Paranoid Imaginings: Wilkie Collins, the Rugeley Poisoner, and the Invisibility of Novelistic Ekphrasis

If, in an era of Jane Eyres and David Copperfields, there is something curiously generic about “The Woman in White,” we might surmise this is because she is two women, not one. When Walter Hartright, the first of the novel’s rotating cast of narrators, unexpectedly encounters a mysterious woman clad in filmy white on the road to his new post as a private drawing instructor, we are likely to conclude that we have come upon the title character. Yet when Walter arrives at his destination and is introduced to the young woman he is meant to teach, we discover another candidate for that role. Collins’s novel, in nuce, is a story of this likeness, even if the baroque complexities are likely to distract us from this fundamental point.¹The Woman in White reveals ways in which the body functions as the ground and an instrument for recognizing human likeness in the nineteenth century. The fungibility of the sick body of one woman and the dead body of another tell the story of the newly dominant paradigm of anatomical medicine — a framework in which the similarity of bodies and the limits of their capacity to cause and control their own internal operations imply one another.

The paradigm of anatomical medicine that came to the fore in the final decade of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth differed from its humoral precursor in insisting that the causes of disease are entirely internal, located in individual organs unavailable to direct observation by either patient or physician. Bodies are now viewed as fundamentally like one another — standard; therefore, diagnoses take place by way of an implicit comparison of the patient’s sick body, with its unobservable interiors, and dead bodies whose systematic autopsies were at the center of the newly formalized systems of medical education throughout Europe.

But to the degree to which the relationship between one character’s sick body and another’s dead body is a story — to the degree to which Collins presents the identity of these two bodies as the consequence of elaborate machinations of the plot rather than simply as an analytical postulate — The Woman in White challenges as well as affirms the logic of anatomical medicine. In detailing the temporal chain of cause and effect by which a sick body and a dead one come to be substituted for one another, Collins’s novel insists that we attend to the gap (of time, of state) between being sick and being dead — precisely the period of transformation that anatomical medicine must exclude if it posits the standardized body as a theoretical first principle. The Woman in White thus engages the contradiction between physicians’ therapeutic authority — their capacity to make people well or sick — and their authority to diagnose by way of a standardized body; it turns this contradiction into the structuring principle of the plot. Bodies can only be seen as fundamentally identical so long as the process by which one is transformed into another is overlooked. Collins’s ekphrastic practice, his detailed descriptions of bodies that the readers cannot see, effects this elision and provides the ground for examining the implications of anatomical medicine’s conception of a standardized body as not-quite-visible. The novel challenges the notion that individual subjects are identifiable over time by virtue of the fact that they occupy the same body.

In linking questions surrounding the legibility of the human body over time to an examination of the practices by which novels encourage readers to feel as if they can have important information about the characters they do not quite perceive, Collins suggests that the continuity of bodies through time — and the continuity of subjectivity — is less a quality inherent in the bodies themselves than an effect of complex communal relations of representation and recognition. By suggesting that in order to be known bodies must be known over time, The Woman in White complicates any hard-and-fast distinction between the particularity of individual bodies and the resemblances by which groups of people come...