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POSSESSING DRESSES: FASHION AND FEMALE COMMUNITY IN THE WOMAN IN WHITE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2016

Casey Sloan
Casey Sloan*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Austin
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Extract

Margaret Oliphant much preferredThe Woman in White (published serially 1859–1860) to Great Expectations (published serially 1860–1861). This partiality emerges in a comparative treatment of the texts in her oft-quoted 1862 treatise on sensation fiction, and it rests on the desirability of authors producing thrills using “modest and subtle means” (“Sensation Novels” 569) instead of “by fantastic eccentricities” and “high-strained oddity” (“Sensation Novels” 574). While the existence of an argument against the allegedly regrettable excesses of fantastical narratives will not shock any reader familiar with contemporary criticism of sensation fiction, or, for that matter, Romantic-era novels or Gothic works in general, the primary evidence Oliphant uses to argue her case might come as a surprise. In order to discredit Charles Dickens's ghostly accounts of Miss Havisham's bridal tomb in favor of Wilkie Collins's eerie images of Anne Catherick appearing on a moonlit moor, Margaret Oliphant turns to clothing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , December 2016 , pp. 801 - 816
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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