As the title suggests, the central characters in The Woman in White<\/i> surround marriage and brides.\u00a0 What is interesting about the novel is though marriage is the only acceptable social and legal communion between man and woman in the Victorian era, Collins\u2019 presents marriage \u201cas [the] sinkhole of deception, hostility, abuse\u201d (Dever, 114) and illegal activity that is naturally present in male-female relations.<\/p>\n
If we examine the conventional marriages in the novel, there is a clear male-dominated, female-directed ownership and exploitation that is justified in the name of property laws.\u00a0 The most obvious of these is Laura\u2019s marriage to Sir Percival.\u00a0 The central marriage of the novel is motivated by the man\u2019s desire to secure the monetary inheritances of his wife.<\/p>\n
A side note here: traditional Victorian marriages typically joined a man and a woman of similar economic and social standing.\u00a0 For instance, Laura\u2019s father would never have arranged her marriage to a middle class, blue-collared worker because quite frankly his name would not deserve the Fairlie Estate and he would not be able to provide for his wife in a reciprocal nature.<\/p>\n
Back to the point: When we realize that Sir Percival \u201cwas not Sir Percival Glyde at all, that he had no more claim to the baronetcy and to Blackwater Park than the poorest labourer who worked on the estate,\u201d it becomes clear that he intended to absorb Laura\u2019s property through the justification of marriage (510).\u00a0 What otherwise would have been illegal (Percival\u2019s right to aristocratic inheritance) is warranted by the sanctity of mariage.<\/p>\n
We see similar questionable, if not illegal, manipulations in the Fosco marriage.\u00a0 Throughout Walter\u2019s investigations it is revealed that Count Fosco is associated with an illegal organization referred to as \u2018The Brotherhood\u2019 (574). And from what we\u2019ve seen of Madame Fosco\u2019s obedience to the Count, it can be assumed that she has been used and manipulated by the Count either to protect his identity or to further his illegal agenda.\u00a0 When he writes his confessions he also admits to his control over his wife: \u201cI ask, if a woman\u2019s marriage obligations, in this country, provide for her private opinion of her husband\u2019s principles? No! They charge her unreservedly to love, honor, and obey him\u201d (612).\u00a0 Clearly, Madame Fosco was not allowed to think or act independently within the marriage, so her illegal associations with The Brotherhood were a direct consequence of man\u2019s ownership of woman.\u00a0 Through her marriage to Fosco, Madame Fosco was legally contracted to act as the instrument for her husband\u2019s illegal endeavors.<\/p>\n
Even Mrs. Rubelle\u2019s marriage ties her to illegal activity.\u00a0 Her husband\u2019s relation to Fosco directly linked Mrs. Rubelle\u2019s interests to the Count\u2019s if by nothing other than her marriage (598, 603).\u00a0 And so Mrs. Rubelle becomes an active member of the illegal identity-swap of Anne and Laura for the legal benefit to both Sir Percival and the Count.<\/p>\n
But women are also exploited when involved in extramarital male-female affairs. \u00a0The male-domination and manipulation of women is “natural” in a society where women are second class, but it seems that outside of marriage they are given no legal safety net for this abuse. \u00a0 For one, Mrs. Catherick births an illegitimate daughter in exploitation by Mr. Fairlie\u2019s sexual desire. \u00a0This consequently leads Mrs. Catherick to a life of isolation and societal rejection. \u00a0And on an unrelated occasion, she is also used by Sir Percival as a means to execute a criminal scheme to which she is held accountable until the day Sir Percival dies (532-533).<\/p>\n
In fact, critics of The Woman in White<\/i> including Carolyn Dever, cite homosexual and bisexual relations as the only \u2018marriages\u2019 that do not hinge on this unbalance between partners and abuse\u00a0of women as men’s property. \u00a0More specifically, Dever writes that the sisterly love between Laura and Marian is “affirmative, loving,” mutual, and respectable (void of an illegal activity and exploitation) (114). \u00a0And so it appears that it is the legal and social sanctity of male-female marriages and relations that permit abuse and the less socially and much less legally acceptable sanction of female-female relations that allow for the freedoms of life and liberty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As the title suggests, the central characters in The Woman in White surround marriage and brides.\u00a0 What is interesting about the novel is though marriage is the only acceptable social and legal communion between man and woman in the Victorian era, Collins\u2019 presents marriage \u201cas [the] sinkhole of deception, hostility, abuse\u201d (Dever, 114) and illegal … Continue reading Life, Liberty, Property, and Women<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2035,"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-309","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\/309","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\/2035"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}