I suspected The Woman in White would be an excellent Autumnal read. A gothic mystery novel published in 1860, it seemed sufficiently sensational and spooky enough in the lead up to Halloween. The title itself evokes ghostly connotations of my most feared variety – spectral women dressed all in white, wandering around graveyards and doing the creepy things that ghosts tend to do.
While The Woman in White does have plenty of brushes with the supernatural, this actually isn’t what made it so eerie to read. Ultimately, Wilkie Collins avoids obvious scares in favour of creating a more subtle, secretive atmosphere. That which is hidden – things left unsaid, skeletons left to fester – causes the most harm in Collins’ tale, and the ghosts residing in each of the main characters makes for the most uneasy reading. This quiet sense of uneasiness is what originally made it so difficult for me to pinpoint why I found The Woman in White so compelling, despite it not actually having many overt moments of horror, making it feel like quite the opposite of one of my favourite classics, Dracula. The fear of the other, while a well known principle, is primarily a psychological and therefore intangible fear, but it manifests itself in so many ways in Collins’ novel that danger appears to be on the edge of every page. In fact, it is only once characters are able to embrace their individual sense of ‘otherness’ – that element inside themselves that they most fear revealing – that they (or at the very least, the reader) eventually gains a sense of reassurance.
*MAIN STORY SPOILERS AHEAD!*
Stranger in a Strange Land
The fear of the other more often than not takes the form of aversion to anything foreign, especially people. From the outset, Collins makes it clear that ‘foreign’ in The Woman in White can be equated to suspicious. This is at times played to comedic effect in highlighting the absurdity of Mr Farlie’s exaggerated opposition to all things foreign, particularly his sister’s marriage to an Italian count. However Farlie was after all correct to distrust Count Fosco, who ends up being a dangerous adversary (even if Farlie’s reasons were superficial).
The other principal foreign character, Professor Pesca, is by Walter’s admission the catalyst for all the terrible events which follow. As such, Italians are not generally portrayed particularly favourably or with much nuance (both are defined by their love of the opera and of their own voices), but there is a key distinction between Pesca and the Count. Pesca is, with some convincing, willing to embrace his shady past and reveal all in the name of aiding his friend, and is therefore allowed to escape the events of the novel shaken but unhurt. The Count, by contrast, is allowed to flee with his identity and motives hidden, revealing them only through a letter provided under coercion yet still at his own discretion. He remains a spy who is literally in disguise for the entirety of the novel and is emblematic of a shadowy secretive world and concealed history. Yet his end is described in a few lines by Walter Hartright as so:
“There he lay, unowned, unknown, exposed to the flippant curiosity of a French mob! […] , no other traces of violence appeared about the body except on the left arm, and there exactly in the place where I had seen the brand on Pesca’s arm were two deep cuts in the shape of the letter T, which entirely obliterated the mark of the Brotherhood.”
Fosco’s demise is constructed with contrasts; he rests, as he was in life, “unowned, unknown” and yet in the same breath is “exposed” to “curiosity”, behind a glass screen on display before all of Paris (not unlike the specimens he might have studied himself as someone with a self-proclaimed interest in medical science). He held the same secret as Pesca, that of his membership to the Brotherhood, but while Pesca voluntarily shared his mysterious past in an act that embraced his own ‘otherness’, the very same secret is forcibly extracted from the Count and exposed for all to see. The Count is unable to face his otherness, but this essentially catches up to him in death.
The Woman in White Herself
The supernatural, while subtle, is still an important element of The Woman in White. Ghosts, visions, and unnatural doppelgangers – it is a novel positively heaving with Victorian melodrama and the fear of the ‘other world’. The menacing presence of Anne Catherick, a woman who shares a striking resemblance to Laura Fairlie and who is wrongly committed to an asylum, haunts many of the initial events of the story.
When Walter first meets Laura, he remarks “At one time it seemed like something wanting in her: at another like something wanting in myself. [She was] most troubled by the sense of incompleteness… something wanting, something wanting – and where it was, I could not say.”
There is the suggestion that there is “something” which might complete Laura, and one may conclude the “something” to complete her is Anne Catherick herself; living in each other’s shadows they are simultaneously alike and different, like two halves of a whole waiting to be joined. Eventually Laura is linked to Anne both mentally and in the eyes of the law – she literally becomes the ‘other’ when she herself is engulfed by Anne’s persona. Laura is put in Anne’s clothes, placed in her cell within the asylum, and forced to adopt her identity while surrendering her own. The trauma of this causes her to become sickly pale and suffer memory loss, essentially completing the transformation by having Laura utterly take on Anne’s aspect. Whether by choice or not, Laura adopts the sense of ‘otherness’ that dogs her from her first meeting with Walter. It’s only from this point onward that Laura is able to begin her life anew; rather than reclaiming her identity, it’s rebuilt from the ground up with the help of both Walter and her sister, and she is eventually enabled to start a new chapter in the form of motherhood.
Collins would have been aware of the scandal in Victorian England which saw asylums used to suppress sane people.
A Man’s World
I had trouble figuring out what sense of ‘other’ was hanging over Marian (Laura’s sister), until I considered her defining characteristic: how she utterly rejects and even loathes her femininity and all that she considers ‘womanly’. Between her internalised misogyny (“women can’t draw – their minds are too flighty, and their eyes are too inattentive”) and Walter’s description of her as having a “masculine mouth and jaw”, Collins is keen to convey her efforts to not “be like a woman”, so that she can fulfill her role as Laura’s sole protector. It is this attitude which encourages Marion to undertake the most risky escapade within her part of the story. She eavesdrops on the Count and Sir Percival by exiting through her bedroom window to scale the side of the house to a location above their meeting place, in the most dramatic of weather – pouring rain in the pitch black of night. It’s an extremely tense section, under the constant threat that her subjects may hear her movements, or that the Countess, whose shadow can be seen pacing in the window beyond, may choose any moment to look outside. But the most spine-chilling moment, and perhaps my favourite passage in the novel, comes once Marion is back in her room. Despite being drenched to the bone, she skims over any mentions of her own discomfort in an effort to piece together what she has heard over the course of several pages, until her monologue because less and less coherent.
“Can I even remember when the chilled, cramped feeling left me, and the throbbing heat came in its place? […] Why do I sit here still? Why do I weary my hot eyes and my burning head by writing more? Nine o’clock. Was it nine struck, or eight? Nine, surely? … So cold, so cold – oh, that rain last night! And the strokes of the clock, the strokes I can’t count keep striking in my head-”
Collins builds up to the final line of Marion’s account with a barrage of questions that make her illness seem to come on almost like madness. She becomes paralysed and unable to act, and completely overcome with emotion for the first time in the novel, at the thought of being rendered helpless by physical weakness – in her eyes, like a woman. Collins makes the point that Marion’s incapacitation from this point lays the foundation for Laura’s subsequent downfall as she is unable to prevent any of the perils that follow. In what is now considerably dated and sexist but more commonly accepted when The Woman in White was published, he also implies this can be traced back to Marion finally succumbing to acting “like a woman”.
On the other hand, Walter Hartright leaves the country to brave the wilds of central America, and unlike other stories that feature a departure to a “strange land” and uncertain return, he returns changed for the good – by his own admission, he wouldn’t have been prepared to defend himself from Sir Percival’s lackeys later in the novel without his experiences abroad. Walter’s sense of ‘otherness’ is a societal issue, the knowledge that he will never be able to marry Laura due to his lower status and lack of resources. His trip away from the Farlie’s and the ruin of Laura allows him to embrace the sense of adventure (something seemingly restricted to men), and achieve a triumphant return, along with the victory of restoring Laura to her name. He is elevated in order for his ‘otherness’ to be equalised, whereas Marion is lowered, rendered “useless” and “panic-stricken”, and the epitome of her biggest fear. The feeling of futility which Marion is enveloped by, combined with the reader’s knowledge of the Count’s nefarious plans, and the very abrupt end to her account signified only with a hyphen, makes for very unnerving reading indeed.
Ghosts of the Past in The Woman in White
You may have spotted a trend by this point. The protagonists of The Woman in White tend to face their sense of ‘other’ (whether by choice or not), while the antagonists run from it, to their own downfall. Sir Percival tries to destroy his greatest fear in an attempt to remove a page from his past – by literally removing a page from the wedding registry, which he originally tampered with to establish his claim to the Glyde name. Sir Percival pays the ultimate price, ironically via a fire that rages within the church where he first attempted to perjure his past, the flames taking on an almost cleansing connotation within this biblical context. Sir Percival’s ‘otherness’ is entirely self-made; he transformed himself into the unknown, a man with no past and only a dark secret that is apparent yet unknown to all. Over time, this fabricated version of himself becomes the norm, and it is his true self that he seeks to conceal.
‘“What the devil did Mrs Catherick want at this house?” The manner in which he put the question was even more offensive than the language in which he expressed it.”
Anne Catherick and her mother come to represent the truth, and such is the reason for Sir Percival’s terror at any mention of them, causing his desire to hide them through any means at his disposal. Honesty is his antithesis, and so it is Walter and Marion’s determination to catalogue the facts and seek justice through detailing the truth that brings about his downfall. There is something both poetic and chilling about the fact that, even in his last moments, neither Walter nor the reader see his face/read any specific details about the anguish of his death. Instead, he enters the church to hide himself, and is accordingly never seen again.
Closing Thoughts
The Woman in White is a shadowy story, but not in the way you or I might expect.
Collins provides each character with an internalised fear, and the threat of being totally consumed by it. The characters who are able to face their ‘otherness’, the very thing that they feel makes them strange and at risk, are the ones who manage to escape the events of the novels with their lives intact and a hopeful outlook. Physical concealment is still an important element of the horror within Collins’ novel, but mostly the fear of the unknown is not created in graveyards and manor houses, but primarily in the hearts and minds of those who populate them.
