The Crisis Of Victorian Masculinity And The Anxiety Of Identity In Wilkie Collins’s Two Major Novels

Wilkie Collins has two most representative works, namely, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), which are respectively heralded as the birth of the sensational novel and the first English detective novel. Not a few critics have noted the male and female characters in the novels and revealed that the author expresses the masculine anxieties about the nature of femininity. However, they have not attached importance to the fundamental characteristics of the crisis of Victorian masculinity. This thesis tries to explore the Victorians’anxiety of masculine identity, of feminine identity, and of cultural identity, which are embodied in the crisis of Victorian masculinity with defining characteristics of deprivation, diversion and dispersion.The main body of the present thesis consists of three parts as follows:The first chapter deals with the crisis of Victorian masculinity characterized by deprivation and Victorians’anxiety of masculine identity in the novels. The absence of father or fatherly roles in the novels reveals the loss of the patriarchal control in the Victorian home. Besides, the lack of social recognition of men’s social roles also demonstrates men’s incompetence in the public spheres. Again, some male characters in the novels are effeminate, because they possess feminised bodily features and lose the psychological features of masculinity and social power pertaining to men. In the second chapter, the focus is the relationship between the "diversion" of Victorian masculinity and people’s anxiety of feminine identity. Women’s dominance in domestic affairs, excessive reliance on each other, and their intervention in social conflicts intensify the maternal control both inside and outside the home. Besides, some of the female characters in these two novels lose their feminine features, especially embodied in their masculine physical features and manlike characters and behaviours. Hence, men’s masculinity weakens while that of women strengthens. The "diversion" of masculinity also causes people’s anxiety about the masculisation of female identity.Chapter Three explores the crisis of Victorian masculinity, characteristic of dispersion, and people’s anxiety of cultural identity. In Collins’s these two novels, men do not seem masculine enough, because they have to enter into alliance with each other so as to search for truth of the mystery or achieve success. Only the combination of male melancholia and narcissism can bring about the "ideal masculinity". However, main male characters in the novels merely possess one of such characteristics. Therefore, with the dispersion of masculinity, people begin to worry about their cultural identity, especially embodied in their anxiety about class identity in the Victorian era.By and large, Collins reveals the crisis of Victorian masculinity and anxiety of identity in his The Woman in White and The Moonstone. Meanwhile, with rejection of the traditional gender hierarchies in the Victorian society, Collins discloses the transgressions of gender roles and social roles in his novels.