In Mona Caird’s “The Yellow Drawing-Room,” Vanora is initially described by the narrator, Mr. St. Vincent, as “a headstrong and probably affected young person” (Caird 103). She is everything that St. Vincent hates in a woman; she is too loud and independent, and he detests her before he even meets her. However, his opinion of Vanora is immediately confused when he meets her for the first time. It seems that the last thing he expected to see in Vanora’s appearance was femininity, yet, “She was supremely, overpoweringly woman” (Caird 105). St. Vincent is bewildered at the fact that Vanora’s feminine beauty could exist at the same time as her headstrong personality. Surely a woman with a lovely figure and beautiful golden hair could never be anything but quiet and amenable.
A very similar instance occurs in Wilkie Collins’ “The Woman in White.” When Walter Hartright sees Marian for the first time, she is turned around, and Hartright marvels at the beauty and femininity of her body. However, the second that he sees Marian’s face, he is at once struck with the same confusion as Mr. St. Vincent. To Hartright, Marian’s masculine face completely contradicts the femininity of her body. Additionally, he makes judgements about her personality in a way that mimics St. Vincent’s judgements about Vanora: “Her expression – bright, frank, and intelligent – appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete” (Collins 35).
In these two instances, St. Vincent and Hatright both have a hard time grappling with the contradiction of the women’s ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ attributes. Hatright states it plainly, saying “to see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model […] was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognize yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of dreams” (Collins 35). The reactions of both men likely represent the general public’s views on gender roles. There is a very narrow definition of what a woman or a man can be, and anything that deviates from this is difficult to understand and accept.