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Brief encounters: sensation fiction and the short story

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journal contribution
posted on 2022-11-03, 09:34 authored by Anne-Marie BellerAnne-Marie Beller
Building on recent work on sensation short fiction, which has convincingly argued for the form’s significance to our knowledge of mid-Victorian sensationalist culture more broadly, this article examines Wilkie Collins’s ‘A Marriage Tragedy’ (1857–58), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘Levison’s Victim’ (1870) and ‘The Mystery at Fernwood’ (1861). Through a focus on generic hybridity, marriage, and identity, the connections and divergences between the short and long forms of literary sensationalism are traced, from the passing of the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act in 1857 to the first Married Women’s Property Act of 1870. These particular markers reflect the distinct emphasis on matrimony within these texts during a crucial period of public interest in the Marriage Question. It is argued that the sensation short story is more heavily characterised by gothic tropes than its longer counterpart, even as it eschews the supernatural. Female characters in these stories encounter marriage as an uncanny site of terror and are silenced and traumatised by these intimate experiences. Despite the legal reforms and ongoing public debate of the 1860s and 1870s, writers of the sensation short story suggest that modern marriage retains the threats to female liberty, safety, and sanity that characterised the gothic narratives of an earlier period.

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • English

Published in

Victoriographies

Volume

12

Issue

3

Pages

269 - 287

Publisher

Edinburgh University Press

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© Edinburgh University Press

Publisher statement

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in Victoriographies. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2022.0470

Publication date

2022-10-31

Copyright date

2022

ISSN

2044-2416

eISSN

2044-2424

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Anne-Marie Beller. Deposit date: 2 November 2022

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