A victim in search of a torturer: Reading masochism in Wilkie Collins's No Name

Jones, Anna

"You planned this marriage of your own free will," pursued the captain, with the furtive look and the faltering voice of a man ill at ease. "It was your own idea-not mine. I won't have the responsibility laid on my shoulders-no! ...."

"Look at these," pursued Captain Wragge, holding up the envelopes. "If I turn these to the use for which they have been written, Mrs. Lecount's master will never receive Mrs. Lecount's letter. If I tear them up, he will know by tomorrow's post that you are the woman who visited him in Vauxhall Walk. Say the word! Shall I tear the envelopes up, or shall I put them back in my pocket?" ...

She raised her head; she lifted her hand and pointed steadily to the envelopes.

"Put them back," she said.

"Do you mean it?" he asked.

"I mean it." (474-75)

In this passage from Wilkie Collins's No Name, the swindler, Captain Wragge, questions the heroine Magdalen's resolve to go through with her marriage to her cousin (and foresworn enemy) Noel Vanstone. The letters that the Captain holds out protect her false identity. They also stand as the visible symbol of Magdalen's conflicted desires. To order Captain Wragge to destroy the letters would be to release herself from the miserable prospect of using a disguise she hates to marry a man she hates (probably a little less than the disguise itself). Yet, the marriage to despicable, degenerate Noel Vanstone is the culmination of all of Magdalen's plotting and efforts-to marry him is to realize her desires. This conversation-- like many others in the novel-underscores the fact that it is Magdalen's power to choose that determines the course of the plot (in both senses of the word). The question and answer format of the conversation enacts a verbal contract through which Magdalen reasserts her commitment to masochistic suffering.

I begin with this quote because it highlights precisely the reasons that No Name has been (and still is) problematic for sensation novel readers and critics. First, the novel makes the reader privy to all the secret plotting and machinations, so that the tension of the plot cannot hinge on unrevealed secrets or hidden motives and actions. It demands, instead, that the reader's suspenseful pleasure come from experiencing, in minute detail, the execution of a clandestine plot. Second, the protagonist Magdalen is neither an heroically noble and pure suffering heroine, nor a demonically conniving and evil villainess. Instead, the novel tries to present her as somewhere in between-a transgressive, guilty heroine, in constant and painful conflict with herself. These generic differences beg the question, what kind of reader is produced by No Name? The answer to this question very much depends how we conceive of the sensation reader. I want to make it clear that my argument does not depend on describing an imaginary reader's "response" to the novel, but in defining an "ideal" reader who is posited by the text itself. In large part my argument assumes a Victorian reading public.1 This is a public which one imagines as: first, well-versed in the ideology of separate spheres and the sanctity of the domestic sphere, but increasingly involved in questions of Woman's agency and rights; second, primed by widespread sensational journalism to expect hidden crimes in the domestic sphere; and third, well-- conditioned to respond to the affective stimuli of the sensation novel, yet deeply suspicious of the category of "sensation fiction" itself. Given these criteria, No Name paradoxically demands a reader who is well-disciplined and deviant-one who understands and accepts literary and social conventions, even as he or she is driven by the affective power of the novel to feel at odds with those conventions. Through its manipulation of the tropes of heroine (and villainess), plot, and sympathy, the novel forces the reader to examine individual agency in relation to the productive and regulatory mechanisms of disciplinary power.

1. Generic Knowledge

In 1982 when Patrick Brantlinger wrote "What is 'Sensational' about the 'Sensation Novel'?" he articulated the parameters of the genre thus:

The sensation novel was and is sensational partly because of content: it deals with crime, often murder as an outcome of adultery and sometimes of bigamy, in apparently proper, bourgeois, domestic settings ....

The best sensation novels are also, as Kathleen Tillotson points out, "novels with a secret," or sometimes several secrets, in which new narrative strategies were developed to tantalise the reader by withholding information rather than divulging it. (30)

Critics since Brantlinger have provided lucid and compelling accounts of how the "novel with a secret" functions in, to use Foucault's language, the production, regulation, and distribution of disciplinary power. D.A. Miller argues in The Novel and the Police that the very fictional representation of a mystery that must be discovered is in itself an exercise of a disciplinary power. He writes: "To the extent that the genre of the novel belongs to the disciplinary field that it portrays, our attention needs to go beyond the policing forces represented in the novel to focus on what Foucault might call the 'micro-politics' of novelistic convention" (21). Similarly, in Mixed Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich maintains that the sensation novel's display of (particularly female) excessive affect works as a mechanism for producing, regulating, and containing that excess. According to Cvetkovich: "The readers who are excited by the sensational lure of [the novels'] mysteries are provided with experiences of affect that are ultimately regulated and controlled" (7).

Through readings of the sensation novel like Miller's and Cvekovitch's, we have become proficient at uncovering the discursive significance of the sensation novel's mysterious woman whose secrets are systematically revealed and luridly detailed-simultaneously titillating with the spectacle of transgression and reassuring with the exercise of disciplinary power over that transgression. Within this framework, the detective (professional or lay) occupies the position of disciplinarian, and the possessor of the secret becomes the subject to be discovered, categorized, described, and maintained in a state of "compulsory visibility." Think, for example, of Lady Audley's Secret. Clearly, in this "novel with a secret" the reader's investment lies with the mechanisms of disciplinary power that can uncover and render legible the secret crimes of its murderous femme fatale. As critics like Anthea Trodd have noted, this investment produces an identificatory position that is implicitly if not explictly masculine. In other words, femininity is presented as the mysterious and sinister unknown, while masculinity occupies the position of empirical observation and truth-seeking.' Here the ultimate payoff for being subjected to what Brantlinger describes as "narrative strategies ... [which] tantalise the reader by withholding information rather than divulging it" is that one does, like Braddon's indefatigable detective Robert Audley, eventually uncover the secrets) of dangerous femininity.

Although it lacks dangerous femininity (unless, perhaps, one reads Count Fosco as effeminate), The Woman in White undertakes a very similar narrative project. In its "Preamble" Collins remarks: "As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now.... Thus, the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness-with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect" (1). Clearly, acting as the "judicial authority" in relation to the plot of a novel places the reader squarely on the side of institutional discipline and in a position to "render visible" the secrets of the novel. In The Woman in White, as in Lady Audley's Secret, the appeal lies in uncovering the mysteries of a convoluted plot in order to reveal a "direct and intelligible" truth.

Whereas this model works for a great many sensation novels, it fails to explain novels which rely on the reader's investment in keeping the secret. In No Name we find not a mystery to be solved, or a secret to be detected, but a detailed examination "behind the scenes" of a sinister plot. Because the plot is revealed at the outset to the reader, but not to the detective(s) within the novel, the reader's investment lies with the transgressor, the plotter, and not the detective. Without denying the pleasure that comes from occupying the position, alongside the detective, of voyeur and disciplinarian, No Name provides the reader with a very different textual pleasure-that of a masochistic identification with the hunted and ultimately disciplined transgressive subject. I don't mean to say that No Name is not a sensation novel (indeed, it fulfills all but one of Brantlinger's criteria). Neither do I want to claim that it is alone in its production of reader identification with a transgressive heroine. One thinks, for example, of Mary Braddon's Aurora Floyd, or even Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne in which the guilty woman is also the sympathetic heroine. Even so, I would argue that Aurora and Lady Isabel Vane, though transgressive and even, in Lady Isabel's case, masochistic, do not provide the same active, self-motivated models of femininity-they are not so deliberate in their pursuit of punishment; neither are they rewarded for their sins. For my purpose in this essay, however, answering the question of whether the novel does or does not fulfill the generic conventions of sensation fiction is less important than considering how it manipulates those conventions and to what purpose. As Raymond Williams cautions:

Genre-classification, and theories to support various types of classification, can indeed be left to academic and formalist studies.... [Genre] is neither an ideal type nor a traditional order nor a set of technical rules. It is in the practical and variable combination and even fusion of what are, in abstraction, different levels of the social material process that what we have known as genre becomes a new kind of constitutive evidence. (185)

With this in mind, we would do better to ask not "Why doesn't this novel live up to the aims of its genre?" but rather pursue the more interesting question of "What exactly is the aim of this novel?" By employing a critical lens that accommodates both material conditions and practices and psychic investments in the relationship between novel and reader this redirected examination of No Name, with its production of a differently-desiring, differently-disciplined reader, offers a useful model for critics to rethink what have become rather entrenched assumptions about the novel's contribution to the production of disciplined subjects.

That Collins himself saw No Name as an experiment seems clear from his prefatory comments to the 1862 edition:

It will be seen that the narrative related in these pages has been constructed on a plan, which differs from the plan followed in my last novel, and in some other of my works published at an earlier date. The only Secret contained in this book, is revealed midway in the first volume. From that point, all the main events of the story are purposely foreshadowed, before they take place-my present design being to rouse the reader's interest in following the train of circumstances by which these foreseen events are brought about. In trying this new ground, I am not turning my back in doubt on the ground which I have passed over already. My one object in following a new course, is to enlarge the range of my studies in the art of writing fiction, and to vary the form in which I make my appeal to the reader, as attractively as I can. (5-6)

No Name doesn't offer the same alluring mastery over Truth that his earlier success The Woman in White did, so Collins must rely on other means to "rouse the reader's interest." The appeal of the novel lies in the reader's finding "attractive" the anticipation of predictable events. In other words, if the suspense of the earlier novel lies in the revelation of truth, then the suspense of the later work lies in the exploration of consequences.

It is clear from its literary reception that the "new course" of No Name was not as attractive to readers as Collins had hoped. As Mrs. Oliphant remarked in a review of No Name in Blackwood's Magazine:

Mr. Wilkie Collins, after the skilful and startling complications of The Woman in White-his grand effort-has chosen, by way of making his heroine piquant and interesting in his next attempt, to throw her into a career of vulgar and aimless trickery and wickedness, with which it is impossible to have a shadow of sympathy, but from all the pollutions of which he intends us to believe that she emerges, at the cheap cost of a fever, as pure, as high-minded, and as spotless as the most dazzling white of heroines.... It is true that, if [the story] is to move at all with anything deeper than superficial touches, it must be able to strike boldly upon the deeper chords of human life and passion; but it is noway necessary for the production of these strong effects that the worse should be made to appear the better cause, or that it should be represented as possible that certain qualities of mind or amiabilities of temper are sufficient to bring a character safely through all kinds of actual and positive wrongdoing without fatal or even serious damage. This is a great mistake in art, as well as a falsehood to nature. (170)

Mrs. Oliphant's objection to the novel highlights the reader's difficulty with it: Magdalen is a sympathetic heroine, but one cannot sympathize with her without also sympathizing with or condoning her "vulgar and aimless trickery and wickedness." If she were not sympathetic, then that trickery and wickedness would not create such a moral stumbling block; Magdalen would merely be a spectacular villainess. But even if one were to view her antagonistically (a position not at all encouraged by the text), one's expectations would still be thwarted because Magdalen doesn't get punished for her wickedness. There is no comfortable reassertion of law and order at the end of the novel that leaves the villains properly contained (imprisoned in a mental institution, or executed by an agent of a secret Italian society, for example) and "the good people all happy and at peace" (Braddon 3: 10, 447). Just as the novel rewards villainous behavior, so it promotes guilty identification that allows the reader to enjoy moral transgression by association.

2. The Masochistic Heroine

In No Name we have a heroine who not only contradicts the virtuous ideal, but also highlights the virtues of her elder and more passive sister Norah. When the parents' bigamy and the daughters' plight is revealed the narrator muses, through the governess Miss Garth:

Was the promise of the future shining with prophetic light through the surface-- shadow of Norah's reserve; and darkening with prophetic gloom, under the surface-- glitter of Magdalen's bright spirits? If the life of the elder sister was destined henceforth to be the ripening ground of the undeveloped Good that was in her-- was the life of the younger doomed to be the battle-field of mortal conflict with the roused forces of Evil in herself? (147)

The answer, which is reiterated throughout the novel, is a resounding yes. It is not just that Magdalen's actions are misinterpreted by others in the novel as bad;3 she really does think and do evil things.

But, if Magdalen is not a helpless, virtuous victim of a conspiracy like Norah or Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White, then neither is she a spectacularly demonized villainess like Lucy Audley in Lady Audley's Secret. Rather, she is an active agent in her own suffering. She conspires against her enemies and she suffers acute moral pangs as a result. She transgresses, even as her "natural delicacy" revolts. She writes to her sister: "Try to forgive me. I have struggled against myself, till I am worn out in the effort. I am the wretchedest of living creatures .... If you knew what my thoughts are; if you knew how hard I have fought against them, and how horribly they have gone on haunting me in the lonely quiet of this house, you would pity and forgive me" (I: 181). Magdalen's distress in contemplating her transgression and its attendant punishments is tempered with the imagined pay-off for those transgressions-the pity and forgiveness of a beloved sister. Her pleasure in transgressing comes from imagining herself being observed and judged, pitied and forgiven, by Norah. Notice, Magdalen imagines that Norah's knowledge of her wicked thoughts would place Norah in a position to sympathize with rather than despise Magdalen. Likewise, the novel itself imagines a relationship with its reader in which intimate descriptions of the heroine's transgressions and suffering will place the reader in a similarly sympathetic position, despite the reader's knowledge that Magdalen's behavior is wrong.

I want to be careful here when I posit Magdalen as a masochistic heroine. Masochism and femininity have typically been considered as either redundant or incompatible terms. As Jonathan Noyes' writes in his insightful work The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism:

The masochist's body was invented in the late nineteenth century as a machine that could do one of two things, depending on how it was regarded, how it was used, or where it was positioned. It could reduce socially nonproductive aggressivity to an individual pathology, or it could transform social control into sexual pleasure. The one use of the masochist's body supports the project of socially sanctioned aggression and the various stereotypes society has developed in order to invest cultural identity with aggressivity. The other use of the masochist's body subverts this project, initiating an unsettling process whereby cultural identity is parodied, masqueraded, and appropriated in the name of pleasure. These two uses initiate all the conflicts surrounding masochism as we understand it today. (9-10)

It is not, I think, too much of an overstatement to say that these two uses of masochism have been gendered for critics and proponents of masochism: the normative (reassuring) kind attached to feminine interpellation, the "unsettling" parodic kind attached to masculine perversion.4 This paradox arises from as far back as Freud's "The Economic Problem of Masochism" in which he describes the masochistic fantasy as placing "the subject in a characteristically female situation ... that is, being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby" (277). In other words, the perverse fantasies of the male masochist constitute normative female experience. There is no room to imagine a female perversion that might be called masochistic-women are, by definition, masochists.

Following this logic, feminist literary critics have tended to elide the terms femininity, passivity, and masochism, thereby reading scenes of female suffering as satisfying some sinister, masculine-identified "gaze."5 In Schools of Sympathy: Gender and Identification through the Novel, Nancy Roberts describes the role of such protagonists as Clarissa, Tess, Isabel Archer, and Hester Prynne in precisely these terms:

In the figure of the heroine/victim is conjoined the activity of the hero and the passivity of the victim. Such a conjunction raises perplexing problems. One of these is that the "heroism" or "greatness" of the heroine is measured by means other than her actions. For she can do, can move, very little. (After all, as victim she is less an actor than one who is acted upon.) Her heroism is measured instead by the pity and sympathy she elicits from others, by the extent to which she moves them (us) .... [She] is placed as an icon, the purpose of which is to draw and invite our response. Often she is represented as having little life or character of her own. (6)6

In this way, masochism becomes the big blank of passivity, of status quo, of the lack of radical potential for women.

This impasse highlights another problem for thinking through masochism: that is, if woman's suffering is indeed normative, then that suffering is somehow more "real"-more fundamentally tied to experience-than the "pretend" masochism of the perverse man who playfully reproduces scenes of violence. As Jonathan Noyes remarks:

On the one hand, masochism is a paradoxical strategy for removing social violence from the sexual scene. It is a limited and controlled enactment of violence, aimed at escaping the punitive and disciplinary function-the subjectivizing function-- which our culture attaches to violence. This is the case even when the masochistic staging produces a violence which is extreme and a hurt which is real. But on the other hand, masochism is a continuation of social violence. It defuses violence, rendering it harmless and profitable, while perpetuating its forms. (14)

According to this logic, if pain is the result of real punishment, then it can't be liberatory, and certainly shouldn't be erotic. Pretend punishment occurs in a fantasy arena where it somehow escapes or nullifies the production of the subject. Real punishment is productive and regulatory. The problem with this kind of bifurcation is that it precludes the eroticization of the real or the regulatory. Or, to put it another way, it denies the possibility that masochism can exist outside of sexual fantasy, or that the real world can contain opportunities for erotic pleasure. Given that we have been able in recent years to theorize the politics of sex, it seems reasonable that we also acknowledge the sexualization of politics, the endless possibilities for everyday encounters, relationships, and objects, to be invested with erotic power. We need to revise our reading of masochism to avoid essentialized divisions between real subject-producing punishment (as a tool of disciplinary power) and fake production-resistant punishment (as parodic practice), and to avoid relying on mutually exclusive definitions of masochism as having to do with either normative femininity or radically perverse masculinity.

Magdalen's role in No Name bears close examination precisely because it allows us to consider the perverse masochistic female. Significantly, Magdalen is an independent agent who is able to act on her own behalf. As she says to Captain Wragge, after she has run away from her friends: "Suppose I am discovered? ... Who has any authority over me? Who can take me back, if I don't choose to go?" (201). More significantly, she uses her independence not to escape the "punitive and disciplinary function ... [of] violence," but to eroticize her encounters with that violence. It is not that she chooses a course of suffering over one of happiness and ease. Indeed, her other option, to accept the loss of her fortune and earn a living as a governess, certainly involves a generous amount of humiliation and pain for Norah, her virtuous sister. The difference in Magdalen's course of action lies in her choosing to desire, to earn her punishment. According to Jonathan Noyes: "masochism is not the love of submissiveness. It is not the pursuit of unpleasure or humiliation. It is a complex set of strategies for transforming submissiveness, pain, and unpleasure into sexual pleasure" (11). Magdalen uses her relative independence to enter into contractual alliances or relationships that allow her to transgress and to be punished.

The concept of the contract is crucial to understanding No Name's exploration of masochism because (particularly for Victorian thinkers) it describes a social condition in which the individual has a basic level of agency.7 In 1861 Henry Summer Maine confidently asserted in Ancient Law that the contract was the foremost distinguishing feature of "civilized" society:

There are few general propositions concerning the age to which we belong which seem at first sight to be received with readier concurrence than the assertion that the society of our day is mainly distinguished from that of preceding generations by the largeness of the sphere which is occupied in it by Contract.... Not many of us are so unobservant as not to perceive that in innumerable cases where old law fixed a man's position irreversibly at his birth, modern law allows him to create it for himself by convention. (252)

Being able to contract means that one has a certain amount of power over one's subjectivity. In other words, it means that one can, to a certain extent, choose the ways in which one interacts with disciplinary power. For this reason, the contract is fundamental for articulating the masochist's relationship to his or her master. As Wanda says to Severin in Venus in Furs: "What is the point of having a slave in a country where slavery is common practice? ... If we live in a cultivated, sensible, Philistine society, then you will belong to me, not by law, right or power, but purely on account of my beauty and of my whole being. The idea is most exciting" (197).

According to Gilles Deleuze, who writes of the masochist (as opposed to the sadist), in his essay "Coldness and Cruelty":

We are no longer in the presence of a torturer seizing upon a victim and enjoying her all the more because she is unconsenting and unpersuaded. We are dealing instead with a victim in search of a torturer and who needs to educate, persuade and conclude an alliance with the torturer in order to realize the strangest Of schemes. This is why advertisements are part of the language of masochism while they have no place in true sadism, and why the masochist draws up contracts while the sadist abominates and destroys them. The sadist is in need of institutions, the masochist of contractual relations. (20)

The masochistic contract requires punishment, suffering, sacrifice, but most importantly, it demands agency. Passive suffering alone is not enough-one must consent to suffer. The question then becomes, not whether one occupies a passive relationship to disciplinary authority, but how one came to occupy that position. Masochism demands, as a precondition, a certain amount of agency that can be relinquished. This does not mean that only men, as (typically) active agents, can be masochists. It does mean that the masochistic subject must have some power-gender, racial or social position, marital or maternal influence, economic security, etc., even or perhaps especially, the power to stop reading-which can be sacrificed. It also means, that as an active, contracting subject, the masochist does not capitulate to disciplinary power so much as engage with it, even manipulate it for his or her desired results. Thus, the masochist becomes, in a way not anticipated by Bentham's Panopticon, a knowing, albeit disciplined, subject, for whom the processes of self production, regulation, and control are at all times visible, explicit, and, most importantly, eroticized. The contract is the site of that visibility-the articulation of the subject's relationship to and under the law.

3. Affect is a Contract

How then does the reader's identification with No Name's active, masochistic heroine work? Affect is the control a novel exerts over its reader-the means by which the reader's emotions and sympathies are "produced, regulated and controlled" by the text. To be an educated reader is to be trained to respond correctly to affective cues. Reading the novel implies a tacit agreement to identify with the protagonist, and if the protagonist transgresses and suffers the punishment for that transgression, then so does the reader.8 Magdalen is not the murderous femme fatale we love to hate, but a loveable heroine whose sins disturb us and cause us pain, just as they disturb and pain her, and whose punishment we both dread and expect, just as she dreads and expects it. Thus, in No Name, the only way to avoid the pain of identification is to stop reading, thereby breaking the contract between text and reader.

In the novel, the reader's suspense is produced (and painfully sustained) by frozen scenes of anticipation, like the one quoted at the beginning of this article, that contemplate the still imminent punishment which Magdalen (again and again) agrees to bring upon herself. In one of her first uses of her power to suffer, Magdalen insists, despite repeated pleas from her sister and her friends not to do so, on seeing the letter from her uncle which gives the final refusal of the sisters' claim to any of the inheritance:

"May I see it?"

Mr. Pendril hesitated, and looked uneasily from Magdalen to Miss Garth, and from Miss Garth back again to Magdalen.

"Pray oblige me by not pressing your request," he said. "It is surely enough that you know the result of the instructions. Why should you agitate yourself to no purpose by reading them? They are expressed so cruelly; they show such abominable want of feeling, that I really cannot prevail upon myself to let you see them."

"I am sensible of your kindness, Mr. Pendril, in wishing to spare me pain. But I can bear pain; I promise to distress nobody. Will you excuse me if I repeat my request?"

She held out her hand-the soft, white, virgin hand that had touched nothing to soil it or harden it yet. (152-53)

This scene works on two levels at once-addressing both Magdalen's and the reader's masochism. The interchange is expressed unequivocally in terms of both contract law and sexual defilement. The exchange between Pendril and Magdalen, like the one quoted at the beginning of the article, enacts the ceremony of the verbal contract described by Henry Maine: "Now, if we reflect for a moment, we shall see that this obligation to put the promise interrogatively ... by effectually breaking the tenor of the conversation, prevents the attention from wandering over a dangerous pledge" (273). For the reader this scene invokes the contract in that it highlights precisely the "dangerous pledge" we make if we agree to identify with Magdalen-that we will be forced to experience over and over her assertion of the choice to suffer-and it reaffirms that we are willing to identify with her anyway. The passage provides the reader with the pain/pleasure of reading an intensely suspenseful and overwrought scene in which Magdalen's will and capacity to suffer are showcased ("I can bear pain").

The danger to which Pendril draws Magdalen's attention and which she accepts nonetheless is that the letter is an object capable of polluting the purity of her "virgin hand." Note, however, that Collins refuses to use rape imagery. The thing we see foremost is not penetration, but a grasping hand:

Line by line-without once looking up from the pages before her-Magdalen read those atrocious sentences through, from beginning to end. The other persons assembled in the room, all eagerly looking at her together, saw the dress rising and falling faster and faster over her bosom-saw the hand in which she lightly held the manuscript at the outset, close unconsciously on the paper, and crush it, as she advanced nearer and nearer to the end. (155-56)

For Magdalen, reading the uncle's letter means laying claim to an instrument of the Law that exerts control over her and her sister, and deriving erotic pleasure from the pain it produces.

The uncle's letter becomes emblematic throughout the novel of Magdalen's erotic pleasure in pain: she puts a copy of it, along with a copy of her father's will and a lock of her lover's hair in a white silk purse which she carries in her bosom, taking it out at key moments to re-emphasize the emotional stakes of her plot. Clearly, the law and sexual desire here become intermingled in Magdalen's subjectivity. The purse stands unsubtly for enclosed and pure (white silk) female sexuality, yet the purse is already penetrated by the mechanisms of the law (the will, the uncle's letter) and with the sexualized symbol of her love for Frank (the lock of hair). Furthermore, the objects together symbolically describe her own state of suspense. The will might represent either her own sense of guilt at having caused her father's death or the inherited taint of his bigamy; the letter represents the punishment and suffering she will incur by scheming against her uncle; and the lock of hair represents her ultimate reward for having suffered. As Deleuze writes: "Formally speaking, masochism is a state of waiting.... The masochist waits for pleasure as something that is bound to be late, and expects pain as the condition that will finally ensure (both physically and morally) the advent of pleasure" (71).

It is interesting to note that the purse is productive of Magdalen's pleasure and pain entirely through her own manipulation of it. In a later scene we see how her suspension between her conflicting desires (be a bad girl and win her money back, or be a good girl and quit subjecting herself to punishment) is figured in the purse. While contemplating her ability to use her sexuality to control Noel Vanstone:

'I can twist any man alive round my finger,' she thought, with a smile of superb triumph.... She shrank from following that thought to its end, with a sudden horror of herself: she drew back from the glass, shuddering, and put her hands over her face.... Her eager fingers snatched the little white silk bag from its hiding-place in her bosom; her lips devoured it with silent kisses.... The tears gushed into her eyes. She passionately dried them, restored the bag to its place. (306)

"Triumph" in her power to do evil is transformed into horror and self-loathing, which is then immediately transformed into abject pleasure-Magdalen embraces with "eager fingers" and "devouring" lips what Mrs. Oliphant described as her "course of vulgar and aimless trickery and wickedness." It is this suspension between conflicting desires that drives the plot of No Name.

4. The Rewards of the Contract

If, as Deleuze claims, masochism is a state of waiting, how does that prolonged suspension between pleasure and pain resolve itself in the novel? Magdalen's plot to marry Noel Vanstone succeeds with the narrator's grim declaration: "It was done. The awful words which speak from earth to Heaven were pronounced. The children of the two dead brothers-inheritors of the implacable enmity which had parted their parents-were Man and Wife" (511). This is the point at which the reader's relationship to the novel becomes most painful, and it becomes most difficult to sustain the masochistic contract with the text. The remaining third of the novel ekes out a bleak denouement in which Magdalen's fate is more and more thoroughly sealed. As Captain Wragge tells his wife, "She has gone her way.... Cry your cry out-I don't deny she's worth crying for" (513). Though Magdalen is (technically) still alive, the novel's prophetic gloom seems to have been realized in the irremediable loss of her character. She has lost her purity; her chance to repent before it is too late; her connections to friends and family (the love of whom might have "saved her from herself"). In the remaining chapters, Magdalen even loses the money for which she's given up everything else, when her husband writes her out of his will and then dies moments later. She gives up her position as a lady and her last few hundred pounds when she trades places with her servant to go in search of a Secret Trust that might allow her to contest the last-minute will. While searching for the Trust, she is caught and thus gives up any claim she had to the law's protection. Furthermore, throughout the course of her plotting, she has sacrificed her health, so that when she runs away from her employer's house with the law in pursuit, she succumbs to a life-threatening fever.

The reader's painful suspense here is no longer tied so much to the tension of Magdalen's conflicted desires and the increasingly faint chance of her redemption. Suspense depends on the reader's familiarity with novelistic conventions and the inevitability of punishment equal to or exceeding the crime. Fallen women, no matter how sympathetically rendered or whether they finally repent, do not come to good ends. (Lady Isabel Vane in East Lynne, Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, or Edith Dombey in Dombey and Son are just a few examples.) We know, therefore, that the best Magdalen can achieve is a deathbed scene of confession that elicits Norah's forgiveness. To continue reading after the marriage is merely to confirm what we already know will happen. In this way, the reader is punished for entering into a contractual agreement with the novel:

If this really were how No Name ended, with Magdalen's tragic but necessary death, then one could easily agree with Ann Cvetkovich that the novel provides its reader with "experiences of affect that are ultimately regulated and controlled" (7). A "natural order" would be reasserted in which there was a causal relationship between good behavior and reward and between bad behavior and punishment. And, Magdalen would be reduced to anon-subject, an object lesson without any means to interpret or articulate herself in relation to disciplinary power. This would indeed offer a disturbing scenario for the feminist reader of masochism in the novel, for it would prove that masochism for women means annihilation and self-destruction. In other words, that it offers nothing more than the fulfillment of Magdalen's assertion: "'I have lost all care for myself. I have only one end in life now; and the sooner I reach it-and die-the better'" (338).

But No Name does not end this way. In the last few pages Magdalen gets every good thing that the logic of the genre and social mores say she doesn't deserve. She returns to family and friends. She regains her lost 80,000 pounds, her health, and even the love of a man much superior to her original lover. This ending suggests that the rewards for masochism are rich and plentiful, not only for the transgressive heroine, but for the reader who has given up all hope of a happy ending and has still suffered through the last quarter of the book. One might be tempted to assume that this ending signifies some kind of rebirth on the heroine's part as the narrator's rather smug assertion might suggest: "So, she made the last sacrifice of the old perversity and the old pride. So, she entered on the new and nobler life" (737). Her suffering has apparently been severe enough to allow her to "emerge ... as pure, as high-minded, and as spotless as the most dazzling white of heroines." But Mrs. Oliphant didn't find this moral renaissance convincing, and neither should we. Magdalen is not only brought "safely through all kinds of actual and positive wrongdoing without fatal or even serious damage" but also achieves happiness because she avows and does not repent her past life.

What exactly does a "new and nobler life" with the Captain involve? Here again we see the significance of Magdalen's white silk purse. In Kirke we have an amalgamation of the dead father (for whom she mistakes Kirke in the delirium of her fever) and the object of desire, Frank. But, we also have the third portion of her collection of fetishes. Kirke also represents for Magdalen disciplinary authority-the threat of punishment. Before she can enter into the contractual relationship of marriage with Kirke, Magdalen must make another kind of contractual alliance with him: she must confess her sins and invite his judgement. "Oh don't encourage me in my own miserable weakness! Help me to tell the truth-force me to tell it, for my own sake, if not for yours!" (728). The final reward for the heroine is realized only through the reiterated threat of disciplinary authority in the possibility that Kirke might reject her for her transgressions. That he does not reject her in no way erases the specter of punishment. Nor should we forget that it is the visibility of this punitive discipline that is crucial for the masochist's sexual pleasure. As the last scene demonstrates:

The next instant, she was folded in is arms, and was shedding delicious tears of joy, with her face hidden on his bosom.

'Do I deserve my happiness?' she murmured, asking the one question at last. 'Oh, I know how the poor narrow people who have never felt and never suffered, would answer me, if I asked them what I ask you. If they knew my story, they would forget all the provocation, and only remember the offence-they would fasten on my sin, and pass all my suffering by. But you are not one of them?' (740)

Here Magdalen has the last word on her subjectivity. She asks "Do I deserve my happiness?" And she answers (implicitly) "Yes, because I have 'felt and suffered.'"

No Name demands, in the final scene as much as anywhere else in the novel, that the mechanisms of disciplinary power be visible and explicit. It is only through their visibility that one can linger and derive erotic pleasure from them, as the text invites the reader to do. In the final scene of the novel Magdalen's passionate tears in her moments of abject humiliation are converted to "delicious tears of joy." The masturbatory "silent kisses" with which she has formerly "devoured" her white silk purse are transformed into sexual union in the form of a verbal and non-verbal contract between Kirke and Magdalen:

'Tell me the truth!' she repeated.

'With my own lips?'

'Yes!' she answered eagerly. 'Say what you think of me, with your own lips.'

He stooped, and kissed her. (741)

The moral of the story is not that disciplinary power doesn't work, but that it works too well. Here the subject of the Panopticon, having internalized her position of "compulsory visibility," uses that position to perform "sinful actions" and experiences the erotic pleasure of the punishment attendant thereon. Furthermore, in eroticizing the disciplinary scene, masochism produces a "doubling-back" effect by which the "compulsory visibility" of the Panopticon is turned in on itself. Paradoxically, the novel makes tangible the succesful machinations of disciplinary power-a power which, theoretically, is only effective insofar as it is intangible. No Name displays, through Magdalen, the production of a subject who is able, if not to escape, at least to examine and manipulate the machinery of her interpellation. Likewise, the novel allows the reader, through identification with the masochistic heroine, to participate knowingly in the process of discipline.

Ironically, since D.A. Miller challenged the "subversion hypothesis" of literature that presupposes a radically destabilized (and therefore politically radical or liberatory) text, more often than not the "real" detective of the sensation novel has been the critic who "reveals" or "provides evidence for" the novel's "secret," "masked," "invisible," alliance with disciplinary power (xi). The new detective's role is to uncover the novel's secret crime-its complicity with (in Miller's words) the "totalizing power" of the social order (xiii). No Name thwarts this critical project by refusing to offer the critic such a secret. Collins's preliminary disclaimer that "the only Secret contained in this book, is revealed midway in the first volume" (Preface 5-6), might well be addressed to the novel's critics who lie in wait to "catch" it producing disciplined subjects.

Given this fact, let me suggest in closing what an examination of No Name offers to readers of sensation fiction or of novels in general. No Name's potential for subverting disciplinary power lies in its faithful and loving representations ofand in the reader's masochistic pleasure in experiencing-the mechanisms of that very power. Certainly many novels may portray suffering or self-sacrificing protagonists, and many more may produce suffering in the act of reading them without offering the same promise of satisfaction (Dude the Obscure is an excellent example of both). If No Name is not unique in its combination of these valences of pleasure and pain, it is at least very, very unusual. The unusual qualities of this novel are there, I believe, to remind us of two significant things: first, that no matter what position the reader assumes in relation to plot, narrator, or character (masochistic, sadistic, voyeuristic, etc.), at some level any act of reading implies a relinquishing of control to the text. To pick up a novel and read is to consent to submit to its affective power and to collaborate in the production of our selves as disciplined reading subjects. Second, and more importantly, No Name reminds us that despite our submission to the novel, the discipline of novel-reading does not necessarily produce a "docile" reader. Discipline does not preclude agency, even perverse or deviant agency. No Name calls for ways of reading that don't necessarily regulate, control, or contain desire.

1 Understandably, the problems posed by the novel are very different for Victorian and late-- twentieth century readers. The same transgressive qualities and action that made Magdalen shocking to Victorian audiences can seem, to a late-twentieth century audience, disappointingly incomplete. We who have been taught to identify with morally ambiguous heroines (like Melrose Place's super-bitch Amanda, for example), can find Magdalen's sins nominal, and her suffering overblown and self-defeating. Magdalen doesn't, after all, actually murder anyone.

2 Trodd writes: "The narrative [of Lady Audley's Secret] is largely presented from Robert's point of view, and like Basil is a masculine enquiry into the mystery of domesticity. Robert, who initially endorses the domestic ideal Lady Audley so brilliantly impersonates, gradually discovers the sinister secrets which lie behind her realisation of this ideal" (105).

3 Think, for example, of the suspicious reticence of The Moonstone's heroine Rachel Verinder in regard to the disappearance of the diamond.

4 See, for example, Leo Bersani's account of the "shattering" of the self through masochism in The Freudian Body or Carol Siegel's Male Masochism.

5 For a good critique of masochism as a problem for feminist theory, see Lynda Hart's analysis: "Ironically, while feminists continue to argue with each other about lesbian sexual practices, masochism, the term that has become synonymous for some feminists with internalized oppression, has undergone a theoretical renaissance in which the erotics of submission have been reclaimed by a diverse group of scholars as an emancipatory sexuality for men" (87).

6 Similarly, Michelle Masse describes masochism as one of the primary facts of women's acculturation: "Masochism is the end result of a long and varyingly successful cultural training. This training leaves its traces upon individual characters and upon the Gothic itself, which broods upon its originating trauma, the denial of autonomy or separation for women, throughout the centuries" (3). Even more nuanced arguments about female suffering, like Ann Cvekovitch's chapter, "Crying for Power: East Lynne and the Maternal Melodrama" in Mixed Feelings, to which I myself am deeply indebted, tend to erase the agency of victimized heroines.

7 In order to enter into a contract one must first have agency; therefore, a society in which the contract is possible is a society that allows more agency for more people. This was particularly pertinent to the "Woman Question" as laws regarding women's rights to property, divorce,

etc., were being debated and revised during the 1860s. In fact, as many critics have noted, the changing laws often end up working into the plots of sensation novels.

8 This is not to say that every act of reading implies masochistic identification. Indeed, I think James Kincaid and others (Laura Mulvey in film criticism, for example) are often correct in assessing the reader's relationship to plot and character as one of sadistic voyeurism. Neither do I wish to imply that a masochistic engagement with discipline on the part of a reader necessarily renders violence more harmless or subversive than would a sadistic engagement.

Works Cited

Bersani, Leo. The Freudian Body: psychoanalysis and art. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley's Secret. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Brantlinger, Patrick. "What is 'Sensational' about the 'Sensation Novel'?" Ed. Lyn Pycket. Wilkie Collins. New York: St. Martin's, 1998. 30-57.

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. London: Chancellor, 1994. No Name. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

-. The Woman in White. New York: Bantam, 1985.

Cvetkovich, Ann. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992.

Deleuze, Gilles. "Coldness and Cruelty." Masochism. Trans. Jean McNeil. New York: Zone Books, 1991. 9-138.

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Rutland: Tuttle, 1994.

-. Dombey and Son. New York: Oxford UP, 1982.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York. Vintage, 1979.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Economic Problem of Masochism." Ed. Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly. Essential Papers on Masochism. New York: New York UP, 1995. 274-85.

Hart, Lynda. Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.

Maine, Henry Summer. Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas. London: Routledge, 1910.

Masse, Michelle A. In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.

Miller, D.A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Noyes, John K. The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997.

Oliphant, Margaret. "Novels." Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. 94, August 1863.

Roberts, Nancy. Schools of Sympathy: Gender and Identification through the Novel. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1997.

Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von. Venus in Furs. Masochism. Trans. Jean McNeil. New York: Zone Books, 1991. 147-276.

Siegel, Carol. Male Masochism: Modern Revisions of the Story of Love. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.

Trodd, Anthea. Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel. New York: St. Martin's, 1989. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Wood, Mrs. Henry. East Lynne. London: Everyman, 1994.

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