Class Blog

In his article “The New Woman Fiction” from The Victorian Web, Dr. Andrzej Diniejko outlines the socially constructed image of the “New Woman” as it developed toward the end of the 19^th century. As Diniejko describes, the New Woman “departed from the stereotypical Victorian woman” in her desires for independence, education, and employment (Diniejko 2). This departure from traditional femininity was mocked in popular satirical depictions of the New Woman, which “usually pictured her riding a bicycle in bloomers and smoking a cigarette” (Diniejko 2). This image presents the New Woman as markedly masculine: she wears pants to allow her to straddle a bicycle and she smokes cigarettes, a typically male activity (for the time) involving a phallic object.

However, Diniejko qualifies this masculinization, considering Lyn Pykett’s observations of “the ambivalent representations of the New Woman in the late-Victorian discourse: ‘The New Woman was by turns: a mannish amazon and a Womanly woman…’” (qtd. in Diniejko 2). Pykett links these seemingly contradictory descriptions with “and,” illustrating the New Woman as a multi-faceted figure containing both masculinity and femininity. As a result, the New Woman evades gender distinctions as well as any kind of singular identity or face.

Considering these complexities of the New Woman, I will analyze how Mona Caird’s The Yellow Drawing Room engages with the cultural conversation. In the story, Vanora Haydon presents a fascinating take on the New Woman which both holds up and challenges the popular image. Before even meeting Vanora, Mr. St. Vincent learns of her garish decoration of the drawing room and determines that she must be “headstrong” and attention-seeking (Caird 103). He muses plainly, “I hate that sort of girl,” and contrasts her with his idea of the “true woman,” who is “retiring, unobtrusive, and indistinguishable” (Caird 103). Caird sets up Vanora against the image of “true” womanhood, playing into the popular masculinized caricature.

This division is seemingly continued when Mr. St. Vincent considers Vanora’s plain sister Clara as his “ideal woman,” who would never decorate in bright yellow (Caird 104). However, upon seeing Vanora for the first time, Mr. St. Vincent observes her “mass of glistening, golden hair,” her “eyes like the sea,” and her “robust” figure (Caird 104). This description recalls Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, the pinnacle of the female form. Indeed, Mr. St. Vincent goes on to describe Vanora as “supremely, overpoweringly womanly. The womanhood of her sisters paled before the exuberant feminine quality which I could not but acknowledge in Vanora” (Caird 105). Here, Caird overthrows Mr. St. Vincent’s idea of the “true” or “ideal” woman,” because Vanora’s femininity exceeds that of her sister Clara. His “scheme of the universe” (Caird 105) is entirely upended by Vanora’s extreme womanliness and beauty, for although Vanora’s behavior frustrates gendered expectations, her image overwhelmingly fulfills them.

With the character of Vanora, Caird challenges the popular masculinization of the New Woman by presenting an overly feminine figure whose personality contradicts her appearance. Caird engages with the ambiguity observed by Lyn Pykett but completely avoids the “mannish amazon” image. On the outside, Vanora is purely feminine, yet beneath the surface she bewilders traditional gender norms. With this choice, Caird presents her own version of the New Woman which blends with the “true” woman,” casting doubt on the Victorians’ ability to clearly distinguish a traditional woman from a rebel.

In Mona Caird’s “The Yellow Drawing Room,” Clara is depicted as the archetypal “angel in the house.” This term stems from a Coventry Patmore poem describing the ideal woman as tame, docile, and living to serve men. The main character of this story, Mr. St. Vincent, comments that this ideal woman should be “retiring, unobtrusive, indistinguishable even until you come to know her well, and then she is very much like what every other true woman would be under the same conditions” (103). St. Vincent expresses “Certain suspicions which I had harboured that Clara Haydon was my ideal woman grew stronger as I watched her quiet English face bent over the tea-tray… If I was to give up my liberty, the reins should be handed over to a kind, sensible young woman like Clara, who would hate to make herself remarkable, or her drawing room yellow” (104). In other words, a woman who would not actually take the reigns or distinguish herself in any way.

Though St. Vincent clearly feels that Clara checks all the boxes of his perfect wife, it is not Clara that St. Vincent falls for. It is her total opposite– the wild, “new woman” Vanora, who stands out as much as the bright yellow walls she chose for the drawing room. He is incredibly sexually attracted to her, describing her figure as “robust, erect, pliant” and he expresses feeling “penetrated” by her “glowing atmosphere” (105-106). In sexual contexts, the word “penetrates” is usually an action a man does to a woman. Interestingly, here it is Vanora penetrating him, suggesting that she challenges his power and masculinity (not just through her personality, but also her sexuality). In comparison, Clara is physically described with much more boring terms, with a “straightforward look” and “blue eyes and a fair complexion” (104). 

St. Vincent’s contempt for Vanora’s behavior and attitude only seem to increase his sexual attraction towards her. He says, “all the dominating instincts of my manhood roused into activity by this hateful experience,” the sexual connotations of the phrase “my manhood roused” connecting his hatred to his lust (108). Further, this desire to dominate her suggests that he is turned on by Vanora’s disobedience and wants to “tame” her (both emotionally and physically).   

Ultimately, St. Vincent confesses that he loves and wants to marry Vanora. Clara, fades into the background of the story, still “gentle” when wounded by St. Vincent’s choice. 

St. Vincent’s feelings for Vanora, despite Clara meeting every one of his standards for the ideal woman, implies that as the “new woman” emerged, not only were men challenged, but the “angel in the house” was challenged. St. Vincent’s aggressive attraction to Vanora suggests that some Victorian men were intrigued by the “new woman,” desiring the sexual satisfaction of “taming” these women, presenting conflicting guidance for how women should draw in men.

This double standard continues today, as men are often sexually attracted to archetypes like the “femme fatale” that challenge their control. Simultaneously, they don’t want their power challenged, and also to some extent want “traditional wives.” Which is more appealing: an outspoken woman in a tight dress, or a loving, modest woman doing your laundry for you?

“The room was in a glow of golden light; no ladylike antidote, however strong, could lead one to ignore it. It was radiant, bold, unapologetic, unabashed. It was not the room that my ideal woman would have created. My ideal woman would unfailingly choose a nice tone of grey-blue. Certain suspicions which I had harboured that Clara Haydon was my ideal woman grew stronger as I watched her quiet English face bent over the tea-tray. I liked the straightforward look of the girl, her blue eyes and fair complexion. If I was to give up my liberty, the reins should be handed over to a kind, sensible young woman like Clara, who would hate to make herself remarkable, or her drawing-room yellow.” (Caird 104).

The narrator (presumably a man) describes the yellow drawing-room using the following description words: “It was radiant, bold, unapologetic, unabashed. It was not…” (Caird 104) Meaning, that the narrator does not use these noteworthy adjectives when illustrating his ‘ideal woman’ and his expectations for her, providing a stark contrast from a traditional ‘ladylike’ outlook. The yellow room represents a beak from conventional female autonomy, symbolizing the need for female autonomic independence, rights, and expression. The “grey-blue” color that the narrator prefers, doesn’t stand out or present the striking qualities in the analysis above. Therefore, the yellow room serves as a challenge to the norms of femininity in Victorian society.
The narrator’s selection of “a nice tone of grey-blue,” (Caird 104) as the ideal color for a woman’s drawing-room suggests his masculinized lens as to how a woman should behave in Victorian society. This is particularly relevant in the illustration of Clara Haydon, perceiving her as passive, submissive, and an idealized style of beauty. The keywords in the passage above connotate with the following claim: “quiet English face, … straightforward look, and blue eyes and fair complexion.” (Caird 104). Furthermore, this emphasizes the yellow room as a woman who does not rebel against constricting social and societal norms. With this description, Clara is perceived as an “Angel in the house,” (Victorian Web 2) and a limitation of women’s independence and self-autonomy in the domestic sphere, marriage, and confining middle-class wives in the home.

Though Mona Caird’s The Yellow Drawing-Room is full of color metaphors, framing color around the nature motifs throughout reveal the societal shift from grey-blue to yellow or rather the Old Woman to the New Woman. Nature offers a framework to contextualize colors and expand the color metaphors to the natural world, which connects to the woman’s place in both the private and public sphere or rather in the home and out in nature spheres.

The narrator positions the yellow room around nature motifs as initial points of disagreement with the type of woman Vanora is. Comparing types of women to color and nature elements like the sun, the narrator sets the room “…in a flow of golden light; no ladylike antidote, however strong, could lead one to ignore it. It was radiant, bold, unapologetic, unabashed. It was not the room that my ideal woman would have created. My ideal woman would unfailingly choose a nice tone of grey-blue” (Caird 1892, 104). The “flow of golden light” evokes both water and light imagery. The following ode to how “un-ladylike” these natural elements are separates women from the natural world, instead instructing a re-aligning to the narrator’s version of an “ideal woman” with “grey-blue” hues. Perhaps, Caird suggests the ridiculousness of the narrator’s obsession with associating light and color as a foundation to criticize a strong-headed woman.

The stark contrast between “yellow” and “grey-blue” offers a physical manifestation of the Old Woman transforming into the New Woman. That New Woman coding correlates yellow and radiance or “golden light” to the sun and a change to the natural world. Though, yellow is “unapologetic” and abrupt in its change from the narrator’s “ideal woman’s” choice of a “grey-blue” room, it is simultaneously natural as it blends with the sun’s light.

Posing “unapologetic” women with nature disassociates the narrator and society’s more “idealistic” definition for women’s positioning in gender hierarchies. If not the natural world as it is too “radiant” and “bold,” Caird codes men to desire women with what the Victorian era considered more natural, intuitive responsibilities and to more respected “grey-blue” rooms. The narrator disagrees with Vanora’s choice of nature as it differs from the Victorian era’s nature of gender structure positioning men in power over women.

Nature—sun and water—plays a role in Vanora’s womanhood, though, the narrator’s ideas of feminine nature in societal terms strays away from the natural world and absorbs order from societal instruction as he says Vanora continues “to think and act in disharmony with the feminine nature and genius” (Caird 1892, 106). While the narrator implicates nature and the sun’s rays, he also mentions the breaking from “feminine nature and genius.” The varying uses of nature stresses how society used scientific and natural elements in the Victorian era to prove women had instinctual domestic responsibilities and to associate a woman attuned to nature as estranged from those traditional roles.

Though, this gender structuring and difference in nature definitions advantaging men is contradicted when Caird also grants women slight mobility with the repeated mention of women having to “create” and “choose” colors, which implicates women at the centers of creation stories. Geographically, Caird locates women in domestic narratives as they both create rooms and are confined to them. This mobilized and confined space relates to Charlotte Perkin’s Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, in which the female narrator, diagnosed with hysteria and given the “rest cure” by her doctor husband, gains agency in her confined space by becoming one with the moving wallpaper (Gilman). The yellow coloring in both texts implicate bold colors and illness narratives as symptomatic of women straying away from the boxed in “feminine nature and genius” designed by men. Yellow draws attention to their misbehavior, painting targets on their backs and incentivizing a return to the traditional natural order even though there is anything but order at the end of The Yellow Drawing-Room when the narrator causes chaos between the sisters.

Image from the 2021 film rendition of The Yellow Wallpaper.

Works Cited:

Caird, Mona. The Yellow Drawing-Room. 1892.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. First Avenue Editions, A    division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., 2017.

Image: https://www.filminquiry.com/the-yellow-wallpaper-2021-review/

 

In 1996, Walt Disney Pictures released their animated adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame to widespread critical acclaim. Though Disney’s take on the classic deviates in several major ways from its source material, Claude Frollo—in the film, the Parisian Minister of Justice—is consistently driven to madness by his attraction to Esmeralda, a young Roma woman. This desire culminates in Frollo’s primary sung number, “Hellfire,” in which he laments his attraction to Esmeralda and claims she has sown these sinful thoughts within his mind. Mona Caird’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Drawing-Room” similarly follows a self-proclaimed man of virtue in conflict with his own desire for the transgressive Vanora. As the two grow to see each other more often, the narrator grows nearly mad with desire, believing her to be exerting some sort of influence over him. 

“Hellfire” places Frollo’s confession within the larger framing device of a prayer: “Beata Maria, you know I am a righteous man / Of my virtue, I am justly proud,” he sings, “Beata Maria, you know I’m so much purer than / The common, vulgar, weak, licentious crowd,” (Hulce 2:19). Frollo is framed as possessing moral authority and “purity” compared to the public, whose attitudes he deems “licentious.” The Hunchback of Notre Dame has the privilege of being a long-form work, and by this point in the film adaptation, it has been established that Frollo is ostensibly villainous despite his claims. “The Yellow Drawing-Room,” on the contrary, works within the confines of its length and also through the narration of its morally-superior protagonist. He often skirts around directly addressing his broader perspective on morality beyond conservatism, but in his first exchange with Vanora, he claims that “‘people don’t know what is good for them,'” (Caird 107). He creates a dichotomy between himself, the moral authority, and the rest of society. Within these parameters, it is impossible for either Frollo or Caird’s narrator to be incorrect in their persuasions.

Frollo and Caird’s narrator are similarly quick to blame the object of their affections for their emotions and deny all responsibility. Frollo is more direct: “It’s not my fault / I’m not to blame,” he argues, “It is the gypsy girl, the witch who sent this flame,” (Hulce 3:26). Esmeralda is labeled a “witch” (and later a “siren” at 3:48), a dehumanized being with undue influence over her perceived targets. Caird’s narrator is marginally more subtle, instead entreating that Vanora “must release him” as he is “led away by qualities which ought to repel [him],” (107). Neither woman has, until and in this moment, suggested to either man that she is romantically interested in him, but as they cannot admit their own agency, they instead label these women as villains searching to dispel their moral purity.

Though The Hunchback of Notre Dame was written by a Frenchman and during the Georgian era (while Caird wrote in the Victorian), the larger theme of blaming women for men’s moral failings runs throughout both works and profoundly influences the audience’s readings of morality as it relates to gender. In learning that Frollo and the narrator’s moral authority is built upon their incrimination of innocents, it is firmly established that such authority is nothing more but a facade.

In Christian Rossetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio“, she writes, about the man looking at the woman’s portrait: “He feeds upon her face by day and night, / And she with true kind eyes looks back on him, /…../Not as she is, but as she fills his dreams” (Rossetti 9-14). The “feeds upon her ” part seems sort of vampiric to me, but it’s interesting that Rossetti is referring to a British man. Most of the vampire-like connections we’ve talked about have been applied to foreigners, like Count Fosco and his animals, mesmerism, and love of sugar. Yet pretty much all the men in what we’ve read so far have fed on women. Even though the Count is the one with vampiric undertones, living with Percival is what sucks the life out of Laura. Hartright also feeds on Laura, in a similar way to the artist in “In an Artist’s Studio”; he has a picture he painted of Laura that looks back on as he is telling the story (Collins 51). The “true kind eyes” part makes the woman sound very innocent, endearing and submissive, a lot like Laura, but then the final line reveals that the woman only looks this way in an idealized version that the man imagined when he painted her. This reminded me of Perkins and Donaghy article, ” A Man’s Resolution: Narrative Strategies in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White” where they argue that Walter is an unreliable narrator and has his own motivations that bleed into everyone else’s narratives, since he is presumably the editor of all the “evidence” he compiled (Perkins & Donaghy 400). All this made me wonder if any of the New Women writers exploited vampire tropes when writing about bad husbands and men. “The New Woman Fiction” from the Victorian web mentioned that New Woman fiction dealt with the issues of “venereal diseases” and “domestic [and sexual] violence” (The New Woman in Late Victorian Fiction section), and I think those were both the two major shock factors in Dracula. 

Elizabeth Lee’s article “The Femme Fatale as Object” focuses on how women were portrayed in art and poetry in the 19th century. She states 

Such a treatment, therefore, not only objectified the woman, but also dismembered her body and her identity; the artistically rendered woman is no longer an individual person but really the pleasing arrangement of shapes and light, easily allowing “peaches and pears” to substitute for flesh. (Lee) 

Looking at Christina Rossetti’s poem “In an Artist’s Studio”, Lee’s description of how women were viewed and portrayed and encapsulated perfectly by Rossetti’s commentary on her brother’s studio and what occurs inside it. She states “A nameless girl in freshest summer greens,/A saint, and angel…” (Rossetti lines 6-7). This girl’s body and identity have been separated, or as Lee calls it, dismembered. The fact that she is nameless means that her identity has been lost. She is also not a person anymore. She is both a saint and an angel, which implies a form of death that has occurred. To be a saint and to be an angel, or both as this girl is, means she has to have died. In Rossetti’s poem, it’s a symbolic death. She is no longer a person to the artist, she is just a muse, something to paint. Her identity and her personhood are lost to the artist.

Rossetti continues by later stating “He feeds upon her face by day and night,/And she with true kind eyes looks back on him” (lines 9-10). The act of feeding calls to mind the act of consuming. The artist is consuming the woman’s image and using it for his art. Meanwhile, the woman looks back ignorantly, not knowing how the artist is using her. This connects with Lee’s claim that a woman’s image becomes just an assortment of shapes pleasing to the eyes “easily allowing “peaches and pears” to substitute for flesh” (Lee). The woman in Lee’s piece is being likened to a piece of fruit, something naturally sweet. The transformation from woman to food allows for her to be consumed by the artist, something Rossetti is commenting on in her poem. The artist is “consuming” the woman’s personhood and rather than spitting out seeds, he is spitting back out an image that leaves her without her identity or even her body, as even that, the artist had full control over how it is portrayed just like the woman’s unnatural body in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in La Grande Odalisque.

In Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s poem “The Portrait” there is a repeated theme of burial, both literally in the model’s death, but also metaphorically in the poet’s return to images of incarceration, suffocation and looking through.  Christina Rosetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio” speaks back against these images of confinement and locates their cause. 

The poem’s first quatrain is scanned as iambic pentameter, the meter which corresponds to walking or breathing, but the subject is eerily inanimate: 

“One face looks out from all his canvases,  

One selfsame figure sits of walks or leans: 

We found her hidden just behind those screens, 

That mirror gave back all her loveliness.” (“Artist’s” l. 1-4). 

Alongside the steady beat of the scansion, “One” is repeated in parallel to capture both the subject’s “face” and “figure” creating a preoccupation with the body.  There is also something interesting happening with the rhyme scheme: ABBA.  Since “we” find the “her” in question “behind those screens,” behind the surfaces of the painting, the speaker also metacognitively embeds the suggestion in the contained “B” lines: she “leans” on the “screens,” waiting to be let out of the “canvases” that are only interested in her external “loveliness,” and not her personhood. 

Moving into the second quatrain delivers similar information, but with a new twist from the speaker: “A saint, and angel – every canvas means, / The same one meaning, neither more nor less.” (“Artist’s” l. 7-8).  Again, the parallel pattern of descriptors trundles on, until the middle of line 7 with the emdash where the narrator explodes, making even further explicit what the parallelism suggests.  The monotonous iambic pentameter certainly mocks the meaninglessness of each creation, but the word “one” recalls the woman’s description from the first quatrain.  Here, the speaker criticizes both the artists’ monolithic conception of the woman’s personhood, and his compulsion to return to the same subject (either from inability to invent or obsession with a single rendering). 

 The poem’s criticism then turns vampiric: “He feeds upon her face by day and night, / And she with true kind eyes looks back on him” (“Artist’s” 9-10).  Jan Marsh writes that “women are rendered decorative, depersonalized;…reduced to an aesthetic arrangement of sexual parts, for male fantasies” (Lee).  In these lines, the sestet begins, and the rhyme scheme begins to indicate that the subject and artist are out of sync.  The consonance of “feeds” and “face” and parallelism of “day and night” suggest an uneven exchange where violence is done on the woman who can but passively “look back on him” with “aesthetic[ally] arrang[ed]”
“true kind eyes.” Even before the artist’s “dream” is mentioned in the final lines, the speaker hints at the fantasy of consumption whether that be in a sexual or metaphorical way. 

The final lines are also resonant with Marsh’s criticism: “Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; / Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.” (“Artist’s” 13-14). The artist’s “dream” ultimately results in a Platonically dangerous echo-chamber where the artist is more interested in copying his idea of her (“Not as she is, but was”) and his paintings of her than the woman herself.  This is perhaps why in the first quatrain discusses the surface of the paintings rebounding “loveliness” – the paintings are the mirrors to one another, not to the woman, and so the woman is lost.  But not completely.  The repetition in the final three lines of “not as” resists his categorization of her identity, and the final line is unrhymed, resisting the traditional sestet resolution to show that the speaker recognizes that the artist’s “dream” is out of constancy with who she “is.” 

 

Works Cited: 

Rossetti, Christina. “In an Artist’s Studio.” The Poetry Foundation, [1896] 2025, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/146804/in-an-artist39s-studio. Accessed 12 March 2025. 

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. “The Portrait.” The Poetry Foundation, [1870] 2025, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45023/the-portrait-56d22459825d7. Accessed 12 March 2025. 

Lee, Elizabeth. “The Femme Fatale as Object.” The Victorian Web, 1996, https://victorianweb.org/gender/object.html. Accessed 12 March 2025. 

In class, we discussed the idea of the “Victorian Doppelgänger” and how it connects to The Woman in White. In the article we read it says, “Specifically, doppelgänger narratives involve a duality of the main character who is either duplicated in the figure of an identical second self or divided into polar opposite selves.” The original concept of the Victorian doppelganger was from the superstition that seeing one’s double was an omen of death. There are many doppelgängers or doubles in this novel that reflect the difference in the characters.

The clear double in the novel is between Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick. They are close enough in appearance that Anne is mistaken for Laura even after her death. While their physical similarity allows for the novel’s biggest deception, their different lives show where they differ. Laura is a wealthy woman of high status meaning she is protected, but her life is in the hands of the men who surround her. Anne is poor, but her perceived knowledge gives her a certain power against the people who try to bring her harm.

Another double that I recognized in the novel is between Walter Hartright and Sir Percival Glyde. Walter is seen, as recognized from his telling last name, as the “good guy” who is driven by his morality and pursues justice when others have been wronged. He is honest, passionate, and loyal to Marian and Laura. In contrast, Sir Percival is deceptive and relies on lies to maintain his status. He experiences his downfall from his lies and secrets. Their relationships with Laura highlight their differences and show the difference between virtue and villainy.

Another double I found interesting was between Mrs. Catherick and Mrs. Clements. Although Mrs. Catherick is Anne’s biological mom, she is cold and self-interested. She is more focused on keeping her status and reputation than protecting her own daughter. Mrs. Clements is not Anne’s biological mom, but she is nurturing and protective towards Anne. She raises Anne as her own and steps into the role of her mother. Mrs. Clements is genuinely kind and seeks out the best for Anne. They represent motherhood in the Victorian era and the reader sees how their care influenced Anne. Despite their significantly different roles, I find it interesting that Mrs. Clements ends up being part of the reason for Anne’s demise. She brings Anne to Count Fosco, thinking she was helping Anne, but she was deceived by him, and he is the cause of Anne’s untimely death.

The use of doubles in this novel reinforces the themes of the novel. By mirroring characters and contrasting them against each other, Collins highlights the differences between good and evil, truth and deceit, and justice and corruption. It also reflects morality and choice. The doubles show how the characters can be so similar but take vastly different paths. The doubles not only drive the plot but show human nature.

“The outside of the man you were marrying was fair enough to see. He was neither tall nor short—he was a little below the middle size. A light, active, high-spirited man—about five-and-forty years old, to look at. He had a pale face, and was bald over the forehead, but had dark hair on the rest of his head. His beard was shaven on his chin, but was let to grow, of a fine rich brown, on his cheeks and his upper lip. His eyes were brown too, and very bright; his nose straight and handsome and delicate enough to have done for a woman’s. His hands the same. He was troubled from time to time with a dry hacking cough, and when he put up his white right hand to his mouth, he showed the red scar of an old wound across the back of it. Have I dreamt of the right man? You know best, Miss Fairlie; and you can say if I was deceived or not. Read next, what I saw beneath the outside—I entreat you, read, and profit.”

I was really drawn to Freud’s understanding of dreams, and, as it pertains to the text, I was interested in the letter written by Anne Catherick to Miss Fairlie. Here, I’ll analyse the Freudian influences of Victorian understandings of dreams, which adds another layer of complexity to the already suspenseful reading of the letter. Anne’s description of Sir Percival Glyde as “fair enough to see” but urging Miss Fairlie to “read next, what I saw beneath the outside” is laden with both conscious and unconscious insight. It provides an essential clue to the tension between appearances and hidden truths, an idea central to the narrative of The Woman in White. Anne’s letter can be seen as an attempt to reveal the truth, which is something that has been deeply buried by Sir Percival. Anne, as a character, embodies the struggle of the repressed voice fighting to break free. In her letter, she is not just offering a description of Sir Percival; she is, in fact, attempting to expose the hidden, unconscious layers of his identity that she knows are dangerous and deceitful. Freud’s theory of the return of the repressed is relevant here. Anne herself is a repressed figure, in the literal sense of being confined to an asylum, so her experiences with Sir Percival result in the suppression of her truth. In the letter, Anne seeks to break that silence, demanding that Miss Fairlie “read next, what I saw beneath the outside.” This can be seen as a call to confront the repressed truths about Sir Percival, which, like all repressed material, will inevitably return. I feel that Freud would point to Sir Percival Glyde’s scar on the back of his hand as a sign of a repressed past, an evident manifestation of his guilty past that cannot be hidden completely. Here, Freud would likely argue that there’s a danger of ignoring psychological truths that lie beneath the surface, which is a topic that the novel itself seeks to explore. In Anne writing the letter, she mirrors the novel’s broader thematic concern with the return of repressed elements: those aspects of the self or the past that cannot remain concealed forever. With this understanding, the letter isn’t her describing Glyde’s physicality, but rather represents an unconscious struggle to bring forth the repressed truth. The dream is explained by Freud’s idea that what is repressed will eventually find a way to surface. Or who knows, maybe she took Benadryl and saw the hat man instead of Sir Percival Glyde! 

I’m walking away, but don’t worry, I’m still following all the rules… kinda.

Jay Walker