Author: Mina Murray

“Socially, morally, legally—dead” (Collins 413). This is how Laura Fairlie is described, in dramatic, definitive fashion, by Walter Hartright at the beginning of his long narrative after returning from abroad. It is important to note that Laura is not physically dead, and instead is in hiding, but that her “death” is still quite real in all of the senses that Hartright listed. Being a Victorian “sensation novel,” it combines gothic themes like death and mystery with romantic ideals (in the Romantic poetry sense) such as the thoughtful and noble artist: “Alive, with the poor drawing-master to fight her battle” Hartright says about himself and his determination to help (413). It is no surprise that the beginning of Hartright’s narrative reads as it does, then, full of scandal and daring. He frames Laura as practically dead, a fake-out that fills readers with mortal terror and then scandalous satisfaction, and himself as a moral protagonist against the world, reflective of poetic drama. Collins truly plays up the mystery and scandal of the novel during this portion.

In doing so, The Woman in White exemplifies the obvious connections between Victorian “scandal” and “sensation novels.” William A. Cohen in Sex, Scandal, and the Novel connects Victorians’ lengthy novels with a want to explore scandalous topics dramatically, yet sensitively—sexual content, for example, must be conveyed by journalists “without offending their readership” (Cohen). Cohen generally speaks of sex being the “scandal” that these novels indulge in, and by extension, Victorian readers indulge in due to their fascination with scandal. But the topics beyond sex in The Woman in White also exemplify scandal at its finest: not only is Laura’s fake-out death “sensational,” as in grand and terrible, but it is also scandalous in the ways Hartright describes. First of all, she has gone from wealthy to “in poverty” as Hartright says, a fall from grace that leaves her less capable monetarily and, considering Victorian literature sometimes connects wealth not only with power but with morality, perhaps less able to act reasonably (413). Though, considering Hartright is framed as a moral protagonist and is described as poor, this novel may actually criticize the idea of wealth and standing as morality. Regardless, Laura is also “in hiding,” a stark contrast from her social standing beforehand. Her uncle has “renounced her,” a family connection that is massively important, and she is dead to any “persons in authority” who dictate the law, and who therefore stand at the middle and final steps to truly putting the mystery of the novel to rest in terms of the ledger and inheritance (413). Though none of this is sexual in nature, it is all opposed to “polite” or socially lawful Victorian society, which neither Laura nor Walter are a part of any longer at this point. In other words, Collins’ readers, at this point, are indulging in the affairs of some quite scandalous characters who have found themselves in a terrible and sensational situation. The brief plot summary of later events in The Woman in White provided by Walter Hartright in this first chapter of his return alone could make up a scandal headline. His expressive use of punctuation, especially exclamation points, and his imagined binary between the shunned family he has grown into with Laura against greater polite society (remember how he so exaggeratedly “fight[s]” Laura’s “battle”) do not need much remodeling to become fantastic news stories.

The overall effect of this on fiction readers, then, is not unlike the indulgence in real(ish?) scandal that Cohen describes: following these protagonists “provides the opportunity to formulate questions” and “discuss previously unimagined possibilities” (Cohen). In fact, one of these questions may be the criticism of wealth as morality or power I mentioned earlier. Portraying Walter as poor and cast aside, but also heroic and determined raises questions about the norm of being wary of folks who have been “cast out” by Victorian society (think of Anne Catherick, who is pure and modest and honest in a polite womanly fashion yet also “insane” or “mad,” othering her). Sensation novels like The Woman in White, then, clear the way for plenty of scandalous “dangers,” and help pave the way for a number of critiques of Victorian society that “true” scandals are also defined by. In this case of Laura and Hartright, wealth/estate/property and morality are called into question especially.

 

Cohen, William A. “Sex, Scandal, and the Novel.” From Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction, Duke University Press, 1996. The Victorian Web, www.victorianweb.org/gender/wac.html. 

Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Penguin Books, 2003. 

William A. Cohen’s “Sex, Scandal, and the Novel” describes the Victorian connection between Victorian concepts of sexual forbiddenness, other elements of socially unspeakable acts, and the style in which authors wrote. He explains, “Like other restrictions upon expression, the conventions of sexual unspeakability serve writers as a productive constraint, contributing to a certain historical formation of the literary”. The Woman In White, particularly the narrative of Walter Hartright, contains a number of paragraph-long descriptions that are winding and detailed, especially surrounding the novel’s women. Using this aspect of Cohen’s thinking as a lens, Hartright’s descriptions of the titular Woman in White become less curious, and more scandalous, regardless of any actual sexual intent. Now known to be Anne Catherick, she is further linked to the social undesirability of mental illness, as upon first meeting her, Walter discovers that she has escaped from an asylum. 

The most prominent rumination here is that of scandal rather than sex when thinking about Cohen. Whether she is the mysterious and ghostly Woman in White, or the tormented Anne Catherick, the woman is permanently linked to socially complex topics. Upon meeting her for the first time, Walter’s “restrictions of expression” produce a fascinating description, a long paragraph that takes great pains to deemphasize the sexualization of the woman. “The one thing of which I felt certain was,” he says, “that the grossest of mankind could not have misconstrued her motive in speaking, even at that suspiciously late hour and in that suspiciously lonely place”. Despite her wandering out late, Walter makes clear to readers that the woman is not a prostitute—however, instead of saying it outright, he politely states that her motives were pure, and that they could not have been “misconstrued” as promiscuous. Instead, her social unconventionality is linked to her rank, her social standing. Part of why the descriptive paragraph Walter embarks on is so long is because the woman defies categorization, being dressed in fabric “certainly not composed of very delicate or very expensive materials”. Additionally, her manner is inherently scandalous in that she hardly displays conventional femininity, according to Walter’s description. The “first touch of womanly tenderness” he hears from her is in the middle of their conversation, and he is unable to tell the nature of her “manner,” whether it is that of the noble lady or “the manner of a woman in the humblest rank of life”. All this from Walter is, in short, to say that the woman in white is more than a little strange, phrased in the politest way possible. On top of this inherent societal nonconformity (what we might call scandalous, even if not the exact “scandal” Cohen refers to), the woman in white is an escapee from a mental health institution, which Walter discovers after their first meeting.

However, the societal conventions of unspeakability that Cohen mentions guide Walter’s continual fascination and confusion with her in the text. Not even a day after they part, Walter is distracted by her: “I sat down and tried, first to sketch, then to read—but the woman in white got between me and my pencil, between me and my book.” He then asks a series of vague questions: “Had the forlorn creature come to any harm? That was my first thought, though I shrank selfishly from confronting it. Other thoughts followed, on which it was less harrowing to dwell”, he begins. Calling the mysterious figure a “forlorn creature,” especially, solidifies the image of her as something potentially scandalous in nature, even if not always sexual. In fact, Walter goes on to call her a “creature” rather than a “woman” more than once, throughout the novel. Late in the novel, when the obsession with unraveling the mystery consumes him further, he internally thinks, “Again, and yet again, the woman in white. There was a fatality in it”. This vaguely-stated “fatality” in question refers to his unconventional fascination, to the idea that this woman haunts him in a way greater than any other average lady—entirely due to her societal unconventionalism, the very thing that makes her ghostly other than her pale face in the moonlight. 

Walter’s fascination with the woman as unconventional is important in the formation of the novel because his point of view is the majority of readers’ exposure to this ghastly character. Readers only perceive Anne Catherick as so haunting due to her scandalous placement in Walter’s mind. These descriptions provide structure to the mystery, forming as a literary staple of the novel on a smaller scale than the way Cohen describes a historical formation of the literary. In addition, perhaps the mystery of the Woman in White has connections to the scandal-story that Cohen describes. 

Bibliography:

Cohen, William A. “Sex, Scandal, and the Novel.” From Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction, Duke University Press, 1996. The Victorian Web, www.victorianweb.org/gender/wac.html. 

Collins, Wilkie. (1996). The Woman in White. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved February 5, 2025, from https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/583/pg583-images.html.