ABSTRACT

This article introduces texture as a key category of material analysis in Victorian literature and culture. Challenging distinctions between inside and outside structures, texture offers not only a complex, multi-layered understanding of material surfaces but also provides aesthetic and interpretive tools for rendering and analysing matter in literary and cultural representations. Drawing on Wilkie Collins’s No Name, this article argues that the novel presents the protagonist’s illegitimacy as a material condition by foregrounding the textural qualities of her bodily surface. Textural principles serve as a central technique of characterisation in No Name and are a crucial device through which the characters shape themselves and assess each other. As a means of interrogating Victorian laws and norms, the novel uses textures to show how normative conceptions of (il)legitimacy inform the characters’ and the narrator’s perception of (bodily) matter. The article shows how the novel’s textural construction of bodily materiality undermines comfortable distinctions between inside and outside, subject and object, as well as legitimate and illegitimate.

摘要

本文介绍了纹理作为维多利亚文学和文化中材料分析的一个关键类别。具有挑战性的内部和外部结构之间的区别，纹理不仅提供了对材料表面的复杂、多层次的理解，而且还提供了审美和解释工具，用于渲染和分析文学和文化表现中的物质。本文借鉴威尔基·柯林斯的《无名》，认为小说通过突出主人公身体表面的纹理品质，将主人公的私生子作为一种物质条件呈现出来。结构原则是《无名》中表征的核心技术并且是角色塑造自己和相互评估的关键装置。作为质疑维多利亚时代法律和规范的一种手段，这部小说使用纹理来展示（非法）合法性的规范性概念如何影响人物和叙述者对（身体）物质的感知。这篇文章展示了小说对身体物质性的结构构造如何破坏了内部与外部、主体与客体以及合法与非法之间的舒适区分。