Experiencing textures: the materiality of illegitimacy in Wilkie Collins’s No Name

ABSTRACT

This article introduces texture as a key category of material analysis in Victorian literature and culture. Challenging distinctions between inside and outside structures, texture offers not only a complex, multi-layered understanding of material surfaces but also provides aesthetic and interpretive tools for rendering and analysing matter in literary and cultural representations. Drawing on Wilkie Collins’s No Name, this article argues that the novel presents the protagonist’s illegitimacy as a material condition by foregrounding the textural qualities of her bodily surface. Textural principles serve as a central technique of characterisation in No Name and are a crucial device through which the characters shape themselves and assess each other. As a means of interrogating Victorian laws and norms, the novel uses textures to show how normative conceptions of (il)legitimacy inform the characters’ and the narrator’s perception of (bodily) matter. The article shows how the novel’s textural construction of bodily materiality undermines comfortable distinctions between inside and outside, subject and object, as well as legitimate and illegitimate.

KEYWORDS:

• Texture
• surface
• materialism
• illegitimacy
• grotesque
• Wilkie Collins
• No Name

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See also Sattaur (2012) for an overview of Victorian scholars’ investigations into “thing theory.”

2. This article is connected to a research project I am conducting with Ariane de Waal on “Liminal Matters: Textures in Nineteenth-Century Material and Literary Cultures.”

3. In fact, Bora distinguishes between two meanings of texture that are acutely relevant to nineteenth-century conceptions of materiality. Whereas he applies the conventional term “texture” more generally to “the surface resonance or quality of an object or material […] that can usually be anticipated by looking” (1997, 98), he coins the term “texxture” to refer more specifically to “the stuffness of material structure” (99). “Texxture” is thus a more complex category insofar as it refers more specifically to the relation between surface and depth. While maintaining this distinction in his analysis, Bora acknowledges that the categories do overlap in multiple ways as both are concerned with “perception, creation, and responsive processes” (99). Thus, Bora admits that the “distinction between the two types of texture” is “extremely complicated, almost false at times” (101). Rather than opposed to each other, therefore, both terms seem to represent different gradations of textural properties, which is why I will employ “texture” in this article as an umbrella term that encompasses this wide range of meanings.

4. Gilbert notes how this increasingly widespread materialist understanding of selfhood productively interacted with what she refers to as approaches inspired by German idealism, which did not locate subjectivity in the body but envisioned it as a transcendental “force that exists prior to or beyond individual embodiment” (2019, 28). Even though they were often presented as opposed to each other, Gilbert shows that materialist and idealist strands co-existed and argues that the nineteenth century was marked by a “struggle to reconcile the two poles” (28).

5. As Sarah Lennox has argued, “during the 1860s, as the pseudoscience of physiognomy enjoyed a final burst of public interest, many sensation novels evaluated physiognomic principles, and, in some cases, challenged the pseudoscience by depicting bodies that failed to provide the promised information about character and identity” (2019).

6. For a textural reading of skin in relation to sunburn and tanning, see Charlotte Mathieson’s contribution to this special issue.

7. According to the narrator, Magdalen’s hair, for example, “is oftener seen on the plumage of a bird than on the head of a human being” (Collins 2004, 8), and her “serpentine suppleness” is compared to “the movements of a young cat” (9).

8. Cadwallader-Bouron concludes that “Collins use[s] the fusion between different realms of existence as a forceful way of conveying the sense that the world and all things therein form a great continuum, an organic, breathing entity in which boundaries are blurred, it is organicist, rather than mechanistic, and holistic rather than dualist” (2014, 181).

9. As such, Russo’s category of the “female grotesque” may seem tautological because “the female is always defined against the male norm” (1994, 12) and thus as a grotesque deviation. Yet, as she deftly shows in her seminal study, the notion of the “female grotesque” “is crucial to identity-formation for both men and women as a space of risk and abjection” (12).

10. Talairach-Vielmas has critically analysed Captain Wragge’s problematic relations with female characters, as both Magdalen and Mrs Wragge testify to “Captain Wragge’s power in managing transgressive femininity […], Wragge is the patriarch incarnate, devising fictions and maintaining women under his control, exactly as Victorian consumer society weaves fictions of the domestic ideal to such an extent that feminine identity becomes a feminine representation” (2007, 138).

11. Talairach-Vielmas somewhat relativises this contrast between Mrs Wragge and Magdalen by arguing that the former’s “obsession with female fashion and her addiction to shopping […] connects her to the model of the actress, commodified and exhibited on a stage, engaged in self-representation” (2007, 140). While both types – the female shopper and the actress – deny “the patriarchal scripts that enforce their submission to the male order,” the novel nevertheless “reasserts male supremacy over female transgressiveness” (143) at the end.

12. Drawing on nineteenth-century medical discourse, Andrew Mangham compares this procedure to an operation (2007, 190).

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Anja Hartl

Anja Hartl is an Assistant Professor of English at the Department of Literature, Art and Media Studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany, where she is currently working on a postdoctoral project on shame in the Victorian novel. Her research interests include Victorian fiction, affect theory, contemporary British theatre, and adaptation studies. She is the author of Brecht and Post-1990s British Drama: Dialectical Theatre Today (2021) and co-edits the Methuen Drama Agitations series.