In the opening pages of Collin’s The Woman in White, Mr. Walter Hartwright comes face to face with the titular character, a strange woman wandering the streets of London in the middle of the night. Based on Victorian-era social strictures applied to women at the time, it was considered improper for a young woman to be out late at night unaccompanied. Men and women were often relegated to “separate spheres”, with the Victorian woman “protected and enshrined within the home, her role to create a place of peace where man could take refuge from the difficulties of modern life” (Norton Anthology 992).
Collins demonstrates the strict nature of English society at the time of his novel by highlighting Hartwright’s utter shock at the woman’s appearance. Commenting on the encounter, he writes “I was far too startled by the suddenness with which this extraordinary apparition stood before me, in the dead of night and in that lonely place…” (24). This sentence clearly articulates how uncomfortable the woman in white’s presence has made him, not only because of her mystique but also by virtue of the situation. Because Hartwright considers himself to be a “gentleman” by Victorian social standards, he goes to great lengths to make clear that nothing untoward occurred between the two when they were alone so late at night. Even the woman herself is clearly anxious to be percieved improperly, saying “You don’t suspect me of doing anything wrong, do you?” and “Why do you suspect me of doing wrong?” (25) with little prompting from Hartwright himself.
Although he finds the interaction out of the ordinary, Hartwright quickly defends her honor, saying “the grossest of mankind could not have misconstrued her motive in speaking, even at that suspiciously late hour and in that suspiciously lonely place” (24). Even under strange and dream-like circumstances, Hartwright’s rhetoric stays strictly within the confines of proper English social standards. In writing his narrator this way, Collins is demonstrating that much of the novel’s most interesting revelations are to be found in the subtext.