In her chapter on Wilkie Collins’s unique variations on the standard marriage plot, Carolyn Dever discusses the ways in which Collins triangulates romantic relationships in The Woman in White: “The novel distributes the emotional intimacy ordinarily credited to marital love among three figures, rather than the conventional two” (113). Dever focuses her exploration of this idea on the novel’s most overt triangulated relationship—the relationship among Laura, Marian, and Walter. She asserts the relationship between the two sisters “is the novel’s most fully realized ‘marriage,’ if we consider marriage a union based on emotional depth, mutual trust, and the presumption of permanence” (114). While Marian functions as an emotional ‘spouse’ for Laura, Dever continues, she simultaneously serves as an intellectual, masculine ‘spouse’ for Walter: “Walter and Laura enter a marriage anchored by its essential bisexuality. Providing a masculine companion for Walter and a feminine one for Laura, Marian is a full partner in this marriage of three” (114). The novel contains ample support for Dever’s argument.
Laura and Marian share multiple scenes wherein emotions and thoughts are shared and accompanied by physical touch or gesture. For example, after Laura finally discloses some of the events of her unhappy honeymoon, the sisters embrace and ultimately kiss: “I had caught her in my arms, and the sting and torment of my remorse had closed them around her like a vice… How long it was before I mastered the absorbing misery of my own thoughts, I cannot tell. I was first conscious that she was kissing me…” (Collins 262). The impassioned embrace and comforting kiss that follow a scene of emotional intimacy, though not overtly sexual, do seem as though they are gestures that would typically come from a lover or a spouse. Similarly, Walter frequently confides in Marian, sometimes asking her advice or for her assistance in carrying out a plot or scheme. In the wake of Sir Percival’s death and the Count’s disconcerting visit to Laura, Marian, and Walter’s temporary London home, Walter turns to Marian for advice on how to protect Laura moving forward: ‘“I was guided by your advice in those past days,’ I said; ‘and now, Marian, with reliance tenfold greater, I will be guided by it again’” (558). Their exchange results in a plan to extract information from the Count as well as Laura and Walter’s marriage.
Though Dever is undoubtedly correct in pointing out Marian’s unusual, and possibly subversive, partnerships with Laura and Walter, I do think she fails to address one important fact that may limit the extent to which we can read this triangulated relationship as a challenge to traditional marriage. Since Marian is a woman, she does not pose a threat to the main legal purpose of marriage—inheritance. At the end of the novel, Walter happily allows Marian to “end our Story” with her introduction of Laura and Marian’s son as “Mr. Walter Hartwright—the Heir of Limmeridge (626-7). Marian’s presence in Laura and Walter’s relationship, while disrupting the institution’s traditional heteronormative binary, poses no threat to marriage’s perpetuation of patrilineal inheritance.
Your point about inheritance is a very apt critique of Dever’s argument. Another counterargument I thought of while reading that text was that Dever fails to address the “relationship” between Marian and Count Fosco. They are effectively a “marriage” of compatibility and matched wits. Their relationship is also, arguably, the most passionate, described in terms of erotic fervor. Although this relationship is technically a heterosexual one, it is nevertheless transgressive because their passion occurs outside of marriage and their gender roles are swapped, as the Count is often described as effeminate and Marian as masculine.
This post points out some really important scenes supporting Dever’s reading of Walter, Laura, and Marian’s joint “marriage.” I am particularly interested by the idea that Marian and Laura have a more complete, emotionally fulfilling relationship than either Laura and Walter or Marian and Walter can ever achieve. In this case, Walter–the only man of the group–becomes the redundant member of the relationship, rather than Marian. In his essay, Greg poses solutions for the problem of “redundant” single women in Victorian society, but never addresses what may happen if men become the redundant party. This question is especially significant in the case of Walter, Laura, and Marian, since Laura and Marian do not need Walter’s assistance in gaining the property and wealth of Limmeridge–Laura inherits it automatically.
I find the idea of Marian fulfilling both feminine and masculine roles fascinating. By acting as both a wife to Laura and a husband to Walter, Marian becomes an androgynous entity. If we can use Marian’s “flexible gender” and see her as a man, it could be argued that she emasculates Walter and, in their relationship, converts him into more of a female. To add upon Redundant Canary’s idea, maybe Walter isn’t a redundant man, but the ever familiar redundant woman.