Return of the Repressed, and the Hat Man?

“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