ABSTRACT
My dissertation tracks the production of "common sense" about female sexuality
and psychology in nineteenth-century sensational British literature. I move from the
sensation novel’s heyday, represented by Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) and
Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), through the fin-de-siècle Gothic
literary revival with Bram Stoker's Dracula (1895), and conclude with a reading of the
representation of aberrant female sexuality in the emergent science of nineteenth-century
sexology. For Victorian readers, few things could have seemed further removed from
sensation literature—from lurid crime novels to sordid news stories to sexualized
science—than common sense. Yet, my project illustrates the role of sensational literature
in provoking the dark millennial fantasies that passed as common sense and often
animated theories of femininity expressed in late-Victorian science. Common sense
retains its rhetorical force through the assumption that its premises arise naturally and
apply universally. But if we take a historical view, a troubling pattern emerges: common
sense has often worked to preserve reactionary views of femininity. For example, in the
nineteenth century, common sense led medical professionals to the belief that a woman's
reproductive system left her constitutionally more susceptible to "hysteria."
I define common sense as the product of the frequent iteration of a particular train
of associative logic that results in the naturalization and legitimation of claims about
reality, even if those claims are both sensationalized and arbitrary. The rhetorical force of
common sense requires the perpetual obscuration of its origins. The elusive and
frustrating quality of common sense as a cognitive category derives from its ability, in
Stuart Hall's words, to "represent itself as the 'traditional wisdom or truth of the ages,'
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[when] in fact, it is deeply a product of history, 'part of the historical process'"
("Gramsci's Relevance" 431). Hall describes this type of associative relationship between
disparate figures often exemplified in the logic of common sense as "an articulation."
What Hall refers to as an "articulation" might also be called, when viewed through the
lens of literary theory, a “metonymic chain,” wherein the literal term for one thing is
applied to another with which it becomes linked, articulated. Both terms—articulation
and metonymic chain—effectively describe the illusion of necessary correspondence in
mere arbitrary association.
My translation of this cultural phenomenon into the framework of literary analysis
allows for a precise description of the rhetorical transformations involved in conjuring
common sense. With frequent iteration, metonymic association may appear to be based
on some more substantial similarity—not circumstantial, but necessary; not the product
of sensationalism, but the inevitable conclusion derived from and constituting common
sense. Common sense regarding female sexuality has frequently been preserved through
sensationalism; but paradoxically, sensationalism is often most effective when its
characteristic paranoia seems somehow self-evidently justified, even rational. In other
words, sensationalism works best to consolidate the paranoid patterns of associative logic
informing the nineteenth-century figuration of femininity when it appears not to be
working at all—when sensationalism takes on the weight of common sense.

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