Blurring the Spheres: Wilkie Collins’ ‘The Woman in White’

So, I had to re-read this for my last mammoth university essay – it was also around the same time the new BBC mini-series came out. I only made it through a couple of episodes, partly because I was so swamped, partly because Walter is a little… bland? A little vanilla… But Marian was great – excellent… boots.

Let’s get down to it though. The Woman in White. 1859 – definitely a fascinating-with-a-capital-F period in English literature. We’ve had the evolution from Romanticism and sensationalism, we’ve had the trail-blazing Brontës, we’ve got slave narratives coming from across the pond along with the earth-shaking popularity of titans like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, we’ve got a queen on the throne again, and now we have this bizarre new genre of sensation fiction born from the voyeuristic obsession with real murder cases like that of Constance Kent and the fresh conversations about class that exploded as a result. After allegedly abducting and brutally murdering her 4 year-old half-brother, Kent escaped prosecution for five years due to public pressure against the “metropolitan witchery” of a working-class detective accusing a wealthy “respectable” woman. One of London’s first ever detectives (appointed in 1842) Sergeant Jack Whicher made the initial accusations against Kent in 1860 based on her missing nightdress but was utterly vilified by the public and the House of Commons. Kent eventually confessed and was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted and she emigrated to Australia. Whicher then became the inspiration for the laconic and hawkish detective Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins’ 1868 novel The Moonstone, as well as the archetypal model for investigators ranging from Dickens’ Inspector Bucket and Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse, to the subversive governess in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and the timeless creation of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

Collins drew on his legal experience as a clerk for a tea merchant to pen The Woman in White, a multi-perspective detective tale that portrays two versions of femininity: the submissive ideal and the subversive reality. In the end he seems to conclude they exist in close proximity to one another, contrasting forces which manifest themselves in the forms of the sisters Laura Fairlie and Marian Halcombe, the latter saving the former. He wanted to imagine an alternative to the bland and formless feminine world demanded by contemporary Victorian society, but he struggled with the means, opting to make Marian more conventionally masculine to do so, even though she becomes the most violated and desexualised. His distinctly male gaze is evidenced in the very first line of the novel when he genders the highest virtues this story will extol as the woman’s “patience” and the man’s “resolution”. Women in this book are creatures of endurance trapped in the domestic sphere. Like Uncle Silas’ Maud, Laura’s fortune is sought by a predatory male, and the extent to which she is controlled and repressed sees her placed in a literal asylum. Even if the madwoman archetype of Anne Catherick did indeed suffer from a mental illness, Laura does not, and so her abduction and the theft of her identity renders her world a prison in which she is voiceless and invisible. It’s the ultimate act of erasure – “her sanity, from first to last, practically denied”.

Madness is weaponised to silence Anne’s life and steal Laura’s, while it’s Marian who subverts the domestic sphere rather than become trapped by it. She argues women should not submit themselves to men as legal property, urging Laura not to marry Glyde. With her masculine physical attributes and attitude of dominance, Collins has Marian describe herself as a “plain spinster” after Walter declares “feminine attractions” dependent upon “gentleness and pliability”. This idea of the malleable feminine is ingrained in the construct of women as restorative and submissive healers of the unrefined, immoral, or traumatised masculine (*gags*).

In the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the literal foundation text of Western feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft quoted the same sentiment expressed by Rousseau a century earlier in his 1762 treatise on education, that “the first and most important qualification in a woman is good nature or sweetness of temper”. Wollstonecraft went on to observe how “virtuous male characters were allowed to be of many temperaments”, while “all women are to be levelled, by meekness and docility, into one character of yielding softness and gentle compliance”. Have you ever read a more timeless sentence? But Collins ensures Marian is not explicitly feminine, and so she’s supposedly not aligned with innate pliability – and yet the limitations and prejudices made inevitable by her status as a woman are inescapable. Marian’s illegitimacy disinherits her from birth, whereas Glyde almost gets away with an elaborate conspiracy to conceal his, a disparity in experience that suggests recognition of the inequality of women and men in both the legal and social constructs of the Victorian spheres, which is pretty cool. Marian’s masculinity blurs these spheres, to an extent.

Verdict?

Collins doesn’t really subvert gender roles to any degree. He makes a pointed effort and example of describing his subversive character, Marian, as physically masculine in an explicitly unattractive and undesirable way, drawing on another set of gendered prejudices women like George Eliot herself had to navigate, as well as reinforcing the alignment between ugliness and intellect that Eliot went on to subvert with characters like Dorothea Brooke.

So, no, I’m not out here calling Collins a proto-feminist, but he does blur the almighty spheres.