Essays he notes that girls never question a new baby. This suggests a different relation to knowledge, a different ordering of curiosity and expectations based on gender. It suggests a different relationship to the problems of the maternal body. And, it brings up the question that if girls d o not ask, are they excluded from narrativity at this site, just as they are excluded from language at the site of the Oedipal?

Works Cited Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation) ." L a i n and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review, 1971. 127-86. Anderson, Nancy. "The 'Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister Bill' Controversy: Incest Anxiety and the Defense of Family Purity in Victorian England." The Journal of British Studies 21.2 (1982): 67-86. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Ed.J. Dover Wilson. Cambridge, England: The University P, 1971. Barthes, Roland. Writing Deg-ree Zero. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill, 1967.

. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. Preface Richard Howard. New York: Hill, 1974. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audlty's Secret. New York: Dover, 1974. Collins, William Wilkie. The Woman in White, Ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. Dickens, Charles. Selected Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. David Papoissen. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Doane, Mary Ann. "The Moving Image: Pathos and the Maternal." The Desire to Desire: The Woman ?Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 70-95. Freud, Sigmund. "Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. Vol. 2. London: Hogarth and the Inst. of Psycho-Analysis, 1910. 59-137.

.

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. London: Imago, 1949.

Hughes, Winifred. The Maniac i n the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

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Kristeva, Julia. Powers ofHorror:A n Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Levine, George. The Realistic Imagination. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. Meredith, George. The Letters of George Meredith. Ed. C.L. Cline. Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon, 1970. Miller, D.A. "Cage aux f o l k Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White." Representations 14 (Spring 1986): 107-36. Miller, Nancy. "Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction." Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. 2546. Mulvey; Laura. "Afterthoughts o n 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' inspired by Duel i n the Sun." Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. New York: Routledge, 1990. 2435. Myers, Frederick William Henry. "Sacred Pictures of a New Religion . . ." Pre-Raphaelite Writing:A n Anthology. Ed. Derek Stanford. London: Dent, 1973.95-96. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Dffermce: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histmies of Art. London: Routledge, 1988. Reily, Denise. "Feminism and the Consolidations of 'Women' in History." Coming to Term: Feminism, Theory, Politics. Ed. Elizabeth Weed. London: Routledge, 1989.13439. Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in theField of Vision. London: Verso, 1986, Schor, Naomi. "Eugenie Grandet Mirrors and Melancholia." Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. 90-107. "Sensation Novels." London Quarterly Review113 ( 1 8 6 3 ) ,American ed.: 12835. Williams, Raymond. "Structures of Feeling." Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. 128-35. Rev. of The Woman in White, by William Wilkie Collins. Critic 25 Aug. 1860: xxi, 233-34.