The summary for the introduction from The Serious Pleasures of Suspense is very detailed. Within, “ Victorian fictions, the secret, when it finally emerges, turns out to be entirely different from what we have been invited or expected to imagine. Readers and characters may put forward a range of guesses and conjectures, but narrative mysteries remind us that even the plentiful range of our guesses may be narrow when compared with the hidden truth. And so, as we read suspenseful plots, we learn to doubt and guess, to speculate and hypothesize, to pause in the knowledge that we do not know”.
The author transitions between subjects of the scientific to the dramatic then to politics. It first starts out with what some of the top critics say about suspense. Some of them say it is barbaric, boorish and low. Others say that it is the exact opposite: too civilized. The two critics agree to disagree and settle on the idea that it is “organized set of stoppages”. The first critics that say it is too barbaric are E.M. Forster and Roland Barthes. They say that, “suspense emerges as a literary instrument of social control. The other critics like John Ruskin, Michael Faraday, Charlotte Bronte, and Wilkie Collins would say the contrary, “the experience of suspense was not a means of social regulation, but a rigorous political and epistemological training, a way to foster energetic skepticism and uncertainty rather than closure and complacency.
Suspense not only has a place within literature, but also within science. Most nineteenth century scientists felt that the doubtful pause that someone gets was necessary in the pursuit of knowledge; otherwise, we would assume that our thoughts are correct and never think of the possibility of surprises or unexpected truths. Also most scientists and philosophers would agree that to do a true experiment one should not use their imagination, but only rely on the facts that the world brings to the table. However, others would say that it is imagination that creates the possible experiments. For if someone cannot think of new situations to experiment with then the raw data is not true within every realm. The only main thing that they all agree on is that the imagination should be kept within check. It would be the imagination that would try and correlate the data within the same realm as what the hypothesis had envisioned.
Within the realm of Victorian Realism the idea is to mimic real life. In order to mimic life “John Ruskin urged the scientific experiment as the most effective approach to cultural images, inviting his readers to test the representations around them against the reality of their own experience”. The only drawback to this experiment was that the images that were placed in front of the reader were not real enough compared to the images that the reader had experienced firsthand.
Suspense seems to be only a narrative problem. Many Realist authors are trying to allow the reader to gather their own assumptions that align with their own ethics, morals, and values. Along with that they are also trying to change the reader’s boundary of comfort zone and make a new judgment upon witnessing the world within someone else’s culture. Within those new experiences the author engages the reader to allow themselves to review their ethics, morals, and values. Within the nineteenth century suspense was, “an essential critical instrument” within the intellectual culture.
It's interesting--and probably makes sense--that the authors who seem in favor of suspense are the ones you use it most skillfully in their novels (Wilkie Collins in particular). Eighteenth-century fiction tended to follow the predictable. The hero/heroine was always going to marry the person you wanted him/her to marry and, if they didn't have money, relatives would die conveniently and leave them money. The Victorians definitely reacted against that, and I think suspense is one way they did so.
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