Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1862) is, to use its narrator’s own words, a “a narrative of dramatic disasters,” an exercise in building a “dramatic world out of a domestic chaos.” It is the story of two sisters who find their lives completely upended, and must rely on developing professional skills to restore their broken personal lives.
The sisters are twenty-six-year old Norah, who possesses “incurable formality and reserve,” and eighteen year old Magdalen, who is impetuous and passionate. They lead a blissful life as the daughters of wealthy, doting parents, but then tragedy strikes their family. Both of their parents die—their father in a train accident and their mother in childbirth. Norah and Magdalen expect to inherit their parents’ fortune but are informed that there is a technicality preventing it: their parents had only married one another recently. The sisters learn that their father had long ago married another woman before falling in love with their mother, and that Mr. and Mrs. Vanstone have been waiting for Mr. Vanstone’s legal wife to pass away so that they might finally, properly wed. Norah and Magdalen learn that they were technically born out of wedlock and, because of a legitimacy codicil in their father’s will, are therefore unable to receive their parents’ money. The sisters are suddenly illegitimate and propertyless. Both unmarried, they find themselves in need of work to survive. Their money goes to their father’s estranged brother, who refuses to support his nieces.
Norah and Magdalen learn that they were technically born out of wedlock and, because of a legitimacy codicil in their father’s will, are therefore unable to receive their parents’ money.If the two sisters did inherit their parents’ fortune, Norah would have become mistress of their house, while Magdalen would have gotten married. (At the time of her parents’ death, she had been engaged to a local man named Frank Clare—but the invalidation of their succession and the sisters’ corresponding destitution have led to his abandoning her.) Thus, in this novel, the Vanstone sisters are constantly prevented from achieving their ultimate goals of domesticity, through no faults of their own. After they lose everything, Norah becomes a governess, while Magdalen runs away to pursue a life on the stage. Magdalen, living with her mother’s relative, Captain Horatio Wragge, a small-time crook, becomes a successful actress. But she is not able to make peace with the rupture of her previous life and begins to concoct a plan to reclaim her money and home—plans involving her performance skills. By working in the theatre, she has already begun to fashion a “dramatic world out of a domestic chaos” for herself, but she takes this mantra to intense degrees.
Magdalen undertakes a series of elaborate disguise attempts to ingratiate herself into the lives of the new, male heirs to her own family home and fortune, exhibiting behavior that, in an ordinary novel of this era, might code her as the novel’s detective. But in No Name, it becomes clear that Magdalen does not possess all the skills to become a lady detective, which not only prevents her detection efforts from being successful, but almost turns her into a criminal.
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Magdalen’s sister Norah, who eventually becomes a governess, at first seems like she possesses the opposite qualities as Magdalen—that she is all ratiocination and no emotion. Since Magdalen is all emotion and no ratiocination, No Name might seem to tease that the real detective character is split across the two sisters. But Norah is ultimately revealed not to possess the necessary inductive, analytical, observant, or even rational qualities that she would need to become Magdalen’s opposite and therefore complete her; she is merely obedient and becomes a governess because it is proper, not as a signal of her mental capabilities.
While Magdalen’s exertions are more in line with those of the lady detective novels of the era (after all, she disguises as servants and embeds in households to conduct surveillance), Magdalen lacks the inductive, analytical abilities of the traditional actress-detective. Miriam Lea, from Mr. Bazalgette’s Agent, has worked as an actress as well as a governess prior to working as a detective, with the role of “governess” mediating the transition from actress to detective, emphasizing how performance skills lead to detective skills through their common root in inductive thinking and analytical observation. Magdalen Vanstone, the heroine of No Name, represents the opposite—a woman who is unable to move from being an actress to a detective because she lacks the analytical skills necessary for both, and who very nearly becomes a criminal because of her reliance on performance without an emotional intelligence to temper and balance it. The Vanstone fortune cannot be recouped until Magdalen finally develops a strong emotional intelligence—until her thinking and observation skills grow to match her acting skills, and then begin to work together.
In this novel, as in contemporary Victorian Lady Detective novels, the work of the lady detective is principally to achieve a domestic union (or reunion), but No Name is special because it attributes the same root cause for the lady’s initial need to become more of a detective, and for the specific lengths she goes to in solving the case at hand; the ejection from the domestic sphere is both the justificatory inciting incident and the novel’s main mystery. Even though it makes domesticity the endgame of both performance and detection, as do (frankly), most of the actress-detective stories from this era, No Name is additionally distinct among these stories for how it represents the progression from actress to detective. Most stories of this ilk build a linear trajectory—from performance, occasionally to education, to deduction, and finally to the household—but No Name is a circular story. It begins and ends with the domestic and the performative space in harmony with one another, with detection making up the remainder of the circuit (just as it also begins and ends with the two sisters in unity). In between, everything (and everyone) is separated, and therefore, in strife.
Though she begins a career in acting when she is newly impoverished, Magdalen decides to pursue the stage in the first place because she has previously fallen in love with it. Magdalen loves attention, but this is not treated as a fully problematic quality, the way it might in the traditional actress novel, because all her erratic and exaggerated attempts to reclaim her inheritance through performance ultimately signify her commitment to and desire for the domestic space. No Name is unique for the extremeness with which it represents performance and domesticity as counterparts, rather than as conflicting or competing spheres.
No Name is a theatrically framed novel. It is organized in eight “scenes,” within which are smaller chapters. Furthermore, the novel opens on a world that has long been enmeshed in performance. No one knows it yet, but Mr. and Mrs. Vanstone have been locked into a long performance of traditional domesticity—genuinely in love but pretending to be legally married for at least twenty-six years, and additionally pretending that Mr. Vanstone has not been the legal husband of another woman, that entire time. But the novel opens on a scene that establishes their home as a place where performance can exist. The Vanstone home, Combe-Raven, is described literally as a theatre—right from its opening scene, which presents the entrance of all the residents of the home as if they are walking onto a stage. The unmoving narratorial perspective is stationed at the staircase, capturing the movements of the entire house over a period of a few hours in the early morning—as the residents leave their chambers and descend into the main area, as if they are actors making their first entrance below a proscenium. “Who were the sleepers hidden in the upper regions?” the narrator asks, presentationally, “Let the house reveal its own secrets; and, one by one, as they descend the stairs from their beds, let the sleepers disclose themselves.” The narrator references the tolling of the clock while waiting for the characters to assemble—engineering as theatrical an atmosphere for the start of the story, as possible, and cementing that performance is the story’s governing framework.
No Name, as its very title suggests, is about two women who are robbed of their identities and must attempt to create new ones. But, it turns out, only one sister can do this well.Furthermore, it is in the home that Magdalen discovers her love for acting; she receives word that their neighbors, the Marrables at Evergreen Lodge, are hosting amateur theatricals—they are putting on The Rivals—and they have invited her to take a part. Magdalen is thrilled; She turns out to be a highly effective actress—a passionate, natural stage presence as well as a gifted imitator. Playing Julia in The Rivals, Magdalen commits “cool appropriation of Norah’s identity,” reproducing her demure sister’s mannerisms and way of speaking. Magdalen both clones and embodies her sister Norah, here—demonstrating several of the novel’s main themes, namely, the “intertwining of the sisters’ identities” and their abilities to inhabit the other’s bodies. The narrator even asks, at this early stage of the novel, if Norah initially dark disposition and Magdalen’s sunny one will switch places—as if they are actors switching roles; “Was the promise of the future shining with prophetic light through the surface-shadow of Norah’s reserve, and darkening with prophetic gloom, under the surface-glitter of Magdalen’s bright spirits?” But Magdalen’s temporary embodiment of her sister’s demure, obedient nature does not temper her impulsive, dramatic tendencies—only the development of an empathetic, analytical intelligence can do that.
No Name, as its very title suggests, is about two women who are robbed of their identities and must attempt to create new ones. But, it turns out, only one sister can do this well. Even though both sisters find work, after their family disaster, Magdalen is not happy with her acting life, even though she forges an extremely successful career. Because she has been robbed of aspects of her erstwhile selfhood, she is not satisfied with a commercial replacement. She feels incomplete—she cannot consistently, reliably evacuate her body of her own self in performance and take in new qualities, as she has done previously (when embodying Norah’s qualities during the private theatricals, earlier in the novel), because the fracturing of her family has fractured her sense of self. She oscillates between being overwhelmed by her identity and losing all sense of it—two sensations that complicate her stage performances. Before her first appearance, she is so heartbroken thinking of her supportive, dead father, that she bursts into tears and wails about him, backstage. She can set this sadness aside to play her part, but she is hyperactive and almost mad at the prospect of having to act while she is in a personal crisis.
Captain Wragge, who is watching the show, notes that Magdalen “rushed full gallop through her changes of character, her songs, and her dialogue; making mistakes by the dozen, and never stopping to set them right; carrying the people along with her in a perfect whirlwind, and never waiting for the applause.” Her feelings are so powerful that they have the ability to move, shape the entire production—it ends twenty minutes sooner than it is projected to. Afterwards, Magdalen is so overburdened by having to hold her anguish while entertaining a crowd that she “fainted on the waiting-room sofa a minute after the curtain was down.”
Magdalen is nothing but an emotional body. She is frequently described as being devoid of reason or even empty of thoughts; at one point, she looks out the window, “her eyes looking mechanically at the view, her mind empty of all impressions, and conscious of no thoughts.” When Magdalen recreates her shy sister’s qualities onstage “for an audience of strangers,” and Miss Garth scolds her for it, she specifically mentions Magdalen’s thoughtlessness in doing so—meaning that her lack of thoughts makes her callous. While she and Norah are separated, Magdalen attempts to ingratiate herself at Combe-Raven, using her “bodily tools,” as Gracia phrases it—specifically, her abilities to perfectly replicate others for the sake of spectacle. She searches through new bodies, new selves to find her old self. When she is offered her first role—Julia in The Rivals at the Marrables’ local production, she intuits that she has a preternatural capacity to fill her own body with characters. “I have the strongest internal conviction that I could act every character in the play—Falkland included,” she says.
When she is attempting to win back her fortune, she first disguises as her old governess, Miss Garth (whom she has also imitated in one of her performances, along with Norah, again), but is caught by the housekeeper, the controlling Mrs. Lecount. Next, she disguises herself as a staid young woman named Miss Bygrave, successfully attempting to catch the attention of the heir, her sickly cousin Noel Vanstone. She tricks Noel into proposing, but when they are married, he learns of her true identity from Mrs. Lecount and cuts her off, before dying. Magdalen then disguises as a maid to infiltrate the home of the new heir, George Bartram, to search for the document that Noel had signed to keep her from accessing the fortune—but after she locates it, she is spotted and must flee. Magdalen clearly has the makings of detective, but she succeeds only where the detective must rely on performance. Where she requires analysis—including in the act of strategizing, in the first place—she fails.
After her third and final attempt to obtain her rightful fortune, she collapses. Exhausted and ill, she gives up her mission. Norah goes to search for her, and in doing so, encounters George Bartram, the heir. They fall in love and marry, which restores Norah to her share of the Vanstone estate—and then, after Norah moves back into Combe-Raven, finds the document that Magdalen had desperately searched for. This restores a portion of their old fortune to Magdalen as well (from her deceased husband Noel), ending the Vanstones’ tribulations for good.
The scholar Helena Michie has argued that Magdalen “embodies three major Victorian anxieties about acting and actresses.” When she imitates Miss Garth and Norah onstage, and then dresses as Miss Garth to confront her uncle, she is guilty of both “the blurring of distinctions between fiction and reality” and “the promiscuous multiplication of (especially female) identity.” Because she falls in love with Frank Clare while onstage with him during The Rivals, forever associating her own sexual awakening with her discovery of her love of performance, she also embodies the anxiety about the “corporeal and erotic dimension of life on stage.” And yet, even after perpetuating these qualities throughout the entire novel, she is easily redeemed by her sister’s measured, reasonable decisions and restored to her birthright. Magdalen even marries an honorable man, a sea captain named Kirke.
Magdalen’s changing, fillable, emotionally ready body is a complication of the traditional emotional body in the prototypical actress novel. Although she is not in pursuit of the fortune for greedy reasons and in fact desires nothing more than to be restored to the domestic world, she perpetuates the kind of performative and domestic disorder of her parents’ household, which, clearly, brought about tremendous negative effects. Magdalen does not interpret her parents’ situation as a cautionary tale of bringing performance too much into the domestic space; because she lacks the facility for reason and is so susceptible to her feelings. The narrator even goes so far to wonder if her “life” is “doomed to be the battle-field [sic] of mortal conflict with the roused forces of Evil in herself?”—that is, if her slushy emotional nature will have made enough room for a sinister self to take over. The Lady Detective in Leonard Merrick’s Mr. Bazalgette’s Agent, a detective novel from 1888, Miriam Lea, wonders the same thing when she travels through Europe, but about her detective work. She decides that performance outside the theatre is a form of lying and can have damaging repercussions. When Magdalen does the same thing, it leads her towards deception, including marrying Noel while pretending to be someone else.
Magdalen… is unable to move from being an actress to a detective because she lacks the analytical skills necessary for both, and who very nearly becomes a criminal because of her reliance on performance without an emotional intelligence to temper and balance it.This is not the only time that Magdalen’s near supernatural ability to reproduce people’s bodies has gotten her into trouble. Indeed, her habit for practicing unchecked and desperate performance in everyday life leads to destruction, further destitution, and even death. She tricks Noel Vanstone into marrying her under an alternate identity, which not only prevents her from obtaining her fortune (since, when Noel is informed of her deception, he removes her from his will), but also kills Noel. He, sickly, is so worn out from learning of Magdalen’s con and from all the exertions of disinheriting her that his heart gives out. Later, Magdalen embeds herself (in disguise as a maid) in Admiral Bartram’s house to find the trust documents, watching him for months until the she catches him sleepwalking to its hiding place, a locked cabinet.
When she finally breaks open the cabinet and nabs the documents, she foolishly lingers in the room to read them. And she is caught in the act by Old Mazey, Bartram’s friend. “Burglary,” he screams, informing Magdalen that he’s going to bring her to court. By the next morning, he softens a bit—giving her a chance to flee the house before the authorities arrive. But Magdalen has been felled by her own brazen deception. “Her energy was gone; her powers of resistance were crushed. The terrors of that horrible night, following one close on the other in reiterated shocks, had struck her down at last. She yielded as submissively, she trembled as helplessly, as the weakest woman living.” At the start of the next chapter, in the novel’s final “scene,” she is described as “a woman apparently in the last stage of illness,” and is being evicted from her residence in a poor neighborhood to be taken “to the hospital, if they will have her… and to the work-house, if they won’t.” She has not only ruined others’ lives with her rampant performative deceptions, but she has nearly destroyed her own. Indeed, since Magdalen embodies the performativity of the detective without the necessary emotional intelligence to regulate it, her performance habits—cultivated on the stage and then shaped at home by the crook Wragge—bring her to the brink of criminality.
In Victorian fiction, lady detectives are not the only figures who meld the acts of performance and detection; Victorian fiction’s lady actress-criminal is a figure who employs on these two skills in tandem to achieve strategic unspectacularization and invisibility, but who lacks the lady detective’s necessary combination of empathy and inductive thinking. She has abandoned interest in the moral organization of the theatre and is a force equally performative and calculative.
The detective-heroines (and especially the actress-detectives) in this canon are careful about how performance might be extended to social duplicity, dishonesty, and fraud—but the lady criminals of Victorian detective fiction cross this line easily. Specifically, the actress-criminal’s public body and her systematic mind quickly become tools to manipulate others into giving them what they want. There are numerous villains in this canon who have also worked as actresses—and might have easily become detectives, if they had been able to access a degree of emotionality and combine it with the rational, observational components of acting. The opera singer Irene Adler who bests Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Dora Myrl is locked in a battle of wits with the actress Carrie Vivian in “The Pauper’s Legacy,” and Mrs. Paschal figures out that a former actress, Fanny, now known as the Countess of Vervaine, is an infamous bank robber.
As Magdalen demonstrates, the female body’s trickiness is as useful as a tool of detection just as much as it is an opportunity for criminality—as the case of Irene Adler, and several contemporary mystery villains. The female body is unknowable and uncontainable, and, in the words of Elizabeth Grosz, stands ontologically as “a formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order.” As Gracia has noted, it is long accepted by scholars that female detectives provide an unconventional path towards the themes of control and restoration that are the promised endgames of the genre—when lady detectives arrive on their respective cases, their movements and even presences are naturally illegible and abstruse, indiscernible as acts of detection, which gives them the upper hand. Lady criminals take advantage of this illegibility for their own gain—unlike lady detectives, who are preoccupied with solving crimes, helping others, and restoring justice.
Obsessed with recovering her fortune, Magdalen’s uses of disguise and performance become manipulative, treacherous, and even cruel. Indeed, actress-criminals are coded as being similarly greedy; they are the women who discover that they would make much more money from their performance skills as criminal agents, than as detectives. Irene has blackmailed the Bohemian royal family, Carrie is a thief who has stolen rare stamps from a penniless woman unaware of their value, and Fanny disguises as a man to gain access to a bank vault.
Magdalen brushes up against this ideology before it nearly kills her—and, once she is ill, the only way that she fully heals is by confessing her sins to Captain Kirke, her amorous rescuer. His strong moral presence not only saves “her life,” but “her reason.” He helps her reclaim her faculties; it is with Kirke that, finally, her emotional intelligence is able to develop again. Soon, she learns that she has inherited half of the Vanstone fortune after all, but she refuses it. This has a cleansing effect; the narrator says, “So she made the last sacrifice of the old perversity and the old pride. So she entered on the new and nobler life.” Soon Magdalen and Kirke will declare their love. Since she has returned to a sustainable domestic life, Magdalen will no longer need to work a detective—the irony is that she now possesses a complete set of skills that would allow her to conduct that work properly.
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