Author: mustache

When one really thinks about it, Mrs. Catherick falls no short of qualifying as the protagonist of this book. She is involved with two of the most evident scandals, two of the most important marriage plots in this book–one having to do with bringing about “the woman in white” and the other, the mystery to bring forth the downfall of Sir Percival Glyde.

Yet, she is nothing. She sits with her hands crossed on her lap, in her little house in the town where the clergyman bows to her. She sends Haltright away the first time he comes–although he wasn’t much better at dealing with her than she was with him–and the second time, sends him a letter in a pretense handwriting to show her “gratitude.” The text goes to much extent, indeed, to make Mrs. Catherick an unlikeable character–and this would be an understatement.

She is extremely vain. She was so when she was young, years ago with Sir Percival, and although she calls herself foolish, she never changed–“the allowance was a handsome one” (534), and she lived on the money from her so-called “enemy” for as along as before Sir Percival died, and her savings from that after. She supports a better house, better carpets, and better dresses–silk–with the money from the man she wished dead than anything else. She enjoyed her “comfortable income, in return, paid quarterly” (534). She was unjustly used by Sir Percival, thus justifying her hatred towards him. Yet it was a bargain and she enjoyed it–how to call that unjust at all? To her, the foolishness was not in vanity, but in not checking if it was safe to do so. Despite of everything that happened due to her longing for it, despite the fact that it directly ruined her life, she still cherishes the watch–“I have got them still – the watch goes beautifully” (532).

Would she ever look back to herself, and consider even remotely the fact that she might, at times, not be in the most correct position? Highly unlikely. She considers herself to “have written in the friendliest possible spirit,” and if Hartright “see[s] the necessity of writing me[her] an apology,” she would be willing to accept it (539). Friendly she may indeed have been, as she is at least being honest with her opinions. She shows without holding back how she hasn’t moved an inch from where she had been years ago, when she couldn’t resist helping a stranger for a golden watch. One might even say she was a better person than she is now, at the time–when she was young and perhaps, less caught in her own shallow pride.

This makes her, despite of everything she knows, despite of the keys she holds to so many of the mysteries throughout this novel, an insignificant character. Could she really have done so little to get revenge on Sir Percival Glyde had she not been caught up in the handsome payment she received four times a year? Had she possessed half the character of Marian Halcombe, would she have been limited her life to the sad person she had become? Yes, indeed, this novel may have never existed, this story and mystery all never created, had this one woman not labled her voluntary, self-imposed inaction as pride.

Laura Fairlie lies in the center of the romance in “The Woman in White.” Walter Hartwright hopelessly falls in love with her during the period of his narrative, then after the parting, gets reduced to a bitter mess both Gilmore and Marian are surprised and sorry to find. Then there is Sir Percival Glyde, pursuing his engagement with “unchangeable love and admiration of two long years” (174), apparently not only for Laura but her inheritance. And then, there are Gilmore and Marian. They appear to be armed with a different kind of love, but the bitterness by which Marian writes–“She will be his Laura instead of mine!”–makes a reader wonder if she, too, may act as one of the voices driving Laura into confusion.

And yet, for the woman in the center of all this attention, Laura is given very little power. This is not to argue that her environment is at fault. True, the Victorian era gives no legal power for women, but Marian is doing just fine with her “robust nervous system,” to the envy of Mr. Farlie (176). Upon coming of age, Laura is also entitled to an inheritance of twenty-thousand pounds, a sum that is “absolutely Miss Fairlie’s own” (150). And on account of her marriage, it is not, to be strict, a forced one, either. Sir Percival Glyde, as pale as he gets when Laura calls to talk to him (165), still voluntarily leaves one window open by passing onto Marian that he could, under Laura’s desire, “sacrifice himself by leaving her perfectly free to withdraw from the engagement” (138).

She is not yet of age–three months short of being twenty-one (146). And while this puts her in roughly the same area as the readers in our class, her emotional state does not seem to be parallel at all. Again and again, she is referred as not only a ghostly figure in white, but as a child.

Her encounter with Gilmore is especially so. On trying to express her desire to leave some inheritance to Walter Hartwright, she bursts into tears and Gilmore “drie[s] the tears that were gathering in her eyes, with [his] own hand, as if she had been the little Laura Fairlie of ten long years ago” (144). And from the way she leans towards him and smiles, she apparently is still a little girl of ten, at heart. The later page supports this by mentioning that she was “[s]till clinging to the past – that past which I represented to her, in my way, as Miss Halcombe did in hers!” (145).

Her love for Walter, too, then becomes questionable not in its existence but its meaning. Is it actually love, or is it a form of idolizing admiration and affection that a little girl might have towards an older man? The time spent alone upstairs looking at the album Walter had given her, the act of pinning her hair to it and asking to give it to him upon her death, and of saying to Marian “say for me, then, what I can never say for myself – say I loved him!” (173) all points to a kind of love that is just pure and selfless. This is comparable to Walter’s remembering “at one time to be bending over her, so close to her bosom as to tremble at the thought of touching it” (65). There is nothing sexual about Laura’s love at all–not just, I daresay, because this is a Victorian novel and women are not “qualified” to have such thoughts, but because her love does not include any at all.

She is, in this way, caged and deprived of power not by her environment or her situation, but by the limits of her own naive self. All she can do in the center of attention, is to do what she thinks she “should do,” then cry in her bedroom in secret. She is too young in spirit to execute her right to refuse her marriage, or pursue her romance–which may not be romance at all.