Reading the seen: Mystery and visual fetishism in nineteenth-century popular narrative

From the "urban mysteries" phenomenon of the 1840s to the reign of super-detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, stories of mystery rank high among the most popular narratives in nineteenth-century Europe and America. Despite the importance of mystery fiction to nineteenth-century literature and culture, however, the most significant characteristics that define the mystery genre---across its wide range of texts, which include "urban mysteries" serials, detective stories, and "sensation" novels as well as journalistic exposes and narratives of "passing"---remain largely untheorized. In this dissertation, I trace the spectacular rise and proliferation of the popular mystery narrative from the 1840s forward. Investigating the cultural, ideological, and economic power of the fictional mystery, I address how and why mysteries became a profoundly seductive narrative force in the nineteenth century, employed by myriad authors and embraced by audiences that crossed class, race, gender, and national lines.;I contend that the unique, defining element of nineteenth-century mystery, and the key to its mid-century emergence and popularity, is its reflection and endorsement of a particularly modern kind of ambivalent visual faith. More than any other narrative genre, the mysteries that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century provide a rich example of what I call "visual fetishism," a term that refers to the paradoxical yet persistent belief that visual signs are always stable and always uncertain. According to the logic of the mystery narrative, people and things always bear ineffaceable, visible traces of their histories and identities, yet protagonists or readers are also always subject to tricks of visual deception. The genre's central, opposing tropes of the master observer and the master of disguise reveal a heightened, unshakable faith in visual clues that exists in suspenseful tension with its celebration of the malleable nature of visual evidence. Through its fetishistic play with modern anxiety about the stability (and instability) of the visible world, the mystery distills nineteenth-century ambivalence about the epistemological power of the act of seeing into a deeply pleasurable game that signally helped readers cope with their newly---and increasingly---industrialized, urbanized, and technological culture.