The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins is a fine example of the “Sensation Novel” an off-shoot of the Gothic novel and quite popular in England in the 1860’s and 1870’s. The brief description sounds like this:
“Typically the sensation novel focused on shocking subject matter including adultery, theft, kidnapping, insanity, bigamy, forgery, seduction and murder. It distinguished itself from other contemporary genres, including the Gothic novel, by setting these themes in ordinary, familiar and often domestic settings, thereby undermining the common Victorian-era assumption that sensational events were something foreign and divorced from comfortable middle-class life.”
The Woman in White does not disappoint as it does indeed include all of the above appalling features. In many ways it leans far more in the direction of a modern crime series on TV (Chase, Lie to Me, etc.) than in the direction of a Jane Austen novel where the great shock might involve a broken engagement rather than a kidnapped victim of sexual abuse being drugged on laudanum and imprisoned in an asylum at the behest of a criminal mastermind who winds up murdered by his gang. “If the machinery of the Law,” says the primary narrator,
“could be depended on to fathom every case of suspicion, and to conduct every process of inquiry, with moderate assistance only from the lubricating influences of oil of gold, the events which fill these pages might have claimed their share of the public attention in a Court of Justice.
But the Law is still, in certain inevitable cases, the pre-engaged servant of the long purse; and the story is left to be told.”
In one of the early chapters, the story’s hero, art-teacher Walter Hartright (it is always helpful when authors name their good-guys with names that make them easy to identify as good guys) falls deeply in love with one of his pupils, Miss Laura Fairlee. I always enjoy the way that different authors describe this fundamental experience of young love born and then crushed. Here is how Wilkie Collins goes about it.
“. . . The days passed on, the weeks passed on, and the track of the golden autumn wound its bright way visibly through the green summer of the trees. Peaceful, fast-flowing, happy time! my story glides by you now as swiftly as you once glided by me. Of all the treasures of enjoyment that you poured so freely into my heart, how much is left me that has purpose and value enough to be written on this page? Nothing but the saddest of all confessions that a man can make -- the confession of his own folly.
The secret which that confession discloses should be told with little effort, for it has indirectly escaped me already. The poor weak words, which have failed to describe Miss Fairlie, have succeeded in betraying the sensations she awakened in me. It is so with us all. Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.
I loved her.
Ah! how well I know all the sadness and all the mockery that is contained in those three words. I can sigh over my mournful confession with the tenderest woman who reads it and pities me. I can laugh at it as bitterly as the hardest man who tosses it from him in contempt. I loved her! Feel for me, or despise me, I confess it with the same immovable resolution to own the truth.
. . . I should have remembered my position, and have put myself secretly on my guard. I did so, but not till it was too late. All the discretion, all the experience, which had availed me with other women, and secured me against other temptations, failed me with her. It had been my profession, for years past, to be in this close contact with young girls of all ages, and of all orders of beauty. I had accepted the position as part of my calling in life; I had trained myself to leave all the sympathies natural to my age in my employer's outer hall, as coolly as I left my umbrella there before I went upstairs. I had long since learnt to understand, composedly and as a matter of course, that my situation in life was considered a guarantee against any of my female pupils feeling more than the most ordinary interest in me, and that I was admitted among beautiful and captivating women much as a harmless domestic animal is admitted among them. This guardian experience I had gained early; this guardian experience had sternly and strictly guided me straight along my own poor narrow path, without once letting me stray aside, to the right hand or to the left. And now I and my trusty talisman were parted for the first time. Yes, my hardly- earned self-control was as completely lost to me as if I had never possessed it; lost to me, as it is lost every day to other men, in other critical situations, where women are concerned. I know, now, that I should have questioned myself from the first. I should have asked why any room in the house was better than home to me when she entered it, and barren as a desert when she went out again -- why I always noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had noticed and remembered in no other woman's before -- why I saw her, heard her, and touched her (when we shook hands at night and morning) as I had never seen, heard, and touched any other woman in my life? I should have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was young. Why was this easiest, simplest work of self-culture always too much for me? The explanation has been written already in the three words that were many enough, and plain enough, for my confession. I loved her.”
It is inevitable that the issue of class and familial expectation be introduced to break up this natural process. And in the case of Walter Hartright, the news is delivered by Laura’ step-sister, Marion. “Crush it,” she says.
“As your friend,' she proceeded, `I am going to tell you, at once, in my own plain, blunt, downright language, that I have discovered your secret -- without help or hint, mind, from any one else. Mr Hartright, you have thoughtlessly allowed yourself to form an attachment -- a serious and devoted attachment, I am afraid -- to my sister Laura. I don't put you to the pain of confessing it in so many words, because I see and know that you are too honest to deny it. I don't even blame you -- I pity you for opening your heart to a hopeless affection. You have not attempted to take any underhand advantage -- you have not spoken to my sister in secret. You are guilty of weakness and want of attention to your own best interests, but of nothing worse. If you had acted, in any single respect, less delicately and less modestly, I should have told you to leave the house, without an instant's notice, or an instant's consultation of anybody. As it is, I blame the misfortune of your years and your position -- I don't blame you. Shake hands -- I have given you pain; I am going to give you more, but there is no help for it -- shake hands with your friend, Marian Halcombe, first.'
The sudden kindness -- the warm, high-minded, fearless sympathy which met me on such mercy equal terms, which appealed with such delicate and generous abruptness straight to my heart, my honour, and my courage, overcame me in an instant. I tried to look at her when she took my hand, but my eyes were dim. I tried to thank her, but my voice failed me.
`Listen to me,' she said, considerately avoiding all notice of my loss of self-control. `Listen to me, and let us get it over at once. It is a real true relief to me that I am not obliged, in what I have now to say, to enter into the question -- the hard and cruel question as I think it -- of social inequalities. Circumstances which will try you to the quick, spare me the ungracious necessity of paining a man who has lived in friendly intimacy under the same roof with myself by any humiliating reference to matters of rank and station. You must leave Limmeridge House, Mr Hartright, before more harm is done. It is my duty to say that to you; and it would be equally my duty to say it, under precisely the same serious necessity,
. . . if you were the representative of the oldest and wealthiest family in England. You must leave us, not because you are a teacher of drawing --'
She waited a moment, turned her face full on me, and reaching across the table, laid her hand firmly on my arm.
`Not because you are a teacher of drawing,' she repeated, `but because Laura Fairlie is engaged to be married.'
The last word went like a bullet to my heart. My arm lost all sensation of the hand that grasped it. I never moved and never spoke. The sharp autumn breeze that scattered the dead leaves at our feet came as cold to me, on a sudden, as if my own mad hopes were dead leaves too, whirled away by the wind like the rest. Hopes! Betrothed, or not betrothed, she was equally far from me. Would other men have remembered that in my place? Not if they had loved her as I did.
The pang passed, and nothing but the dull numbing pain of it remained. I felt Miss Halcombe's hand again, tightening its hold on my arm -- I raised my head and looked at her. Her large black eyes were rooted on me, watching the white change on my face, which I felt, and which she saw.
`Crush it!' she said. `Here, where you first saw her, crush it! Don't shrink under it like a woman. Tear it out; trample it under foot like a man!'
The suppressed vehemence with which she spoke, the strength which her will -- concentrated in the look she fixed on me, and in the hold on my arm that she had not yet relinquished -- communicated to mine, steadied me. We both waited for a minute in silence. At the end of that time I had justified her generous faith in my manhood -- I had, outwardly at least, recovered my self-control.
`Are you yourself again?'
`Enough myself, Miss Halcombe, to ask your pardon and hers. Enough to be guided by your advice, and to prove my gratitude in that way, if I can prove it in no other.'
`You have proved it already,' she answered, `by those words. Mr Hartright, concealment is at an end between us. I cannot affect to hide from you what my sister has unconsciously shown to me. You must leave us for her sake, as well as for your own. Your presence here, your necessary intimacy with us, harmless as it has been, God knows, in all other respects, has unsteadied her and made her wretched. I, who love her better than my own life -- I, who have learnt to believe in that pure, noble, innocent nature as I believe in my religion -- know but too well the secret misery of self-reproach that she has been suffering since the first shadow of a feeling disloyal to her marriage engagement entered her heart in spite of her. I don't say -- it would be useless to attempt to say it after what has happened -- that her engagement has ever had a strong hold on her affections. It is an engagement of honour, not of love; her father sanctioned it on his deathbed, two years since; she herself neither welcomed it nor shrank from it -- she was content to make it. Till you came here she was in the position of hundreds of other women, who marry men without being greatly attracted to them or greatly repelled by them, and who learn to love them (when they don't learn to hate!) after marriage, instead of before. I hope more earnestly than words can say -- and you should have the self-sacrificing courage to hope too -- that the new thoughts and feelings which have disturbed the old calmness and the old content have not taken root too deeply to be ever removed. Your absence (if I had less belief in your honour, and your courage, and your sense, I should not trust to them as I am trusting now) -- your absence will help my efforts, and time will help us all three. It is something to know that my first confidence in you was not all misplaced. It is something to know that you will not be less honest, less manly, less considerate towards the pupil whose relation to yourself you have had the misfortune to forget, than towards the stranger and the outcast whose appeal to you was not made in vain.”
Alas, Mr. Hatright. What were you THINKING?
“. . . Left by myself, my mind reverted, with a sense of forlorn wretchedness which it is not in any words that I can find to describe, to my approaching return to the solitude and the despair of my lonely London home.”
And thus Walter and Laura take their leave of one another to free her to marry the charming but, as we will soon discover, conniving and evil, Sir Perceval Glyde and his side-kick, the nefarious Count Fosco.
`Oh!' she said innocently, `how could I let you go, after we have passed so many happy days together!'
`Those days may never return, Miss Fairlie -- my way of life and yours are very far apart. But if a time should come, when the devotion of my whole heart and soul and strength will give you a moment's happiness, or spare you a moment's sorrow, will you try to remember the poor drawing-master who has taught you? Miss Halcombe has promised to trust me -- will you promise too?'
The farewell sadness in the kind blue eyes shone dimly through her gathering tears.
`I promise it,' she said in broken tones. `Oh, don't look at me like that! I promise it with all my heart.'
I ventured a little nearer to her, and held out my hand.
`You have many friends who love you, Miss Fairlie. Your happy future is the dear object of many hopes. May I say, at parting, that it is the dear object of my hopes too?'
The tears flowed fast down her cheeks- She rested one trembling hand on the table to steady herself while she gave me the other. I took it in mine -- I held it fast. My head drooped over it, my tears fell on it, my lips pressed it -- not in love; oh, not in love, at that last moment, but in the agony and the self- abandonment of despair.
`For God's sake, leave me!' she said faintly.
The confession of her heart's secret burst from her in those pleading words. I had no right to hear them, no right to answer them -- they were the words that banished me, in the name of her sacred weakness, from the room. It was all over. I dropped her hand, I said no more. The blinding tears shut her out from my eyes, and I dashed them away to look at her for the last time. One look as she sank into a chair, as her arms fell on the table, as her fair head dropped on them wearily. One farewell look, and the door had closed upon her -- the great gulf of separation had opened between us -- the image of Laura Fairlie was a memory of the past already.”
From here on in, Collins simply heaps a series of tragedies worthy of Job on these people for their betrayal of young love. Romeo and Juliette meets Miami Vice. He does manage to pull it out of the fire in the end and, the various rodents who wreck havoc on Walter and Laura’s love of each other for their love of money all get their comeuppance.
I can certainly see why people would stop naming their children “Perceval” after this book came out.
Question for Comment: Why do you think people like watching crime and justice stories on TV so much?
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