‘Deform[ing] Hercules’ in Wilkie Collins’s Antonina

Miranda: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone

关键词: Ancient Rome;    Collins;    Victorian novel;    the Gothic;    deformity;    vestiges;   

DOI  :  10.4000/miranda.6831

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Antonina, Wilkie Colins’s second novel, seems to be one of a kind in the novelist’s work who is known to be one of the Victorian masters of sensationalism. For one who, as Henry James once said, was most gifted to stage “those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries that are at our own doors », Collins could not have chosen a more remote scenery for Antonina, both historically and geographically (Ancient Rome at the time of its siege by the Goths). And yet, despite its sometimes heavy, lengthy, even clumsy passages and its apparent and complete Otherness, this early novel is fascinating in what it offers its readers―the metamorphosis of young Collins into a powerful writer, and, more importantly, the very origins of what became his most successful sensational ingredients. Collinsian sensationalism seems to have been born from the metamorphosis of classical standards. Collins mistreats Roman bodies, maims, distorts, weakens, degenerates them, however not to destroy, but to recreate a brand new aesthetic conception of the body, one which prevails in all his later work. In Antonina, the Gothic replaces the Classical, the mental and intellectual relationship to the world becomes intensely physical and sensual, the historical novel slowly moulds itself into a sensational and gothic one, enabling Collins to find his own path.

【 授权许可】

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