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Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Providence Against the Evils of Propriety
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2023
Extract
The tendency persists to separate the artful storyteller in Collins from the less successful thesis novelist. Like Wells and, to a lesser degree, Lawrence, Collins developed too strong a sense of mission. Beginning with Man and Wife, his novels seem encumbered with social protest. Collins's “old-fashioned” opinions, especially the remark that the “primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story,” are frequently quoted to reduce the skilful storyteller to a mere entertainer. Storytelling in The Woman in White is, of course, superb; but for once the novelist of sensation and suspense utilized his narrative skills to advance an idea important to himself and of consequence nationally: his conviction that the worship of propriety had become, by 1870, one of the besetting evils of Victorian life. In The Woman in White, Collins combines his talent for melodrama with just enough of the social critic, even if the Victorian eventually upstages the dissident moralist: the way things happen, the novelist argues, is ultimately determined not by propriety, man's law, but by providence, which may by God's.
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- Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies, 1982
References
1 Collins's intellect has been underrated ever since Swinburne regretted the “evil day” Collins decided to correct abuses and advocate reforms. See William H. Marshall, Wilkie Collins (New York, 1970), p. 17.
2 See Collins's “Preface to the Second Edition” in Julian Symons, ed., The Woman in White (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 32. Most critics have taken their cues from this remark. Clyde K. Hyder insists Collins “belongs among the great story-tellers rather than among the great novelists.” Bradford C. Booth recommends Collins to all who “have not lost their appetite for sheer, one might even say, mere story telling.” Robert Ashley finds The Woman in White a masterpiece judged by standards of melodrama, “the only standards by which it is fair to judge it.” Harvey Peter Sucksmith calls it “the greatest melodrama ever written.” The present essay is more in line with Ashley's revaluation of Collins as a “serious novelist,” a “rebel who rather subtly attacked the most cheerful foundations of Victorian respectability.” See Clyde K. Hyder, “Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White,” PMLA, 54 (1939), 297-303; Bradford C. Booth, “Wilkie Collins and the Art of Fiction,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 6 (1951), 131-43; Robert Ashley, Wilkie Collins (London, 1951), p. 69; Harvey Peter Sucksmith (ed.), The Woman in White (London, 1975), p. xxii; and Robert Ashley, “Wilkie Collins” in George Ford (ed.), Victorian Fiction: A Second Guide to Research (New York, 1978), pp. 228-29. All subsequent quotations from The Woman in White are from the Penguin edition.
3 See James Laver, Manners and Morals in the Age of Optimism 1848-1914 (New York, 1966), pp. 40-45; and Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper (New York, 1964), pp. 116-17.
4 Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement (London, 1959), p. 465.
5 Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven, 1957), pp., 394, 397.
6 Symons grants Collins some of Dickens's talent but asserts that “a powerful symbolic image was beyond him.” Collins, Woman in White, p. 20.
7 Ibid, p. 84.
8 Ibid, p. 39.
9 Ibid, p. 38.
10 Ibid, p. 405.
11 Ibid, p. 400.
12 Ibid, p. 390.
13 Ibid, p. 497.
14 Ibid,p. 440.
15 Ibid, p. 568.
16 Ibid, p. 359.
17 Mr. Fairlie, one of several narrators whose reports contribute to the reconstruction of this episode, twice apologizes for mentioning Fanny's bosom. Ibid, p. 365.
18 Ibid, p. 630.
19 Ibid, p. 376.
20 Ibid, p. 194
21 Ibid, p. 199.
22 Ibid, p. 209
23 Ibid, p. 274.
24 Ibid, p. 156
25 ibid, p. 258.
26 Ibid, p. 336.
27 Ibid, p. 40.
28 Peter Caracciolo hunts down Collins's allusions to Dante in “Wilkie Collins's ‘Divine Comedy': The Use of Dante in The Woman in White, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 25 (1971), 383-404. Pesca's employer, “the golden Papa,” epitomizes the denial of the natural in favor of the artificial when he proclaims: “We don't want genius in this country, unless it is accompanied by respectability—and then we are very glad to have it, very glad indeed.” Collins, Woman in White, p. 41.
29 Ibid, p. 86.
30 Ibid, p. 88.
31 Cumberland seems an ironic name for a county whose remote moors supposedly are unencumbered by conventionality.
32 Collins, Woman in White, p. 95.
33 ibid, p. 97.
34 Ibid, p. 162.
35 Ibid, p. 147.
36 An early tip-off to Fosco's vulnerability is his extraordinary interest in learning whether any “Italian gentlemen” are settled in the vicintiy of Blackwater Park. Ibid,p. 245.
37 Ibid, p. 190.
38 Ibid, p. 193
39 Ibid, p. 208.
40 Ibid, p. 552.
41 Ibid, pp. 220-21.
42 Women wrote most of the new books of etiquette which contained rules for decorous conduct. See Maurice J. Quinlan, Victorian Prelude (London, 1965), p. 139.
43 U.C. Knoepflmacher typifies the prevalent reading of Collins's “asocial energies.” He insists Collins's “trademark” is the “sympathetic treatment” of villains. “The Counterworld of Victorian Fiction and The Woman in White” in Jerome H. Buckley (ed.), The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, Harvard English Studies 6 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), p. 361.
44 Collins, Woman in White, p. 259.
45 Ibid, p. 434.
46 For Fosco's probable employers consult the footnote for p. 582 in Sucksmith's edition, p. 624.
47 Collins, Woman in White, p. 644.
48 Ibid, p. 643.
49 Caracciolo, “Wilkie Collins's ‘Divine Comedy,’ p. 397. Collins called Fosco “a clever Devil” in “How I Write My Books: Related in a Letter to a Friend,” The Globe (26 November 1887), reprinted in Sucksmith, p. 596.
50 Collins, Woman in White, p. 644.
51 Ibid, p. 257.
52 Ibid, p. 47.
53 Ibid, p. 48.
54 Ibid, p. 49.
55 Ibid, p. 54.
56 Ibid, p. 61.
57 The woman in white accosts Walter early the same day on which he later travels to his new post at Limmeridge House. The next morning, at breakfast, he encounters Marian.
58 Collins, Woman in White, p. 78.
59 Ibid, p. 89.
60 Ibid, pp. 465-66.
61 Ibid, p. 636.
62 Ibid, p. 639.
63 Ibid, p. 504.
64 Reviewing “Sensation Novels” for Blackwood's Magazine, Mrs. Oliphant, missing Collins's antipathy for the proprieties, failed to understand Laura's resolution to marry Sir Percival. She also found Mrs. Catherick's extortion of bows from the clergyman disagreeable when, of course, it is highly pertinent. See Norman Page (ed.), Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage London, 1974), pp. 120-21.
65 Collins, Woman in White, p. 507.
66 Ian Ousby does not include Walter prominently in his survey of detectives who are heaven's agents. Bloodhounds of Heaven (Cambridge, Mass., 1976).
67 Collins, Woman in White, p. 355.
68 Ibid, p. 575.
69 Ibid, p. 255.
70 The reviewer for The Times (October, 1860) objected that Collins miscounted the days his novel covers by an entire fortnight. Lady Glyde, he explained, could not have left Blackwater Park before August 9 or 10, which would make providence dilatory. Collins immediately corrected the error. See Collins, Woman in White, pp. 102-03.
71 Marshall thinks they are. Wilkie Collins, p. 64. Of similar opinion is A. Brooker Thro in “An Approach to Melodramatic Fiction: Goodness and Energy in the Novels of Dickens, Collins and Reade,” Genre, 11 (1978), pp. 359-74.
72 Collins, Woman in White, p. 97.
73 Ibid, p. 101.
74 Ibid, p. 305.
75 Walter and Marian both use “doubt” in the obsolete sense of “suspect” or “dread.“
76 Collins, Woman in White, p. 435.
77 Ibid, p. 451.
78 Knoepflmacher treats Collins as an “amoralist.” “Counterworld of Victorian Fiction,” pp. 353, 368-69.
79 For an example, see the epigraph that states the themes for Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point (London, 1928).
80 Houghton finds the Victorian era one of transition from settled beliefs to a new state of mind that was forced to see life in terms of “the conflicting claims of incompatible doctrines.” Victorian Frame of Mind, p. 18.
81 Winifred Hughes replaces the struggle between'good and evil that Walter chronicles with a trial of skill. She also argues that Reade and Collins, unlike Dickens, wrote morally ambiguous sensation novels. The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton, 1980), pp. 138-45.
82 Ousby concludes that Collins's use of providential patterns rests on no Prm intellectual foundation and merely serves to link him with lesser writers of the age. Bloodhounds of Heaven, p. 127.
83 John R. Reed indicates the widespread popularity of providence as a novelist's helper in Victorian Conventions (Athens, Ohio, 1975), pp. 132-37.
84 Collins, Woman in White, p. 305.
85 See Exodus, 34:7. Collins, Woman in White, p. 575.
86 These include the question of Sir Percival's legitimacy, Jacob's mistaken vision of Anne Catherick as the ghost of Mrs. Fairlie, the use of doubles, allegations of madness against Anne, and the attempts to confine first her and then Laura in an asylum.
87 Collins, Woman in White, p. 80.
88 Grover Smith (ed.), Letters of Aldous Huxley (London, 1969), p. 228.