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The passage in which Marian describes Count Fosco reveals a Victorian anxiety and fascination with androgyny. On the surface, Marian begins her description of the Count by highlighting his masculine qualities: \u201cHis features have Napoleon\u2019s magnificent regularity: his expression recalls the grandly calm, immovable power of the Great Soldier\u2019s face\u201d (218). While appearing to suggest the Count\u2019s authority and stoicism, this comparison to Napoleon actually indicates the Count\u2019s \u201cperplexingly contradictory\u201d (219) nature from the outset, since Napoleon was himself a contradictory figure in his short stature yet commanding demeanor.<\/p>\n
Two paragraphs later, Marian explains the Count\u2019s \u201ccontradictory\u201d nature more fully: \u201cFat as he is, and old as he is, his movements are astonishingly light and easy. He is as noiseless in a room as any of us women\u201d (219). As the simile \u201cas noiseless in a room as any of us women\u201d suggests, the Count\u2019s incongruousness is rooted in his feminine attributes. Marian\u2019s use of the collective first-person pronoun \u201cus women\u201d situates the Count in direct opposition to women; yet the comparative \u201cas\u201d linguistically bridges this gender divide, connecting the Count to the feminine through his \u201clight and easy\u201d movements.<\/p>\n
Marian proceeds to emphasize the Count\u2019s femininity through two more similes: \u201cand, more than that, with all his look of unmistakable mental firmness and power, he is as nervously sensitive as the weakest of us. He starts at chance noises as inveterately as Laura herself\u201d (219). Here, Marian successfully undermines the Count\u2019s Napoleonic appearance of power by not only revealing his womanly nervousness but also linking the Count with the \u201cweakest\u201d of Marian\u2019s sex. This superlative, along with the following direct comparison to Laura, highlights the Count\u2019s feminine qualities.<\/p>\n
This passage holds the key to Marian\u2019s complex attitude toward the Count; she is at once fascinated and threatened by him. As Marian\u2019s description reveals, he is both alluring and dangerous, not merely because of his increasingly suspicious behavior throughout the narrative, but because he unnaturally exhibits the qualities of both sexes. Even though Marian does not explicitly identify the Count\u2019s androgyny as the reason for her discomfort with him, the novel\u2019s keen preoccupation with identifying unknown figures by their sex illuminates the anxiety underlying Marian\u2019s description of the Count. For example, when Marian and Laura encounter the figure at the boathouse, the first question Laura asks is, \u201cWas it a man, or a woman?\u201d (263). Marian asks the same question when Laura hears a noise outside of her room: \u201cWas it a man or a woman?\u201d (307). Clearly, The Woman in White<\/em>, as evidenced by the title itself, consistently seeks to classify characters by sex, with \u201cmale\u201d and \u201cfemale\u201d connoting a corresponding set of traits. Yet the Count complicates those binary categories, and, in true Victorian fashion, his deviance attracts simultaneous fascination and repulsion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The passage in which Marian describes Count Fosco reveals a Victorian anxiety and fascination with androgyny. On the surface, Marian begins her description of the Count by highlighting his masculine qualities: \u201cHis features have Napoleon\u2019s magnificent regularity: his expression recalls the grandly calm, immovable power of the Great Soldier\u2019s face\u201d (218). While appearing to suggest … Continue reading Count Fosco and the Androgynous Mystique<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1077,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111380,108029],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-360-victorian-sexualities","category-spring-2015"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1077"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}