Sabina Fazli Sensational Things - Api.pageplace.de

keepsakes undergird their owner’s self-identity as they materialise relationships, organise their possessor’s biography, and may be deployed to curate and manage moods andemotions. From the mid-century, roughly from the Great Exhibition, to the establishment of photography as the accepted medium for private souvenirs in the last decades ofthe century, the sensation novel developed as a genre that capitalises on the anxietiessurrounding identity and the vulnerability of the home to influences and intrusions fromoutside the domestic sphere. Imagined as unstable, the determinants of family, socialrank, memory, mental ‘sanity,’ ‘race,’ and gender are exposed as unreliable constructsto determine an individual’s ‘true’ identity. Critics have pointed out how Wilkie Collins’s (1824-1889) fiction thematises this fluidity of identity yet allows a (often precarious) reconstruction of identity through material clues (e.g., Pykett, Sensation; BourneTaylor, Secret). I argue that the affinity between the novels Collins published around thesensational 60s and the contemporaneous fashion of, and fascination with, materialkeepsakes has led to the object category’s absorption in sensational plots where it hashitherto been overlooked as an important part of the texts’ object worlds.Reading a selection of Collins’s less studied texts that prominently feature keepsakes, I propose to focus on how mementos enter the texts as significant objects enmeshed with other themes and significantly adding specific discourses that only becomevisible by considering mementos as material objects with lives in- and outside of thetexts. To do so, I draw on the material turn in Victorian studies that has introduced andadapted concepts and methods from object-centred disciplines to the study of literarytexts. I combine this with close readings to do justice to texts that have not yet attractedas much critical attention as the bestsellers of the ‘sensational 60s.’ Apart from tracingthe significance of sentimental souvenirs in the novels, the chapters also offer slightlydifferent angles on the material souvenirs and texts that integrate the readings with topics in existing scholarship, such as colonialism, class, gender, detection, and the Victorian conceptions of the mind.Souvenirs as objects invested with memories that are, in turn, constitutive of the remembering individual’s sense of identity exist on a continuum ranging from the individual and her keepsake to larger communities organising, sharing, and mobilising theirmemories around group-specific memorials and monuments. The latter, which may bereferred to as ‘cultural,’ ‘collective,’ or ‘social’ memory, is the subject of a large bodyof scholarship. Jan Assmann, for example, sketches this continuum in his discussion ofdifferent levels and scales of memory (109):External objects as carriers of memory play a role already on the level of personal memory.Our memory, which we possess as beings equipped with a human mind, exists only inconstant interaction not only with other human memories but also with “things,” outwardsymbols. With respect to things such as Marcel Proust’s famous madeleine, or artifacts,objects, anniversaries, feasts, icons, symbols, or landscapes, the term “memory” is not ametaphor but a metonym based on material contact between a remembering mind and areminding object. Things do not “have” a memory of their own, but they may remind us,may trigger our memory, because they carry memories which we have invested into them,things such as dishes, feasts, rites, images, stories and other texts, landscapes, and other“lieux de memoire.” On the social level, with respect to groups and societies, the role ofexternal symbols becomes even more important, because groups which, of course, do not“have” a memory tend to “make” themselves one by means of things meant as reminders2

such as monuments, museums, libraries, archives, and other mnemonic institutions. (111;emphases in the original)Charting individuals’ engagements with keepsakes, however, is a much more elusiveendeavour. Historically placing the birth of the personal souvenir is, I think, impossible.Some materials that may be recovered, such as hair and foliage, would only register askeepsakes if set, framed, or worked, so that their significance becomes apparent to outsiders. Talia Schaffer writes about the creation of immediate frames or stages for keepsakes that “the curating of the precious object – wrapping it with ribbon, constructing asmall shelf, making a special box, pasting it into a collage – was as important as theobject itself” (14), emphasising the aspect of ‘keeping’ the object apart from otherthings. If encountered out of context, the objects lose their character as souvenirs andmight often as well be mistaken for rubbish. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesespecially thought about and through such personal souvenirs as markers and vessels forrelationships and experiences. In the eighteenth century, Deidre Lynch argues, the confluence of sensibility and the “consumer revolution” created the class of the souvenir asa distinct category:[B]y 1790 [first written record of ‘keepsake’ (OED)] members of the propertied classes hadlearned to want to give and to receive keepsakes from one another [which] bespeaks thereciprocal influence between eighteenth-century people’s love affair with feelings and theirfascination with the new opportunities for acquisitiveness that they discovered in shops.(“Personal” 63; emphasis in the original)In the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility, Anna Ananieva and Christiane Holmargue, keepsakes were integrated in sentimental discourse: Experiments and attempts tosound the boundaries of language to accommodate overpowering feelings includedgestures such as crying, fainting, and blushing, which substitute immediate somaticreactions for words. The search for possibilities to express oneself beyond speech andwriting also led to the incorporation of the sentimental keepsake to stand in for the inadequacy of words to express emotions (163-165). Personal souvenirs are thus caught upin literary and aesthetic negotiations of sensibility and the contingencies of the emerging consumer culture.In the nineteenth century, giving and receiving keepsakes continues as a practicethat was distinct and worthy of description and reflection. Historically, Queen Victoriawas an important model of how to record bourgeois family life in keepsakes. The fashion of observing extended periods of mourning with an elaborate outward display, significantly shaped by Victoria’s response to Prince Albert’s death in 1861, inspired anupsurge in memorial objects remembering deceased family members and friends. Inthis, critics have identified both the rise of secularised mourning and the persistence ofreligious practices in the shape of the Victorian death souvenir. Patricia Jalland arguesthat, as religious certainty dissolved, memory became more important in the grievingprocess (286) and with it, “[g]rave visiting, memorabilia, and likenesses of the dead”(299). Apart from wearing keepsakes as mourning jewellery, commemorative bequestsalso commended personal possessions to legatees’ care, with the intention of combiningusing the object and remembering the giver or directing the fate of a keepsake beyond3

the recipient’s death so that the object’s biography entwines two people’s lives (295299). While Jalland explains the importance of these practices with the waning of religion, Deborah Lutz acknowledges that Victorian “relic culture” (Relics 3) partly owesits reverence for materials relating to the dead body to the Catholic cult of saints (4) aswell as the evangelical celebration of the ‘good death’ and the spiritualists’ belief inmaterial traces as evidence of immaterial presence, which still strongly persisted in anincreasingly secular culture (10). Mementos, Lutz holds, are part of a specifically “Victorian relic culture” and their meanings draw on different currents in nineteenth-centuryculture. For individuals, however, these meanings are liable to change and slide overtime, because[t]he story of Victorian relic culture, [ ] includes in its plot the stirrings of widespreadagnosticism and atheism, the rise of mechanical mementos in photography, and the fadingof material embodiment with the growing commodity culture [ ]. Death keepsakes hadvaried meanings to varied individuals and groups; a single relic might shift in significancedepending on its viewer or possessor. Even to the individuals who most cherished it, thememento’s expressiveness could be blunted or heightened over the years. Sometimescorpses and their leftovers appeared fearful or loathsome to Victorians; other times theywere treated with indifference. (Relics 8)“Death keepsakes” hence draw on a mixture of religiously inspired hope of an afterlifejoining deceased family and friends, the material and affective example of saints’ relics,and encroaching atheism for which mementos provide consolation through their tangibility.3 Mementos were part of institutionalised practices, appearing in formal and informal wills, in manuals on mourning fashion, and as jewels, in the context of emporiaproviding the appropriate attire and jewellery for different stages of mourning (e.g.,Curl 200-204). Although mementos remembering deceased loved ones are an importantcategory, keepsakes can also work to remember an absent person, authenticate livingrelationships, or monologically refer to a moment experienced alone, yet deemed worthremembering through the investment in an object. These objects are even more elusivethan mementos relating to death because they are not necessarily part of ritualisedevents and have attracted less attention.In her study of ‘secular relics,’ Teresa Barnett writes more generally that34Phillippe Ariès summarily traces the origin of the souvenir back to small, sixteenth-centurymemento mori objects. In their design, the coffin holding a skeleton gradually changed in theeighteenth century to include hair in a jewel that retained the shape of a coffin. This, according to Ariès, marks the transition from the memento mori to the memento illius. Images ofgraves persist; however, they acquire the more idyllic shape of classicist mourning picturesthat include willows, female mourners, and graves or urns. In the nineteenth century, Arièsargues, these designs give way to lockets holding hair and miniatures, and forms of jewellerythat may remember a living or deceased person. Historically, the exhortation to contemplatedeath in the memento mori eventually recedes behind the remembrance of another person(586-587).

the nineteenth century saw a particular focus on the small personal articles that werevariously called mementos, tokens, keepsakes, remembrances, and even relics and thatcould include virtually any object: locks of hair, flowers and bits of foliage, photography,clothing, and other personal items. On the one hand, Victorians seem to have preservedsuch things much more widely and persistently than was done in other eras, as evinced bythe repeated references to mementos in diaries, memoirs, and letters from the latter twothirds of the century. On the other hand, they indisputably were uniquely conscious of thememento as a specific cultural form, developing not only a language and literature thatdescribed its effects but specific material practices that enabled it to mean. (57-58)Sonia Solicari points out a development in nineteenth-century engagements with thingsarguing that “there was an increasing investment of emotion in the ephemeral: greetingcards, scrapbooks and music sheet covers. From beautifully illustrated dictionaries ofthe language of flowers, to the manufactured memories of The Keepsake.” She contextualises this investment in the transformed survival of eighteenth-century sentimentalism. Rather than individual and isolated indulgence in inward-looking feeling, however,she argues that the main objective of Victorian sentiment was its “interactive” and“communal” character that fed into aesthetics and a burgeoning art market. Ananievaand Holm hold that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of the souvenirdiffer in the kinds of distances that they were supposed to overcome. The eighteenthcentury keepsake referred to spatial separation while the nineteenth-century owner of akeepsake would have privileged time as the defining feature of a souvenir. This development towards temporal distance, Ananieva and Holm point out, highlights the moment the souvenir has been ‘made’ that recedes into the past while the material keepsake continues to mark its tangibility in the present (167). At the same time as perceptions of time’s importance and the sense of a past slipping away in linear conceptions ofhistory engendered the emphasis on souvenirs as bridging ‘time,’ global networks oftrade, migration, and colonial expansion still made Victorians uniquely susceptible tothe souvenir as a mediator of globally dispersed “social networks” across space:[N]ever before or since, trinkets and ornaments became metonymic placeholders forgeographically disaggregated social networks. All over ‘Greater Britain,’ Victorian loversmade elaborately braided hair-jewelry, parents decorated photographs of far-off childrenwith hair-pieces woven from actual hair, and letter-writers frequently enclosed palpabletokens attesting to an enduring attachment. (Plotz, Portable xiii)In John Plotz’s argument, Britain’s imperial and economic success led to the desire tomake home and social relationships ‘portable’ in material objects that bolstered socialnetworks which were increasingly geographically dispersed.An interesting commercial offshoot of keepsake culture may be found in the fashionable gift books and annuals that were popular in the publishing culture of the earlyand mid-nineteenth century, generically referred to as ‘keepsake books.’ They illustratethe pervasiveness of the category of the keepsake and the implicit and explicitknowledge about its exigencies as a gift, that is, familiarity with “the memento as aspecific cultural form.” From the 1820s to the 1840s, literary annuals were published asgift books, appearing in time for the Christmas market. Their shape goes back to theFrench and German tradition of almanacs and diaries, a medium associated with record5

ing the passage of time and life events. The hallmark of these anthologies was theirlavish decoration that made them an expensive item. Among them, the Keepsake wasthe longest running and most successful of literary annuals, and its title turned into ageneric designation for souvenir books in general, including its derogatory use as anattribute and adjective for whimsical and sentimental verse and illustrations (“keepsake,n.”). In its wake appeared The American Keepsake, Catholic Keepsake, Christian Keepsake, Keepsake Annual, Keepsake of Friendship, Pet Keepsake, Religious Keepsake,and Youth’s Keepsake. Others were published as The Gem, The Amulet, The LiterarySouvenir, Friendship’s Offering, The Gift, The Forget-Me-Not, Remember Me! A NewYear’s Gift or Christmas Present, and The Rose of Sharon (Ledbetter and Hoagwood 35).Economically, the keepsake book catered to the growing and increasingly affluentmiddle classes and their demand for prestigious and fashionable reading, to which thetitles added a sheen of sentimental intimacy. The books were specifically designed aspresents and geared towards women as the recipients of gifts. This is mirrored in their‘feminine’ appearance highlighting visuality and sensuousness both in material and inthe subject matter of prints and engravings (Pulham, “Jewels” 14). The titles referenceobjects that are reminiscent of the “small, personal articles” that could also be cherishedas material souvenirs, such as jewels and flowers. Titles like ‘keepsake,’ ‘gift,’ and‘souvenir’ further instruct the consumer in how to affectively relate to the books as wellas determining the gendered context in which their giving was appropriate. It seems thatthe connection between the literary keepsakes and the material culture of fragmentarykeepsakes was a link deliberately invoked and understood by publishers, buyers, andreaders as the commercial keepsake book could tap the emotions and practices associated with this culture. In his prefatory essay to the Keepsake for 1828, Leigh Hunt drawson this affinity. The passage on the literary keepsake is worth quoting in full as Huntleads over from the commercial and literary to the fragmentary material keepsake andthe properties that slide from one to the other to confer on the keepsake book the sentimental and authentic qualities associated with personal souvenir objects:4As we had nothing to do with the christening, we may be allowed to express ourapprobation of the word Keepsake. It is a good English word; cordial, unpremeditated,concise; extremely to the purpose; and, though plain, implies a value. It also sets usreflecting on keepsakes in general, and on the givers of them; and these ar

This study examines how Wilkie Collins's successful sensational plots are entwined with the histories and properties of the small, overlooked objects that bring . 4.1.1 Hidden Letters and Buried Writing in Collins's Fiction.112 4.1.2 Sarah Leeson Among Things .116 4.1.3 Hands and Touch in the Characterisation of Sarah Leeson .