Everybody knows this Victorian novelist for his ultra-popular The Moonstone and The Woman in White. However, Wilkie Collins’s lesser known novels are also worth reading. As part of the Classics Challenge, I have read his novel No Name and now regret not placing more of Collins’s books on my Classics list. In my opinion, No Name is a lot better than both of the author’s more popular novels, and I wonder why it isn’t better known.
The greatest achievement of the novel is the protagonist, Magdalen Vanstone. World literature hasn’t produced many images of strong, resourceful, intelligent women. This is why rare exceptions such as Collins’s heroine are so priceless. Magdalen is a woman with a cause, a plan, a dream that she pursues single-mindedly and without any reservations. Thankfully, this dream does not consist of snagging a rich husband with a big mansion, which makes Magdalen very unlike the insipid protagonists of Austin’s novels.
No Name has a very complex plot where two powerful, resourceful women scheme against each other. At a first glance, it seems that the object of their scheming is money. However, one soon realizes that it isn’t about money at all for either of the heroines. Of course, as women of the comfortable, educated class of society, they need some financial means to maintain an existence that will not be too degrading to their sensibilities. However, their struggle for the inheritance allows them to exercise their intelligence in a way that no other pursuits available to women of their class at the time would be able to do.
The ending of the novel is particularly curious. Behind an apparent concession to the patriarchal norms presenting women as pathetic, fragile flowers, the readers can see an alternative vision of reality, one where women remain untamed and undaunted no matter what befalls them.
It’s interesting how the novels with weak and pathetic female characters survive and preserve their popularity a lot better than novels with powerful and complex female protagonists. Everybody is besotted with the inane, weak and weepy protagonists of Pride and Prejudice Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, etc. but who has heard of Magdalen Vanstone and Aurora Floyd? Bear in mind that the absolute majority of the readership of these novels is and has always been female.
Clarissa's Blog 
Oh I love _No Name_!! (I am a huge Wilkie Collins fan.) It was so fun to read your review. 🙂
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I’m adding this to my list of books to read. The characters sound fascinating.
As for Pride and Prejudice, I don’t remember Elizabeth Bennet being weepy and weak. She’s not an intellectual mastermind either, but then none of the characters are. I also never got the sense that Austen is giving complacent approval to the little world they all live in and the scope of their ambitions and the limitations on how they can lead their lives.
Many of Austen’s current fans and some of her detractors I think misread the books as romantic escapist fantasies of a sort, where it’s all about a carefree life of love and money in mansions (you can see it in the way many fans tend to gush over Mr. Darcy, with a devotion fueled by Colin Firth’s portrayal of him in one of the movie adaptations); but the book isn’t cheerfully uncomplicated like that.
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Can’t relate to the paradigm of weepy women, either. ‘Weak” is contextual, never psychological. When I began researching my thesis, I believed in psychological weakness. By the end of it, I didn’t. I thought, “Every animal, including those that are human, fight for their survival with everything they have.” To succeed or fail only defined circumstantial weakness, not inherent weakness. This is a particularly Nietzschean insight, which links creativity with the tendency to go beyond circumscribed limits and thus to create tragic outcomes. Failure is therefore likely — but it is not at all the same as “weakness”.
Zarathustra, however, looked at the people and wondered. Then he spake thus:
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman–a rope over an abyss.
A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING.
I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers.
I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive.
I love him who liveth in order to know, and seeketh to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeketh he his own down-going.
I love him who laboureth and inventeth, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeketh he his own down-going.
I love him who loveth his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing.
I love him who reserveth no share of spirit for himself, but wanteth to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walketh he as spirit over the bridge.
I love him who maketh his virtue his inclination and destiny: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more.
I love him who desireth not too many virtues. One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one’s destiny to cling to.
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I never heard of this one before, but I’m adding it to my to-read list. Thanks for the review!
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