Essential to upholding gender roles during the Victorian era included the emphasis on domesticity for women (Christ 2006, 992). Though, too, the concept of “New Womanhood” brought alternative responses to the rigid gender norms. Resorted to the kitchen and to the private sphere of the home, women’s responsibilities were to construct the home itself and the people within it. Being a child’s primary caretaker, it seemed women and children were one and one. Though, in The Woman in White, the mother-child relationship is revealed differently. With this particular scene, Marian, lacking children of her own, interacts with a schoolboy or rather interrogates him. Caught in the midst of her response to the boy, “her face crimsoned with indignation—she turned upon little Jacob with an angry suddenness which terrified him into a fresh burst of tears—opened her lips to speak to him—then controlled herself—and addressed the master instead of the boy” (Collins 2011, 88). Marian’s clear “angry suddenness” and “indignation” in response to the previous line of questioning towards the boy reveals her emotional state around a child. She, in one sense, understands the power imbalance of an adult speaking down to a child as the boy is “terrified” of her to the point of a physical emotional response of breaking into “tears.” Yet, in another sense, Marian treats the schoolboy as her equal, interrogating him like an adult and feeling as though she can speak with such “indignation” and “suddenness.”
It is as if up to this point in conversation Marian has not recognized how “terrified” the boy is because she is blind to the power imbalance a parent and child might endure. She ignores the differences in gender and age dynamics or perhaps she does the exact opposite—using her position as a masculine coded woman to pry information out of someone younger than her. She understands how power operates and her glimpse into possessing that power is squashed by her self-control. The literary dashes are telling of Marian’s mental operations—her mind simultaneously pausing to rethink just as the text implores the reader to do the same. Just as she opens “her lips” to voice her power over the boy, she stops herself.
That preemptive control preventing her from continuing her line of aggressive questioning that women do not typically make reveals an ingrained behavior to check herself. Societal demand of women always being controlled caught up to her in this moment. Her emotional “suddenness” also becomes a “suddenness” to remember her obligations as a woman—to respond to the male master and remind herself of the normative gender and age power hierarchies defining societies of the time. Instead of caring for a child, she interrogates one and in doing so Collins suggests that her understanding of power hierarchies between children-adult and between male-female and her breaking of it is constantly met with her own society fueled initiatives to prevent such forward thinking.
References
Christ, C. T., & Robson, C. (2006). The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age (8th ed., Vol. E). W.W. Norton.
Collins, W. (2011). Woman in White. Penguin Classics.
I love your observation that Marian’s internal conflict is can be analyzed through this dialogue. The Woman in White compels its reader through the subtext, which drives the mystery of Anne Catherick and Count Fosco. We have observed that Marian exemplifies a resistance against classic gender roles, but as we have continued to read the novel it becomes clear that she tries to fit within them even as she is rattling the bars of her cage. Marian resisting the mother/child dynamic that would be her expected gender role and then immediately checking herself by realigning to the gendered man/woman hierarchy is a great demonstration of the conflict of her character.