Wilkie Collins and socially deviant women : an attack on the Angel in the house

The "sensation" genre of novels, a domestication of the gothic novel, flourished in the 1860s. Its heroines are not conventionally womanly: they are allowed a wide range of actions and often seem to be challenging the accepted social code. However, they are usually killed off by the end of the novel or seen as insane, in order to demonstrate that their actions are unacceptable and can never be successful. Wilkie Collins was one of the best known sensation novelists and puts such women as these at the center of his works. He is exceptional in giving his heroines attractive qualities, and in demonstrating that they fight social expectations more because society is unreasonably restrictive than because the women themselves are simply immoral. In Basil and Armadale, Collins examines in particular the inability of his society to deal with female sexuality. In No Name and The Woman in White, the argument is more subtle, but it is ultimately made clear that women's very identities are threatened by society, and that there is no place for the independent, active and non-conformist woman in nineteenth-century culture. In demonstrating the inequity of women's role in bourgeois Victorian society, Collins makes a strong case for greater female independence.