From the moment I saw the title of the novel, The Woman in White, I thought that somehow this novel is going to have ghosts. The very first episode of one of my favorite TV shows, Supernatural, deals with a ghost known as a Woman in White.<\/p>\n
At one point during the episode, Sam describes what creates a Woman in White:<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a ghost story. Well, it\u2019s more of a phenomenon, really\u2026they\u2019re spirits. They\u2019ve been sighted for hundreds of years, dozens of places\u2026All of these are different women, you understand, but they share the same story\u2026See, when they were alive, their husbands were unfaithful to them. And these women, basically suffering from temporary insanity, murdered their children. Then, once they realized what they had done, they took their own lives. So now their spirits are cursed, walking back roads, waterways. And if they find an unfaithful man, they kill him.\u201d (source<\/a>)<\/p>\n In Sam\u2019s description of a Woman in White, a lot of themes similar to those we have seen so far in the novel appear: ghostliness, walking\/wandering (Anne always being found by Walter walking around in places she shouldn’t be), unfaithfulness (Walter\u2019s suspicion that Glyde has \u201cruined\u201d Anne and then locked her away), insanity, mistreated women.<\/p>\n In addition, the Woman in White featured in the episode has a similar mood swing as Anne does on page 104. Anne\u2019s \u201cface, at all ordinary times so touching to look at, in its nervous sensitiveness, weakness and uncertainty, became suddenly darkened by an expression of maniacally intense hatred and fear, which communicated a wild, unnatural force to every feature\u201d (Collins, 104). In the beginning of the Supernatural episode, the Woman in White is a beautiful, relatively meek and submissive \u2013 if seductive \u2013 woman (see clip below, apologies for the bad quality):<\/p>\n [youtube_sc url=”https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=NeKHkWrFzLA”]<\/p>\n However, by the end of the episode, the Woman in White becomes extremely aggressive and demonic (see clip below, watch until about the 2:00 mark):<\/p>\n [youtube_sc url=”https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=SPY0W5_Fjt0″]<\/p>\n Looking at Sam\u2019s \u2013and Supernatural\u2019s \u2013 definition of a Woman in White, Anne being so closely tied to this ghostly idea – called by the same name, sharing many of the same qualities – raises\u00a0questions\u00a0about Anne\u2019s secrets, especially why she was sent to the asylum. If, like the episode suggests, Anne\u2019s problems are tied up in infidelity, insanity, children and\/or murder\/suicide, there are plenty of possibilities: perhaps Glyde committed infidelity \u2013 marrying or sleeping with Anne only to cast her away when the time came that he was engaged to Laurie (or at least coming up on the date when he would marry Laurie); if she was married\/sleeping with Glyde, perhaps Anne got pregnant and somehow miscarried the child; perhaps she purposefully miscarried\/killed any children she had by Glyde and was sent to the asylum for that crime; perhaps \u2013 craziest of all \u2013 Glyde had a dalliance in his youth with Anne\u2019s mother, Anne is the product of that, and Glyde locked her away to try and hide that dalliance from Laurie, so as not to impede his wedding to a proper heiress? I\u2019ll have to read on and find out!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the moment I saw the title of the novel, The Woman in White, I thought that somehow this novel is going to have ghosts. The very first episode of one of my favorite TV shows, Supernatural, deals with a ghost known as a Woman in White. At one point during the episode, Sam describes … Continue reading Infidelity and Insanity: The Ingredients for a Woman in White (According to Supernatural)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2255,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111380,111423],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-360-victorian-sexualities","category-fall-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723","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\/2255"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}