Author: Laura Hartright

Maternity, Society, and the Legitimization of the Female Storyteller

At the end of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice’s older sister imagines “how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman […] and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys” (Carroll 99, Norton 1992 Ed. Gray). Alice’s sister immediately thrusts her forward from childhood into womanhood, from an imaginative, experiential role to an informative, supporting one. Although initially problematic because it seems to sketch Alice’s future solely within the confines of motherhood, this image of Alice as a maternal figure subtly legitimizes her role as a female storyteller.

Alice’s experience in Wonderland is validated by its transmission to the next generation, whose gaze lies “bright and eager” on her tale. Through the socially accepted role of “mother,” Alice is able to use her imagination (which, despite her dream state, I would deem her female experience) to form new physical and emotional bonds within her society—to “gather about her” a group of children, and to “feel” their sorrows and joys, perhaps even giving them advice. Her role as mother empowers her to retain her dream-world in a way that other adults cannot, and to spread the lessons that she learned and the experiences that she had there to the next generation.

In “Goblin Market,” Christina Rossetti similarly paints the two sisters transitioning from an experiential otherworldly danger to the safe, idealized realm of domesticity. Although their story is more explicitly didactic than Alice’s tale, it still retains the thrilling, imaginatively provocative elements of “the haunted glen,” “the wicked […] men,” “poison in the blood,” “deadly peril,” and “the fiery antidote” (Rossetti 488). That they have access to the experience with which to tell such a tale positions Lizzie and Laura as authoritative storytellers. Furthermore, the moral of their tale, like the end of Alice’s sister’s imaginings, includes connective imagery—with their story, they “[join] hands to little hands […and] bid them cling together,” thus aligning the emotional bond and mutual reliance of sisterhood with the physical bond of clasped hands (Rossetti 488). Like Alice, the sisters bring about structural social change in the next generation by telling their story. This depiction empowers them in their role as female storytellers, underlining their experiential authority—but it does so by first legitimizing them as mothers.

Girls and Goblins: Gendered Tensions

Maurice Sendak’s 1981 illustrated children’s book, Outside Over There, tells the story of a young girl named Ida who must rescue her baby sister from goblins who have kidnapped her in order to marry her off to one (or more) of their kind. The title page of Outside Over There alone picks up the themes of foreign anxiety, the otherworldly realm of sexual danger, gender divisions, and sisterly care—all of which we’ve discussed in the context of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.”

The title page to Maurice Sendak's 1981 Outside Over There
The title page to Maurice Sendak’s 1981 Outside Over There

The title itself evokes the foreign world of the goblins: it is not only outside, while the girls often remain inside the house, but it is also over there, in a space not normally inhabited by the baby or by Ida (one is kidnapped and taken there, the other must “climb backwards out” of her window and fly around for some time to find it). The dangerous otherness of this world is emphasized by the goblins’ mysterious grey cloaks and hunched, low-to-the-ground posture, as well as the black, absent spaces where their faces should be. These features contrast greatly with the pastel colors worn by the girls, Ida’s upright posture and the baby’s distance from the ground, and the anxiety obvious on both of the girls’ faces. Elsewhere in the text, it is made clear that the goblins are all male, so the physical space between the goblins and the sisters on the title page can be read not only as an anxiety-bred othering, but also as an intentionally enforced gender divide. Ida’s anxious, serious sideways glance, the tightness of her grip around her sister, and the tension in her feet and shoulders all convey her instinct to protect her sister from the parade of otherworldly goblins. I read this as a sexual anxiety because later in the text, Ida’s first thought upon realizing that the goblins have taken her sister is that they have “stole[n] [her] sister away […] To be a nasty goblin’s bride!” Before she actually discovers them in the middle of a wedding, her explicit goal is to interrupt their “goblin honeymoon”—with its distinct connotation of sexual activity.

It is interesting to put Outside Over There in conversation with Rossetti’s text, not only because of the obvious content-based and underlying thematic similarities, but also because both claim a role as children’s literature. Why do these texts that sensually entrance the young reader (either through imagery or illustration) encompass so much sexual danger for young girls? Why is it the girls’ job to save their sisters, with their parents providing mere oral/anecdotal guidance rather than practical support only after a kidnapping or fruit-buying-encounter has already occurred (Ida’s father sings a song on the sea that guides her to the goblin lair; Lizzie and Laura tells her children and Lizzie’s about the dangers of goblin men—but Ida’s mother dreams absentmindedly of her husband and leaves Ida to take care of the baby, and Lizzie and Laura’s parents never appear in the text)?

The Male Gaze and the Female Art Object in The Woman in White (1859) and Laura (1944)

Laura is a 1944 film noir directed by Otto Preminger and based the 1941 novel Ring Twice for Laura by Vera Caspary (IMDb). There are several eerie coincidences between this text and The Woman in White. (As it turns out, a number of online sources suggest that Caspary was inspired by Wilkie Collins’s 1868 Moonstone—though none of my sources cites a primary source for this information). In terms of characterization, a wealthy young woman named “Laura” Hunt is courted by multiple men—one named “Waldo,” who is a combination of Walter’s possessive condescension; Count Fosco’s aged, effeminate, well-dressed, world-wise manipulation; and Sir Percival’s constant concern with appearances. Plot-wise, Laura is known to be murdered before the film begins, and Detective Mark McPherson spends much of the film trying to pin down the details of her murder—at which point he discovers that Laura is alive, and spends much of his time trying to find evidence of what really happened. Narratologically, the story is established through first-person narratives by multiple characters—though unlike Laura Fairlie/Glyde/Hartright, Laura Hunt does tell a portion of her own narrative. One of the most interesting parallels between the texts occurs when Detective McPherson falls in love with Laura’s portrait, before he has met her and while he still thinks she is dead:

The Male Gaze: McPherson falls in love with Laura- or at least her portrait  (http://www.screeninsults.com/images/laura-painting.JPG)

Though the portrait is not McPherson’s own handiwork, this scene is parallel to Walter’s enamourment with his own watercolour portrait of Laura, almost in substitute of Laura herself: “A fair, delicate girl in a pretty white dress, trifling with the leaves of a sketch-book, while she looks up from it with truthful, innocent blue eyes… Think of her as you thought of the first woman who quickened the pulses within you that the rest of her sex had no art to stir” (Collins 52). In both situations, a woman is defined by her physical features through a work of art that she herself did not create, and her worth is determined by the interest she can arouse in a man—in the effect the gendered “art” of her appearance has on his “pulse,” his body. Though both McPherson and Hartright claim to love their “Lauras” in the end, there is something discomfiting about the way they reflect on the beginnings of their love by referring back to their attraction to a portrait, rather than to the woman who inspired it—their male gaze is directed at a female art object, and their male hearts have undisclosed motives. The eerie discomfort created when McPherson falls in love with (the theoretically dead) Laura’s image exemplifies the creepiness of Walter’s consistent memory of his watercolour portrait of Laura, even after the woman he fell in love with is lost to child-like behaviors resulting from trauma. An attentive reader must question the validity of a “love” that roots itself first and foremost in a stylized image.

 

 

The Anxiety of Count Fosco’s Influence

An uneasy combination of admiration and fear characterizes Marian’s reception of Count Fosco in the second epoch of The Woman in White. Having long wanted to meet him herself, Marian initially describes Fosco with admiration, as “the magician who has wrought this wonderful transformation… a man who could tame anything” (217).  She portrays him in positions of power: he is a magician performing awe-inspiring magic, a ringmaster taming his “once wayward” wife (217). However, Fosco’s splendid power is tinged for Marian with an anxiety over the extent of his control. She writes of him in her diary:

“I am afraid to confess it, even to these secret pages. The man has interested me, has attracted me, has forced me to like him” (217).

“What is it that makes me unable to blame them [his peculiarities], or to ridicule them, in him?” (217).

“They [his eyes] have at times a cold, clear, beautiful, irresistible glimmer in them, which forces me to look at him, and yet causes me sensations, when I do look, which I would rather not feel” (218).

“He has… that secret gentleness in his voice… which we [women] can none of us resist” (219, all above emphasis mine).

The language Marian uses to describe Fosco collectively demonstrates her fear, the sense that he is acting on her, against her will, to produce a certain end—one that she cannot resist, and that she does not desire. He “forces her” to feel and to look, “causes her” to feel a certain way, and even “makes her unable” to blame him for it. She is stripped of agency in her interactions with him. Though she may not have the modern vocabulary to describe it, Marian’s diction is somewhat evocative of acquaintance rape: anxiety, social pressure, force, and finally silence—in Marian’s inability to “blame” Fosco, and a fear that somehow, even in the secrecy of her journal, he will discover her fear and become sure of his advantage over her.

This sense of oppressive force and underlying anxiety concerning Count Fosco heightens the audience’s sense of uncertainty about where his loyalties lie, or what his motivations are. Is he a friend, or is he simply waiting to force his aims upon the sisters? The unease evident in even Marian’s praise of him frames him for readers as a skilled manipulator, thus furthering the impression that we cannot see through his actions any more than she can (at least until he adds his postscript to her diary).