{"id":780,"date":"2016-09-16T07:21:36","date_gmt":"2016-09-16T07:21:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/?p=780"},"modified":"2016-10-13T12:47:54","modified_gmt":"2016-10-13T12:47:54","slug":"wilkie-collins-feminist-or-sexist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/2016\/09\/16\/wilkie-collins-feminist-or-sexist\/","title":{"rendered":"Wilkie Collins: Sexist or Feminist?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I first started reading\u00a0The Woman in White<\/em> by Wilkie Collins, I began to formulate a question in my mind on the true views of the author. \u00a0I was curious on whether Wilkie Collins would portray the women of his novel in a stereotypical Victorian way: men being superior to women in numerous rights and aspects of life.<\/p>\n

At first, I was convinced that Wilkie Collins’ views were similar to William Rathbone Greg’s opinions on women, which were rather degrading. \u00a0In his essay entitled “Why Are Women Redundant?”, Greg described single working\u00a0women of England as people who were “wasting life and soul, gathering the scientist subsistence, and surrounded by the most overpowering and insidious temptations” (158). \u00a0Meanwhile, in\u00a0one passage in The Woman in White<\/em>, Collins has one of the female characters, Miss Marian Halcombe, state, “Women can’t draw – their minds are too flighty, and their eyes are too inattentive” (37). \u00a0Also, Collins’ other female characters such as Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie are\u00a0shown\u00a0as emotionally unstable. \u00a0Both Greg and Collins seem to portray women in their writings as fragile, careless, and incapable of performing certain tasks of life. \u00a0After reading such words, I came to believe that both writers were sexist towards women.<\/p>\n

However, after delving deeper into the story of\u00a0The Woman in White<\/em>, I noticed that the personalities of women, especially that of Miss Marian Halcombe, did\u00a0not represent female characters\u00a0as the\u00a0dim, meek people I had expected Collins to portray them as. \u00a0Rather, Marian and her half sister, Laura, are shown as strong characters protesting against the cruel regime of men in Victorian society. \u00a0This is most evident during the weeks leading up to Laura’s dreaded wedding ceremony with Sir Percival Glyde. \u00a0Marian, fed up with the selfish decision makings of their uncle, Mr. Fairlie, and Sir Percival, exclaims, “No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. \u00a0Men! \u00a0They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace – they drag us away from our parents’ love and our sisters’ friendship – they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helps lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel” (181). \u00a0Such words are powerful and bold because they blatantly explain the unequal statues that women suffered during the Victorian Era.<\/p>\n

After reading the outcry of Marian, I changed my opinion on Collins, now viewing him as a potential advocate on women’s rights. \u00a0However, it is still debatable on what Collins’ true intensions were due to other passages (such as the one mentioned before about women being incapable of drawing) that do\u00a0not exactly portray women as equals to men.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first started reading\u00a0The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, I began to formulate a question in my mind on the true views of the author. \u00a0I was curious on whether Wilkie Collins would portray the women of his novel in a stereotypical Victorian way: men being superior to women in numerous rights and … Continue reading Wilkie Collins: Sexist or Feminist?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3299,"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-780","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\/780","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\/3299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}