Laura Fairlie’s wedding with Sir Percival Glyde seems to signify the end of the world for quite a few people. Marion takes it especially hard and acts as if once Laura marries Sir Percival, she will be dead. “She will be his Laura instead of mine!… [it is] as if writing of her marriage were like writing of her death” (185).This novel really seems to be Laura’s coming of age narrative because all her life, all she has known was Marion and her loyal promise to marry Sir Percival.
When she was exposed to Walter Hartwright and to what true love feels like, everything changed and she had to sacrifice her desires in order to keep her word. She is forced to leave her childhood innocence behind and leave her sister, whom she was inseparable with all her life in order to “grow up” and marry another man like she was meant to do according to familial expectations. Once Laura marries Sir Percival, her own sense of individual identity will cease to exist. She has to sacrifice true love, family, and possibly her inheritance (which she does not yet have access to) in order to marry a man who she promised her late father she would wed.
There is a theme her in which women were only meant to marry and once they did that, it’s like their life is over and they have accomplished all there is to accomplish at that point in their life, it’s portrayed as a rite of passage into adulthood and maturity for the ideal Victorian woman represented by Laura. She now has wifely duties that she is expected to fulfill after she is married not only in the sense of the domestic sphere and responsibility, but also there is a loss of her sexual innocence that comes with marriage. This loss of virginity is only hinted at when Marion discusses the loss of Laura’s innocence through the image of her “pretty little white bed” (194) she’s leaving behind after her wedding, only like a true Victorian novel does.
Marion really emphasizes this point when she states,”It is all over. They are married” (195) and mourns Laura’s death (oops… I meant marriage).
I agree with every observation in this post regarding how marriage and death seem interchangeable in the novel. In accordance with this, I would also like to propose that Collins’s infusing marriage with death imagery is foreshadowing a piece of the plot. I believe this marriage being the death of Laura symbolically represents a plot Sir Percival Glyde has to murder her. I have this premonition due to monetary discussion in Mr. Gilmore’s account. On page 151 it is made clear that Glyde wishes of Laura’s inheritance that “The whole sum, if she left no children, was to slip into the pockets of her husband”. This greed’s motive is made clear when Gilmore is informed that “the debts on his estate were enormous and that his income, though nominally a large one, was, virtually, for a man in his position, next to nothing”(151). My inkling based on this evidence is that Glyde is marrying Laura purely for her inheritance and he plans to kill her in order to obtain it. In this case, Collins’s death imagery in connection with the marriage is merely a foreshadowing of Glyde’s plot.
The correlation between death and Laura Fairlie’s wedding is made extraordinarily clear in the narrative, as you have mentioned here. I think this theme is also evident with the couple instances of locks of hair being given or received in the days leading up to Laura’s wedding. In Victorian mourning, it was often customary to wear a piece of jewelry containing the deceased’s hair (http://www.victorianweb.org/art/design/jewelry/vmourning/13.html). Laura actually severs a lock of her own hair and places it into the book of Mr Hartright’s sketches (172-173), perhaps symbolically “giving” him the hair, as if she expects him to mourn her “death.” In addition, the gift given to Laura by her uncle for her wedding is described as “a shabby ring, with her affectionate uncle’s hair for an ornament,” (192-193). While it is true that this is perhaps more of a foreshadow of Mr Fairlie’s death, it still seems significant that Laura receives such a gift on the eve of her own wedding. One thing is certain–that Laura Fairlie died on the day that Lady Glyde was married (as noted by Marian later on in the novel, “I miss something when I look at her–something that once belonged to the happy, innocent life of Laura Fairlie, and that I cannot find in Lady Glyde” (211).
You bring up an interesting idea! As Sir Percival’s property–er, wife–Laura does lose her autonomy. I completely agree that this is foreshadowing Laura’s death; if Sir Percival is capable of beating up dogs (I can’t even wrap my mind around this), then I think he’s capable of killing someone he doesn’t seem to have any respect for. Sir Percival only wants her inheritance, so now it’s only a matter of time until Laura literally passes away.