A fascinating hint : Marian and Laura’s sibling love

The basic assumption of Denver’s article is that in The Woman in White Collins aims at deconstructing one of the fundamental values of  patriarchal societies: heterosexual marriage. According to Denver, while doing so, Collins’ novel is the celebration, on the other hand, of the purity and the depth of another form of love: the one between Laura and Marian, the same-sex sibling love.

On many occasions, the bond between Marian and Laura is described with all the traits of a lovers’ union, rather than as fraternal love. As such, it is both a sweet and a subtly erotic tie, of which we get a sense all throughout the novel, for example when Marian is looking at her sister one night while she is sleeping, or when she says that:”I heard her [Laura] speaking, and I knew by the tone of their voice that she was comforting me- I, who deserved nothing but the reproach of her silence![…]I was first conscious that she was kissing me[…]” (262). Just like the other dichotomies which permeate the novel (white-Laura and dark-Marianne or men’s active social role versus women’s subordination), marriage too is presented in the contrasting binary of legal marriage versus non-marital bonds. “He [Collins] often presents legal marriage as a sinkhole of deception, hostility, abuse and grubby materialism at worst, and at best a site of placid, jog-trot boredom” (Denver, 114) while, on the other hand, “the same-sex bond embodies a positive and constant emotional continuum”(Denver, 122). All the marital bonds in the novel are, in fact, presented as inspired by everything except love, or are rather not presented. In the case of Laura and Marian, for example, their parents are dead, as in the case of Walter’s father. Sir Percival’s marriage to Laura is inspired by the only desire to get her inheritance and even Count Fosco clearly asserts that his marriage is just a legal agreement , in which his wife performs “marriage obligations” (610), nothing to do with the love he feels for Marian, “the first and the last weakness of Fosco’s life”(611).

Such reflections lead the reader to believe that Collins’ novel is innovating in denouncing marital marriage as one of the miserable social conventions of the time and in proposing same-sex bonds as a more sincere and authentic form of love. Following this point of view, however, the conclusion of the novel seems incoherent with all the rest. Despite the fact that the classic marital dyad is replaced by the triad Laura-Walter-Marian, in fact, Collins “concludes invariably at the altar of convention” (Denver, 123), not only marrying Laura to Walter, but also and especially bringing everything back to the question of inheritance.