The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Twelve years after Jane Eyre, and within the genre of sensation fiction proper, literature takes a dramatic turn when Wilkie Collins writes The Woman in White. Taking up many of the same issues raised in Brontë’s work, his novel begins the trend of mixing Gothic elements of mystery and terror with the addition of very detailed and realistic domestic fiction. Where nuances in Jane Eyre focus on elements such as large, old buildings, and the mysterious moaning sounds made by Bertha Mason in the attic, realism in The Woman in White has stronger connections with multiple well-developed characters, their interactions, and new domestic technologies such as banking and postal service. The women in Jane Eyre have polarizing mobility when it comes to institutionalization: Jane shows movement from institution to institution, while Bertha has one permanent move and no voice.
Collins's text highlights a different aspect of female institutionalization: the interchangeability of two women and their confinement to a private asylum. This interchangeability is deeply embedded in the plotline that must be briefly explained. Two male antagonists, Sir Percival Glyde and Count Fosco, are in debt and plan to recover their fortunes through Glyde’s future wife, Laura Fairlie and her £30,000 inheritance. Laura Fairlie and her half-sister Anne Catherick are vulnerable to these men because they are fatherless and lack a protective male guardian. Their safety is reliant on the protagonist, Walter Hartright, who appears to orchestrate the affair with good intentions, but who is arguably no different than Glyde and Fosco. Publicly, Sir Percival Glyde is the Baronet of Blackwater Park. His position gives him the agency of a gentleman in a society that values property titles.
However, Glyde is a threat to Victorians’ sense of security in titles because he is a fraud. His parents never officially married, so in order to take a loan against his Blackwater estate, he secretly forges his father and mother’s marriage in a vestry book in an almost abandoned church to create a marriage certificate. Anne Catherick’s naïve awareness of Glyde having a secret, without knowing about the fraud, is enough to make Glyde wrongly commit her to a private asylum—a private asylum offered a veil of dignity, whereas a public asylum would bring shame and disgrace to her mother. Towards the end of the novel, Anne’s mother writes a letter to Walter, to convey the truth about Glyde’s treatment of Anne. She writes, “‘Suppose, for yourself, the raging, swearing frenzy of the lowest ruffian in England…It ended, as you probably guess, by this time, in his insisting on securing his own safety by shutting her up’” (537). This brief plotline reveals multiple issues for vulnerable women.
The novel suggests that society protected men with property titles, like Glyde. This protection easily led to fraudulent behaviors and enables him to use Laura as a financial backup to recoup his losses, which also suggests women had few opportunities other than marriage. Next, Glyde wrongly commits Anne to protect himself, and the asylum takes her on his word. The logical question a modern reader might ask is, how is Anne that easily institutionalized? One way is through a monetary bribe, but another is that only “two doctors were required to certify a patient as insane” (660). As it will be demonstrated later in my argument, the two-doctor assessment, in hindsight, is an illegitimate medical practice and a severe deficit in mental wellness management. It was a medical strongarm of the patriarchy, alongside of other male dominated institutions within society such as banking and law; women had very little social mobility in these fields. Collins’ literature exposes the disparity of this medical loophole that allowed crimes against women to progress.
The point in the plotline when the ladies become interchangeable is when the two-doctor interview takes place, a development that reveals its inaccuracy. As soon as Anne Catherick dies from a preexisting heart condition and without a family to inquire about her, Fosco announces to Laura’s family estate (Limmeridge House, where Laura’s uncle Frederick Fairlie is Esquire), that Laura has passed away. The Limmeridge townsfolk attend Laura’s funeral, but it is for Anne Catherick’s body. There are no questions regarding the identity of the body because the ladies resemble one another. Fosco later receives Laura at the train station and takes her to an unknown building where he gives her a glass of water, mixed with a sedative. Laura is traumatized by the experience and her loss of memory requires Marian, her other half-sister and friend, to narrate her testimony about the two-doctor test experience: After this singular introduction—in the course of which no names, to the best of Lady Glyde’s recollection, had been mentioned—she was left alone with the stranger. He was perfectly civil; but he startled and confused her by some odd questions about herself, and by looking at her, while he asked them, in a strange manner. After remaining a short time, he went out; and a minute or two afterwards a second stranger—also an Englishman—came in. This person introduced himself as another friend of Count Fosco’s; and he, in his turn, looked at her very oddly, and asked some curious questions—never, as well as she could remember, addressing her by name; and going out again after a little while, like the first man. (426)
This passage allows the reader to witness a realistic example of the two-doctor process of committing a woman to an asylum, and to see how simply Fosco commits Laura Fairlie to the same private asylum from which Anne Catherick escapes. Also, while a small detail in the plotline, it becomes the crux around which the plot can occur. In spite of the sedative in that scene, Laura remembers and reports what took place with the two strange men: she is not addressed by her name, which means the doctors assume she is Anne Catherick, or they are otherwise allied with Fosco; both doctors look at her oddly and ask a few odd questions. This process hardly equals its outcome of a life in confinement.
Another important detail in the scene is the white dress—Fosco has a woman dress Laura in Anne’s white gown, and then recommits her to the asylum as Anne Catherick. The “woman in white” therefore refers to either of the women who are accused of insanity. Because of this accusation, both young women spend time in the private asylum, and it is evident in the text that the asylum has negative effects on their nerves which indicates the asylum experience influences unstable thought processes. The symbolism of the color white is multivalent. It suggests they are as innocent and pure as the color white. White also acts as a blank canvas because the women are so indistinct that they cannot be separately identified—they can be any woman. The color white also suggests absence of color or thought, implying the women lack something inherent that would otherwise protect them, making them responsible for the crimes committed against them.
The white of the feminine dress thus becomes more than the title of the novel as it engages a changing discourse surrounding the women, without a fixed meaning. The identity switch is a plot technique, yet it is also a challenge to test who is listening, because it might be said in a masculine world, the particulars of the women do not matter. The identity switch is simple to pull off because of flimsy medical policies and the patriarchal stability of men accepting one another at face value. Convincing the asylum owner to admit Laura as Anne is effortless: “On receiving his inmate again, the proprietor of the Asylum acknowledged that he had observed some curious personal changes in her” (419).
These “sensational” circumstances are embedded in realistic exchanges between the characters and are very believable in hindsight when considering how closely they resemble gendered power structures like those between husband and wife or a male doctor and female patient. Recalling Radford’s study, first wave critics of sensation fiction denied this realism for its opposition to patriarchal moral standards. Second wave critics instead argued that “sensation both emerged from and reconfigured realist narrative” (Radford 30), meaning it employed realist narrative and reconfigured the content of the literature, due to changes in how literature came to occupy a key role in reassessing modern gender politics. In other words, making critical claims against the dominant patriarchal culture took many decades of reconfiguring literature.
In his introduction to the novel, Matthew Sweet addresses the details of Collins’ literary techniques. He writes, “By the late 1850s, the genre of domestic fiction…had become the dominant stylistic mode. Its interest in psychological realism had established standard structures of interiority and continuity, critical yardsticks by which the novelist’s skill was measured. Collins wanted to retain this realism, but he also wanted to inspire pleasurable anxiety in his readers” (Sweet xxv). The “structures of interiority and continuity” refer to the novel’s use of psychological realism, which were made more real based on reader exposure to previous novels and firsthand accounts of similar real-life plotlines. Victorian readers likely knew someone or read about people who faced a medical fate similar to that of Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie.
Collins goes to great literary lengths to create a fictional story told by multiple narrators, in the form of individual testaments and narratives, all organized by the character Walter Hartright in defense of Laura Fairlie’s identity. Yet, Collins is also highly aware of his subject matter and of the realistic details his readers expected: he pays great attention to detail surrounding the most delicate parts of the story, including the construction of interaction between his characters, the use of letter writing and postal service, the intricacies of English property titles, and anxieties about asylums.
Sweet goes on to say, as mentioned before, “The end of the 1850s saw a so-called ‘lunacy panic’ in Britain, the result of a spate of cases involving individuals wrongly diagnosed and certified insane, and forcibly committed to madhouses. An interview conducted with Collins in 1871 by [Edmund] Yates reveals the explicit part played by these events in the composition of The Woman in White” (Sweet xxvi). Sweet’s recognition of Collins’ connectivity between fiction and reality is like Jonathan Andrew’s comparison between types of literary constructions and actual cases of madness they resemble. It seems almost a fallacy to rely on fiction as reality, but it is safe to say that fiction tends to resemble reality in ways that help readers understand situations hidden from the public eye.
Collins packs issues related to gender and to the integrity of institutionalization into his novel, and in doing so, presents the question: who is more at fault in these cases, the person committing the crime or the institution allowing the crime to happen? This question presents an issue with the Victorian acceptance of institutionalization. “Comfort in Small Things? Clothing, Control and Agency in County Lunatic Asylums in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England,” provides statistics that help clarify the growth of this acceptance. An interesting statistic found in the discussion reads: The 1845 Lunacy Act made the building of asylums by local authorities (previously merely enabled by the County Asylums Act of 1808) compulsory; the numbers of county and borough asylums in England and Wales increased substantially, from 21 in 1847 to 95 in 1910. Pauper committals to public asylums rose dramatically from 5,247 in 1847 to 94,215 in 1910, a rise which outstripped the growth in the population. (Hamlett 96)
This study shows the correlation between government sanctions and the social acceptance of asylums in Victorian England, and the rapidly increasing the number of committed patients throughout the century. To illustrate, the increase in number of asylums between 1847 and 1910 was one or more per year for 63 years, and the increase in patients committed in the same time span was 88,968—an average of 1,412 people per year. These increases in asylum buildings and commitments of patients is another iteration of what Charlotte Newman called “the complex negotiation of national and local ideologies” (Newman 123-24).
In order for Collins to fictionalize women being wrongly institutionalized, more than imagination is at work in his novel. The local ideology, or the individual’s acceptance of confinement, works together with the national ideology of the same acceptance to perpetuate the practice. The commitment of Anne Catherick and later her recommitment (as Laura Fairlie), along with growing numbers of asylums and patients over 63 years, show that Victorian England embraced institutionalization and the movement of unwanted people from society by placing them out of sight.