The moment we are first introduced to the unspeakably lovely Laura in Collins’ The Woman in White, she is described as having golden hair that melts away and her aura is one of daintiness and fragility. Almost immediately, Laura is revealed as the embodiment of femininity and marriageability (according to Walter), directly juxtaposed with Marian’s sturdiness and refusal to go unseen. If not watched closely, Walter and Marian fear that she could fade away – physically in her health and mentally. In a novel so dependent on recalling details specifically, even Walter fears he’s forgetting her:
How can I describe her? How can I separate her from my own sensations, and from all that has happened in the later time? How can I see her again as she looked when my eyes first rested on her—as she should look now, to the eyes that are about to see her in these pages? (p39)
Here he cannot separate the different memories he has of Laura because they fade together. It is almost as if she is a blank slate on which to project Walter’s impressions and ideas of the future. At the same time, she is the connection to the past of Anne Catherick her appearance as a wisp in the moonlight harkens back to Walter’s strange meeting with her.
There stood Miss Fairlie, a white figure, alone in the moonlight…the living image at that distance and under those circumstances, of the woman in white!
Walter later notes that the likeness between Laura and Anne seems like casting a shadow on her future. Not only is Anne disordered by her perceived mental illness, but now she is corrupting the future of the fair Ms Fairlie. Now the likeness between the two of them darkly foreshadows what may happen to Laura.
It might be a stretch to make the claim that a perfect woman has a completely mutable future. Laura threatens to fade away, making her completely under the control of whomever is looking after her. Laura insists that Marian, our symbol of stability and permanence, receives her entire fortune, knowing that she has her best interests at heart. This inability to control her own life might be why the creepy Sir Percival is so insistent on receiving her entire fortune if (or when, as he sub-textually insinuates) something happens to her.
Furthermore, with the idea that Laura is capable of fading into memories, we can assume that Laura is the perfect candidate for a traumatic event. If a disordered woman is permanent and remembers painful memories (like how Anne’s trauma follows her around and expresses itself symptomatically), Laura’s possible future trauma (which will most definitely be related to Sir Percival) will be swept under the rug and walked over. Laura’s strict femininity will force her into doing the most important thing a woman can do after a trauma: stay silent and fade into the background.
Bianca LoGiurato
logiurab@dickinson.edu
It is interesting that you mention Laura “staying silent and fading to the background” in response to trauma; for the beginning chunk of Monday’s reading, that is exactly what Laura does: something Glyde said or did during her honeymoon has horribly upset her, but she refuses to tell Marian about it. Marian noticed this trauma by Laura’s continuous insistence on everything being as close as possible as it was in Limmeridge – a return to the past to try and ignore the problems of the present – or even discuss the topic of her husband – again, avoidance of the present situationBy the end of the reading, though, Laura has proven herself stronger in character: ***SPOILERS*** she has defied Glyde’s demands to sign a document without first reading it and understanding what she is signing and broken her silence on the emotional trauma she suffered while abroad. Laura’s strict femininity has found a reason to rebel, a reason to stand strong and defy her husband – what we don’t know yet are the consequences of that decision.
I really enjoyed your comparison between Laura and a blank slate, and it occurred to me that this might be a reason that Hartright is a drawing tutor (combines instruction with imposing images onto surfaces). The fact that this is a desirable quality speaks volumes about the mindset of Victorian England, which held up silent, passive, and accommodating women as the ideal.
I also appreciate the connection you drew between everyone’s worry about Laura fading away and the pressure on trauma survivors to remain silent. It made me think as well about one of the symptoms of PTSD and trauma disorders, which is to withdraw from the world and interactions with others. It is almost as if Laura mirrors Anne intentionally, committing herself to an asylum-like existence with Marion and then Glyde as her caretakers, revoking all of her rights and agency as an individual. She literally resigns herself to a life with Glyde, but she also seems to subscribe to the Victorian notion that unwanted emotions/impulses can be removed if one is removed from triggering presences (Walter, in this case).
I like mccrillm’s idea of Laura mirroring Anne in her asylum-like existence, but I would go on from there to clarify that everything we know about Anne so far suggests that she does not passively accept the controls imposed on her by Sir Percival, seeing as she escapes the mental institution. In fact, she takes advantage of the impression she gives off of passivity and acceptance, saying that she was never suspected because she “was so quiet, and so obedient, and so easily frightened,” (99). She stays quiet and fades into the background, but she also uses that strategically. Neither does she completely suppress all emotional reaction to her trauma, as we saw in the scene in the graveyard when she becomes animalistic and wild, demonstrating her intense rage against Sir Percival. It will be interesting to see how Laura’s responses to the man change the longer she is with him–already we have seen this shift in her, but the reins also seem to be tightening, leaving her and Marian with less and less agency over their own lives.
I really like the observations of Laura “fading” after experiencing some sort of trauma. Staying silent and fading away as an embodiment of feminine duty seems directly connected with the expectation of women to mourn. As we talked about in class, Queen Victoria mourned her husband’s death for years. This seems to be a more interesting sort of trauma, as if Laura is mourning herself. Perhaps the loss of herself to a marriage with a loveless man.
Your second quotation from the book comparing Laura to the woman in white does seem like some incredible foreshadowing. It also seems to be very telling of how women are perceived if they have experienced trauma or have been deemed insane. At that point, they are more like a foreign, ghostly memory than a real person.