CENTURY LITERATURE A Dissertation by JUNG SUN ... - Repository

CHAPTER III
ECCENTRICITY AND MARGINALITY IN WILKIE COLLINS’S HIDE AND SEEK
Wilkie Collins, the Eccentric Novelist
While Victorian popular writers, including sensation fiction novelists, have
sometimes been categorized as eager to write for money by catering to the cheap taste of
the public, many tried to occupy a well-balanced position of providing both
entertainment and moral lessons for those who bought their words. Collins was one of
the Victorian popular novelists who delivered a “moral” message of his own kind to his
readers. It is worth mentioning that recent mainstream criticism on Collins has moved
away from a focus on his novels’ entertainment value and begun to recognize Collins’s
interest in social problems. The Victorian compulsion to enforce conformity was one of
his primary targets in questioning and criticizing the social norm in gender, sexuality,
and class structure, as many Collins critics point out.
While Pamela Perkins and Mary Donaghy focus on Collins’s exposure of
inequalities related to Victorian gender, Stana Nenadic pays attention to Collins’s
addressing the economic and moral problems of middle-class society by exploring the
ideas of illegitimacy, insanity, and insolvency. 6 Deirdre David also argues that Collins’s
6 For instance, illegitimacy was one of the recurring topics in Collins’s literary texts as well as in
many Victorian novels. In her article “Representations of Illegitimacy in Wilkie Collins’s Early
Novels,” Jessica Cox points out that the concept of illegitimacy is more than a plot or literary
topic. She writes that “through his fiction, [Collins] continually questioned society’s
condemnation of the unmarried mother and her child, whilst simultaneously portray[ing]
illegitimacy as a figure for types of social exclusion and disenfranchisement” (151). Since the
matter of illegitimacy involves the forfeiting of legal or economic inheritance, what Sir Percival
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