Wilkie Collins and nineteenth-century psychology : cultural significance and fictional form

This thesis considers the relationship between the novels of Wilkie Collins and nineteenth-century psychological methods and ideas. It explores the ways in which Collins extrapolates from these theories by appropriating them as means both of generating suspense and resolving tension, and shows how an investigation of these psychological ideas elucidates his fiction. The Introduction briefly reviews Collins's development as a sensation novelist in relationship to contemporary sensation fiction. Chapter One outlines the wide range of psychological ideas that have a direct bearing on Collins's work. It considers, firstly, how the meaning both of insanity and of social identity was shaped by the development of the asylum system and the precepts of moral management - precepts that encapsulated many of the aspirations of early Victorian liberalism. Secondly it considers mid- nineteenth-century debates on the workings of the mind: debates about how to understand identity, about how to analyse the workings of the consciousness, and about how to interpret the significance of aberrant states and unconscious mental processes. Thirdly it summarises how conceptions of evolution and heredity developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. The analysis of the novels emphasises Collins's development of narrative strategies. It explores how he both assimilates and resists contemporary psychological perceptions in his manipulation of narrative perspective and time, and how the development of this narrative method links the conjuring with perception and cognition with the exploration of the subjective shaping of social identity. Moral management provides the overarching framework for Collins's stories and is usually the source of narrative resolution, but it is qualified and undermined. In Basil and The Woman in White it is a primary source of tension and suspense; in No Name it is both undermined and underpinned by juggling with contrasting notions of evolution. Armadale draws on contemporary theories of dreams to explore social and psychic inheritance and transmission; The Moonstone appropriates contrasting theories of the unconscious in a complex cognitive investigation. The final chapter briefly discusses a selection of the later novels, considering their distinctive features, and arguing that the growing dominance of theories of degeneration had an important bearing on Collins's method in his later work