SILVER-FORK LEGACIES: SENSATIONALIZING FASHIONABLE FICTION

ISSN： 0969-9082

Source： Women's Writing, Vol.16, Iss.2, 2009-08, pp. : 301-322

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Abstract

This article seeks to reassess the literary legacies of silver-fork fiction for women's writing at the mid-century. It proposes the term “silver-fork sensation novel” to explore the self-reflective revival of the genre's most popular characteristics as an expression of resistance to the confines of domestic realism at a time when domesticity in popular fiction almost predictably implied an engagement with domestic containment in primarily middle-class households. As it externalized outmoded ideals of gentility divorced from wealth yet associated with the high life of the past, this reworking of fashionable society fiction engendered a move back up the ranks and into a preoccupation with Gothic castles and aristocratic lineage in novels that at the same time sought to adapt them to the demands of literary sensationalism. As specifically sensation novels by women writers drew on the structures of largely retrospective fictionalizations of an aristocratic elite declining in social and political power, they moreover capitalized on the increasingly ambiguous narrative potential of “shabby-gentility”. In illustrating the effects of a downward movement as the other side of the coin of social mobility, the shabby-genteel thereby came to embody a form of resistance to the newly pervasive ideology of self-help. Such redeployments of silver-fork elements at once facilitate and demand a larger reconsideration of categories of nineteenth-century women's writing and the intertextual interchanges within popular fiction.