ABSTRACT
Perhaps more subversively than No Name, Wilkie Collins’s Armadale prolongs some of the ambiguities of No Name by literally fusing the figure of the Victorian lady with that of the scheming actress. Published a few years after No Name, Armadale seems to expose the Victorian underworld of feminine construction, using the fairy tale Snow White and the figure of the narcissitic Queen to offer its readers an insight into the looking-glass of femininity. Indeed, Collins’s play with woman’s commodification is brought a step further since the readers are granted access to the backstage of feminine construction where the epitome of womanliness and the socially inferior actress become one and the same. By displaying Lydia Gwilt’s correspondence with her personal adviser, Mrs. Oldershaw, who is modelled on Rachel Leverson, as well as Lydia Gwilt’s own diary to which she confides her future murderous plots and her multiple identities, Armadale proposes a survey of duplicitous female practices.
