The Sensation Novel and the Redundant Woman Question

Abstract

This chapter follows the narrative logic of biopolitics into the English countryside, where similar pressures turn out to be covertly at work. It traces how the sensation novels of the 1860s became notorious for enclosing the infectious qualities of the crowd within a female body and allowing that body to infiltrate the apparently protected sphere of domestic fiction. To explain the outrage provoked by such bestsellers as Lady Audley's Secret and East Lynne, the chapter attributes their distinctive plot twists to the Victorian demographic theory of “redundant women”: a female population exceeding the national demand for wives and mothers. It investigates how the novels of Mary Braddon and Ellen Wood made their antiheroines all but synonymous with mass population, mass culture, and systems of industrial mass production. Ultimately, the chapter demonstrates why a particular narrative version of redundancy became paradoxically central to fiction as well as to the sexual and cultural politics of criticism.