William A. Cohen’s “Sex, Scandal, and the Novel” describes the Victorian connection between Victorian concepts of sexual forbiddenness, other elements of socially unspeakable acts, and the style in which authors wrote. He explains, “Like other restrictions upon expression, the conventions of sexual unspeakability serve writers as a productive constraint, contributing to a certain historical formation of the literary”. The Woman In White, particularly the narrative of Walter Hartright, contains a number of paragraph-long descriptions that are winding and detailed, especially surrounding the novel’s women. Using this aspect of Cohen’s thinking as a lens, Hartright’s descriptions of the titular Woman in White become less curious, and more scandalous, regardless of any actual sexual intent. Now known to be Anne Catherick, she is further linked to the social undesirability of mental illness, as upon first meeting her, Walter discovers that she has escaped from an asylum.
The most prominent rumination here is that of scandal rather than sex when thinking about Cohen. Whether she is the mysterious and ghostly Woman in White, or the tormented Anne Catherick, the woman is permanently linked to socially complex topics. Upon meeting her for the first time, Walter’s “restrictions of expression” produce a fascinating description, a long paragraph that takes great pains to deemphasize the sexualization of the woman. “The one thing of which I felt certain was,” he says, “that the grossest of mankind could not have misconstrued her motive in speaking, even at that suspiciously late hour and in that suspiciously lonely place”. Despite her wandering out late, Walter makes clear to readers that the woman is not a prostitute—however, instead of saying it outright, he politely states that her motives were pure, and that they could not have been “misconstrued” as promiscuous. Instead, her social unconventionality is linked to her rank, her social standing. Part of why the descriptive paragraph Walter embarks on is so long is because the woman defies categorization, being dressed in fabric “certainly not composed of very delicate or very expensive materials”. Additionally, her manner is inherently scandalous in that she hardly displays conventional femininity, according to Walter’s description. The “first touch of womanly tenderness” he hears from her is in the middle of their conversation, and he is unable to tell the nature of her “manner,” whether it is that of the noble lady or “the manner of a woman in the humblest rank of life”. All this from Walter is, in short, to say that the woman in white is more than a little strange, phrased in the politest way possible. On top of this inherent societal nonconformity (what we might call scandalous, even if not the exact “scandal” Cohen refers to), the woman in white is an escapee from a mental health institution, which Walter discovers after their first meeting.
However, the societal conventions of unspeakability that Cohen mentions guide Walter’s continual fascination and confusion with her in the text. Not even a day after they part, Walter is distracted by her: “I sat down and tried, first to sketch, then to read—but the woman in white got between me and my pencil, between me and my book.” He then asks a series of vague questions: “Had the forlorn creature come to any harm? That was my first thought, though I shrank selfishly from confronting it. Other thoughts followed, on which it was less harrowing to dwell”, he begins. Calling the mysterious figure a “forlorn creature,” especially, solidifies the image of her as something potentially scandalous in nature, even if not always sexual. In fact, Walter goes on to call her a “creature” rather than a “woman” more than once, throughout the novel. Late in the novel, when the obsession with unraveling the mystery consumes him further, he internally thinks, “Again, and yet again, the woman in white. There was a fatality in it”. This vaguely-stated “fatality” in question refers to his unconventional fascination, to the idea that this woman haunts him in a way greater than any other average lady—entirely due to her societal unconventionalism, the very thing that makes her ghostly other than her pale face in the moonlight.
Walter’s fascination with the woman as unconventional is important in the formation of the novel because his point of view is the majority of readers’ exposure to this ghastly character. Readers only perceive Anne Catherick as so haunting due to her scandalous placement in Walter’s mind. These descriptions provide structure to the mystery, forming as a literary staple of the novel on a smaller scale than the way Cohen describes a historical formation of the literary. In addition, perhaps the mystery of the Woman in White has connections to the scandal-story that Cohen describes.
Bibliography:
Cohen, William A. “Sex, Scandal, and the Novel.” From Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction, Duke University Press, 1996. The Victorian Web, www.victorianweb.org/gender/wac.html.
Collins, Wilkie. (1996). The Woman in White. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved February 5, 2025, from https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/583/pg583-images.html.