Page 114 - DENG202_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_III

Unit 9: The Traveller's Story of a Terribly Strange Bed by Wilkie Collins

Notes

Notes Viewed by many to represent the advent of the detective story within the tradition
of the English novel, The Moonstone remains one of Collins’s most critically acclaimed
productions. T.S. Eliot states it as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English
detective novels...in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe,” and Dorothy L. Sayers
referred to it as “probably the very finest detective story ever written”.

Various factors (most often cited are the death of Dickens in 1870 and thus the loss of his literary
mentoring; Collins’s increased dependence upon laudanum; and a penchant for using his fiction
to rail against social injustices) appear to have led to a decline in the two decades following the
success of his sensation novels of the 1860s. His novels and novellas of the 1870s and 1880s, while
by no means devoid of merit or literary interest, are generally regarded as inferior to his
previous productions and receive comparatively little critical attention today.
The Woman in White and The Moonstone share an unusual narrative structure, somewhat
resembling an epistolary novel, in which different portions of the book have different narrators,
each with a distinct narrative voice (Armadale has this to a lesser extent through the
correspondence between some characters). The Moonstone, being the most popular of Collins’s
novels, is considered a precursor to detective fiction, such as Sherlock Holmes.

After The Moonstone, Collins’s novels contained fewer thriller elements and commentary that
is more social. The subject matter continued to be sensational, but his popularity declined. The
poet Algernon Charles Swinburne commented: “What brought good Wilkie’s genius nigh
perdition?/Some demon whispered—’Wilkie! Have a mission.”

9.3 Writing Style

Wilkie Collins is most notably credited with creating the sensation genre with his novel
The Woman in White (1860) and writing the first full-length detective story, The Moonstone
(1868). Collins is writing style is characterized by an emphasis on creating a convincing
atmosphere of suspense and intrigue. The Woman in White, arguably his most successful work,
shows Collins at his peak in terms of plotting and characterization. In The Woman in White,
Collins borrows key elements from the gothic tradition while updating and innovating the
already popular genre. He does this by changing the settings of his stories, moving them from
foreign countries, such as France and Italy, to England. He also bombards the reader with
documents, reflecting the age of information in which he lived. He takes a somewhat outdated
writing style and contemporizes it to his time.
In The Woman in White, Collins contemporizes the gothic novel in two important ways.
The first way is through transgressive gender characterizations. Collins is widely known for
creating characters that do not fit into the specific moulds of male and female. His female
characters often show masculine resolution and courage in deciphering mysteries within a
particular novel. His male characters frequently show a softer, more feminine side whereby
they express their innermost emotions as well as exercising feminine intuition. One of the ways
in which Collins illustrates his transgressive gender characterizations is through his use of
documents within the text of the story itself to indicate one character’s textual possession of
another.

Example: Two of the three, works by Collins examined here feature first person narrators
who control the information the reader receives about other characters in the stories.

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