Braddon's Haunting Memories: Rape, Class and the Victorian Popular Press

This article draws out the class-based functions of genre by contrasting “penny bloods” with the Victorian middle-class sensation novel. In the penny fiction, the threat of rape is pervasive and yet obscured by the genre's surfeit of spectacle, which absorbs the rape threats into the novel's broader scope. The heroine threatened with rape in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Black Band (1862) exhibits little psychological response to her two abductions, and the events seem to be quickly forgotten once the moment is past. The memory of trauma, however, is transposed onto other elements of the plot. The penny blood's play between generic codes functions as a sleight of hand to de-emphasize the reality of sexual violence.