Renegotiating Authoritative Conventions: Wilkie Collins's Blurring of High and Low in The Law and the Lady, The Moonstone and Armadale

Abstract

This thesis is interested in Wilkie Collins’s blurring of high and low, authoritative and non-authoritative discourses, in The Law and the Lady, The Moonstone and Armadale. It looks at how these novels undermine the legal system, realism, and medicine respectively—three discourses that presumed high levels of authority during the nineteenth century. Collins supplements this undermining of authority by privileging less official approaches to human understanding and behavior. I argue that it is this self-reflexive subversion of Victorian normative values that renders his novels deserving of critical attention and reconsideration within the canon