Author: Daddles

Upon meeting Mrs. Catherick, Mr. Hartright narrates her physical appearance, describing her as having dark eyes that “look straight forward, with a hard, defiant, implacable stare. She had full square cheeks; a long, firm chin; and thick, sensual, colourless lips. Her figure was stout and sturdy, and her manner aggressively self-possessed” (Collins 484). As Mrs. Catherick guarding her position and reputation she has carefully constructed within her community against a foreigner investigating the identity she wants to remain stable, her personality exudes hostility.

The attention towards her “sensual” lips assume a more stereotypical female trait as compared to Marian’s “masculine form and masculine look” (Collins 35). Marian and Mrs. Catherick remain a complex duo as they are both female characters who are assertive and protective of their identities. Though as Marian defends her identity in relation to the safety of her sister’s emotional and legal well-being, Mrs. Catherick is “self-possessed” in safeguarding her own persona and its perception to others. While her “manner” is “aggressive” and inwardly obsessed with maintaining the perfect “high” standing amongst other assumed low standing community members, her physical appearance is “stout and sturdy” (Collins 487). The combination of those words reveals the linkage between Mrs. Catherick’s fatness and her immovable and “defiant” nature. Her logic connects the benefits of remaining stagnant in her community positioning and physical home to stability and sturdiness. And yet, that sturdiness is coupled with her fatness—a quality describing the other defiant, male character, Count Fosco.

Fatness in the nineteenth century was often female coded as it signified both the ability to maternally “nurture” with appeasing sexual appetites (Huff 408). Mrs. Catherick represents a mixture of sensualness and fatness. While at this time fatness was stigmatized and led to hostile responses from the public despite being in a consumer culture urging people to spend money, Mrs. Catherick seems to disregard the negativity of her body by being hostile towards others. Perhaps, Collins suggests that her “aggressively self-possessed” manner is so full of excess that the fatness trickles out as hostility towards others instead of others responding with hostility towards her stoutness. She, in turn, reverses the ills of her fatness as she uses her sturdiness and size to her advantage as both a feminine coded “sensual” seductor and a “stout and sturdy” aggressive self-protector.

While her bourgeois body is considered “improper” and therefore an inefficient “machine,” she has spent her whole life with her unforgiving “stare” and “defiant” personality to prove herself as an effective turning machine, successfully defying what fatness should mean for her Victorian existence and challenging it (Huff 408). Though, alternatively, Collins presents Mrs. Catherick as a “stout” woman effectively hiding behind a secret, lacking the agency she supposedly has. Perhaps, her fatness instead symbolically weighs her total freedom down as achieving that freedom in stability and remaining known and liked in the community is her sole focus. Hartright’s investigation into this secret damages the body and therefore reputation management she has built. Her “bourgeois body management,” in this instance, falls short of securing the individual security she seeks as her physical stoutness masks the control she actually has (Huff 409).

Essential to upholding gender roles during the Victorian era included the emphasis on domesticity for women (Christ 2006, 992). Though, too, the concept of “New Womanhood” brought alternative responses to the rigid gender norms. Resorted to the kitchen and to the private sphere of the home, women’s responsibilities were to construct the home itself and the people within it. Being a child’s primary caretaker, it seemed women and children were one and one. Though, in The Woman in White, the mother-child relationship is revealed differently. With this particular scene, Marian, lacking children of her own, interacts with a schoolboy or rather interrogates him.  Caught in the midst of her response to the boy, “her face crimsoned with indignation—she turned upon little Jacob with an angry suddenness which terrified him into a fresh burst of tears—opened her lips to speak to him—then controlled herself—and addressed the master instead of the boy” (Collins 2011, 88).  Marian’s clear “angry suddenness” and “indignation” in response to the previous line of questioning towards the boy reveals her emotional state around a child. She, in one sense, understands the power imbalance of an adult speaking down to a child as the boy is “terrified” of her to the point of a physical emotional response of breaking into “tears.” Yet, in another sense, Marian treats the schoolboy as her equal, interrogating him like an adult and feeling as though she can speak with such “indignation” and “suddenness.”

It is as if up to this point in conversation Marian has not recognized how “terrified” the boy is because she is blind to the power imbalance a parent and child might endure. She ignores the differences in gender and age dynamics or perhaps she does the exact opposite—using her position as a masculine coded woman to pry information out of someone younger than her. She understands how power operates and her glimpse into possessing that power is squashed by her self-control. The literary dashes are telling of Marian’s mental operations—her mind simultaneously pausing to rethink just as the text implores the reader to do the same. Just as she opens “her lips” to voice her power over the boy, she stops herself.

That preemptive control preventing her from continuing her line of aggressive questioning that women do not typically make reveals an ingrained behavior to check herself. Societal demand of women always being controlled caught up to her in this moment. Her emotional “suddenness” also becomes a “suddenness” to remember her obligations as a woman—to respond to the male master and remind herself of the normative gender and age power hierarchies defining societies of the time. Instead of caring for a child, she interrogates one and in doing so Collins suggests that her understanding of power hierarchies between children-adult and between male-female and her breaking of it is constantly met with her own society fueled initiatives to prevent such forward thinking.

References

Christ, C. T., & Robson, C. (2006). The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age (8th              ed., Vol. E). W.W. Norton.

Collins, W. (2011). Woman in White. Penguin Classics.