Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Creates an Oppressive Atmosphere Which Overshadows the Villainy of Stapleton

...

role of victim: vulnerable, beautiful and slightly unhinged, she is also pivotal in the doppelganger or mistaken identity theme that crime novels have come to employ. With gormless housemaids, lawyers and useful witnesses, The Woman in White has the ideal detective novel cast. However, it would be unjust to consider Collins’ characters as purely stereo-typical or functional. With Collins’ attention to detail, the reader is presented with appearances so skilfully constructed that the characters are physically impressed on their minds. The depiction of Marian is one example of this, ‘Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant, firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightedly undeformed by stays.’

The above extract is followed by the line - ’The lady is ugly!’, and Collins’ characters are an immense source of fascination and humour as much as a necessary part of the story. Marian is a strange mix of heroine and hero; Lord Fairlie, a ridiculously self-absorbed hypochondriac, and the devoted Pesca provide endless amusement, broadening the appeal of the novel. All the characters in the novel are in a state of constant flux, with no character being stable.

When Sir Percival Glyde’s mercenary motive in marrying Laura Fairlie fails him to access her wealth, he resorts to the sinister identity-substitution plot, under the guidance of the maleficent, but seductively charming, Count Fosco, exploiting the resemblance between Laura and Anne Catherick.

Count Fosco is a consummate actor, always performing and setting in to a new role. He is eloquent, charming, and aristocratic. He is flirtatious (with Marian), suppressive, and also highly manipulative. Fosco likes to play with the characters, treating them like mere puppets, while himself being the master. Also, in Victorian fiction, foreigners were often used as villains. Fosco being an Italian, thus adds a super-suspicious element to his character.

The trope of the double is another recurrent feature in Collins’s works. Laura and Anne are literal doubles. Through their identity-swapping, the novel taps into another major concern of the Victorian age in the 1850sthe fear of insanity and the abuse of mental asylums. It offers a critique of the gendered and dehumanising treatment accorded by institutions to vulnerable people.

Laura switched her identity with Anne Catherick, her institutionalization and the consequent mental breakdown testify to the fragility of identity. The physical and psychic changes inscribed upon her person by her traumatic experience render her unrecognizable to all, barring Marian Halcombe and Hartright. One of the key motifs in Collins’s writing is the vulnerability and interchangeableness of human identity. People are not what they appear to be. Identity becomes a kind of performance, behind which lies a secret that cannot be revealed. The secret of Glyde is his illegitimacy: “he was not Sir Percival Glyde at all, that he had no more claim to the baronetcy and to Blackwater Park than the poor labourer who worked on the estate”. Laura cannot prove her identity to her own uncle, who completely fails to recognize her. She is “socially, morally, legally-dead” and she is stigmatised as “mad Anne Catherick, who claims the name, the place, the living personality of dead Lady Glyde”.

It’s notable that all the villains in the novel have false identities, a trend that hints at the dangerous and unstable nature of identity.

Consequent upon the postmodern and poststructuralist critiques, the notion of identity has been problematised as multiple, fragmented, provisional and inherently mobile; and not stable and unified. In this light, The Woman in White Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White offers tremendous scope and potential for addressing potent questions of identity, gender and sexuality. His work is no longer seen as merely about crime, but is seen as his commentary on his culture’s obsession with crime. It is increasingly becoming a lens for engaging with the deepest cultural concerns and anxieties of his age. Moreover, with the collapsing of the generic boundaries and the blurring of the distinctions between “popular” and “high” art, Collins has been canonised both as a popular and a serious writer.