Difficulties of Decision: Wilkie Collins’s Armadale

This chapter reflects on how the ‘difficulties of decision’ are portrayed in Wilkie Collins’s novel Armadale (1866). It traces first the distinctions between morbid and ‘critical’ forms of hesitation, which were contrasted in popular discourse with a much-maligned policy of haste. In Armadale, these differing approaches to action and thought are transposed onto its main characters and ‘tested’ by them. Contrary to the majority critical opinion, this chapter argues that the initial form of hesitation displayed by Ozias Midwinter is flawed and paralleled by Allan Armadale’s inverse (but equally detrimental) impulsivity—only by the novel’s end does it acquire a purposeful side. The chapter’s final section proposes that Allan’s dream is meant to illustrate the difficulties of decision and foster uncertainty. It is optimally responded to by a ‘mid-way approach’ between credulity and scepticism—an approach that Collins discovers in works of spiritualism, but which also describes what the author considers to be the essence of scientific discovery.