Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

     There is a telling moment in the confrontation between Walter and the Count near the end of the book when the count asks Walter about his motivations for disclosing Fosco and Gylde’s scheme. When Walter declares that he acts in his wife’s interest, the young man notices that he “sank in [the Count’s] estimation as a dangerous man from that moment” (401). We get a sense of Collins’s tastes here, too. The romance between Walter and Laura seems like something he includes out of obligation, a sort of necessary motivation for our hero which the author never really develops as colorfully as he should. Instead, he depicts Laura as a wilting flower, a figure so lifeless that one suspects that even Walter is losing interest in her as he explores the machinations of Collins’s proudly elaborate plot.

     This isn’t to say that Collins is completely disinterested in romance. In fact the book includes a compelling love story—between Fosco and Marian. Fosco gives mouth to the reader’s (and Walter’s and Collins’s) fascination with Marian. After Fosco, she is the most developed character. This is due to the chance she is given to narrate and the amount of agency she has in the story. Laura says little and does even less. Walter regards her as a little sister or a child, and the fond remarks he makes of Marian (each more unsettling than the last) give evidence to his latent attraction.   

     Fosco, though, is the most developed character. The way that Collins relishes every paint stroke of his characterization gives evidence to the author’s deep identification with the Count. He is the only character with any nuance—and Collins takes time to depict his cruelty towards humans and his tenderness with animals in such a way that they somehow each make sense and lend themselves overall to a more elaborate portrait of a man. I suspect that Collins imagines himself like Fosco. As with Collins, the Count takes pride in his writing skills, and he even suggests that his caper might be fodder for a compelling English romance. But Fosco, like Collins, is disinterested in traditional love stories that end in marriage (his apathy towards blank-canvas Madame Fosco is evidence of this). His written account, much like Collins’s entire book, swerves again and again to fawning discussion of Marian. His attraction to the more “masculine” sister (much like his cruel aristocratic worldview or his unapologetic love of himself) might be a latent aspect of Collins’s own mind. The Woman in White ends with Collins bored and confused with the Walter-Laura pairing and, as a consequence, not doing much with it at all. He leaves Laura upstairs with a headache for too much of the novel and chooses instead to end the novel with an acknowledgement of Walter’s real love, Mariane, “the good angel of our lives” (426).  

     It seems that the masculine aspects of Marian keep her from being depicted as “desirable” in the traditional sense. Is this merely a consequence of Collins’s period? Jayne Eyre is desirable and autonomous, so I suspect that Collins’s depiction of Marian has to do with his gender as much as his time period. At what point did male romance writers realize that a woman could be both desirable and self-assured—that a woman like this need not be divided into two sisters, and that, if she wasn’t, it would make for a more compelling read?