Author: ruby slippers

Our first day in the Trout Gallery, there was an engraving called Fannie’s Pets with a girl in the middle surrounded by birds, rabbits, frogs and fish. It made me think of the illustration in Alice‘s Adventures in Wonderland after the scene where Alice and all the animals do the caucus race (Carroll 19). I think this illustration is showing Alice handing “round as prizes” the comfits she found in her pocket (Carroll 19); Fannie is also feeding the birds around her which is maybe why it made me think of Alice. Besides Fannie and the animals, there is also a creepy guy watching Fannie from the shadows behind her and a house in the background. Both these made me think of the idea of surveillance in Alice. I think there are two different levels of surveillance; the first is the Queen, and the second is some higher power (maybe the narrator?). The Queen is so quick to behead people that everyone is wary of her seeing/hearing them doing something “wrong”. The cards painting the roses red, for example (Carroll 63) or the scene where the Cheshire Cat asks Alice if she likes the Queen: “‘Not at all,’ said Alice: ‘she’s so extremely–‘ Just then she noticed that the Queen was close behind her, listening: so she went on ‘–likely to win…'” (Carroll 68). There also seems to be some magical god-like presence. At the beginning, when Alice is trying to get through the little door, but she’s too big, and then she leaves the key on the table when she shrinks if feels like something is trying to help her get through the door. She finds the “drink me” bottle “(‘which certainly was not here before,’ said Alice)” (Carroll 5). At some points, it feels like the narrator is the all-powerful being; they know what Alice is thinking at times, but it’s not exactly in third person, because sometimes the narrator addresses the audience, and sometimes they refer to themselves with “I” (“…fancy curtseying as you’re falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?” [Carroll 3]). It’s hard to tell though if this second surveilling force exists or if it is just dream logic. 

Fannie’s Pets (Illman Brothers)/Alice in Wonderland (p19)

https://collections.troutgallery.org/Media/images/1988.21.63_Prim-LoRes.jpg

In Christian Rossetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio“, she writes, about the man looking at the woman’s portrait: “He feeds upon her face by day and night, / And she with true kind eyes looks back on him, /…../Not as she is, but as she fills his dreams” (Rossetti 9-14). The “feeds upon her ” part seems sort of vampiric to me, but it’s interesting that Rossetti is referring to a British man. Most of the vampire-like connections we’ve talked about have been applied to foreigners, like Count Fosco and his animals, mesmerism, and love of sugar. Yet pretty much all the men in what we’ve read so far have fed on women. Even though the Count is the one with vampiric undertones, living with Percival is what sucks the life out of Laura. Hartright also feeds on Laura, in a similar way to the artist in “In an Artist’s Studio”; he has a picture he painted of Laura that looks back on as he is telling the story (Collins 51). The “true kind eyes” part makes the woman sound very innocent, endearing and submissive, a lot like Laura, but then the final line reveals that the woman only looks this way in an idealized version that the man imagined when he painted her. This reminded me of Perkins and Donaghy article, ” A Man’s Resolution: Narrative Strategies in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White” where they argue that Walter is an unreliable narrator and has his own motivations that bleed into everyone else’s narratives, since he is presumably the editor of all the “evidence” he compiled (Perkins & Donaghy 400). All this made me wonder if any of the New Women writers exploited vampire tropes when writing about bad husbands and men. “The New Woman Fiction” from the Victorian web mentioned that New Woman fiction dealt with the issues of “venereal diseases” and “domestic [and sexual] violence” (The New Woman in Late Victorian Fiction section), and I think those were both the two major shock factors in Dracula. 

In the “Sugar” reading from last class, Eastlake talks about the gender implications of sugar and how they changed over the course of the Victorian era. She talks about how at the end of the century, sugar, which had previously been associated with women and children, became masculinized, writing: “This newly masculinized hunger for sugar reflects a broader cultural move away from the kind of midcentury masculine ideals described by James Eli Adams, which had emphasized ‘an elaborately articulated program of self-discipline'” (Eastlake 517). I thought this was interesting because in Mrs. Michaelson’s narrative, she notes multiple times how self-possessed Count Fosco was when taking Doctor Dawson’s criticism. When the Count offers his medical advice to Dr. Dawson, and Dr. Dawson tells him he will only reply to a “professional man,” Mrs. Michaelson is impressed how “Buffeted in this inexcusably uncivil way, on one cheek, the Count, like a practical Cristian, immediately turned the other, and said, in the sweetest manner, ‘Good morning, Mr. Dawson'” (Collins 362). This self-discipline is directly opposed to the Count’s sweet tooth, as Eastlake mentions earlier in the article.  

We’ve talked about it in class a little, but it’s interesting how the foreigners in the books are not held to the same standards as the English people. Pesca and Count Fosco are vastly different. Pesca is open and excitable, and Fosco is creepy and unsettling, but both of them are characterized in some way as lacking self-discipline. Fosco eats lots of sweets, and Pesca was so excited to tell Hartright and his family the news of the job at Limmeridge House that he foregoes propriety and acts in a “boyish manner” (Collins 14).  

The Woman in White was published before the end of the century, which means sugar was still feminized and juvenilized. Like the foreign men in the novel, the foreign women don’t seem to fit with Victorian norms. Mrs. Rubelle is very cold and I think she could be described as self-disciplined. The same goes for Countess Fosco (especially compared to her pre-marriage self). Even though she isn’t technically foreign, she seems to have been foreignized by Fosco. I’m not sure whether the novel sees the differences between Victorian expectations and foreigners as a strength – as in, they are free from the strict societal standards that English people are held to- or as a weakness – as in, they can never fully assimilate to British society and become an English person because they’re just different. I’m leaning toward the latter, because most of the foreigners in the novel are the bad guys, but Pesca’s role in this is complicated and makes it hard to generalize (which maybe is the point). 

When Mr. Pesca tells the story of how he scored Mr. Hartright a new job, he describes everyone in the family of the “fine house” where he teaches “fair and fat”, with the “…Papa [being] the fairest and the fattest of all … [and] a mighty merchant, up to his eyes in gold…” (Collins 16). Mr. Pesca continues to describe the Papa, saying he was “…a fine man once, but seeing that he has got a naked head and two chins, fine no longer at the present time” (Collins 16). This passage seems to connect to the idea of consumption and imperialism from “Brother Jacob”. The Papa is a merchant, and I think it can be assumed that he deals with goods imported from the British colonies. The second part of this passage seems like it can be read as a critique of imperialism and extraction. While this man is gaining rich from exploiting the people and resources from the colonies, he is losing his aesthetic value, just like the colonies are losing their resources and the people there are losing their freedom. 

I think it might be possible to read into the critique of imperialism in other aspects of this book as well. The men in Anne Catherick’s life try to control her by locking her in an asylum. When Hartright first meets Anne on the road, she asks him to help her get to London, and then let her leave. Hartright agrees and follows through with his promise, even though he is worried about her (Collins 30). This lack of control or domination separates Hartright from the other men in the novel (besides Pesca). Sir Percival Glyde, like the Papa, is one of the imperializing men in the novel, and like the Papa, he has some physical affliction that shows that; his cough and scar (as Anne mentions in her letter) (Collins 80).  

Ms. Halcombe is another character with physical attributes that are seen as hindering her aesthetic value (“The lady is ugly! [Collins 34]). She does not seem to be very imperializing though, and I’m not sure what to make of her role in my reading of the novel so far. Maybe because she embraces the class of the Fairlies, wearing the fancy clothes, she is seen as an accomplice or at least someone gaining something from British imperialism?