“Man and machinery blended in one”: Dexter's wheelchair and the Victorian railway in Wilkie Collins's The Law and the Lady

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Notes

1 For more discussion of Dexter's gender traits, see Mangum (1998), Rosner (2004), Cothran (2006), Stoddard Holmes (2008), Denisoff (2003), Allan (2006), and Herzl-Betz (2015). Zigarovich (2018) categorizes him and his cousin Ariel as nonbinary characters. As Allen makes clear, sensation fiction often features “shocking and scintillating representation[s] of women and men gone off the rails of proper gender: manly women, effeminate men, and most variants in between” (2011, 401). By turning detective and defiantly ignoring her husband's wishes, Valeria also upends gender norms. She acknowledges that her “plans and projects were sufficiency strange, sufficiently wide of the ordinary limits of a woman's thoughts and actions” (Collins 1875, 226).

2 See Hyman (2009) for an extended analysis of Dexter's cooking and appetites.

3 Brusberg-Kiermeier similarly calls Dexter “a strange composite of ‘man’ and mechanical appliance” (2014, 42).

4 See Dupeyron-Lafay for further discussion of The Law and the Lady as a gothic novel, including analysis of Dexter as “a quintessentially gothic character” (2004, 145) and of Dexter's gothic house.

5 This setup reflects Colin's upper-class status, as I discuss in another article: “Colin's arms seem robust enough to operate a self-propelling wheelchair … but he instead uses a wheelchair that always requires a servant and, therefore, always constructs him as a master” (Valint 2016, 266).

6 In both The Secret Garden and The Clever Woman of the Family, only men are seen pushing the wheelchairs, implying that women are not strong enough for that task (see Valint 2016, 267–268).

7 See work on Victorian artificial limbs by O’Connor (2000), Daen (2017), Sweet (2017), Warne (2009), and Blair (2010).

8 I agree with Janechek that “it is important to reexamine what seem to be physical objects of disability – especially the wheelchair, a ‘thing’ around which many ableist prejudices are focused” (2015, 149).

9 Another “self-propelling Chair” with “stuffed back and seat” costs eight pounds in the Catalogue of Surgical Instruments, Manufactured by Arnold and Sons (1885). To illuminate how costly these chairs were, a basic pair of crutches in this catalogue cost three shillings, though ones made with better padding and springs cost more. Similarly, Gooday and Sayer look through catalogues to show that the variety of hearing aids available for purchase “were shaped to amplify sound to varying degrees for different kinds and experiences of deafness and for use by different degrees of wealth, manufactured in a range of materials” (2017, 33).

10 Sweet also highlights that “gender is a major factor” in “the literary and commercial history of prosthetics” (2017, 115) in his analysis of the types of artificial limbs women were encouraged to obtain and avoid. 

11 When linking the way sensation fiction and railway travel preyed on the nerves, Daly makes a passing reference to Dexter as “a human locomotive” but does not unpack the connection between Dexter and the train (2004, 51).

12 Herzl-Betz offers a fascinating reading of Ariel and Dexter's “queer and painful” interdependent relationship (2015, 41).

13 As another form of railway-associated communication, Valeria and her father's friend Benjamin “invent a telegraphic system” so she can signal to him when he should clandestinely start and stop writing Dexter's words (Collins 1875, 303). Becoming signalmen, Benjamin sits, “expecting the signal” (317), and she soon “make[s] the signal” (318) when she senses Dexter approaching the desired subject.

14 Smith shows how those feelings were illustrated in the common conceits of the “monster-machine” and “demon-railway” in Victorian literature (2012, 507). Daly elucidates how sensation plays also addressed anxieties over the railway: “‘railway rescue’ plays … envision scenarios in which a human agent can beat a mechanical agent” (2004, 23). In watching these plays, the audience is “thrilled rather than traumatized” (25).

15 See Delafield (2012) for more context on The Law and the Lady's troubled serialization in The Graphic.

16 Taylor identifies Dexter as Collins's “most bizarre and contradictory image of insanity” for existing on the “borderlands of eccentricity, insanity, and idiocy” (1988, 221, 226).

17 The Victorian railway's “vast energies were held in fragile balance,” and “it contained within itself the potential for breakdown, malfunction and crisis” (Harrington 2003, 203). Railway travel deteriorated not only travelers but also the materials that formed the train – Schivelbusch calls this effect “material fatigue” (1986, 125).

18 O’Connor considers how “artificial limbs finally dehumanize the subjects they are used to restore” in texts by Trollope, Dickens, and Poe (2000, 132). Dickens's chair users become “dehumanized, assimilated into the chairs that they employ” in Janechek's analysis (2015, 148). In her interpretation of Thomas Hood's poem Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg, Warne highlights how the artificial leg becomes “autonomous” (2009, 91). Miss Kilmansegg dies, murdered by her husband with her own leg, manifesting the poem's “distrust of prosthetic technology” (91). Blair analyzes the song “The Steam Arm” in which a man's replacement arm begins to act of its own accord; the song, Blair argues, exhibits “the desires and fears surrounding new technology” (2010, 203).

19 Keith, in discussing the “miraculously walking child” in The Secret Garden and Heidi, similarly recognizes these novels’ suggestion that “children who cannot walk are to be pitied and cared for but they can never be accepted. In order for them to live into adulthood, they must be cured” (2001, 99).

20 LaCom points out that Ermine's marriage and motherhood “disrupt[] the cultural expectation that categorically consigned nonambulatory and infirm women to nonmaternal space” (1997, 197). Stoddard Holmes also notes that in The Clever Woman of the Family, Yonge “ultimately imagines a world in which nondisabled and disabled people are equal participants in the rewards of marriage and community life” (2004, 52).

21 Strovas (2017) foregrounds the resistance Valeria receives from everyone around her “against her unfeminine meddlings in a judicial murder case.” In response, she pursues the strategies of “gothic detection,” proceeding “intuitively – and thus impulsively – rather than rationally.”

22 Talairach-Vielmas reads Valeria's restlessness as a “clichéd hysterical symptom[]” and a response to being “bound to an enigmatic husband” (2007, 162). 

23 In linking sensation fiction and the railway, Daly notes, “The novels depend on the rapid succession of diverse locations” (2004, 47).

24 Because of the “gendered ideology of travel as a masculine activity” (Mathieson 2015, 60), society viewed train travel as dangerous particularly for unaccompanied women.

25 Mangum and Jacobson also find connections between Dexter and Valeria. To Mangum, both characters “challeng[e] the norms of gender and genre” (1998, 296). To Jacobson (2003), both use masquerade, Valeria to solve the mystery and Dexter to create his identity.

26 Cavallaro suggests that while Valeria, at the outset, “persists in her unconventional, even subversive, fact-finding” (2005, 19), by the end of the novel, she is “driven back into her constricted roles as wife and mother” (21).

27 Talairach-Vielmas highlights how the novel's Bluebeard-like elements reveal “the darker aspects of Victorian wedlock” (2007, 161). Valeria, like Bluebeard's newest wife, must “investigate the secrets of her husband's first marriage to save her own” (162). Sara's suicide letter, which reveals Eustace's cruelty, “is finally silenced once more by her husband” (171). To Allan, Sara's “letter complicates, rather than resolves, the question of [Eustace's] guilt: He remains simultaneously both/neither innocent and/nor guilty” (2006, 54).

28 Mangum recognizes that Valeria's final line “chillingly identifies her with the most pathetic female character in the novel, Dexter's cousin and servant, the masculine, leaden Ariel. Just as Ariel had doggedly begged Valeria to beat and abuse her rather than punish Miserrimus Dexter, Valeria now appeals to her readers” in a similar fashion (1998, 302).

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Alexandra Valint

Alexandra Valint is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her book Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel was published by Ohio State University Press in 2021. Her next project examines Victorian mobility aids, particularly wheelchairs and crutches. Her articles appear in Victorian Literature and Culture; Dickens Studies Annual; Children's Literature Association Quarterly; and English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920.