The passage in which Marian describes Count Fosco reveals a Victorian anxiety and fascination with androgyny. On the surface, Marian begins her description of the Count by highlighting his masculine qualities: “His features have Napoleon’s magnificent regularity: his expression recalls the grandly calm, immovable power of the Great Soldier’s face” (218). While appearing to suggest the Count’s authority and stoicism, this comparison to Napoleon actually indicates the Count’s “perplexingly contradictory” (219) nature from the outset, since Napoleon was himself a contradictory figure in his short stature yet commanding demeanor.
Two paragraphs later, Marian explains the Count’s “contradictory” nature more fully: “Fat as he is, and old as he is, his movements are astonishingly light and easy. He is as noiseless in a room as any of us women” (219). As the simile “as noiseless in a room as any of us women” suggests, the Count’s incongruousness is rooted in his feminine attributes. Marian’s use of the collective first-person pronoun “us women” situates the Count in direct opposition to women; yet the comparative “as” linguistically bridges this gender divide, connecting the Count to the feminine through his “light and easy” movements.
Marian proceeds to emphasize the Count’s femininity through two more similes: “and, more than that, with all his look of unmistakable mental firmness and power, he is as nervously sensitive as the weakest of us. He starts at chance noises as inveterately as Laura herself” (219). Here, Marian successfully undermines the Count’s Napoleonic appearance of power by not only revealing his womanly nervousness but also linking the Count with the “weakest” of Marian’s sex. This superlative, along with the following direct comparison to Laura, highlights the Count’s feminine qualities.
This passage holds the key to Marian’s complex attitude toward the Count; she is at once fascinated and threatened by him. As Marian’s description reveals, he is both alluring and dangerous, not merely because of his increasingly suspicious behavior throughout the narrative, but because he unnaturally exhibits the qualities of both sexes. Even though Marian does not explicitly identify the Count’s androgyny as the reason for her discomfort with him, the novel’s keen preoccupation with identifying unknown figures by their sex illuminates the anxiety underlying Marian’s description of the Count. For example, when Marian and Laura encounter the figure at the boathouse, the first question Laura asks is, “Was it a man, or a woman?” (263). Marian asks the same question when Laura hears a noise outside of her room: “Was it a man or a woman?” (307). Clearly, The Woman in White, as evidenced by the title itself, consistently seeks to classify characters by sex, with “male” and “female” connoting a corresponding set of traits. Yet the Count complicates those binary categories, and, in true Victorian fashion, his deviance attracts simultaneous fascination and repulsion.
I think it might be interesting to also examine Marian’s attraction to the Count. She writes, “The man has interested me, has attracted me, has forced me to like him” (217). He is the only male character thus far that we have seen Marian express an attraction for, though as you note he falls somewhere in between masculine and feminine. We have also seen that Marian might be attracted to Laura in some ways. Her relationship to femininity- outwardly expressing distaste for it and inwardly seeming to find it attractive- is something I find intriguing in the novel.
I am also intrigued by the gendered descriptions of the Count. In my post from last week, I discussed the repeated attention to characters’ clothes. Marian comments on the Count’s fondness for ostentatious clothes in “light garish colors” several times throughout her narrative, usually in conjunction with a reference to his large, intimidating figure (“…all immensely large even for him”) (221). Marian’s pairing of these two observations exhibits the odd masculine-feminine tension you are highlighting here. The Count’s “fool[ish]” affinity for colorful, intricate clothing seems to verge on the feminine while his large, imposing frame is undeniably masculine (221). I also wonder if this—to borrow your term—androgynous depiction of the Count is racialized. ‘Foreign’ men, like Pesca, are often feminized by imperial powers.
Count Fosco’s androgynous nature makes me wonder why Collins chose to have Marian be attracted to him. Compared to Sir Percival who has more “masculine” qualities, she “flatly [denies] his good looks” (191) (she acknowledges them at first, but a “strange perversion prevents [her] from seeing it” (188)), but she is attracted to the Count who has “feminine” qualities. Could Collins therefore be suggesting that Marian is a lesbian? Since this was a radical thing to write about, he covered it by having Marian be attracted to a man, but suggesting her homosexuality by giving the Count feminine qualities.
I think another important moment that reflects the way Count Fosco complicates the gender binary is on page 287, when he describes the quality of evening light to Marian. In his description, the light itself seems to represent both genders: he calls the light “modest” and “trembling,” equating it with traditional femininity, but later on talks about how the light is “penetrating,” giving it a masculine role as well. The language of this passage further establishes Count Fosco’s ambiguous gender, since he appreciates the femininity of the light from a masculine perspective, but is also penetrated by it.