SOURCE: “‘Traced and Captured By the Men in the Chaise’: Pursuing Sexual Difference in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White,” in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 28, No. 2, Spring, 1998, pp. 91-110.

Immediately after he learns that the woman in white is in fact a woman at large, Walter Hartright asks himself this question:

What had I done? Assisted the victim of the most horrible of all false imprisonments to escape; or cast loose on the wide world of London an unfortunate creature whose actions it was my duty, and every man's duty, mercifully to control?

(22)

From first to last Anne Catherick, the eponymous woman in white, plays the part of a fugitive sign whose significance every one of the novel's persons is determined to secure. Tracked by a series of men bent on extracting her “Secret” and defining her status, eluding one “false imprisonment” only to wind up buried beneath a tombstone bearing the wrong woman's name, Anne Catherick's place and identity are never definitively settled until, late in the novel, Walter Hartright, hero and author of The Woman in White's first and “final” narratives (374), manages with “One line only” to match the name on the monument with the woman lying beneath it (577).

That “One line only” has its counterpart in the “plain narrative” Hartright writes to restore the true identity of Laura, Lady Glyde (575), the woman whose “fatal resemblance” (399) to her illegitimate half-sister Anne enables Sir Percival Glyde and a cohort to lock Laura away under the assumed identity of Anne Catherick in the Asylum from which Anne had earlier escaped and to bury the fugitive herself, who has died while in the villains' custody, beneath a monument marked “Laura, Lady Glyde.” This conspiracy to confound the separate identities of Lady Glyde and Anne Catherick, along with the forgery through which Sir Percival secures his title, sets the stage for what I take to be The Woman in White's premier project: namely, to inscribe, by establishing the difference between two women, the difference of woman, Woman's Difference; and, by representing that difference as empirically available, to reify the binary model of sexual difference whose stability remained crucial to the coherence of mid-Victorian gender ideology. For, as it turns out, Hartright's “plain narrative” not only settles the vicissitudes of the Lady's identity, it also represents the difference which guarantees that identity as something which should and indeed will be recognized by the circle of listeners gathered to hear his account. The similarity between what Hartright's narrative does and what Collins insisted in the novel's 1861 “Preface” every narrative ought to do is striking. A novel's task, he there maintained, was to represent men and women as “recognisable realities”—“their existence, as recognisable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told” (xxxii).¹ Taking Collins at his word, I shall argue that The Woman in White, a text in which the “recognisable reality” of sexual identity is obscured by a pair of crimes which through some “ominous likeness” (51) make it literally impossible to recognize just who is the Lady and who is or is not the Sir, seeks to stabilize those identities by making the difference upon which they depend not only female, but physiological. The difference, then, whose discovery and affirmation supplies the “sole condition” of this novel's own aesthetic and ideological efficacy is thus the recognizably real, material difference between having or not having a phallus.

The Woman in White's deployment of the material body to clear up the gender confusion on which its plot turns has attracted recent critical attention, most notably in D. A. Miller's “Cage Aux Folles: Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White.” Arguing that “[t]he specificity of the sensation novel in nineteenth-century fiction is that it renders the liberal subject the subject of a body” (117), Miller shows how Collins's novel enlists the nominally male reading body's somatic responses—fear, jitteriness, “the modern nervousness that is as fundamental to this genre as its name” (107)—in order ultimately to reinforce the masculine/feminine dichotomy here threatened by the neuropathic body of the Woman. The Woman in White's sensational effects thus work on “the disciplinary subject, whose sensationalized body both dramatizes and facilitates his functioning as the subject/object of continual supervision,” a watch mounted to guard against the male subject's “feminization via the nerves” (114). For Miller, then,

The drama in which the novel writes its reader turns on the disjunction between his allegedly masculine gender and his effectively feminine gender identification (as a creature of “nerves”). … In this sense, the novel's initial assumption that its reader is male is precisely what cannot be assumed (or better, what stands most in need of “proof”), since his formal title—say, “a man”—is not or not yet a substantial entity—say, “a real man.”

(117)

But if, as Miller argues, the sensationalized body's “gender identification is an active and determining question” which shapes this novel (117), then a related query, also pending, is the identification of that body's gender, i.e., the discovery of the phallic referent whose presence or absence can alone, to borrow Miller's phrasing, supply the “proof” needed to turn formal titles—say, in this case, “Lady” and “Sir”—into substantial entities.² Thus while the “sensationalized body” may indeed be crucial to our understanding of how The Woman in White constructs masculinity and femininity—and Miller is not alone in making the case³—that understanding, I would suggest, remains incomplete without taking into account the sexed body as well, which serves to naturalize those categories by providing the bodily difference which guarantees them.

The Woman in White's insistence on anatomical difference, far from being wayward or racy, is perfectly in keeping with mid-nineteenth century medical and scientific representations of gender, where, to take Thomas Laqueur's crisp summary, “sex is everywhere precisely because the authority of gender has collapsed” (156). As Laqueur among others has shown, gender did not acquire either its biological buttress or its binary configuration until the last half of the eighteenth century when, after the Enlightenment's radical reconstruction of the political subject and in the drastically enlarged bourgeois public sphere of post-revolutionary Europe, questions regarding the rights and place of women in the new social order made differentiating between the sexes politically and culturally imperative.⁴ Earlier accounts of male and female bodies as greater or lesser versions of “one sex,” ranked hierarchically along an axis whose telos was male, gave way to what Laqueur styles a “two-sex model,” an “anatomy and physiology of incommensurability” which holds

that there are two stable, incommensurable, opposite sexes and that the political, economic, and cultural lives of men and women, their gender roles, are somehow based on these “facts.” Biology—the stable, ahistorical, sexed body—is understood to be the epistemic foundation for prescriptive claims about the social order.

(6)

New scientific representations of the body provided the “facts” needed to support this biology of incommensurability. In 1759 Thiroux d'Arconville published a detailed model of the female skeleton (a structure hitherto regarded as sexually indistinguishable), its fantastically enhanced pelvis and diminutive cranium nicely illustrating the “maternal nature.”⁵ New renditions of the nervous system revealed the source of feminine sympathy in “female fibers” (Laqueur 149, 157). Ovaries and testicles, organs which had for two millennia shared a single name (testicles), were linguistically and graphically distinguished, while the vagina, hitherto undistinguished, was given its own name.⁶ These last distinctions in particular mark a radical departure from Classical and Renaissance renditions of male and female bodies which, following the Galenic model of an exact physiological homology between the sexes' reproductive organs, continued to represent the female body as an inverted version of the male's, differing in configuration rather than kind.⁷ But by the last half of the eighteenth century, Laqueur argues, “the genitals whose position had once marked a body's place on a teleologically male ladder came to be rendered so as to display incommensurable difference” (157); thus “[i]n terms of the millennial traditions of western medicine, genitals came to matter as the marks of sexual opposition only last week” (22).

More even than making an epistemological shift graphic, these renditions of reproductive difference pinpoint the bodily parts that were to take on major political and cultural significance in the following century, when, as Mary Poovey has shown, “a binary representation of sex as the fundamental definition of difference” came to stand as “the characteristic feature of the mid-Victorian symbolic economy” (199). With customary Victorian finesse, The Woman in White works to give that symbolic economy its material, anatomical base by resolving the crimes against gender it recounts through “the idea of something hidden below the surface” (434), some thing the uncovering of whose presence or absence proves indispensable in the hero's quest to determine and then represent the true (sexual) identities of Lady Glyde and Sir Percival. In order better to examine just how the discovery of what lies “hidden below” informs The Woman in White's representation of sexual identity as well as its hero's stunning narrative ascension, I want to bring the psychoanalytic account of the role perceiving genital difference plays in constituting gendered subjectivity to bear on Walter Hartright's own discovery of the woman's difference. That discovery, as we shall see, stands as the enabling condition of his and the novel's “final narrative” (374), securing the masculine and discursive positions its hero needs not only to represent the Lady's difference as a reality which, in perfect accordance with Collins's “Preface,” should and indeed will be “recognized,” but also to conduct an investigation into Sir Percival's own sexual/textual identity that will legitimate Hartright's position as man and master narrator and his final narrative's representation of gender as a “recognisable” reality.

The Woman in White bills itself as “the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and of what a Man's resolution can achieve” (1). As it happens, “a Man's resolution” supplies the story's; and what both achieve is a spectacular reification of the difference that establishes “a Woman's” place and identity. But in order to pull this off, the “Man” in question—Walter Hartright, at this point “out of health, out of spirits” (2), and strangely disinclined to serve as drawing master for “the two young Misses” at Limmeridge House (13)—must first secure his own position as man and then (or rather therefore) master narrator, positions which, as his first and unsuccessful try at the narratorial post makes clear, remain contingent upon his discovery of the woman's difference.⁸

Throughout the course of his early relations with Laura Fairlie, the young drawing master is nagged by a “vague suspicion of something hidden,” something he is “left to find by [his] own unaided efforts” (56). The trouble at this point is, he has no idea where to look, no idea what is hidden. “In all this,” Freud writes with regard to the male child's first inquiries into the nature of sexual difference, “the female genitals never seem to be discovered” (“Some Psychical Consequences” 145)—which is no surprise since Freud situates those inquiries within the phase of phallic primacy, when “only one genital, namely the male one, comes into account” (142). Hence, to take Stephen Heath's summary, “given the perspective of visibility established, it is the sex of the woman that is taken as the very instance of the unseeable, the hidden” (54). The arrangement, Heath notes, underwrites “a particular economy of representation” whereby “the difference of the woman is the visibility of the man, the assured perspective, the form of exchange; with woman's representing as the lack, the difference … a certain mystery, the veil of truth (‘this lack is only ever presented as reflection on a veil,’ [Lacan] SII, p. 261)” (83).⁹

That particular economy of representation, with its penchant for reflecting the lack by way of a veil, is The Woman in White's. Early on, and no doubt because her sudden appearance has left him “far too seriously startled … to ask what she wanted” (15; my emphasis), Hartright fails to “lift the veil that hung between” Anne Catherick and himself (19). Later, certain that he “might never look on [Laura] again,” Hartright's gaze is checked by the veil covering her face (79). Between these failures to discover the lack behind the veil occurs another, perhaps the most telling. Once again, the failure entails a signal inability to ascertain “what she wanted,” a symptomatic bungling of look and lack; once again, it leaves the young man feeling “ill at ease and dissatisfied” with himself (45). Here is the sensation baffling Hartright the moment he first sees Laura:

Mingling with the vivid impression produced by the charm of her fair face and head … was another impression, which, in a shadowy way, suggested to me the idea of something wanting. At one time it seemed like something wanting in her; at another, like something wanting in myself, which hindered me from understanding her as I ought. … Something wanting, something wanting—and where it was, and what it was, I could not say.

(42)

Although Hartright later fills in what he thinks is wanting here with his “own recognition of the ominous likeness” between Laura and her half-sister Anne (51), that recognition will not assist him in “understanding [Laura] as [he] ought” any more than it will help him apprehend either his masculine identity or his authoritative narrative position. For as his imminent dismissal from Laura's presence and the narratorial post makes clear, what the drawing-master needs to recognize is not two women's similarity, but one woman's difference.¹⁰

“Something wanting, something wanting—and where it was, and what it was, I could not say.” The passage gives Hartright's perplexity two dimensions: first, he cannot locate the lack; second, he cannot name it. Both difficulties are intimately related. According to the psychoanalytic paradigm, the moment the boy-child sees the woman's anatomical difference—an event he will experience retroactively as providing confirmation of the prohibition against incest, the law that endows anatomical difference with its cultural significance—is also, crucially, a moment which precipitates his entry into the order of language, the cultural or symbolic order within which, and on the basis of that difference, he will be assigned his sexual and signifying positions.¹¹ A product of intense cultural mediation, that moment is also one in which, as a number of feminists have pointed out, woman comes to symbolize lack, difference. As Laura Mulvey puts it, “Ultimately the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for organization of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father” (16). As Mulvey's gloss makes clear, entry into the order of language depends, like the paternal prohibition itself, upon the ‘recognition’ of the woman's difference, i.e., the discovery of her “castration.” To put all this back in the novel's terms, then, Hartright needs to see Laura's difference before he can say it, needs, that is, to perceive her lack in order to acquire his own position as man and master narrator.

The narrative meets this requirement with considerable figurative brio by having Laura actually unveil her difference before its hero's rapt gaze: a difference that is, literally, her difference from Anne but that figures, thanks to the long-standing equation between the lifted veil and the exposed female genitalia, her anatomical difference.¹² Here is the situation: after learning from his mother that Laura has ‘died,’ Hartright returns to Limmeridge, hoping to find consolation at his beloved's gravesite. As he kneels before Lady Glyde's tombstone, head bowed, he hears the sound of approaching footsteps and looks up. Standing before him are two figures, a veiled woman and the now ravaged Marion Halcombe, her eyes “large and wild, and looking at [him] with a strange terror in them”:

I took one step towards [Marion] from the grave. She never moved—she never spoke. The veiled woman with her cried out faintly. I stopped. The springs of my life fell low; and the shuddering of an unutterable dread crept over me from head to foot.

(377)

“Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital,” Freud remarks (“Fetishism” 154)—a sentiment Marion apparently intuits, since she sinks to her knees and begins crying out “Father! strengthen him. Father! help him, in his hour of need,” in a voice which “faltered and sank low—then rose on a sudden, and called affrightedly, called despairingly to [Hartright] to come away”:

But the veiled woman had possession of me, body and soul. She stopped on one side of the grave. We stood face to face, with the tombstone between us. …

The voice came nearer, and rose and rose more passionately still. “Hide your face! don't look at her! Oh, for God's sake, spare him!—”

The woman lifted her veil.

(377-78)

And Hartright instantly sees the difference that allows him to identify Laura as the Lady without “the shadow of a suspicion, from the moment when she lifted her veil” (380), the lack that entitles him to announce, as he does immediately thereafter: “My position is defined” (381).

Having recognized the Lady's difference, Hartright is now ready to represent it. Accordingly, he “open[s] a new page” and prepares to write the account that will establish Laura's identity by representing the difference he has just recognized as, exactly and again, recognisable (379). Hartright's recognition of the woman's difference thus provides the enabling condition of his and the novel's “final narrative,” giving him the masculine and narratorial positions he needs not only to represent the Lady, but also to take charge of the narrative disorder that has prevailed since his initial failure at the narratorial post. In a move which breaks decisively with the format first laid out in the novel's “Preamble” and fully operative up to this point—namely, to let the story “be told by more than one pen” and under the direction of persons who would “relate their own experience, word for word” (1)—Hartright immediately blue-pencils Laura's and Marion's first-person accounts, electing instead to relate “both narratives, not in the words (often interrupted, often inevitably confused) of the speakers themselves,” but in the words of his own “brief, plain, studiously-simple abstract”—“So,” as he explains, “the tangled web will be most speedily and most intelligibly unrolled” (381).¹³ But if, as another narrator manquée has it, the “gentleman['s]” ability “to put my language right as he goes on” provides convincing testimony of Hartright's having mastered his sexual and signifying positions alike (366), then it is his detective work—work launched immediately after his discovery of the woman's difference—that allows The Woman in White to produce the material evidence on which its narrator-hero's position as man and master narrator ultimately rests. For as it turns out, representing the difference that will establish the Lady's place and identity requires investigating the real bases of a man's “Rank and Power” as well (381), a requirement by which this novel intends to disclose precisely what the woman's difference guarantees.

That Rank and Power belong, of course, to Sir Percival Glyde, who having forged a record of his unwed parents' marriage in the Old Welmingham register is not at all the man he claims to be. Percival, as Walter Kendrick aptly puts it, owes his identity “to a few lines of writing where there ought to be a space” (30): and in a text which holds its masculine and feminine vocabulary to a genital referent and a properly authored line, the man who is really a “blank” is doubly illegitimate.¹⁴ But although Hartright will spend a good deal of time girding himself “for the coming struggle with Sir Percival” (399), in point of fact there never is any struggle. This is not, as some critics have claimed, simply because the hero, having survived during the term of his exile from Laura “the wilds and forests of Central America,” assorted attacks by Indians, a plague and one shipwreck, has already proven himself sufficiently manly (373).¹⁵ The stakes here, I think, are different, higher: far from showing what it takes to become a man, the contest between the hero and the villain is intended instead to show what it takes to be a man. So—to take the clearest case in point—the “trial of strength between [Hartright] and Sir Percival Glyde” (419) will be decided purely on the strength of what does or does not lie “hidden below.”

Suspecting, then, that “[s]moothly and fairly as appearances looked … there was something wrong beneath them” (465), Walter Hartright scans a second copy of the Old Welmingham register, which like the first ought to contain a record of Sir Percival's parents' marriage. But what he discovers instead, “there, at the bottom of the page,” is “a blank space.” “That space told the whole story” (470). Percival, it appears, does not have what it takes to be a Sir:

The idea that he was not Sir Percival at all … had never once occurred to my mind. At one time, I had thought he might be Anne Catherick's father; at another time, I had thought he might have been Anne Catherick's husband—the offense of which he was really guilty had been, from first to last, beyond the widest reach of my imagination.

(471)

The fact that Percival is neither father nor husband; that the “secret which had been [his] life-long terror” is not the “common, too common, story of a man's treachery and a woman's frailty” (432); that “the offense of which he was really guilty” might entail, as Count Fosco phrases it, a “private difficulty” (300), trouble figured by his compensatory habit of “cutting new walking-sticks,” “not one of which he ever takes up for a second time,” but always “thinks of nothing but going on, and making more” (207)—these tell-tale impotencies suggest that Percival's textual lack, that “Secret” which has “a contemptible side to it” (456), is at bottom a sexual lack.¹⁶

But in case we miss the point, the novel obligingly annotates the crime through its punishment. Hoping to destroy all evidence of his forgery by burning the incriminating documents, Percival steals the keys to the church vestry and locks himself inside; but when he tries to let himself out after having set the room afire, he cannot extricate his key from the “perverse lock” (465) and so is unable to withdraw. Hartright—who has just discarded his own “light” walking stick for “a stout country cudgel … heavy at the head” (472)—arrives just in time to hear “the key worked violently in the lock” and then “a man's voice … raised to a dreadful shrillness” (476). Clambering onto the roof, Hartright smashes the skylight with his cudgel but to no avail; the “horror of [Percival's] situation” drives our hero to find himself a still larger tool. Calling to “every man,” he rushes into an abandoned cottage and seizes a beam:

God! how it held—how the brick and mortar of the wall resisted us! We struck, and tugged, and tore. The beam gave at one end. … There was a scream from the women … a shout from the men. … Another tug all together—and the beam was loose at both ends. We raised it, and gave the word to clear the doorway. Now for the work! now for the rush at the door! (479)

By the time that door collapses after the third “run with the beam,” Percival has been erased—“nothing,” “nothing,” the narrative intones—and Hartright reels back, spent (479). The scene is intensely phallic. The grinding contrast between Hartright's virility and Percival's impotence, a point driven home by the relentless progression from stick to cudgel to beam, by Hartright's knack for extricating his tools; the fact that Percival perishes in a room filled, à la Tristram Shandy, with “‘Portraits of the twelve apostles in wood—and not a whole nose among 'em’” (460); even the “Rude caricatures” somebody bothers to scrawl on the boards barring the charred-out vestry (487): all suggest how steadfastly determined this text is to base a man's identity on the phallic referent.

But there is a more serious side to the villain's crime, a threat which, it seems to me, is finally responsible for the terrible thoroughness and urgency of his expulsion. Percival's forgery, together with the spurious documents through which he and Count Fosco effectively write out the difference between Lady Glyde and Anne Catherick, raises what for this novel are a pair of equally intolerable possibilities: first, the possibility that sexual identity and the difference upon which it is founded are not, after all, “recognisable realities”; and second, the possibility of a writing which, far from reflecting, in fact produces its referent.¹⁷ This last, at any rate, is patently the case with Sir Percival, whose identity has no ground outside of or prior to the writing which produced it. But nowhere are the possibilities that difference might not be a recognisable reality or that writing might come to wield more authority than the referent it ought to reflect more darkly entertained than when Lady Glyde, freshly incarcerated as Anne Catherick, finds every attempt to assert her own identity systematically countered by “the marks on each article of her underclothing” (393). Here is the nurse instructing her new patient:

Look at your own name on your own clothes, and don't worry us all any more about being Lady Glyde. She's dead and buried; and you're alive and hearty. Do look at your clothes now! There it is, in good marking-ink; and there you will find it on all your old things … —Anne Catherick, as plain as print!

(393-94)

The “good marking-ink” that reads Anne Catherick but refers to Lady Glyde stands as the last in a series of writerly operations—including counterfeit doctors' orders, fake medical certificates, and spurious letters—by which Percival and Fosco have managed to inscribe Anne's name on Laura's body and Laura's name over Anne's body. The upshot is semiotic chaos: with Anne buried beneath a tombstone marked “Laura, Lady Glyde” and Laura alive but no longer functioning as an object of reference, each woman becomes a referent deprived of its proper sign, each name a sign cut loose from its proper referent.

Reuniting these estranged pairs and effacing the script which set them at odds supply the impetus for the “plain account” Hartright composes to “secur[e] the just recognition” of Laura Fairlie (550), an account he will read to the men and women gathered at Limmeridge House. Beyond treating his listeners to what MacDonagh and Smith aptly call “an abridged version of The Woman in White itself” (280), Hartright's “plain account” of the difference that renders the Lady's place and identity “publicly recognised” (576, 574) fulfills the literary task as Collins himself had defined it—which, we recall, was to reproduce fictional men and women in terms that would render them “recognisable” to their real-life counterparts. After the family solicitor declares that account “proved by the plainest evidence he had ever heard in his life,” the narrator-hero then lifts Laura in his arms, raising her

so that she was plainly visible to every one in the room. “Are you all of the same opinion?” I asked. …

The effect of the question was electrical. Far down at the lower end of the room, one of the oldest tenants on the estate started to his feet, and led the rest with him in an instant. … “There she is alive and hearty—God bless her! Gi' it tongue, lads! Gi' it tongue!” The shout that answered him, reiterated again and again, was the sweetest music I ever heard.

(576-77)

Hartright's electrifying achievement is to have restored a woman's identity in terms fully consistent with its representation in mid-nineteenth century gender ideology where, as here, it was based on her bodily difference, tangible evidence of her place and, of course, the man's. Laura Mulvey's remark is worth recalling in this context: “Ultimately the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for organization of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father.” Laura Fairlie's identity rests on the discovery and affirmation of the difference which, narratively and thematically, constitutes her meaning and which, first at the cemetery and then again at Limmeridge House, is displayed as “visually ascertainable.” By the same token, Walter Hartright's position as man and master narrator is predicated on his having perceived the “material evidence” of that bodily difference, the very evidence he will adduce in support of his final narrative's claim for the recognisable reality of the Woman's difference.

“Hartright's campaign of textual renovation,” Walter Kendrick writes with regard to The Woman in White's determination to ground the truth somewhere outside texts, “is set moving by an experience which cancels the similitude set up in the second sensation scene three hundred pages before”(31)—the experience, Kendrick says, of seeing “language negated by the sight of a living face” as Laura Fairlie stands beside the inscription recording her death (32). What Kendrick describes as “an experience which cancels … similitude,” “an immediate vision which transcends the lies of language,” comprises what I have argued is the perception of the woman's lack, the sight of an anatomical difference whose recognition, to return to the novel's 1861 “preface,” clearly constitutes “the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told.” But the very moment that makes this “compaign of textual renovation” possible—“this striking moment when language is negated by the sight of a living face”—is also a moment that threatens to undo it. For with “Laura, Lady Glyde … standing by the inscription” recording her death (378), the bind between words and the woman's body—a bind vital to legitimating the narrative project—comes undone; at the same time, and precisely because of that hiatus, difference loses its anatomical foundation and becomes purely linguistic (the woman's difference from words), the site of resistance rather than a term for containment.

The possibility that Woman's Difference might, like the Lady herself, confound rather than complement its inscription suggests just why The Woman in White might be, as one critic has described it, a book “profoundly about enclosing and secluding the woman” in spaces ranging all the way from marriages and madhouses to musty chambers and monuments like Mrs. Fairlie's or Cecilia Matella's (Miller 112). For if, as I have suggested, the representation of men and women as “recognisable realities” depends upon representing the woman's bodily difference, then her escape would amount to nothing less than a disappearance of the “plainly visible” referent needed to substantiate difference's strictly anatomical significance and the truth of Hartright's inscriptions—a threat elaborated through the constant worry over whether the novel's fugitive females have been “traced and captured by the men in the chaise” (23). Thus besides ordering the masculine/feminine, homo/heterosexual dichotomies set awry by the woman's unnerving drift, The Woman in White's determination to “Cherchez, cachez, couchez la femme,” as Miller translates it, also works to countermand the peculiar problems her flight poses to its representational agenda (125).

Nowhere is this imperative to immobilize and inscribe the woman's body more sublimely at work than in the case of Anne Catherick, the text's most elusive and therefore threatening woman. The woman in white, as Diane Elam has suggested, can be read as “the figure of reference itself, haunting the representational claims of the realist novel” (50) with her infinite supplementarity, her role as “a rhetorical trope which figures the impossibility of literal, descriptive reference” (55). Anne's talent for evoking “the impossibility of literal, descriptive reference” begins the moment she leaves Hartright unable to tell whether he has just confronted “a victim of the most horrible of all false imprisonments” or “an unfortunate creature whose actions it was [his] duty, and every man's duty, mercifully to control” (22). Insofar as arresting this slippage between victim and ward turns out to require some form of incarceration, whether criminal or kindly, Hartright's dilemma would seem to reflect the novel's. For if the woman's difference is her difference from language—that spectral possibility raised when Laura stands beside her own inscription—then any attempt to secure her body as difference's “literal, descriptive” referent would in fact be tantamount to making her “a victim of the most horrible of all false imprisonments”—an epitaph uncannily brought home when Anne is immured beneath the wrong inscription.

Correcting that inscription and glossing the crime which laid her beneath it as a dark but ineluctable destiny, a desire felt by the fugitive and sanctioned by Providence, comprise the steps by which novel and narrator alike plan not only to erase what is “false” and “horrible” from the fact of Anne's imprisonment, but to put to rest as well any doubts raised by the question she once asked the hero as she “knelt down before the inscription”: “Where should I go, if not here?” (85). Harking back to those “by-gone days when [he] had met [Anne] by Mrs. Fairlie's grave, and met her for the last time,” Hartright marvels at how decisively an “unerring … chain of circumstances” has secured the fugitive's destiny:

I thought of her poor helpless hands beating on the tombstone, and her weary, yearning words murmured to the dead remains of her protectress and her friend. “Oh, if I could die, and be hidden and at rest with you!” Little more than a year had passed since she breathed that wish; and how inscrutably, how awfully, it had been fulfilled! … There (I said in my own heart)—there, if ever I have the power to will it, all that is mortal of her shall remain, and share the grave-bed with the loved friend of her childhood …

(514-15)

The “One line only” Hartright has engraved in order to make certain “all that is mortal” of this text's most mobile woman “shall remain” clearly aspires to share in the same sublime inscrutability which presides over the fugitive's fate. But neither that gloss nor the inscription it seeks to underwrite are without their difficulties. “The End is appointed; the End is drawing us on—and Anne Catherick, dead in her grave, points the way to it still!” (415). Dead in her grave, the fugitive also points up the violence required to intercept and inscribe her errant body so as to finish off this “story of what a man's”—and a novel's—“resolution can achieve.”

Notes

1. The immediate context for Collins's use of the term “recognisable” is the charge, leveled by a fair number of the novel's reviewers, that he was deficient in his portrayal of character. For a discussion of Collins's relations with his reviewers, see Lonoff.

2. I read the terms “Lady” and “Sir” and the confusion surrounding their status as tropes through which The Woman in White dramatizes its concern with sexual identity and gender difference. The nineteenth-century, as Davidoff among others has remarked, is a period in which “class designations came to carry gender overtones” (88), when the appellation ‘Lady’ “signified as much gender as economic and social meaning” (91). Indeed, according to Kaplan, “[t]he many layered, compacted representations of class and gender found in imaginative literature are not generic metaphors. … They occur in many other nineteenth-century discourses—metonymic, associative tropes which are linked by incomparable similarities, through a threat to identity and status that inheres to both sets of hierarchies, both structures of difference” (164-65). For a reading of The Woman in White which focuses exclusively on questions of class identity, see Loesberg.

3. For Anne Cvetkovich, who also concentrates on the sensationalized body, Hartright's sensitivity to affect helps diffuse and naturalize his sensational climb up the social ladder.

4. It is important to note, as both Laqueur and Schiebinger insist, that far from being a result of scientific advances or a greater understanding of female anatomy, this new model of sexual incommensurability is instead the effect of a complex set of cultural and political determinates. For a full discussion of those determinates, see Laqueur, Chaps. 1 and 5, and Schiebinger, Chaps. 7 and 8.

5. D'Arconville's rendition continued to be favored throughout Europe and especially in England over its far more anatomically correct rival, the Soemmerring skeleton (1796). On the advent of the female skeleton and England's preference for the d'Arconville model, see Schiebinger, 191-206.

6. See Laqueur, 4-5, 157-61. According to Jordanova, the genitals of late-eighteenth century wax models and engravings, which earlier models had customarily covered, were now “not just present, but drawn to attention” (54).

7. Laqueur describes the Galenic model thus: “The vagina is imagined as an interior penis, the labia as foreskin, the uterus as scrotum, and the ovaries as testicles” (4).

8. With the notable exception of Miller, critics tend to regard Hartright's questionable masculinity as a figure for something beyond itself. Cvetkovich, for example, reads the drawing-master's “desexualization” as “the sign of his class difference” (28), while Tamar Heller, who reads The Woman in White as a novel which “revolves around the attempts of a male artist to detach himself from the world of women and their blank ‘whiteness,’ or lack of social identity” (111), connects the “symbolic emasculation” Hartright suffers while at Limmeridge to the economically marginal and therefore feminized status of the male artist (117); for Heller, then, “male professionalism is posed as the solution to the problem of masculine identity” (128).

9. For more on the interrelationship between the woman, the veil, and her certain mystery in psychoanalytic discourse, see Kofman.

10. Critics who treat this scene tend to focus on the overdetermination of Hartright's failure to recognize the similarity between Laura and Anne. See Cvetkovich, 34-36, and Miller, 25-27.

11. On the importance of sight in the Freudian scenario and its intense cultural mediation, see Mitchell and Rose, Silverman, 137-149, and Laplanche and Pontalis. Coward and Ellis offer a detailed account of the link between the perception of difference and the subject's entry into the symbolic order, as do Mitchell and Rose, as well as Silverman.

12. Elam argues that, through “the figural play inscribed by the infinite supplementarity” of Collins's women in white (55), “the feminine refutes the decidability of identity and instead unveils the untruth of decidable sexual difference” (62). I am arguing that, like the mid-nineteenth century medical discourses with which it is profoundly allied, The Woman in White wards off this figural threat by collapsing femininity and the female, making the woman's body (or more precisely, her anatomical difference) the truth of sexual difference.

13. This startling redistribution of narrative duties has attracted critical attention, but never as an effect of Hartright's perception of the woman's difference. See, for instance, Perkins and Donaghy, and Heller, 134-41.

14. For an exhaustive treatment of the links between writing and illegitimacy, see MacDonagh and Smith.

15. See, for instance, Miller, 118-119.

16. It seems pertinent in this context of castration to mention that one of the novel's most enthralled reviewers “def[ied] Oedipus himself, after reading two volumes, to predict the end of Sir Percival Glyde” (Page 82).

17. Kendrick makes a similar point when he suggests that “At the heart of The Woman in White stands the momentous question whether … the language of any text might not generate the reality which it pretends to imitate” (35). I share Kendrick's conviction that, for all its flirtation with textuality, Collins's text is “founded in the realistic faith which it violates.” But for an opposing point of view, see Thomas.

Works Cited

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———. The Woman in White. 1861. Ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973.

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