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 A Narratology o f Detection in the Victorian Novel

by

Stefanie Pinto ff

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

o f the requirements for the degree o f

Doctor o f Philosophy

Department of English

New York University

January 2002

/ /
/d - -• l j
Mary Poovey
' I
/

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 UMI Number 3035310

Copyright 2002 by
Pintoff, Stefanie

Ail rights reserved.

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 © Stefanie Pintoff

All Rights Reserved, 2002

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the many people who contributed to this project,

especially those faculty members who worked closely with me: Mary Poovey,

Carolyn Dever, and John Maynard. They have offered much support and

encouragement throughout the writing and revision process, and I have appreciated

their patience and intellectually challenging feedback at every step o f the process.

Very special thanks also to Natalie Kapetanios and Karen Odden for their ongoing

enthusiasm and interest in my work; they have both read every chapter o f this

dissertation in various draft stages and offered significant constructive feedback. I

gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance provided through the MacCracken

Fellowship offered by New York University. Lastly, I want to thank my family,

and especially Craig, for providing tremendous support and patience through these

many years o f academic study.

iv

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 ABSTRACT

This project is fundamentally about how writers o f Victorian detective

fiction explore and interrogate the narrative forces that shape our lives. I argue that

these writers develop narrative strategies o f fragmentation and linking that not only

defer closure by obscuring the mystery’s solution, but also initiate an inquiry into

our processes o f linking associations into a coherent narrative and calling the result

“knowledge.” Within this fragmented narrative structure, each novelist may be

seen to explore innovative and unconventional strategies for assimilating this

fragmented information into reliable knowledge. The novels I examine in this

dissertation appear to construct narratives around two shared concerns: 1) to

recognize as problematic the concepts ordinarily relied upon to construct narratives

o f certain knowledge; and 2) to model for readers new epistemological approaches.

The effect o f this narrative experimentation is to demand that readers become self-

conscious about the epistemological processes by which we construct the

knowledge we believe we achieve.

The various novels I examine in this dissertation each foreground a different

narrative device to interrogate a particular epistemological question. In each,

traditional assumptions about ways o f knowing are called into question and new

methods are explored. Novelists employ metonymic narrative devices to examine

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 the fragmented split between persons and their intimate objects in Lady A udley’s

Secret, The Woman in White, and certain Sherlock Holmes stories; likewise,

synecdochal devices are developed to question assumptions about “wholeness” in

Bleak House and The Moonstone. In Dracula, “fragmented time” becomes a

narrative device used to challenge assumptions about temporal order, and in The

Golden Bowl, the Jamesian ficelle is employed to make a self-conscious inquiry

into the nature o f knowing itself. This problem is one that I contend is aligned

with the project o f Agatha Christie’s most controversial novel, The Murder o f

Roger Ackroyd, which I examine in the conclusion as a postscript.

My project is significant to Victorian studies o f the novel because it

recognizes an important change in patterns o f writing, reading, and knowing that -

while initially structuring only detective narratives —will later, as the James novel

suggests, extend to other novelistic forms and arguably Modernism itself.

vi

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 TABLE O F CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv

ABSTRACT v

CHAPTER 1. Introduction I

CHAPTER 2. Forensic narrative in Lady A udley’s Secret, 32

The Woman in White, “A Case o f Identity,” and “The Adventure
o f the Blue Carbuncle”

CHAPTER 3. Fragmented Selves, Fragmented Stories: 85

Bleak House and The Moonstone

CHAPTER 4. Fragmented Time in Dracula 126

CHAPTER 5. An Epistemological Detective Story: Henry

James’s The Golden Bowl 160

CHAPTER 6. Conclusion: Untrustworthy Narrators, Uncertain

Knowledge - or, Agatha Christie as Post-Script 199

BIBLIOGRAPHY 220

vii

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 Chapter One.
Introduction

"Only connect. ”
—E.M. Forster

The story o f the crime is a simple one. In December 1811, over a period o f

only twelve days, seven people were brutally clubbed to death in London’s East

End. Dubbed the Ratcliffe Highway Murders, the murders horrified the public and

captured the attention o f several prominent political and literary figures: the Prime

Minister spoke about the crimes in the House o f Commons, Sheridan made a series

o f public observations, and De Quincey was later inspired to write his essay On

M urder Considered as One o f the Fine Arts (1827).1

The story o f the criminal investigation that followed, however, is much less

simple. The case was never adequately solved, although police were quick to place

blame upon a suspect who conveniently died while in police custody - and whose

decomposed body was first paraded through the streets o f London and then buried

at a crossroads with a stake through the heart. As T. A. Critchley has illustrated in

his A History o f Police in England and Wales, 900-1966, the case was doomed

from the start by inexperienced magistrates who mishandled key evidence. It was

1 For a complete synthesis o f all information relating to the crime, including

contemporary news reports and the official account in the Newgate Calendar, see
P.D. James and T.A. Critchley, The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe
Highway Murders, 1811 (London: Faber and Faber, 2000).

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 “an extraordinarily incompetent investigation,” in which the magistrates o f

Shadwell and Wapping were more concerned with protecting their own reputations

than cooperating with one another (James 167). This bungled case provoked a

widespread nationwide panic about crime and a demand for police reform that was

instrumental in the creation o f the Metropolitan Police in 1814.

What I want to suggest is especially significant is that the investigation’s

primary failing was a narrative one. In The M aul and the Pear Tree, a work o f

historical reconstruction that revisits the evidence o f the Ratcliffe Highway

Murders, the research o f Critchley and James recounts the appalling failure o f the

original investigators to “connect” disparate pieces o f evidence. Because the seven

murders occurred in two separate parish districts, two different magistrates initiated

separate enquiries. Each independently collected important evidence, but they did

not share their findings with one another (or anyone else, for that matter).

By linking together the evidence independently gathered by each precinct,

and evaluating it in light of modem evidentiary analysis, Critchley and James

present a convincing argument that not only clears the suspect who died in police

custody and was given such an ignominious burial, but also identifies the more

probable killer. Because they work from only the historically documented

evidence that was available to contemporary investigators in 1811,1 argue that their

success is first and foremost a narrative one. Unlike the magistrates o f a century

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 earlier, Critchley and James succeed in weaving together disparate fragments of

evidence into a coherent, persuasive narrative - largely because they have learned

modem narrative patterns that make it instinctive for them to do so.

But what is it that makes their narrative reconstruction o f this 1811 case

appear so natural and self-evident —not only to Critchley and James, but also to

their modem readers? They bring their diverse training in history, detective work,

and fiction writing to bear upon the scant evidence available and, in doing so, they

create a coherent, connected story. Yet the manner in which they do so involves an

approach to evidence and a manner o f thought that was not available to their 1811

counterparts.

I suggest that their approach to “solving’' the Ratcliffe Highway Murders is

the effect o f narrative patterns that developed in nineteenth-century fiction and

changed the way readers and writers approached the process o f detection. The

connection between the epistemological processes that surround detection in reality

and in fiction has been made by criminal profilers John Douglas and Mark

Olshaker, who cite examples from Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur

Conan Doyle to contend that the “antecedents” o f modem professional detective

work “actually do go back to crime fiction more than crime fact” (19). Crime

fiction and fact are interrelated because in each, the process o f investigation is

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 •y
essentially a process o f constructing a specialized kind o f narrative. Moreover,

writers o f detective fiction were at liberty to explore these new and specialized

ways o f knowing through imaginative narratives in a way that ordinary officials

could not.

My analysis in this dissertation contributes to our understanding o f the

interrelation between narrative and epistemology, which has been outlined by

theorists from philosophical as well as literary traditions. Many o f these theorists,

including philosopher C. A. Coady in his study entitled Testimony, argue that

narrative represents our primary way o f knowing, or at least the primary means by

which we organize information and knowledge. Throughout this project, I will

distinguish between “information” and “knowledge” as representing two different,

interdependent facets o f knowing. By “information,” I mean to invoke facts that

are certain and ascertainable. By “knowledge,” I gesture towards an understanding

that results from a more rigorous assimilation o f information that may be either

incomplete or contradictory. For example, the fact that the stained nightgown in

The Moonstone is discovered to belong to Franklin Blake would represent

“information” that must be linked with other information if “knowledge” o f the true

2 Peter Thoms has examined John Douglas’s contention elsewhere in Mindhunter

that “storytelling ability” is an “important talent” for the detective (quoted at 9).
While Thoms focuses almost exclusively on the detective’s storytelling ability in
his study, I focus in this dissertation upon broader narrative paradigms than those
generated by the detective him or herself.

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 story o f the jew el’s theft is to be properly assimilated. The narrative strategies that

pervade Victorian detective fiction thus may be seen to represent an inquiry into the

reader’s process o f making associations and calling the result “know ledge.”

Moreover, if narrative represents our primary way of understanding and processing

information, then innovative narrative patterns have a significant potential to

change habits and processes o f thought. As close readings in subsequent chapters

will show, these strategies challenge traditional ways in which associations are

understood - and in so doing, gesture towards new habits o f knowing.

This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century narratives o f detection

make two important narrative moves that I term “fragmentation” and “linking”;

these narrative devices have important epistemological implications. Narratives o f

detection first present fragmented, partial evidence and then proceed to link this

evidence into a coherent story. Narrative strategies o f “fragmentation” and

“linking” are counterparts that work together. I contend that they do so by first

breaking down traditional narratives of identification, and then initiating not only a

new kind o f epistemological process to take its place, but also a new relationship

between narrators and narratees.3

In his reading o f the Victorian detective novel as inaugurating an

3 With the term “narratee,” I follow Genette’s usage, which invokes not only the
reader o f the story, but also any character who fulfills the role o f a “listener.”

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 exploration o f the modern police state and its effects upon the modem subject, D.A.

Miller has claimed in The Novel and the Police that the classical detective story is

formally based “on the hypothesis that everything might count” [emphasis his]

(33).4 In other words, all fragmented information in the novel has the potential to

link into a coherent narrative. Yet the hypothesis that “everything might count” is

learned, not instinctive - and its very formulation is part o f the development of

conventions associated with the detective novel. Moreover, it reflects the

epistemological understanding o f novelists and readers generated by nineteenth-

century patterns o f narrative not available to the earliest writers and readers of

detective fiction.

Traditional narratives work not through the reader’s process o f learning that

“everything might count,” but instead through the reader’s sympathetic

identification with a central character.5 Through sympathy, readers respond to the

4 Miller draws upon Foucault’s ideas from Discipline and Punish to argue for a
structural distinction in the detective novel between public and private space, in
terms o f the narrative role o f the detective and disciplinary police power. I differ
from Miller not in this larger ideological reading, but in its narrative implications.
For example, Miller sees that despite the character-narrators, The M oonstone is
what Bakhtin has termed “monological” —there is one voice overriding all others
that ensures a single and coherent interpretation o f the world. I will argue in
Chapter Three that the “final interpretation o f the world” is anything but
“coherent.”
5 For an analysis o f the role o f “sympathy” in the novel, see David Marshall’s The
Surprising Effects o f Sympathy (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1988) and
Adam Smith’s Theory o f M oral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982).

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 emotions o f particular characters and feel that they come to know them and feel as

they do. Sympathy is also linked with a moral purpose, for as we come to

sympathize with Austen’s Emma, Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Dickens’s Pip, or Eliot’s

Dorothea Brooke, we also come to identify with these central characters. The

moral lessons that each character learns - “how to be a good woman” or “how not

to be proud” - are rendered powerful through such readerly identification.

Detective narratives, however, function to break apart such readerly

identification. Patrick Brantlinger has outlined an aspect o f this process when he

describes the narrator’s relationship with the typical detective plot in “What is

‘Sensational’ About the Sensation Novel?”:

[T]he mystery acts like a story which the narrator refuses or has

forgotten how to tell; the detective must now ‘put the pieces

together.’ The plot unwinds through the gradual discovery - or,

better, recovery - o f knowledge, until at the end what detective and

reader know coincides with what the secretive or somewhat remiss

narrator-author has presumably known all along. (45-46)

Brantlinger is correct to link the detective story narrator’s reduced omniscience

with a broken plot that must be “recovered.” The narrator is necessarily complicit,

Brantlinger suggests, when the plot appears to mimic “a story which the narrator

refuses” to tell, I will later argue against the principle that this fragmented plot is

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 finally and fully reconstructed so that the knowledge o f the detective and reader

reaches that of the narrator (a primary topic o f Chapter Three). For now, it is

important simply to recognize that because o f certain specific narrative devices

associated with detective fiction, the narrator no longer functions as the reader’s

trustworthy guide - neither in terms o f morality nor even basic knowledge.

Detective fiction appears to become self-conscious about these narrative devices in

ways that earlier novels, whose narratives expected to evoke sympathy and

identification, were not.

In many cases, readerly identification with the narrator is further fractured

by the device of multiple narration; the reader o f such novels is asked to listen to a

story “told by more than one pen,” as Collins describes it in The Woman in White.

Such a narrative style not only fragments the experience o f the story by

apportioning it to a number o f individual characters, but also makes it unlikely that

the reader will identify with any particular one. Other novels that adhere to more

traditional narrative styles, such as third-person omniscient, still seek to break

identification patterns by focalizing through more peripheral characters.

For example, Braddon’s Lady Audley s Secret is narrated through an

omniscient narrator, but focalizes most often through the bumbling Robert Audley

- arguably, a character with minimal relation to the primary action o f the story

surrounding Lady Audley. O f course, Braddon’s technique o f repelling readerly

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 identification with Lady Audley has a moral purpose as well as an epistemological

one: readers must be dissuaded from identifying with the morally-corrupt central

character. This duality o f purpose, however, yields a singular effect: a different

kind o f thoughtful, knowledgeable reader is engendered through devices other than

sympathy.

Peter Thoms has argued in Detection and Its Designs: Narrative and

Power in I -Century Detective Fiction that “[p]ersuasive stories rely upon

reputable storytellers, a dependence which partly explains why detective fiction

(with its emphasis on the process o f solution) does not arise until the nineteenth

century, when the detective begins to emerge as a more trustworthy figure” (9).

The problematic that Thoms does not take into account, however, is that while the

detective figure may increasingly become more “trustworthy,” the narrative itself

becomes less so. Fragmented narratives comprised o f gaps in which much

unknown information is hidden from the reader become proliferate. Such

narratives are not unique to the detective novel; admittedly, that any novel’s

narrative is more or less fragmented in some way is a basic tenet of narrative

theory. Yet within detective fiction, there is a remarkable incidence o f what

Brantlinger has called a “disintegration of narrative authority” (31).

This “disintegration o f narrative authority” fundamentally alters the reader’s

ability to rely upon the narrative voice. Donna Bennet’s analysis in “The Detective

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 Story: Towards a Definition o f Genre” has offered the term “confidentiality” to

describe the extent the reader can rely upon truthfulness in the novel. Her analysis

describes five levels o f trust, ranging from zero-degree (where the reader is entirely

in the dark) to (almost) complete confidentiality (250-57). Detective narratives

increasingly begin to demonstrate a complete lack of “confidentiality.” Yet despite

the fact that this narrative practice obscures a certain type o f knowledge, it is

important to recognize that it paves the way for other, new kinds o f knowledge.

When traditional narrative patterns disintegrate, they do manage to “let in kinds o f

knowledge that realistic fiction had often excluded” (Brantlinger 53). The purpose

o f this study is to explore what kind o f knowledge that is, and how it is specifically

constituted through narrative.

Critics o f the detective novel - and its forerunner, the sensation novel -

have long been interested in primarily thematic issues related to plot.

Thematically-oriented critical attention has focused on the way criminals and their

crimes are represented; critics have analyzed issues of character, paying attention to

memorable detective figures, both professional and amateur, ranging from Poe’s

Auguste Dupin and Collins’s Sergeant Cuff to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes

and Christie’s Hercule Poirot. From early criticism such as A.E. Murch’s The

Development o f the Detective Novel and Ian Ousby’s Bloodhounds o f Heaven: The

Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle, to more recent criticism such

10

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 as Glenn Most and William Stowe’s The Poetics o f Murder: Detective Fiction and

Literary Theory and Martin Priestman’s Detective Fiction and Literature: The

Figure on the Carpet, thematic studies have helped detective narrative finally to

become a “legitimate academic subject” (Pyrhonen 6).

In large part, this thematic focus is no doubt because these genres are

remarkable for their sensationalized themes (usually crime, often murder) in

“proper, bourgeois, domestic settings” (Brantlinger 1). These themes, as

Brantlinger has usefully observed, constitute the mysteries that are the central and

distinguishing features o f both sensation fiction and detective fiction proper (2).6

For purposes o f this study, I will follow the practice o f many critics including

Patrick Brantlinger and Ian Ousby in treating the detective novel and its forerunner

the sensation novel as constituting a general class o f “detective fiction” because

both make use o f similar themes, detective plots, and numerous “scenes o f crime

6 For additional influential thematic studies, see Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan,
The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction (London: Victor
Gollancz, 1981); Martin A. Kayman, From Bow Street to Baker Street: Mystery,
Detection and Narrative (London: Macmillan, 1992); Audrey Peterson, Victorian
Masters o f Mystery: From Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle (New York: Frederick
Ungar, 1984); and Anthea Trodd, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (London:
Macmillan, 1989).

11

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 and murder” (Peterson 6).7

Many critics interested in the thematics o f detective fiction and particularly

detective figures have developed a concomitant interest in tracing patterns o f

epistemological thought. Such criticism has usually framed these epistemological

issues in terms o f reading the detective’s role as illustrative o f thematically paired

opposites: rational thought versus irrational thought; moral order versus chaos, and

objective thought versus sentimental thought.8 Many o f these studies have

examined such themes in light o f historical or cultural connections between

fictional narratives o f investigation and nineteenth-century developments in the

science o f criminology and prevailing attitudes towards criminal behavior.9 These

studies may be viewed as part o f a larger critical perspective that views detective

fiction as displaying both in theme and structure a desire to rationalize and control

7 The genre o f detective fiction is recognized by most critics as inaugurated by

Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 publication o f Tales o f M ystery and Imagination involving
the detective Dupin. See Most and Stowe at 19. However, this view is challenged
by Richard Alewyn in “The Origin o f the Detective Novel,” in which he finds an
earlier example in an 1818 story o f E.T.A. Hoffmann (Most and Stowe 62).
8 See Laura R. Braunstein, “Strange Cases: Representing Epistemology in
Victorian Detective Narratives,” PhD Diss. Northwestern University, 2000.
9 Criminology may be understood as a branch o f study that seeks to understand the
origins o f criminal behavior using insights from psychology, sociology, law, and
anthropology. See especially Marie-Christine Leps, Apprehending the Criminal:
The Production o f Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1992); and Ronald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise o f
Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

12

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 elements o f the criminal and deviant.10 In other words, the genre creates narratives

o f social transgression, allows them to flourish through plot, but predictably

contains them in the end, when the rationality o f the detective’s method triumphs

and principles o f formal closure inhere.

Such critics have argued that, through the detective figure, writers o f fiction

explore basic problems o f knowledge and knowing —most o f which involve

questioning what the detective knows, with what degree o f certainty, and subject to

what limits.11 Taking into account such questions, Brian McHale has described

detective fiction as the “epistemological genre par excellence” (16). Certainly

readers o f detective fiction have long appreciated the ways in which fictional

detectives —be they professional masters o f detection or gifted amateurs —have

spun brilliant solutions to perplexing mysteries. Yet that “solution” is often the

result not o f the character o f the detective or even his or her superior intellectual

acumen; instead, the solution is an effect created by the narrative art o f the tale.

Notably, this narrative art guides the reader’s encounter with knowledge,

10 Many critics have articulated variations o f this narrative trajectory o f

“reassurance”; see, for example, Brantlinger, Cvetkovich, and Thomas.
11 See the extensive discussion offered by Most and Stowe.

13

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 and to a greater extent than purely thematic readings can recognize.12 This same

interest in “how knowledge works” has been readily linked with psychoanalytic

theory as critics began to pay attention to issues o f narrative as well as theme; for

example, Lacan’s famous reading o f Poe’s The Purloined Letter reads the

epistemological themes and narrative repetitions within this early detective story in

light o f both psychoanalytic and narrative-linguistic analysis.

Critics interested in all issues o f narrative have thus found detective fiction

to be an especially rewarding area of study, largely because “in its essence, the

detective novel is almost pure narrative” (Most xii). The understanding o f

detective narrative as a perfect “laboratory” for narrative theory is well

documented.13 To the extent that critics have been interested in extrapolating a

more broad-based theory from detective fiction, this genre “displays exceptionally

clearly those basic narrative devices and strategies employed by other kinds of

12 See Jonathan Loesberg’s argument in “The Ideology o f Narrative Form in

Sensation Fiction” that the narrative structure o f sensation fictions manifests the
ideology that generates similar narrative structures in parliamentary reform
discussions o f the late 1850s and 1860s (116).
13 See, for example, Peter Huhn’s discussion in “The Detective as Reader:
Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction,” M odem Fiction Studies
33:3 (1987) at 451-66 and S.E. Sweeney’s “Locked Rooms: Detective Fiction,
Narrative Theory, and Self-Reflexivity” in The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on
Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory, Eds. Ronald G. Walker and
June M. Frazer (Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1990) at 1-14.

14

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 narratives as well” (Pyrhonen 115).14

Moreover, as Kathleen Tillotson has pointed out, narrative is integral to the

development o f detective fiction, for innovative narrative strategies developed to

delay closure and thus “tantalize the reader by withholding information rather than

divulging it” (xv).15 Critics have recognized that detective plots provide an

intellectual “game” or “puzzle” for the reader:

Some detective stories are all plot, intricately woven tissues o f

causes and effects, coincidences and missed chances, that challenge

the reader by their complexity. Others focus more on the telling,

teasing their readers out o f thought and patience by limiting the

narrative point o f view and controlling the rhythm and tempo o f the

exposition. (Most and Stowe xii)

What is most important, however, is to recognize that this puzzle is controlled by

narrative strategies designed to engage the reader —specifically by alternately

“challenging” or “teasing” him or her.

Most and Stowe are aligned with most critics o f narrative and detective

14 Heta Pyrhonen’s M urderfrom an Academic Angle offers the first comprehensive

survey o f the critical history o f detective fiction. Pyrhonen’s tracing o f critical
trends and her comprehensive bibliography have proven extremely helpful to me in
conceptualizing this project.
15 For Tillotson’s general argument about sensation novels as “novels with a
secret,” see Kathleen Tillotson, “The Lighter Reading o f the Eighteen Sixties,”
Introduction to Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Boston: Riverside, 1969).

15

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 fiction in analyzing narrative strategies as devices that generate certain effects that

do not depend upon the possibly idiosyncratic responses o f individual readers. O f

course, some critics do make some distinction among the possible reader responses

that narrative devices will generate. For example, Umberto Eco has argued that

readers are culturally divided into “average” or “sophisticated” readers: the former

tend to engage emotionally with characters and focus extensively upon plot, while

the latter will appreciate issues o f literary style and be able to see through devices

o f narrative manipulation (163-72). Yet while such distinctions are important to

understanding the differences in what readers perceive, they continue to be less

relevant to a consideration o f what narrative devices may suggest about models of

knowledge assimilation. Moreover, the point o f inquiry for this dissertation

extends far beyond a simple interaction between readers’ knowledge and novelists’

manipulation of narrative.

My inquiry focuses upon the way in which fragmented narratives

specifically guide the reader to connect new sources o f evidence into a coherent

story. These fragmented narratives suggest a change in the way readers and writers

come to approach information. Significantly, these narrative strategies are

instrumental not only in the development of detective fiction as a genre, but also in

16

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 the generation o f particular habits o f reading and assimilating knowledge.16

Fragmentary narratives may thus be seen to represent an inquiry into the process o f

knowing - but “knowing” through specific, narratively constructed ways. In other

words, fragmentary narratives demand that readers become self-conscious about the

narrative process by which we construct the knowledge we believe we achieve.

The most productive inquiry into the relationship between detective fiction

and narrative form was initiated by the structuralists. As the name given this

critical field implies, these critics were interested in examining the fundamental

structures o f detective fiction, and they did so by means of narratological analysis.

Their aim was to formulate a general “grammar” of the detective narrative; this

“grammar,” derived from common plot structures, would help to illuminate the

central features o f the “laws o f fiction” by which all narratives were presumed to

work.17

These “laws o f fiction” are what Tzvetan Todorov has described as a

16 See Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History o f the
Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1957)
for a full discussion o f the Victorian reading public and particularly o f how the
process o f serialization created reading practices.
From almost the beginning, detective fiction was viewed as a genre governed by
specific conventions. Two 1928 essays describe these conventions: Ronald
Knox’s “A Detective Story Decalogue” and S.S. van Dine’s ‘Tw enty Rules for
Writing Detective Stories.” Generally, both Knox and van Dine agree that there
must be a central detective, an identifiable victim, and a culprit who is not the
detective. Moreover, the “whodunit” must be solved by rational means.

17

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 “poetics” o f detective fiction —his term for the systematic structure that organizes

all such fiction despite individual variation in less significant features (42). Two

essays that have explored and attempted to define such a “poetics” are Todorov’s

“The Typology o f Detective Fiction” and Umberto Eco’s “Narrative Structures in

Fleming.” Structuralist critics like Todorov and Eco make a valuable contribution

to the available concepts and terminology for describing the relationship between

story and discourse in detective narratives. One such valuable concept, borrowed

from Russian formalist discourse, is the distinction made by narratologists between

fabula (or “histoire” or “story”) and sju iet (or “discourse” or “plotted narrative”)

(Prince 21, 91; Culler 169-71).18

This distinction speaks to an important conceptual division between the vast

world o f events alluded to by the story and the limited sequence o f events narrated

in the text proper. Peter Brooks has conceived this distinction as particularly

appropriate to detective fiction:

Narrative always makes the implicit claim to be in a state o f

repetition, as a going over again of a ground already covered: a

181 follow the distinction between story (fabula) and narrative (sjuzet) made by
Genette in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in M ethod (Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1980). Another prominent narratologist, Mieke Bal, uses these
terms differently, based upon her “three-layer distinction - text, story, [and]
fabula.” Narratology: Introduction to the Theory o f Narrative (Toronto: University
o f Toronto Press, 1997) at 6-10.

18

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 sjuiet repeating the fab u la, as the detective retraces the tracks o f the

criminal. (97)19

In other words, the conceptual division between sjuiet and fabula is essential for

grasping the principles o f “repeating,” “reordering,” and “reconstructing” that

narratologists explore.

With the detective novel, this distinction has proven especially helpful in

articulating what a number o f critics have observed - namely, that detective fiction

always encompasses not one story but two. Todorov has pointed out that the

“secret,” or what is often the “crime” o f a detective story, “is in fact the story o f an

absence: [and] its most accurate characteristic is that it cannot be immediately

present in the book” (46). He distinguishes between the absent story o f the “crime”

and the present story o f the “investigation,” which is a mediating story that we

understand as “plot.” 20 This latter story - which focuses upon the investigation of

the absent story - is ultimately about resolving gaps in knowledge (e.g., what the

19 Brooks has suggested that Freud’s investigation of “beginnings” and “ends” in

Beyond the Pleasure Principle may suggest a model for plot. In other words, what
operates in the text through repetition is the death instinct - or the desire for the end
- but an end reached only through at least a minimally complicated detour, in
tension, o f the plot o f narrative. See Reading fo r the Plot: Design and Intention in
Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
20 Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics o f Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1977). Other critics have formulated this distinction in similar
terms. See, for example, Dennis Porter, The Pursuit o f Crime: Art and Ideology in
D etective Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) at 29.

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 reader and detective figure do not know) with the implicit promise that these gaps

will be closed, or “connected,” by the story’s end. This connection is o f course

two-fold: it encompasses not only the numerous unknown gaps in the fragmented,

absent story, but also the bringing together o f the story o f the crime and that o f the

investigation. My own study is particularly invested in those fragmented gaps that

make up a significant part o f the “absent” story.

Recent scholarly work on detective fiction that focuses upon narrative

issues has shifted from approaches that are predominantly thematic or structural to

those that encompass a more textually based narratological analysis. Narratological

critics have extended their attention to include all aspects o f discourse, not just plot

structure - and in doing so, they significantly broaden the conception o f “form” in

ways I will draw upon in this study.21 According to R. Austin Freeman, the plot of

the detective story is really “an argument conducted under the guise o f fiction”

(11). Although Freeman is primarily interested in plot structure, he extends his

analysis o f that structure to describe four important elements o f the fictional

“argument” that have implications for discourse: first, there is a statement o f the

problem; second, there is a production of the evidence (by which Freeman means

clues and other information); third, there is a discovery (after which the detective

21 In this analysis, I conceive o f “structure” to indicate different levels o f narration,

both in terms o f narrative voice and temporal division. By “form,” I mean to
gesture to concepts o f language and style as well as narrative structure.

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 announces that the case is solved); and fourth, there follows the proof o f solution

(in which the detective explains his or her process o f ratiocination) (7-17).

Freeman’s four elements appear to suggest that there is a complete story to

be elucidated through the narrative’s “argument,” and that this story is retrievable

by the novel’s closure in the “proof o f solution.” I contend, however, that any

analysis o f the discourse or “argument” o f the text must take into account not only

the narrative strategies surrounding the present story, but also the one that is

“absent.” For in many o f the novels I examine in this dissertation, the “absent”

story is never entirely recouped in the detective’s “discovery” or “statement of

proof.”

Alexander Welsh in Strong Representations has usefully re-directed the

critical focus from the detective’s narrative role towards broader narrative issues.

He analyzes a body o f novels - most o f which invoke detective plots - and argues

that there was a shift in patterns o f narration in the nineteenth century based upon

“things not seen,” or circumstantial evidence. He suggests that the paradigm o f

circumstantial evidence helped to shape the form o f the novel, for just as law courts

came to prefer the “truth” o f a story narrated by circumstantial evidence, so too did

novels o f the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (15). This preference resulted

from the increasing belief that circumstances could not lie, though witnesses might.

Welsh is correct in identifying one facet o f a changed epistemological-narrative

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 paradigm that operates throughout nineteenth-century fiction.

My analysis o f specialized narratives o f “connection” in this dissertation

may be seen to contribute to our understanding o f the facets o f this nineteenth-

century epistemological-narrative paradigm. The previous conceptions o f this

paradigm, articulated by Alexander Welsh as one o f “circumstantial evidence” and

by Peter Brooks as modeled upon Freudian repetition, have usefully added to our

understanding o f nineteenth-century narrative patterns, but there remain areas for

additional analysis. Brooks, who has written persuasively about the relation o f

narrative structure to issues o f “endings” and novelistic closure in Readingfo r the

Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, reads the “absence” o f ends as a narrative

o f “permanent deferral” (313). Yet this paradigm, while helpful for understanding

some narratives, cannot fully account for what I identify as the interplay o f

strategies o f “linking” and “fragmentation” in particular detective narratives. More

recently, Peter Thoms has argued that the detective figure plays an important

narrative role - specifically, to expose the “constructed” nature o f narrative. In

Thoms’s view, the detective figure is an authorial figure in a storytelling game o f

artifice where what is invited is “a kind o f reading that counters the interpretive

work o f the detective, undoes his assertions o f power, and turns us back again to

the mystery” (8).

Most critics o f narrative in the detective novel appear to agree about two

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 important points. First, implicit in each critic’s argument is the belief that the

formal, or structural, properties o f narrative have important implications for literary

meaning. Second, each critic has noted a problematic “gap” in knowledge

surrounding the detective novel’s closure. This dissertation suggests that, in

addition to creating narratives founded upon the desire to entertain the reader,

writers also appear both to experiment with and interrogate new ways o f

assimilating information into what the novel deems “knowledge.” In doing so,

these writers construct gaps and absent stories, but for what I ultimately suggest is a

constructive purpose that offers new knowledge in substitution for that lost in the

irretrievable fragments o f the text.

The narrative device o f “fragmentation” has been examined by Donna

Bennett in “The Detective Story: Towards a Definition o f Genre,” although in her

view, this device is always combined with temporal distortion to allow the gradual

uncovering of the narrative mystery. After the story is broken apart in “fragments”

that are dispersed throughout the discourse, the reader must step in to reorder

events temporally (244-45). This strategy is a common one, and the subject o f my

analysis in Chapter Four will examine it closely. But what is important is that gaps

can be seen to explore epistemological issues that extend far beyond temporality

alone - and for purposes beyond merely preventing premature disclosure o f the

ending.

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 To conceptualize this problematic o f closure, especially as it relates to the

fragmented devices that surround certain “absent stories” in detective fiction, it is

helpful to draw upon a structural division o f narrative levels even more detailed

than Todorov’s distinction between fabula and sjuzet. In Genette’s terminology,

the narrative levels important to distinguish are: the act o f narration (Genette’s

extradiegetic level); the events o f narration, usually the detective’s investigation

(Genette’s diegetic level) and embedded narratives, usually to do with the

committing o f the crime (Genette’s metadiegetic level) (Genette 228-34; Huhn

545-56).

The critic S.E. Sweeney has described these levels as illustrating a “double

logic” in which a story is produced by its narrative structure just as a story produces

narrative structure (5-7). Detective narrative is “self-reflexive,” Sweeney argues,

because it draws attention to itself on every level o f narrative: it foregrounds form

and content, and “it dramatizes the interplay among narrative levels and embedded

texts” because it is self-conscious about the acts o f writers and readers (3-5).

Although I am interested in the interrelation o f particular narrative devices at all

levels, my particular focus is upon the metadiegetic level, where we can identify

the story that is “absent” or “secret.” This focus enables me to foreground various

narrative models o f assimilating knowledge through the lens o f differently

embedded absent stories.

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 My analysis blends my interest in narrative and epistemology to extend and

complicate previous inquiries by posing the following narratological questions:

how do narrative patterns shape what we know through formal properties as well as

substantive ideas? How are particular habits o f mind and ways o f seeing the world

fostered through narrative? And what, if any, are the implications o f new narrative

strategies for areas beyond the realm o f detective fiction - in other words, for the

novel as well as epistemological thought more generally?

In her article on “Sensation Novels,” Margaret Oliphant complained that

“[t]he sensation novel is ... a literary institutionalization of the habits o f mind o f

the new police force” (354). Although Oliphant was more disturbed by the

prospect o f police intrusion into private homes and lives, she is correct on a

secondary level as well. New “habits o f mind” are in fact formed through literary

narration, especially as novels begin to model new ways and sources of

approaching knowledge through specific narrative devices.

The different novels I examine in this dissertation each foreground a

different narrative device - specifically, a metonymic device in Chapter Two; a

synecdochal device in Chapter Three; a non-chronological device in Chapter Four;

and James’s use o f the ficelle point-of-view in Chapter Five. Each chapter

interrogates the process by which we come to knowledge using these devices as a

lens. All chapters problematize concepts previously relied upon to construct

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 narratives o f certainty, and instruct readers in new epistemological approaches to

knowing.

My project revisits Victorian detective narratives in terms o f

epistemological concerns that, I believe, have not previously been considered.

Through close readings o f particular narrative strategies surrounding issues ranging

from identity to time and subjectivity, I argue that detective narratives initiate an

inquiry into the process o f assimilating knowledge. They generate new habits o f

knowing and inaugurate a new relation between the narrator and narratee that, I

ultimately suggest, prefigures Modernist habits o f reading and knowing. By

breaking patterns o f identification with a central character and generating narrative

patterns that promote an intensified reading experience, detective narratives create

a different kind o f thoughtful reader than previously engendered by novelistic

practice.

My focus is upon what Brooks calls the “deeper levels o f fabula” - those

never entirely present stories that are revealed to have motivated a particular crime

(26). Brooks’s reading o f Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Musgrave Ritual” has described

“a vast temporal, historical recess, another story, the history o f regicide and

restoration” illuminated by the narrative o f crime and detection (26). These levels

o f absent stories offer insights into the stakes o f detective narrative that extend

beyond simply unraveling the mystery. I trace this narrative inquiry in the four

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 chapters that follow.

In the chapter that follows this introduction, I examine the fragmented

narratives o f physical objects in four works o f detective fiction: Lady Audley's

Secret. The Woman in White, and two Sherlock Holmes stories, A Case o f Identity

and The Adventure o f the Blue Carbuncle. In these detective narratives, Braddon,

Collins, and Conan Doyle each examine the fragmented split between persons and

objects - for example, that gap between the finger and its fingerprint, the hand and

its handwriting, the typewriter and the typewritten letter. In doing so, they may be

said to read the object “forensically.”

In nineteenth-century usage, the term “forensic” had a meaning somewhat

different from its more recent understandings, for its connotation o f “justification”

dominated its reference to medical or scientific data (OED). I use the term

“forensic narrative” in this chapter to explore those elements o f detective plots that

revolve around physical objects, which are themselves read forensically to establish

a link between object and person. I further describe these narrative strategies as

“metonymic” because o f the way they shape that narrative link, and in so doing,

gesture towards a new way o f conceiving identity. My analysis in this chapter

relies upon Gerald Prince’s discussion o f the process o f metonymy as a device that

“stand[s] at the heart o f verbal activity” (51). Prince’s discussion, based upon

Roman Jakobson’s conception o f metaphor and metonymy as distinct narrative

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 strategies, positions the relation o f these rhetorical tropes to narrative structure (51-

52).

Chapter Three analyzes fragmented identity, as narrated in Bleak House and

The Moonstone. In these examples, the “self’ is a mystery, but one that cannot be

understood through traditional narrative techniques o f introspection. Instead, the

narrative deploys new strategies for connecting the parts o f the self that are known

with those that remain unknown. I suggest that the narrative paradigm that

develops from these strategies may be called “synecdochal” because it represents

an inquiry into the way the relationship between “parts” and “wholes” may

influence the way in which narratives work to link information so that knowledge

may be assimilated.

Chapter Four examines narratives o f fragmented time by focusing upon

Dracula. In this novel, detection is the task o f multiple narrators, whose

epistemological doubts about strange occurrences and deaths are represented

through their concerns with time. Each narrator displays an obsession with time,

and particularly gaps in time. As Mina Harker, D racula's ostensible translator and

editor, claims, “in this matter dates are everything.” Dracula subverts the

conception o f temporal order that governs most detective fiction: that the plot

begins with a violation o f temporal order and works to restore events to a

chronological, linear sequence in the end (Sweeney 5). In Dracula, this normal

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 plot trajectory is not followed, for characters claim that they restore events to a

chronological order when in fact they do not. Dracula thus uses “time” as a

structural device to investigate assumptions about ways o f knowing through linear,

chronological methods as opposed to more associational approaches.

Chapter Five examines a novel that has been termed an epistemological

detective story - Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. In this work, James utilizes

what is now called the “Jamesian point-of-view” together with a ficelle-like

narrative device to initiate a self-conscious inquiry into narrative epistemology, and

specifically the relationship between narrative and the nature o f knowing and

doubt. In James’s novel, we see not only how detective narratives have extended

beyond the realm o f the detective novel proper, but also how the narrative devices

associated with them interrogate problems o f knowing that we associate with

modernism.

Finally, in Chapter Six, my conclusion examines Agatha Christie’s most

controversial novel, The Murder o f Roger Ackroyd. By the time Christie writes,

the detective novel is a fully developed genre with specific conventions. Narrative

conventions o f “fragmentation” and “linking” are well established for both writers

and active, participating readers. Thus, Christie’s fiction o f the early twentieth

century may be viewed as very much a sign o f the epistemological moment, for in

the detective novel’s acceptance o f fragmentary evidence as a convention of the

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 genre, narrators and narratees both gesture unmistakably towards new, modernist

thinking. Yet The M urder o f Roger Ackroyd raises new questions about the process

o f knowing that align Christie more closely with Henry James, and separate her

from other practitioners o f her genre who viewed the detective novel as an inelastic

genre o f particular “rules.”

Although early critics viewed the genre o f detective fiction as opposed to

modernist literature, they now have to varying degrees recognized its connection

with the discourse o f modernity. On the one hand, Martin Priestman has noted

some similar concerns shared by tum-of-the-century detective fiction and

modernist fiction, although he ultimately argues that the differences predominate.

Specifically, he believes that while modernism repeatedly blurs the distinction

between the Self and Other, detective fiction consistently keeps the Other (e.g., the

criminal) at bay (136-47). On the other hand, Bims and Bims have demonstrated

that there are “many angles from which Christie viewed selfhood, and showed

similarity between detective’s and villains’ selfhood, as both operate on the

perceived confusion between mask and reality” (120-34). Heta Pryhonen, who has

noted this trend o f thought in Murderfrom an Academic Angle, argues that the

issue will remain “unresolvable” (45). Yet it seems too early to pronounce this

judgment, for what is still inadequately understood is not the fact o f - but instead

the nature o f - these links. This dissertation will contribute to our evolving

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 understanding o f this epistemological connection between detective narratives and

modernist narratives.

This project is significant to Victorian studies o f the novel because it

recognizes an important change in patterns o f writing, reading, and knowing that -

while initially structuring only detective narratives - will later, as the James novel

suggests, extend to other novelistic forms. Thus, by the time W oolf writes Mrs.

Dalloway, Joyce pens Ulysses, and Ford Maddox Ford centers The Good Soldier

around his unreliable narrator’s phrase “I don’t know,” patterns o f narrative

understanding have fundamentally altered. Readers have become skeptical; they

know how to connect fragmented evidence into a linked, coherent story. And even

more important, this process has become naturalized; readers either make their own

meaning, or readily accept the lack thereof. That they do so is o f course indebted to

the art o f Modernist writers and the unique narrative experimentation they practice.

But it is also indebted to nineteenth-century detective plots in ways previously

unrecognized.

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 Chapter Two.
Forensic narrative in Lady Audley’s Secret, The Woman in White,
"A Case o f Identity,” and “The Adventure o f the Blue Carbuncle”

“I think o f writing another little monograph some o f these days on the typewriter
and its relation to crime. ” —Sherlock Holmes in "A Case o f Identity ”

“[IJt has always been my habit to hide none o f my methods, eitherfrom

my frien d Watson or from anyone who might take an intelligent interest in
them. ” —Sherlock Holmes in "The Reigate Puzzle ”

At the beginning o f Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure o f the Blue

Carbuncle” (published January 1892), the famous detective Sherlock Holmes

performs a strange and impressive feat: based solely upon evidence drawn from a

lost hat, he constructs a coherent narrative about its unknown owner. Holmes’s

accomplishment appears incomprehensible, and the narrator o f this story, Watson,

voices the reader’s astonishment when he responds: “But you are joking. What

can you gather from this old battered felt?” (330).1 The answer, for Holmes,

appears to be “a great deal,” for he deduces the following:

That the man was highly intellectual is o f course obvious upon the

face o f it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three

1 Like James Krasner in “Watson Falls Asleep: Narrative Frustration and Sherlock
Holmes,” English Literature in Transition 40:4 (1997), 424-36,1 view the narrative
role o f Holmes’s companion Watson as that o f a “double” for the reader. For
another reading o f the relationship between Holmes, Watson, and the reader, see
Christopher F. Baum’s “The Twice-Stained Treaty” in The Baker Street Journal
32:3 (1982) at 146-48.

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 years, although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight,

but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression,

which, when taken with the decline o f his fortunes, seems to indicate

some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may

account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love

him. ... He is a man who leads a sedentary life, goes out little, is out

o f training entirely, is middle-aged, has grizzled hair which he has

had cut within the last few days, and which he anoints with lime-

cream. These are the more patent facts which are to be deduced

from his hat. (331)

Initially, it seems preposterous that Holmes could glean such detailed

information merely from the condition o f an abandoned felt hat. Yet, when

explained in careful detail, Holmes’s deductions seem perfectly logical, even

scientific. For example, he bases his account o f the mysterious hat owner’s

reversal o f finances upon his observation that:

This hat is three years old. These flat brims curled at the edge came

in then. It is a hat o f the very best quality. Look at the band o f

ribbed silk and the excellent lining. If this man could afford to buy

so expensive a hat three years ago, and has had no hat since, then he

has assuredly gone down in the world. (331)

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 Holmes’s superb feats o f ratiocination are a hallmark characteristic o f this eccentric

yet brilliant detective, and they are manifest in the investigative plot o f every

Sherlock Holmes story.

Through the lens o f different critical methodologies, most critics o f these

stories take Holmes’s deductive methods into account in some way. For example,

Martin Priestman has discussed Holmes’s debt to syllogistic reasoning in Detective

Fiction and Literature: The Figure on the Carpet, and Gian Paolo Caprettini has

argued in “Sherlock Holmes: Ethics, Logic, and the Mask” that Irene Adler (“the

woman” in “A Scandal in Bohemia”) outwits Holmes because her methods o f

deduction so closely duplicate Holmes’s own. Thomas Sebeok has suggested that

Holmes’s methods are not in fact “deductive” at all, but instead constitute what he

terms “abduction,” which he believes better characterizes Holmes’s conjecturing o f

general premises from specific factual evidence (1-10).2

In my analysis, however, I am less interested in Holmes’s methods p e rse

than in the epistemological understandings they gesture towards. I argue that

Holmes’s methods constitute a forensic narrative device that is based upon

metonymy. Although critical attention has considered the figure o f Holmes as

2 In Sebeok’s view, deduction describes reasoning from general premises to draw

conclusions about particulars; induction describes drawing general conclusions
from particular instances; and abduction uses particular instances to conjecture
general premises, taking into account some particulars while dismissing others as
“red herrings” (1-10).

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 representing a metonymy for logic, this attention has not explored metonymy as a

unique narrative device.3 In other words, each story shows Holmes recognizing

and exploring a new kind o f metonymy between individuals and the objects they

hold, touch, and live with on intimate terms. By recognizing that objects have a

symbolic value that enables them to function narratively in a metonymic way,

Sherlock Holmes illustrates an approach to objects —one I describe as “forensic” -

that influences the way in which we understand and make sense o f the world.4

In describing this particular narrative device as “metonymic,” I am

borrowing a term that has an extensive history in traditional studies o f figurative

language as well as structuralist-linguistic theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis. As

M.H. Abrams has pointed out, the term metonymy derives from the Greek word for

“a change o f name," and in figurative language has generally been understood as a

“species o f metaphor” in which a term for “one thing is applied to another with

which it has become closely associated because o f a recurrent relationship in

common experience” (98). It is this concept o f a “close” and “recurrent

3 See the essays on Holmes in Eco and Sebeok, The Sign o f Three: Dupin, Holmes,
Pierce.
4 Metonymy also affects the ways in which readers read. Peter Rabinowitz in
Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics o f Interpretation has read
narrative procedure in relation to metonymy, arguing that the interrelation produces
a set o f reading rules that he characterizes as a “mode of consumption.” He claims
that all narratives require decoding on either the metaphoric or metonymic levels,
and the reader must choose one approach that will, in turn, determine his or her
reading experience (185-90).

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 relationship” that I want to examine in a structural, narrative way. Whereas, in the

traditional example discussed by Abrams, the “scepter” might have served as a

metonymy for the “king,” I argue that writers o f detective fiction may be viewed as

transforming the concept within a narrative context (98). Thus, the “felt hat” in my

Sherlock Holmes example above not only functions as a metonym for the

individual who wears it, but also —and more importantly - gestures metonymically

towards a narrative link between the man and his hat. This narrative, in turn, can

be read in a manner I term “forensic” so that the link reveals a story about that

same individual. It is this readable metonymic link between persons and their

intimate objects in which early writers o f detective fiction are particularly

interested.

By invoking the concept o f metonymy in this manner, I also draw upon

particular aspects o f post-Lacanian and post-Jakobsonian discussions o f metonymy

and metaphor.5 From Lacanian discussions, I want to borrow the concept o f

metonymy as suggesting a type o f “lack,” for as Jane Gallop has emphasized in

Reading Lacan, “metonymy bodies forth some lack” (127). Lacan has described

the origin o f metonymy in the French verb “to find” (trouver), which implies an

absence; moreover, he elaborates, “the connexion [sic] between ship and sail is

s Synecdoche also has a role to play in this debate, but I will defer a discussion o f
this role and my specific usage o f the term until Chapter 3.

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 nowhere but in the signifier, and ... [it is in] the word-to-word connexion [sic] the

metonymy is based” (“Agency o f the Letter” 156, emphasis his). For Lacan,

metonymy’s relation to “lack” remains a continuing problem despite the “word-to-

word” connection, for he concludes his essay by asserting that “nothing yet has

been validly articulated as to what links metaphor to the question o f being and

metonymy to its lack” (“Agency o f the Letter” 156). The metonymic narrative

device I describe in this chapter is also grounded in “lack,” for it is a device used to

connect what is unknown about an event or character with what may be learned.

I should also make clear that I am following Lacan in viewing metonymy as

distinct from metaphor, as opposed to Abrams’s “species o f metaphor” (98). Lacan

describes metaphor as “one word for another: that is the formula,” and his

conception o f metaphor derives from that o f Roman Jakobson (“Agency o f the

Letter” 157). Jakobson’s conception of metonymy —as distinct from metaphor -

has been important not only for rhetorical theories, but also for narratology. In

‘Two Aspects o f Language and Two Types o f Aphasic Disturbances,” Jakobson

describes metaphor and metonymy as “two types o f connection”; with metaphor,

one topic leads to another “through similarity,” and with metonymy, one topic

leads to another “through contiguity” (91-92). It is the principle o f association

invoked by “contiguity” that I choose to draw upon in m y conception o f a

metonymic narrative device.

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 Jakobson has argued for the primary role o f metonymy in prose, stating that

“[p]rose [unlike poetry] ... is forwarded essentially by contiguity” (94).

Specifically for my purposes, he has described “metonymical style” as the

“prevailing literary canon” o f the late-nineteenth century (93). As Wai Chee

Dimock has helpfully explained in her essay on “Class, Gender, and a History o f

Metonymy” :

Jakobson sees metonymy as a principle o f contiguity and contrasts it

with metaphor as a principle o f equivalence. He associates the

former with realist narrative, and the latter with romantic poetry

(97).

Yet Jakobson’s conception o f how this contiguous process occurs appears to

encompass broad features o f text to the exclusion o f specialized narrative devices;

thus Jakobson describes how “the realistic author metonymically digresses from the

plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space o f time” (92).

Prince has addressed Jakobson’s discussion on this point,6 describing how,

“following and expanding Jakobson, many narratologists have treated narrative as

predominantly metonymic - arguing that motifs and functions are integrated into

sequences through relations o f contiguity” (52). Peter Brooks nicely summarizes

6 Prince also points out, however, that narrative may also be viewed as metaphoric:
“in narrative sequence, the la s t... event constitutes a partial repetition o f the first,
creating a relation o f similarity between the two” (52).

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 the narratologicai understanding o f these two competing concepts o f metaphor and

metonymy when he states:

Narrative operates as metaphor in its affirmation o f resemblance, in

that it brings into relation different actions, combines them through

perceived similarities ... appropriates them to a common plot, which

implies the rejection o f merely contingent (or unassimilable)

incident or action. P lo t... thus must use metaphor as the trope o f its

achieved interrelations, and it must be metaphoric insofar as it is

totalizing. Yet it is equally apparent that the key figure to narrative

must in some sense be not metaphor but metonymy: the figure of

contiguity and combination, o f the syntagmatic relation. The

description o f narrative needs metonymy as the figure o f linkage in

the signifying chain: ... the movement from one detail to another,

the movement toward totalization under the mandate o f desire. (91)

In terms o f Brooks’s primary argument in Reading fo r the Plot about the

importance o f closure, metaphor represents the eventual end achieved after the

complications o f plot are resolved (96); metaphor is thus representative o f the

finality that “may be reached through the chain o f metonymies” (93). Brooks thus

associates metonymy with the process of the plot working through to closure, and

metaphor with the coherently plotted end achieved by novelistic closure.

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 Because I am interested in what the narrative device that I term

“metonymic” may reveal about the epistemological processes interrogated by

detective fiction, Brooks’s emphasis upon the process o f metonymic linkage is

particularly important to my use o f the term metonymy. I suggest this rhetorical

trope o f fragmentation underscores detective fiction’s general concern with the

fragmentary - a concern that is apparent in both thematic and narrative-structural

ways and has implications for epistemological understanding. In other words, it is

no accident that novelists turn to rhetorical tropes o f fragmentation to articulate

their concerns about understanding fragmentary information. These rhetorical

tropes, however, combine with an epistemological approach I term “forensic” to

constitute what I refer to as a forensic narrative device.

“The Adventure o f the Blue Carbuncle,” like so many other Sherlock

Holmes stories, is grounded in Holmes’s reading o f “forensic objects” to connect a

fragmented mystery into a coherent narrative. By the term “forensic object,” I

mean to suggest that an object may be recognized as having a metonymic link with

an individual, and this link may in turn be read forensically and extrapolated into a

coherent narrative. In addition to Holmes’s reading o f the lost hat in the story’s

early pages, he also must construct a narrative surrounding a stolen goose and its

strange contents - specifically, a “precious stone” identified as the Countess o f

Morcar’s blue carbuncle diamond (333). Holmes must follow the trail of the

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 goose’s whereabouts to construct a coherent narrative that will explain the

carbuncle’s theft. Again, Holmes is careful to “teach” Watson how to construct

knowledge from incomplete information. He encourages Watson by reassuring

him that he sees everything that is important; Holmes’s sole constructive criticism

is that Watson remains “too timid in drawing [his] inferences” (330).

Holmes frequently reminds Watson that the average person merely “sees”

where the great detective “observes.” John A. Hodgson has assessed this

distinction in light o f Holmes’s analytic ability and unique storehouse o f

knowledge:

He not only sees, (Watson can do as much), he makes sense of what

he sees, thanks to his vast store o f useful, if often esoteric,

knowledge and his highly developed powers o f inference. (336)

Holmes, however, is careful to stress that his deductive powers can be learned, and

are not merely innate. In fact, Holmes’s goal o f teaching others - specifically,

Watson - to reason and “observe” is clear. In the above example involving the hat,

Holmes responds to W atson’s incredulity by admonishing him: “You know my

methods ... you can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you

see” (330). If Watson functions narratively as a “double” for the reader, then

Holmes’s project o f teaching Watson the finer habits o f mental reasoning may be

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 seen as explicitly extended to the reader as well.7 For as the reader identifies with

Watson as a trustworthy narrative guide, the reader will follow Watson as he learns

from Holmes.

A point repeatedly emphasized throughout all the Holmes stories, including

much critical assessment o f them, is that Holmes is a detective with a unique

expertise. In the narrator Watson’s assessment, Holmes is “the most perfect

reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen” (“A Scandal in

Bohemia,” 209). Certainly Holmes’s deductive feats are what most impress readers

and critics o f the Sherlock Holmes stories. For example, the critic Stephen Knight

has read Holmes as a singular imaginative creation, markedly different from other

detectives o f the late nineteenth century.8 Yet this kind of statement - one with

which many would agree —suggests an assumption that I want to interrogate

throughout this chapter. For while it is true that Holmes presents a distinctive

figure with his idiosyncratic habits o f pipe and cocaine, both o f which he employs

7 Peter Thoms has argued that Watson’s submission to Holmes mirrors the reader’s
submission to Watson, and is the ultimate source o f the stories’ narrative pleasure:
“That submissiveness can generate pleasure ... is effectively illustrated by
Watson’s ambivalent commentary on Holmes’s m astery... What Watson describes
is analogous to the reader’s pleasurable submission to the nervous trails o f the text
- a connection the doctor recognizes as he translated the adventure into a reading
experience” (139).
8 See Stephen Knight, “The Case o f the Great Detective,” Sherlock Holmes: The
M ajor Stories with Contemporary Critical Essays, Ed. John A. Hodgson, New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994: 368-80.

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 to aid his remarkably nimble mind, it is by no means wholly accurate to see

Holmes as diametrically opposed to other detectives and other crime fiction o f the

late-nineteenth century. Instead, Holmes’s habits o f mind and methods o f

constructing a narrative are representative of an epistemological inquiry that can be

recognized in earlier nineteenth-century fiction. That Holmes can perform such

feats o f “scientific deduction” from the interplay o f circumstance and physical

evidence is indebted to models o f knowing that are presented and interrogated in

earlier Victorian novels o f detection.

In this chapter, I examine these novelistic inquiries into the process of

knowing through the lens o f two mid-century sensation novels, The Woman in

White (serialized 1859-60) and Lady Audley 's Secret (serialized 1860-61), followed

by the Sherlock Holmes story, “A Case o f Identity” (published September 1891).

The common concern o f these fictional works involves an interest in exploring

what I term forensic narrative. On its simplest level, I conceive o f this narrative

device as one that governs the assembling of physical evidence to create a

persuasive argument about the link between that physical evidence and some

individual. Both The Woman in White and Lady Audley's Secret suggest an acute

knowledge o f the same kind o f metonymic link between persons and objects that

Sherlock Holmes will borrow as the foundation o f his famous “science of

deduction.” For in those narratives plotted around the hat in “The Adventure o f the

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 Blue Carbuncle,” the typewriter in “A Case o f Identity,” the dated cab receipts in

The Woman in White, and the shredded telegram in Lady A udley’s Secret, what is

emphasized are the relationships between individual characters and those objects

intimately associated with them. These objects are marshaled to tell stories in a

way that individual characters - sometimes limited by physical absence, other

times by bad memory or ill motive - cannot.

From its earliest usage in the seventeenth century, the term “forensic” has

been connected with formal arguments or pleadings in a court o f law. By the

nineteenth century,9 its standard usage invoked a sense o f “justification,” although

by mid-century its modem association with medical or scientific evidence was

established. In this chapter, I invoke this standard nineteenth-century meaning o f

“justification,” particularly with regard to justifying one side o f a given question.

This usage is, I believe, not only historically appropriate, but also useful for

interrogating the ways in which novelists used the evidence gleaned from physical

evidence to generate new theories about the process o f constructing knowledge.

The novels and stories in this chapter interrogate a particular method o f

knowing the world through the significant physical evidence that populates it. By

9 The OED lists examples o f nineteenth-century usage ranging from Charles

Dickens in 1865 (“In an imposing and forensic manner” —Our M utual Friend,
n.viii) to James Fitzjames Stephen in 1874 (“A ... mixed science known by the
name o f Forensic Medicine or Medical Jurisprudence” —Commentary on the Laws
o f England, 1.8).

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 the time detective narratives began to proliferate in novels o f the nineteenth

century, such physical evidence had begun to dominate a theory o f knowledge

known as “circumstantial evidence.” This theory o f knowledge, derived from law,

has no simple definition, for legal commentators regularly debated a working

definition o f the theory without ever reaching agreement. A general definition

would characterize circumstantial evidence as a way o f viewing evidence with

particular presumptions in mind; in fact, as early as 1768, Blackstone treated the

phrase “circumstantial evidence” as synonymous with “the doctrine o f

presumptions” (3:371). By the time Sir James Fitzjames Stephen argued for his

own interpretation o f circumstantial evidence in several writings o f the 1860s,10 the

concept o f this theory was dominated by a number o f metaphors intended to imply

its strength and reliability. Narratives constructed through circumstantial evidence

were perceived as tightly woven and “scientific,” and William Paley’s view became

a popular one:

A concurrence o f well authenticated circumstances composes a

stronger ground o f assurance than positive testimony, unconfirmed

by circumstances, usually affords. Circumstances cannot lie. (426)

Practically speaking, though most commentators stressed the importance o f the

10 See his article “Circumstantial Evidence - The Case o f Jessie M ’Lachan,” which
appeared in C om hill Magazine in 1862 in addition to his 1863 treatise, A General
View o f the Criminal Law o f England.

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 corroboration o f all types o f evidence to the theory o f circumstantial evidence,

physical evidence played an especially significant role.

The relationship between the paradigm o f circumstantial evidence and

narratives involving physical evidence is an area o f inquiry that Alexander Welsh

pursues in his study, Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial

Evidence in England. As I have briefly outlined in Chapter One, Welsh argues that

the paradigm o f circumstantial evidence helped to shaped the form o f the novel in

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for just as law courts came to prefer the

“truth” o f a story narrated by circumstantial evidence, so too did novels, as a result

o f the belief that circumstances cannot lie (IS). He suggests that novelists began to

create narratives that marshaled circumstantial evidence so that “the facts speak for

themselves” (8). Welsh views physical evidence as part o f this larger narrative

paradigm o f circumstantial evidence that he believes dominated Victorian plots,

and his analysis has offered a useful contribution to studies o f nineteenth-century

epistemology.11 I believe, however, that physical evidence plays a more complex

role in the process o f knowledge production than Welsh’s analysis can account for.

In other words, my inquiry takes Welsh as a starting point rather than an ending

11 It should be noted that the critic Jan-Melissa Schramm has corrected Welsh’s
view o f circumstantial evidence in her Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law,
Literature, and Theology; she correctly points out that the theory o f circumstantial
evidence works not in opposition to testimony, but rather in conjunction with it.

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 point. For it is not enough merely to observe that narratives employ much physical

evidence as part o f increasing narratives o f “circumstance,” since to make this

observation, as Welsh’s study does, raises a subsequent question: what do these

narrative patterns surrounding physical evidence say about the process o f

assimilating knowledge?

One critic who has recognized the crucial role played by narratives

organized around what he terms “forensic devices” is Ronald Thomas. In his

Detective Fiction and the Rise o f Forensic Science, he describes how the history o f

detective fiction is greatly influenced by and connected to the history o f forensic

technology. These later forensic devices - including the fingerprint, the mug shot,

and the lie detector —are what Thomas focuses upon in his examination o f how

writers construct detective narratives increasingly plotted around such devices. For

Thomas, these devices demonstrate the power o f forensic technology to “read” the

suspect’s body as well as the victim’s body (2-3). Because Thomas is

predominately interested in the technological and “surveillance” aspects o f these

narratives, he views forensic devices as participating in a larger project o f “making

and monitoring the modem subject” (8). In contrast, my own project is less

concerned with emergent technology, and more concerned with the process of

knowledge building that surrounds physical evidence and relies upon the

metonymic connection between persons and objects.

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 Innovative ways o f thinking about the connection between the criminal and

the physical evidence he or she leaves behind are represented in detective narratives

throughout the nineteenth century. Such fictional representation was a precursor to

real life, as one example - that o f the fingerprint, perhaps the most dominant image

o f new technological advances —suggests. This form o f physical evidence, though

initially discovered in 1877 by Herschel, was not successfully employed in a

criminal trial until 1902 (Beavan xiv, 155). Then, Henry Jackson was found guilty

o f burglary in an English court, solely on the evidence of his fingerprint at the

crime scene. That such evidence was then controversial is evident from a letter

written by a London magistrate at the time:

Scotland Yard, once known as the world’s finest police

organization, will be the laughingstock o f Europe if it insists on

trying to trace criminals by odd ridges on their skin, (quoted in

Beavan, 156).

Yet, despite such lingering doubts, methods o f “linking” the criminal and the crime

through physical evidence that could function forensically were clearly gaining

credence.

In my reading, the fingerprint as a forensic device is not as important as

what the fingerprint suggests about habits o f thought that were established by 1902.

For despite the disagreement o f some, such as the magistrate quoted above,

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 ordinary people had begun to accept as “natural” the thought process that could

“link” a criminal with incriminating physical evidence to suggest guilt. I view this

habit o f mind as owing much to authors o f detective narratives who, like criminal

investigators, were highly invested in exploring and interrogating new ways of

making connections between persons and crime scenes.

As early as 1864, some years after the publication o f the early detective

novels I examine in this chapter, a man called Franz Muller was convicted in a

criminal trial based upon physical evidence alone. The trial was for murder, and

the only evidence against Muller was physical evidence gleaned from the crime

scene - namely, some jewelry and a hat. As Colin Beavan has argued, “a hundred

and fifty years earlier, with no eyewitnesses, a prosecution would have been

impossible” (35). But relying upon physical evidence, marshaled forensically, the

jury sent Muller to the gallows. Moreover, John Sutherland has suggested that

Collins’s inspiration for The Woman in White may have been the poisoning case of

William Palmer, who was convicted largely as a result of circumstantial evidence

(both physical evidence and testimonial evidence).12 Physical evidence

increasingly becomes something that can bind the guilty to their crimes through, as

popular metaphor describes it, a “chain o f circumstances.” The ability to make -

12 See his essay on “Wilkie Collins and the Origins of the Sensation Novel” in
Wilkie Collins to the Forefront: Some Reassessments, Ed. Nelson Smith and R.C.
Terry, New York: AMS Press, 1995 at 75-90.

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 and intellectually accept as valid - this kind o f narrative connection between

persons and objects is one that novelists explore and interrogate through narratives

surrounding “forensic objects.” But the connection I want to stress as important is

not that o f the chain o f circumstance, but rather the metonymic relationship that

physical objects have with the individuals who handle them - and specifically the

language and narrative structure that makes this relationship apparent.

Such detective narratives that are premised upon “forensic objects” have

two functions. First, they can help to fill the gap in information that detective

narratives necessarily confront, so as to link person and object in a coherent and

connected reconstruction o f events. Second, as the texts examined in this chapter

will show, “forensic objects” function to teach a methodology for properly

recognizing the symbolic value o f all things. This last point is especially important

when knowledge is constructed from fragmented pieces o f evidence that, unlike

persons, cannot be interrogated. The world, these narratives suggest, is a place

populated by fragmentary information where things may not be as they appear.

Filling in the gaps o f information to create knowledge is important, but vulnerable

to misinterpretation; consequently, the forensic object must be interpreted by

analytic and careful constructors o f narrative who understand the importance o f

method. For this reason, I believe, the novels I examine in this chapter will register

a split between “good” detectives who recognize the symbolic value o f all objects

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 and “bad" detectives who cannot grasp this kind o f metonymic connection.

The works o f fiction I examine in this chapter were not the first to rely

extensively upon physical evidence as a plot device to structure narrative.13 Yet, in

detective narratives, this physical evidence functions not only to generate realistic

effects, as critics have previously read such evidence, but also to interrogate

assumptions about how knowledge is produced and verified. As new ways of

thinking are presented and evaluated in a fictional venue, we can see novelists

participating in a larger debate than previously recognized —one with important

implications for both criminology and epistemology more generally.

I. The Woman in White: Forensic lessons

Walter Hartright, the “editor” of all narrative accounts in The Woman in

White, 14 places his account o f the story’s sensational climax at the midpoint o f the

13 Much critical attention has read the presence o f embedded documents as part of
novelists’ efforts to establish the conventions o f realism and enforce them as a
norm. See Michael McKeon’s introduction in The Origins o f the English Novel
1600-1740, where he discusses the “kind of authority or evidence ... required o f
narrative to permit it to signify truth to its readers” (27). See also Welsh.
14 Hartright’s narrative perspective is unique, as Walter Kendrick makes clear:
“Hartright’s privilege is shared by no other narrator ... [a]s the editor o f the
collection o f documents called The Woman in White, Hartright sees the story
whole, from the beginning, and he has arranged its components so that they form at
once a temporal and a causal continuity” (76).

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 novel. Hartright visits the gravesite o f his beloved Laura only to discover a

contradiction: Laura appears - very much alive - even as Hartright mourns at her

grave. This dramatic moment initiates the investigative effort that dominates the

second part o f the novel, as Hartright strives to reclaim Laura’s identity and

inheritance and bring to justice those who stole these things from her.15 To do so,

he must fill in the fragmented gaps in her memory (because o f her traumatic

experience) as well as Marian’s (because o f her illness) and his own (because o f his

physical absence from England). To fill in these significant gaps, Hartright turns to

forensic objects - those items intimately attached to a person that, when the link

between person and object is forensically read - can connect a fragmented story

into coherence.

The Woman in White is a novel filled with physical evidence, much of

which is in the form o f documents. Some of these are true, while others are

15 This sensational moment has been read by many critics as inaugurating the
detective plot of The Woman in White. Walter Kendrick states: “All o f Hartright’s
subsequent investigations o f diaries, letters, and register books are anchored in this
striking moment when language is negated by the sight o f a living face” (82). In
Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud, Carolyn Dever similarly cites this
scene: “The discrepancy o f the living Laura, Lady Glyde, and a tombstone
memorializing her dead body not only precipitates the drive to discover that is the
novel’s detective plot; it also foregrounds a tension between the physical and the
rhetorical that poses as realistic something at once uncanny and empirically
provable, impossible, yet true. Which tells the true story, the body or the text?”
(108). See also Cvetkovich. Both Kendrick and Dever emphasize the problem o f
language raised in this scene.

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 forgeries, and the plot o f the novel describes how the language o f forgery is

gradually replaced with a narrative o f truth - and through fragmented devices. As

Kendrick has written, the reader must believe, “as the novel urges him [or her] to

do, that a man named Hartright has a heart which is right and writes from his heart”

(82). While Hartright’s project is invariably one concerned with language - what

Kendrick describes as a “re-writing” and what Dever terms a “revisionary

narrative” - this project o f language is grounded in physical evidence in a way

previous readings have not recognized (Kendrick 82; Dever 130).

Hartright’s narrative task is to disprove compelling physical evidence that

attests to Laura’s death: a medical death certificate signed by the attending

physician and an inscription upon a tombstone. Yet when Hartright finally

succeeds in the final pages o f the novel, it is after he has negotiated a maze of

“forensic objects,” and used each one carefully to reconstruct an accurate version of

events. In other words, Hartright learns to read physical objects correctly - in fact,

forensically. In recognizing their symbolic value, he accesses the kind of

specialized metonymic narrative they can produce, which in turn helps Hartright to

construct the requisite proof to destroy the novel’s villains and restore Laura to

proper name and inheritance.

The story o f The Woman in White hinges entirely upon these physical

objects, as Walter Kendrick has observed. Kendrick’s reading focuses upon

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 documents and dates; he argues that these “connecting links” o f the novel “are

trifling and crucial at once” (75). But what Kendrick does not take into account is

the way in which these objects function forensically in a metonymic relation with

individual characters to generate a specialized narrative, not simply a plot

connection. In my reading, forensic objects manage the heroine’s fake death and

subsequent resurrection; manipulate two inheritances and one disinheritance; and

provide the proximate cause for the villain’s demise. They complicate the plot;

constitute an innovative device for delaying narrative closure; and ultimately,

register an anxiety about the consequences o f too greatly privileging certain types

of evidence. What is important, Collins suggests through Hartright’s steps and

missteps, is the process o f knowledge assimilation —specifically, that process o f

learning to recognize the symbolic value o f certain kinds o f physical evidence.16

This interrogation into how knowledge is assembled is heightened by the

narrative style employed by The Woman in White, that o f multiple narration. The

mode o f narration is structured like a legal trial, and the story is elicited through the

testimony o f multiple “witnesses” who are subject to the evidentiary rule against

hearsay, lest unreliable evidence be introduced (33). The hearsay rule prohibits a

witness from introducing as truth any evidence that does not come from personal

16 See pages 4-5 o f Chapter One, “Introduction,” for an explanation o f my usage of

the terms “information,” “knowledge,” and “knowledge assimilation.”

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 knowledge, but instead from the mere repetition o f what the witness has heard

others say. In the Preamble, Hartright expresses an anxiety about how collective

information may best be marshaled into coherent, accurate knowledge. With that

goal in mind, he decides to employ the testimony o f multiple narrators, just like in a

courtroom —“with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its

most direct and most intelligible aspect” (33). O f course, as in the witness box,

narrative problems remain, for the narrative structure o f a legal trial cannot resolve

all o f the many problems o f channeling an incoherent variety o f accounts and

evidence into a coherent whole that represents knowledge. In fact, such a method

o f narration may actually generate additional gaps in knowledge, for much

information will be beyond the knowledge o f any one narrator/character. Where

testimony is thus presented as alone insufficient, forensic objects must come into

play.

The Woman in White first establishes narrative standards for Hartright’s

project o f assimilating fragmented information into a coherent narrative. As both

characters and narrators, the lawyers Gilmore and Kyrle articulate concerns about

Hartright’s methods as well as the standards he must satisfy. Knowledge, they

suggest, is not knowledge unless it will be widely accepted by others. And most

importantly, one must proceed carefully so as to recognize correctly the metonymic

link between persons and things.

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 The function o f the lawyer’s role is an evaluative one, as Gilmore makes

explicit when he describes his role as “judicial” (155). Both Gilmore and Kyrle

pronounce judgment on Hartright’s information (they “weigh the probabilities,”

Gilmore repeatedly emphasizes), and proceed to model for him what he must do

(155). For in assembling a coherent narrative that will persuade Gilmore and Kyrle

to accept his alternate version o f events, Hartright must follow a process of

knowledge assimilation that forces him to out-lawyer the lawyers in painstakingly

reading objects forensically.

In The Woman in White, three pivotal plot developments are marked by the

use o f physical evidence as a forensic object that can participate in a specialized

narrative. In the first instance, Laura’s scheming husband, Sir Percival Glyde,

relies upon physical documents to circulate a “legitimate” report o f her death, put

her away in an asylum, and consequently inherit her fortune absolutely. These

physical documents - all o f which justify the view that Laura is dead - include the

writing in stone upon the tombstone and the death certificate certified by the

doctor, Mr. Goodricke.

The original news o f Laura’s death is given through the deposition of

Hester Pinhom, a cook in the service o f Count Fosco. She narrates how a very ill,

pale lady that all referred to as “Lady Glyde” was brought to the Count’s house,

only to die the following day. Because Count Fosco is a foreigner, the attending

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 doctor, Mr. Goodricke, takes it upon himself to register the death according to

English law:

The doctor considered a minute, and then says he, ‘I don’t usually

do such things,’ says he, ‘but it may save the family trouble in this

case if I register the death myself.” (424)

The death certificate, in this case, functions as a forgery, despite Mr. Goodricke’s

best intentions. Because his well-intentioned language nonetheless constitutes a

forgery, it poses formidable proof.

The false tombstone poses a similar complication, as Hartright suggests in

the “Narrative of the Tombstone.” Quite simply, the tombstone reads: “Sacred to

the Memory o f Laura, Lady Glyde,” followed by her dates of birth, marriage, and

death (426). As Hartright narrates his visit to her grave, he describes how “the

newly-cut inscription met my eyes - the hard, clear, cruel black letters which told

the story o f her life and death” (429). Collins seems, in both o f these cases, to

make a sardonic comment on the groundless trust we place in the language o f

“official” documents. One function o f Collins’s use o f the forensic object is to

elevate the mundane at the same time as he de-elevates the official, as I will discuss

more extensively below.

Because Laura’s family is persuaded by such false documentation and

cannot recognize Laura, Marian and Hartright decide to fight back in kind, with

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 documentation. They have little choice, for any efforts to provide conventional

proof through Laura’s testimony are precluded by her nervous condition and weak

physical health. Hartright despairs that Laura’s “memory o f events, from the

period o f her leaving Blackwater Park to the period o f our meeting in the burial-

ground o f Limmeridge Church, was lost beyond all hope o f recovery” (576). Thus,

the traditional testimonial means o f proving her identity —a memory o f specific

events that no one other than Laura might know —must fail. The battle to restore

Laura’s identity and reclaim her inheritance will henceforth be one waged via

forensic objects, which is suggestive o f why the metonymic link between objects

and persons is so important: this link can step in where memory fails and official

documents “lie.”

When Hartright consults with Kyrle, the lawyer is discouraging; based on

the evidence Hartright possesses at the mid-point of the novel, he “ha[s] not the

shadow o f a case” (462).17 Kyrle continues:

The evidence o f Lady Glyde’s death is, on the face o f it, clear and

satisfactory. There is her aunt’s testimony to prove that she came to

Count Fosco’s house, that she fell ill, and that she died. There is the

17 D.A. Miller points out that Hartright (and the reader) has “suspiciously inferred]
a complicated structure o f persecution” merely from “trifles and common
coincidences”; thus both characters and readers may be seen to be “paranoid”
(160).

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 testimony o f the medical certificate to prove the death, and to show

that it took place under natural circumstances. There is the fact o f

the funeral at Limmeridge, and there is the assertion o f the

inscription on the tomb. That is the case you want to overthrow.

What evidence have you to support the declaration on your side that

the person who died and was buried was not Lady Glyde? ... I ask

you, if this case were to go now into a court o f law —to go before a

jury, bound to take facts as they reasonably appear - where are your

proofs?’ (462-63)

This last question —‘where are your proofs?’ - suggests to Hartright the path he

must follow. Mr. Kyrle’s last advice to him is to “compare the dates”:

If you could show a discrepancy between the date o f the doctor’s

certificate and the date o f Lady Glyde’s journey to London, the

matter would wear a totally different aspect, and I should be the first

to say, Let us go on. (464)

The dates, o f course, lead Hartright to physical evidence that can be forensically

deployed to establish his case.

This effort initially leads to a second important plot development,

seemingly unrelated to Laura’s faked death and disinheritance: the fact o f Sir

Percival’s illegitimacy. Hartright’s suspicions are awakened after his interview

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 with Anne’s mother, Mrs. Catherick, so he decides to check the local parish register

to see if it is possible that Sir Percival’s parents never married at all. Though

Hartright does not initially presume to think the evidence o f the register false, the

odd appearance o f the “compressed space” where Sir Percival’s parents’ marriage

is recorded sparks his suspicions that the marriage register has been altered (521).

Hartright resolves this doubt by looking to another object, the duplicate

register in the central parish records. There, Hartright locates a blank - and claims

“that space told the whole story” of Sir Percival’s illegitimacy and hence his

motivation for injuring his wife (528-29). For if Anne Catherick knew the secret

story o f Sir Percival’s lineage and shared it with Laura, then “the disclosure o f that

secret, even if the sufferers by his deception spared him the penalties o f the law,

would deprive him at one blow o f the name, the rank, the estate, the whole social

existence that he had usurped” (530). Hartright thus locates two competing

marriage registers - one with a “compressed space” and one with a “blank space” -

and learns to read both forensically so as to identify the forgery in the “compressed

space.”

What is most remarkable about this scene is that while the document or

forensic object has itself been falsified, there is something about it that nonetheless

hints o f the truth. Carolyn Dever has described the space on the marriage register

as invoking a “readable blankness”; her reading o f the novel, like mine, focuses

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 upon the importance o f absent stories rather than present ones (137).18 She

describes how “this novel, because it is a detective novel, is concerned not with that

which is present, but with that which is absent but still detectable in absence”

(117). Specifically, she explains the importance o f the absence in the marriage

register thus:

The ‘blank space’ in the marriage register is a far more powerful

signifier than any entry Hartright might find; silence speaks louder

than words, for in this marriage register, it is the absence o f text, not

its presence, that is graphically significant. (137)

But whereas Dever suggests that the absences in The Woman in White (in the

marriage register, on the tombstone, within the “something wanting” about Laura

Fairlie) characterize a “resistance” to “fictionalizing and forgery,” I am specifically

figuring what she calls a “resistance” or “readable blankness” as instead signaling a

missing metonymic connection that inheres in the absence or forgery itse lf (137-

18 Dever’s reading focuses upon what she argues is the primary absence in the
novel - the “missing mother,” who suggests at once a “crisis in the world o f the
present” while “her absence” invokes an “abstract ideal” (109). Using the narrative
figure o f the missing mother, Dever reads the novel as foregrounding a crisis in
legitimacy, in which what is important is ‘“ telling the difference’ between
legitimate and illegitimate children” and doing so “in the context o f potentially
unreliable textual and physical evidence” (109). Thus she connects the “lies” o f the
tombstone and the marriage register with the “lies” o f the mother to offer a
persuasive reading about how the anxieties about legitimacy, inheritance, and class
are represented through and complicated by feminine sexuality (130-38).

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 38). In other words, my emphasis is not upon the “blankness,” but instead upon the

connection between Sir Percival and the objects he has handled that their very

appearance gestures towards. That connection specifically makes use o f the

fragmentary trope o f metonymy to gesture towards fragmentary information; thus

Hartright may construct the kind of specialized narrative that advocates viewing the

world in a way that is both forensic and metonymic.

Even falsified physical evidence, Collins suggests, may be deployed

forensically to tell the kind o f story that will enable Hartright to assimilate

fragmentary information into knowledge. Hartright looks to the “compressed

space” and the “blankness” o f the two registers in question, and what he recognizes

is that Sir Percival has handled these objects. That handling leaves a sign - one

that Hartright reads forensically in order to construct his narrative. What Hartright

recognizes is that this “blank” has a symbolic value: the “compressed space”

functions as a kind o f metonymy, for its odd appearance suggests a link between

Sir Percival and the register that he alters. Sir Percival believes that by merely

generating physical evidence —forged marriage registers, death certificates, and

tombstones - that he has created sufficient evidence to corroborate his own story.

Yet, he forgets that when “good” detectives examine such evidence forensically,

they are capable o f reading beyond the forgery to a still visible metonymic link that

suggests the truth.

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 In the final pivotal scene involving forensic objects, Hartright goes to Count

Fosco’s home to demand the proof that will restore Laura's name and inheritance.

He demands not only a “full confession o f the conspiracy” written in Fosco’s own

hand, but also “plain proof, which does not depend on your personal asseveration,

o f the date” o f Laura’s true arrival in London (610). In other words, he requests

two forensic objects that will help to justify Hartright’s version o f events.

Count Fosco’s narrative thoroughly fills in the gaps o f unaccounted-for time

by directing Hartright to the physical evidence that will corroborate it. As Fosco

claims, “I combine in myself the opposite characteristics o f a Man o f Sentiment

and a Man o f Business ... I have all the dates at my fingers’ ends” (627). Fosco

satisfies Hartright by offering first, corroborating testimony in the form o f a letter

from Sir Percival to Fosco stating the actual time o f Laura’s arrival in London and

“written, signed, and dated by himself [Sir Percival].” The handwriting will

provide an important link with Fosco, despite his physical absence. Second, Fosco

offers Hartright evidence o f the carriage-for-hire that picked up Laura upon her

arrival in London, invoking the truth-value presumption that inheres in records

maintained in the ordinary course o f business. As Fosco suggests, “his order-book

may help you to your date, even if his coachman who drove” is o f little use (610).

Fosco’s instinct is correct, because as it implies, the coachman’s log symbolizes the

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 intimate link between the coachman and his work. Thus, Hartright records in his

narrative:

It [Sir Percival's letter] was dated from Hampshire on the 25th of

July and it announced the journey o f ‘Lady Glyde’ to London on the

26th. Thus, on the very day (the 25th) when the doctor’s certificate

declared that she had died in St. John's Wood, she was alive, by Sir

Percival’s own showing.... When the proof o f that journey was

obtained from the flyman, the evidence would be complete. (614)

When Hartright consults with the carriage company, the order book is dispositive

o f this evidence: “Brougham to Count Fosco, 5 Forest Road. Two o'clock (John

Owen)” (633). Moreover, when the flyman is personally interviewed, his

testimony further corroborates the testimony o f this forensic object, and fills in yet

another gap in the narrative Hartright has constructed.

With this narrative evidence and the lawyer Kyrle’s assistance, Laura is

restored to name and inheritance. Hartright has successfully replaced a false

narrative with a true one because he has learned to recognize the symbolic value of

the disparate physical evidence he encounters. Deployed by novelists as a narrative

device, the role o f forensic objects within a paradigm o f evidence becomes a means

o f interrogating the basic assumptions that underpinned Victorian understandings

o f knowledge as well as language. Language alone may be vulnerable to forgery

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 and manipulation. Yet when language is read as operating within the realm o f

symbolic meaning - as it is here in the metonymical connection Hartright

recognizes in the marriage register and the coachman’s order book - this

vulnerability may be remedied. This concern with the metonymic link between

persons and objects is one that Mary Elizabeth Braddon further problematizes in

her novel, Lady Audley's Secret.

II. Ladv Audlev's Secret: Robert Audlev and Forensic Objects

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1861 novel Lady A udley’s Secret is narrated

through a third-person omniscient voice that focalizes extensively through the

novel’s detective figure, Robert Audley, to generate an investigative viewpoint.

Yet Robert’s character is by no means an accomplished detective; in fact, to the

contrary, he is represented as lazy, bored, and unprofessional. He is a lawyer, but

the narrator makes clear that he is not a particularly good one:

As a barrister was his name inscribed in the Law List; as a barrister,

he had chambers in Fig-tree Court, Temple; as a barrister he had

eaten the allotted numbers o f dinners, which form the sublime ordeal

through which the forensic aspirant wades on to fame and fortune.

If these things can make a man a barrister, Robert Audley decidedly

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 was one. But he had never either had a brief, or tried to get a brief,

or even wished to have a brief in all those five years, during which

his name had been painted upon one o f the doors in Fig-tree Court.

He was a handsome, lazy, care-for-nothing fellow ... (32).

Many critics have recognized as important the way in which Robert Audley’s role

is transformed during the course of the novel from lazy ne’er-do-well to competent

detective figure. As Simon Petch has stated, Robert’s “investigation o f Lady

Audley’s secret is the means to the establishment o f his own identity as a

professional man” (1). Petch, however, wishes to read this transformation in terms

o f Robert’s increasing masculinity and entry into the patriarchal social order. This

reading, while valuable to recognizing the gender dynamics at play within the

novel, elides the issue o f how this transformation is also intimately linked with

lessons in knowledge production.

What Braddon’s narrative choices emphasize throughout the novel is that

Robert must learn to assimilate knowledge in a symbolic manner. Braddon

suggests through her narrative designs surrounding physical objects that this

methodology must recognize and correctly interpret metonymic relations between

persons and objects. When this method is correctly employed, the woman who

claims to be the gentlewoman Lady Audley is revealed as the bigamous Helen

Talboys. Yet, what is o f even more particular interest occurs at the structural level,

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 where narrative devices surrounding physical evidence teach the reader how to

make such distinctions. They do so by contrasting the detective process o f “good”

detectives who can leam to recognize the symbolic value o f objects and read them

forensically with the process o f “bad” detectives who repeatedly fail to understand

that physical evidence may yield symbolic information.

Like the plot of The Woman in White, that o f Lady A udley’s Secret employs

many forensic objects - including a tombstone, death certificate, marriage register,

telegram, and newspaper report - in marshalling the story o f the investigation.

Braddon’s heroine, Lady Audley, attempts to manipulate such physical evidence to

create a misleading evidentiary narrative that is itself consequently unraveled by

Braddon’s detective figure, Robert Audley. Yet, as in The Woman in White, even

misleading or falsified physical evidence may be examined forensically by “good”

detectives who recognize its inherent symbolic value.

Through the contrast between the ways in which Lady Audley and Robert

Audley “read” physical evidence, Braddon explores the ways in which narratives

surrounding forensic objects must be understood. Though Robert Audley has not

managed to achieve any measure of professional success, he has somehow in the

course o f his halfhearted legal training absorbed a rudimentary understanding o f

legal reasoning. This reasoning appears to help him leam to read objects

forensically.

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 In chapter thirteen, Robert tabulates a long list o f evidence that has given

him cause for suspicion; the facts on his list center upon his general suspicions of

Lady Audley and particularly her report that George Talboys suddenly left town.

Robert’s list is grounded in his own theory o f circumstantial evidence, which he

describes at length in chapter fifteen:

Circumstantial evidence ... [is] that wonderful fabric which is built

out of straws collected at every point o f the compass, and which is

yet strong enough to hang a man. Upon what infinitesimal trifles

may sometimes hang the whole secret o f some wicked mystery,

inexplicable heretofore to the wisest upon the earth! A scrap o f

paper; a shred o f some tom garment; the button off a coat; a word

dropped incautiously from the over-cautious lips of guilt; the

fragment o f a letter; the shutting or opening o f a door; a shadow on a

window-blind; the accuracy o f a moment; a thousand circumstances

so slight as to be forgotten by the criminal, but links o f steel in the

wonderful chain forged by the science o f the detective officer. (120)

Robert’s description o f circumstantial evidence leaves much to be desired, for it is

reductive to view this complex theory as relying solely upon the physical evidence

o f “a scrap o f paper” or a “button off a coat.”

Yet Robert’s language and manner o f thought, as he invokes the importance

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 o f “a fragment o f a letter” or “shred o f some tom garment,” is evocative o f the

language and methodology Sherlock Holmes will use in constructing elaborate

narrative accounts. These examples o f objects are intimately connected with the

individuals who handle them; thus, Robert instinctively gestures towards the

connection between person and object that such evidence implies. It is this link -

not the physical evidence itself - that is important. Braddon’s Robert Audley thus

recognizes the importance of such evidence, although he is far less expert and

practiced in understanding it than Conan Doyle’s Holmes will be.

The evidence that Lady Audley marshals in order to document the death o f

her prior self, Helen Talboys nee Maldon, is remarkably similar to that manipulated

by Count Fosco and Sir Percival to document the death o f Laura, Lady Glyde.

Both involve the use o f unwitting eyewitnesses in the form o f doctors, nurses, and

passersby; moreover, each involve the use of a “doubled” physical body for the

woman whose death required documentation. Just as the dying Anne Catherick is

taken to London and repeatedly addressed as “Lady Glyde,” so the dying Mathilda

Plowson is taken by Captain Maldon to a cottage in the town o f Ventnor. There,

the landlady may hear the sick woman called “Helen Talboys” and “Mama” by her

supposed father and son. Thus, when George and Robert visit this same cottage at

Ventnor in an effort to leam more about Helen’s death, the landlady, who ironically

has a truthful intent, verifies the false account o f her death.

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 The narration suggests a reason why George might disbelieve this particular

death narrative when he notices that the keepsake lock o f hair the landlady has

preserved is “smooth and straight” rather than curling with the “rippling wave” that

he remembers (42). Yet, like a bad detective, George cannot correctly read this

information, for he does not recognize the metonymic link between person and

object that the lock o f hair should imply. Moreover, because George cannot

recognize that objects have a symbolic value that must be read against what the

language o f the landlady superficially implies, George actually contributes to the

web o f documented evidence Lady Audley has spun. When George finds his

“wife’s” grave to be unmarked, he orders a tombstone for her, which further

narrates the lie o f her death: “Sacred to the Memory o f / HELEN / The Beloved

Wife o f George Talboys, / Who departed this life / August 24th, 1857, aged 22, /

Deeply regretted by her sorrowing Husband” (42).

Lady Audley seems to have shown remarkable foresight in covering all of

her bases with paperwork. She recognizes that because “a shallow falsehood would

be discovered,” extensive work is required on her part:

We decided at once upon the first step. This was that on the date of

the probable arrival o f the Argus, or a few days later, an

advertisement of my death should be inserted in the Times.

But almost immediately after deciding upon this, we saw that there

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 were fearful difficulties in the carrying out o f such a simple plan.

The date o f the death, and the place in which I died, must be

announced, as well as the death itself. George would immediately

hurry to that place, however distant it might be, however

comparatively inaccessible ... unless he saw the grave in which I

was buried, and the register o f my death, he would never believe

that I was lost to him. (355-356)

Lady Audley’s care for details extends to the smallest minutiae o f her false

narrative; for example, when she desires to leave town quickly, she manufactures a

telegram to summon her to London. This telegram is addressed to “Miss Lucy

Graham, at Mr. Dawson’s,” as the purported sender would not have heard o f her

recent marriage to Sir Audley (59).

Lady Audley’s manipulation o f physical evidence ultimately fails, however,

because she does not take into account the fact that objects have a symbolic value

as well as a mere face value. She forgets the metonymic link between herself and

her things, and she foolishly believes it is sufficient to generate telegrams and news

reports with the appropriate language to lie. Consequently, the physical evidence

that she has handled or with which she has otherwise been intimately connected

betrays her.

In Captain Maldon’s fireplace, a telegram she has sent her father remains

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 only partially destroyed, available for reading by any curious onlooker. The

partially burnt telegram captures Robert’s attention, and he describes its appearance

thus:

‘alboys came to last night, and left by the mail for London,

on his way for Liverpool, whence he was to sail for Sydney.’ The

date and the name and address o f the sender o f the message had

been burnt with the heading. (94)

As with the “blank space” in The Woman in White that nonetheless gestured

towards a hidden link and hence a hidden story, here the blank gaps o f the telegram

are likewise suggestive. Robert takes this blank space into account, and becomes

highly suspicious. He contemplates why such a telegram would be sent to Captain

Maldon - and once sent, why destroyed.

Robert begins to investigate, and as the narration focalizes more exclusively

through Robert’s point-of-view, Braddon emphasizes the supposedly “scientific”

nature o f his investigation. A repeated image that Robert deploys is that of the

mathematical radius. When he first draws up his “Journal o f Facts Connected with

the Disappearance o f George Talboys, inclusive o f Facts which have No Apparent

relation to that Circumstance,” his consideration o f the evidence ends with Robert’s

resolve: “I shall first go to Audley Court, and look for George Talboys in a narrow

radius” (100-101). The mathematical language o f “narrow radius” implies both

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 precision and connection. He invokes this image yet again, after he has explained

his “theory o f circumstantial evidence” to Lady Audley and observed her reaction

(of fainting away). “The radius grows narrower day by day,” he pronounces as he

stands over her unconscious body (120). Moreover, when he returns to fig-tree

court and discovers a locksmith has been to his chambers, he questions whether

“the radius [will] ... grow narrower day by day, until it draws a dark circle round

the home o f those I love” (150).

The more Robert investigates, the prouder he becomes o f his reasoning

abilities. He proudly proclaims to Alicia, “I am a barrister... and able to draw a

conclusion by induction” (123). Yet Robert repeatedly questions whether he

should continue to construct the narrative that he does through physical evidence,

for he fears what the truth might reveal. Early in the investigation he wonders:

Should I be justified in letting the chain which I have slowly put

together, link by link, drop at this point, or must I go on adding fresh

links to that fatal chain until the last rivet drops into its place and the

circle is complete? I think and believe that I shall never see my

friend’s face again; and that no exertion o f mine can ever be o f any

benefit to him. (157)

Yet Robert only momentarily questions whether the evidence he uncovers is

correct. When he considers whether “the chain o f evidence which I have

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 constructed link by link is woven out o f my own folly,” the question is resolved in

the negative when he construes the appearance o f Clara, his missing friend’s sister,

to be a sign to continue (254).

Through Robert’s investigation, Braddon renders more complex the

problem o f reading objects forensically. Robert appears to excel at producing

knowledge from the fragmentary information yielded by physical evidence. When,

by examining a book belonging to George Talboys, Robert discovers that the

handwriting o f George’s former wife Helen is a perfect match for that o f Lady

Audley, he concludes “I can understand all now” (159). He has correctly

recognized the metonymic link between Lady Audley and the objects Helen

Talboys has handled; furthermore, he corroborates this recognition when he

uncovers a string o f names and addresses on an old hatbox that link the narratives

o f Helen Talboys, Lucy Dawson, and Lady Audley (238-9). These physical objects

that Lady Audley has handled reveal the link between herself and her things - a

metonymic link that Robert has learned to read and to reproduce in narrative.

It is true that Robert has managed to construct a coherent narrative by

reading those forensic objects that tell the true stojy o f Lady Audley’s past. But

this narrative - even when corroborated by Lady Audley’s “confession” at the

novel’s end - will be notably wrong in telling of his friend George’s fate. For Lady

Audley is guilty o f murder in intent, but not in fact.

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 Through Lady Audley, Braddon shows how easily physical evidence may

be manipulated. And through Robert, Braddon shows how physical evidence may

still function as a forensic object with symbolic value, despite the subterfuge Lady

Audley has assembled in order to construct an alternate version o f events. That

Robert succeeds in unraveling Lady Audley’s checkered past might at first suggest

that the novel wholeheartedly endorses Robert’s approach to knowledge

assimilation. Yet Robert only partially unravels the truth; his fascination with how

the physical objects he detects show the guilt o f Lady Audley is correct with regard

to her true past, but flawed with regard to George’s true fate.

Braddon uses Robert’s consultation with Dr. Mosgrave to suggest the flaws

in the narrative Robert has constructed:

This Mr. George Talboys has disappeared, but you have no evidence

o f his death. If you could produce evidence o f his death, you could

produce no evidence against this lady, beyond the one fact that she

had a powerful motive for getting rid o f him. No jury in the United

Kingdom would condemn her upon such evidence as that. ... I do

not see adequate reasons for your suspicions; and I will do my best

to help you. (379-80)

Dr. Mosgrave attempts to remind Robert that he has not fully satisfied the

evidentiary standards that most reasonable people would require. Yet Robert

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 remains convinced with a kind of moral certainty that Lady Audley has murdered

George; Robert reads only the “motive” and not the actual “facts.” Lady Audley’s

own confession o f how she struck George and caused him to disappear down the

well appears to confirm Robert’s suspicions - but in the end, the doctor is correct.

That part o f the narrative is revealed only by Luke Marks’ deathbed confession,

which is corroborated by his mother and by the farewell letter from George to

Helen that Marks has retained. Robert has, in the end, only partially succeeded in

generating an accurate and coherent narrative from fragmentary information.

Robert’s lack o f complete success has been read by contemporary critics as

a problem o f inadequate novelistic closure; although the fact o f George’s survival

is established, the details o f his travel abroad are elided, as are the details o f Lady

Audley’s sad fate. As Chiara Briganti has stated, even when the mystery

surrounding George’s disappearance is solved, “the mystery continues to circulate”

(189).19 Such comments gesture not only towards the lack o f closure in the novel,

but also towards the way in which real information is withheld - either because

Robert Audley does not know, or chooses not to tell.

The narrative o f Lady Audley's Secret may thus be seen to demonstrate

several anxieties surrounding how - and how much —knowledge is gleaned. When

19 See also Pamela Gilbert’s argument in “Madness and Civilization: Generic

Opposition in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady A udley’s Secret” that Robert’s
narrative never fully articulates Lady Audley’s experience.

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 Robert’s conclusion about George Talboys is disavowed as ultimately wrong, his

process o f knowledge assimilation is challenged. In Lady Audley's Secret, as well

as in The Woman in White, interpretation o f facts must yield to careful inquiry.

Like Collins’s The Woman in White, Braddon’s Lady A udley’s Secret suggests that

physical objects may be understood forensically to invoke a metonymic connection

—one that may, in turn, produce a new and specialized kind o f narrative. This

specialized narrative plays a role not only in the legal courtroom, as the cases

discussed in Beavan’s work suggest, but also in the experimentation with formal

features o f language and structure developed in detective fiction.

Yet Braddon goes further than Collins in suggesting the problems inherent

in knowledge assimilation are not easily put aside. Collins offers at least a

superficial endorsement o f the process by allowing his primary investigative

character, Hartright, to construct a correct narrative and thus obtain novelistic

closure. Braddon, however, ends her novel by emphasizing the failure o f her

primary investigative figure, Robert Audley, to construct a complete, coherent

narrative despite his apparent success in reading physical objects forensically.

When her hero gets the story wrong, Braddon registers a real anxiety about how we

“connect” fragmentary information into knowledge —even when we privilege the

role of intimate objects in that process. Her means o f closure in the novel at once

suggests the enormous potential o f this method for knowing the world and the fact

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 that it may be alone insufficient.

HI. Sherlock Holmes as Master Forensic Narrator in “A Case of Identity”

In analyzing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s memoirs, Stephen Knight

emphasizes how Conan Doyle was disappointed with contemporary crime fiction

because “it depended so much on luck for a solution: the detective should be able

to work it all out” (368-69). This privileging o f the detective’s power of

knowledge assimilation (“to work it all out”) is not only important to our

understanding o f what Conan Doyle strives to do with Sherlock Holmes, but also

our understanding of how some novelists have been highly invested in interrogating

habits o f mind. The process o f making sense o f a particular mystery, as well as o f

the world more generally, has become more important than the creation o f those

perplexing mystery circumstances that initially stymie the detective.

In this reading, I align myself closely with Michael Atkinson, who has

argued that:

[Sherlock Holmes’s] most valiant struggles pit him against certain

habits o f mind - carelessness, conventionality, reflex assumptions,

and romanticism. He champions a fresh and scrupulous attention to

the ordinary, the commonplace, the apparently insignificant. He

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 struggles ceaselessly to convert the police, Watson, and (most

importantly) his readers to a new way o f seeing. (25)

As Atkinson’s comment recognizes, Conan Doyle appears to employ Holmes in a

very self-consciously educative role. Holmes’s favorite maxim may be that

“careful observation o f facts is the surest path to the truth’’; hence, Holmes’s

frequent admonitions to Watson to leam to “observe” where others only “see”

(Atkinson 33). Yet, the detective plots o f varied stories insist additionally that

these observations o f fact must be put to good use. What is at stake is more than

simply Holmes’s attention to the “commonplace” details o f life; it is Holmes’s

recognition that “the ordinary” and “the commonplace” may reveal a metonymic

link between themselves and individuals. The knowledge implicit in this link, and

not the object itself, is what is important.

The detective plot o f “A Case o f Identity” is initiated by Mary Sutherland,

who seeks Holmes’s help in discovering what has become o f her missing fiance,

Hosmer Angel, who disappeared as they traveled in separate hansom cabs to their

wedding. She chronicles to Holmes the details o f her courtship and her

disapproving stepfather. They planned to marry while her stepfather was out of

town, but in planning to do so, Hosmer employed a strange condition. He required

that Mary “swear, with [her] hands on the Testament, that whatever happened [she]

would always be true to him” (257). She believes that “he foresaw some danger,

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 ... [a]nd ... what he foresaw happened” (258).

Holmes’s response is to take the papers Mary Sutherland gives him: an

advertisement from The Chronicle and four letters written by Hosmer. After she

leaves, Holmes proceeds to read her character with the help o f the “forensic

objects” that she wears. He challenges Watson:

You did not know where to look, and so you missed all that was

important. I can never bring you to realize the importance of

sleeves, the suggestiveness o f thumb-nails, or the great issues that

may hang from a boot-lace. Now, what did you gather from that

woman’s appearance? Describe it. (260)

Watson offers a detailed physical description o f Mary Sutherland’s appearance and

dress, and in return, receives limited praise from Holmes: “ ‘Pon my word,

Watson, you are coming along wonderfully ... It is true that you have missed

everything o f importance, but you have hit upon the method” (260). Holmes thus

makes clear his educative goal: method is the most important element o f

knowledge assimilation. And method, for Holmes, involves “the suggestiveness of

thumb-nails” and “the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace” - mundane

details o f objects intimately linked with individuals that may yield particular

narratives.

Watson has learned enough, the story makes clear, to observe the “one

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 remarkable point” about Hosmer Angel’s love letters: they are all typewritten,

even the signature. Although Watson cannot entirely understand the significance

o f this fact, Holmes can, so he arranges for an interview with Mary’s stepfather. In

requesting an appointment, Holmes gives this man the opportunity to reply - which

the stepfather does, using his typewriter. The typewritten letter thus functions as a

forensic object that closes the gap between the man’s dual identity as Mary’s

stepfather and Mary’s fiance.

Holmes succeeds in reading the “link” between the stepfather and his

typewriter to decipher the man’s motivation and method —namely, his desire to

keep hold of the use o f Mary’s income by making sure “that for ten years to come

... she would not listen to another man” by disguising himself as an eligible suitor

(265). What seems most important is that the seeming anonymity provided by the

typewriter has failed: the typewriting has nonetheless functioned as a forensic

object that “tells a story” in spite o f its typist’s intention (264). That the typewriter

may function in this manner is due in part to the object itself, but in greater part to

Holmes’s analysis. Holmes’s explanation is revealing:

It is a curious thing ... that a typewriter has really quite as much

individuality as a man’s handwriting. Unless they are quite new, no

two o f them write exactly alike. (263)

Because he understands this characteristic o f “individuality” as it manifests itself in

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 a typewritten letter, Holmes distinguishes the “link” between the suitor and the

greedy stepfather. Holmes confronts the stepfather with his wrongdoing, and

laments that Mary Sutherland would not believe the truth. But at the same time, he

continues to meditate on “the typewriter and its relation to crime” (264). That

relation, it seems, is repeatedly characterized in the story as a metonymy yielded by

the link between individual and object.

IV. Conclusion

It is with this last image o f Holmes continuing to meditate on the

typewriter’s relation to crime that I want to conclude. For this image, I argue,

suggests the real importance o f this story as well as the other detective narratives

examined in this chapter. That the “case o f identity” that Mary Sutherland presents

to Holmes does not offer a real challenge to him is immediately clear from the

story. First, Holmes ends his interview with Mary with the advice, “Let the whole

incident be a sealed book, and do not allow it to affect your life” (259). Read in

conjunction with his lament at the end o f the story that “[i]f I tell her she will not

believe me,” it is clear that, even in this initial interview, Holmes attempts to

dissuade her from pining for the missing Hosmer Angel. Second, Holmes’s first

comment to Watson following Mary’s departure is that he “found her more

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 interesting than her little problem, which, by the way, is rather a trite one” (259).

Holmes thus signals that he has solved Mary’s problem immediately; what follows

in the course o f the story is merely a kind o f “song and dance” rehearsed for

Watson’s (and the reader’s) benefit. Even the ever-puzzled Watson is convinced

that Holmes “must have some solid grounds for the assured and easy demeanour

with which he treated the singular mystery” o f Hosmer Angel’s disappearance

(262).

Ronald Thomas has read the typewriter in this story to “function as a lie

detector” (85). Certainly, it is true that the proof o f this mystery’s solution is

derived from the unique character smudges o f an idiosyncratic typewriter. But this

test is one provided for Watson’s benefit; it does not help Holmes in solving the

case, for he already has. As a result, we may see the typewriter as functioning

more to provide a forensic lesson than to offer real proof as a forensic object. The

typewriter offers an occasion for Holmes to demonstrate to Watson, once again, a

proper habit o f mind. In fact, Holmes only sends away for the “p ro o f’ o f the

stepfather’s typewriter when Watson cannot adequately answer Holmes’s question:

“My dear fellow, is it possible that you do not see how strongly it [the typewritten

signature] bears upon the case?” (261).

In this story - where the stepfather will not be asked to answer to a formal

legal charge, where the stepdaughter will not believe the truth if it is told her - the

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 point is clearly neither “justice” nor “truth,” for neither is possible in the end.

Instead, Conan Doyle suggests, what is important is what detective fiction tells us

about “putting it all together.”20 Raw information must be carefully and

methodically assimilated if it is to offer any kind o f real knowledge. And the

methods with which we evaluate physical evidence, such as this case’s typewritten

love letter, are not only more important than the mystery case itself, but also more

important than its eventual solution.

Although each author uses a different lens and focuses upon different

problems and anxieties, this privileging o f a forensic methodology is apparent in

The Woman in White, Lady Audley's Secret, and both of the Sherlock Holmes

stories this chapter examines. This common narrative concern suggests that writers

o f early detective fiction - while they may not have anticipated the many ways and

aids to crime-solving that would develop over the years - nonetheless were

interested in exploring the value o f developing the habits o f mind that register an

acute knowledge o f the metonymic link between persons and the objects they

handle.

20 My reading of this point is closely aligned with Catherine Belsey’s argument in

“Deconstructing the Text: Sherlock Holmes” that these stories extend their
endorsement of careful scientific thought “not only in the spheres conventionally
associated with detection (footprints, traces o f hair or cloth, cigarette ends), where
they have been deservedly influential on forensic practice, but in all areas” (383).
In other words, one must apply careful forensic thought to all problems, and not
just physical evidence.

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 Chapter Three.
Fragmented Selves, Fragmented Stories: Bleak House and The Moonstone

‘‘[I]t is a lame story, feebly whispering and creeping about, and

any brighter spark o f life it shows soon dies away."
—from Bleak House

“It is all confusion to begin with; but it may be all brought into
order and shape, i f you can only fin d the right way. ”
—Ezra Jennings, The Moonstone

The thematic and formal features o f two early detective novels - Charles

Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-53) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) -

are preoccupied with secrets, and especially those involving some person’s secret

past or secret memories. Although all detective fiction develops a relationship

between narrative and the necessary pursuit o f information to solve a mystery,

these two novels are remarkable for the way in which they interrogate the very

narrative structures that enable us to assimilate information about the mystery.

This chapter analyzes both that structure (one that I term “synecdochal,” for

reasons explained below) and each novel’s concomitant interrogation o f it, for this

phenomenon has significant implications for what Dickens and Collins ultimately

suggest about the process o f knowledge assimilation.

In his examination o f mid-Victorian novels, the critic Patrick Brantlinger

has described what he terms a “disintegration of narrative authority” in which

narrative omniscience is reduced in order “to let in kinds o f knowledge that realistic

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 fiction had often excluded” (31, 53). My own reading in this chapter extends

Brantlinger’s argument in two ways. First, I show that Bleak House and The

Moonstone not only “let in” new kinds o f knowledge, but also structure that

knowledge to suggest something about how it should be properly assimilated. And

second, I suggest that in these novels, the effect generated by the narrative process

o f mystery-solving is not quite as neatly resolved as Brantlinger would have us

believe. It is true that the conventional aim o f a detective story is for the detective

to “recover” all secrets so that by novel’s end, the detective, the narrator-author,

and the reader all share the same body o f knowledge. Not only is this conventional

end subverted in Bleak House and The Moonstone, but my reading will also suggest

that such subversion may be precisely the point. For both o f these novels are

ultimately more concerned with narratively safeguarding the portions o f their

mysteries that remain concealed than with elucidating those which are eventually

revealed.

The structural paradigm introduced in these two novels is one I will term

“synecdochal,” because it explores and interrogates the narrative relationship

between a whole and a part - specifically a revealed whole and a hidden part. The

term synecdoche has played a role in the post-Lacanian and post-Jakobsonian

discussions o f metonymy and metaphor that I have discussed in Chapter Two; most

rhetoricians have distinguished synecdoche from both metonymy and metaphor

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 although they have acknowledged its close relationship with metonymy. I follow

the differentiation both Kenneth Burke and Wai Chee Dimock have made in

distinguishing between metonymy and synecdoche by “associating the former with

reduction and the latter with relations between part and whole” (Dimock 97).

Burke does admit, however, that the tropes o f metonymy and synecdoche “do

shade into one another” and that “metonymy may be treated as a special application

o f synecdoche.” 1

Despite this recognized similarity, I want to distinguish my use o f the term

synecdoche from that o f metonymy to better emphasize the differing narrative

structures and epistemological relations I characterize by each term. For although I

use both terms to characterize a hidden connection that must be illuminated through

narrative, in Chapter Two I am primarily interested in the hidden link that inheres

in a physical object that is intimately connected with any character, and in this

chapter I am primarily interested in the way hidden portions o f the narrative itself

both construct character identity and constrain novelistic closure. Moreover, the

significance o f each rhetorical trope is different when invoked by detective

novelists as a narrative device. In the previous chapter, m y readings o f The Woman

1 Dimock quotes Burke on this point in footnote 10, page 97; she also points out
that Burke’s vision o f metonymy is “narrower” than that o f cognitive linguist
George Lakoss but can still be seen as similar. See Burke’s discussion at pages
503-11 o f A Grammar o f Motives.

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 in White, Lady Audley's Secret, and two Sherlock Holmes stones suggest that the

metonymic link that novelists interrogate is absent yet recoverable. In this chapter,

my readings o f Bleak House and The Moonstone suggest that the missing

synecdochal narrative part that novelists interrogate may, in contrast, be

irretrievable.

I suggested earlier that both Bleak House and The Moonstone were

fundamentally about secrets and secret pasts. Both novels narratively depict these

secret pasts through narratives of fragmented identity that must be re-connected for

the mystery to be resolved. Although much interesting and productive work has

been done on issues o f identity or the “split self’ in the detective novel -

particularly from a psychoanalytic perspective - this subject is not one I will focus

upon in my project.2 Instead, because o f my interest in the narrative structure of

this phenomenon, I use the term “story o f the self’ to draw attention to the ways in

which a character’s identity is depicted narratively through strategies of

fragmentation and linking. I am interested in the issue o f identity not as a thematic

representation, but as a narrative construction. In other words, I examine how the

thematic o f fragmented identity is mirrored in a formal narrative structure, which is

2 For just two examples from this wide body of criticism, see Robert Rogers,
Psychoanalytic Study o f the Double in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1970); and Jenny Boume Taylor, In the Secret Theatre o f Home: Wilkie
Collins, Sensation Narrative and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London:
Routledge, 1988).

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 itself grounded in the rhetorical trope o f synecdoche.

This “story o f the self’ may be seen to fit within a synecdochal paradigm

because what we see fragmented is some secret “part” o f a narrative o f identity

(sometimes remembered, sometimes not) that must be reconnected with the larger

“whole” o f that identity. For example, in Bleak House, the narration o f Lady

Dedlock’s secret past - her illicit love affair and the birth o f her illegitimate

daughter - is depicted as a missing, inaccessible, partial narrative that must be

recovered by assorted detective figures. What is emphasized through this structure

is the synecdochal aspect o f Lady Dedlock’s identity, where the hidden part that

engaged in a love affair with Captain Hawdon and produced Esther is fragmented

and rendered secret; it is unconnected with her known and narratively-available3

3 1 am distinguishing between the missing part o f the narrative and the present part
that I describe as “narratively available” in a way that is different from D.A.
Miller’s famous distinction between the narratable and the nonnarratable. Miller
describes the narratable as those “instances o f disequilibrium, suspense, and
general insufficiency from which a given narrative appears to arise. The term is
meant to cover the various incitements to narrative, as well as the dynamic ensuing
from such incitements, and it is thus opposed to the ‘nonnarratable’ state of
quiescence assumed by a novel before the beginning and supposedly recovered by
it at the end” (ix). The nonnarratable is “not the unspeakable - but its incapacity to
generate a story” (S). What I describe as narratively unavailable is not lacking in
capacity to generate story - instead, its very capacity to narrate is what troubles
readers when this portion o f the story is suppressed.

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 public identity as the proud wife o f Sir Leicester.4 A similar synecdochal paradigm

governs the narrative o f The Moonstone, in which Franklin Blake, an English

gentleman possessed o f all the advantages o f wealth and family, must learn to

recognize and assimilate into his narratively-available identity that secret, hidden

part o f himself that, with the aid o f an opiate, is capable o f brazenly entering a

young woman’s bedroom in the dark o f night and stealing away her precious

diamond.

The novels I examine in this chapter explore, interrogate, and ultimately

reconnect these fragmented “stories o f the se lf’ through at least a nominal closure.

Many previously unavailable narratives are made available - to detective figures, to

the reader. Moreover, the synecdochal structure o f each novel may be seen to

function in two primary ways: first, it explores our desire to structure the

information we have about our world and particularly our selves into narrative; and

second, it interrogates the proposition that our identities may, in fact, be

constructed by what we do not know as much as by what we do know. Especially

where the information that is fragmented involves a character’s memory - as is the

4 Many critics have noted the use o f “synecdoche” by Dickens in relation to the
thematic o f body parts; this feature o f Dickens’s writing was noted as early as 1935
by Dorothy Van Ghent, and more recently Elana Gomel has examined it as “an
important element in nineteenth-century poetics o f corporeality” that is associated
with “ornamentation and femininity” (49-50). In my analysis, however, I examine
not Dickens’s literal use o f bodily “parts” for “wholes,” but rather Dickens’s
narrative structure o f identity as a relation o f “missing parts” to “wholes.”

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 case for Lady Dedlock, Esther, Franklin Blake, and Mr. Candy - the connection the

novel eventually proposes has implications for epistemology in expanding the

traditional link between memory and identity.

In the tradition of Locke, personal identity was understood to be formed

through the concept o f memory, as his language from An Essay Concerning Human

Understanding suggests: “We must consider what person stands for ... as far as

this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far

reaches the identity o f that person” [emphasis his] (Book II, chapter 7, section 11).

Literary scholars who have drawn upon Locke’s ideas to discuss the relationship

between memory and identity include Jenny Boume Taylor in her study In the

Secret Theatre o f Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative and Nineteenth-

Century Psychology,5 as well as Alison W inter in Mesmerized: Powers o f M ind in

Victorian Britain and Mary Poovey in A H istory o f the M odem Fact. My analysis

is grounded in their collective understanding o f this issue, and contributes to it by

pointing out the way the link between memory and identity may function in a

specific narrative device.

As my analysis of Bleak House and The Moonstone will show, Dickens and

Collins appear to challenge this traditional construction o f identity as insufficient.

They do so by creating narratives in which part o f a character’s identity is rendered

5 See especially chapter one o f Taylor’s study.

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 “lost,” constituting a fragmented story part that circulates throughout the narrative

until it is rejoined with its character’s available narrative once more. Notably, these

fragmented memories are realigned with characters’ individual stories through

narrative strategies o f connection that, for the most part, do not engage with the

issue of memory. Novelists thus appear to suggest that identity must be more

broadly conceived if we are going to produce the kind o f knowledge that certain

mysteries and problems o f knowing demand.

It is important to my analysis that the fragmented information that

constitutes the thematic mystery o f these novels is figured through a specific and

formal narrative style. Both Bleak House and The Moonstone invoke the paradigm

o f multiple narration,6 which in turn suggests how a new relation between the

narrator and the reader is beginning to be forged. In both novels, narrative

strategies for linking fragmented “stories o f the se lf’ abound, and there is no

forthright narrative persona to aid the reader in making sense o f this fragmented

6 In Bleak House, the narrative o f Chancery may be viewed as a separate narrative

voice, characterized by the highly stylized rhetoric with which the novel begins:
“In Chancery. London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor
sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather” (1). This narrative
voice, characterized by short sentence fragments, and the lack o f verbs and subjects
(which imply a lack o f action and agency), is mediated through the production of a
mass of documents, affidavits, wills, charges, and letters that are presented (many
as part o f Jarndyce v. Jarndyce), but neither described nor understood. This
strategy appears in keeping with the novel’s thematic treatment o f the law case,
which is represented as being both slow and incomprehensible, but the narrations of
Esther and the omniscient narrator remain problematic.

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 information. Bleak House utilizes three different narrative voices, and The

M oonstone employs no less than eleven.7 Although so many narrative perspectives

appear to offer a greater accumulation o f information, in fact, this strategy more

frequently works to obscure relevant information. Although Dickens and Collins

each examine and interrogate slightly different aspects o f this process o f knowledge

making, the result is quite similar: both novelists may be seen to suggest,

ultimately, that our desire to connect all fragmented information into knowledge

may be subject to limits.

I. Bleak House: A Narrative “Fog Everywhere”

The key fragmented narrative o f identity in Bleak House is that o f Lady

Dedlock - a narrative that necessarily implicates Esther Summerson as well.

Although I am primarily interested in the synecdochal paradigm that structures the

narrative o f Lady Dedlock’s hidden past, it is noteworthy that both Lady Dedlock

and Esther exist themselves within a synecdochal relationship: daughter Esther is,

quite literally, a part o f her mother, Lady Dedlock. Within the narrative

7 In The M oonstone, the eleven different narrators are: 1) Mr. Hemcastle (author o f
‘Tam ily Paper”); 2) Gabriel Betteredge; 3) Miss Clack; 4) Mathew Bruff; 5)
Franklin Blake; 6) Ezra Jennings; 7) Sergeant Cuff; 8) Mr. Candy; 9) Sergeant
Cuff’s Man; 10) The Captain; and 11) Mr. Murthwaite

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 synecdochal paradigm that surrounds Lady Dedlock, however, I want to explore

her secret past in light o f the differing strategies that surround both her own and

Esther’s narratives o f identity.

These narrative strategies develop a synecdochal relationship between the

“part” o f each character’s personal history that is private and obscured and the

“whole” o f each character’s own story that is public and appears (falsely) to be

complete. Although critics have previously documented many o f Esther’s narrative

shortcomings,8 what is surprising to recognize is the degree to which both Esther

and the omniscient narrative voice are complicit in at once creating and suppressing

these fragmented “stories o f the self.” The narrative strategies surrounding Esther’s

story are very different from those surrounding Lady Dedlock’s history. In a

reversal o f what would seem naturally expected, Esther’s public history is

predominately shaped through her own autobiographic narrative voice,9 while her

private history, including her secret past, is detailed through the focalization lens o f

various minor characters. The resulting effect is a narrative that conceals more than

8 See for example, Joseph Sawicki, “ ‘The Mere Truth Won’t D o’: Esther as
Narrator in Bleak H ouse,' ” Journal o f Narrative Technique, 17:2 (1987): 209-224.
9 Carolyn Dever has also described Esther’s narrative voice as exhibiting
fragmentary qualities; Dever invokes the rhetorical figure o f prosopopeia to
describe how Esther’s “rhetoric insistently precedes embodiment” (88-89). My
focus upon what I call a synecdochal narrative device suggests the opposite: the
narrative o f Esther as well as the omniscient narrator alludes to, yet never fully
names or “embodies,” the hidden part o f Lady Dedlock’s history.

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 it reveals, insofar as the mystery o f Lady Dedlock is concerned.

Lady Dedlock’s story is handled differently still. Her public history is

developed through the focalization o f different characters (especially through that

o f detective figures o f Tulkinghom and Inspector Bucket), while her secret private

history is handled narratively through the language o f embedded texts - namely,

some law reports, a news clipping, and a group o f old love letters. These

embedded texts function symbolically to gesture toward that secret part o f Lady

Dedlock’s whole past that it is the aim o f the detective plot to discover and reveal.

They appear to function differently than those letters and documents I examined in

the previous chapter, for they function not to create a connection with Lady

Dedlock (that there is a connection is never in doubt), but instead to represent the

unknown part o f her story of identity - a story that, I ultimately suggest, is never

fully recovered.

Bleak House is among the first detective narratives to deploy what may be

described as a loose form of multiple narration, and it has the effect o f discouraging

readerly identification with any particular narrator or character. Not only does

Dickens divide his narrative among three primary narrators and styles - Esther’s

autobiography, Dickens’s omniscient narrative, and the Chancery Court case o f

Jam dyce v. Jam dyce —but also within each narrative voice, he practices rigorous

narrative non-disclosure. The frequent changes in narrative voice and focalization

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 might alone ensure that the reader does not develop a sympathetic identification

with any one narrative voice. Yet the strategy o f multiple narration is also joined

with a practice o f non-disclosure, which is more complicated than simply

withholding the mystery’s solution in order to delay reader gratification. This

practice o f non-disclosure m ay be seen to complicate the way o f knowing that the

novel explores - the necessary connection that must be made between concealed

“parts” and revealed “wholes.”

In Bleak House, these fragmented stories are eventually connected into

coherence through, in Todorov’s terms, the mediation o f the “present story” of the

investigation. Detective figures including Guppy, Krook, Tulkinghom, and even

Esther work to assemble and evaluate evidence. The expectation is that, through

their efforts, the story o f the investigation will eventually reveal all. Yet this

expectation is thwarted in Bleak House, despite the presence o f three narrative

voices and the introduction o f the official detective, Inspector Bucket.10 The reader

must rely for knowledge on narrators who refuse to tell all they know, and

characters who work to hide and destroy evidence that would reveal knowledge.

Fragmented stories are carefully narrated, but lingering story fragments

remain and are never satisfactorily “connected” and resolved through the novel’s

10 See Chapter Two o f The Novel and the Police for D.A. M iller’s influential
reading o f Inspector Bucket and the role o f the police as a disciplinary force in
Bleak House.

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 attempts at closure. This narrative practice o f non-disclosure combined with the

“lingering story fragments” that evade closure is suggestive o f the real importance

o f the narrative o f Bleak House: to inaugurate a narrative practice o f changing the

way readers (and writers) make associations and assemble knowledge from

fragmented information, and eventually come to terms with the way that some

fragmented information may never be fully “connected.” In other words, the

synecdochal paradigm I have described as structuring the narrative o f Bleak House

is particularly useful for highlighting those hidden parts o f the mystery that it is the

stated aim o f the novel to reveal. The central narrative o f Bleak House is one of

concealment, and the synecdochal paradigm that structures this narrative at once

constructs the concealment and safeguards it —even as the novel claims to achieve

revelation and closure.

Ladv Dedlock’s “Secret Past”

The omniscient narrative voice that we find in the first chapter of Bleak

H om e introduces Lady Dedlock in careful terms: she is “one o f a class,” and,

moreover, “she supposed herself to be an inscrutable Being, quite out of the reach

and ken o f ordinary mortals” (14). Yet, there is a part o f her identity that is secret

and unknown, even to her: while her memory o f her past liaison with Captain

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 Hawdon is intact (albeit carefully repressed), she erroneously believes their child to

be dead. Early hints o f this incomplete narrative come through Lady Dedlock’s

barely concealed interest in the handwriting o f a law clerk known as Nemo.

Moreover, the specific narrative strategies that reveal this portion o f Lady

Dedlock’s history function synecdochally. They constitute embedded narratives

that do not narrate through the traditional medium o f language; instead, these law

reports, news clippings, and love letters appear not for their narrative content, but

instead as a sign o f the synecdochal part o f Lady Dedlock’s identity that is secret.

Dickens’s omniscient narrator, either through the narrator’s third-person

perspective or through the characters’ direct discourse, generally controls the

“telling” o f Lady Dedlock’s secret love affair. When her secret past is introduced

at the beginning o f the novel, it is through exchanges between Lady Dedlock and

the lawyer Tulkinghom. Tulkinghom recognizes that the law reports of the law-

writer called Nemo have “powerfully stimulated her curiosity” (140); she notes his

suspicion, but commands the lawyer to “let me hear the story out” (149). At this

point in the novel, no one knows the opium-addicted Nemo’s real name, and there

is little clue to his identity. He is known by his documentation only - and those

law reports gesture synecdochally towards Lady Dedlock’s hidden past. As her

strange interest in Nemo’s reports hints o f some secret surrounding her interest, the

law reports gesture towards some part o f the story as yet unknown. The narrative

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 increasingly makes clear that the “secret part” the documents represent is related to

Lady Dedlock herself.

The story Tulkinghom relays is unsatisfying, so Lady Dedlock resorts to a

second embedded textual narrative, that o f a newspaper. Notably, the content o f

this news clipping is not specifically outlined; as this content drops out, what the

newspaper signifies is more compellingly emphasized —specifically, some

inaccessible part o f Lady Dedlock’s story. Lady Dedlock disguises herself as a

servant and journeys to London to seek out the young crossing-sweep, Jo.

Together, she and Jo visit the places mentioned in the newspaper account of

Nemo’s death: Cook’s Court, Krook’s house, and the graveyard (200-202). Their

spatial tracings offer no real information, but hint even more strongly o f secrets in

Lady Dedlock’s past that motivate her to disguise herself and visit these strange

places.

Although the above story-line is narrated through the combined direct

discourse o f the characters and the symbolic suggestion o f the law reports and

newspaper clippings, Dickens’s omniscient narrative voice repeatedly intervenes to

keep the mystery afloat by drawing attention to Lady Dedlock and Tulkinghom’s

mutual suspicions o f one another: “what each would give to know how much the

other knows - all this is hidden, for the time, in their own hearts” (150). Dickens’s

use o f the phrase “for the time” is an implicit promise that at some point the

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 narrative will reveal all - a narrative promise that tantalizes the reader with the

promise o f revelation o f the full story, yet never materializes.

Moreover, the narrator adopts an interesting strategy with regard to

Tulkinghom, who is responsible for uncovering much o f Lady Dedlock’s past even

as the scenes featuring their interaction most fully represent Lady Dedlock’s public

identity as the respected and proud wife o f Sir Leicester. Tulkinghom is a

repository o f secrets; he “carries family secrets in every limb o f his body, and every

crease o f his dress” (147). Keen to discover Lady Dedlock’s secret, he withholds

the information he knows, taking no one into his confidence, and his murder occurs

before he is able to proclaim anything that he knows. The narration negotiates

balancing the mystery against Tulkinghom’s reticence by focalizing through

Tulkinghom in the early stages o f the novel to draw attention to the law reports and

newspaper, but ceasing to do so once Tulkinghom uncovers any substantive

information. Thus, Dickens’s omniscient narrator consistently either permits free

rein to the characters’ discourse (without additional explanation, only the

invocation o f embedded texts) or else adopts the subjectivity o f any character who

is also excluded from knowledge o f the secret.

The fragmentary narrative surrounding Nemo is significant to reading Bleak

House, since it not only is fraught with mystery, but also must be connected with

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 Lady Dedlock’s fragmented story o f identity.11 The fragmentary information

surrounding Nemo and Lady Dedlock is, like previous intimations o f Lady

Dedlock’s secret, synecdochally structured through the narrative o f a group o f old

love letters. The physical letters appear to substitute symbolically for the desired

story that appears lost when Nemo dies alone, “with no more track behind him, that

any one can trace, than a deserted infant” (131). Nemo leaves behind only written

material —his law reports and a packet o f letters written by his former lover, later

revealed to be Lady Dedlock. As Carolyn Dever has traced, these letters pass

mysteriously from one character to another —specifically, from Nemo to Guppy,

Tulkinghom, Bucket, Sir Leicester, Jamdyce, and then Esther (94). Despite the

importance o f these letters to the narrative gap in Lady Dedlock’s history, the

reader never learns o f their contents.

My reading here is aligned with that o f Dever, who notes that “[t]he

significance o f the letters is not in their content, but rather in their existence” (95).

Dever argues that these letters are important because, “[b]y evidence o f

handwriting alone,” they construct a parentage for Esther and thus resolve the

11 My own readings o f two important scenes - Nemo and his love letters, Esther’s
reunion with Lady Dedlock - are, like m y reading o f Bleak House generally, based
upon the readings o f this novel offered by Carolyn Dever both in graduate seminars
at New York University and also in Death and the M other from Dickens to Freud:
Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety o f Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998).

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 mystery o f her uncertain origins (95). I would like to emphasize instead that the

letters not only produce a family history for Esther by identifying her birthparents,

but they also gesture synecdochally towards the unavailable narrative surrounding

Lady Dedlock - that hidden part o f her own history in which she became Esther’s

mother. The letters symbolically represent an inaccessible “part” o f Lady

Dedlock’s hidden past that, as the letters pass among different detective characters

in the novel, is partially re-integrated into the narrative about Lady Dedlock.

Viewed in light o f Lacan’s reading o f Poe’s The Purloined Letter, the letters

may be seen to function not as a unit of meaning (a signified) but as something that

produces certain effects (a signifier). These effects occur both within the story

(affecting characters, including the narrator) and outside the story (affecting

readers). The content o f the letters is, as stated above, less important than what the

letters signify: not only does their possession change the dynamic o f power

relations among the novel’s characters (for knowledge is power, as Tulkinghom

and Guppy illustrate), but their existence also signifies the missing part o f Lady

Dedlock’s history that no one can successfully access. The desire (of characters

and readers) to know their contents (and thus Lady Dedlock’s history) is thus

displaced onto a narrative game o f “follow the letters.” Thus, the letters also

illustrate an important problem o f knowing generated by the absent narrative that is

signified, but suppressed.

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 As Mieke Bal has stated, “secrecy is an act,” for the secret substitutes for a

narrative that is unknown (35). Moreover, “a secret that must be found out implies

a process in which that finding out takes place” (35). In this chapter, I am

describing a narrative process o f “finding out” that is structured synecdochally.

That the trope o f the synecdoche is invoked in this narrative paradigm suggests not

only a particular way of organizing information both known and unknown, but also

o f a way in which language and rhetoric may be deployed both to communicate and

to conceal. While many critics, such as Dever, have emphasized that the fact o f the

letters’ possession remains more important than their content, I want to add that it

is specifically the absence o f their content that remains important. Each mention o f

the packet o f letters increasingly confronts the reader with his or her lack o f

knowledge; the letters represent the absent, fragmented story o f identity that is not

fixlly told, and their circulating presence in the novel cannot help but remind the

reader that, as each successive character leams about this secret, the reader remains

excluded.

Thus, at the same time that the omniscient narrative voice manipulates a

fragmented story o f self-identity for Lady Dedlock through the device o f the letters,

the relationship between narrator and reader is being fundamentally altered: the

reader can no longer even pretend to view the omniscient narrator as a trustworthy

guide. This reading o f the letters emphasizes not only the way the letters structure

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 changed relations among characters and between the narrator and reader, but also

raises a problematic o f insufficient language that I explore more fully below. For

as language that might reveal knowledge is repeatedly suppressed and obscured,

questions about its sufficiency are inevitably raised.

Each character seems to taunt the reader with what the reader does not

know, revealing only tidbits o f information that do little to explain the full story.

Guppy, who wishes to establish a family connection that would benefit Esther in

the Jamdyce v. Jamdyce lawsuit, approaches Lady Dedlock to inform her that

Esther’s true name is “Hawdon.” This information, for the first time, allows Lady

Dedlock to recognize that there is an aspect to her identity that she has never

previously fathomed: she is the mother o f a child who is living. Once she

discovers this aspect o f her identity, she takes great pains to hide it even as she

confesses it to Esther, twice impressing upon Esther the importance o f maintaining

Sir Leicester’s honor (450). For this reason, Lady Dedlock admits to Esther that

she dreads the lawyer Tulkinghom, who “is indifferent to everything but his

calling,” which Lady Dedlock describes as “the acquisition o f secrets, and the

holding possession o f such power as they give him” (451). But in denying

Tulkinghom the information that would enable him to “connect” the secret hidden

past of Lady Dedlock (and consequently, also o f Esther) with the narrative o f their

stories o f self-identity, both the omniscient narrator and Esther also deny the same

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 information to the reader.

Esther’s Complicity in Obscuring the “Secret Past”

What is especially unexpected in Bleak House is the degree to which

Esther’s first-person narration is complicit in this project o f nondisclosure.12 As

Esther’s narrative begins, she invokes her earliest memories and, in so doing, she

presents a fragmentary narrative o f her self-identity. Throughout her

autobiographical narration, Esther exhibits what Genette terms “paralipsis,” or “the

omission o f some important action or thought o f the focal hero, which neither the

hero nor the narrator can be ignorant o f but which the narrator chooses to conceal

from the reader” (Narrative Discourse 196). Writing her autobiography from a

retrospective perspective, Esther repeatedly invokes her incomplete knowledge

about her past, yet she reveals little o f what information she actually possesses to

the reader.13

When Esther finally meets Lady Dedlock midway through the novel, Lady

12 As Harry E. Shaw has suggested in “Loose Narrators: Display, Engagement, and

the Search for a Place in History in Realist Fiction,” Narrative 3:2 (1995) at 95-98,
first-person narratives such as Esther’s blur Genette’s distinction between narrators
(whose function is to speak) and characters (whose function is to see and act).
13 Peter Thoms has read Esther’s narrative in terms o f her perpetual “conflict
between self-expression and self-denial” as she “claims some authorship over her
life and strategically denies others the opportunity o f pilfering her secrets” (92).

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 Dedlock discloses that she is Esther’s mother and begs for continued secrecy. Lady

Dedlock says little more; presumably a fuller version o f her story is contained

within the letter she leaves with Esther - the contents o f which are not shared with

the reader, and the entirety of which is immediately destroyed. Esther merely

reports:

She put into my hands a letter she had written for my reading only;

and said, when I had read it, and destroyed it, but not so much for

her sake, since she asked nothing, as for her husband’s and my own

- 1 must forevermore consider her dead. (451)

This letter presents Esther with the information necessary to assimilate knowledge

about her own fragmented, partially known past; thus, the letter functions

synecdochally to narrate that “part” o f Esther’s past that is also Lady Dedlock’s.

Esther will eventually put together the connection between her “Aunt Barbary” and

the estranged sister o f Lady Dedlock. Yet Esther does not share the details o f this

connection with the reader, for she hides the contents o f the letter (other than to

sketch briefly the deception practiced by her Aunt Barbary). She writes, “my first

care was to bum what my mother had written, and to consume even its ashes”

(453).

By immediately burning it, Esther becomes complicit in the novel’s

narrative process o f suppressing and even destroying the absent, incomplete story

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 o f the past. Because Esther’s narration presents the tale o f the reunion through

direct discourse, she is able to construct herself as both implicated in concealing

part o f the absent story and yet exonerated because she merely follows her mother’s

wishes. At the moment o f narration, Esther promises to reveal the contents o f the

letter at a later time. She addresses the reader directly, “What more the letter told

me, needs not to be repeated here. It has its own times and places in my story”

(453). This empty promise is echoed in Esther’s later justification o f why she does

not tell Jamdyce of the letter’s content: “I would have told him all my mother’s

letter, but he would not hear it then” (534). But the narrative promise o f another

“time and place” in Esther’s story is never fulfilled, for Esther never again

mentions her mother’s secret in substantive terms. Esther’s autobiographical

narration consistently hides the full story —an unusual strategy for an

autobiographical narrative. She scoffs at the beginning o f her narrative, “[a]s if this

narrative were the narrative o f my life” (27, emphasis hers). It unquestionably is,

and yet her narrative practice consistently works to deny it by suppressing the story

o f Lady Dedlock’s secret past as well as her own.

There are other parts o f Esther’s own story that she works to keep secret -

namely, the “secret” o f her appearance. Even the question of Esther’s disfiguration

is presented as a narrative fragment —and one never connected to a full and

coherent explanation. Notably, we discover, some characters appear never to

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 notice a serious disfiguration at all. Even after Esther’s illness, Jo readily confuses

her with Lady Dedlock, “t’other lady,” whenever they meet. And George, who

never meets Esther at all until after this presumed disfiguration has taken place,

immediately confuses mother and daughter.

Esther’s own narrative ends in furtherance o f this ambiguity, as she relays

her husband Allan’s question to her: “don’t you know that you are prettier than

you ever were?” (770). In her reply, Esther merely reinforces the fragmented story

and omits information that might prompt a definitive conclusion:

I did not know that; I am not certain that I know it now. But I know

that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is very

beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my

guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was

seen; and they can very well do without much beauty in me - even

supposing - (770).

Esther’s fragmented story o f self-identity thus ends, quite literally, with a fragment

in the form o f a dash. As D.A. Miller has said o f this unfinished sentence, “though

one easily supplies what Esther keeps from saying (“even supposing I have my

beauty back”), the modesty that consigns this assertion to silence is, to the last,

radically inconclusive” (101). Dever’s reading o f Bleak House also focuses upon

this final fragmented dash; she emphasizes the “rhetorical indeterminacy” o f this

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 scene in Esther’s response o f “disavowal and displacement” (102). While Miller

emphasizes Esther’s “insecurity” and Dever stresses the interplay between female

sexuality and Esther’s narrative role in reading Bleak H ouse's ending, I want to call

attention to the fragmented dash as emblematic of the novel’s final act o f narrative

non-disclosure. This fragmented ending symbolizes Esther’s inability to make

even the most rudimentary o f connections. Unsurprisingly, further de-mystification

o f Lady Dedlock’s secret is left to the omniscient narrator - and more particularly,

to the activity o f characters who assemble evidence as they try to learn more about

Lady Dedlock’s real identity and secret past. Even in this respect, the omniscient

narrative disappoints —much as Esther has just done.

Novelistic Closure

Inspector Bucket emerges at the novel’s end as a character substitute for a

more forthright narrative persona, and his role is to channel an array o f evidence

into a coherent narrative. In his very name, “Bucket,” he is characterized as a

repository for miscellaneous evidence. He appears to follow clues that other

characters —not to mention the unreliable narrators - do not. When he appears in

the novel’s concluding chapters, Bucket promises to Sir Leicester (and implicitly to

the reader): “you shall see the whole case clear, from first to last” (647).

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 In his interview with Sir Leicester, Inspector Bucket relates the story o f Mr.

Tuikmghom’s suspicions regarding Lady Dedlock and then clears her o f the

murder charge (639). This interview allows Inspector Bucket to summarize Lady

Dedlock’s hidden secret, produce witnesses, and clarify (almost) all o f the

mysteries. The reader learns the story o f the incriminating love letters - how they

were not burned with Krook as originally thought, but rather found by Smallweed

when he came into Krook’s property and passed along a chain o f characters (642).

Bucket also directs the testimony o f Mrs. Rachael, Smallweed, Weevil, the

Snagsbys, and Hortense (who is subsequently arrested for Tulkinghom’s murder).

Most importantly, he directs their individual testimony so that it corroborates other

testimony given earlier in the novel. The effect o f corroborating testimony is to

create a linked narrative that is nonetheless not entirely coherent.14 Much

pertaining to the histories of Lady Dedlock, Sir Leicester, Nemo, Tulkinghom, and

even Esther is missing from Inspector Bucket’s summation - and the narrative

device o f the detective’s summation cannot wholly obscure this fact.

Inspector Bucket comes late in the novel, and he wraps up the narrative

14 Others have seen the role o f Inspector Bucket in a more positive fashion. Peter
Thoms has argued that Bucket is “a guide we would like to trust, a figure whose
confident showmanship in unfolding his case reminds us o f the authorial mastery o f
Dickens him self’ (94) and Richard Thomas has stressed Bucket’s role in
representing the power o f rational thought to contain and defeat the dark forces of
criminality in “Minding the Body Politic: The Romance o f Science and the
Revision o f History in Victorian Detective Fiction.”

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 rather too quickly.13 His summation is presented after readers have already begun

to practice a “model” o f assembling the evidence. For example, from the

corroborating testimony o f Guppy and Jo, we make the connection that Esther’s

face and figure exactly resemble those of Lady Dedlock. We first discover the

identity o f Esther’s father by piecing together the link between Lady Dedlock’s

interest in Nemo’s handwriting and subsequent death, Guppy’s discovery that

Esther’s birth name was “Hawdon,” George’s remembrance o f service with

“Captain Hawdon,” and George’s possession o f a letter from Hawdon, which

contains handwriting identical to that o f Nemo. We connect these fragments o f

information long before Esther testifies about her mother’s letter o f confession, and

long before Tulkinghom summarizes Lady Dedlock’s tale to Sir Leicester. As

Tulkinghom puts it, “a train o f circumstances” led to discovery o f her secret (506);

but readers have followed this train already.

If the reader must assemble evidence much as Inspector Bucket does, and

arrive at independent conclusions as to the content o f the “absent” story, then it is

more important that Bucket’s final summation validate this already-established

model than that it actually resolve all mysteries. In other words, what the detective

resolves is o f lesser importance than what the narrative resolves. Certainly the

15 D.A. Miller also discusses the problem o f closure in Bleak House, though his
reading focuses upon the character o f Mademoiselle Hortense rather than Inspector
Bucket. See especially pages 96-101 o f The Novel and the Police.

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 novel’s epistemological concerns appear to engage a larger repressive project o f

“not giving away the full story.” Yet these concerns, too, suggest that the novel is

ultimately about how readers evaluate knowledge. There is a secret enshrouded in

the fog o f Chancery and the unreliable narration o f Bleak House. Yet finding out

its content is not nearly as important as understanding its form, and - as with Poe’s

letter - using the secret to observe how characters and readers assemble meaning as

they attempt to uncover the novel’s secret.

What is disturbing about the novel, however, is that lingering fragments o f

information remain unconnected in that many details o f Lady Dedlock and Esther’s

lives remain unknown; for example, all details o f Lady Dedlock’s early love affair

and Esther’s early childhood remain, for the most part, entirely mysterious. As the

omniscient narration describes these lingering, unconnected parts o f the story:

There is a hush upon Chesney Wold in these altered days, as there is

upon a portion o f the family history. ... [I]t is a lame story, feebly

whispering and creeping about, and any brighter spark o f life it

shows soon dies away. It is known for certain that the handsome

Lady Dedlock lies in the mausoleum in the park ... but whence she

was brought home, to be laid among the echoes o f that solitary

place, or how she died, is all mystery. (763)

For the reader, these parts o f Lady Dedlock’s story may not be a complete mystery,

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 but they nonetheless remain fragmented, and are never fully connected to the larger

story. This lack o f connection may suggest a privileging o f the reader’s process of

connection over that o f more formal narrative characters - but it also suggests the

limits o f that process, when narrators cannot be fully trusted to share the complete

story and information cannot be wholly connected. The fragmented portions o f the

narrative that remain concealed pose the following question: are the contents o f the

letters and news reports that constitute the synecdochal structure o f this mystery

concealed because narrative —or language itself - is insufficient to communicate

the stories these documents signify? This issue is further explored and

problematized in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.

II. The Moonstone: Placing the “whole storv” on record

There are two pivotal scenes in The Moonstone that I want to explore in

terms o f this synecdochal narrative paradigm as well as its resulting implications

for what readers learn about the process o f knowledge assimilation. The first scene

involves Franklin Blake’s secret identity as a jewel thief; the second involves the

narrative reconstruction Ezra Jennings generates from that part o f Mr. Candy’s

memory hidden by delirium. Both examples teach readers something about the

process o f connecting information about “parts” and “wholes,” and also that this

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 process is nonetheless problematic. For in spite o f this process, there may remain

something incomplete about the resulting narrative.

In a reading that analyzes the relationship between dreams and detective

work, the critic A.D. Hutter has recognized that the process by which fragments are

connected to construct knowledge is o f greater importance than the content o f the

mystery itself:

The resolution o f the mystery is never as important as the process

itself o f connecting and disconnecting, building a more complete

account from an incomplete vision or fragment. And as in a dream,

it is precisely this tension between the reordering o f imagination and

the facts on which it works that formally defines the genre. (192)

The purpose o f this chapter is to examine what the “process itself o f connecting and

disconnecting” suggests about ways o f coming to knowledge —especially where

information about self-identity and memory is problematic. To notice that the

process o f knowledge assimilation is emphasized rather than the mystery itself

should prompt us to ask further, “what does the process itself suggest is

important?”

In The Moonstone, the narrative o f Franklin Blake’s identity is depicted

through the trope o f synecdoche, in which hidden “parts” are ostensibly recovered

to connect with gaps in “whole” identities. The value o f this process is that it

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 seems to generate a new way o f knowing the self —especially when memory

“fails,” as it does for both Franklin Blake and Mr. Candy. This process is first

depicted as highly important, but by the novel’s end, the narrative suggests a kind

o f incompleteness that renders the process problematic and, as with Bleak House,

raises questions about the efficacy o f language and narrative itself.

Franklin Blake: “So many different sides to his character”

When Gabriel Betteredge introduces Franklin Blake in Wilkie Collins’s

1868 novel The Moonstone, he astutely characterizes Blake as a man o f many parts.

Betteredge believes this amalgamation of identity is the unfortunate result o f

Blake’s “Continental education”:

He had come back with so many different sides to his character, all

more or less jarring with each other, that he seemed to pass his life

in a state o f perpetual contradiction with h im self... He had his

French side, and his German side, and his Italian side —the original

English foundation showing through, every now and then. (55-56)

Though Blake himself dismisses this commentary as merely one o f Betteredge’s

“quaint” ideas, the idea o f Blake - or any character for that matter - having

“different sides” is one that the novel exploits narratively. For the narrative

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 suggests that Blake’s nighttime activity on the occasion o f Rachel’s birthday

constitutes a forgotten portion o f his memory and character that must be recovered

(296).

To understand the process o f knowing that The M oonstone both endorses

and challenges, it is first necessary to examine the process it rejects entirely —

ironically, a process o f metonymic connection similar to that embraced by other

novels and explored in Chapter Two. Franklin Blake’s character emerges as a

primary detective figure who investigates the diamond’s theft with great success -

but only after the novel’s professional detective, Sergeant Cuff, has left the case.

C u ffs failed methods represent the process o f knowledge assimilation that the

novel may be understood to reject.

The reasons for C u ffs failure are many, and in D.A. Miller’s reading, have

important implications for an ideological understanding o f the novel.16 His failings

are also failures o f narrative, however. Sergeant C uffs reputation is depicted a

formidable one, for Franklin Blake declares that if stories are true, “when it comes

to unraveling a mystery, there isn’t the equal in England of Sergeant Cuff!” (106).

More specifically, Sergeant C u ffs prodigious talent appears to be that o f narrative

16 In D.A. Miller’s reading, Cuff does not abandon the case, but rather is “ejected”
from it by the family. In this reading, the family (or “community”) ejects Cuff
because as a sign o f their rejection of the police surveillance his presence implies.
See chapter 2, “From roman policier to ro m a n -p o lic e in Miller’s The Novel and
the Police (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1988).

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 connection, for he is able to connect disparate fragments o f information into a

coherent explanation for the crime at issue. In so doing, Sergeant Cuff reprimands

a local police officer, Superintendent Seegrave, for his lack of observation o f small

details. Cuff observes:

At one end o f the inquiry there was a murder, and at the other end

there was a spot o f ink on a tablecloth that nobody could account

for. In all my experience along the dirtiest ways o f this dirty little

world, I have never met with such a thing as a trifle yet. (109)

Despite this talent, which has stood him so well in previous cases, C uff does not in

fact succeed in solving the mystery of the diamond’s disappearance. Instead, he is

credited only with “bringing trouble and misery with him into the house,” and he

leaves in failure (116).

As Miller’s reading o f Sergeant C uffs failure suggests, much more is at

stake in the novel than the mere discovery o f the th ief s identity. The Moonstone

promises that in the “ordinary fullness of time and circumstance,” the truth will

come - fully, completely, and coherently (110). Yet neither time alone nor a

detective’s super-attention to “trifles” can ultimately solve this mystery. Instead,

the mystery’s solution depends upon the ability o f a few amateur characters to

apply strategies o f detection to a new kind o f fragmentary evidence: fragmented

individual memory. For while Sergeant Cuff takes a traditional approach o f linking

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 a petticoat smear with a diamond thief, it is the untraditional, innovative approach

to “connecting evidence” undertaken by Franklin Blake, Ezra Jennings, and Gabriel

Betteredge that solves this mystery.

When Franklin Blake begins his investigation o f the moonstone’s theft, he

believes his own memory o f events to be intact. No other characters disagree; in

fact, Betteredge reports how, the morning after the theft, Blake reported “he had

had a good night’s rest at last” (91). Blake believes his role will be that o f a

traditional detective like Sergeant Cuff; he will simply re-examine the physical

evidence and the testimony o f witnesses with renewed attention: “There are

missing links in the evidence, as / left it, which Gabriel Betteredge can supply, and

to Gabriel Betteredge I go!” (300). But in a climactic scene, Blake discovers that

his memory o f events - which he had erroneously thought “whole” - is in fact

fragmentary and incomplete. There is a “side” of Blake that is missing - not a

French or Italian side, as Betteredge would describe it —but instead a narrative part.

This part corresponds not only to a particular chronological time period, but also a

gap in memory and hence Blake’s individual “story o f the self.” This synecdochal

relationship surfaces when Franklin reads his own name on the nightgown marked

by the incriminating paint stain.

“I had discovered Myself as the Thief,” he laments, and “the shock inflicted

on me completely suspended my thinking and feeling power” (314). As he

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 recovers, he begins to question “the evidence o f the nightgown” and wonder

whether someone else might not have worn it the night o f the theft. Yet, this hope

is dashed when Rachel Verinder charges him, “I saw you take the Diamond with

my own eyes!” (347). Franklin Blake can only respond, “Before God who hears

us, I declare that I now know I took it for the first time!” (347). The narrative

paradigm that is introduced here is “synecdochal,” because it explores and

interrogates the relationship between the presumed “whole” integrity o f Blake’s

memory and the newly-discovered missing “part.”

Franklin Blake must learn to recognize and assimilate into the story o f his

identity that secret, hidden part of himself that - broken apart from memory due to

the intervention o f an opiate - is capable o f entering Rachel’s bedroom and stealing

the moonstone. Most critics read Blake’s actual theft o f the diamond in terms of

sexual symbolism and desire. As Thoms has succinctly stated, “the nocturnal

episode becomes a symbolic representation o f desire: the virgin loses her jewel to

the lover who secretly enters her room clad in a nightgown which, when later

found, bears an incriminating stain” (107).17 It is also important to recognize,

however, that the “nocturnal episode” represents a fragment o f information that

17 For additional examples o f this reading, see Charles Rycroft, “A Detective Story:
Psychoanalytic Observations,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 26 (1957): 235-38; and
Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and His Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric o f
Authorship (New York: AMS Press 1982) at 208-11.

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 requires rigorous effort to assimilate into the whole of Blake’s memory and

narrated identity. To do so, Blake must turn to Ezra Jennings, who expertly

models for the reader the process o f reconnecting missing, fragmented “parts” o f

information with a larger “whole.”

Mr. Candy’s Fragmented Ramblines

When Blake begins his investigation, one o f the aids he expects to draw

upon are those friends “who were present on that occasion [of Rachel’s birthday],

to lend me the assistance o f their memories” (366). Though Mr. Candy readily

admits, “I have got something to say to you about that,” it is immediately apparent

that his recollection is “lost” because o f a debilitating illness (368). As Blake and

Ezra Jenning discuss the problem o f how to recover the lost fragment o f Mr.

Candy’s memory so important to Blake, Jennings proposes a new kind o f detective

process that avoids “the necessity o f appealing to Mr. Candy him self’ (371).

Jennings emphasizes that - whatever the case of Mr. Candy’s memory at

the time he consults with Blake —when Mr. Candy first suffered from delirium,

what was “lost” was the “faculty o f speaking connectedly,” not the “faculty of

thinking connectedly as well” (emphasis mine, 374). In other words, language

fails, but the mental process does not. Thus, Jennings works at the problem as

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 though it were a “child’s puzzle,” which is “all confusion to begin with” but “may

be all brought into order and shape, if you can only find the right way” (374). The

“right way,” it is soon evident, is one that explicitly works to connect the

incomplete fragments o f identity. Jennings describes his work o f recording Mr.

Candy’s mental “wanderings” thus:

I reproduced my shorthand notes, in the ordinary form o f writing -

leaving large spaces between the broken phrases, and even the single

words, as they had fallen disconnectedly from Mr. Candy’s lips ... I

filled in each blank space on the paper, with what the words or

phrases on either side o f it suggested to me as the speaker’s

meaning; altering over and over again, until my additions followed

naturally on the spoken words which came before them, and fitted

naturally into the spoken words which came after them In

plainer words, after putting the broken sentences together I found

the superior faculty of thinking going on, more or less connectedly,

in my patient’s mind, while the inferior faculty o f expression was in

a state of almost complete incapacity and confusion. (375)

In other words, Jennings is able to recognize that the “whole” o f Mr. Candy’s

information and memory is intact, although only “parts” can be expressed because

o f the delirium. Jennings connects the part with the whole, and penetrates “the

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 obstacle o f disconnected expression” (387). He leams o f Mr. Candy’s intent to

trick Blake with opium, which had a more powerful effect than expected.

As a result, Jennings devises an experiment to recover Blake’s own lost

memory, which relies upon placing Blake “as nearly as possible, in the same

position, physically and morally, in which the opium found [him] last year” (389).

With this reconstruction o f events, which is a complete success, Blake does

respond as he did the previous year and the fragmented part o f his memory that had

been lost to him for that year is re-integrated into his “story o f the self.” That

Jennings and Blake discover in the process that Godfrey Ablewhite is the true thief

is almost beside the point, for what is important is that the synecdochal split in

Blake’s memory is restored to a complete, coherent whole.

Like Bleak House, The Moonstone actively works to reframe, through

narrative, the ways in which our knowledge o f identity (both that o f the self and

others) is constructed and assimilated through this synecdochal relationship

between whole and part. One might extend this analysis even to other characters

in The Moonstone: Godfrey Ablewhite’s “hidden” identity as a man “whose life

had two sides to it” (452) or the annoying Miss Clack’s “hidden” infatuation with

Ablewhite would also fall within this narrative paradigm.18 Yet it is the

18 Elisabeth Rose Gruner has argued in a reading that focuses upon issues o f gender
and privacy that Miss Clack, “like Franklin, ... keep[s] a secret from herself’ (227).

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 predicament o f Franklin Blake and Mr. Candy that most clearly illustrates how

character identity in the novel is depicted narratively through strategies o f

fragmenting and linking memory. These strategies appear to make use o f a

synecdochal structure to first describe the relation of missing “part” to “whole,” but

in the end, this structure appears problematic in The Moonstone, just as it did in

Bleak House - despite the apparent closure Franklin Blake’s narrative seemingly

achieves.

TTT- Conclusion

Critics have recognized both Bleak House and The Moonstone as the “first”

English detective novel; Bleak House is often cited for offering the first

professional detective, and The M oonstone is described, in the famous words of

T.S. Eliot, as “the first and greatest o f English detective novels.” 19 What both early

detective novels have in common, remarkably, is an interrogation o f the narrative

processes by which we know and understand the self and its story. The process

19 For the reasons why Bleak House should be considered the first English detective
novel, see Julian Symons’s argument in Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story
to the Crime Novel: A History (London: Faber and Faber, 1972) and Gwen
Whitehead, “The First Fictional English Detective,” Round Table o f South Central
College English 27.3 (1987): 1-3. For T.S. Eliot’s contrary view, see his essay
“Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens” (1927), reprinted in Selected Essays: New
Edition, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950 at 413.

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 endorsed by both novels —that o f connecting those parts o f the self that drop away

from the larger whole o f the self —is one that is presented as necessary to the

solving o f each novel’s major mystery, and yet problematic.

For in each case, the novel’s final chapters may provide a nominal closure

marred by lingering fragments and gaps in the text. The stories o f Lady Dedlock

and Esther Summerson remain somewhat fragmented, underscored by Esther’s

final equivocation about even her physical appearance at novel’s end. And in The

Moonstone, the final pages recount not only the unknown whereabouts and future

adventures o f the diamond, but also the demise o f Ezra Jennings, whose “story”

remains a “blank,” just like the “unfinished book” he leaves behind (460). This

ending would suggest that the “story of the self’ is one that may necessarily be

always fragmentary, not wholly susceptible to the process o f connection. By

implication, the “story o f the self’ may also be unsusceptible to expression through

narrative and language itself.

Such concerns o f Bleak House and The Moonstone gesture to a later

detective novel with a narrative that explicitly explores the fragments and

contradictions within the self - Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel, The Strange

Case o f Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This novel - part detective story, part horror

fiction - generates a narrative exploration o f the idea that “man is not truly one, but

truly two” (76). As part o f that exploration, Stevenson narratively invokes all that

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 is unknown about the self and the “fortress o f identity” that it inhabits:

I say two, because the state o f my own knowledge does not pass

beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the

same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately

known for a mere polity o f multifarious, incongruous and

independent denizens. (76)

This commentary on all that is still unknown about the conception o f self-identity

appears to gesture back to the “lingering fragments” o f Bleak House and The

Moonstone that remain incompletely connected to the “whole” presumably

established through novelistic closure. To identify this shared concern in two early

detective novels as well as a later one is to show that, from its very inception, this

genre is one that prefigures modernism in its concerns about how we deal with

providers o f information we cannot wholly trust, and problems o f knowledge we

cannot wholly access. For writers o f detective narratives are among the first to

recognize and explore those epistemological problems posed by information that is

highly resistant to full assimilation into a coherent, connected form o f knowledge -

and to full assimilation into narrative expression itself.

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 Chapter Four.
Fragmented Time in Dracula

“In this matter dates are everything, and I think that i f we get a ll our material
ready, and have every item p u t in chronological order, we shall have done much. ”
—Diary o f Mina Harker

“In the struggle which we have before us to rid the earth o f this terrible monster we
must have all the knowledge ... we can get. ”
—Diary o f Dr. Seward

Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula has raised many provocative issues for

critics, ranging from its representations o f vampirism and sexuality to psychology

and technology.1 Yet, as David Seed has argued, “all too little attention is paid to

its formal complexities” (61). In this chapter, I examine one such previously

unexamined formal complexity - namely, the way in which narrative devices

surrounding “time” in D racula raise larger epistemological issues. Most readers

will recognize that “tim e” functions as a recurring theme in this story where

vampires exceed natural life spans, travel occurs instantaneously via dust specks

and light, characters’ activity is carefully circumscribed by approaching sunrises

1 For examples o f critical readings on these issues, see: Margaret L. Carter, ed.,
Dracula: The Vampyre and the Critics (Ann Arbor & London, UMI Research
Press, 1988); Christopher Craft, “Kiss Me with Those Red Lips: Gender and
Inversion in Dracula, ’’ Representations 8 (Fall 1984): 109-10; Franco Moretti,
“Dialectic of Fear,” Signs Taken fo r Wonders (London: Verso, 1983) at 83-108;
and David J. Skal, H ollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web o f 'Dracula ’from Novel to
Stage to Screen (London: Andre Deutsch, 1990). It may be noted that o f all critical
readings, those that emphasize D racula’s themes o f sex and gender predominate.

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 and sunsets, and all natural assumptions about the rules governing time and place

are generally perverted. Most readers will not, however, recognize the extent to

which “time” not only functions as a narrative device to structure the false-

chronological ordering o f the narrative, but also frames larger questions about the

process o f assimilating new, sometimes strange knowledge.

The basic plot o f Dracula involves the efforts o f five different characters

first to explain a seemingly inexplicable crime, and then to track down a pre­

modem serial killer.2 That these characters succeed in doing so is primarily the

result o f their obsession with the details o f chronology. Not only do D racula's

characters attempt to solve the mystery of the elusive vampire by deciphering

times, places, train schedules, and date patterns, but D racula’s narrative sequence

also mirrors their efforts to achieve coherence and the problems they encounter

trying to do so. There is a “sequence” to the narrative organization o f Dracula, but

it is not one that is readily apparent to the reader, for it is not chronological. The

narrative effect of Dracula - in substance and in style - is that of disjointed,

fragmented time. Prior to Dracula, no detective narrative was nearly as

preoccupied with the problems o f resolving disjointed events into a coherent

2 The historical analogy between the notorious Victorian serial-killer Jack the
Ripper and the fictional representation of Dracula has been frequently noted. For a
full account, see Maurice Hindle’s Introduction to Dracula (New York: Penguin,
1993). Additionally, all parenthetical page references to Dracula are from this
edition.

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 chronology.

Narrative theorists have recognized the importance o f chronology to the

way in which we order available information into a knowledge system. This

importance is implicit in the very distinction between fabula and sjuzet - or story

and narrative plot - that underscores the difference between “events in their

chronological sequence” and “events as narrated” (Prince 30). The choice o f

narrative order is important to our understanding o f the text, and it is also part o f

why “we find the same fabula beautiful when by one writer and trite when

presented by another” (Bal 78). For these reasons, narratologists have created a

vocabulary to talk about issues surrounding narrative order and the effects

generated thereby. In the following discussion of narrative devices surrounding

“time” in Dracula, the two most important concepts will be those o f anachrony and

syllepsis. Anachrony refers to any discordance between the two temporal orders of

story and narrative plot (Genette 40) and syllepsis describes the grouping o f events

governed by any non-chronological principle (Genette 85; Prince 95). Dracula, as

we shall see, makes extensive use of both concepts to frame an inquiry into the

nature o f knowledge assimilation.3

Mieke Bal has succinctly explained not only the importance of sequenced

3 See pages 4-5 o f Chapter One for a discussion of m y use o f the term “knowledge
assimilation” as well as my distinction between information and knowledge.

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 order to narrative, but also its relation to reader involvement:

As against various other art forms - architecture, visual arts - a

written linguistic text is linear. One word follows another, one

sentence follows another; and ... [i]n a narrative text, it is even

possible to speak o f a double linearity: that o f the text, the series of

sentences, and that o f the fabula, the series o f events. ... There are

various ways o f breaking such linearity, forcing the reader to read

more intensively. ... If deviations in sequential ordering correspond

with conventions, they will not stand out. They can, however, be so

intricate as to exact the greatest exertions in following the story. In

order not to lose the thread it is necessary to keep an eye on the

sequential ordering, and the very effort forces one to reflect also on

other elements and aspects. Playing with sequential ordering is not

ju s t a literary convention; it is also a means o f drawing attention to

certain things, to emphasize, to bring about aesthetic or

psychological effects, to show various interpretations o f an event, to

indicate the subtle difference between expectation and realization,

and much else besides. (81-82; emphasis mine).

Bal’s explanation emphasizes two important points. First, she stresses that in

reading a narrative, our instinctive approach to make sense o f both the fabula and

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 sjuzet (or in Bal’s terminology, simply “text”) is a “linear” one. And second, she

points out that where this natural linearity is broken, the effect is to draw attention

to “certain things” and encourage the reader to “read more intensively.” In

Dracula, these issues are even more interesting because the narrator-characters

strive self-consciously to persuade readers that an unbroken linear narrative exists.

D racula's narrative successfully feigns a chronological organization, for the

novel is self-conscious in its claim to be perfectly ordered, and initial appearances

support that claim. Presumably, the purpose o f this obsession with chronology is to

create effects o f “accuracy” and “coherence.” Unlike most other nineteenth-

century detective fiction, Dracula employs neither a single narrator nor even a

single detective figure. Instead, a collaborative effort governs both the

investigative process and the narrative process, which develops through multiple

first-person narrators.4 The narrative experience is thus immediate and personal,

yet also fragmented and disjointed. For the multiple narration o f Dracula is no less

than a jumble o f journal entries, letters, phonograph transcriptions, case notes, and

news accounts - all organized according to a sequence that is never made entirely

clear.

4 For critical attention to the device of multiple narration, two articles are especially
on point: Valerie Pedlar’s “Dracula: Narrative Strategies and Nineteenth-Century
Fears” in The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Identities, Ed. Dennis Walder, (London:
Routledge, 2001) at 217-41 and David Seed’s “The Narrative Method o f Dracula,”
Nineteenth-Century Literature 40.1 (1985): 61-75.

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 Dracula opens with a statement o f narrative rationale that outlines

principles o f order and coherence. This statement immediately precedes chapter

one, and unlike all other portions o f the novel, no specific author is credited:5

How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made

manifest in the reading o f them. All needless matters have been

eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities

o f later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is

throughout no statement o f past things wherein memory may err, for

all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the

standpoints and within the range o f knowledge o f those who made

them. (6)

These claims emphasize the novel’s organization, relevance, and truth-value.

Although the story’s substantive tale may contain elements o f the fantastic, we are

asked to view it merely as a “history” o f “simple fact[s],” in which each event is

recorded exactly at the time o f its occurrence to minimize the risk that “memory

may err.” “Needless matters” have been edited out, according to principles of

relevance, and multiple narrators are justified as adding to the truth-value o f the

total record, for each writes only from his or her specialized “range o f knowledge.”

5 Because many references in the novel refer to the character o f Mina Harker as the
transcriber and organizer of all papers that make up the story, she is the most
probable author o f this statement.

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 Most importantly, this narrative statement claims that there is a principle of

organization —a “sequence” - that will be readily apparent to the reader.

This claim to narrative organization is repeated by a number o f characters

throughout the course of the novel. Mina and Jonathan Harker are credited with

first transcribing and later arranging the many papers and accounts that make up the

content o f Dracula; Van Helsing praises them for having “put up in exact order all

things that have been” (302). As soon as she reads her husband’s diary account o f

his ordeal in Transylvania, Mina immediately wants to transcribe and organize: “I

shall be prepared. I shall get my typewriter this very hour and begin transcribing.

Then we shall be ready for other eyes if required” (232). When other characters

make use o f the transcribed materials, they echo Mina’s opinion that “dates are

everything,” and that all will be clear once the materials are “put in chronological

order” (288). Dr. Seward echoes this sentiment:

Harker has gone back, and is again collating his material. He says

that by dinner-time they will be able to show a whole connected

narrative ... I hardly see this yet, but when I get at the dates I

suppose I shall. (289).

Characters’ comments about the importance o f dates, such as those

mentioned above, are supported by the way in which each individual account

appears visually on the page. Dracula's multiple narrators each contribute a

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 number o f immediate, first-person accounts to the mix o f journal entries, letters,

phonograph transcriptions, memoranda, case notes, news accounts, telegrams, and

real property deeds and conveyance transfers that constitute the novel. Each

account scrupulously begins with a notation o f the relevant time, date, and place, a

practice that suggests a chronological assumption as well as an obsession with

accuracy. That this chronological principle is not followed —but actually subverted

- will be discussed fully in close readings below. For now, it is necessary only to

note the contradiction between the appearance o f chronological order and the actual

lack thereof. As Bal suggests, any deviance in normal narrative sequence is

important —especially, I would add, where such deviance is so self-consciously

denied within the narrative itself.

D racula's narrative obsession with time and chronology is important to the

main inquiry o f the novel as a whole —one that, I argue, is not “scientific accuracy”

as Van Helsing claims but instead an examination o f new ways o f assimilating

knowledge. For representations o f time ultimately suggest that what is important is

not the preoccupation with chronology itself, but instead the larger epistemological

questions about the process o f knowing that Dracula raises through its narrative

engagement with time. What assumptions about chronology are being

interrogated? And what new assumptions may take their place?

This chapter argues that Dracula is a novel that, in invoking a narrative o f

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 detection, initiates an inquiry into the process o f knowledge assimilation. Not only

does this particular novelistic inquiry focus upon new ways of understanding

sequence and chronology, but it also generates a particularly educated kind of

reader. As I have mentioned in the introduction and discussed more extensively in

Chapter 2, the use of multiple narration is a device that distances the reader in that

it discourages readerly identification with any one narrator.

Moreover, the multiple narration o f Dracula creates an additional distance

through the framing device of Mina’s transcription. Many journal entries are

recorded in phonograph or written in “shorthand,” itself an abbreviated form o f

normal writing that signifies compressed time. The reader accesses these narrative

accounts only through Mina’s subsequent transcriptions.6 Hence, the reader is once

removed by transcription from each narrator’s immediate narration. Mina, in fact,

will compile and “translate” most of the papers in the novel - a narrative framing

device that distances the reader from feeling intimately connected with any

particular narrator. In Dracula, this effect o f distancing the reader is intensified by

the confusion generated by the non-sequential narrative. The end result is that the

6 Mina’s transcriptions may also pose an interpretive problem o f authenticity. For

example, when she first meets Van Helsing, she is careful to record their interview
in shorthand. Can shorthand accurately render Van Helsing’s foreign accent and
broken English when Mina transcribes the interview at a later point in time? If not,
then Mina’s “transcription” not only involves an interpretive element, but also is
subject to the fallibility of memory over time.

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 reader will enjoy an increased interpretive involvement with the text.

The first portion o f the novel may be read as a narrative exercise in

“educating” the reader in proper habits o f connecting fragmented, disjointed

information. We follow Jonathan Harker’s efforts to synthesize information during

his strange sojourn at Dracula’s castle; we also learn from Van Helsing as he

“teaches” Dr. Seward the appropriate methodology for understanding vampirism.

Then, the second portion o f the novel encourages the reader to apply his or her

learning. The narrative offers the reader all necessary clues —including many that

the characters themselves ignore. This generates an intensified interpretive process

on the part o f the reader. Moreover, the reader enjoys a feeling of superiority when

he or she is better at “connecting” fragmented evidence than are even the

investigating character-narrators.

I. Modeling Methodology in Part One

The first narrative account presented in Dracula is that o f solicitor Jonathan

Harker. His series o f first-person journal entries chronicles his visit to a new client

in Transylvania - a foreign count named Dracula. Harker’s first journal entry is

remarkable for its immediate preoccupation with the minutiae o f time and date:

3 M ay. Bistritz. - Left Munich at 8.35 p.m. on 1st May, arriving at

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 Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46, but train

was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place ... I feared

to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would

start as near the correct time as possible. (7)

Critics who have remarked on the narrative preoccupation with times and dates in

Dracula have usually understood this phenomena as signifying the division

between Eastern Europe and Western Europe.7 The West is associated with

regularity and punctuality; the East with precisely its opposite. As Harker

comments, “It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the

trains. What ought they to be in China?” (9). But as this chapter will illustrate, the

preoccupation with time and date does much more than simply symbolize the

division between East and West. It provides insight into the process o f connecting

fragments into a cohesive, meaningful narrative. The narrative manipulation o f

“time” in Dracula not only teaches us how to “connect” events linked by time, but

also initiates an inquiry into the assumptions inherent in knowledge construction

more generally.

I suggest that Harker’s initial preoccupation with the details o f time and

7 See, for example, Stephen D. Arata’s argument in “The Occidental Tourist:

Dracula and the Anxiety o f Reverse Colonization,” Victorian Studies 33:4 (1990):
621-45.

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 date represents his attempt to impose structure upon the situations he encounters

that are “very mysterious” and also “strange and uncanny” (11, 23). The places,

people, and customs he encounters are alien to him - and yet, his experience o f

them can be structured according to the familiar rhythms o f month, day, and hour,

the understandable progression o f linear time. Later, when Harker has encountered

so many strange events that he feels “as though [his] own brain were unhinged,” he

invokes the idea that recording such details is a kind o f therapy: “[t]he habit o f

entering accurately must help to soothe me” (52). In fact, he is unfailingly careful

throughout his early entries to specify the date and time that each event he

describes occurs.

What is most important, however, is not Harker’s initial motivation for

recording events so carefully, but instead the process o f knowing that Harker

“models” for the reader. The crisis that prompts Harker’s question for information

is sparked when he discovers, merely three days into his visit with Dracula, that his

host has imprisoned him in a castle that lacks any apparent exit. Everything about

his experience in Transylvania seems strange, from his meal-and-mirror-averse host

to his actual location. Harker remarked early in his journal on the fact that the

home o f Dracula is itself unlocatable:

I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality

o f the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps o f this country as yet to

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 compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps. (8)

The metaphor is appropriate for the entirety o f Harker’s experience, for the normal

markers o f place, time, and experience seem inapplicable in Transylvania. With so

much unfamiliar, Harker uses the methods o f the familiar to generate information

about his strange situation. He continues to record times and dates; he creates his

own mental map o f the Castle’s layout; and he observes his host surreptitiously

whenever possible.

Most important to a narrative reading o f Dracula, Harker’s experience at

the castle is figured as a battle for knowledge: the more quickly and completely

Harker can discover information about the Count and his strange practices and

synthesize it into knowledge - all the while depriving the Count o f what he himself

knows - the greater Harker’s chance for a safe return to England. When he

remarks upon his situation, he frames his task explicitly in terms o f this complex

mission o f simultaneously learning and withholding as much information as

possible:

When, however, the conviction had come to me that I was helpless I

sat down quietly - as quietly as I have ever done anything in my life

- and began to think over what was best to be done. ... O f one thing

only am I certain: that it is no use making my ideas known to the

Count. He knows well that I am imprisoned; and as he has done it

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 himself, and has doubtless his own motives for it, he would only

deceive me if I trusted him fully with the facts. So far as I can see,

my only plan will be to keep my knowledge and my fears to myself,

and my eyes open. (40).

The battle over knowledge in this first segment o f the novel is explicitly figured as

a battle between Harker and the Count: “He knows that I know too much, and that

I must not live, lest I be dangerous to him; my only chance is to prolong my

opportunities” (58). Even as he avoids raising the Count’s suspicions, he must

“find out all [he] can about Count Dracula,” for “understanding” is his only hope

(41). The puzzles he encounters are many: why does the Count neither eat nor

drink? How can he control the wolves? Why has he no servants? What is

signified by the crucifix, garlic, wild rose, and mountain ash? What sort o f creature

is the Count? At this early point in the narration, both narrator and reader are

deprived o f sufficient information.

Harker’s search for knowledge is also bounded by limits o f time. He learns

o f these limits nearly two weeks into his visit, when Count Dracula dictates a series

of letters for Harker to write to his friends and associates in England. The

unsettling part is that he demands Harker post-date the letters by four to six weeks.

Harker records the exchange as follows in an entry dated “ 19 May”:

I therefore pretended to fall in with his views, and asked him what

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 dates I should put on the letters. He calculated a minute, and then

said: -

‘The first should be June 12, the second June 19, and the third June

29.’

I know now the span o f my life. God help me! (58)

During the time span allotted to Harker, he investigates assiduously, making sure to

“put down every detail in order” (65). This impulse to narrate according to

principles o f “detail” and “order” may be read primarily as Harker’s intuitive way

o f approaching information. For certainly, by the time he is aware of his true

situation in Transylvania, he is also aware o f the probability that he will not survive

to share his written account with others. Like most journals, this form o f writing is

purely personal, intended for no wider audience.

His final journal entries chronicle his attempts to escape Count Dracula’s

castle, culminating in his last, desperate effort to scale the castle wall. His ending

statement - “Goodbye, all! Mina!” - leaves the reader in suspense. Whether

Harker has succeeded or failed remains unknown at this point. His journal,

however, provides an important model for the reader. First, it represents the

process o f assimilating information into knowledge as intimately connected with a

mastery o f “details,” dates and times, and order. Second, the substance o f the

details thus recorded will later prove important to Van Helsing’s more sophisticated

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 model o f knowledge assimilation.

Harker’s first-person narration yields to an epistolary exchange among

Mina, Lucy, and her three suitors that even further problematizes issues o f time and

how they function within the processes of knowledge assimilation that Dracula

models. These letters and telegrams, like Harker’s journal, evidence a

preoccupation with the details o f time, date, and order. This exchange not only

introduces the reader to a wider range of narrators, but it also provides the first

example o f a non-chronological narrative that nonetheless falsely claims to be

“ordered.”

The epistolary exchange begins with a letter from Mina to Lucy dated May

9, which immediately suggests to the reader that the same time period just narrated

by Harker (from May 3 until June 30) will now by re-narrated from a different

point-of-view. Although the early dates of Harker’s journal and the epistolary

correspondence are not in perfect correspondence, such parity seems unnecessary,

for we readily discern that Mina and Lucy are writing at the same time as Jonathan

Harker’s early imprisonment within the castle. Ironically, Mina’s letter indicates

that she is under the misapprehension that Harker “is well” and that she expects his

return “in about a week” (75).

The exchange o f letters primarily serves to introduce the primary character-

narrators who will soon be involved in the vampire investigation: Quincy Morris,

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 the Texan; Arthur Holmwood, Lucy’s fiance; and Dr. Seward, the director o f the

lunatic asylum. The narrative effect is to imply what sort o f life continues in

England for Harker’s friends, as he endures strange adventures in Transylvania.

Yet, an additional effect is to provide advance mention of information that will

eventually connect to the novel’s principal mystery. In Prince’s view, the primary

characteristic o f the narrative device o f “advance mention” is that there be no

indication o f the information’s future significance (4). Dracula's frequent use of

advance mention as a narrative strategy is one way in which the novel generates an

active reader. For with little help from the novel, the reader becomes active in

“connecting” disparate fragments o f information, and particularly begins to notice

patterns developing among occurrences linked only by time and location.

The true investigative portion o f the novel is inaugurated by Mina’s journal,

which commences July 24th in Whitby - nearly a full month after Harker’s escape

from Count Dracula. Mina’s journal immediately details information about Lucy’s

ill-health: Lucy, we leam, has “lately taken to her old habit o f walking in her

sleep” (97) and has an “anemic look” (98). That there is a link between the events

described in Mina’s journal and strange behavior by a patient at Dr. Seward’s

lunatic asylum is indicated solely by the narrative juxtaposition o f her journal and

his case notes - despite the fact that they are dated weeks apart. The connection is

thematic (related to vampire activity) rather than chronological - and yet, it is a

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 thematic connection that the reader cannot recognize at this point in the novel.

Immediately following Mina’s July 24th entry, the narrative hearkens back to Dr.

Seward’s case notes o f June 5. The case history o f Renfield through mid-July is

carefully documented, before the narrative returns to Mina’s journal entry o f July

26th. The rationale is likewise not chronological and the thematic connection to

vampirism remains obscure. Yet, despite the confusion such juxtaposition must

generate, that a connection must exist remains an implicit designed effect o f this

narrative arrangement.

The narration o f such disparate, unconnected events continues, with the

inclusion o f news reports that describe a dog escaped from a deserted ship and a

cargo o f “wooden boxes” consigned to a Whitby solicitor. As the log o f the ship is

interspersed with additional journal entries from Mina (describing strange marks

upon Lucy’s throat), case notes by Dr. Seward (chronicling more strange behavior

by Renfield), and invoices describing the movement o f the cargo boxes (which

move to addresses that are synonymous with letters Count Dracula addressed back

in Transylvania), it becomes increasingly clear that the non-chronological narrative

arrangement is meant to inspire “connection” of the substantive information

described therein. In narrative terms, Dracula makes use o f syllepsis to promote

“connection” through a non-chronological principle - sometimes thematic,

sometimes spatial, yet always relevant to the vampire investigation.

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 The narrative depiction o f Lucy’s death is likewise a narrative anachrony', it

bears a similar non-chronological, associational aspect, with an additional emphasis

upon contradiction. The issue o f whether Lucy’s anemic illness is becoming

progressively worse or is improving is repeatedly raised - and contradicted —in a

succession o f letters and journal entries. These accounts suggest that she wavers

constantly between recovery and further lapses into sickness; this suggestion is

furthered by the lack o f chronology in the dates. On August 18th, Mina notes that

Lucy “slept well all night” and that “the roses seem coming back already to her

cheeks” (129). Yet on August 24th and 26th, Lucy describes herself in her diary as

feeling “so unhappy,” “horribly weak,” and with pain in her throat (143-44).

If the chronological inconsistency o f merely six days were not enough to

suggest fluctuation in Lucy’s health, Lucy’s letter to Mina dated August 30th in

which she claims to be “quite restored” and to “have quite given up walking in my

sleep” would do so (141). There is not only chronological inconsistency when the

dates are considered, but also a narrative anachrony or discordance in that the letter

o f August 30th is placed in between papers o f August 18th and August 24th.

Narrative order thus presents an associational picture o f Lucy consistently

recovering (two accounts) and then consistently declining (two final accounts).

Restored to chronological order, however, a picture emerges instead o f increased

fluctuation in health: improvement, followed by decline, and then improvement

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 once more. Narrative chronology thus reveals the fragmentation and inconsistency

in the story o f the days leading up to Lucy’s death, while the narrative order

appears to obscure it.

If, as Bal has explained, a break in linear sequence suggests a designed

narrative effect, what can be the point o f the breaks described above? Lucy does

fluctuate between poor and improved health in the days before her death. Why

should it matter that the dates are ordered irrespective o f chronology? What might

this narrative manipulation o f linear order suggest? In this case, the narrative

manipulation may be viewed within the context of its psychological effect on the

reader. The non-chronological order o f dates in this section not only demands that

the reader read more attentively, but also generates confusion. The reader’s

bewilderment may be seen to mirror that o f the characters as they confront lack of

certainty and absence o f meaning. Sometimes, the narrative suggests, the very

process o f trying to make sense o f events may be confusing, especially when

meaning remains elusive.

Lucy’s death may be read to initiate the second instance in the novel that a

character “models” the process o f assimilating information into knowledge.

Because he is so disturbed by Lucy’s declining health, Dr. Seward requests help

from his former teacher and mentor, Professor Van Helsing. Van Helsing

explicitly teaches the other characters the rudiments o f investigative methodology;

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 he is described as a doctor and lawyer as well as a “philosopher and metaphysician”

who “knows as much about obscure diseases as any one in the world” (147).

Yet, perversely, Van Helsing’s initial narrative role appears to be to obscure

information rather than share it. He claims that it is “better that [Arthur

Holmwood] not know” the substance o f Van Helsing’s initial suspicions about

Lucy’s illness (155). Moreover, he tells even Dr. Seward: “I have for myself

thoughts at the present. Later I shall unfold to you” (156). Dr. Seward defends this

rationale o f non-disclosure, and he assures Arthur Holmwood that Van Helsing’s

unwillingness to share information is merely temporary:

He would not give me any further clue. You must not be angry with

him, Art, because his very reticence means that all his brains are

working for her good. He will speak plainly enough when the time

comes. (149)

Van Helsing’s unwillingness continues for a significant portion o f the novel,

spanning more than fifty pages, even as other characters become even more

puzzled by Lucy’s condition and question him. Van Helsing continues to advise

them only: “You shall know and understand it all in good time; but it will be later”

(195).

Van Helsing’s approach initially seems to follow the standard detective-

narrative convention o f delaying information about a “secret mystery” in order to

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 tantalize the reader. Yet D racula's invocation o f this standard convention is

problematized in two primary ways. First, Dracula offers a parallel to Van

Helsing’s non-disclosure in the plot surrounding Mina Harker. And second, the

novel represents Van Helsing as, even as he repels characters’ demands for more

information, continuing to teach them a proper methodology for knowledge

assimilation once they have it.

Mina Harker is not normally averse to embracing information; in her first

journal entry, she compares herself to a “lady journalist” who strives to “interview”

and “write descriptions” in what she views as an “exercise book” rather than a

journal (74). Certainly, together with Van Helsing, she emerges as the novel’s

primary detective figure; her “memorandum” in the final pages of the novel

provides the definitive reasoning that allows the band o f characters to capture

Dracula in the end. Yet, her own plot line throughout the novel is structured

around the tension between aversion and desire for knowledge. This is most

notable when Mina’s aversion to knowledge parallels Van Helsing’s refusal to

share it at the time o f Lucy’s illness and death.

In a letter to Lucy that describes a reunion with Jonathan and immediate

marriage, Mina significantly depicts their marriage vow as a vow of ignorance.

Harker places his hand on his diary, and asks Mina to share in his desire to suppress

knowledge:

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 ‘[Y]ou know, dear, my ideas o f the trust between husband and wife:

there should be no secret, no concealment. ... The secret is here,

and I do not want to know it. ... Are you willing, Wilhelmina, to

share my ignorance? (138-39)

After they are married, Mina symbolically makes a sacrament o f this vow of

ignorance, for she ritualizes her agreement with the aid o f a book, blue ribbon, and

a seal formed with her wedding band:

I took the book from under his pillow, and wrapped it up in white

paper, and tied it with a little bit of pale blue ribbon which was

round my neck, and sealed it over the knot with sealing-wax, and for

my seal I used my wedding ring. (139)

This sacramental “vow” is respected for only a matter o f weeks, however. After

Harker suffers an episode o f great agitation in seeing the Count in a London Park -

suddenly grown younger and healthier - Mina resolves that “the time is come, I

fear, when I must open that parcel and know what is written” (224).

The narrative plot surrounding Mina in this instance reminds us not only

that knowledge has the potential to be dangerous, but also that the process of

knowing entails a process both painstaking and collaborative. Harker’s desire “not

to know” requires Mina’s collaboration; for this reason, he asks her to “share” his

ignorance. Mina’s response following her review o f Harker’s Transylvania journal

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 underscores this point, for she immediately envisions sharing its contents with a

widened narrative audience:

I shall be prepared. I shall get my typewriter this very hour and

begin transcribing. Then we shall be ready for other eyes if required

(232).

She uses this same rationale to impress upon Dr. Seward the necessity o f having his

journal - normally kept on phonographic record - translated onto the written page.

When he invokes a preference for secrecy (“No one need ever know, shall ever

know”), she replies that “they must,” for only through “all the knowledge and all

the help which we can get” can Dracula be defeated (286).

As Mina’s actions explicitly invoke the necessity o f collaborative effort,

Van Helsing’s efforts explicitly teach the value o f painstaking detail. At the same

moment that he declines to share his suspicions with Dr. Seward, Van Helsing also

offers a “lesson”:

You were always a careful student, and your casebook was ever

more full than the rest. You were only student then; now you are

master, and I trust that good habit have not fail, [sic] ... Take then

good note o f it [Lucy’s case]. Nothing is too small. I counsel you,

put down in record even your doubts and surmises. Hereafter it may

be o f interest to you to see how true you guess. (157)

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 As with this advice to Dr. Seward, Van Helsing continues to teach the other

characters how to connect fragmented, illogical clues. Initially, he suggests by

spatial action what the narration o f Dracula has already suggested by sylleptic

placement: Van Helsing “thrust last night’s Westminster Gazette," with its story of

a “Hampstead Mystery” and the “bloofer lady,” into Dr. Seward’s hand.

As readers, we have encountered the Westminster Gazette some twenty

pages earlier, and we have already made the “connection” that Van Helsing forces

upon Dr. Seward. Specifically, there is a similarity between the throat wounds on

the children described in the news and Lucy. Yet when Dr. Seward mentions this

similarity, Van Helsing remonstrates with him:

Do you mean to tell me, friend John, that you have no suspicion as

to what poor Lucy died of; not after all the hints given, not only by

events, but by me? ... You are [a] clever man, friend John; you

reason well, and your wit is bold; but you are too prejudiced. You

do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside

your daily life is not o f account to you. Do you not think that there

are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that

some people see things that others cannot? (246)

It is not enough, Van Helsing suggests, merely to notice similar patterns and thus

make loose connections. Instead, Dr. Seward - and by extension, the reader —must

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 also continue to be skeptical o f appearances.

As we have seen earlier in the novel, in the case o f Harker’s postdated

letters home that assured everyone he was well, appearances may deceive. In that

case, the handwriting, the letter date, the postmark, and the sight o f a man dressed

in Harker’s coat would all serve to suggest the false situation described in the letter

rather than the truth o f Harker’s predicament. We simply may not be able to

understand everything we see, and we must leam to accept information that may be

far removed from what our “eyes see,” “ears hear,” and may be readily encountered

in “daily life.” As the responses to information-gathering by Mina and Van

Helsing suggest in this first portion o f the novel, the proper methodology for

assimilating new and strange knowledge involves both the assembly o f

painstakingly detailed information and a collaborative effort in making the

“connections” necessary to decipher its meaning.

II. Interrogating Methodology in Part Two

The first portion of Dracula may be read as modeling the proper approach

to knowledge assimilation by teaching characters (and readers) to connect

fragmented evidence by association and by painstaking attention to markers o f

time. Thus, the epistemological move blends both a chronological approach and a

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 more associational approach. The second portion o f Dracula may be read as

initiating a broader inquiry into the process o f knowing. As assumptions about

conventional ways o f knowing are interrogated, the novel also generates a

particularly educated kind o f reader who participates actively in the interpretative

process.

When the hunt for Dracula begins in earnest —after Lucy’s death, and after

the main characters have come to understand something o f his vampire identity-

the four male detective figures resolve to exclude Mina from the investigation.

They worry that she may be “harmed, or that “her heart may fail her in so much and

so many horrors”; consequently, they determine to exclude her both from the

investigation and the information it will uncover (302). By this mid-point in the

novel, they know much about Dracula. They now understand both their own and

their adversary’s strengths and weaknesses:

This vampire which is amongst us is o f him self so strong in person

as twenty men; he is of cunning more than mortal, for his cunning

be the growth o f ages; he can ... appear at will when, and where,

and in any o f the forms that are to h im ;... he can ... direct the

elements: the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the

meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat - the moth, and the

fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he can at

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 times vanish and come unknown. ... [B]ut we too are not without

strength. We have on our side ... resources o f science ... [and] the

hours o f the day and the night are ours equally. (305-6)

They have obtained significant information regarding both the Count and his

methods. For they now know how to recognize the signs of vampire victimization

in victims like Lucy: marks on the throat, a look o f paleness and anemia, an

appearance o f tiredness, and a history o f bad dreams. Yet, the narrative depiction

o f M ina’s exclusion from the investigation is framed to reflect a split between two

knowledge-making efforts: that o f the male detective figures in Dracula and that

o f the novel’s readers. For all character-narrators succeed in “missing” the signs o f

vampire victimization in Mina, even as the reader is helped to recognize them.

The reader, significantly, does not miss the signs that mark Mina as

victimized by the vampire. Although continuing journal accounts merely mention

Mina’s symptoms in passing, the reader becomes active in “connecting” these

disparate symptoms, though the detective figures themselves do not. In a journal

entry written the morning o f October 1st, Jonathan Harker describes how he began

that evening’s search with an “easy mind,” for he “never saw Mina so absolutely

strong and well” (319). Yet in the same entry, he describes returning from the

search and noticing that Mina “looks paler than usual” (327). Though readers

immediately associate the image o f “paleness” with the vampire bite - especially

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 when Harker also mentions that Mina awakes as if “out o f a bad dream” - Harker

merely attributes her symptoms to her disappointment at not being included in the

investigation. Mina’s own entry describes a growing mist, strange lights, and a

“livid white face” (333-34). Yet even she does not associate these phenomena with

Dracula’s vampire activity, and assumes she has only suffered a dream triggered by

anxieties over the investigation.

Succeeding journal entries develop these symptoms further through the

narrative device o f advance mention. With each entry, symptoms are merely

recorded and little significance is attributed to them; yet despite any guidance from

the narrative itself, the reader - now “trained” in making connections between

disparate, fragmented pieces o f information - readily intuits the true meaning.

Mina describes night after night o f sleeplessness and bad dreams, and Harker

describes how Mina continues to look “heavy and sleepy and pale, and far from

well” (338). But in fact, the detective figures do not leam the fact o f Mina’s

victimization until Renfield’s deathbed confession puts the fact plainly in front o f

them: “it made me mad to know that He had been taking the life out o f her” (361).

This disparity o f knowledge between the reader and all detective figures is a

narrative strategy that not only creates a sense o f accomplishment and feeling o f

superiority on the part o f the reader, but also frames the intensified interpretive

process that the reader experiences in the investigative portion o f Dracula. For in

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 the final stages o f the investigation, attitudes about knowledge and how it is

derived are interrogated in three ways: through hypnosis, through discussions o f

criminality, and through the juxtaposition o f linear versus associational models o f

knowing.

As the five detectives cross Europe in pursuit o f Dracula, Mina suspects she

may be experiencing a strange, telepathic link to Dracula. Not only has he drunk o f

her blood, but she has also tasted o f his. That Mina and Dracula may have similar

habits o f mind has been hinted before: both characters obsessively memorize train

schedules, for example. Mina somehow realizes that she may be able to

communicate something o f Dracula’s whereabouts and state o f mind via hypnosis.

She tells Van Helsing, “you can hypnotize me and so leam that which even I

myself do not know” (420). Hypnosis was invoked earlier in the novel as a means

by which “you can follow the mind o f the great Charcot... into the very soul o f the

patient” (247). Though all characters appear to accept the validity o f hypnosis as a

means to knowledge, it is significant that the knowledge it imparts to them of

Dracula is both fragmentary and associational. Because the hypnotized Mina can

articulate that “it is all dark” and that she hears “the lapping o f water,” Van Helsing

can conclude that Dracula is “on a ship” that has “weighed anchor” (402-3).

This sort o f information, though it is fruitful to their investigation, is

nonetheless very different from that derived from more normal channels. Can

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 knowledge derived from a methodology bound by time (Mina can “speak” at times

o f sunrise and sunset only) but not physical presence or location be valid? The

eventual outcome o f the novel appears to suggest that it may, even as it juxtaposes

this form o f coming to knowledge with other, more standard forms. For the

associational knowledge that results from the hypnotic trances is combined by

Mina with “hard facts” about geography, ship transport, and train schedules in her

“Memorandum” in order to predict accurately where Dracula will choose to land

ashore.

The novel also depicts a radical twist in the process of knowing through its

depiction o f Dracula’s criminal mind. Although Van Helsing describes Dracula as

a criminal who possesses a “child-brain” rather than a “man-brain,” Dracula is

nonetheless depicted as a worthy adversary because o f his habits o f mind (439).

Count Dracula has been portrayed throughout the novel as a highly organized

individual: he has memorized train schedules from the English Bradshaw’s Guide

(34); he has an active interest in English real estate and banking (44); and he has

successfully mastered the rudiments o f shipping policy so as to arrange for the

transport of fifty “cases o f common earth” from Transylvania to England (291).

Harker praises Dracula for his organization: “there was nothing that he did not

think or foresee” (45).

It is through associating the information they leam about Dracula’s habits o f

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 mind that the detective figures succeed in tracking him down. Mina states: ‘T he

Count is a criminal and o f criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify

him, and qua criminal he is o f imperfectly formed mind. Thus, in a difficulty he

has to seek resource in habit. His past is a clue” (439). Dr. Seward writes that in

life, Dracula had “a mighty brain, a learning beyond compare, and a heart that

knew no fear and no remorse” (389). These “brain powers” have survived

“physical death,” and are “growing” as “this monster [creeps] into knowledge

experimentally” (389). When they confront Dracula at one o f his London houses,

Van Helsing concludes that, notwithstanding Dracula’s “brave words,” the monster

“fears us” and “fears time.” Van Helsing emphasizes this point with a rhetorical

question: “For if not, why he hurry so?” (395).

Through the analogy of time, boundaries between life and death, sunrise

and sunset, human and animal, the criminal and non-criminal are blurred. The

novel’s final events are carefully circumscribed by time - and in both form and

substance, they represent an inquiry into our ordinary assumptions about

understanding. Moreover, the narrative impulse to “connect” time to assimilate

information into knowledge is transformed into a race against time. The stakes,

quite explicitly, are those o f Mina’s life, for though Dracula “can live for

centuries,” Mina is “but mortal woman” and ‘T im e must be dreaded” so long as

she bears his mark upon her throat (404).

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 What Dracula ultimately challenges through varying narrative devices

surrounding “time” is our understanding o f chronological order versus associational

order. Though the narrators themselves claim that their narrative is never anything

other than chronological, the reader leams differently. And in learning differently,

he or she also leams that other methods o f order may be equally useful. D racula’s

investigation suggests that neither chronological order nor associational order alone

is sufficient. For Mina, Van Helsing, and their compatriots succeed in defeating

Dracula primarily because they succeed in blending methodologies o f learning

based upon linear order with those based upon associational order. That the reader

not only observes characters who rely on both models o f understanding, but also

actively participates in this interpretative work, helps to underscore the lesson that

we must blend the two models o f knowing.

Dracula ends with a memorandum written by Jonathan Harker seven years

after the events surrounding Dracula’s capture and defeat. What is described in this

final account is a conventional domestic ending, with each character married, and

Mina depicted as mother o f a young son. Time, it seems, has been restored to its

normal, chronological sequence —or so the depiction o f generational continuity

would suggest. What is invoked is a world unburdened by Dracula in which trains

run on schedule and events are predictable and easily comprehensible.

Appropriately, the novel ends with a self-consciously narrative point. As

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 Harker surveys the manuscript that represents the narrative o f Dracula, he remarks

that it is not “authentic” and is merely a “mass o f type-writing” (486). His final

opinion is that “[w]e could hardly ask anyone, even did we wish to, to accept these

as proofs o f so wild a story” (486). Yet the “proofs” that readers are asked to

accept are not of a “wild story” in substance, but o f a process o f assimilating

varying kinds o f knowledge that has been carefully modeled throughout the

narrative. Dracula thus offers a comprehensive understanding o f the process of

knowledge assimilation; in so doing, this process replaces and obscures the status

o f fact in Harker’s “proofs o f so wild a story.”

Early in the novel, Van Helsing chastises Dr. Seward by asking: “friend

John, am I to take it that you simply accept fact, and are satisfied to let from

premise to conclusion be a blank? No?” (247). The narrative structure of

Dracula, so carefully ordered by an obsession with time, seems designed to ensure

that readers will not simply take a detective’s conclusion o f a mystery narrative “as

fact” - but instead participate actively in the interpretative process that leads “from

premise to conclusion.” Only then, Dracula suggests, can we achieve a full

understanding of the process that ultimately yields “conclusion.” Such an

understanding is necessary, since where the content o f one’s world is not subject to

order, at least the process by which it is understood may be.

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 Chapter Five.
An Epistemological Detective Story: Henry Jam es’s The Golden Bowl

His idea was there, his idea was to fin d out something, something he wanted much
to know, and to fin d it out not to-morrow, not at some future time, not in short
with waiting and wondering, but i f possible before quitting the place.
—The Golden Bowl

Critics usually assign the novels o f Henry James to the genre o f “novels o f

character.” For James is highly invested in exploring the development o f

individual character, and each o f his novels examines the reaction o f a character

confronted with a moral challenge or other test o f personal character. In his later

novels, both his choice o f subject matter and his increasingly convoluted narrative

style suggest that a new concern informs his traditional interest in individual

character - namely, the problem o f knowing. This problem is so prevalent in his

last novel, The Golden Bowl, that the novel has been termed an “epistemological

detective story” (Marshall 237).

In this dissertation, through the lens o f different novels, I have examined the

use o f a particular narrative device that both privileges and interrogates a certain

way o f making sense o f the world. These earlier chapters have examined novels

that explicitly invoke narratives o f detection, which problematize the natural

connection between how things appear and how they really are. When the

connection between appearance and reality is broken —a convention that detective

narratives invariably follow - the process by which knowledge o f the “real truth” is

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 obtained becomes especially important.

In my introduction, I suggested that narratives o f detection in the Victorian

novel influenced not only the development o f the detective novel, but also the

epistemology o f the novel more generally. David Marshall has argued in The

Figure o f the Theatre: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot that the

history o f the development o f the novel is one in which the reader is trained to be

“an impartial spectator” o f the representation o f characters’ lives (236). Even

where sympathy and identification have existed in novels, David Marshall has

argued for a pervasive “epistemological void” between readers and characters.

Readers o f novels have always been separated “from the inward experience of

others,” according to Marshall, although the third-person omniscient narrative style

that characterizes so many nineteenth-century novels promised to provide “a

broader view o f the human condition” (236-37). Eventually, he argues, in the

novels of Henry James at the end o f the nineteenth century, we see “the possibility

o f access to the inner experience o f others increasingly undermined by

epistemological detective stories in which knowing itself is the object o f doubt and

suspense” (237).

Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, originally published in 1904, is a novel in

which a secret mystery complicates the story line, tantalizing the reader by

withholding information important to the story while at the same time revealing it

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 through the assembly o f fragmentary evidence. That mystery —specifically, the

extent o f the Prince’s and Charlotte’s past and present relationship - is one that

governs both the structure and the central crisis o f the novel. It is certainly

appropriate to describe the novel as an “epistemological detective story” in which

“knowing itself’ is a mechanism o f doubt and suspense.

Yet, to recognize this feature o f James’s novel is not merely to deny the

possibility o f accessing others’ inner experience, as Marshall suggests. It is also to

recognize that detective narratives began to influence more traditional “novels of

character.” For by the time Henry James writes The Golden Bowl, the novel as a

genre has produced a skeptical readership adept at connecting and evaluating

fragmented evidence, as well as writers who have become highly self-conscious

about narrative and its relationship to processes o f knowledge assimilation. The

narrative effect, I ultimately argue, is a shift in epistemological emphasis. What

becomes important is no longer the truth-value obtained from the knowledge

making process, but instead a meaning that derives from the process itself.

The Golden Bowl is a story with a simple plot: over the course o f several

hundred pages, a wife slowly synthesizes the information that eventually leads her

to know o f her husband’s infidelity. Yet, because o f James’s complicated narrative

strategy, we do not merely follow the wife and her inferences in a straightforward

way. The novel is narrated through a perspective that is now generally recognized

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 as the “Jamesian” point o f view - some first-person consciousness o f events is

narrated through a third-person account o f the story (Welsh 236).

James introduces this narrative project in the Preface to the novel, stating

that the entire narration “remains subject to the register ... o f the consciousness o f

but two of the characters” (Preface xlii).1 These two centers o f consciousness are

presented in succession - Prince Amerigo in Book I, followed by Maggie Verver in

Book n . Percy Lubbock has rightly termed the Jamesian point o f view a

“combined” narrative o f the author and character, although he stresses only its

function of “sustain[ing] dramatic illusion” rather than emphasizing its role in

depicting experience (156-71). Yet the narration of “experience” was important to

James; he believed that “what a man thinks and what he feels are the history and

character of what he does.”2

This combined author-character narration necessarily limits the knowledge

that can be conveyed to the reader. In particular, the consciousness o f Charlotte -

the character with the most complete knowledge o f events —is virtually excluded

1 All references to The Golden Bowl are taken from the Oxford University Press
“World’s Classic” edition o f 1983, edited by Virginia Llewellyn Smith.
Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.
2 From Henry James’s Preface to The Princess Cassamassima (New York:
Penguin, 1977) at 38.

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 from the novel.3 She possesses knowledge o f the novel’s secrets, including useful

information about her past relationship with the Prince and her current motives.

But Jam es’s ideal o f submission to the consciousness of Maggie and the Prince

dictates that the reader will learn little o f this information. Nonetheless, we have

seen already in previous chapters that the narrative practice o f withholding

information can be very important, for it often points towards the real stakes

involved in knowledge-making.

I argue in this chapter that the role o f Charlotte Stant says something

important about the way in which characters —and readers —assimilate knowledge

by the end o f the nineteenth century. For the narrative devices surrounding James’s

depiction o f Charlotte Stant suggest that the knowledge that the reader assimilates

is markedly different from that assimilated by the novel’s primary characters, and

even the central consciousness o f Maggie Verver.

As Bradbury has pointed out, narrative consciousness in The Golden Bowl

is neither strictly limited to the awareness o f the Prince and Maggie nor wholly

independent and reliable (8). The Prince is constantly forced to share Book I with

dialogues between the Assinghams, the thoughts o f Adam Verver, and even the

3 In Alexander Welsh’s reading o f The Golden Bowl at 236-55, he argues that

characters generate intimacy with one another by excluding others from
knowledge; thus in his view, Maggie’s consciousness must necessarily exclude
Charlotte if Maggie is to (re)establish intimacy with the Prince.

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 consciousness o f Charlotte (for a very few pages).4 Book II, though more

consistently composed o f Maggie’s thoughts and feelings, places the novel’s

emphasis firmly upon Maggie’s awakening to “limited” knowledge —her

inferences, her growing assertiveness,s and her conscious decision to restrict her

own knowledge o f the Prince and Charlotte’s relationship (she mentions her

“accepted ignorance” at 459).6 Maggie’s narrative is what Bakhtin would call

“monological” in that it is a voice that corrects and subordinates all other voices.

The voice most subordinated by this narrative technique is that o f Charlotte,

primarily because Maggie repeatedly imagines what Charlotte’s thoughts and

feelings may be.

Certainly much o f James’s writing focuses upon attempts by one person to

reach the consciousness o f another, and the characters o f Fanny and Maggie show

how this goal may be possible through the use o f imagination and inference.7 But

4 See Dorothea Krook’s discussion at 236-246 in The Ordeal o f Consciousness for

a detailed analysis o f how these differing narrative portrayals o f consciousness
intersect.
5 Virginia Fowler in Henry Jam es’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas
(Madison: University o f Wisconsin Press, 1984) at 107-40 provides an account o f
The Golden Bow l as the assertion o f Maggie’s independence from her father.
6 For the donnee o f the novel, see The Notebooks o f Henry James, Eds. F.O.
Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York: Braziller, 1955) at 130-31 and
187-88.
7 See Welsh’s discussion at 242-44 for his view o f the role o f “inference” in this
novel. Welsh links the place of “inference” with that o f “circumstantial evidence”
in this novel.

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 discrepancies among different representations o f the character o f Charlotte call into

question the validity o f such inferences. As Armstrong has argued, “perfect

intersubjectivity is impossible, and the Other must always remain somewhat

obscure” (137). But despite James’s strategy o f limited focalization, we

nonetheless obtain significant objective information about Charlotte Stant and the

nature o f her relations with the Prince, both past and present.

In this chapter, I suggest that Charlotte’s role in Book I o f the novel creates

a fragmented narrative story that carries over to Book II and controverts Maggie’s

monological version o f events. Specifically, Charlotte plays an important narrative

role in the novel as a kind o fficelle, a narrative device that James has described as

“a direct aid to lucidity” that is “the reader’s friend.”8 Granted, James does not

explicitly label Charlotte Stant a ficelle as he does Maria Godfrey of The

Ambassadors, and Charlotte’s role is certainly not as straightforward as Maria’s.

Nonetheless, as this chapter will show, Charlotte plays a complicated narrative role

in the novel that is somewhat ficelle- like in its ultimate function. For although she

may not reveal an objective reality as Maria Godfrey does, Charlotte constitutes

James’s means of offering an epistemological model that illustrates the split

between subjective and objective knowledge.

o
For a complete discussion o f his vision o f the ficelle, see Henry James, Preface to
The Ambassadors (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994) at 12.

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 Throughout Book I, Charlotte’s character is depicted as active, intelligent,

and manipulative o f people, events, and “secrets.” Because this representation is

inconsistent with Maggie’s depiction o f Charlotte’s “defeat” in Book n, Charlotte’s

character necessarily confronts Maggie’s narrative voice with the issue of the

reliability o f language and perception. Charlotte is “a rare, a special product” whose

“want o f ramifications” gives her an “odd precious neutrality”; contradictory

portrayals o f her character and the secrets she alone possesses must implicate

narrative coherence (41). To recognize Charlotte’s role is to recognize that The

Golden Bowl employs a narrative strategy and achieves a narrative effect even

more complicated than what the spouses’ divided consciousness alone might

suggest.

Although critical attention has registered interest in the “secret” of this

novel, it has almost uniformly focused upon Maggie and how her knowledge o f the

“secret” has threatened her innocence.9 The majority o f critics read Maggie’s

process o f “coming to knowledge” as the central event o f the novel, although they

have split over the issue o f her character. Some critics have viewed Maggie as the

emblem o f innocence and goodness; one contemporary reviewer remarked that

9 For a discussion o f Maggie’s changed subjectivity in relation to knowledge o f the

secret, see Yvonne Reineke, ‘Tantalizing Truths: Sexual Secrets and Subjectivity
in Bronte, James, and Barnes.” Diss. University o f California at Irvine, 1991. DA
52 (1991): 9120552.

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 “Maggie and her father are quite genuine, and they alone lift the book from

degradation ... and carry it with dignity” (Anonymous 422) and Matthiessen

believed that Maggie “keeps her innocence intact” (101).10 Other critics have

deplored Maggie’s “recourse to intricate manipulations” (Boynton 416). In fact,

McWhirter argues that Maggie discovers her own capacity for evil, and that, unlike

Lambert Strether o f The Ambassadors, she wants to have “got something for

herself’ out o f the affair (183).11 In a similar reading, F.R. Leavis blames Maggie

for destroying the only “decent passion” in the book - that between Charlotte and

the Prince (160). The above readings, while focusing upon Maggie’s innocence or

loss thereof, do evaluate her process o f coming to knowledge and assess what she

does (or does not) know.

In contrast, critical attention given to the character o f Charlotte has focused

upon other issues having little to do with the novel’s secret or the process o f

10 In similarly positive readings o f Maggie’s character, F.C. Crews has argued that
Maggie is “an agent o f mercy” surrounded with images that link her to Christ
(105). Krook has argued that Maggie is the “instrument of the redemptive act,”
although she also recognizes that there are passages bearing on Maggie’s scheme
for separating the Prince and Charlotte that stress an element o f selfishness and
cruelty (240).
11 Some have argued that Maggie, “while on the surface all righteousness and
forbearance, yet leaves room for an appreciation o f her whole campaign o f
aggressive forgiveness as being in effect a vengeful stratagem against the woman
who had dared to marry her father” (Putt 377). Gore Vidal expresses a similar
view in “Return to The Golden Bowl” New York Review o f Books, 30 Jan 1984, 8-
12 .

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 coming to knowledge. For example, Sandra Sessom has argued in “Charlotte in

Perspective: A Fuller Reading o f The Golden BowT’ that Charlotte is actually the

heroine o f the novel. Sessom’s argument extends the parallel between Charlotte

and Isabel Archer, originally drawn by Jean Kimball in “Henry James’s Last

Portrait o f a Lady: Charlotte Stant in The Golden Bowl," to implicate other

Jamesian heroines. In addition, Femer Nuhn in The Wind Blew from the East: A

Study in the Orientation o f American Culture has briefly speculated about the story

that would emerge if the novel were to be written from Charlotte’s point of view (a

point o f view James clearly intended to obscure). Although Charlotte does not rise

to the level o f a heroine in The Golden Bowl, especially in light o f James’s

insistence in the Preface on Maggie’s functional importance as a reporter o f the

action (she is a “compositional resource” and a “value intrinsic”), I do suggest that

she is critical to the narrative and plot in ways previously unrecognized (Preface

xlii).

The Jamesian point o f view exemplified by Maggie and the Prince is rightly

credited as the central narrative strategy o f the novel, and the perspective o f the

Assinghams plays an important role.12 But as the reading I want to propose will

show, Charlotte has an important function in James’s very complicated narrative

12 For a thorough treatment o f the Assinghams’ role in the novel, see Ruth Bernard
Yeazell’s Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels o f Henry James at 87-99.

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 structure: her character constitutes a ficelle- like narrative device by which James

examines a certain way o f knowing the world. Only by understanding her role can

we more comprehensively undertake a reading o f this “epistemological detective”

novel.

I. Charlotte Stant and Narrative Plot

When Charlotte first admires the flawed golden bowl, the Bloomsbury

merchant asks her, “if it’s something you can’t find out isn’t it as good as if it were

nothing?” (86). The merchant’s logic introduces a theme o f inaction that runs

throughout this novel. James says o f the Prince, “He had done nothing he oughtn’t

- he had, in fact, done nothing at all” (74). And Fanny Assingham later explains,

“Nothing - in spite o f everything - will happen. Nothing has happened. Nothing is

happening” (269).

Nonetheless, much does happen eventually in this novel, and I suggest that

Charlotte Stant is the character who initiates each of the plot’s major events.

Specifically, these events are: 1) the marriage o f the Prince and Maggie Verver; 2)

the marriage o f Charlotte and Adam Verver; and 3) the adulterous affair o f

Charlotte and the Prince. Furthermore, although she does not intend to do so,

Charlotte initiates the chain of events that brings about the “testimony” o f the

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 golden bowl (or rather, its vendor) to Maggie. To recognize Charlotte’s agency in

initiating plot development is also to recognize not only a previously misread

aspect o f her narrative importance, but also an attribute o f her character that is at

odds with her eventual representation by Maggie in Book II.

Charlotte m ay be viewed as having set into motion the sequence o f events

that causes the marriage o f Maggie and the Prince to occur. Charlotte leaves the

Prince in Rome in a timely manner after they break o ff their relations, she stays

away in America for the duration o f his courtship o f Maggie, and she refrains from

telling her “great friend” Maggie anything o f this disappointment in love (31). By

these actions, I suggest that Charlotte has done more to “arrange” the match

between the Prince and Maggie than even Fanny Assingham (who takes all the

credit).

We learn from Fanny that Charlotte arrived in Rome the previous

November and planned to stay throughout the summer. She was to have stayed to

visit with the Assinghams and the Ververs; in fact, Maggie planned to visit Rome

especially so as to see Charlotte. Yet, Charlotte “left suddenly” in April for

Florence, agreeing to part from her lover, the Prince, because it was impractical to

marry him (53). Charlotte’s action here not only serves to clear the way for the

Prince to court Maggie, but also spares Maggie the knowledge o f Charlotte’s

earlier, secret love affair with the Prince. Maggie and Charlotte are described in the

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 novel as “great friends” (31), and it is possible that, notwithstanding the Prince’s

personal charms, Maggie may have been reluctant to court the former lover o f such

a friend.

Although Fanny is quick to tell the Colonel that she —not Charlotte - first

mentioned Maggie and her fortune to the Prince, Fanny’s narrative leaves room for

doubt (54). Fanny prides herself upon having “arranged” the marriage, and yet the

evidence o f Charlotte’s activity in the text contests this assumption. Furthermore,

Fanny is under Charlotte’s influence on other matters; as Fanny explains her

silence on the matter o f the “secret” to the Colonel, “I can perfectly feel Charlotte’s

not wanting to [tell]” (62). Even when Fanny’s allegiance has switched to Maggie

in Book II, her own guilt combines with Charlotte’s wish and prevents Fanny from

telling the particulars o f the “secret” (425-27). Given the circumstantial evidence

o f Charlotte’s quick departure from Rome on the eve o f Maggie’s arrival, the

Prince’s brief courtship with Maggie, and the conspiracy o f silence initiated by

Charlotte, it seems likely that Charlotte was more active in engineering the Prince’s

match than Fanny recognizes. But, however active Charlotte m ay have been in

facilitating the Prince’s match, her inaction alone is sufficient to establish Charlotte

as the original agent o f causation for this marriage.

Charlotte may again be credited with “manipulating” the second event of

the novel —her own marriage to Maggie’s father, Adam Verver. Although Maggie

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 likes to think that Adam Verver married “all and only for me” (424), it is important

to recognize that the events leading to this marriage were initiated by Charlotte.

Although Maggie persuades her father to ask Charlotte to visit them at Fawns in his

“own name,” Charlotte has all but invited herself. As Maggie tells her father at the

time, “[Charlotte] writes me, practically, that she’d like to [visit] if we’re so good

as to ask her” (131). Charlotte has given an indication o f her personal desire to her

“great friend” Maggie, and Maggie is good enough to accommodate Charlotte’s

request.

Once Charlotte arrives, she scares away the other guests; as Fanny remarks,

“she simply cleared them out” (142). Then, Charlotte bonds with Adam over the

care o f the principino in Maggie’s absence and proves herself socially entertaining

in conversation and at the piano. As was true with Charlotte’s facilitation of the

Prince’s marriage, the orchestration of her own marriage is premised upon keeping

her secret past hidden. Before accepting Adam Verver’s offer, she has demanded

to hear that Maggie and the Prince approve o f her marriage. The Prince sends her a

cryptic telegram o f approval, and Charlotte later reflects that exposure o f it to Mr.

Verver would “straightway have dished her marriage” (213). But by counting upon

Adam Verver’s good will, she successfully keeps its contents - and her past history

- secret. Thus, she is able to arrange her own marriage to a man of great fortune.

The most obvious o f Charlotte’s actions within the plot is her initiation o f

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 the extra-marital affair with the Prince. She arranges for Fanny’s silence at the

embassy ball, she makes a surreptitious visit to the Prince on a rainy day, and she

works with Lady Castledean (a fellow adulterer) to form the pretext o f a fictitious

lunch invitation. After having “squared” and surprised Fanny into a guilty silence,

Charlotte’s next step is to visit the Prince at home alone and revive in him “the

sense o f the past” (218). Although Charlotte makes complaints to engender

sympathy —that Maggie has taken the Verver carriage and that she herself has been

unable to have children - she immediately focuses upon what she wants. She asks

the Prince to conspire with her in forming yet another secret - the “story” they will

tell their spouses “in concert” about how they spent the day (225).

With a mutual commitment to protect Maggie and Adam from knowledge

o f this secret affair, Charlotte and the Prince echo the “I do” o f the marriage

ceremony with their vow “It’s sacred.” They commemorate the start o f their affair

with a kiss. Although this kiss has been read as a renunciation o f passion by

Kimball (who notes that the renunciation scene between Maggie and her father also

ends in an embrace), I follow Jacques Barzun in reading the kiss as the beginning

o f the adulterous affair (Kimball 461, Barzun 28). The description o f the kiss

reverberates with sexual charge: “everything broke up, broke down, gave way,

melted and mingled. Their lips sought their lips, their pressure their response and

their response their pressure; with a violence ... they passionately sealed their

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 pledge” (229). By invoking their mutual isolation from their spouses, by

generating memories o f their past love affair, and by recreating their mutual

“secret,” Charlotte initiates the adulterous affair.

Charlotte next makes elaborate plans to consummate their affair at

Matcham. When the Prince sees Charlotte wearing a hat and jacket the day o f their

departure, he becomes aware that she intends to take “the larger step.” The Prince

has had no role in this plot development: “the larger step had been, since the

evening before, intensely in his own mind, though he had not fully thought out,

even yet, the slightly difficult detail o f it” (261). Charlotte is in control: she has

made certain Lady Castledean knows “how they like cathedrals,” she has “made

out the very train,” and she has even located an inn for their tryst (265-66).

Charlotte, indeed, is “terrible” in her manipulation o f this plot. “These days,”

Charlotte says, “I’ve wanted everything” (266); certainly she has manipulated

everything so as to get what she wants.

Finally, with regard to the fourth event in the novel, Charlotte’s admiration

o f the golden bowl may be identified as the root cause o f Maggie’s eventual

knowledge o f the secret affair. Arguably, Maggie’s suspicions are excited by other

factors, and she may well have learned eventually o f the affair through some other

source. But the fact remains that in James’s plot as it actually unfolds, Maggie

gains knowledge through the chain o f events set into motion by Charlotte.

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 Charlotte’s original scheme to shop with the Prince introduces the symbol o f the

cracked golden bowl into the novel. And because Charlotte makes herself

memorable to the shopkeeper with her vivacity (he assumes she is “the

Principessa”), and later remarks upon the charm o f antiquarian shops, Charlotte sets

into play the events that will culminate in Maggie’s acquisition o f knowledge. This

flawed bowl presides over the novel to symbolize not only imperfect love and

imperfect happiness, but also Charlotte’s approach to living a full life —“I risk the

cracks” (264). Charlotte’s active risks —embodied in the scene in which she shops

with the Prince and admires the golden bowl —dictate the plot o f this novel.

In the remainder o f this chapter, I explore why it is significant that Charlotte

Stant is the agent o f causation in the novel, and yet is frequently not recognized as

such. Although she plays an active role in “manipulating” the plot developments o f

this novel, she is perceived by other characters as “manipulated.” This

inconsistency between her actual role within the novel and other characters’

perception o f her role creates a narrative contradiction that will become more fully

apparent in Book n.

II. Point-of-View and Charlotte’s Character

Throughout the novel, the remarks o f Fanny and Maggie indicate they do

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 not perceive Charlotte’s manipulation o f people and events. In the beginning,

Fanny says o f Charlotte, “She doesn’t deliberately intend, she doesn’t consciously

wish, the least complication ... She’s incapable o f any plan to hurt a hair o f her

[Maggie’s] head” (53). Charlotte is seen as a character without money or influence,

who may be “used” at the whim o f other characters (354). But when read closely,

representations o f Charlotte within this novel reveal the incredible control she

exercises over every situation, primarily through restructuring the novel’s “secret”

in different situations. I suggest that it is in part because her acts o f manipulation

are subtle —directed toward preserving the secret o f her past and present relations

with the Prince —that mistaken perceptions o f Charlotte’s character abound.

At first, Fanny appears more accurate in her assessment o f Charlotte’s

character. When Charlotte intervenes on the eve o f the Prince’s impending

marriage to Maggie, Fanny Assingham ominously remarks, “What’s certain is that

she didn’t come for nothing” (49). Charlotte arrives prepared to find the Prince

with Fanny because she has had the foresight to question the butler; the Prince is

conscious that she “could have looked at her hostess with such straightness and

brightness only from knowing that the Prince was also there” (34). Fanny

immediately worries that Charlotte, because o f her romantic entanglement with the

Prince prior to the beginning o f the novel, is a manipulator who has come to act

upon some kind o f design. The Prince seconds this impression when he wonders

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 consciously, “Has she come with designs upon me?” (31). But Fanny has sympathy

for Charlotte, derived from what little she knows about Charlotte’s past

disappointment. This sympathy leads Fanny to conceive o f the idea that Charlotte

has come not to manipulate or interfere, but “to be magnificent” and “to see

Maggie through” (63). Fanny then proceeds to think not about how Charlotte may

manipulate others, but rather about how Charlotte may be manipulated (naturally,

for her own good).

Fanny decides the way to manage Charlotte is to find a husband for her; as

she tells the Colonel, “W e’re to marry her. It will be the great thing I can do” (64).

With this sentence, Charlotte is re-cast as a woman to be manipulated and used for

Fanny’s match-making pleasure. It is a characterization that will be repeated

throughout the novel: Fanny will discuss the chances of marrying Charlotte

successfully (66); Adam and Maggie will discuss different “uses” for Charlotte

(129, 354); Adam will appreciate Charlotte’s usefulness in giving him “a life”

(368); and Maggie and Adam will eventually part upon a discussion o f Charlotte’s

value and use (560-66).

Perhaps the most prominent circumstance o f the novel that creates a

misperception o f Charlotte is her marriage to Adam Verver. The American multi­

millionaire, who likes to collect sculptures, paintings, and Princes, appears to view

Charlotte as part o f this collection. This view is evidenced by his frequent

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 comments to Maggie that Charlotte “makes us grander” and is a beautiful

“addition” (133); notably, he never associates love or even passion with Charlotte,

but speaks o f her “with a note o f possession” (560). With respect to marriage,

Charlotte even presents herself as the antithesis o f a manipulator. She inspires pity

in the Prince in their early meeting by telling him she has tried to marry before: “I

tried everyone I came across. I did my best. I showed I had come, quite publicly,

for that. Perhaps I showed it too much. At any rate it was no use ... No one would

have me” (43). This confession “disconcerts” the Prince, possibly because it is at

odds with his impression that Charlotte is so capable of “designs” (31).

For the Prince (and therefore the reader), there can be no misperception

about Charlotte’s ability to manipulate others. Her first design in the novel is to

revive and even extend her “secret” relationship with the Prince. She manipulates

the Prince and Fanny into agreeing that the Prince should “find an hour” to join

Charlotte on a joint shopping expedition (47). She pretends to want to buy a gift

for Maggie, tells the Prince she would like his help, and manipulates Fanny into

agreeing with her. Even the Prince recognizes this act of manipulation:

He wonderfully smiled, but it was rather more, after all, than he had

been reckoning with. ... Quickly, quickly, however, the note o f

publicity struck him as better than any other ... for what so much as

publicity put their relation on the right footing? By this appeal to

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 Mrs. Assingham it was established as right, and she [Mrs.

Assingham] immediately showed that such was her own

understanding. (46-47)

Note that although the Prince feels manipulated (“more ... than he had been

reckoning with”), he is nonetheless impressed with the “note” upon which

Charlotte manages this outing and obtains Fanny’s approval to “put their relation

on the right footing.”

Charlotte, immediately after they are alone on the shopping expedition,

confesses her further design: she came back “to have one hour alone” with the

Prince, “as [they] are now and as [they] used to be” (67, 72). She recreates their

“secret” by reminding him that their relations are not open, but surreptitious - after

all, Maggie must be surprised by the gift. Thus, Charlotte alters the content o f the

“secret;” it now encompasses not only her past relationship with the Prince, but

also her present one.

In front o f the shopkeeper (who later “will remember” them), Charlotte

confesses she really wants to buy a gift, a little ricordo, for the Prince and not

Maggie (82). She would like the Prince to have something to remember her by; she

actually has little interest in buying a gift with which to congratulate Maggie. The

Prince refuses, because he feels he could not keep the source o f the gift a “secret”

from his wife. The day ends with their mutual vow to keep the day’s events to

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 themselves, the Prince’s offer to buy her a gift, the Prince’s advice that she must

marry, and her reply, “I would marry, I think, to have something from you in all

freedom” (91). Charlotte’s reference at the time is to a brooch, but Charlotte’s

eventual marriage actually allows her to have the Prince himself through the

“freedom” o f their family connection. The Prince fully recognizes the way in which

Charlotte extends his agreement to spend “an hour” with her into “a day,” a gift

“for Maggie” into a gift for the Prince, and her transformation o f the secret past into

a secret present. Charlotte has freely admitted her motives in this instance to the

Prince, and his narrated consciousness ensures that the reader is under no

misapprehension.

A portion o f the Prince’s narrative that is yielded over to Adam Verver

illustrates the force o f Charlotte’s personality. Although Adam realizes “he had

‘brought’ her” to the home o f Mr. Gutermann-Seuss, he nonetheless feels as though

“she were herself, in her greater gaiety, taking him about and showing him the

place” (156). This strength o f character is evident in Charlotte’s calculated

response to Adam’s marriage proposal. Direct discourse reveals that she balances

her dislike of the spinster’s condition against her evaluation o f the married state:

“Only I don’t see why, for what I speak o f ... I need do quite so much ... I might

get what I want for less” (162). Charlotte delays accepting Adam’s proposal for

some time, and her motive for doing so remains unclear. Is she actually worried

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 about whether Maggie and (especially) the Prince approve? Is she simply trying to

delay the necessity o f giving a response? Or, is she beginning a battle to establish

herself instead o f Maggie as the premier woman in Adam Verver’s life? Only one

o f Charlotte’s motives is clear: that o f hiding the past history o f her relations with

the Prince.

The scene at the Embassy Ball is an important one, for it marks the only

part o f the novel in which the narrative focalizes upon Charlotte’s consciousness.

At the time o f this scene, her marriage is two years old, her husband is at home

with Maggie, and her plan for the evening is “to square” Fanny Assingham on the

renewal o f Charlotte’s relations with the Prince. Tonight, she decides, is as good as

any for “going through that process with the right temper and tone” (183). Thus,

she tells the Prince to stay with her so Fanny may see them together. Her control of

the situation is complete:

Her point was before her; it was sharp, bright, true; above all it was

her own. She had reached it quite by herself... To make it now

with force for Fanny Assingham’s benefit would see her further, in

the direction ... o f her greater freedom - which was all in the world

she had in mind. (186)

Charlotte offers Fanny all the necessary excuses for her adultery: she and the Prince

are excluded from the unusually close father-daughter bond o f Maggie and Adam;

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 she has tried to surmount this bond without avail; and she has contracted her

marriage originally just so she could be useful to Maggie by letting her have her

father “so much more” (192).

What is remarkable is that Charlotte here names Maggie as the “other

woman,” saying, “your husband doesn’t treat you as o f less importance to him than

some other woman [emphasis mine]” (190). Charlotte’s analysis is not a glib

excuse for misconduct with the Prince; it is rather an insightful criticism tailored to

justify the renewal o f a past relationship. Charlotte has chosen the “right temper

and tone” to correct Fanny’s misperception o f her and to make Fanny complicit in

the “secret” o f her present relations with the Prince.

HI. Narrative Contradiction and Knowledge Assimilation in Book n

In the Prince’s portion o f the novel, Charlotte’s actions are frequently at

odds with perceptions o f her by the other characters. I suggest that this

contradiction between agency and perception is repeated in M aggie’s portrayal of

Charlotte in Book H Furthermore, the recognition of this contradiction between

narrated perception and narrated action casts indeterminacy over Maggie’s

inferences within the “Princess” portion o f the novel.

When Book II begins, Maggie’s suspicions are heightened and she is

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 conscious o f Charlotte’s every move. This consciousness is especially acute in

those scenes in which the two meet in conflict. In the first o f these scenes, Charlotte

confronts Maggie on the garden terrace. Maggie, who is non-confrontational,

views Charlotte with fear as a “creature who had escaped by force from her cage”

(474). Maggie believes that her newly discovered knowledge has caught Charlotte

in a trap or cage —and yet she fears Charlotte, presumably because she does not

wish to force Charlotte into a confession to Adam. In this scene, even Maggie

recognizes that Charlotte has retained a semblance o f control; as the two watch

Adam play a card game, Maggie feels she looks at him “by Charlotte’s leave and

under Charlotte’s direction” (476). Charlotte then initiates a confrontation,

demanding whether Maggie has “any complaint” of her (480). Maggie lies and

denies this charge.

Charlotte is an intelligent woman who has picked up on Maggie’s change o f

disposition towards her, and there is little question that she doubts Maggie’s denial.

Yet Maggie is pleased with having denied Charlotte knowledge, for in doing so she

has both “protected” her father and, especially, allied herself with the Prince in

excluding Charlotte from their understanding:

They were together thus, he and she, close, close together - whereas

Charlotte, though rising there radiantly before her, was really off in

some darkness o f space that would steep her in solitude and harass

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 her with care. (481)

John Bayley has persuasively argued in “Love and Knowledge: The Golden B o w r

that Maggie and the Prince save their marriage by conspiring to withhold

information and knowledge from Charlotte (383). If, as Welsh has argued, marital

intimacy involves exclusion, then Maggie must save her marriage by excluding

Charlotte from M aggie's consciousness o f the truth (289). But it is important to

remember that the converse o f this exclusion would also be true. Just as Maggie

excludes Charlotte, Charlotte continues to exclude Maggie from Charlotte’s

consciousness o f the truth.

For an example o f the realm o f knowledge from which Charlotte excludes

Maggie, we need not look only to the past. In the present, Charlotte appears to “act

in concert” with Adam Verver to prevent Maggie from obtaining “certain”

knowledge. Maggie and her father engage in a conversation that reveals their

mutual knowledge o f the adulterous affair, and yet each decides to play along as

though the other remained blissfully ignorant. I locate this mutual understanding in

the following passage:

“I guess I’ve never been jealous,” he finally remarked. And it said

more to her, he had occasion next to perceive, than he was

intending; for it made her, as by the pressure o f a spring, give him a

look that seemed to tell o f things she couldn’t speak ... it was,

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 strangely, as if, by this sudden arrest, by their having, in their

acceptance o f the unsaid, or at least their reference to it, practically

given up pretending. (491-92)

Although their communication tempts them nearly to “giv[e] up pretending,” they

do not. When Maggie suggests the idea o f “shipping back to American City,”

Adam seizes the idea as if it was his own (496).

What is remarkable, however, is that Maggie never wonders how her father

came to learn o f the affair, or what may have transpired between Adam and

Charlotte after he does. It is hardly to be supposed that this American multi­

millionaire, accustomed to the power his money and class station permits him,

would take the suspicion o f a spouse’s betrayal as complacently or as quietly as

Maggie does. Although his inclination to protect his daughter from such

information is understandable, it is unlikely he would have a motive to protect the

two culpable parties. Thus, Charlotte shares with Adam a secret that excludes

Maggie - the secret of Charlotte and Adam’s present relation as husband and wife.

Maggie’s recurring image of Charlotte in these final scenes is that o f a bird

in a gilded cage. She imagines her father leading Charlotte about by a silken halter

(508). She believes Charlotte is unhappy by Adam’s design as well as the

“torment” o f her own “ignorance” (543), and thus Maggie portrays Charlotte as a

“shrieking soul in pain” (512). Yet this image is Maggie’s perception o f the

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 situation, and even Fanny cannot confirm its truth. Although Fanny claims “I don’t

need to be told [to know how Charlotte feels],” her statement indicates that her

knowledge o f Charlotte’s state is inferential only (520). I contend that a different

picture emerges if we look closely at the final two portrayals o f Charlotte: the

garden scene and the card-playing scene.

The garden scene begins when Maggie, in search o f a pretext to join

Charlotte, remembers that the maid has brought Charlotte the wrong volume of a

three-volume set. Maggie sees Charlotte in the garden with the second volume and

decides to take her the first. She joins her, saying, “This is the beginning; you’ve

got the wrong volume, and I’ve brought you out the right” (526). Although Maggie

has initiated this confrontation, it is Charlotte who chooses its topic: “there’s

something I’ve been wanting to say to you” (528). She tells Maggie that although

Maggie likes “this life,” she, Charlotte, has “dreamed another dream.” She

continues, “I am selfish. I place my husband first... My plan is completely

formed” (529). This plan, we leam, is to “take” Adam “to his real position” in

America, and thus “keep the man [she] married” (529).

It is Maggie’s view that Charlotte’s words here are merely evidence o f the

“style” and “performance” with which Charlotte graces a bad situation. Maggie

imagines Charlotte tapping against a glass, talking o f the pain o f “being broken

with:”

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 You don’t know what it is to have been loved and broken with. You

haven’t been broken with, because in your relation what can there

have been, worth speaking of, to break? Ours was everything a

relation could be. (538)

Maggie believes Charlotte suffers because o f Adam’s plan to return to America, but

she does not know what kind o f agreement Charlotte and Adam may have reached

prior to making this decision.

Charlotte’s point o f view is obscured by Maggie’s narration, but Charlotte’s

actions earlier in the novel lead us to question Maggie’s inferences. Charlotte has

been unfaithful to Adam, but when confronted by him, she undoubtedly would

point out his own “unfaithfulness” to her. Charlotte discusses Adam’s error in

“placing Maggie first” not only in the scene above, but also with Fanny and the

Prince earlier in the novel. Perhaps mutual error has led to mutual understanding,

and Charlotte indeed looks upon the move to America as a kind o f new beginning,

as her words in this scene suggest. Charlotte claims she wants to “possess” her

husband, and, in the end, she makes Maggie acknowledge that Maggie has “failed”

in her attempt to work against Charlotte. This “lie” makes Maggie feel “she had

done all”; it also subordinates any actions that Charlotte has taken (530). We

cannot know exactly what Charlotte thinks and feels at this time, but we can

question Maggie’s interpretation o f the matter.

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 It is my contention that Maggie’s perception in this case may be a

misperception. Kimball discusses Maggie’s lack o f card-playing skill in a reading

of the card scene: “cards were as naught to her [Maggie] and she could follow no

move, so that she was always on such occasions out o f the party” (464). This scene

suggests that Maggie’s inability to “follow the moves” is not only applicable to

card games, but also to the game o f life. Although Kimball cites this evidence to

argue that Charlotte has not committed adultery at all, I wish merely to suggest that

Maggie misperceives the extent o f Charlotte’s unhappiness (Kimball 468).

Maggie’s habit o f inference frequently tempts her to draw “immense conclusions

from very small matters” (426).

Furthermore, Maggie is quite agitated by her discovery o f this adulterous

betrayal. As Mrs. Assingham remarks to the Colonel, “we’re not talking o f course

about impartial looks. W e’re talking o f good innocent people deeply worked upon

by a horrid discovery and going much further in their view o f the lurid ... than

those who have been wider awake all round from the first... no imagination’s so

lively, once it’s started, as that of really agitated lambs” (396). By the time o f

Maggie’s final interview with Charlotte, she is indeed very agitated - “she might,

with such nerves, have supposed almost anything o f anyone” (526).

Maggie’s perception o f Charlotte in Book II is not only at odds with the

character Charlotte presents in Book I, but is also inconsistent with what is known

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 o f Charlotte’s “secret” history. The cessation of a sexual liaison with the Prince is

not a new event for Charlotte. Fanny Assingham is equivocal in Book I on this

issue: on the one hand, she tells the Colonel that there was no previous sexual

relationship because “there wasn’t time”; on the other hand, she admits that

Charlotte “might have been anything [the Prince] liked - except his wife” (54).

I suggest that the Prince’s conscious thoughts when he first meets Charlotte

pose an admission that he was previously sexually intimate with Charlotte:

He knew her narrow hands, he knew her long fingers and the shape

and colour o f her finger-nails, he knew her special beauty o f

movement and line when she turned her back, and the perfect

working o f all her main attachments, something ... for a prize. He

knew above all the extraordinary fineness o f her flexible waist, the

stem o f an expanded flower, which gave her a likeness also to some

long loose silk purse ... [emphasis mine] (35-36)

The repetition o f “knew,” read together with the Prince’s allusion to “her flexible

waist,” leaves little doubt that the Prince has touched this waist and “known”

Charlotte physically. Charlotte has loved and lost the Prince before —and yet lived

to fight for him a second time. If we accept Maggie’s representation o f Charlotte as

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 “defeated” by the end o f her relationship, we must question why, when the former

experience did not destroy Charlotte, the present experience would cause her soul

to shriek in pain.

Maggie tells the Prince, “It’s as if her unhappiness had been necessary to us

- it’s as if we had needed her, at her own cost, to build us up and start us” (551).

That this impression may be only Maggie s impression is indicated by the Prince’s

response: “He took it in with consideration, but met it with a lucid inquiry. ‘Why

do you speak o f the unhappiness of your father’s wife?”’ (551). When she replies

that it is because she cannot speak o f her father, he looks at her as though “she but

fanned his wonder” (551). The Prince recognizes Maggie’s knowledge o f the

affair; he furthermore recognizes that he has possibly hurt Charlotte by ending his

relationship with her.

Yet, he is filled with “wonder” at Maggie’s mention o f Charlotte’s

unhappiness: “What I mean is that she’s not, as you pronounce her, unhappy”

(552). Either the Prince is oblivious to the feelings o f his recent mistress, or

Maggie is unduly imagining the depths of Charlotte’s thwarted love and subsequent

pain. And i f she can unduly imagine the extent o f Charlotte’s pain, then perhaps

she also misperceives the extent to which she and her father have “defeated”

Charlotte’s plans. When Maggie pities Charlotte, saying “I see it’s always terrible

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 for women,” the Prince counters, “everything’s terrible, cara - in the heart o f man.

She’s making her life. She’ll make it” (553).

What the Prince sees —and what Maggie appears not to see - is that

Charlotte is as much in control o f her life as ever. Charlotte is a woman who has

not scrupled, from interested motives, to marry the father o f her friend and to “carry

on” subsequently with the husband o f the same friend. Perhaps Maggie is right,

and the golden bowl o f Verver’s wealth is really a gilded cage o r silken harness that

imprisons Charlotte. But Charlotte is a woman who has previously made choices

freely, intelligently, and pragmatically. Fanny remarked early in the novel that

Charlotte was not so much in love with the Prince that she would not marry

someone else (65). Perhaps the bond o f love between Charlotte and the Prince is

not very strong, at least when balanced against the allure o f Adam Verver’s

millions.

I do not intend to suggest that Charlotte is not “punished” by her exile to

American City or by separation from the Prince. Certainly, Adam’s plan censures

Charlotte. Charlotte, an American by blood who has been raised a European by

culture, has not previously found America to her liking. She will now have to like

it and “be interested” in it (520). But it is possible that Charlotte has freely chosen

to remain with Adam Verver, and with the aid o f “her gifts, her variety, her power,”

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 she will “not be wasted” (565). Krook has rightly argued that Charlotte’s pride

gives her an extraordinary resilience that “turns her ‘punishment’ into a fresh

opportunity for the exercise o f her gifts” (308). Charlotte does not merely put a

cheerful gloss upon an unhappy situation; her strength o f character allows her to

create an acceptable personal situation within the parameters o f her marriage to

Adam Verver.

The scene o f the Ververs’ departure confirms a reading o f Charlotte that is

alternative to Maggie’s view. Charlotte has enthusiastically thrown herself into

preparations for travel that leave little time for social calls, even on the eve o f the

Ververs’ departure. At the time o f their final good-bye, Maggie is surprised that

“Mr. and Mrs. Verver were making the occasion easy” and that Charlotte in

particular makes a “resplendent show o f serenity” (558). Maggie and her father

part on the agreement that “Charlotte is great,” acknowledging that Charlotte’s

“value” may be found in her faultless exterior (563). That her interior may remain

a mystery to them both - carefully guarded by the narrative structure o f the novel,

which has shielded Charlotte’s thoughts, feelings, and motives from view - is not

the point. Rather, James is more interested in showing a “split” between subjective

and objective information. Because we cannot ever get past this split, we can only

recognize it for what it is: the way in which we necessarily make sense o f the

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 world around us.

Charlotte’s role in the novel has generated a two-fold narrative effect. First,

James’s narrative has worked to engender a skeptical reader who can recognize a

discrepancy between subjective and objective information. And second, James

reminds us that, however adept readers may become at linking fragmented

associations, the process o f knowledge-making remains uniquely individual and

cannot ever circumvent this necessary “split.”

IV. Conclusion

Rosalyn Jolly has argued that Maggie has control over the history and the

plot o f this novel: “she is able to read the past correctly and to direct the future

successfully” (162). Jolly explains that “the heroine’s usurpation of authorial

functions is not contested and defeated (as in earlier novels) but rewarded with one

o f James’s few ‘happy’ endings” (162). But although Maggie has learned enough

o f the secret past to put a stop to the Prince’s affair with Charlotte, it must be

remembered that for Maggie, “knowledge was a fascination as well as a fear”

(422).

It is my contention that Maggie never comes to possess certain knowledge

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 in this novel, for not only does she refuse to assimilate the information she learns,

but James uses her individual character to emphasize the ultimate unattainability o f

the kind o f knowledge Maggie wants. She fears knowing too much; for this reason,

she avoids discussion o f the novel’s secret with her father and she “checks” the

Prince’s confession before he can utter it. Because o f her “accepted ignorance,”

she will never to know for certain “how far they had gone together” (422).

It is unlikely that this ending will prove “happy” for any o f the principals

involved, but this denouement has little to do with what this epistemological

detective story reveals. We learn that the Prince has married Maggie because she is

a “young woman with a million a year” (58). That she is not disagreeable to him is

an advantage; that she will not make him happy is intimated even at the novel’s

beginning when, after the arrangement o f his marriage settlement, the Prince

laments: “even when one pretended to no quarrel with it, the moment had

something o f the grimness o f a crunched key in the strongest lock that could be

made” (4). The novel begins and ends on the pragmatic note o f the Prince’s

marriage to Maggie; in neither space is this note a happy one.

I contend that it is Charlotte who is in control o f the history and plot o f this

novel. She, not Maggie, is the character who shows “something o f the glitter o f

consciously possessing the constructive, the creative hand” (405). She has

orchestrated the novel’s main events, successfully limited the “knowledge” that is

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 available about her secret past and her secret motives, and exhibited behavior that

casts doubt upon the extent to which she is “defeated” at the novel’s end. As such,

she mirrors in both character and narrative function the primary interest o f James in

the relation between narration and the process o f knowing.

Throughout the second part o f the novel, Charlotte’s actions and words

threaten the inferences, the perceptions, and even the narration o f Maggie Verver.

Many critics have followed Matthiesen in reading an extraordinary cruelty in

Maggie’s treatment o f Charlotte at the novel’s end (Matthiesen 96-104). But

Maggie’s very bias and cruel thoughts call her own perceptions o f Charlotte into

question. Maggie’s view o f “what Charlotte must think” and “what Charlotte must

feel” is a reflection o f the threat she feels at the hands o f her adversary. Yet the

accuracy o f these perceptions is very much at issue, for no one - not Maggie, not

the reader - can go beyond the mere recognition that there are different narrative

“truths” to be had.

Charlotte’s contested role within the narration o f The Golden Bowl suggests

not only that a true accounting o f experience necessarily involves a distortion of

reality, but also that the aim o f the novel —even a novel structured around a

mystery - is no longer to find the truth and uncover all secrets. The “secret” o f the

novel must be given away, in that the story must be told, social order must be

reconstituted, and some measure o f narrative closure must be attained. But the

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 “secret” must also be kept, if James is to stress the indeterminacy o f Maggie’s -

and hence anyone’s - objective knowledge.

It is in keeping this secret that Charlotte’s character plays a major role

within the novel, complementary to Maggie’s role o f inferring the secret. Charlotte

refuses to confide her past or present love disappointment to Maggie (137), and she

withholds its details from everyone else. Notably, all other characters in the novel

follow her example. Maggie and Adam choose not to share their mutual

knowledge o f the secret affair they have uncovered (491-92). And the Prince

refrains from confession, with Maggie’s approval: “she must strike him as waiting

for a confession. This, in turn, charged her with a new horror: if that was her

proper payment she would go without money” (566).

Charlotte’s actions and secrets within the novel mark her as complicit with

the “creative hand” o f the author in designing this ambiguous, indeterminate

Jamesian ending; they ultimately suggest that the juxtaposition o f objective and

subjective knowledge is the only reality for James. At the novel’s end, the Prince

tells Maggie, “I see nothing but you” (567). As readers, neither do we - nor have

we for more than half o f the novel, although Charlotte’s role has made us question

what we do see. We must be content to imagine these characters at the novel’s end

just as they were throughout the novel —centers o f consciousness who perceive,

misperceive, and keep their respective secrets inviolate. In this, as in the ficelle-

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 like narrative strategy surrounding Charlotte Stant, James stresses the importance

not o f knowledge itself, but of the terms by which it is achieved.

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 Chapter Six.
Conclusion: Untrustworthy Narrators, Uncertain Knowledge -
or, Agatha Christie as Post-Script

"I am rather pleased with m yselfas a writer. "

—Dr. Sheppard, The M urder o f Roger Ackroyd

Through the lens o f a specific narrative device - the metonymy surrounding

forensic objects, the synecdoche depicting memory and identity, the disruption o f

chronology, and the Jamesian fic elle —each chapter o f this dissertation has

examined a particular problem o f knowing generated by fragmented information.

Each novel has suggested that the world is a place where information is necessarily

fragmentary - and not just when thievery or murder is afoot. Within the context o f

this fragmentary world, each novelist may be seen to explore unconventional ideas

about how to assimilate such information into knowledge. These new processes

become “naturalized” as narrative patterns are repeated in novel after novel. Thus,

all the novels I examine in this dissertation appear to construct narratives around

two shared concerns: 1) to recognize as problematic the concepts ordinarily relied

upon to construct narratives o f certainty; and 2) to “instruct” readers in new

approaches to epistemology. The ultimate effect o f this narrative experimentation

is to generate a deeply thoughtful reader who no longer simply accepts narratives as

they are told. Instead, the reader is forced to become educated, skeptical, and

highly involved in the process o f “connecting.”

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 From the inauguration o f the English detective narrative, such as found in

the early efforts o f Dickens in Bleak House or Collins in The Moonstone, each

novelist analyzed in this dissertation has appeared to question the reliability of the

knowledge he or she constructs through narrative. At first, traditional assumptions

about the process o f knowing are interrogated, as novelists call into question

assumptions about “wholeness” in The Moonstone or assumptions about order and

chronology in Dracula. Yet, as much as novelists have been interested in finding

new methods o f linking information together - and exploring the nature o f the new

kind o f knowledge that results —each has also registered some skepticism about the

new narrative methods o f linking they depict. For example, Bleak House and The

M oonstone appear to address the problem o f the “lingering fragment” that cannot

be fully connected into the larger, coherent narrative; Dracula appears to register

an anxiety about whether even an innovative methodology can address the problem

o f “wild facts”; and The Golden Bowl may be seen to suggest that objective and

subjective knowledge can never be adequately distinguished.

Agatha Christie’s 1926 novel The M urder o f Roger Ackroyd appears to

epitomize these concerns, for it foregrounds them in its narrative. As Sara Gesuato

has described the novel in ‘Textually Interesting Aspects o f Agatha Christie’s The

Murder o f Roger A c k r o y d the narrative presents a “challenging unpredictability of

form and function” (29). It is true that by the early twentieth century, this “form

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 and function” o f the detective novel appeared to be fixed. When Agatha Christie

wrote The M urder ofR oger Ackroyd at the height o f her career, the narrative

conventions o f the detective novel seemed so firmly established that just two years

later, two critics published essays that outlined the standard conventions o f the

genre.

In 1928, both Ronald Knox’s “A Detective Story Decalogue” and S.S. van

Dine’s ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” were published, and the

primary argument o f each critic addressed both narrative method and substantive

content. The crime not only had to be solved through rational means, but the story

must also feature a detective, a victim, and a culprit - and specifically, a culprit

who is not the detective (Knox 196; Van Dine 190).1 This last “rule” is the one

Christie is charged with violating in The Murder o f Roger Ackroyd, for her culprit

figures as both the narrator and a detective figure (a role he assumes when he

undertakes to assist her official detective, Hercule Poirot).

As many critics have recognized, Christie is not the first writer to create a

criminal who is at the same time a detective figure. Hodgson has pointed to

Oedipus as “the classic instance o f the detective as the criminal” (339). And, we

might also consider The M oonstone’s Franklin Blake, who continues an

1Notably, modem views o f detective conventions have differed. In 1980, Robin

Winks asserted just the opposite: “The ideal detective story is one in which the
detective hero discovers that he (or she) is the criminal” (5).

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 investigation that all other characters abandon only to discover that he is himself,

the thief. Yet Christie is unique in that her criminal detective is also the sole

narrator.

Critics who have examined The Murder o f Roger Ackroyd have addressed

the way its narrative techniques “misguide the reader’s approach to and grasp o f the

text” (Gesuato 31). However, I suggest that the many unexpected devices offered

by Christie’s narrative strategies positively guide - as much as they misguide - the

reader’s epistemological experience. In 1902, detective novelist G.K. Chesterton

wrote an essay that is now considered to be one o f the first serious discussions o f

the detective narrative (Pyrhonen 2).2 In his “A Defence o f Detective Stories,”

Chesterton describes detective fiction as the “only form” o f popular literature to

express a sense o f the “poetry o f modem life as it is lived and experienced” (4).

This dissertation has argued that detective fiction expresses the way the mind

experiences information as necessarily fragmented, yet goes on to construct it into

coherent narratives. In Chesterton’s terms, perhaps the “poetry o f modem life” is

simply that o f taking the fragmented experience of life and learning to make sense

o f it. For The M urder o f Roger Ackroyd, like most detective novels, does not

“misguide” the reader without also offering some specific guidance about how to

2 Other early critics include Dorothy Sayers, Williard Huntington Wright (more
popularly known as S.S. van Dine), and C. Day Lewis. As Pyrhonen notes, like
Chesterton, they were authors as well as critics.

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 make sense o f the problems its narrative creates.

I argue that Christie’s novel addresses two problematic questions through

the narrative role o f Dr. Sheppard: first, how do we deal with providers o f

information we cannot wholly trust? And second, how do we make sense o f

knowledge that cannot be wholly assimilated into a coherent, “connected” narrative

that we feel confident to be “knowledge”? In asking these questions, I should point

out that these identical questions were seen to operate in James’s The Golden Bowl,

the subject o f analysis in Chapter Five. There, James was seen to suggest that no

provider o f information can be wholly trusted because individual subjectivity

cannot help but blur attempts to reach objective knowledge. Consequently, he

suggests, we may never feel entirely confident that the coherent narratives we

construct represent “knowledge.” While Christie’s vision o f the possibilities for

knowledge making is considerably brighter than James’s, she may nonetheless be

viewed as troubled by similar concerns in her creation o f Dr. Sheppard.

Christie’s novel is a Hercule Poirot mystery that employs the first-person

narrative o f a new character, the country-doctor-tumed-murderer, Dr. Sheppard.

Dr. Sheppard addresses his audience in a comfortable, witty manner from a

retrospective perspective. That knowledge itself is a central concern o f the novel is

suggested by Dr. Sheppard in the first chapter, in which he describes the battle over

information that he repeatedly wages against his sister Caroline. Caroline’s first

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 and most prominent characteristic is her ability to “find things out.” The narrator

admits, “I don’t know how she manages it, but there it is. I suspect that the

servants and the tradesmen constitute her Intelligence Corps” (2). If Caroline is

characterized by her innate ability to “gather information,” then Dr. Sheppard is

alternately defined by his “aim at discretion,” which he invokes as the natural

responsibility o f any “professional man” (2).

Notably, when Caroline succeeds in deducing correct knowledge from her

admittedly fragmentary understanding o f events, Dr. Sheppard criticizes her

sharply for her slipshod manner o f assimilating information into knowledge. For

example, the narrator describes how “Mrs. Ferrars’ husband died just over a year

ago, and Caroline has constantly asserted, without the least foundation for the

assertion, that his wife poisoned him” (2). Although it is revealed at the novel’s

end that Mrs. Ferrar did in fact poison this husband —and that Dr. Sheppard has

known this fact all along - he nonetheless reproaches his sister for the inexcusable

methodology through which she makes this conclusion:

She scorns my invariable rejoinder that Mr. Ferrars died o f acute

gastritis, helped on by habitual over-indulgence in alcoholic

beverages. The symptoms o f gastritis and arsenical poisoning are

not, I agree, unlike, but Caroline bases her accusation on quite

different lines.

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 ‘You’ve only got to look at her,” I have heard her say.

Mrs. Ferrars, though not in her first youth, was a very attractive

woman, and her clothes, though simple, always seemed to fit her

very well, but all the same, lots o f women buy their clothes in Paris

and have not, on that account, necessarily poisoned their husbands.

(2 )

Dr. Sheppard’s sharp criticism o f Caroline suggests a dichotomy that a

trusting reader —perhaps captivated by the witty and confidential tone of Dr.

Sheppard’s narration - will no doubt follow. Caroline’s deductions should be

discounted, Dr. Sheppard implies, because her conclusions are derived from

irrelevant, even intuitive, considerations. He invites readers to consider it

preposterous that Caroline might identify a murderer only by looking at her, and

reminds us that French frocks do not a murderer make.

Moreover, Dr. Sheppard commands narrative authority as a respected town

doctor rather than a town gossip. He offers a rational interpretation o f Mr. Ferrar’s

demise based upon the “symptoms of gastritis,” and works to win the reader’s trust

by contrasting his own methodology for deducing knowledge from Caroline’s: “it

is all wrong that Caroline should arrive at the truth simply by a kind o f inspired

guesswork” (5). This language pits the doctor’s careful and scientific ratiocination

against his sister’s “inspired guesswork” and apparently evokes a standard

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 convention o f the detective novel: that rationality and scientific deduction must

triumph over irrational forces.

Dr. Sheppard’s role as the first-person narrator is usually the subject of

greatest contention among critics. It has been said that his greatest crime is

“disobedience” to narrative focalization; since the reader can access the story only

through the lens o f his point o f view, the fact that he conceals particularly relevant

knowledge from the reader seems especially insincere (Gesuato 35). These various

traps have been well documented and analyzed —and even by Dr. Sheppard himself

in his “Apologia,” as I will discuss below. Because these strategies are readily

observed, my primary concern is less these narrative strategies through which

information is obscured, for this dissertation has suggested in each chapter that all

detective narratives obscure information to some extent, even when closure has

supposedly been attained. Instead, we might consider why this obscured

knowledge is made a prominent novelistic feature and why it so thoroughly targets

the reader’s understanding.

I suggest that The Murder o f Roger Ackroyd is a novel that directly engages

with the epistemological problem o f how knowledge may be attained in the face o f

unmitigated uncertainty. Although its primary engagement with that problem is

through the lens of the primary narrator, Dr. Sheppard, my emphasis in the analysis

that follows is not on what this narrative suggests about the criminal mind, for

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 previous studies have most usefully connected contemporary attitudes towards

crime and the criminal mind with the detective genre.3 Rather, I want to

emphasize the epistemological effects that result when the “confidentiality”

between reader and narrator is broken, as it necessarily is when the first-person

narrator reveals himself to be the murderer in the novel’s final chapter. Once this

fact is known, the status o f all knowledge and information depicted by this narrator

becomes destabilized.

Agatha Christie herself seems to have disagreed that her narrative choices

were quite so radical as her critics and readers seemed to think, for in her

autobiography she states:

A lot o f people say that The M urder o f Roger Ackroyd is cheating;

but if they read it carefully they will see that they are wrong. Such

little lapses o f time as there have to be are nicely concealed in an

ambiguous sentence. (129)

The “ambiguous sentence,” Christie implies, is an ordinary device such as we

regularly encounter in life. This device is not “cheating”; instead, we may view it

3 See especially Marie-Christine Leps’s influential study, Apprehending the

Criminal: The Production o f Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1992). For a study o f the anthropological and sociological
thought that we find reflected in the detective novel, see Ronald R. Thomas’s
D etective Fiction and the Rise o f Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).

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 as an ordinary problem o f knowing. Yet few critics regard Christie’s choice in this

way. Contemporary critical response to Christie’s novel was divided: the Daily

Sketch reviewed it as “the best thriller ever,” but the News Chronicle deplored it as

a “tasteless and unfortunate let-down” (quoted in Osbome 45). Most critics agreed

that Christie had radically changed the conventions o f the detective novel - though

whether she had experimentally “rewritten” them or created a major breach against

the standards o f her art was subject to debate.

Agatha Christie gave her fullest explanation o f her narrative choices in The

M urder o f Roger Ackroyd in a 1966 interview, in which she explained:

I have a certain amount o f rules. No false words must be uttered by

me. To write ‘Mrs. Armstrong walked home wondering who had

committed the murder’ would be unfair if she had done it herself.

But it’s not unfair to leave things out. In Roger A ckroyd... there’s

lack o f explanation there, but no false statement. (Sunday Times 27

February 1966)

Christie’s defense - that “it’s not unfair to leave things out” - certainly seems one

with which her earlier predecessors might have agreed. “Lack o f explanation” is

readily replicated in fiction, perhaps, because it is so common in life. In that

important first chapter, Dr. Sheppard admits, “I have got into the habit o f

continually withholding all information possible from my sister” (2). This habit

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 serves him well with regard to the reader, too. “Withholding information” has

become natural to Dr. Sheppard; arguably, this instinct is why his narrative so

easily disguises the gaps in information it creates.

I argue that Dr. Sheppard may be seen not only as the story’s narrator, but

also as a substitute figure for the detective writer more generally. In addition to

manipulating the basic information he knows about the crimes at issue, we should

also note that o f his many narrative roles —that o f town doctor, aid to detective

Poirot, and narrative chronicler o f events —the role he is proudest o f is that o f a

writer. This characterization seems clear from his “Apologia” - the final chapter o f

the novel, written just prior to the doctor’s presumed suicide by veronal.

In this final chapter, Dr. Sheppard has the opportunity to justify his crimes,

express contrition, bid goodbye to his sister, or engage in any number o f standard

conventions typical o f the novelistic deathbed confession. Instead, Dr. Sheppard

can only praise his own narrative skill as a writer:

I am rather pleased with myself as a writer. What could be neater,

for instance, than the following:

'The letters were brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was ju st on

ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I

hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and

wondering i f there was anything I had left undone.’

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 All true, you see. But suppose I had put a row o f stars after the first

sentence! Would somebody then have wondered what exactly

happened in that blank ten minutes? (240).

The answer, o f course, is that they would have. But to help raise the reader’s

suspicions so explicitly would defeat the lesson offered by Dr. Sheppard, and by

extension, Agatha Christie. The novel, these “writers” suggest, is fundamentally

about these absent stories —how easily they are disguised, and how vigilant we

must be if we are to identify them. This lesson in epistemology is what those

critics who merely deplore Dr. Sheppard’s reticence ignore.

Whether or not writers o f detective fiction are as artfully duplicitous as Dr.

Sheppard, similar gaps exist everywhere, and must be seen as a fundamental part o f

most narratives. That they are so pervasive suggests not only the “misguidance”

with which Christie is repeatedly charged, but also the lesson in “how to read”

offered by Dr. Sheppard: the reader should be suspicious o f gaps (both in

substantive information and chronological time) and, above all, recognize that the

“natural” implications o f ambiguous language may not necessarily be correct.

For example, Dr. Sheppard points the reader to a passage early in the novel

in which he overhears a conversation between Ralph Paton and Mrs. Ferrars. As he

admits in the “Apologia,” “I thought then that she was confiding in him” (239). As

he expresses it in his contemporaneous account, it is clear that his language points

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 to a double possibility of meaning:

Suddenly before my eyes there arose the picture o f Ralph Paton and

Mrs. Ferrars side by side. Their heads so close together. I felt a

momentary throb o f anxiety. Supposing —oh! But surely that was

impossible. I remembered the frankness o f Ralph’s greeting that

very afternoon. Absurd! (34)

The reader who follows a natural inclination to trust the narrator will assume that

Dr. Sheppard’s language about his “anxiety” and the unvoiced thought he dismisses

as “absurd” must have to do with his own suspicions o f Ralph Paton. Instead, the

“Apologia” makes clear that Dr. Sheppard is worried about Ralph Paton’s

suspicion o f him. This ambiguity is part o f what makes the detective story appear

so well plotted and clever. Yet, we might also question, what does that suggest

about the reading experience? What might it suggest about the function of

narrative and language? And additionally, what might it suggest about the more

general epistemological processes by which we assemble and “connect” those

narratives fundamental to our daily lives?

The previous chapters o f this dissertation have argued that, because

narrative is the primary medium available to us for shaping what we know,

detective narratives are particularly important for the ways in which they model the

production o f knowledge. Such narratives represent investigation as a process o f

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 “connection,” and in so doing, model for readers “new” ways o f apprehending

information. Moreover, that information left out o f the story is frequently as much

a part of the story as what is included. Detective novelists remind us that narrative

gaps are important through their myriad explorations o f the ways in which we must

confront such gaps.

Heta Pyrhonen has described the most basic convention o f detective fiction

as the ensuring o f “victory o f the detective over the criminal,” but that is just what

is finally complicated in Christie’s novel (10). For although Hercule Poirot

successfully manages to identify the proper killer, it is clear that in significant

narrative ways, Dr. Sheppard may be viewed as a “victor.” Although the doctor

has made a few mistakes in his execution o f the murder(s), he is careful to maintain

that his narrative skill is beyond reproach. Moreover, in Peter Brook’s terms, we

might say that Dr. Sheppard is victorious because he controls his own “choice of

ends.” “Let it be veronal,” the doctor writes, as he enacts the end o f his story both

narratively and literally (241). He completes his own narrative tale; he ends his

own physical life in the manner he chooses; and he appears to ensure that his good

reputation nonetheless remains intact. “I can trust him,” he claims o f Poirot,

implying that his secret will be kept from all channels except those necessary to

clear Ralph Paton; his sister Caroline “will never know the truth” (241).

A view o f Dr. Sheppard as victorious at least in narrative terms offers one

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 more example o f something I suggest throughout this dissertation: to the extent

that Dr. Sheppard “wins,” it appears that the methodology for handling narrative

gaps in information emerges as more important than the novel’s secret itself. This

phenomenon may be seen as an additional example o f a story of investigation

prevailing over a story o f crime —but with interesting complications. Because Dr.

Sheppard is so self-conscious about his methodology for withholding information,

he teaches us an important lesson about how to recover the absent story. Hercule

Poirot may ferret out the identity o f the murderer, but he is not the one who offers

us this insight.

Before one can begin to make proper connections, Dr. Sheppard suggests,

one must first recognize where information is fragmented. That lesson is one that

most detective novelists elide through sometimes superficial efforts to achieve

closure. Yet Christie in The M urder o f Roger Ackroyd, like James in The Golden

Bowl, ends her novel with the suggestion that fragmented information is most

dangerous to knowledge making where it is not even recognized as fragmented.

Conclusion

This dissertation initially claims that nineteenth-century detective

narratives, as constructed by a variety o f novelists, attempt to work through new

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 methods o f “connection.” As novelists make use o f detective plots to work through

themes o f secrets and crimes, they construct increasingly complicated narrative

devices to explain and guide the process o f knowing —for characters, for readers.

On the one hand, the developing genre o f detective fiction appears to validate the

kind o f knowledge that the detective figures (and the reader) can deduce through

these new ways o f approaching knowledge assimilation. On the other hand, each

novelist who employs these same devices appears to concede that no methodology

is foolproof. In other words, no single method may consistently help us to connect

information into knowledge in such a way as to be confident in the result. The

novels ultimately interrogate the assumption that if the process is right, then what

we learn through that process must be true.

The detective narratives that I discuss in this dissertation explore this shared

concern about the methodologies available for assimilating fragmentary

information by breaking habits o f readerly identification and exploring different

ways o f constructing knowledge. To do so, novelists repeatedly suggest, is not

easy when one is confronted with uncertain knowledge and unreliable narration.

Each novelist I have examined not only appears to question the ability o f narrative

itself to communicate reliably as narrative fragments are connected into a coherent

story, but also appears to validate narrative as our only possible means of

understanding. This self-conscious inquiry is begun in the detective narratives of

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 the Victorian era, but it extends into James’s “novel o f character” as well as

Christie’s modem detective novel.

These ideas have an enduring legacy in life as well as fiction, as my

opening example o f the Ratcliffe Highway Minders suggests. I introduced this

dissertation with the example o f that 1811 murder case in which magistrates failed

to “connect” available evidence. Their inability to solve the murder case was, I

argued, a narrative failing because they did not understand that where available

information is highly fragmented, an imaginative approach to connection is

required. Detective narratives suggest that in life as in art, necessary evidence does

not simply arrive at the detective’s door; he or she must actively seek it out, and

once it is found, must imaginatively link it with other known facts until a coherent

narrative may be constructed. We typically call that result “knowledge” - even as

we may continue to question the assumptions that lead us to construct it as we do.

We have seen that literature has imaginatively interrogated these assumptions, as

well as standard narrative devices for “linking” information - sometimes offering

new narrative devices, other times validating old ones.

That we can identify this issue raises additional questions for future inquiry.

In my introductory chapter, I cited the quotation by criminal profilers John Douglas

and Mark Olshaker that claimed criminal investigative methodology had roots in

“crime fiction” more than “c-ime fact” (19). Yet, despite noticing the many ways

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 in which novelists interrogate and experiment with narrative strategies o f

“connection,” can we truly say that writers o f literature actually help to bring about

new ways o f thinking and new approaches to problem-solving? Or, does

nineteenth-century detective literature simply reflect such new approaches that are

already in play - in The London Times, in courts o f justice, and in ordinary police

activity everywhere? If the latter, does literature help to “popularize” these new

ways o f thinking? The implications of such questions for future studies of not only

detective fiction, but also other genres of literature invested in epistemological

issues, may be recognized as far-reaching.

I might re-write the observation of Douglas and Olshaker to emphasize

instead that “crime fiction” and “crime fact” illustrate shared narrative models of

knowledge assimilation, regardless of which is chronologically primary. These

shared models raise important questions about the narrative impulses we repeatedly

invoke in fiction and in fact. As I conclude this project, m y fellow New Yorkers

and our country continue to mourn those lost in the terrorist attacks o f September

11,2001. The carnage o f the World Trade Center has been described by Attorney

General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert S. Mueller HI as the “largest crime

scene ever.”4 Additionally, narrative patterns have begun to emerge that describe

4 David Johnston, “A Nation Challenged: The Crime Scene; At site, Ashcroft and
Mueller Speak o f Pushing Ahead.” New York Times. September 22, 2001. B l.

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 the resulting criminal investigation in terms strikingly reminiscent not only o f the

models o f knowledge assimilation generally described in this dissertation, but also

o f the crisis o f investigation that confronted 1811 London.

I want to make clear that while the events o f September 2001 are not at all

like those factual and fictional events analyzed in this dissertation, the narrative

patterns and impulses we invoke in their wake may be seen to have some similarity.

In the weeks after the attacks, questions have been delicately raised: why was this

event not prevented? Why did American intelligence fail? Were there no signals

that this event was planned? In the New York Times, the staff director o f a

commission on aviation security and safety, Gerald B. Kauvar, is quoted as saying

that the failure to heed any warning signs was “an indication o f the failure to put

the pieces together.”5 He goes on to describe how certain information may have

been available, but a strategy for “linking” it with other leads was not.

In terms eerily reminiscent o f the 1811 Ratcliffe Highway Murders,

politicians and investigators continue to question “whether the CIA and FBI

sufficiently shared information”6 - not only among themselves, but also with

foreign agencies, United States Immigration and Naturalization Services, the

5 Matthew L. Wald, “Earlier Hijackings Offered Signals That Were Missed,” New
York Times, October 3,2001. B2.
6 Alison Mitchell and Todd S. Purdum, “Lawmakers Seek Inquiry on Intelligence
Agencies’ Failure to Prevent Attacks.” New York Times. October 22, 2001. B7.

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 Federal Aviation Authority, and individual airliners.7 As editorialist Maureen

Dowd describes it, “the CIA and the FBI keep telling reporters how close they

came to breaking up the hijackers’ plot - if only they had had cooperation from the

other agency.” In hindsight, officials, investigators, and politicians seem to agree

that certain evidence was available but was simply not put together in time —in part

due to laxity on the part o f officials, in part due to a failure o f communication

among these many federal, state, and local levels. Once again, just as in 1811

London, the failure “to know” is depicted as a narrative failing. Meanwhile,

investigators sift through what are repeatedly characterized as “links” and

“connections” among hijackers, known terrorists, banks, aliases, telephone records,

purchase receipts, and more to put forward a coherent “timeline” narrative o f the

planned terrorist crime.9

The journalistic assessments o f this recent tragedy that appear daily thus

suggest that the epistemological issues o f this dissertation remain both timely and

unresolved. In a time o f crisis - whether that be the serial killings o f nineteenth-

century England or mass murder by terrorists in twenty-first-century America - is

our impulse always to return to the problem o f “connection”: to blame those who

7 CNN News Live Telecast. October 18, 2001.

8 Maureen Dowd, “Is Camel Pox Coming?” New York Times. October 21,2001.
Section 4:15.
9 “Financial Sleuths on Money Trail” and ‘T lot Conceived in UK, Germany,
UAE.” CNN. September 29,2001. <www.cnn.com/terror/290901>.

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 did not seek out and connect admittedly fragmentary information correctly? That

imperative seems no less significant as the function o f criminal investigation may

be shifting from an emphasis upon crime solution to one o f crime prevention. Is

this attention to the process o f “connection” a method o f explaining failure in

rational terms? Those officials invoking this language seem to imply that, if we

had only “connected” fragmentary leads, then this tragedy could potentially have

been averted. Or, is this reaction a recourse to our willing belief that our available

models o f knowing —if used adequately - must be able to supply needed answers,

because the idea that they may not is unthinkable? Perhaps our repeated invocation

o f “connection” as a way o f knowing is finally a way o f asserting control over what

seems fundamentally uncertain and unknowable.

To say that such narratives represent our way o f exercising control over a

situation that is frightening, uncontrollable, and highly threatening is not new. For

many critics have said just the same about the emergence o f detective novels

(particularly Dracula) and detective figures (particularly Sherlock Holmes) during

previously anxious and uncertain times. Yet, to query and explore the narrative

impulses with which we attempt to deal with the unknown - both as these narrative

strategies presently exist and as they will no doubt continue to evolve - is a topic

that remains open to additional investigation in literary genres and beyond.

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