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The Yellow Mask, The Black Robe, and The Woman in White: Wilkie Collins, anti-Catholic discourse, and the sensation novel.(Critical Essay)

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From: Narrative
Date: 20040101
Author:Griffin, Susan M.

Summarizing the Gothic history of sensationalism, Patrick Brantlinger traces a movement from the religious to the secular: "By a kind of metaphoric sleight of hand, the Gothic romance has managed to make secular mystery seem like a version of religious mystery." By the time of sensationalism, Brantlinger argues, there is "not even a quasi-religious content" (32). Without claiming that sensation novels are, as such, religious, I nonetheless want to suggest that anti-Catholicism can provide those masks, cloaks, and mysteries, ready-made, as it were. (1) One way to achieve the ...

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