ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the question of partial insanity and the scope it offered sensation writers in terms of narrative opportunities. Reflecting on the densely populated madhouses of the nineteenth century, the narrator famously wonders in Lady Audley's Secret, 'how many minds must tremble upon the narrow boundary between reason and unreason, mad to-day and sane to-morrow, mad yesterday and sane to-day'. Therefore, while many literary analyses of No Name have identified Magdalen's mental distress as pertaining to the monomaniacal, the authors may consider Collins's insistence on the emotions of the character as rather a reference to moral insanity. Unlike the characters who yield to idleness because of their nervous disorders and their confinement at home, Lucy, Robert, Magdalen, and Walter are highly active characters, whose actions are motivated by their obsessive thoughts and their insecure situation outside the domestic space.
