SOURCE: “Rewriting the Male Plot in Wilkie Collins's No Name: Captain Wragge Orders an Omelette and Mrs. Wragge Goes into Custody,” in Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender (ed) Criticism, University of Massachusetts Press, 1990, pp. 186-96.

In the following essay, David argues that No Name's questioning of Victorian gender politics disrupts its conventional narrative discourse.

Whether Wilkie Collins was a feminist, deployed popular literature for feminist ideology, or even liked women is not the subject of this essay. My interest is in something less explicit, perhaps not fully intentional, to be discovered in his fiction: an informing link between restlessness with dominant modes of literary form and fictional critique of dominant modes of gender politics. In what follows, I aim to show how the narrative shape of one of Collins's most baroquely plotted, narratively complex novels is inextricably enmeshed with its thematic material. I refer to...