Often, scholars of sensation fiction (as well as sensation fiction’s contemporary Victorian critics) argue that the genre was primarily deemed ‘sensational’ for its focus upon carefully constructed, formulaic plots of mystery, crime, and violence. Patrick Brantlinger, who wrote the oft-quoted essay “What is ‘Sensational’ About the ‘Sensation Novel’?,” maintains the traditional critical view that the genre’s “content” and plots, concerned with “murder” and “bigamy” in “proper, bourgeois, domestic settings,” generated its “sensational” aspect and produced the affective shock expected from the reader (Brantlinger 1). As Elisabetta Marino has noted in an article entitled “Challenging the Commodification of Victorian Femininity: The Sensation Novel,” Victorians “undoubtedly linked [the word ‘sensation’] with bodily pleasure and excitement rather than emotional or intellectual enjoyment,” and this appeal to the ostensibly superficial or sensual ultimately degraded the genre in the opinion of its literary critics. (Marino 170). The genre’s abundant emphasis on plot and mystery, in the eyes of the critic, suggests the sensation novel’s simultaneous reduction of character development and sympathy, elements which usually characterized the realist novels of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Honoré de Balzac. Though scholars typically define the sensation genre as a “mix” of the Gothic and the realist novel forms that preceded it, the sensation novel’s ‘realism’ is relegated to the genre’s setting in the domestic home rather than the depiction of character and interiority (Brown 101). As a result, the genre has often been labelled as having “one-dimensional characters” that lose the agency and complexity of ‘realist’ characters (Haugtvedt 157). Brantlinger’s essay stresses the dichotomy between sensational plot and realistic character numerous times; he argues that the sensation novel “is the subordination of character to plot” (Brantlinger 12), that the “sensational derives much more from plot than from character” (13), and that “circumstances rule characters” and strip them of their agency (13). Brantlinger even goes so far to assert that the “sensational” aspects of the genre ensure that it is “not to be taken too serious” (27).

These assertions regarding the “one-dimensional” quality of sensation fiction’s characters were widely used to denounce the genre’s dangerous efforts to undermine Victorian social conventions and ideals, particularly the idealistic view of women and femininity. Since female characters were habitually the perpetrators of sensational crime, violence, and murder in sensation novels, contemporary critics often cited arguments of realism and character development to destabilize and challenge such subversive representations of women. In “Feminine Sensationalism, Eroticism, and Self-Assertion: M. E. Braddon and Ouida,” Natalie Schroeder quotes E. S. Dallas, a Victorian journalist, who argued that novels require “personages in whom we can be interested,” or rather, characters that are believable and sympathetic (Schroeder 89). Furthermore, Dallas invokes stereotypical Victorian notions of the docile, domestic angel of the house to denounce the sensation genre’s reliance on violent female characters to move the plot, arguing that “if the novelist depends for his sensation upon the action of a woman, the chances are that he will attain his end by unnatural means” (89). Victorian critics lauded realist novels for their “serious and sympathetic treatment of average people,” particularly characters who adhered to the cultural and social norms of their era (Brown 96). By contrast, the severe derision of sensation fiction seems to have stemmed from societal fears about the effect of sensation novels on their audiences, especially female audiences, as well as the transgression of cultural norms upheld in realist fiction. Daniel Brown’s essay, “Realism and Sensation Fiction,” posits that this appeal to sympathy and identification, as it pertained to sensational and subversive characters, demonstrates the ways in which “any forms of subjectivity not in line with those endorsed by realist representation were considered abhorrent” (100). In fact, Victorian author Henry James produced a similar critical gaze in regard to Lady Audley, the titular villainess of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret; he posits that Lady Audley is totally devoid of character (and therefore, realism and sympathy), a “non-entity, without a heart, a soul, a reason” (Reynolds et al. 107). Lady Audley’s violence, deceit, and bigamy render her positively unnatural and unfeminine, and to the eyes of her contemporary reviewers, she represents the total diminishment of sympathetic, realist character to sensational plot devices.

However, more recent scholarly work has begun to probe the limits of sympathetic character development in the sensation genre, and in particular, the ways in which sensation relies on sympathy and realism in order to elicit the genre’s more potent shocks. In fact, much of the scholarly work that I’ve read touches upon the sympathetic aspect of Lady Audley and other subversive sensation fiction characters. In “The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction,” Jonathan Loesberg asserts that, despite Lucy Audley’s “role of villainous conspirator,” she “becomes a figure of sympathy” when she loses everything in the novel’s end (Loesberg 120). Elisabetta Marino argues that Lucy’s violent behavior is “partially justified” (Marino 174), highlighting the character’s “gloomy fate” in being “disposed of like a useless object” (177). Anthea Trodd, author of Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel, states that Braddon “invites sympathy for her heroine as a daredevil careerist capable of anything” (Trodd 116). In Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture, Andrew Mangham suggests Lucy’s role as the novel’s primary sympathetic character, asserting that “the reader’s sympathies are never with Luke Marks” or other male characters attempting to dominate Lucy (Mangham 90). Though definitions of sensation fiction frequently suggest that the sensation genre only deals with plot, questions of character and character sympathy appear (somewhat unintentionally) significant to many scholars’ appraisals of genre’s ‘sensational’ aspect. If the sensation genre solely relies on formulaic plot structure, why do so many scholars evaluate the sympathetic function of sensation novels? How does sympathy function in sensation fiction?

To answer, I would like to pose this question: what did the term ‘sympathy’ signify for Victorian reading audiences? In her recent work, “The Sympathy of Suspense,” Erica Haugtvedt defines sympathy as “a bonding process whereby characters or readers imagine themselves in another’s situation” (Haugtvedt 151). According to Haugtvedt, the reader’s sympathetic “feelings” towards or “investments” in characters enable them to feel the “anxiety of suspense” more fully; our investment in a character makes us eager to know what will happen to them in the end (151). However, she does not necessarily demonstrate why she defines sympathy in this way, nor does she provide context into the term’s use in the Victorian era. Other works on sympathy and sympathetic realism in the Victorian era seem to diverge slightly from her definition of sympathy in relation to feelings. In The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot, Rachel Ablow does define “sympathy” as “the experience of entering imaginatively into another’s thoughts or feelings” (Ablow 8), but her focus on Victorian marriage plots rather suggests that novelistic sympathy indicated a more detached “mode of relating to others and of defining a self” (2). Furthermore, Rae Greiner’s Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction differentiates between Victorian “sympathy” and modern “empathy.” According to Greiner, Victorians maintained a “border between self and other,” where “one could generate experiences of sympathetic connection without requiring that others’ feelings and minds be known or identically shared” (159). Empathy, on the other hand, is the modern effect of “feeling with rather than for others,” rather than a more distant form of identification (159).

This definition of Victorian sympathy seems especially appropriate for appraisals of Lady Audley as a ‘sympathetic’ villainess. Though Lucy’s means are utterly violent and deceitful, hardly an inspirational model for behavior, it becomes increasingly difficult to cast her off or judge her as a wicked madwoman when Braddon details the poverty, societal restrictions, and expectations of ideal femininity that eventual provoke her assertions of agency. Though readers may distance themselves from her violence, they can certainly sympathize, identify with, and understand the reasoning behind her actions. Haugtvedt posits that “only through the reader’s sympathetic investment in the characters can the story have an impact,” and it certainly seems that the ‘sensational’ quality of Lady Audley’s Secret stems from the way that the female reader sympathizes with such a violent and transgressive female character (156). Female readers in the Victorian era “[granted] sympathy to the villainesses” of sensation fiction because they identified with and understood “the stifling domestic environment they were confined to” (Marino 170). This feminine sympathy and identification, rather than simply ‘sensational’ plot elements, generated the genre’s sensational aspect; sensation novels were popular because they “indirectly voiced women’s ambitions for individuality and power,” straining against the “tedium and injustice of the feminine role in marriage and the family” (Schroeder 87). Rather than substantiating critical fears that sensation fiction “posed [a danger] to female readers,” who critics believed would reenact the literary feminine violence, the genre’s appeal to feminine sympathy rather augmented social interrogation of the limiting institutions that sought to restrain women’s agency (89). Sensational ‘villainesses’ like Lady Audley offered a “deconstruction of the ideal Victorian heroine” (Reynolds et al. 105) and exposed the women’s performative efforts to impersonate “an impossible ideal” (Talairach-Vielmas 132). And though the sensation novel may focus more on plot devices (in comparison to realist novels), sensation novels still enable readers to examine “the human condition” in the ways that characters respond to the situations they face (Ifill 8). Thus, we can see how sensation is inextricably linked to sympathy to produce readerly response; as Haugtvedt asserts, sensation fiction relies on sympathy for its production of “affective experience” (156). The shock of sensation fiction lies in its subtle abilities to produce readerly sympathy and identification with violent female characters. Though readers do not ultimately sympathize with the violent actions of characters like Lady Audley, they do identify with the societal anxieties and restrictive realities that produce such violence. It is precisely the sensation novel’s ability to generate sympathetic identification with its female readers that rendered it so “dangerous” to critics.

 

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