SEL 54,peak

Anna 4 (Autumn 2014): 835851 835

835
ISSN 0039-3657
2014 Rice University

Servants and the Victorian

Sensation Novel
Anna peak

The Victorian sensation novel has long been thought difficult

to define.1 Considering the sensation novel a genre of pastiche
that combines both romance and realism in a manner that
strains both modes to the limit, critics have struggled to dis-
tinguish the sensation novel from many of its more canonical
brethren, particularly those that seem also to combine romance
with realism.2 Charles Dickenss novels often involve sensational
plots and incidents, as do Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre (1847)
and Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights (1847), and the works of
Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, Joseph Conrad, and even George
Eliot have all been likened to sensation fiction.3 Kathleen Tillot-
son once defined the sensation novel as a novel-with-a-secret,
but more recently critics have argued that this definition best
fits only a handful of texts, what one might somewhat paradoxi-
cally call the canonical sensation novels.4 In fact, a whole range
of sensation novels exists that has not yet been much explored.
H. L. Mansels famous essay on sensation fiction includes,
alongside Mary Elizabeth Braddons Lady Audleys Secret (1862)
and Aurora Floyd (1863), such disparate and forgotten works as
Such Things Are (1862), Passages in the Life of a Fast Young Lady
(1862), and theological novels such as Miriam May (1860) and
Philip Paternoster: A Tractarian Love-Story (1858).5 How can any
one definition take into account such heterogeneity?
A recent trend has been to examine the query reflexively and
to seek an answer, not to How might we define the sensation
novel? but to Why do we care? Mark Knights Figuring Out
the Fascination: Recent Trends in Criticism on Victorian Sensa-

Anna Peak is an assistant professor in the Intellectual Heritage Program

at Temple University. She is completing a book titled Not a Universal Lan-
guage: The Condition of Music at the Fin de Sicle.
836 Servants and the Victorian Sensation Novel

tion and Crime Fiction admits the frequent blurring between

sensation fiction and other genres and implicitly defines the
Victorian sensation novel as that which attracts a particular sort
of scholarly interest.6 Likewise, Beth Palmers Are the Victorians
Still with Us?: Victorian Sensation Fiction and Its Legacies in the
Twenty-First Century posits that authors of sensation fiction are
peculiarly aware of their participation in print culture, and also
that the sensation novel is especially relevant in an age of e-books
and declining print sales.7 Thus, the sensation novel has been
defined most recently in terms of its relevance (a heavy question
on many academics minds, as the profession increasingly ques-
tions how to define its own relevance). In fact, discussions of the
sensation novel have focused less on the sensation novel than
on ourselves, on why the genre possesses such a powerful hold
on our thinking.8
Such questions are worth asking, and their answers poten-
tially instructive. All this discussion of the sensation novels
blurred edges and the motives behind our desire to sharpen them,
however, fails to take into account the Victorians own certainty as
to what they meant when they categorized a novel as sensation.
Nineteenth-century critics such as Mansel and Margaret Oliph-
ant suffered from no agonies of self-doubt when they confidently
excoriated sensation novels of all sorts, from those of Braddon to
those of James McGrigor Allan, from bigamy novels to theologi-
cal ones (and sensational moments in Dickenss novelsworks
they nonetheless did not consider to be true sensation novels).
Braddon believed herself to be writing different, and lesser, works
than she wished to write; Dickens certainly believed himself to
be writing Literature.
The difficulty of defining the sensation novel springs from our
inability to understand why the Victorians did so with such as-
surance. As professionals, we are used to judging the Victorians
according to our critical standards rather than understanding
theirs (which we fear would implicate us in imperialism, sexism,
and a distasteful religiosity). Yet, our own standards are neither
pure nor infallible. In this sort of predicament, wrote Ludwig
Wittgenstein of the difficulty of definition in general, always ask
yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this word ? From
what sort of examples? Then it will be easier for you to see
that the word must have a family of meanings.9 How did we
modern scholarslearn the meaning of the phrase sensation
novel? We learned it from the Victorians who first used it. If we
are to understand ourselves, then, or this term, we must first
Anna peak 837

try to understand better what prompted the Victorians to draw

such a sharp distinction between works that, to our eyes, are not
always very different. The postNew Critical tendency to seek out
common formal characteristics has made defining the hetero-
geneous sensation novel especially difficult, but Wittgensteins
concept of a family of meanings serves as a reminder that no
term or category is wholly exclusive; what binds a term together
is a historically based perception of a common characteristic.
What did the Victorians talk about when they talked about the
sensation novel?
Victorian discussions of the sensation novel strike one impor-
tant keynote again and again: class. Contemporary discussions
of the sensation novel have usually assumed that these were
texts read by a middle-class audience and reflective of middle-
class concerns, when in fact, as Andrew King has pointed out,
this was not always the case.10 Sensation novels were not merely
middle-class analogs of lower-class penny dreadfuls; they were
texts read by master or mistress and servant alike, as this Punch
cartoons caption illustrates:

Mary. Please, Sir, Ive been Looking everywhere

for the Third Volume of that Book you was
Reading.
Lodger. Oh, I took it back to the Library this
Morning, I
Mary. Oh! then will you tell me, Sir, if as how
the Markis found out as shed Pisoned er Two
fust Usbands?!11

There may, in fact, have been more servant readers in the nine-
teenth century than middle- or upper-class ones, and a regular
duty of domestic servants was to exchange books at the circu-
lating library, providing servants with the opportunity to select
reading for their employers and to discuss reading tastes before-
hand.12 When S. W. Fullom criticized Braddons novels as Kitchen
Stuff and Alfred Austin, writing loftily and with no apparent sense
of incongruity for the Temple Bar, informed his readership that
the sensational novel is that one touch of anything but nature
that makes the kitchen and the drawing-room kin, they were not
simply expressing a fear that the middle and upper classes were
being corrupted by the lower, as has often been assumed; they
were also voicing a fear of lower-class literacy which was rapidly
becoming less and less different from middle-class literacy.13
838 Servants and the Victorian Sensation Novel

This is not to say that servants were able to read as freely as

their masters, or that they made an equally significant audience
for the sensation novel. Servants did not, of course, have the same
access to more expensive sensation novels as they did to cheaper
penny dreadfuls, and their employers were not always obliging
sharers of their own texts, as Braddons narrator in Aurora Floyd
points out: [Y]ou deny them books, you grudge them a peep at
your newspaper; and then you lift up your eyes and wonder at
them because they are inquisitive, and because the staple of their
talk is scandal and gossip.14 And, of course, servants who spent
time reading, writing, or otherwise not devoting their lives exclu-
sively to service risked dismissal and a bad reference.15
Unless new diaries and documents turn up, we cannot know
what servants thought of sensation novels or to what extent they
actually read them. But the Victorians thought of these novels
as being read by servants and the lower classes generally, and
as making middle-class readers read like the lower classes. This
opinion does not seem to have been acquired from friendly chats
with servants or enthusiastic fans of Lady Audleys Secret but
from the texts themselves. Thus, one way of thinking of the sensa-
tion novel is as a genre that disrupts a middle-class perspective,
whereas realist novels (that famously middle-class genre), even
when including lower-class characters, deal with them in a way
that usually does not similarly disrupt a middle-class perspec-
tive. In fact, the presence of servants in the sensation novel dis-
rupts a middle-class perspective in several ways. The portrayal of
servants and reading in the sensation novel suggests that a full
understanding of life requires attending to multiple class perspec-
tives, and that the middle classes must listen to the lower, while
reminding readers of the working-class origins of many members
of the middle class. Further, the sensation novel consistently
aligns the act of reading with the position of the servant, and
this suggests that readers were being asked to identify not only
with transgressively masculine female characters but also with
feminized servant characters. Because servants were expected
to be both genderless and femininely submissive, their presence
in sensation novels problematizes masculinity by undermining
the gender valueswhether conventional or subversivethat
predominate upstairs, revealing that gender transgression is a
function of class privilege.
To think of the sensation novel as a genre that disrupts a
middle-class perspective is to be at odds with previous critical
interpretations of the role of the servant in the sensation novel. The
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few critics who have examined the servants in sensation fiction

have concluded that the presence of servants in sensation novels
reflects middle-class fears. Anthea Trodd, for example, argues
that servants are portrayed as spies.16 Their presence in a genre
devoted to the underside of propriety is, therefore, to Trodd, simply
an expression of middle-class fears about the secret knowledge
of those given access to private moments.17 Brian W. McCuskey
offers a more nuanced argument, insisting that while servants
function as agents of surveillance, their policing activities may be
used on behalf of the middle classes and not exclusively against
them.18 Ultimately, according to McCuskey, locating surveillance
in the person of a domestic servant brings surveillance onto the
payroll and under the control of the middle classes.19 Though
differing in important respects, Trodd and McCuskey both as-
sume that, in reality, the middle classes were observed by their
servants and that only in fiction could the middle classes regain
control. In fact, however, surveillance quite often cut the other
direction; for every servant who blackmailed his or her mistress
or master, there were dozens more who were being closely moni-
tored, their activities prescribed, their relationships proscribed,
and their hours filled relentlessly. Perhaps Trodd and McCuskey
learned this idea that servants, not their employers, are agents
of surveillance from the Victorians: the Victorian middle classes
did think of and fear surveillance as an activity undertaken by
servants not themselves. But if the sensation novel was supposed
to manage that fear by expressing and controlling it, why was
the sensation novel routinely criticized for failing to bolster class
hierarchies? Mansel complained that sensation novels failed to
portray respectfully or knowledgeably the state and ceremony
of royalty, and that the nobleman of the tale is a monster in
depravity, or an idiot in folly.20 Oliphant, too, argued that the
sensation novel could only be a superficial genre because of its
insistence that washerwomen [are] as interesting as duchesses,
an idea that forces the author of a sensation novel to resort to
regions of exaggeration.21 The successes in sensation22 were
not successes in managing middle-class fears; rather, sensation
novels gave rise to them.
Why was the sensation novel spoken of so often as a dangerous
and harmful genre that would erase class distinctions? The an-
swer, in part, is that the real agent of surveillance in the sensation
novel is the reader. Because sensation novels so often rely on plots
in which secrets and mysteries can exist only because different
characters have access to different, and limited, information, the
840 Servants and the Victorian Sensation Novel

reader of the sensation novel must piece together these different

sets of knowledge by exercising a panoptic gaze. To the extent that
the Victorians thought of servants as agents of surveillance, then,
the act of reading a sensation novel aligned the reader with the
figure of the servant. In Aurora Floyd, for example, when Aurora
refuses to be blackmailed by her first and legal husband, their
conversation is presented through the listening ears of Auroras
servants, Steeve Hargraves and housekeeper Mrs. Powell (pp. 205
ff.). Reader and housekeeper both listen in, aligning the act of
reading with the actions of an eavesdropping servant. In Wilkie
Collinss The Moonstone, steward Gabriel Betteredges detective
fever for piecing together clues as to what has happened to the
moonstone likewise aligns the reader not only with detectives like
Sergeant Cuff but with the figure of the observant servant.23 Read-
ing is essential to understandingnone of the characters in The
Moonstone, for example, can properly understand the entire story
of the moonstone or of Godfrey Ablewhites role in its theft until
they have written their own testimonies and read one anothers
accounts of the subjectand the correlation among reading, un-
derstanding, and serving suggests that the middle classes must
learn to survey themselves through the eyes of their employees.
Furthering this idea is the fact that within the sensation novel,
readers must listen to servants qua servants. Passages in the Life
of a Fast Young Lady by Elizabeth Grey, for example, begins with
a timely warning from a retired housekeeper, Mrs. Davis, to her
former mistress, Lady Sunderland.24 At first Lady Sunderland
has little interest in what Mrs. Davis has to say, but she quickly
recognizes that she must listen to Mrs. Daviss narrative in Mrs.
Daviss style: But, said Lady Sunderland, knowing from experi-
ence that she had better let Mrs. Davis relate the story in her own
way, tell me all about it from the beginning; I will not interrupt
you.25 Lady Sunderland is trying to save time by her submission,
but she nonetheless acknowledges that she owes Mrs. Davis the
courtesy of listening to her and allowing Mrs. Davis to frame her
narrative in her own fashion. Likewise, to piece together the full
story of The Moonstone (1868), readers must attend to Betteredges
framing narrative and to the feelings of Rosanna Spearman as
expressed in her own words.
Listening to servants qua servants is important in the sen-
sation novel because it forces readers to attend to events from
multiple perspectives. While servants and lower-class characters
do sometimes contribute to the narratives of nonsensation nov-
els, their thoughts and feelings are usually mediated through the
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voices of middle-class narrators or characters. Nelly Deans nar-

rative in Wuthering Heights is filtered through the middle-class
Mr. Lockwood; Jos thoughts, presented through free indirect
discourse in Bleak House (185253), are nonetheless displayed
theatrically, as an exhibit A to middle-class readers meant to
make them question their own assumptions: for perhaps Jo
does think, at odd times is a typical interpolation that gives
away the fact that Dickenss audience is meant to be examining
their own thoughts and beliefs here, not identifying with Jos.26
Sometimes, it is true, the reverse happens in nonsensation
novels: Jane Eyres eponymous character feels most acutely that
she is lower class when she silently observes Blanche Ingram,
although many recent inductees into the midcenturys swelling
middle class could readily identify with Janes discomfort as a once
and future member of the upper middle class. Rarely, however,
in nonsensation novels is the reader asked to switch perspec-
tives from servant to master and then back again. But sensation
novels routinely make this request. The Moonstone, of course, is
the example par excellence, as readers must piece together events
from narratives given by servants, detectives, doctors, religious
old ladies, and fine gentlemen alike. Similarly, Mr. Carlyle and
Barbara Hare in Ellen Woods East Lynne (1861) are seen first
through the eyes of Lady Isabel Vane, and then through the eyes
of her servant alter ego, Madame Vine. This mixture of perspec-
tives, the request that readers understand how the same events
and characters look downstairs as well as upstairs, is rare outside
the sensation novel; if we broaden our range of nonsensation
novels away from the surnames Bront and Dickens, we see that
servants in nonsensation novels generally have no thoughts that
are not filtered through a middle-class perspective. The servants
in Vanity Fair (1848), such as Miss Briggs, Miss Crowleys com-
panion; Victor in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); Thomas the
entirely forgettable servant in The Mill on the Floss (1860); the
feisty cook, Nancy, who must be put back in her proper place by
her clever mistress in Miss Marjoribanks (1866); their perspec-
tive on events is not important, or not given at all. Nonsensation
novels generally can only ignore, exhibit, or entirely envelop itself
in a servants perspective because nonsensation novels are an
essentially middle-class phenomenon.27 The plot of the sensation
novel, however, requires that middle-class readers understand
themselves through a servants eyes, or even regard themselves
as servants.
842 Servants and the Victorian Sensation Novel

In fact, the figure of the servant often serves as a reminder

of how little distance there could be between a domestic and a
member of the middle class. In Miriam May, for example, the hero
belatedly realizes that he loves Miriam when she offers, tearfully,
to remain with him as a servant: I will be your servant, she said,
and mend your things, and help you in your schools, and Mother
and I can pay something now.28 He immediately proposes mar-
riage to her, and while middle-class women could read into this
scene a rueful reminder of just how similar these two proposals
could be in effect, the scene could also remind servant readers
that the difference between a middle-class wife and a lower-class
servant is one of (sur)name only, and that they were already per-
forming the labors of a wife without the status of one. In Rhoda
Broughtons Cometh Up as a Flower (1867), readers are reminded
that isolated circumstances can collapse class differences when
the narrator laments, I have nobody to sympathize with or be
attracted to, at home, except papa, and our old man-servant, and
the sexton, suggesting that class distinctions are only sustain-
able in a larger society.29 Given three options for a mateones
father, servant, or sextonthe servant and the sexton stand an
equal chance. Similarly, in Matilda Houstouns Such Things Are,
Susy proposes that she and her cousin Florence Harley go to the
opera chaperoned by their Uncle Teggert.30 Florence is horrified,
crying out Why, hes a shopkeeper! but Susy stands her ground:
I know hes a shopkeeper, she said, with a courage which sur-
prised herself. Were a nation of shopkeepers, and most people
are obliged to make their money in some waypapas made his,
Im happy to say; and its a long time since he has been obliged to
sit on a stool with a pen behind his ear. Papa was a clerk, a paid
servant once.31 A clerk is not a domestic, but for Susy and her
cousin there is little difference: both are servants. A respectable
man may have gotten his start in life as a servantindeed, Susy
suggests that most men have, in some sense, when she quotes
the phrase a nation of shopkeepers as a simple statement of
fact. In turn, a middle-class woman may end up as a servant:
Susy meets Miss Baker, for example, who never married and
thus is forced to enter service once her father dies. When Susy,
surprised that Miss Baker might have been treated unkindly in
her new station, suggests that Miss Baker should simply have
adjusted to her new life and forgotten her more comfortable past,
Miss Baker tells her that she needed those memories to get her
through her days as a servant:
Anna peak 843

[W]henever my pupils seemed to think themselves above

me (and well do I remember the sneering promise of the
youngest, that when she had a park of her own I should
be installed in one of the lodges!), whenever, I repeat, they
seemed to think themselves above me, then my indignant
spirit carried me back in fancy to the palmy days when I
too had luxuries of my own around me I fear it must be
owned that I was sentimental, too. I was always hoping and
fancying that in some way or other we should grow rich
again; and when that event took place, I was, of course,
to have a lover. Such a lover, too! One who would throw
all my cousins admirers into the shade, and bestow upon
me in marriage all the advantages I had lost.32

Such moments as these make it possible for servant readers

to identify with characters in a sensation novel in a way that is
less common in other genres. Miss Bakers voice comes directly
to the reader; she speaks about herself, rather than relating the
story of her family, as Nelly in Wuthering Heights does, and she
demolishes her own youthful belief that one could be a part of
the middle class in essence if a servant in (temporary) fact. The
Jane Eyre narrative of a young woman whose advantages are
taken from her and then restored, with service as a temporary if
important interlude, is here portrayed as a fantasy.
The sensation novel, then, disrupts a middle-class perspec-
tive in part by aligning the reader with the servant, by making
servants narratives integral to the full understanding of events,
and by reminding middle-class readers of how close they are or
might be to losing caste. Additionally, the preservation of class
hierarchies depends in part on treating servants as exceptions to
gender ideology, even as gender ideology is simultaneously treated
as innate and universal. Because domestic servants were ideally
supposed to be unattractive to their masters and to their own
class (despite the fact that neither was necessarily the case), and
because they were judged in relation to categories that were not
necessarily gendered (hard work, reliability, sobriety, respectabil-
ity), the domestic servant was in many ways a largely androgynous
creature. On the other hand, servants were also expected to be
obedient and submissive, were thought of as uneducated and
irrational, and were of course considered inferior, all of which
had the effect of gendering them as feminine. Because of this,
the gender values that prevail upstairs in a sensation novel are
often reversed downstairs.
844 Servants and the Victorian Sensation Novel

Servants in sensation novels are often thought of as pale re-

flections or unrefined imitations of their betters. Phoebe Marks in
Lady Audleys Secret is a colorless version of Lady Audley, as Lady
Audley herself points out; The Moonstones Rosanna believes that
she could be as good-looking as her mistress, Rachel Verinder, if
she only had the chance. Thinking of these characters as inferior
versions of the middle and upper classes does nothing to disturb a
middle-class perspective or sense of class superiority. But servant
characters are not simply bland or vulgar copies of middle-class
originals. Because of the gender contradictions inherent in their
class status, they are more feminine versions of their betters.
The dynamic between Lady Audley and Phoebe, or Rachel and
Rosanna, is one in which the servants play a submissive and
feminized role to their more confident, assertive, powerful, mas-
culinized mistresses. The ability to transgress against traditional
gender roles in the sensation novel is a function of class; mascu-
linity is not so much a difference of sex as a marker of privilege.
At first glance, this may not seem like a wholly new argument;
critics have long argued that the sensation novel is a locus of anxi-
ety about instabilities of class, gender, and identity that nonethe-
less reaffirms traditional values in the end. In practice, however,
this view has usually meant pointing out the way that female hero-
ines exhibit conventionally masculinized characteristicssuch
as physical strength, strength of will, criminal behavior, activity
(however surreptitious) rather than passivitybefore being either
hauled off to the madhouse, like Lady Audley, or reestablished
as tender mothers, like Aurora Floyd. Critics have sometimes
also pointed out that gender values have a class dimension; Lady
Isabel is allowed to be pretty and well-dressed, while lower-class
Afy Hallijohns good looks and fancy clothes make her little better
than a whore.33 Such arguments, while true, share a focus on
the figure of the middle-class woman and assume that middle-
class Victorian readers were titillated by the idea of masculine
behavior in a woman while eventually preferring the safety of tra-
ditional values. Ultimately, this line of criticism sometimes comes
dangerously close to valorizing an unproblematized masculinity
and arguing that female characters in the sensation novel are at
their most praiseworthy to us as modern readers when they are
most masculinized. This assumption can then be projected back
into the past, leading to the further assumption that Victorian
readers shared the same feelings. The figure of the servant in the
sensation novel, however, opens up another possibility. Because
servants were supposed to be both genderless and submissively
Anna peak 845

feminine, and because the structure of the sensation novel aligns

the reader with the servant, readers could also experience in the
sensation novel a sense that traditional femininity provided a
valuable, even at times an intellectual, service.
The Moonstones Rosanna, for example, is not merely a less
attractive version of Rachel; she is a more feminine version of the
masculinized Rachel. Once a thief, a profession associated with
men rather than women, Rosanna has reformed, becoming not
just a better person but a woman. From having been an asser-
tive, grasping thief she becomes a quiet domestic. Her increase
of womanhood coincides with her adoption of a proper class role;
she goes from transgressing class hierarchies by appropriating
capital to adopting a subservient position. To be a good servant,
she must be a good woman; Rosanna is the most loyal of ser-
vants precisely because she is the most feminine. Her adherence
to class proprieties is bound up with and made possible by her
womanhood: her passionate love for Franklin Blake is, in one
sense, an extension of her loyalty to him, and when she kills her-
self in misery at his indifference, she also takes with her into the
quicksand the nightgown that she believes would condemn him if
found. In some ways, this love is transgressive, as it crosses class
boundaries, but at the same time Rosannas love for Blake is tied
to her Vine-like apotheosis as a servant. Love spurs Rosanna to
change from one who is tempted to take from her betters into a
devoted domestic who cares more for the welfare of those betters
than for herself. And her love for Blake makes her willing to die,
not just because of him, but for him. Her womanly feeling, then,
makes her extraordinary degree of loyalty possible.
Rachel, on the other hand, is feminized largely through her
good looks; in other respects, however, her character is portrayed
as being masculine. She is an independent, intelligent, and strong-
willed woman. Betteredge describes her as being unlike most
other girls of her age She judged for herself, as few women of
twice her age judge in general; never asked your advice; never
told you beforehand what she was going to do; never came with
secrets and confidences to anybody, from her mother downwards
(p. 109). Loyally, this is the one defect that Betteredge will
acknowledge, and this defective quality suggests that Rachels
independence prevents her from being truly feminine (p. 109).
Rachel is assertive; she declares her love for Blake openly to Ezra
Jennings; she refuses to let the men carry out their scientific plan
for proving Blakes innocence without at least some involvement
on her part, insisting on being present and pouring the water
846 Servants and the Victorian Sensation Novel

for the draught of laudanum; she suggests that Blake spend the
night in her sitting room, kissing him as soon as Jennings leaves
the room. She even addresses Ablewhite, to Miss Clacks horror,
in the off-hand manner of one young man talking to another
(p. 268). But she is completely truthful and honorable, and the
very fact that Miss Clack disapproves of her is enough to make
clear to any reader capable of feeling Collinss bludgeon-subtle
satire of Miss Clack that Rachel is well-nigh perfect despite, or
even because of, her unconventional independence.
However, Rachels independence is ultimately a problem. Jen-
nifer A. Swartz has rightly pointed out that, over the course of
the novel, Rachel essentially changes from a feme sole to a feme
covert.34 More than one critic has argued that the moonstone
stands for sexual desire, and that Blake cannot marry Miss Ver-
inder until they both understand that in taking the diamond, his
desire for its better protection was inseparable from sexual desire
for her, but what truly prevents Rachel and Blake from marrying
is not the suppression of sexual desire but her independence.35
They cannot be wed until Rachel learns her place; Rachels deci-
sions must be proved wrong. By the end of the novel, her strong
will and ability to make decisions without asking for male advice
is blamed for all the confusion over the diamond. She saw Blake
take it, but did not say so, and thus did not provide him with an
opportunity to defend himself. As a result of her secrecy, Blake
and others spend most of the novel under a cloud of suspicion.
When the two argue at the end of the novel over Rachels silence,
they begin to assume traditional gender roles. Blake takes on the
role of advisor, telling Rachel, If you had spoken out [when the
diamond disappeared], you might have left me knowing you
had cruelly wronged an innocent man (p. 420). Rachel responds
by talking, not about ideals of justice, but about her womans
emotions; she replies that to have said anything on the morning
of the diamonds disappearance would have been tantamount to
asserting, My hearts darling, you are a Thief! My hero whom I
love and honour, you have crept into my room under cover of the
night, and stolen my Diamond! (pp. 4178). Rachel couches her
objection in the form of an emotional impossibility, while Blake,
more rationally, stresses ideals of fair play and the straight bat.
Further, his position is productive; when Rachel finally tells of
seeing Blake take the diamond, Jennings and the rest put a plan
in motion for proving Blakes innocence, accomplishing their goal
quickly and to the satisfaction of all. Rachel is wrong and Blake
right; she is strong, but he (with some help from several other
men) is stronger, and, balance restored, they can then be married.
Anna peak 847

True, Collins does not endorse a complete change for Rachel.

It is after all her emotional weakness, as well as her independent
strength, that leads her to hide the truth, and immediately after
the dramatic revelation of Blakes sleepwalking innocence she
is still behaving in an unconventional way. The fact that she
was wrong has not led her into instant submission. But the ex-
istence of that emotional weakness is not so much a hint that
Rachel should not continue to be strong as an indication that
she cannota certain feminine weakness is inevitable in even
the strongest of women and harmless when the role of prime
mover is properly delegated and judgment properly deferred to
men. Rachel can transgress gender boundaries only by moving,
not by removing, them; whatever her conduct, her place is rela-
tive to mens. Further, the attractiveness of Rachels masculine
qualities is not an indication that gender roles are fluid but a
valorization of masculinity. No matter how attractive masculine
qualities may be in a woman, they are so precisely because they
are masculine qualities.
Yet, masculine qualities and traditional gender roles are con-
siderably less valuable or not in evidence among the servants;
instead, both males and females are largely feminized, in that
servants, like women, are not truly independent. Whatever degree
of freedom they may have, their duty is to obey their superiors.
The servants in The Moonstone do not chafe under their subor-
dinate role but embrace it. Far from presenting a world where
secretive householders sit forever under the exclusive scrutiny
of those conventional domestics, the blackmailing butler, the
distracted housemaid and the homicidal cook, as has previously
been argued, the servants in The Moonstone are loyal to and pro-
tective of the family at all times.36 Because a loyal servant must
take on a feminine, supportive role, Betteredge is portrayed as
feminized; because the novel attempts to uphold class hierarchies,
his femininity is not a problem, as it is for Ablewhite. Although
Betteredge is firmly convinced that he is a member of the sex of
superior creatures, he behaves in ways that are stereotypically
associated with women: he exhibits a curiosity worthy of Mrs.
Sparsit in Hard Times, draws conclusions based on assumptions
and feelings, is nearly as dependent on his Robinson Crusoe as
Miss Clack is on her little tracts, and admits that he is superior
to reason (pp. 206 and 229). Yet, while Collins pokes some gentle
fun at Betteredges foibles, Betteredge is ultimately presented as
someone to take seriously. His curiosity, emotional nature, and
obedient responses to commands, such as to Blakes insistence
848 Servants and the Victorian Sensation Novel

that he write the opening and closing narratives of the novel,

are portrayed as laudable because they are a necessary part of a
servants loyalty to his masters. Through the figure of the male
servant, then, stereotypes about feminine curiosity, emotionalism,
and obedience are portrayed as providing a valuable service, and
Betteredge is therefore given the honor of welcoming and dismiss-
ing readers like a good hostess.
One might think that Collins is suggesting that gender roles
are fluid, but if gender roles truly were fluid, a feminine man would
be acceptable above stairs as well as below. This is not the case,
however. Ablewhite is consistently portrayed as problematically
unmanly. He is a ladies man, not only in the heterosexual sense
but also in the sense of being a ladylike man (p. 111). He even
looks like a woman: he has a beautiful red and white colour; a
smooth round face and a head of lovely long flaxen hair (p.
110). Like many a gentlewoman, he is endlessly involved in vari-
ous ladies societies and ladies charities. Betteredge compares
Abelwhite to a dancing woman in the theatre: The lady did it,
with a band of music. The gentleman did it, with a handkerchief
and a glass of water. Crowds at the performance with the legs.
Ditto at the performance with the tongue (p. 111). Abelwhite
is considerate and chivalrous, strewing smiles and deference
endlessly, and generally exhibiting an unmanly desire to please.
Rachel, in fact, tries to encourage, or rather enforce, in him a
manliness more up to her own standard of masculine directness
and frankness: My dear Godfrey, I am going to make a remark
You live a great deal too much in the society of women. And you
have contracted two very bad habits in consequence. You have
learnt to talk nonsense seriously, and you have got into a way of
telling fibs for the pleasure of telling them (p. 269). Of course,
Abelwhite proves to be something more than a weak, smiling
fibber; he is the true thief of the moonstone. The lesson is clear:
femininity is not valuable upstairs.
Downstairs, however, it is a different story; feminized quali-
ties such as obedience, loyalty, curiosity, are so associated with
inferior class status that if a female character in a sensation novel
needs to learn true femininity she may have to become a servant
first. Lady Isabel in East Lynne, for example, is gendered differ-
ently once she becomes a servant. One might think that once a
lady, always a lady, but the novels description of Lady Isabel
suggests that an important change has taken place as Vane shifts
to Vine. As Madame Vine, Isabel becomes the perfect servant by
becoming unattractive; she will have no followers: She limps
Anna peak 849

slightly as she walks, and stoops A scar extends from her chin
above her mouth some of her teeth are missing Her dress,
too, is equally disfiguring. Never is she seen in one that fits her
person, but in those frightful loose jackets which must surely
have been invented by somebody envious of a pretty shape.37
The men who formerly admired Lady Isabel barely notice Madame
Vine, including her own husband. By making Lady Isabel beauti-
ful and Madame Vine unattractive, the novel attempts to carry
through the idea that gender is for the middle classes rather than
for servants because gender is visible while servants should be
invisible. Isabels descent into servitude not only plays up the vast
difference between the classes, but it also unintentionally blurs
the boundaries between them; the same woman can one day be
a lady and the next a servant. Through Isabel, class hierarchy
becomes fluid and dependent on economic and life circumstances,
rather than a fixed arrangement ordained by God. Yet, because
servants are also expected to be femininely obedient and submis-
sive, Isabel also becomes more of a woman once she becomes a
servant. In fact, only when she becomes a servant does she truly
become maternal. As a lady, Isabel took little or no interest in her
children, whom the novel scarcely mentions until Isabel runs off
with Francis Levison and has a child by him. Even then, Isabel
shows little interest in the baby; its only function in the novel is
to mitigate Isabels transgression by allowing her to state that she
only stayed with Levison for the future childs sake (p. 244). When
Levison requests that Isabel take some money for the child, Isabel
draws herself up and refuses: I am still Lord Mount Severns
daughter (p. 248). Class considerations come before children and
their welfare. Three chapters later, the baby is conveniently killed
in a railway accident (p. 268). In a novel filled with drawn-out
emotions, this death is related quickly; the chapter emphasizes
Isabel as an aristocratic bearer of the crossfull of sorrow less for
the dead child than for herself. Only when Isabel returns to East
Lynne as Madame Vine does she show interest in her children;
as a servant, she functions as the most devoted of mothers and
thereby becomes more of a woman than she had been as Lady
Isabel. The quiet, self-sacrificing service that Madame Vine pro-
vides ultimately earns Isabel her famous apotheosis as a woman.
The interplay between class and gender, mistress and ser-
vantwithin the same character, as well as between charac-
terssuggests that one of the sensation novels basic narratives
concerns the downfall of a privilege that is masculinized in
comparison to the humbler classes enforced femininity, which
850 Servants and the Victorian Sensation Novel

is recast as valuable rather than inferior. Even reading is cast

as a feminine, lower-class act, not only because the sensation
novel is exciting and emotionalized, but also because the more
intellectual aspect of readingobserving events, piecing together
informationis likened to the surveillance of a servant. Every
genres boundaries are fluid, but the family of meanings behind
the term sensation novel, as Victorian critics feared, indeed
disrupted class hierarchies even in the process of reifying them.

Notes

See, for example, Winifred Hughes, The Sensation Novel, in A Com-

1

panion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 26078, 261.
2
Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princ-
eton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), p. 16.
3
Andrew Maunder, Mapping the Victorian Sensation Novel: Some Recent
and Future Trends, LiteratureC 2, 1 (December 2005): 133, 21 and 23.
4
Kathleen Tillotson, introduction to The Woman in White, by Wilkie
Collins (Boston MA: Dover, 1969), pp. ixxxvi, xv. See also Maunder, p. 23.
5
H. L. Mansel, ART. IILady Audleys Secret [Sensation Novels],
Quarterly Review 113, 226 (April 1863): 481514.
6
Mark Knight, Figuring Out the Fascination: Recent Trends in Criti-
cism on Victorian Sensation and Crime Fiction, VLC 37, 1 (March 2009):
32333, 323.
7
Beth Palmer, Are the Victorians Still with Us?: Victorian Sensation
Fiction and Its Legacies in the Twenty-First Century, VS 52, 1 (Autumn
2009): 8694.
8
Knight, p. 323, emphasis added.
9
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Ans-
combe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, rev. 4th edn. ed. Hacker and
Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), p. 41e.
10
Andrew King, Sympathy as Subversion? Reading Lady Audleys Secret
in the Kitchen, JVC 7 (Spring 2002): 6085, 60.
11
Punch cartoon from 28 March 1868, qtd. in Kate Flint, The Woman
Reader, 18371914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 279.
12
Bruce Robbins, The Servants Hand: English Fiction from Below (New
York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), p. 105; also see Richard Altick, The Eng-
lish Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 18001900
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 86.
13
S. W. Fullom, Miss Braddons Kitchen Stuff, The Examiner 2878
(March 1863): 200; and Alfred Austin, Our Novels [Part II]: The Sensational
School, Temple Bar 29 (June 1870): 41024, 424.
14
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd, ed. P. D. Edwards (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), p. 178. Subsequent references to Aurora Floyd are
from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by page numbers.
15
See, for example, Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British
Working Classes (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001).
Anna peak 851

16
Anthea Trodd, Household Spies: The Servant and the Plot in Victorian
Fiction, L&H 13, 2 (Autumn 1987): 17587.
17
See Trodd, especially p. 175.
18
Brian W. McCuskey, The Kitchen Police: Servant Surveillance and
Middle-Class Transgression, VLC 28, 2 (September 2000): 35975, especially
360. The Moonstones Gabriel Betteredge is an example of a curious but loyal
servant whose observations are meant to protect rather than destroy.
19
McCuskey, p. 364.
20
Mansel, pp. 506 and 488.
21
Margaret Oliphant, Sensation Novels, Blackwoods Edinburgh Maga-
zine 91, 559 (May 1862): 56484, 574.
22
Oliphant, p. 574.
23
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999), p.
215. Subsequent references to The Moonstone are from this edition and will
be cited parenthetically in the text by page number.
24
Elizabeth Grey, Passages in the Life of a Fast Young Lady, 3 vols.
(London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862), 1:15 ff.
25
Grey, 1:31.
26
Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Nicola Bradbury (London: Penguin
Classics, 1996), p. 257.
27
Jane Eyre, for example, for whom servanthood is only a temporary con-
dition, even as a servant finds it difficult to communicate with other servants.
28
Arthur Robins, Miriam May: A Romance of Real Life, 2d edn. (London:
Saunders, Otley, and Co., 1860), p. 365.
29
Rhoda Broughton, Cometh Up as a Flower: An Autobiography, rev. edn.
(London: Richard Bentley, 1875), p. 35.
30
Matilda Houstoun, Such Things Are, 2d edn., 3 vols. (London: Saun-
ders, Otley, and Co., 1863).
31
Houstoun, 1:130.
32
Houstoun, 1:1956.
33
Lyn Pykett, The Improper Feminine: The Womens Sensation Novel
and the New Woman Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 119.
34
Jennifer A. Swartz, Personal Property at Her Disposal: Inheritance
Law, the Single Woman, and The Moonstone, in Victorian Sensations: Es-
says on a Scandalous Genre, ed. Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina
(Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 1609, 165.
35
Jerome Meckier, Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction: Dickens, Realism,
and Revaluation (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1987), p. 144.
36
Trodd, p. 185.
37
Ellen Wood, East Lynne (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1984),
p. 326. Subsequent references to East Lynne are from this edition and will
be cited parenthetically in the text by page numbers.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.