As the essays in this volume by Carolyn Sale and Katie Adkison clearly demonstrate, King Lear is centrally concerned with virtue. France makes it a priority when choosing Cordelia for his wife, telling her ‘Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon’ (1.1.250). Similarly, Cornwall cites Edmund's ‘virtue and obedience’ when deciding to ‘seize on’ Edmund as his own (2.1.115, 118). The fact that characters as opposite as Cordelia and Edmund are alike ‘seized’ upon on account of their virtue underscores how difficult it can be to determine who and what is truly virtuous. Lear highlights this very problem when he frets and rages about the ‘simular [man] of virtue’ who is actually perjurious and incestuous, as well as the ‘simp’ring dame’ who ‘minces virtue’ but goes to it with ‘riotous appetite’ (3.2.54; 4.5.116, 118, 121). At the end of the play, Albany raises hopes that the problem of virtue's indeterminacy will be fully and finally sorted when he optimistically announces that ‘All friends shall / Taste the wages of their virtue and all foes / The cup of their deservings’ (5.3.278–80). Of course, these hopes are dashed almost instantly by the death of Lear, leading to widespread disappointment at the play's dramatisation of virtue. This was one of the chief concerns motivating Nahum Tate to revise the play in 1681. In Tate's rewrite, both Lear and Cordelia survive the conflict, and in the play's last lines Edgar offers up a pat moral message. Gesturing to Cordelia, Edgar exclaims: ‘Thy bright Example shall convince the World / (Whatever Storms of Fortune are decreed) / That Truth and Vertue shall at last succeed’ (5.6.159–61). This virtue-rewarded ending was preferred by English audiences, and for nearly 150 years Tate's version was the only Lear to be performed. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Shakespeare's version had retaken the stage, once more challenging us with its unflinching moral and ethical vision and forcing us to think long and hard about virtue: what it is, what it does, and what it demands of us.

No better gloss on Walter's Benjamin's characterisation of fascism as ‘the logical result of the entrance of aesthetics into politics’ (241) exists than the scene in Don DeLillo's White Noise where Jack Gladney and Murray Siskind riff on the uncanny affinities between Hitler and Elvis (71). As the Nazi dictator and the hillbilly rock star become twin ‘mama's boys’ obsessed with death, we enter a nightmare where public figures are all celebrities, their aura glinting before an audience ignorant of history and sociology. In 1994 John Duvall noted DeLillo's view that ‘giving oneself over to formal contemplation of the image matrix of either television or the supermarket denies one's assertion into the political economy … is learning how to be a fascist’. DeLillo shows that Jack and Murray consistently fall ‘into [this] suspect formal method when they interpret events in their world’ as if they were happening on television (Duvall 129).

Yet in recent years, many readers, including Duvall, have complained that DeLillo has excised concrete history from politics, reducing 9/11 to an event in the emotional lives of middle-class Americans or glossing over the differences between cities that look like Beirut. Tracing the evolution of DeLillo's stance on politics and history requires following the link between art and violence through his novels. DeLillo's artists often conflate their instruments with weapons, as Bucky Wunderlick does when he muses, ‘I might actually kill someone with my music’ (Great Jones Street 105). Almost antiphonally, Richard Elster, thirty-seven years later in Point Omega, interprets Jim Finley's request for an interview filmed against a wall as an assault: ‘Up against the wall, mother fucker!’ (45). The Names, ‘Baader–Meinhof’ and Point Omega all raise questions about art's relation to political violence. In The Names, James Axton, a freelance writer, becomes an unwitting CIA source and a collaborator with America's neo-colonial presence in the Middle East. Both ‘Baader–Meinhof’ and Point Omega revolve around exhibitions that DeLillo visited at New York's MoMA. DeLillo's persistent conviction that the aesthetic impulse is itself violent or is easily made to serve the goals of terrorists and militarised regimes runs through all three works.

Midway through Don DeLillo's Libra (1988), Nicholas Branch, a retired CIA analyst who has been contracted to write ‘the secret history of the assassination of President Kennedy’, thinks to himself that the Warren Commission report, ‘with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words … is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to a hundred’ (15, 181). In an interview for Rolling Stone on Libra's publication, DeLillo elaborated on this funny and suggestive line:

There is much to say about DeLillo's invocation of Joyce's post-Wake trajectory in Libra, not least as a reflection on his own career trajectory. But taken as a face value comment on the genesis of Libra, this remark is a little unusual. In an interview on how he wrote Libra, DeLillo does not say, as one might expect, that his experience with the Warren Report reminded him of Joyce: he says that thinking about what Joyce could do after Finnegans Wake put him in mind of the Warren Report. The implication is that DeLillo's concern with Joyce predates, or perhaps even led to, his interest in the Warren Report. Without getting lost in unprovable claims about authorial intention, I contend that the primacy DeLillo attributes to Joyce in this moment speaks of his own deep and career-spanning engagement with Joyce: Joyce is, throughout DeLillo's work, one of the smithies in which he forges his art.

He has not been especially coy about this: in his very first interview as a writer, with Tom LeClair in Contemporary Literature, DeLillo famously attributed his apparent reclusiveness to ‘Silence, exile, cunning, and so on’ (LeClair, ‘An Interview’ 4) – a knowing reference to Stephen Dedalus's famous lines at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

‘Not a thing to study but to feel’

To describe something as ‘an icon’ suggests an image that crystallises a set of ideas and feelings, often a historical moment. To describe something or someone as ‘iconic’ marks its persistence in reproductions across time and space. The iconic picture or person is marked by its initial ability to fascinate, to amplify the type of call to attention we might refer to when we speak of ‘the power of the image’. There is no image that is inherently iconic; instead, an image, or a person whose image is repeated, becomes iconic when the familiarity caused by duplication makes of them cultural symbols with a rich and recognisable range of reverberations. James Axton in The Names (1982) puts off visiting the Acropolis because he thinks he is required to respond to ‘the question of its renown’: that is, to those aspects of its status that allow us to think of it as an icon, a vessel for ideas about Western civilisation. ‘The weight and moment of those worked stones promised to make the business of seeing them a complicated one’, ‘so much converges there’, DeLillo has Axton write (The Names 3). DeLillo has said that ‘my mind works one way, toward making a simple moment complex’ (De Pietro 100). The iconic in his novels often acts, as the breathtaking sunsets in White Noise (1985) do, as a prompt for the narrative, or sometimes the character, to stop, discover, study and describe these moments of complexity.

In the pages that follow I argue that DeLillo's meditation on the iconic locates the power of many of these images or figures in their ability to hold and make available the idea of death. This feels to the attracted as though the icon holds an impenetrable secret – the secret glamour of charisma, or the secret of political power, or the power over life and death of a suicide, or a dictator, or of the atomic bomb. The icon's ability to fascinate is figured in these texts in the image of a radiant light, a visual call to attention which is often amplified further by borrowing from the sublimity of death and of the sacred. In keeping with this, Axton's eventual visit to the Acropolis is very different to his anticipated experience of the citadel as already-read.

This chapter explores the effects of sensational narratives on the body of the author rather than the reader. In the previous chapter, I discussed Henry Mansel's depiction of the sensation writer as mechanical and profit-driven. He claimed that the spasmodic poet writes to gratify ‘the unconquerable yearnings of his soul’, while the sensation novelist writes for the purposes of ‘supply and demand’ (212). This more mechanical model of authorship was widespread across reviews of sensation fiction. For instance, the Saturday Review said that Collins had only ‘Mechanical talent’ and compared him to a cabinet-maker (249). Braddon was similarly accused of being ‘a novel-producing machine’ (‘Literature: Miss Braddon's New Novel’ 2). Another model of authorship plagued Braddon and other female sensation writers, one that was arguably even more damning. In contrast to the mechanical model was what we might call the knowledge model of authorship, which understood female authors’ work as the products of their dubious knowledge and experience. It can be summed up by Henry James's notorious assessment of Braddon: ‘She knows much that ladies are not accustomed to know’ (594). Oliphant also comments on Braddon's ‘bad’ knowledge, claiming that she must not know ‘how young women of good blood and good training feel’ (‘Novels’ 260). Implicit in this model is that the sensation author – and the female author especially – can only write through personal experience; her characters’ immorality therefore must reflect her own lived experience or, at the very least, her understanding of the world. Braddon, whose name was ‘a byword for all that was lauded and loathed about the female “sensation novelist”’, was particularly vulnerable to such criticism because her scandalous past as an actress and her relationship with her married publisher, John Maxwell, were well known to the public (Beller, ‘Popularity’ 245).

Yet Braddon responded to these models in creative ways. In The Doctor's Wife, she cannily pokes fun at the mechanical understanding of authorship via Sigismund Smith. Smith must write four stories a week for a public demanding ‘a continuous flow of incident’, so he writes what he calls ‘combination’ stories, stories that are combined, or stolen, from other writers (45).

While I have discussed Margaret Oliphant's role as a critical reviewer of sensation novels, this chapter explores her surprising foray into sensationalism, Salem Chapel. I read Salem Chapel alongside Wilkie Collins's Armadale, focusing on their depictions of public and private feelings. Characters in each novel fantasise about the idea of a private body, immune to social forces and community gossip, yet these texts consistently collapse the public and private, showing that the body, like the home, is leaky and permeable to the eyes and affects of others. For instance, town gossips are often humorous characters in Victorian fiction, but in Salem Chapel, Oliphant depicts the local gossip, the young, disabled Adelaide Tufton, as frightening in her ability to pry information out of vulnerable townspeople. When Mrs Vincent insists on making her usual house calls despite the fact that her daughter, Susan, is assumed to have scandalously run away with an older man, she knows that she must face Adelaide. She tells her maid, ‘I must go out, Mary…. I must do my duty if the world were all breaking up’ (250). When she arrives at the Tuftons’ home, she is confronted with Adelaide's discerning eyes:

This moment sets up the various conflicts that I trace throughout this chapter. Sensation fiction relied upon a kind of voyeuristic pleasure, associated as it was with the ‘satisfaction or thrill of seeing’ (Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings 24). In the case of Mrs Vincent, as with many sensational heroines, her body risks revealing these secrets, as her ‘suspense and excitement seemed to ooze out unawares’, a compelling description of the ways in which affects can be unwillingly transmitted. Yet Oliphant constructs this scene from the perspective of Mrs Vincent rather than Adelaide, and so what might have been an exciting moment of disclosure is instead written as one of anxiety and vulnerability.

Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures

Series Editors: Ruth Heholt and Joanne Ella Parsons

This interdisciplinary series provides space for full and detailed scholarly discussions on nineteenth-century and Neo-Victorian cultures. Drawing on radical and cutting-edge research, volumes explore and challenge existing discourses, as well as providing an engaging reassessment of the time period. The series encourages debates about decolonising nineteenth-century cultures, histories and scholarship, as well as raising questions about diversities. Encompassing art, literature, history, performance, theatre studies, film and TV studies, medical and the wider humanities, Nineteenth Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures is dedicated to publishing pioneering research that focuses on the Victorian era in its broadest and most diverse sense.

Throughout this book, I have discussed the ways in which sensational reading was sometimes seen as dangerous or unhealthy. But reading these novels was of course also pleasurable. It certainly has been for me. In this brief coda, I attend to the pleasurable affects associated with sensational reading, but also to the affects associated with not reading, or what Leah Price calls ‘nonreading’, by which I specifically refer to the pauses between serial reading or distracted reading. I have identified a trope in these novels of characters picking up a novel and attempting to read it, only to be distracted by the more compelling events occurring in their lives. This differs from the immersive reading that I discussed in Chapter 1, but it presents a similar theory of narrative affect.

First, to attend to the pleasures of sensational reading. While I discussed serialisation in the introduction, I have not explored seriality at length in the book, instead focusing on narration, char-acterisation and the language of affect and emotion in these novels. My own experience as a reader has, with few exceptions, been with novels rather than with the original serial publications of these texts. Yet the serial reading of sensation fiction clearly had, and has, specific pleasures and affects. While Oliphant complained of the speed associated with serial reading, the enforced pauses between instalments are an important aspect of the form and the affects it can generate. Breaks between instalments can allow readers to emotionally engage with and gossip about characters. In fall 2018, I taught a class on sensation fiction in which students read The Woman in White serially. Our interaction with the text over such a long period of time (months rather than the weeks that we gave to other texts) made the students even more invested in this narrative. We used the spaces between instalments to discuss what might happen next and share our predictions together, an activity that now tends to be reserved for television shows.

This project on Victorian sensation fiction and historical affects began when I discovered the sensation novels of Amelia Edwards over a decade ago. Edwards was well known to Victorian scholars as a travel writer and Egyptologist but not as a sensation author. When I read Edwards's popular Barbara's History (1864), I found it playful regarding its own generic classification. Barbara reads constantly and details her affective and melodramatic reactions to the narratives that she encounters. Yet the novel is also attentive to the pitfalls of using romantic novels as a guide for life and implies that Barbara feels too much, too deeply. When she attends the opera for the first time, she writes that the experience ‘carried me out of myself. I could not believe that all was not real’ (219). And she overreacts when she believes that her husband is hiding a secret mistress à la Jane Eyre (1847); she runs away and has a child on the continent, only to have her stern aunt chide her for being so ‘dramatic’ (448). When I first encountered this novel, I puzzled over how to categorise it, as it revels in the plotlines and affective language typical of sensationalism but is also critical of the genre and the reading practices associated with it.

Initially, I classified Edwards as an ambivalent sensationalist, placing her alongside Margaret Oliphant, a critic of the genre who wrote a sensation novel, Salem Chapel (1863), or Ellen Wood, whose Christian moralising worked to temper her sensationalism. Yet even ‘classic’ sensation authors like Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins are generically playful, indulging in sensational plots and melodramatic language, only to question and critique such devices. Rather than see Edwards as anomalous, I came to see her work as characteristic of novels called sensational. It is this combination of detailed affective descriptions and self-reflexive commentary on reading, feeling and realistic representation that defines sensationalism. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), amateur detective Robert Audley insists, ‘I haven't read … Wilkie Collins for nothing’ (342). And Robert debates with George and Alicia about the ‘exaggerated’ pre-Raphaelite portrait of Lucy, a work of art that mirrors the exaggerated sensation novel (66). Robert finds ‘something odd about it’ and Alicia agrees, surmising that it is not a realistic depiction of Lucy, even if ‘she could look so’ (66).

I begin this chapter by returning to Anne and Walter's confrontation in The Woman in White. At the moment that Anne touches him, Walter is ‘idly wondering … what the Cumberland young ladies would look like’ (20). Even before Walter and the reader come to learn that Anne and Laura are half-sisters and pawns in the hands of Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde, the women are aligned in the same bewildering moment, as Anne's touch and Walter's imagined image of Laura arrest his senses at once. The next evening, when Walter tries to fall asleep in Limmeridge House, he asks, ‘What shall I see in my dreams to-night … the woman in white? or the unknown inhabitants of this Cumberland mansion?’ (30). As Cvetkovich observes, the ‘memory of Anne is mingled with his anticipation of the other women’ (Mixed Feelings 82). Walter's role in the doubling plot of Anne and Laura is significant: he identifies their likeness and works to right the wrongs of the other men in the novel. A number of critics have suggested that this novel is as much a narrative of Walter's manhood gained as it is Laura's identity restored. Yet to emphasise Walter's role in the novel is to risk missing the relationship developed between the women, specifically that between Laura and Anne, which has received less attention than the intense sisterly bond between Laura and Marian. In fact, Anne has another significant sensational confrontation in the novel when she finds Laura at the boathouse, and surprises her much as she surprised Walter. For Laura, looking at Anne is like looking at ‘my own face in the glass after a long illness’ (282).

In many ways, for Laura, confronting the illegitimate, ‘dazed’ Anne is a confrontation with her sensational self (282). Their relationship calls to mind anxieties associated with sensational and immersive reading practices. As I have noted in earlier chapters, reviewers articulated concerns that young women reading sensation novels would be unable to distinguish between fiction and reality, and between their own desires and those of sensational heroines. Implied in such anxieties about sensational reading was the exaggerated notion that women readers might somehow become the characters about whom they read.

In Wilkie Collins's sensation novel The Woman in White (1859–60), the villainous Count Fosco articulates the materialist qualities of the genre when he claims, ‘Mind, they say, rules the world. But what rules the mind? The body’ (617). Victorian sensation novels are filled with detailed descriptions of bodies that affect and are affected by others. A familiar example is the meeting of Anne Catherick and Walter Hartright in Collins's novel. As Walter walks along London's Finchley Road near midnight, he is interrupted by ‘the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me’ (20). Prior to their meeting, Collins stresses Walter's cognitive vacuity: ‘my mind remained passively open’, Walter records, ‘I thought but little on any subject – indeed, so far as my own sensations were concerned, I can hardly say that I thought at all’ (19). Walter's unthinking body is set to receive ‘sensations’, and the passage continues as follows: ‘I had mechanically turned … and was strolling along the lonely high-road – idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like – when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me’ (20). Walter turns ‘on the instant’ to see ‘the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments’, her ‘hand pointing to the dark cloud over London’ (20). The affective transmission between these two characters is brought about by touch, as critics from Margaret Oliphant to D. A. Miller have emphasised. Walter does not first see Anne but feels her, an aspect of this encounter that he remarks upon as odd: ‘Steal after me and touch me? Why not call to me?’ (22). Collins imagines skin not as a barrier between individuals but as a porous surface through which sensations pass. Additionally, Collins emphasises how Walter's body acts independently of his mind. He ‘mechanically’ turns in the direction of London, just as he finds Anne's voice to be ‘mechanical in its tones’ (20, 21). His legs move involuntarily, ‘on the instant’, and Anne, initially, is simply a disembodied hand (20).

In Margaret Oliphant's 1862 essay ‘Sensation Novels’, she complains about the exaggeration and supposed speed of sensation fiction and other serial forms. By 1867, however, her vitriol was reserved for the genre's candid depictions of desire and its impact on young female readers (568). This later article, simply entitled, ‘Novels’, was part of a national conversation about women's reading, one prompted by the popularity of sensation fiction. Oliphant worries that sensation fiction will disrupt the English practice of family reading and, instead, will lead young women to read and interpret sensation narratives in private (259). She is critical of both female sensation authors and readers:

Oliphant makes two assumptions that were repeated by a range of reviewers in this period: that female readers understood these books to offer ‘a true representation of themselves’, and that this sensational realism was in opposition to ‘the monotony of ordinary life’. In 1868, Francis Paget expressed unease about the ‘kind of follies, scrapes, and difficulties’ into which a girl might fall ‘who should take the sensational novel as her guide in the common-place events of everyday life’ (308). A few years later, the author of ‘The Vice of Reading’ (1874) similarly argues that contemporary ‘works of imagination’ have ‘a dangerous tendency: since they encourage hopes which are never fulfilled, nourish nothing but illusions, and … engender a discontent with life as it exists’ (253). This rhetoric offers little insight into the actual experiences of readers in this period, but the frequency of this kind of language indicates ‘how much was imagined to be at stake in the ordinary act of picking up a novel to read’ (Gettelman 112).