The Yellow Mask, the Black Robe, and the Woman in White: Wilkie Collins, Anti-Catholic Discourse, and the Sensation Novel

Abstract

Summarizing the Gothic history of sensationalism, Patrick Brantlinger traces a movement from the religious to the secular: a kind of metaphoric sleight of hand, the Gothic romance has managed to make secular mystery seem like a version of religious mystery. By the time of sensationalism, Brantlinger argues, there not even a quasi-religious (32). Without claiming that sensation novels are, as such, religious, I nonetheless want to suggest that anti-Catholicism can provide those masks, cloaks, and mysteries, ready-made, as it were.1 One way to achieve the sleight of hand by which the secular takes on a religious aura by brandishing the narrative vestments and vestiges inherited from the Gothic. The secularized mysteries of sensationalism re-placed religion in another sense as well. In an 1863 Quarterly Review article deploring sensationalism, John Murray complained that class of literature has grown up around us, usurping in many re spects, intentionally or unintentionally, a portion of the preacher's office, playing no inconsiderable part in moulding the minds and forming the habits and tastes of its generation; and doing so principally, we had almost said exclusively, by 'preaching to the nerves' instead of to judgment, as preachers should do (252). To think of pointing a moral by stimulants of this kind, Murray pronounces, is like holding a religous service in a gin-palace (262). While Murray mentions a few sensation nov els that deal directly with religious subjects (e.g., Charles Maurice Davies's Philip Paternoster: A Tractarian Love Story), his larger point that religious discourse in forms the sensation novel less as content and more as form. The rhetorical persua sions of the pulpit are now displaced onto the pages of the sensation novel, and,