IN July 1861 Wilkie Collins wrote to his mother, to tell her that: ‘Smith and Elder have bought me away from All the Year Round under circumstances which in Dickens’s opinion amply justify me in leaving . . . Five thousand pounds for nine months or at most a year’s work—nobody but Dickens has made as much ... if I live and keep my brains in good working order, I shall have got to the top of the tree, after all, before forty.’1 The book was to be serialized in Smith’s magazine, the Cornhill; the money to be paid in instalments, as the monthly parts were delivered. ‘Smith & Elder have dealt with me like princes.’
Not a word of the book was yet written; indeed, Collins was already committed to writing another novel for All the Year Round before he could begin to think about one for Smith, Elder. But George Smith was determined to retrieve an earlier mistake. He had published Collins’s collection of short stories, After Dark, in 1856 and had been offered the volume publication rights of The Woman in White in January 1860, while the story was being serialized. Smith, who had unaccountably heard nothing of the novel’s extraordinary success in All the Year Round, made an offer of only £500, and was easily outbid by Sampson Low. Smith said later that he could have offered ten times as much, and still made money on the transaction.
Wilkie Collins was now a very desirable literary property, and the Cornhill was a magazine aimed at a more sophisticated readership than those in which his work usually appeared. But he was running a risk by committing himself so far into the future, and severe and repeated illness had already begun to overshadow his personal life and affect his capacity for work. George Smith had to wait until November 1864 for the first instalment, which should have been delivered on 1 December 1862. Illness delayed the completion of No Name, and Collins fell ill again almost immediately after its volume publication. As Collins claimed in the Introduction to Armadale, the book was not ‘hastily meditated or idly wrought out’. It was to take him more than two years—considerably longer than any other book he had written.
Seeking a cure for his recurrent ‘rheumatic gout’, Collins set out for the Continent in the spring of 1863. His wanderings in the next couple of years, in Britain and abroad, provided a variety of sharply observed settings for the new book. A visit to the spa town of Wildbad in the Black Forest, during May and June 1863, produced the vivid opening scene of Armadale. Later that summer he went sailing with his friend Edward Pigott. Sailing was the one outdoor activity that Wilkie Collins enjoyed, and Armadale was the first of his novels in which it figured as a central element in the plot. He and Pigott had originally planned to take the yacht up the west coast to the Isle of Man, then a wild and relatively inaccessible spot, where some of the scenes of the book were to be set. But the damp sea air brought Collins’s rheumatism back, and the trip was cancelled. He went there in August, taking his mistress Caroline Graves and her daughter Harriet with him. At the Calf of Man he found just what he wanted ‘for my occult literary purposes’ in the wild landscape, the setting for the crucial episode of Allan’s dream.
Behind Allan, as he now stood looking out from the elevation of the mizen-top, spread the broad and lonely sea. Before him, were the low, black, lurking rocks, and the broken waters of the Channel, pouring white and angry into the vast calm of the westward ocean beyond. On the right hand, heaved back grandly from the waterside, were the rocks and precipices, with their little table-lands of grass between; the sloping downs, and upward-rolling heath solitudes of the Isle of Man. On the left hand, rose the craggy sides of the Islet of the Calf—here, rent wildly into deep black chasms; there, lying low under long sweeping acclivities of grass and heath. No sound rose, no light was visible, on either shore. The black lines of the topmost masts of the wreck looked shadowy and faint in the darkening mystery of the sky; the land-breeze had dropped; the small shoreward waves fell noiseless: far or near, no sound was audible but the cheerless bubbling of the broken water ahead, pouring through the awful hush of silence in which earth and ocean waited for the coming day.2
Later that year, still unwell and deciding to ‘run for it’ before the English winter set in, he spent the autumn and winter of 1863/4 in Italy with Caroline and Harriet Graves. Naples, where they spent a short while, became the scene of Lydia Gwilt’s encounter with her former lover Manuel, which precipitates her into the final phase of her murderous career. In Rome he began to plan out his ‘rather extraordinary story . . . something entirely different from anything I have done yet’.3 The following summer a sailing expedition off the Norfolk coast, and exploration of the Norfolk Broads, produced Horsey Mere (‘Hurle Mere’ in the novel) as the place for the deliberately delayed and carefully prepared first appearance of Miss Gwilt, more than a third of the way through the book. It has recently been suggested that it was on this trip to Norfolk that Collins met Martha Rudd, a shepherd’s daughter from the coastal village of Winterton, who was to become the mother of his three children.4
By autumn 1864 Collins had written enough of the book for serial publication to be announced, but his health was still a serious problem, as he confided to Pigott: ‘the gout has attacked my brain. My mind is perfectly clear—but the nervous misery ... is indescribable ... With Smith away, and the first number made up on the first of next month, the disaster is complete—unless I take a turn to the better, in the next few days.’5
Whether his sufferings were emotional and psychological, or resulted from trying to cut down the dose of the laudanum to which he was now addicted (neither gout, nor any other form of rheumatism, attacks the brain), there is no doubt of his courage and determination. The first number came out in the November issue of Cornhill, as planned, and the book was at last on its way to the public.
Early reactions were encouraging. Collins showed the proofs of the early numbers to Dickens and Georgina Hogarth, who were enthusiastic. As Dickens had more than once expressed his dislike of over-elaborated fiction, and warned Collins against his weakness for it, his approval was significant. Almost equally important to Collins was the favourable verdict of the printers, eager to read the further instalments as they set them up in type. When it was completed John Forster, to whom the book was dedicated, called it, ‘a masterpiece of Art... to bring even pity and pathos to the end of such a career as [Lydia Gwilt’s]’.6
But Collins was prepared for attacks by the critics. He knew the novel would be thought immoral, and made bold claims for it in his characteristically aggressive preface: ‘Readers in particular will . . . be here and there disturbed—perhaps even offended. . . Estimated by the Clap-trap morality of the present day, this may be a very daring book. Judged by the Christian morality which is of all time, it is only a book which is daring enough to speak the truth.’
The critics were quick to take up this challenge: the Athenaeum’s reviewer, H. F. Chorley, described Lydia Gwilt as ‘one of the most hardened female villains whose devices and desires have ever blackened fiction’. The Spectator attacked the defence of truth:
The fact that there are characters such as he has drawn, and actions such as he has described, does not warrant his overstepping the limits of decency, and revolting every human sentiment. This is what Armadale does. It gives us for its heroine a woman fouler than the refuse of the streets, who has lived to the ripe age of thirty-five, and through the horrors of forgery, murder, theft, bigamy, gaol, and attempted suicide, without any trace being left on her beauty.
A writer in the Saturday Review expressed the pervasive sense of unease aroused by the book. ‘If it were the object of art to make one’s audience uncomfortable, without letting them know why, Mr Wilkie Collins would be beyond all doubt a consummate artist.’ This reviewer found Lydia Gwilt a ‘waxwork figure’ compared with Becky Sharp. ‘Nor do we understand wherein the “truth” in particular of Armadale consists, unless it is in the fact that red-haired women do exist who are as wicked as Miss Gwilt, a fact which it is not our wish to deny.’ The Westminster Review was more indignant. ‘Mr Wilkie Collins once nearly succeeded in making a mad woman popular, but he has now perfectly succeeded in making religions ridiculous.’7
Wilkie Collins was well used to critical attack, and the book sold well in spite of it: Mudie’s Library faced an unexpectedly large public demand. But Armadale was far from achieving the runaway success of The Woman in White. Its complicated plot was probably as much to blame as its sensationalism, or the wickedness of the heroine, no more extreme than that of the perennially popular Lady Audley. The plot of Armadale has, ever since, been admired for its ingenuity, and criticized for its absurdity. The critic of the Saturday Review called Armadale ‘a lurid labyrinth of improbabilities’; it has more recently been described as ‘one of the most over plotted novels in English literature’.8 Yet there have always been those who have rated it highly. Swinburne thought it ‘astonishingly ingenious and inventive’, and Lydia Gwilt ‘a figure which would have aroused the widest and the deepest sympathies of English readers if only she had not been the creation of an Englishman’.9 T. S. Eliot thought the book ‘has no merit beyond melodrama, and it has every merit that melodrama can have. If Miss Gwilt did not have to bear such a large part of the burden of revealing her own villainy, the construction would be almost perfect.’10 Wilkie Collins was scornfully told that his stories were ‘read in every back-kitchen in England’; but he was more than a provider of lurid sensationalism for the semi-literate. Armadale, at a superficial level the most sensational of sensational novels, uses the devices of melodrama to push to extremes a nightmare vision of society, which repeatedly stretches the reader’s tolerance to its limits. The distortions of the plot, the violent and irrational reactions of the characters, reflect and dramatize the ways in which his readers’ perceptions were distorted by the assumptions and hypocrisies of the society in which they lived.
It is a harsh novel. The unpretentious charm of Collins’s familiar style, which creates a sense of intimacy with the reader, went a considerable way towards making the sensational aspects of The Woman in White and No Name acceptable. This charm is absent, it seems deliberately, from Armadale, which recalls, in its unrelieved intensity, his early novel Basil. There is little attempt at comedy. A scene between the two young lovers Allan and Neelie, which mocks the inconsistencies of the marriage laws, and the brief introduction of a comic clergyman and his mother who have no function in the plot, seem set-pieces, which accentuate the generally stormy atmosphere, rather than providing relief from it. In place of the irresistible vitality of Count Fosco and Captain Wragge, Collins gives us only the self-lacerating black humour and tigerish energy of Lydia Gwilt. Nor is there any satisfactory resolution at the end of the story. One of the two most interesting characters is dead, the other seems still emotionally crippled. The marriage of Allan and Neelie is of little interest by comparison with the fates of Midwinter and Lydia Gwilt. While presenting the surface of a sensational novel, Armadale suggests the existence of a subtext, inviting and yet resisting interpretation, which disturbed its first readers, and still has the power to disturb today.
Though, in order to disguise his use of contemporary events, Collins set the main action of the novel in the early 1850s, and the Prologue twenty years earlier, his real concerns were with the 1860s. In these years the concept of the family, and views of the position of women, were changing rapidly. The possibility of the dissolution of marriage, not available to the characters of Armadale, was established, if only in principle, by the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. The position of women, both inside marriage and as single women earning a living, became one of the major questions of the day. Like so many nineteenth-century heroines, Lydia Gwilt is a governess, though one of a very different kind from Miss Garth in Collins’s previous novel, No Name. ‘[Governessing] is a platform on which the lower and upper classes meet, the one struggling up, the other drifting down . . . here is the means of bread-winning to which access alone seems open—to which alone untrained capacity is equal or pride admits appeal.’11 For Lydia Gwilt, governessing is the perfect cover: a ladylike manner and good education, with a plausible reference, enable her to hide her criminal past and insinuate herself into country society by claiming to be drifting down rather than struggling up. The figure of the governess, in fiction and in the popular imagination, was changing from that of the downtrodden victim to a more ambiguous, attractive, and dangerous image.
Popular sympathy with the position of ‘fallen’ and criminal women was also on the increase, fuelled by campaigns in the Press, as well as by the fiction of the sensation novelists.
On the evening of the Trial, two or three of the young Buccaniers of Literature went down to two or three newspaper offices, and wrote two or three heartrending leading articles on the subject of the proceedings in court. The next morning the public caught light like tinder; and the prisoner was tried over again, before an amateur court of justice, in the columns of the newspapers. . . . Doctors who had not attended the sick man, and who had not been present at the examination of the body, declared by dozens that he had died a natural death. Barristers without business, who had not heard the evidence, attacked the jury who had heard it, and judged the Judge . . . The general public followed the lead of the barristers and the doctors, and the young Buccaniers who had set the thing going.12
This passage is an accurate reflection of an increasing mood of humanity. Most women murderers were not executed, and most of those who were, were miserably poor. Middle-class women murderers, most of them poisoners, either went free, or served terms of imprisonment.13 Wilkie Collins expressed his indignation; but he was himself violently attacked for his portrait of the seductive Miss Gwilt, murderess, adulteress, and forger, not for inaccuracy, but for making her too attractive. His characterization of the beautician and procuress Mrs Oldershaw, ‘disagreeably sensational’, according to the Saturday Review, was very closely modelled on the notorious Madame Rachel Leverson. Rachel Leverson, mentioned by name in Lady Audley’s Secret in 1862, was by 1866 at the height of her success. In 1863 she had opened a shop in New Bond Street, selling cosmetics and beauty treatments at outrageous prices. The slogan over the door, ‘Beautiful for Ever’, and the prominent position of the shop, acknowledged openly for the first time that ordinary women who were neither prostitutes nor actresses used cosmetics. But Rachel Leverson carried on other more criminal activities in the Bond Street premises (which, like the building which houses Mrs Oldershaw’s shop in Armadale, had two entrances), as was proved at her trial for blackmail in 1867, after the publication of Armadale. The portrayal of her in the novel suggests that Collins had private knowledge of these, perhaps through his legal contacts.14
Though no original has been discovered for Doctor Downward, the ‘ladies’ physician’ who turns himself into an alienist, the proliferation of private madhouses throughout the nineteenth century was under attack from many quarters during the 1860s. Charles Reade’s novel Hard Cash, serialized in All the Year Round in 1863, paints a far more melodramatic picture of such an establishment than ‘Doctor le Doux’s’. The Doctor, by purporting to run ‘a sanatorium for the reception of nervous invalids’, attempts to evade the laws governing the licensed private madhouses. His system of treatment, cynically applied to achieve the maximum financial return with a minimum of outside interference, is based on that of the famous (and entirely respectable) Doctor Conolly, whose Treatment of the Insane without Medical Restraints was published in 1856, and who himself kept a select private asylum for up to six ladies, from 1845 to 1866.15 The scandal surrounding some such establishments, and the treatment of the mentally disturbed in general, was recurrently attacked by Wilkie Collins. Of course the madhouse functions in his fiction as one element in the scary ‘sensation’ his readers enjoyed: it is the Victorian equivalent of the gothic castle, or convent, a place of terrifying incarceration from which there seems to be no escape. But there were loopholes in the law which could easily be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous, and cases of wrongful committal did occur—two cases in 1858 caused a public outcry.16
Is Armadale merely a melodrama which makes cynical use of contemporary allusions to add a factitious realism? Collins certainly takes his practised use of duplication, disguise, coincidence, substitution, and confusion of identity, the stock properties of melodrama, to bewildering lengths in this book. Any realistic reading of the novel as a whole is difficult to sustain: the labyrinthine twists of the plot defy summary. Yet Wilkie Collins’s friend Harry Quilter, summing up the novelist’s work in 1888, considered Armadale the greatest of his novels, better than The Woman in White, because it is ‘drawn on a much larger scale, and shows a much wider knowledge of character. If it were only for the intricacy of the plot, and for the manner in which that plot worked out . . . the work would remain of typical excellence, but it is more than this. It is an attempt, and a successful attempt, to deal from the imaginative point of view with the doctrines of heredity, both physical and moral.’17
Questions of biological and psychological inheritance certainly feature in the novel. Evolutionary theory, the idea of inherited characteristics, gave the old theological controversy, ‘the Great Debate’ over destiny versus free will, a new impetus in the middle of the nineteenth century. Collins proposed a larger and more charitable view of Christian morality than the gloomy doctrine of original sin. He found the biblical warning that the sins of the fathers are visited on the children appalling. In a late novel, The Legacy of Cain, the idea that a murderer’s child must herself be a potential murderer is examined and dismissed by one of the characters in terms that express Wilkie Collins’s own beliefs:
No man in his senses can doubt that physical qualities are transmitted from parents to children. But inheritance of moral qualities is less easy to trace . . . Moral resemblances have been traced between parents and children. While, however, I admit this, I doubt the conclusion which sees, in inheritance of moral qualities, a positive influence exercised in mortal destiny. There are inherent emotional forces in humanity to which the inherited influences must submit; they are essentially influences under control—influences which can be encouraged and forced back. That we, who inhabit this little planet, may be the doomed creatures of fatality, from the cradle to the grave, I am not prepared to dispute. But I absolutely refuse to believe that it is a fatality with no higher origin than can be found in our accidental obligation to our fathers and mothers.18
In Armadale the doctrine of predestination is voiced by a murderer, and strongly opposed by an upright and decent clergyman. Finally, the clergyman’s prediction—‘If danger ever threatens Allan, you, whose father took his father’s life—you, and no other, may be the man whom the providence of God has appointed to save him’—comes true. But until near the end the warning in the letter left by the murderer seems to be reiterated in the working out of Armadale’s dream; and the strenuous attempts of the murderer’s son to avoid the fate that has been wished on him, and in which he seems almost to want to believe, create a tension between the external events of the melodrama, and the internal events of his own psychomachia. The conflict in Midwinter between the desire for the emotional satisfactions of friendship and sexual love, and his fear that disaster will be the consequence of giving way to such natural desires, becomes so extreme that it repeatedly drives him to the brink of a breakdown. He longs to escape from his original identity. Born at the time of the emancipation of the slaves in British territories, he is, on his mother’s side, the descendant of slaves, on his father’s, the son of a murderer: ‘. . . an ill-conditioned brat, with my mother’s negro blood in my face, and my murdering father’s passions in my heart’, whose ‘swarthy, secret face’ arouses suspicion. He begins as a wanderer and outsider in the tradition of the gothic novel, condemned to eternal restlessness to expiate an unspeakable guilt: ‘Ozias Midwinter at twenty, spoke of his life as Ozias Midwinter at seventy might have spoken, with a long weariness of years on him which he had learned to bear patiently.’ His manic reaction to Major Milroy’s ridiculous clock is sudden and bizarre, yet psychologically convincing, his hysterical outburst carefully prepared for as ‘only a new aspect of the one ever-recurring struggle of Midwinter’s life’.19
That struggle also involves, as so often in Wilkie Collins’s novels, questions of identity, both psychic and practical. In The Woman in White, the heroine has her identity stolen from her, and a diminished one substituted: she becomes an anonymous ‘woman in white’. In No Name, the title of the book proposes Magdalen’s central problem, the need to establish an identity that will be recognized by the world. In Armadale it is for once the men, rather than the women, who struggle to identify themselves—to themselves as well as to others—in relation to the name. (Collins too had trouble with names: for all three novels, the titles were only decided on long after the central conception of the stories had been fixed.) For Midwinter, the final horror is to find his carefully manufactured new identity, under the ‘ugly name’ that has seemed a refuge from the fate of usurpation, used by the woman he has married to deny their relationship.
Who, in each generation, is rightfully entitled to the name ‘Allan Armadale’, becomes so confused in the mind of the most attentive reader, as it is to the characters themselves, that the whole matter of names, and their relationship to personality, is called into question. Armadale is, indeed, ‘a name without an identity ... a blank space standing for a property that has no real owner—’.20 The idea of property, of possession and dispossession, is intimately connected with this theme of identity. The intricacies of the plot of Armadale turn on the connection of ownership of property with the ownership of a name, as they also do in No Name and The Woman in White. In Armadale the arbitrary nature of possession is made obvious by the very absurdity of the series of accidents and coincidences that set the mechanism of plot going; a mechanism as ridiculous as that of Major Milroy’s clock, and as liable to go wrong, baffled by the gothic refinements introduced by its maker. The series of accidental deaths that make Allan Armadale a wealthy landowner have usually been seen as a flaw in the novel. But the events have their own inner logic, and help to establish some sympathy in the reader with Lydia Gwilt’s feeling that the foolish young Lord of the Manor, who is shown as carelessly assuming the rights, without troubling to undertake the duties imposed on him by his accidentally acquired status, has no right to enjoy the privileges of his new position. She, with no advantage from birth but her intelligence and her beauty, feels that she has as much right to a place in the world as he, and her love for Midwinter, originating in a strong physical and mental attraction to another intelligent outsider, gains added force when she discovers his place in the drama of naming and dispossession.
This is a theme that would have struck home to the thousands of anonymous and dispossessed among Wilkie Collins’s first readers. Women in particular, both the downtrodden menials of the back-kitchens and their comparatively fortunate sisters in the back-drawing-rooms, could, except for a very few, hope to achieve status only through marriage, and the protective colouring of someone else’s name. It is notable that, in a novel where the confusion of naming reaches nightmarish proportions, it is a woman, Lydia Gwilt, who stands out as the character with a steady identity. Although she marries Midwinter, and then takes the name ‘Mrs Armadale’ (which is legally if not morally hers), she defiantly sticks to her original name when a convenient pseudonym might have avoided many dangers, and she remains ‘Lydia Gwilt’ in the mind of the reader, throughout. The minor villains slip on new names as easily as they appropriate other disguises: the procuress, ‘Mother Oldershaw’, becomes the respectable reference ‘Mrs Mandeville’; Doctor Downward buys his new, fashionable French name with the sanatorium and the medical certificates of the man who once owned it. But Lydia, her flamboyant sexuality signalled by the obvious marks of her red hair and fine figure, defies the world and almost gets away with it. This is not without cost to her emotional life, shown to the reader through the narrative devices of her diary and her letters to Mrs Oldershaw, which are used to throw her conflict into relief. The diary reveals her inner turmoil; the letters, appropriately, show her cool, calculating villainy and controlled intelligence at work. The two aspects of the writer of the novel—the poetic imagination and the intelligent control of plot—are given to the character whose weary disillusion with her success in seduction and the complications of her webs of deceit, seem almost to speak for her tired, sick author, finding relief, as she does, only in the blessings of opium.
Lydia Gwilt is the nexus for another form of attempted ownership explored in the novel, the desire for the exclusive possession of another person. She is at the centre of a spiral of sexual jealousies. Mrs Milroy carries jealousy to paranoid lengths, imagining her husband is involved with every woman he meets; but almost all the main characters suffer from that destructive passion. Neelie and Lydia are jealous of each other; Bashwood is jealous of Allan, and so, for a while, is Midwinter. Lydia’s first husband was jealous of Manuel. Lydia is, after she has fallen in love with Midwinter, jealous of his feeling for Allan. It is jealousy that underlies much of the spying in a book where all the characters, at one time or another, spy on each other. Collins takes the private detective employed on matrimonial enquiries as the paradigm for the age.
No eye for reading character, but such an eye as belongs to one person, perhaps, in ten thousand, could have penetrated the smoothly deceptive surface of this man, and have seen him for what he really was—the vile creature whom the viler need of Society has fashioned for its own use. There he sat—the Confidential Spy of modern times whose business is steadily enlarging, whose Private Inquiry Offices are steadily on the increase. There he sat—the necessary Detective attendant on the progress of our national civilisation . . . a man professionally ready on the merest suspicion . . . to get under our beds, and to look through gimlet-holes in our doors.21
In Armadale the spies are everywhere, and they are not only professional: everyone spies on everyone else. Letters are steamed open, lovers are overheard from behind trees, suspicious characters are watched from windows, followed in cabs, and traced to railway stations. Spying is an attempt to usurp another person’s freedom of action and autonomy, literally his or her self-possession. In Armadale the ‘good’ characters may claim to deplore the necessity, but they do it, along with everyone else. Mr Brock and Allan both set spies to watch Lydia Gwilt. There are no absolute standards, only expediency.
The final key to this mysterious and bewildering book lies, perhaps, in Allan’s dream, ingeniously constructed to yield two interpretations. The prophetic interpretation has the weight of tradition behind it, and is inherently more interesting. The canny reader is aware that the alternative, rational interpretation given by the doctor cannot be the right one, or there would be no story. Yet this relies on one theory of dreams then current, which is rational and convincing: that the mind in sleep seeks to make narrative patterns from events encountered in the waking world. The doctor’s explanation corresponds satisfyingly to the rational level of the story, with its careful use of detailed settings and contemporary references. But this common-sense world is constantly being subverted: by coincidence, by nominal confusion, and by the figure of the woman, Lydia Gwilt, connected with every aspect of the Armadale fortunes. Collins guides the reader towards a reliance on the prophetic interpretation, which matches these irrational elements, while hinting at the possibility of yet another, unexpressed meaning, which hovers between the other two, exploring the bases of personality, while leaving the question of free will and destiny unresolved, as it finally is in the novel. Even at the surface level of melodrama, neither interpretation is, nor is intended to be, ultimately satisfactory. The third meaning is intimately bound up with the complicated doubling of the characters.
The central question of the book, ‘Who is Allan Armadale?’22 is symbolically encapsulated in the Dream. One contemporary theory of dreams considered the dreaming state as one in which the moral constraints of waking life were suspended, and in his early novel Basil Wilkie Collins made use, in a fairly unsophisticated way, of a dream of temptation—a young man torn between a dark, sexually enticing woman and a fair, saintly one—which draws heavily on De Quincey’s Suspiria de profundis. The dream in Armadale is more complex. It has been noted that ‘Allan Armadale’s Dream’ reproduces not Allan’s, but Ozias Midwinter’s anxieties, and that the doctor, hearing that someone has had a bad dream, immediately assumes the dreamer to have been Midwinter.23 It is obvious that Allan Armadale dreaming is a far more interesting character than Allan Armadale awake.
The bare narrative of Allan’s dream suggests an inevitable psychic connection between the three people in it: the dreamer, the Shadow of a Man, and the Shadow of a Woman. Collins’s terms embody a startling anticipation of Jung’s theories of ‘the shadow’, the dark part of a personality that is repressed from consciousness, but which must be recognized if self-knowledge is to be acquired. In Jung’s mythology, the shadow-self appears as a figure of the same sex, which, at least in the dreams of Europeans, is dark-skinned, alien, or primitive. Jung himself had a dream in which he was accompanied by an unknown, brown-skinned savage, who was impelling him to kill. The dream ended with a tremendous rainstorm, which washed out traces of the murder. In Armadale the ‘shadow of a man’ is interpreted by Ozias as himself; the ‘other’ dark-skinned, alien, ‘primitive’ Armadale, who possesses, as Jung’s shadow does, ‘an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive or, better, possessive quality’. Allan Armadale’s dream even contains a climactic rainstorm, as Jung’s does. On his own, the fair Allan Armadale is no more than a silly youth, a rash intruding fool without any inner being. Twinned with his shadow, the ‘dark Armadale’, who is alternately a danger to him and his saviour, Allan begins to take on substance. Similarly, the ‘shadow of a woman’, identified as the seductress and murderess Lydia Gwilt, prefigures certain of the less benign aspects of Jung’s ‘anima’, or soul-image. This is always a figure of the opposite sex to the dreamer. Jung puts mildly enough what Collins worked out most powerfully in the figure of the temptress who bewitches both the fair and the dark Armadale. ‘In men with a good-natured and unaggressive persona, the soul-image has a rather malevolent character.’24 Allan is immediately, though temporarily, bewitched by her; his deeper alter ego joins himself to her for a while, and is more seriously and lastingly affected by her. Finally, the split between the two Allan Armadales is resolved. The two, one lacking any inner life, the other a damaged and tormented soul seeking peace, are united in a permanent bond; but it is at the expense of the anima. Yet, though the active female principle may once again have been subjugated and destroyed, Armadale is Lydia Gwilt’s book, and it is she who dominates the story to the end.