‘In the name of her sacred weakness’: Romance, Destiny, and Woman’s Revenge in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

MICHAEL TAYLOR 'In the name of her sacred weakness': Romance, Destiny, and Woman's Revenge in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you - gently, with love, and hand your life back to you. Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Wilkie Collins's hugely popular novel, The Woman in White (1860), was published at a time when the British middle-class woman was denigrated and marginalized by her husband's or lover's patronizing, contemptuous worship of her in a self-aggrandizing version of the traditional romance prostration before the idealized woman. As a 'priestess of virtuous inanity' (Dijkstra, 4), nineteenth-century woman became the object of a 'male fantasy of ultimate power, ultimate control' (Dijkstra, 19). She achieved her dubious, frail, holy status in order to validate and ameliorate the necessary brutalities practised by the century's ambitious men in their pursuit of empire. From this state of affairs emerged the cult of the 'household nun' and the 'consumptive sublime' (Dijkstra, 176) with its apotheosis in the woman's half-welcomed death (half-welcomed, that is, by both partners). In The Woman in White Collins combines a treatment of the cult of the consumptive household nun with elements of traditional romance to produce a scandalous version of romance in which the neurasthenic object of knightly solidtude proves to be far more troublingly resilient than her self-declared protectors - much to their later chagrin could ever have imagined. The Woman in White owes a clear debt to romance, a genre dedicated to the enshrinement of women, in which servility is the chief feature of the male practitioners of knight-errantry locked into their arduous, custodial roles.1 In The Woman in White the predicament of Laura Fairlie, the enshrined object of harassed ministration, activates Walter Hartright, her nineteenth-century surrogate for the medieval knight errant. Unlike his medieval counterpart, however, Hartright displays a neurotic anguish when called upon to assume his traditional role. It is through Hartright's 'inexplicable unwillingness' (63) to venture on the quest, combined with an enervating deference once the quest has been undertaken, that Collins distinguish~s this particular quester's attitude towards his career as a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 64. NUMBER 2, SPRING 1995 290 MICHAEL TAYLOR romantic adventurer.2 Hartright has little of the verve and critical intelligence of his adversary, Count Fosco. At the heart of his traditional veneration of the heroine of romance is a feeble, narcissistic Neoplatonism , applied to Laura Fairlie, but already existing as an aspect of his own character. The beauty that he says he adores in Laura Fairlie has had its 'shadowy conceptions' (76) already in his mind, and its materialization in the form of a woman 'fills a void in our spiritual nature' (76). Vapidly mystical, this process of spiritualization renders Laura a mere vehicle for the 1Jeauty of woman.' Walter sees her in terms of her beauty and sees her beauty in terms of his own unfathomable spiritual nature, and also of the natures of at least some of his readers - whom he seems to be imagining at this stage only as men - and he climaxes a series of imperatives to them with an invitation to a complicit sexist appropriation: 'Take her as the visionary nursling of your own fancy; and she will grow upon you, all the more clearly, as the living woman who dwells in mine' (76).3 But even the most co-operative chauvinist among us would find Walter's injunction difficult to follow. How can visionary nurslings become living women, no matter what credence we might be prepared to give to Walter's dubious claim that the object that dwelt in his fancy was truly flesh and blood? Given Walter's transcendentalizing tendencies, it is not surprising that his conception of the 1Jeauty of woman' should be so compulsively ethereal. In The Woman in White Laura's beauty is strenuously deeroticized , its sensuality safely displaced onto her 'ugly' half-sister, Marian Halcombe. The first woman Walter meets at Limmeridge House is seen by him from behind and turns...