Guilty Pleasure of the Over-Read: Wilkie Collins's "The Woman in White"

Although my first copy of this book was an orange-spined  Penguin English Library edition from the early 70s (bought for me by one of my grandmothers?) the cover illustration is the same as the Penguin Classics edition above--beautifully moody, a portal into a world constructed primarily in my mind...

I've just finished rereading The Woman in White for the third time. It's still good: still intense, still exciting--and still one of the best thrillers ever written after more than 150 years. Also, this is that rarest of things: a really entertaining, well-plotted novel with romance and mystery that English majors don't feel guilty about enjoying.

It's not too much to say that Woman is one of (if not the) prototypes for a large number of the popular novels of today. Though having celebrated its sesquicentennial, it nonetheless feels very modern and familiar in many respects. Not all of them for the best.

But Collins partially redeems his often fanciful plot choices and highly-polarized characters through the byzantine, even baroque structure of his narrative. He is also one of the first in literature to let a wide range of characters from a variety of social backgrounds speak and tell their own stories in their own voices.

This is, perhaps, Collins's great innovation. He certainly thought so. There is the perhaps unavoidable stench of "improvement" or "enhancement" of the voices--it kind of reminds me of how Bellow's characters are invariably described early on as "first-class noticers" (Wood)--but for the most part, and to a very great degree considering the quite low standards of the day in this and related genres, he pulls it off.

One of the best examples comes somewhere after the mid-point of the novel, when the former cook at Count Fosco's rented house in St. John's Wood relates what she knows to some sort of legal clerk. In this short section, Collins takes on the perspective and voice of an uneducated person, a person who could hardly have been less like himself, and does a fine job both with the point of view and the language. He even has the cook ask, though not in so many words, that her vocabulary and grammar be corrected in the taking down of her statement, thus providing a credible alibi for a more readable, less colloquial text than we might have expected otherwise.

There are many drawbacks to the novel, many aspects that irritate a modern reader and also much that is objectionable on artistic terms, but it should be borne in mind that this is one of the few works of literature of any value produced in its time and place, and furthermore that the book was intended as a popular entertainment--compared to today's equivalents (James Patterson, for example) Collins is a writer of great sympathy, vision and subtlety, not to mention the innovative nature of his work which we've already touched on.

Having sung it some praises, I'd now like to move on to some things that irritate me about The Woman in White--though bear in mind that some or all of these will have a lot to do with the socio-historical context that Collins was writing within.

For one thing, Laura, "Lady Laura", kind of pisses me off. This is primarily because the actions, many of them desperate and arduous, of the two most sympathetic characters in the story--our two protagonists, really--are motivated by their deep and repeatedly-repeatedly-repeatedly reiterated love (in all its transcendent mid-Victorian purity) for this girl who is, as far as I'm concerned, a complete dead zone of expression, intellect or significance except in her much-reported and, frankly, overemphasized beauty--oh, and her enormous fortune.

In a sense, this novel is primarily interested in her--and she is the point at which everything in the story turns--primarily because she is rich. And at a level that is both basic and base, Victorian fiction as a whole is about money and very little else. When this kind of thing is faced up to and treated quite openly, things are a lot more bearable--thank you, Trollope. But even the hallowed and feared category/deity of "respectability" is very often defined by or contrasted with the economic fortunes of and forces in the lives of individuals and families.

There is also a kind of "crisis of masculinity" going on in this book, and in a lot of sensation fiction (at least from the few books I've read)--see Mr. Fairlie, for example. Men inflict much pain, misery and depredation on women--women are constantly at the mercy of men who are placed in positions of power over them arbitrarily, without any consideration of the men's merits, often merely as the result of a vacuum in some section of the family tree--but it is always implied that what's needed is a benevolent tyrant in place of the wicked one presently seated on whatever throne.

So in the end it's only really a half-crisis; in the end nothing radical is said or settled. There are problems in this novel and others of its ilk, sure; these contradictions are sometimes presented, sure, and even railed against on occasion--but that's about the extent of it.

The fundamental evil (to call it what it is) of these power structures is hardly assailed at all. The one sort-of exception to this is what I perceive as a latent, 19th-century Liberal critique of the aristocracy, esp. the lower aristocracy, that I see Collins as carrying out without, as it were, putting himself out in the open and in the line of fire, much like a grouse trying not to be murdered by a member of the House of Lords and his pack of gillies. However, what Collins feels about questions that might be but aren't necessarily related, such as the validity of the monarchy in a country with more-or-less universal male suffrage, I just don't know.

There are lots of other things I could tell you about and get bothered about all over again, but in a way they don't actually detract from the pleasure of the story. As long as you can still identify with the characters, in spite of their views and beliefs (many of which I'm convinced Collins himself disapproved of and expected us to as well), at least enough to care about what happens to them, then we're in, we're sold to Collins, who will proceed to (as he was fond of saying) make us cry, make us laugh, and make us wait.

One more thing (god, I could write a whole book on The Woman in White, but I suspect there are too many of those already) before I sign off: I think there's a stronger connection between the serialized novels and perhaps the reading of most fiction in the 19th century to today's narrative TV shows, than there is between the way they read then and we read now. Just an idea....

[Further Reading: For anyone who is (like me) too interested in this stuff, I recommend John Sutherland's essay "The Missing Fortnight" in his first collection of entertaining and illuminating inquiries into the minor and insignificant minutiae of 19th-century English novels, Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (pg. 117 in the first Oxford World's Classics edition).]