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7/25/2019 Woman In White Critics
1/6
Victorian Studies Association of Western Canadais collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
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Victorian Studies ssociation of Western Canada
Wilkie Collins, (185960)The Woman in WhiteAuthor(s): DALLAS LIDDLESource: Victorian Review, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 37-41Published by: Victorian Studies Association of Western CanadaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27793695
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2/6
Victorian
review
forum
:
Keynotes:
Key
Victorian
Texts
-.
The Nick of
Time:
Politics,
volution,
nd the
Untimely.
Durham: Duke
UP,
2004.
-.
Time
Travels:
Feminism,Nature,
Power.
Durham: Duke
UP,
2005.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley.The CollectedWorks ofGerardManley Hopkins. Ed. Lesley Higgins and
Michael
F. Suarez.
Oxford: Oxford
UP,
2006.
Levine,
George.
Darwin
and
theNovelists:
Patternsof Science
in
Victorian Fiction.
Cambridge,
Mass.:
Harvard
UP,
1988.
-.
Dying
to
Know:
Scientific
Epistemology
nd
Narrative
in
Victorian
England.
Chicago:
U
of
Chicago
P,
2002.
O'Connor,
Erin. Raw
Material:
ProducingPathology
in
Victorian
Culture. Durham: Duke
UP,
2000.
Ruse,
Michael.
Darwinism
and
its
Discontents.
Cambridge: Cambridge
UP,
2006.
Pater,
Walter
Horatio.
The
Renaissance:
Studies
in
Art
and
Literature.
ondon:
Macmillan,
1922.
The VictorianWeb. Ed. Alfred
J.
Drake. October
2001. 20
August
2008
.
Williams,
Carolyn. Transfigured
orld:
Walter
Pater
s
Aesthetic
Historicism.
Ithaca: Cornell
UP,
1989.
Wilson, Elizabeth A. Psychosomatic:Feminismand theNeurological Body.Durham: Duke UP, 2004.
Wilkie
Collins,
The
Woman
in
hite
(1859?60)
dallas liddle
?
Since
The
oman
in
hite
was
rediscovered
in
the
later twentieth
century
as
a
fit subject for serious literary riticism, ithas become grist foran unusually
diverse
range
of
criticalmills.
As
a
bestseller and
popular
publishing
phenom
enon
in
its
own
time,
it
has received
strong
responses
from
reader-response
criticism
and
New
Historicism. As
the
paradigmatic
1860s
"sensation
novel"
and
as
a
generic
bridge
between the
eighteenth-century
Gothic and
the
later
nineteenth-century
detective
story,
it
has been
investigated by
genre
criti
cism.
As
a
magazine
serial turned
independent
bestseller,
its
pages
have been
turned
by
scholars of
periodicals
studies and
publishing
history;
as a
proudly
plot-centered
fiction,
it
has
helped
drive modern
narratology.
As
a
sustained
engagement
with
women's
lives
and
legal rights,
containing
several
edgily
cross-gendered characterizations,
it
has been
read
into
the records of feminist
criticism
and
queer
theory.
As
a
domestic
fiction
with characters
who
suffer
in
the
jungles
of Central
America
and
flee the
oppression
of
Italy
by
foreign
overlords,
it
has been enlisted
in
the
postcolonial
canon.
The list of scholars
who have
engaged
Collins's
novel
on
these theoretical levels and others
is
an
honour
roll of
Victorian
studies
and
a
virtual
abc
(Auerbach,
Brantlinger,
Czetkovich)
of
its
theoretical
innovators.
I
believe
The
Woman in
White has
more
to
offer, however,
beyond
even
this
role
as
a
Victorian
proving-ground
for critical
theories,
beyond
even
its
being
an
index
to
them.
It
may
help
us
address
an
emerging
problem
in
Victorian
studies that
is
the obverse of
our success
at
theoretical
innovation?a
trend
toward theoretical
fragmentation
and
compartmentalization.TheVictorianists
37
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3/6
Victorian
review
Volume
35
Number
1
who travel
today's
increasingly
diverse
scholarly
paths
cannot
be said
to
ignore
each
other,
exactly,
but much
of
our
work has
come
to
exist
in
parallel
rather
than
in
dialogue,
separated
not
only
into its
own
panel
sessions
but
into
its
own
conversations
and
even
its
own
conferences.
Is this
a
phenomenon
that
should
worry
us?
What would
greater
dialogue
between and
among
our
theo
retical
subspecialties
accomplish?
Like
Walter
Hartright
in
the church
vestry
at
Old
Welmingham,
we
may
not
know what
secret
is
ready
to
be discovered
until its
last
unexpected
piece
falls
into
place.
But
in
this
space
I'd like
to
con
sider how
some
of
the
critical threads
Victorianists
have
spun
for
TheWoman
in
hite,
already
valuable
in
themselves,
might
become
more
valuable
if
they
were
intentionally
woven
together.
It
has often
been
shown
that
questions
of
identity
furnish
not
only
the
plot
of Collins's
novel,
but much of its thematic content. U.C.
Knoepflmacher
was
among
the
first
to
point
out
that
the
theft f the
identity
of
Lady Glyde/Laura
Fairlie
is
matched
in
the novel
by
a
strong
thematic
concern
with how the
identities of all
Victorian
women were
constituted and
regulated.
Later,
D.A.
Miller showed
that Collins
is at
least
as
concerned with how
the
Victorians
con
structed
male
identity
and
sexuality,
and
scholars
including
Jonathan
Loesberg
have
observed how central
questions
of
class
are
to
the novel. More
recently
still,
Cannon Schmitt
has
argued
that national
identity,
foreign
and
domestic,
is
one
of
Collins
s
chief
concerns,
and Tamar
Heller has demonstrated how
Walter
Hartright's
relationship
to
his
profession?artist
and
art
teacher,
and
laternewspaper illustrator?might offer the central piece of his identityand
characterization.
Appropriately mirroring
the
multiple
detective-characters within the
work,
these scholars
all
seem
to
have found
individually
significant
clues
to
how
The
Woman in
hite
engages
the
issue
ofVictorian
identity.
n
addition
to
being
indi
vidually
right
about the
issues
they
identify,
owever,
they
may
be
cumulatively
right
in
ways
we
have
not
yet
learned
to connect.
If
we
try
to
see
components
of
identity
in
the
novel,
such
as
gender
and
sexuality,
class,
nationality,
and
profession
as
pieces
of
a
larger
central
design
rather
than
as
separate
read
ings
achievable
only
from different
theoretical
perspectives
(feminism,
queer
theory, Marxism, postcolonial theory,
cultural
studies), different conclusions
about their
pattern
and
purpose
may
emerge.
Is
it
possible
to
read the novel
as
being
"about"
each
of
these
powerful
elements of
personal
identity
and
simultaneously
"about" the
multiplex
construction
ofVictorian
identity
itself?
Let's
try
to
imagine
how
a
reading
that
synthesizes
some
of the
criticism
on
identity
in
The
Woman in
hite
might
develop.
Collins
introduces
and
problematizes
five
major
variables of
identity?age,
gender/sexuality,
class,
nationality,
and
profession?so early
and
strongly
in
his
novel that
initially
he
seems
bent
on
creating
a
Dickensian
gallery
of
anti
types.
Within
the
first few
pages,
we
meet an
Italian
who
acts
English,
a
young
woman
who
acts
old,
and
an
older
woman
who
acts
young.
A
few
chapters
on,
we
add
a
notably
masculine
woman
(Marian
Halcombe)
and
a
notably
38
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4/6
Victorian
review
forum:
Keynotes:
Key
Victorian Texts
effeminate
man
(Frederick
Fairlie).
But
it
soon
becomes clear that Collins
does
not
confine
his
study
of each variable
to
one
character,
or
to
the
binary
move of either
invoking
or
reversing
Victorian
expectations,
but instead builds
patterns
or
clusters
of
possibility
around each variable.
By midway
through
the
novel,
as
gender
critics
have
shown,
he shows
not
only
manly
women
and
womanly
men
but also
manly
men
and
womanly
women,
and all
ranges
of
sexual
motivation,
from
aversion
to
absence of
desire,
to
sublimation,
to
desire,
to
tigerish
sexual obsession.
He
plays
the
same
game
of
permutation
with
the
class
issues
that
attract
many
cultural
critics,
showing
a
member of the
upper
classes who behaves
boorishly
(Fairlie)
and
a
middle-class character
who
is
"naturally
a
gentleman" (Hartright),
but
also
lower, middle,
and
upper-class
characters who
act out
role-identity
expectations
precisely?if
sometimes
also
calculatedly and dishonestly (Sir Percival). His "age" cluster includes not only
themirrored
old/young
pair represented
by Hartright
s
mother and
sister
but
an
older
man
(Gilmore)
who
is
proud
of
his
years
and
generation,
an
older
woman
aging
into
vegetative
placidity (Mrs. Vesey),
and
an
older
man
for
whom
age
is
perfectly
irrelevant
(Fosco).
Th?
"profession"
cluster,
which
contains
multiple
doctors,
lawyers,
and
teachers,
also demonstrates
a
striking
range
of individual
self-expressions
possible
within
those roles.
A
solicitor
can
choose the
identity
of
his client's
accomplice (Merriman),
a narrow
subject
specialist
(Kyrie),
or a
fatherly
mentor
(Gilmore).
For
at
least
some
characters,
moreover,
the choice of
how
personal
identity
will match
or
diverge
from
role
expectations
is
fully
conscious.
Gilmore
lives
"professionally
in
an
atmosphere
of
disputation,"
as
he tells
Hartright,
and
while
staying
at
Limmeridge
House
is
"only
too
glad
to
escape
from
it"
(142)
by
avoiding
argument
altogether.
Hartright
himself
is
even
better,
or
worse,
at
strategically compartmentalizing
his
identity,
s
when
he
writes
that
in
his
professional
role he has
habitually
left
"all the
sympathies
natural
to
my
age,"
by
which he
means
his
sexuality,
"in
my
employer's
outer
hall,
as
coolly
as
I
left
my
umbrella
there
before
I
went
upstairs"
(89).
If the scholars
who have
separately
identified the novel's
interest in
these
issues
of
identity
are
right,
do
we
gain
anything
by trying
to
reconcile
their
insights?
One
advantage
of
seeing identity
in
the novel
through
a
wider
lens
might
be
to
reveal
in
Collins's
identity
clusters
a
purpose
at
least
partly
descrip
tive,
making
the novel
to
some
degree
a
field
guide
for the
many
different
ways
to create
and
manage
a
mid-Victorian
identity.
This
metareading
would
suggest
a
generic
function for the
work
precisely
opposite
to
that
of
a
conduct
manual. Rather
than
inscribing
the cultural
expectations
for
any
given identity
and
prescribing
its
readers'
behaviour
on
the basis
of
them,
it
would
be
seen
as
laying
out
ranges
of
behaviour
that
can
be enacted within
or
despite
those
expectations.
It
becomes about
not
only
how
Victorian
culture
imposed identity
on
individual
subjects,
in
other
words,
but also
the
range
of
responses
that
remained
possible
to
those
subjects
even
under that
imposition.
In this light, it is surely significant that the text's most tragic victims?Anne
39
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5/6
Victorian
review
Volume
35
Number
1
Catherick
and Laura
Fairlie?are also the
two
characters
who
assume
the least
personal
control
(Mrs.
Vesey
excepted)
of
their
own
identities and who
are
most
complicit
in the
attempts
of others to inscribe them into roles.The
pli
able
Laura
in
particular
becomes
student, lover,
wife,
and
even
madwoman
almost
literally
on
command.
By
contrast,
every
man or woman
in
the
text
who
actively
tries
to
remake
an
identity
succeeds.
Over
months
in
the
jungles
of Central
America,
Hartright
remakes
himself
into
a
modern
knight
errant;
over
years
in
the "civilised desolation"
(503)
ofWelmingham,
Mrs.
Catherick
rebuilds
herself
from
a
fallen
woman
into
the formidable
Mrs.
Grundy
of
her
community.
Pesca
transforms himself from radical Italian freedom
fighter
to
peaceable
"English"
tutor,
and
Fosco,
once
a
radical Brotherhood
member
alongside
Pesca,
transforms
himself
into
...
well,
Fosco.
Even Sir
Percival,
with
a relatively mpressive display of ingenuity, orgeshisway back into a cherished
identity
he has
been
in
danger
of
losing.
That Collins would
attempt
such
an
ambitious,
panoramic,
and
pointed
treatment
ofVictorian
identity
should
perhaps
not
be
a
surprise.
Tamar
Heller
has
pointed
out
in
a
recent
review
essay
that the
concept
of character
"hybrid
ity"
("Masterpiece"
64)
seems
central
to
many
of Collins
's
projects,
from the
gender
doublings
of The
Woman
in
hite
to
the
strange
half-white,
half-dark
hair
of Ezra
Jennings
in
The Moonstone.
But
in
this
essay,
Heller also
implies
that
modern
scholarship
on
Collins has
kept
pace
with
its
subjects
complexity,
and
I
think this
position
would
be
harder
to
support.
In
the novel's
preamble,
the narrator, Hartright, asks readers to approach the book as a collection of
evidence?and
we
have?but he
also
asks
us
to
treat
every
element
of that
evidence
as
fundamentally
connected?"the
course
of
one
complete
series
of
events"
(33)?and
there
we
have been less
successful.
While
our
various
theo
retical
tools
have
given
us
greater
analytic
strength,
they
also
seem to
inhibit
synthetic
thinking,
encouraging
scholars
to
assert,
when
a
text
responds
to
the
issues
favoured
by
a
specific
theoretical
position,
that
we
have
found
the
key
to
that
text.
Nor
does
it
solve
this
problem
to
collect
our
diverse
readings
in
casebooks
or
essay
collections,
where
they
most
often
remain
a
set
of
opposed
or
diverging monologic
positions
rather
than
forming
true
problem-solving
dialogues.
In
the
same
way
that the
theft f
Lady
Glyde's identity
as
too
complex
and
ingenious
a
crime
for
a
single
detective
to
solve,
literary
texts
such
as
The
Woman
in
hite
may
be
both
too
diverse
to
be illuminated
by
any
single
critical
position
and
too
significantly
unified
in
overall
purpose
to
be
understood
piecemeal.
Precisely
because
it
has
been
almost
uniquely
successful
at
responding
with
intriguing
answers to
the full
range
of
our
current
critical
inquiries,
however,
The oman
in
hite
might
have
unique
potential
to serve as
the
key
to
a
dialogic
reengagement among
Victorianists.
Like the
East
End
neighbourhood
where
Walter, Marian,
and
Laura
go
to
ground,
it
may
provide
the best
place
for
us
to
gather
and
learn
to
better
pool
our
resources,
genuinely
share
our
knowledge
and
perspectives,
and
plot
our next
strategic
moves
together.
40
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6/6
Victorian review
forum:
Keynotes: Key
Victorian
Texts
Works Cited
Auerbach,
Nina.
Women
and the
Demon:
The Life of
a
Victorian
Myth.
Cambridge:
Harvard
UP,
1982.
Brantlinger,
Patrick. "What
is
'Sensational' about the
'Sensation Novel'?"
Nineteenth-Century
Fiction
37
(1982):
1-28.
Collins,
Wilkie. The
Woman
in
hite. Harmondsworth:
Penguin,
1976.
Czetkovich,
Ann.
Mixed
Feelings:
Feminism,
Mass
Culture,
and
Victorian
Sensationalism.New
Brunswick:
Rutgers
UP,
1992.
Heller,
Tamar. Dead Secrets:
ilkie
Collins and
the
Female
Gothic.
New Haven:
Yale,
1992.
-.
"Masterpiece
Theatre and
Ezra
Jennings's
Hair:
Some
Reflections
on
Where We've
Been
and Where We're
Going
in
Collins Studies."
Reality's
Dark
Light:
The Sensational
Wilkie
Collins.
Ed.
Maria K.
Bachman
and
Don
Richard
Cox.
Knoxville:
U
of
Tennessee
P,
2003.
361-370.
Knoepflmacher,
U.C.
"The Counterworld of
Victorian Fiction
and The
Woman
in
hite."
Ed.
Lyn
Pykett.
Wilkie
Collins.
New
York:
St.
Martin's,
1998. 5"8?69.
Loesberg,
Jonathan.
"The
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Representations
13
(1986):
115-38.
Miller,
D.A.
"Cage
aux
Folles:
Sensation
and
Gender
in
The
Woman
in
hite."
Representations
14
(1986):
107?36.
Schmitt,
Cannon.
"Alien
Nation:
Gender,
Genre,
and
English
Nationality
in
Wilkie
Collins's The
Woman
in
hite." Genre
26
(1993):
283?310.
Janet
Hamilton,
"A Plea
for
the
Doric"
(1870)
FLORENCE BOOS
Forgi*e,
oh,
forgi'e
me,
aiild
Scotlan',
my
mither
Like
an
ill-deedie bairn
I've ta'en
up
wi'
anither;
[ill-behaved
child]
And
aft
thy
dear
Doric aside
I
hae
flung,
To
busk
oot
my sang
wi'
the
prood
Southron
tongue.
They
say
that
our
auld
hamlet
tongue,
my
ain
mither,
[homebred]
Is
deein',
and
sune
will
be
dead
a'thegither;
Whan
thy
callants
hae
ceased
to
be
valiant and
free, [lads]
And
thy
maids
to
be
modest,
oh
juist
let
it
dee
Shall
the
tongue
that
was
spoken
by
Wallace
the
wicht,
[valiant]
In
the
sangs
o'
thy
poets
sae
lo'esum
and
bricht,
[lovely/tender;
bright]
Sae
pithy
an'
pawkie,
sae
tender an'
true,
[sly,
roguish]
O'
sense
and
slee
humour
an'
feelin'
sae
fu';
Shall
the
tongue
that
was
spoken by
leal Scottish
men,
Whan
they
stood for their richts
on
the
hill
an'
the
glen?
Oh,
say,
maun
it
dee,
when
the
last
words that
hung
[must
it
die]
On the
lips
o' the martyr war ain mither
tongue?
41
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