Post-Jungian Criticism: Theory and Practice

Jungian Insights into Victorian Cultural Ambiguities: Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

Following trends in postmodern thought, Jungian literary criticism has given increasing attention to the convergence between the psychological and the cultural. Applying Jung’s concepts of individuation, anima, animus, and shadow, I wish to explore such a convergence in one of the most popular novels of Victorian England, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (published in four editions within the first month of its publication).1 Recently, critics have focused on Collins’s subversion of Victorian stereotypes (Balee, Bernstein, Elam, Langbauer, Williams) but have overlooked the Pre-Raphaelites’ influence on Collins’s challenges to gender constructs. Beginning with some Pre-Raphaelite paintings that served as possible inspirations, I would like first to explore the affinities that Pre-Raphaelite paintings and Collins’s narrative images share and then to demonstrate how Collins’s PreRaphaelite concern with the rendering of light and shadow leads him to explore the workings of the unconscious. Even before the appearance of the woman in white at the outset of the novel, while Walter Hartright is walking in a moonlit landscape, Collins masterfully interweaves the real and the imaginative in PreRaphaelite interplays of light with shadow. Collins captures the fluidity 139 Jungian Insights into Victorian Cultural Ambiguities Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White ������ SOPHIA ANDRES of the liberating space between waking and dreaming. In this eerie and mysterious setting, the sudden appearance of the woman in white, an “extraordinary apparition” (Collins, Woman in White 47)—a shadow— partakes of the substantial and the ethereal, the real and the possible, the conscious and the unconscious. Thus Collins’s choice of the moonlit landscape seems extremely appropriate, especially when considered in light of M.-L. von Franz’s description of the unconscious as a “moonlit landscape ,” in which “all the contents are blurred and merge into one another, and one never knows exactly what or where anything is” (173). Although Hartright does not explicitly refer to Anne Catherick as a shadow when he first meets her, he describes her as such at the end of the novel, when he hears about her death: “So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages, as it haunted my life, goes down into impenetrable gloom. Like a shadow she first came to me in the loneliness of the night. Like a shadow she passes away in the loneliness of the dead” (Collins, Woman in White 576). Thus Collins, in an attempt to draw his narrative in Pre-Raphaelite interplays of light with shadow, transforms the social imaginary, the fear of the Other—the outcast, the displaced—into an essential phase in the protagonist’s (the typical Victorian’s) psyche. Eventually, the shadowy figure becomes an integral part of Hartright’s quest for psychic integration . In the process Collins illustrates that psychic integration is not possible without an active interaction of the masculine with the feminine, of the self with the Other, of the personal with the cultural. Thus in Collins’s renowned novel we may discern the same Jungian structures operative across artistic forms. In this case literature and art combined might have enabled Victorians, and may enable postmodern readers, vicariously to explore their own shadows. CULTURAL RELEVANCE AND TRANSCENDENCE: JUNG’S CROSS-GENDERED SHADOW Unlike most literary critics who develop their theories within the boundaries of cultural specificity or textual relevance, Jung’s perspective on literature often transcends yet does not entirely disregard cultural boundaries . Indeed the literary manifestation of his psychology becomes most intriguing and fascinating in the convergence of psychological consequence with cultural relevance. Throughout his works, his definitions of key terms are not static, limited within the psychological, the universal, or the cultural arenas; rather, they fluctuate among these spheres and partake of qualities of all three. His definition of the unconscious, for 140 Sophia Andres instance, distinguishes between the personal and the collective unconscious , designating the contents of the former as having been “acquired during the individual’s lifetime”—thus allowing for its cultural uniqueness —and of the latter as “archetypes that were present from the beginning ” (CW 9.2: 8). Similarly, Jung’s definition of the shadow relies on the convergence of the psychological with the cultural and the universal. Thus he defines the shadow as a “moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality , for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort” (CW 9.2: 8). In this respect, the shadow is of individual consequence and...