SOURCE: “Wilkie Collins and Surplus Women: The Case of Marian Halcombe,” in Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 20, 1992, pp. 197-215.

[In the following essay, Balée sees The Woman in White as a “subversion of Victorian sexual stereotypes.”]

Can you look at Miss Halcombe and not see that she has the foresight and resolution of a man?

Count Fosco in The Woman in White

… The very dust of literature is precious, and its dross may be of more worth to the historian than its beaten gold.

E. S. Dallas, Blackwood's, 1859

Fiction forsooth! It is at the core of all the truths of this world; for it is the truth of life itself.

Dinah Mulock (Craik), Macmillan's, 1861

Wilkie Collins's best-selling novel, The Woman in White, first appeared in the 26 November 1859 edition of Charles Dickens's popular periodical, All the Year Round. For the space of a page—page 95—Dickens's latest novel, A Tale of Two Cities, and Collins's new one were juxtaposed. Sydney Carton spoke his famous last words in column 1, and Walter Hartright inaugurated the genre of sensation fiction in column 2 with this prophetic sentence: “This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.”¹

Dickens's tale of the French Revolution had been a steady seller, but The Woman in White soon eclipsed it, generating enormous sales for the magazine and becoming one of the most popular novels of nineteenth-century England.² Collins had initiated a genre of fiction that intrigued Victorian readers for nearly ten years before its power subsided with its decade—the Sensational Sixties faded into the unsentimental 1870s.

In its own time, The Woman in White elicited both praise and moral indignation from a wide variety of reviewers. Margaret Oliphant, writing in Blackwood's in 1862, praised Collins for not using any supernatural effects to produce his sensations (“Sensation Novels” 566), but she lamented that his elevation of crime to an art form would inspire less-talented followers and that these “disciples will exaggerate the faults of their leader, and choose his least pleasant peculiarities for special study” (567).

Nevertheless, Mrs. Oliphant admitted that Collins did what he did well, and that Dickens—usually considered to be Collins's tutor—could not compete with his student as a sensation novelist.³

Comparing Great Expectations to The Woman in White, Oliphant put the dunce's cap on Dickens.

Mr Dickens is the careless, clever boy who could do it twice as well, but won't take pains. Mr Wilkie Collins is the steady fellow, who pegs at his lesson like a hero, and wins the prize over the other's head.

(“Sensation Novels” 580)

In later reviews of sensation fiction, Oliphant noted that the new-fashioned heroines of these novels were the real sources of their immorality, that such fiction “has reinstated the injured creature Man in something like his natural character, but unfortunately it has gone to extremes, and moulded its women on the model of men …” (“Novels” 258).

H. L. Mansel, whose celebrated “Bampton Lectures” on religious thought were the table talk of 1859, came to the same conclusion in his review of sensation fiction in the Quarterly Review in 1863. He vilified the genre for its dependency on the subversion of female morality to achieve its shocking effects. The point of Mansel's review was the same as that of his Bampton Lectures: he insisted that there are only two roads that the mind is capable of taking, one that “leads up to light and hope,” and another that perceives only a “dark atheistic view which detects nothing in the universe but unconscious forces breaking out” (Smith 49). Clearly, Mansel felt that sensation novels led readers along the darker path. E. S. Dallas, a brilliant mid-century British critic, also perceived the unusual power of sensation-novel heroines, but rather than denigrating heroines who did not fit the angel in the house ideal, he applauded them.

… If the heroines have the first place, it will scarcely do to represent them as passive and quite angelic, or insipid—which heroines usually are. They have to be pictured as high-strung women, full of passion, purpose, and movement. …

(“Lady Audley's Secret” 4)

Nancy Armstrong in Desire and Domestic Fiction argues that conduct books of the late eighteenth century helped to create the domestic woman of the nineteenth.⁴ Words created this dainty maternal creature, and words maintained her. As Davidoff and Hall detail in Family Fortunes, this ideal of the domestic woman was promoted in the 1830s and '40s by “church and chapel” which “were central to the articulation and diffusion of new beliefs and practices related to manliness and femininity” (149). Further, “if a man's ability to support and order his family and household lay at the heart of masculinity, then a woman's femininity was best expressed in her dependence” (114). Therefore, it is not surprising that until the advent of the sensation novel, “the young, dependent, almost child-like wife was portrayed as the ideal in fiction. … Such an image of fragility and helplessness enhanced the potency of the man who was to support and protect her” (323).

Women characters who did not fit this ideal of femininity were treated as abnormal, even evil. Dickens, for example, in Little Dorrit (1855-57) presents in a minor role an androgynous, powerful female character—Miss Wade. But Miss Wade is portrayed as a dark force, a probable lesbian who seeks to lead the rebellious young Tattycoram to her doom.

Wilkie Collins, whose novel appeared two years after his friend and advisor's, recreated in The Woman in White the androgynous heroine not as an evil force, but as a wonderful alternative version of womankind. Further, he would bring this character—Marian Halcombe—to center stage. She, with Count Fosco, would number among the most compelling characters of her day and after. Even Dickens praised her in a letter written to Collins on 7 January 1860: “I have read this book with great care and attention. There can be no doubt that it is a very great advance on all your former writing. … In character it is excellent.” The depiction of Marian, Dickens added, is particularly “meritorious” (Letters 89). Years later, in an interview with Edmund Yates, Collins recalled the many letters he had received from English bachelors who wanted to marry the original for Marian Halcombe (4-6). Clearly, the moment for a new ideal of woman had come, and Collins began to fashion her in words and to promulgate her in fiction.

The Woman in White began its literary devaluation of the angel in the house in 1859 by contrasting her with the strong-minded old maid, Marian Halcombe, as a new ideal of womanhood.⁵ Sensation fiction, and Marian's creation, had everything to do with a social dilemma that had begun in England in the 1850s. This dilemma centered on a proliferation of single women who, as men emigrated to the colonies or were killed in the Crimea, would never find mates, would never have the chance to become those maternal angels beloved by Victorian iconography. Something had to be done for and about England's “surplus women,” and Collins began to do it in the medium most likely to influence the millions—the serial novel.

Fitzjames Stephen, writing in the Edinburgh Review in July 1857, commented on the new role of authors as the boom in periodical literature brought their words into more households than ever before. There is, he said, “one class of writers who are, perhaps, the most influential of all indirect moral teachers—we mean contemporary novelists” (125). Crime reportage, which had increased enormously in the 1850s, soon filtered its facts into fiction; crime and its detection became one of the distinguishing features of the 1860s sensation novels.⁶ Stephen, as early as 1857, feared that “novelists will become a pest to literature, and they will degrade, as some of them have already degraded, their talents to the service of malignant passions, calumny, and falsehood” (155).

Stephen's words in this instance were aimed specifically at Charles Dickens and Charles Reade. Stephen felt that Dickens unfairly represented English bureaucracy with his portrayal of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit, and that Reade was guilty of base falsehoods in his novel of prison reform, It is Never Too Late to Mend (1856-57).

Stephen was by no means the last to comment on the extraordinary turn that literature was taking as periodicals flooded the market. E. S. Dallas, in an essay entitled “Popular Literature—the Periodical Press” published in Blackwood's in January 1859, noted that “literature … is not only the expression of public opinion and the index of contemporary history, it is itself a great force that reacts on the life which it represents, half creating what it professes only to reflect” (97). Further, and this is a point that carried much weight with all the serially-published novelists,

A periodical differs from a book in being calculated for rapid sale and for immediate effect. … It is necessary, therefore, to the success of a periodical, that it should attain an instant popularity—in other words, that it should be calculated for the appreciation, not of a few, but of the many.

(101)

Two years later, W. H. Ainsworth, the former editor of Bentley's Miscellany, discoursed on the problems inherent in the rapid production of serial literature—it lacked research, he admitted, and thus could only amuse rather than instruct.

Every month sees the birth of some new periodical … [and] the writer who has in any way gained the ear of the public is sure to obtain work, not only profitable but tolerably regular in its nature. At the same time, however, it cannot be denied that the character of our literature has degenerated.

(215)

Ainsworth, despite his acknowledgment that the demands of serial publication forced writers to sacrifice quality to meet weekly or monthly deadlines, did little to rectify the situation. He himself was the successful author of several serial novels, including the very popular Jack Sheppard (1839). As an editor, he fostered the talents of numerous popular writers. The sensation novel that was destined to become the best-selling book of nineteenth-century England, Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne (1860-61), was written under his guidance and initially published in another of the magazines he edited, The New Monthly Magazine.

Ainsworth, like Dickens and Thackeray, both wrote for and edited the publications under his management. He noted that this, too, was new in the history of literature. “All of our great writers,” he wrote, “bestow their energies on the serials they have under their management, and the result is such as has never been seen before in literature” (218). Ainsworth's protégée, Mrs. Henry Wood, would go on to manage her own magazine as would Mary Elizabeth Braddon,⁷ another tremendously successful sensation novelist, and the author of Lady Audley's Secret (1861-62).

The changes in the production and publication of literature in the 1850s and '60s cannot be extricated from the changes that were happening concurrently in women's roles. That Mrs. Henry Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon could make the transition from contributing to popular magazines to being their proprietors is yet another indication of the way that the role and social status of women underwent dramatic change in the 1860s. That these changes were linked to the influence of popular literature seems undeniable. For it is certainly true that scores of writers in the late 1850s and early 1860s were commenting on the way that periodical literature together with increased literacy had revolutionized public knowledge. Perhaps Dinah Mulock (Craik), writing for Macmillan's in the spring of 1861, put it best:

The amount of new thoughts scattered broadcast over society within one month of the appearance of a really popular novel, the innumerable discussions it creates, and the general influence which it exercises in the public mind, form one of the most remarkable facts of our day.

(442)

The Woman in White is a novel that plays on the theme of sex-role reversals. D. A. Miller first explicated the ways “sensations”—which the sensation novel produces internally (on its characters) and externally (on its readers)—are gendered. Miller interprets the novel as an elaborate play on the Victorian readers' desire for and fear of homosexuality:

no less than that of the woman-in-the-man, the motif of the man-in-the-woman is a function of the novel's anxious male imperatives (“cherchez, cachez, couchez la femme”) that, even as a configuration of resistance, it rationalizes, flatters, positively encourages.

(114)

Miller reads the novel—breathlessly—as an elaborate pathology of male homosocial bonds and “free-floating homoerotics” (122). I read it rather differently, as a subversion of Victorian sexual stereotypes (the angel in the house, the manly man) in order to promote new icons. The Woman in White actively works to dismantle old myths of sexuality in order to construct new ones that would be of greater use to an economically-altered society. It is no surprise that the angel-in-the-house icon rose to prominence with the industrial revolution and market capitalism, the phenomena that put men to work outside the home and confined women within it. Wives and mothers were idealized, even as they were robbed of economic power (see Christ).

By the late 1850s, single women outnumbered single men significantly: in 1851 in Great Britain there were 2,765,000 single women aged fifteen and over; by 1861, the figure was 2,956,000; by 1871, it would reach 3,228,700—an increase of nearly seventeen percent in twenty years (Banks 27).⁸ This imbalance meant that large numbers of women would never be able to get married, would never live the role of angel in the house—a role that had been presented to them for decades as not only the ideal, but virtually the only part they could play. Cultural ideology and economic necessity, which had reinforced each other for so long, were suddenly in conflict. Women required an alternative ideal of femininity that was not maternal as more and more of their numbers remained unmarried.

When we first see Marian Halcombe through Walter Hartright's eyes, she is shockingly androgynous. Walter, at this point in the novel, perceives Marian through the filter of conventional ideals of female beauty.

The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise that words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!

(58)

What makes Marian ugly to Walter is her distinctly masculine face set upon a perfectly feminine figure. Marian's complexion is dark, and she has an incipient moustache (58). A page later, in direct contrast to Marian, we hear our first words of Laura Fairlie, the blonde angel with whom Walter Hartright will fall in love. She is classically feminine, right down to her nerves. “My sister is in her own room,” Marian informs Hartright, “nursing that essentially feminine malady, a slight headache” (59).

As the novel progresses, Marian's masculine strength of mind is continually juxtaposed with Laura's weakness; readers are left to form their own opinion as to which character is the more admirable of this novel's two heroines. Or perhaps I should say three heroines, for as Barbara Fass Leavy points out, “the woman in white” of the title—Anne Catherick—represents a third and very important heroine (91). Anne Catherick, Laura's half-sister on the father's side, continually figures as a paler version of Laura herself. Both are blonde, physically fragile, and mentally weak. The physically and mentally durable Marian, Laura's half-sister on her mother's side, stands out in dark contrast to these two fluttering angels.⁹

Marian despises her own sex in general, her affection for Laura excepted. What she feels for Laura seems to be a chivalrous, brotherly love¹⁰ that deepens as Laura comes to rely on her more and more. Marian, as the novel progresses—particularly after she experiences a jolt of mutual sexual attraction to Count Fosco—begins to display more classically feminine characteristics. It might be said that Fosco literally makes a woman of her when he reads her diary. His invasion of her room (a private sanctuary that, in psychoanalytic terms, may be read as her “womb”) and his taking possession of her innermost thoughts constitutes a kind of psychic rape (358-60).

Before she meets Fosco, Marian responds to strong emotions with manly reticence. When Laura tells her that she must honor her engagement to a man she does not love, Marian manages her feelings like a man. “I only answered by drawing her close to me again. I was afraid of crying if I spoke. My tears do not flow so easily as they ought—they come almost like men's tears, with sobs that seem to tear me in pieces, and that frighten everyone about me” (187). However, after she comes under the spell of Fosco, Laura's troubled marriage causes Marian to weep like a woman. “Crying generally does me harm; but it was not so last night—I think it relieved me” (289).

Fosco, it should be mentioned, is also described in the most androgynous terms. Although he has a face like Napoleon, he is also fat and feminine in manner. He resembles “a fat St. Cecilia masquerading in male attire” (250). He is tenderly maternal to his pet birds and mice, and is described by Marian as a “Man of Sentiment” (308). Manly reticence is not one of his virtues, yet his charm for Marian is his honeyed tongue. She says,

Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them.

(278)

One may extend this compliment to Wilkie Collins, who put the words in Fosco's mouth.

If Marian is an androgynous character who becomes somewhat more feminized towards the close of the novel, Walter Hartright is described as a eunuch who becomes more manly through his association with Laura and Marian. Hartright first describes himself as safely emasculated.

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.

(89)

He is irresolute and tearful when he realizes that he must leave Laura; Marian exhibits more manly composure than himself. “She caught me by both hands—she pressed them with the strong steady grasp of a man” (148). Nevertheless, as Walter is called into service as Laura's protector and becomes the detective who will unravel the crime that has robbed her of her identity, he behaves increasingly like the Victorian ideal of manhood. Ann Cvetkovich draws a connection between Hartright's accession to patriarchal power and property (when he becomes the accepted suitor, and later the husband of Laura) and his deepening masculinity.

Nevertheless, Collins inverts traditional stereotypes of manliness and femininity in order to alter them. Laura Fairlie, who retains her role as angel in the house throughout, is a pathetic character. When Walter sets up house together with Marian and Laura (in a ménage à trois that must have delighted Collins as he penned it,¹¹ he and Marian play mother and father to Laura, whose brief incarceration in a lunatic asylum has rendered her childlike. Even Laura recognizes her own helplessness.

“I am so useless—I am such a burden on both of you,” she answered, with a weary, hopeless sigh. “You work and get money, Walter, and Marian helps you. Why is there nothing I can do! You will end in liking Marian better than you like me—you will because I am so helpless!”

(498-99)

Walter and Marian play a friendly deception on Laura—they tell her that Walter is selling her drawings as he sells his own:

Her drawings, as she finished them, or tried to finish them, were placed in my hands. Marian took them from me and hid them carefully, and I set aside a little weekly tribute from my earnings, to be offered her as the price paid by strangers for the poor, faint, valueless sketches, of which I was the only purchaser.

(499-500)

Laura's childlike dependency on her artist lover reminds one of David Copperfield's Dora who held his pens and believed she was helping him to compose.¹²

Laura's inability to compete economically—she has no marketable skills and several liabilities—reiterates the infeasibility of the angel-in-the-house role for women who would be forced to earn their own living. When The Woman in White appeared in late 1859 with its positive portrayal of an old maid and its negative portrayal of the Victorian ideal of womanhood, it entered a fiery discussion on the condition of English women that had been heating up the pages of popular periodicals since the mid-1850s. Ideologically-opposed essayists argued about the economic and legal rights of women, examining work opportunities for “the fairer sex” as well as new legislation that affected women. Again and again the question was asked: What could England do about its growing population of impoverished, middle-class spinsters?

An Old Maid, eh? The phrase is quite enough: you have only to mention it, and of course everybody begins to snigger, simper, or sneer.

Francis Jacox, Bentley's Miscellany, March 1859

The Crimean War (1853-56) was a crucial event for English women insofar as one of the heroes it created was a heroine: Florence Nightingale. Nightingale was a single woman possessed of ambition and abilities worthy of any man of her time. Her life, fortunately, coincided with a historical moment that enabled her to develop her talents. Martha Vicinus asserts that Florence Nightingale was the most important role model for single women that the century would produce (19). Vicinus adds:

Nightingale was exceptional in many ways—her class connections, iron determination, and brilliant analytic skills would have placed her in the forefront in any age—but her highly publicized work in military camps gave her an incomparable public image.

(20)

Even contemporary commentators were quick to note that men who admired Florence Nightingale—for it was not only single women whom her deeds had impressed—were more likely to extend their esteem to other single women. An anonymous reviewer writing in the Edinburgh Review in January 1856 intuited that the nurse reformer's important work in the Crimea would reflect well not only on herself, but on all English women.

From the high and the low, from the most noble among the subscribers to the Nightingale Fund to the humblest ballad singers who are singing Miss Nightingale's praises in our streets, we learn lessons of faith in the readiness with which man's esteem is given where it is earned by woman. Her whole sex will profit by the reflection of the light her example has shed upon us; and it is to be hoped that many a woman will feel it both a responsibility and an encouragement that she has lived at the same time with Florence Nightingale.

(“Lectures to Ladies” 153)

By now it should be evident that the web of causes and effects that ultimately produced a significant change in the role and status of women is both dense and subtle. Nevertheless, certain events and individuals do stand out in this complex weave, and Florence Nightingale is one of them. It was soon after her exploits in the Crimea that a new series of articles on the legal and social status of women began to appear in all of the important magazines.

Margaret Oliphant, who later wrote scathing reviews of sensation novels, first took up the cudgels against women's rights in the April 1856 edition of Blackwood's, in a book review entitled “The Laws Concerning Women.” Oliphant, reviewing a pamphlet that detailed the ways women had been wronged by marriage and property laws, attacked the writer with the rhetoric that would soon become the trademark of those opposed to more lenient legislation for women. The catchwords of this rhetoric were “natural,” “preordained,” and “self-evident.” That man should rule woman, that a husband should dominate his wife, Oliphant insists is “natural,” and that the existing laws that confer on him his power to do so are also “natural.” Oliphant declares that “Nature confers this official character upon the head of a household, the law has no choice but to confirm it, and all honest expediency and suitableness justifies this ordination of God and of man” (386). Oliphant concludes this piece by throwing the traditional bone to the angel in the house. Women, she declares, actually have more power than men because—although they have no economic or legal rights—they rule the house, the moral center of society (387).

As Michel Foucault's archeological digs into various fields of knowledge and history have shown us, wherever there is power, there is resistance. I would add that this is particularly evident when a long-standing balance of power is about to make a heterostatic shift in favor of the resistance. This shift happened as the 1850s wore on and surplus women became more numerous while, at the same time, mistreated wives became more vocal about the rapacity of husbands who had full legal rights to their wives' property, and even to their children in the event of divorce (which became an option for the first time in 1857).

The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, it should be noted, is one of the first legal inklings that there was trouble in the paradise of Victorian matrimony, that heretofore hallowed state that was so closely bound to the cult of wife and motherhood, the safe haven of home, the bliss of family life. All of the myths, interconnected as they were, began to suffer together. But this Act, which permitted certain unhappy—and very rich—spouses to get free of one another, did little to advance the rights of women. Men could petition for divorce on the basis of adultery, but women had to prove desertion, cruelty, rape, bestiality, or incest as well.¹³

T. E. Perry, reviewing the divorce bill for the Edinburgh Review in 1857, vehemently advocated married women's property rights. (The Married Women's Property Bill of 1857, which would have protected them, was dropped in order to pass the divorce act. It resurfaced in Parliament ten years later—just as sensation fiction was beginning its decline—and finally became law in 1870.) “The time is past,” he wrote, “when the law could annihilate, by a fiction, the rights of one half of society, and repudiate the claims of that portion which stands most in need of legal protection” (183). Perry, unlike Oliphant, found nothing natural about the law. Instead, he cites numerous instances of the unnatural ways it deprived specific women—such as Caroline Norton—of their personal inheritances and their children. Perry insists that no law can be natural when so much public sentiment is against it.

It appears that during the last Session upwards of seventy petitions with 24,000 signatures have been presented to Parliament, complaining of the law of property as it affects married women; and if such petitions are to be weighted pondere non numero, it will be found that the names attached comprise some of the most eminent thinkers of our day, and nearly all the distinguished women who have made the present such a remarkable epoch of female literature.

(191)

The unhappy state of marriage, particularly for women, would begin to make the spinster's lot look better than it ever had. Frances Power Cobbe, one of the feminists who stands out in this period, reprinted one of her essays in Fraser's in 1862 entitled “Celibacy v. Marriage.” Cobbe concludes, “‘the old maid's life may be as rich, as blessed, as that of the proudest of mothers with her crown of clustering babes” (233). Furthermore, Cobbe reasoned, “while the utility, freedom, and happiness of a single woman's life have become greater, the knowledge of the risks of an unhappy marriage (if not the risks themselves) has become more public” (234). Single women, for one thing, enjoyed exactly the same property rights as men.

What single women did not enjoy—and which commentators now began to discuss at great length—were equal employment rights. Mrs. Oliphant, writing in Blackwood's in 1858, challenged the notion that single women were any worse off than they had ever been historically.¹⁴ Oliphant, ever opposed to change, once again made the plight of women seem “natural.”

There were single ladies as there were single gentlemen as long as anybody can remember, yet it is only within a very short time that writers and critics have begun to call the attention of the public to the prevalence and multiplicity of the same.

(“Condition” 141)

Oliphant argues that the statistically large numbers of surplus women cited by the author of Women's Thoughts About Women (the book that Oliphant is here reviewing) cannot possibly be correct; Oliphant is sure that old maids number a mere handful, that they are simply individuals “drop[ped] … out of the current” (141). Oliphant concludes

It is, however, an unfortunate feature in the special literature which professes to concern itself with women, that it is in great part limited to personal “cases” and individual details, and those incidents of domestic life which it is so easy, by the slightest shade of mistaken colouring, to change the real character.

(153)

Before she reaches this resounding closure to her argument, however, Mrs. Oliphant has herself indulged in a personal “case” to make her argument. The case is literary; Mrs. Oliphant discusses how Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre “bears with no small force upon the present subject” since it treats of the abysmal life of governesses (142). However, Oliphant declares, the Brontë sisters, though they suffered wretchedly as governesses, were no worse off than their brother Branwell, who had a miserable position as a tutor. Oliphant triumphantly concludes that “so far as this example goes, the theory of undue limitation and unjust restraint in respect to women certainly does not hold” (143).

Mrs. Oliphant had probably recently read Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) from which she culled her facts; what is interesting is that she should have suppressed so many equally valid pieces of information about Branwell's life that were detailed in Gaskell's book. Long before Branwell was a tutor he was sent to art school—where his sisters could not follow even if they wished to—and after he failed as a painter, he became an assistant clerk to a railway company (another job not open to women in the 1840s); it was only after he was fired from this job for intemperate negligence that he took up full-time employment as a tutor. All along, Branwell had had educational and work opportunities that were denied to his sisters, but Oliphant does not choose to mention these facts.

Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë's former close friend, in an anonymous essay entitled “Female Industry,” published in the Edinburgh Review in April 1859, argued directly against thinkers like Oliphant. Martineau immediately acknowledges the problem of surplus women, and argues for broadened work opportunities for women as well as pay equal to men's.

In a community where a larger proportion of women remain unmarried than at any known period; where a greater number of women depend on their own industry for subsistence … how can there be a doubt that the women will work more and more, and in aggregate ways … ?

(322)

Martineau cites the greatest obstruction to women's education and employment as “the jealousy of men in regard to the industrial independence of women” (329).

Nevertheless, there were still plenty of people—particularly men—who agreed with Mrs. Oliphant in 1859. An anonymous article entitled “A Fear for the Future that Women Will Cease to be Womanly,” published in Fraser's in February, lamented the damage done to that cherished myth of Victorian iconography—the angel in the house. It was hard to let her go, and the author of this piece bemoans the way that “young ladies” have changed: “the pretty ignorance, the fascinating helplessness, the charming unconsciousness that enslaved us bachelors of long ago—where are they all gone to?” (245)

The battle would rage back and forth throughout the 1860s, with feminists like Frances Power Cobbe, Harriet Martineau, and John Stuart Mill on the one side, and advocates of the old ideology about women, such as W. R. Greg, W. E. Aytoun, and John Ruskin¹⁵ on the other. The familiar rhetoric invoking nature, God, and historical precedent would be employed again and again, just as it is in this piece by Aytoun:

… by the common consent of mankind in all ages, certain vocations have been assigned to each of the sexes, as their proper and legitimate sphere of action and utility—and that any attempted readjustment of these could lead to nothing save hopeless error and confusion.

(198)

What was particularly frightening to men like Aytoun was the notion that the entry of women into the working world of men would deprive women of their femininity and men of their masculinity. When males and females transgress the gender rules of work, he wrote, the result is to “make men effeminate and women masculine by tempting them to unsuitable occupations” (199).

It was exactly these gender rules that Collins broke in The Woman in White; further, the novel's allegiance (and by extension, the readers') is given to the masculine woman and the sensitive man.

D. A. Miller notes that Marian Halcombe is outside the sexual system of the novel (and, presumably, of Victorian society) because she is neither male nor female. She cannot do what males do because she lacks a penis, and she cannot be the recipient of male desire because she lacks the ability to attract men (116). Without realizing it, Miller has offered another definition of the phrase “surplus woman.” At the novel's close, Marian also seems to be the extra or “surplus” woman in the household with Walter and Laura and their child, because she is not a member of this nuclear cluster. Collins, however, skews this perception of Marian's redundancy in the family by having Marian—not Laura—holding the baby (645). And the very last line of the novel is a tribute to the manly spinster as the real heroine of the story: “The long happy labour of many months is over. Marian was the good angel of our lives—let Marian end our story” (646).

Many critics of this novel, such as U. C. Knoepflmacher, D. A. Miller, and Sue Lonoff note that Collins undermines the order of the Victorian world only to restore it with a traditional happy ending. Lonoff thinks that Collins, although “his rendering of women seems enlightened from a twentieth-century perspective,” is really ambivalent about the strong heroines he creates because they “ultimately set their independence aside” (138). I would counter this by saying that Collins knew his audience; he wanted to portray women as he really saw them—strong and capable—but he did not want to alienate his readers. Furthermore, the happy endings tacked on his novels do not eradicate what came before; the subversiveness is still there, and still lingers in the minds of the readers.

I would further argue that the happy ending helped Collins to disguise his real aim, social reform. In Collins's later novels, this reformatory zeal—to redress the wrongs of prostitutes, governesses, illegitimate children—became less and less disguised and, as a result, his reputation sharply declined. Swinburne is reputed to have created this cruel little couplet to describe the once-great novelist's fate: “What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition? Some demon whispered—‘Wilkie! Have a mission’.” Because The Woman in White appears to have no political bias, it offers readers ideology in its most influential form.¹⁶ As Dinah Mulock Craik and countless of her contemporaries were aware, there was no influence on public opinion more powerful than a really popular novel.

The Woman in White was such a novel, and it does not seem too much to say that by its laudatory portrayal of an androgynous old maid, Wilkie Collins helped the movement towards broadened opportunities for single women. It is certainly true that after his novel appeared and throughout the 1860s, work opportunities for women increased and legislation, such as the 1870 Married Women's Property Act, was passed in their favor. Frances Power Cobbe noted in 1862 that the “popular prejudice against well-educated women is dying away” (“What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?” 606), as the first ladies' colleges were instituted in England. New ones were opened throughout the 1860s. The widening sphere of education for women resulted in a widening sphere of career opportunities, a movement that would continue throughout the nineteenth century and up until our own day.

The line that began Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and that inaugurated the genre of sensation fiction is often misread as a reaffirmation of Victorian sex role stereotypes. When Walter Hartright says, “This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve,” the reader assumes that Walter is the resolute man and that Marian or Laura is the patient woman. I beg to differ. Throughout the novel, by virtually every male character who encounters her, from Walter to Mr. Gilmore the solicitor to Fosco the wily villain, Marian is described as “resolute.” Walter, who leaves Laura to go on an expedition to Central America, with no hope that he can ever win her love, is patient. Despite every hardship and the deaths of almost all of his companions, he makes his way back to England and finds her again. Throughout the period when he is tracking Fosco and solving the mystery of Laura's identity, he is patient. He holds his temper, waits for his chances, and takes them when they come. Because he is patient, he solves the case, marries Laura, and becomes the proprietor of her estate.

The first line of The Woman in White, then, presages what the novel is really about: the subversion of sexual stereotypes. Because this is the story of what a man with a woman's patience can endure, and what a woman with the resolution of a man can achieve.

Notes

1. Further references to The Woman in White are from the 1974 Penguin edition, edited by Julian Symons.

2. Kathleen Tillotson cites the unprecedented reader response to Collins's novel. See also Elwin. For an overview of the Sensational Sixties and the four most prominent sensation novelists—Collins, Wood, Braddon, and Reade—see Winifred Hughes. Another account of the critical reaction to sensation novels, particularly as they pertained to women and women's roles, may be found in the third volume of Helsinger, Sheets, and Veeder.

3. A number of mainstream Victorian novelists added sensational effects to their productions in this period. Dickens, in fact, had employed them much earlier; in Bleak House (1852-53), the “chancellor” of the rag and bone shop, Krook, dies of spontaneous combustion, which Dickens had read about in a periodical. In similar fashion, sensation novelists would later read the detailed newspaper accounts of lurid murder trials of the late 1850s and '60s and incorporate spouse poisoning, bigamy, and insanity into their titillating tales.

4. “Conduct books imply the presence of a unified middle class at a time when other representations of the social world suggest that no such class yet existed” (Armstrong 63). The industrial revolution and the changes it produced in the middle-class family required a new kind of woman. “Sexuality,” Armstrong asserts, “has a history that is inseparable from the political history of England” (15).

5. Anti-angel heroines were not new to fiction—one has only to think of Thackeray's Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (1847-48)—but Collins's extremely positive portrayal of an unwomanly woman was new. Other sensation novelists would devalue the angel in the house by showing her to be a demon in disguise (as M. E. Braddon did in Lady Audley's Secret), but Collins went further—he not only debased the old icon, he minted a new one: the androgynous heroine.

6. Altick treats this phenomenon in Victorian Studies in Scarlet. He tentatively draws a connection between the sensational murders of the 1850s and '60s and the birth of sensation fiction; in Deadly Encounters he sees a direct cause and effect relationship between two sensational murders in the summer of 1861 and subsequent sensation fiction. Thomas Boyle argues for a subtler connection between real crime and its literary manifestations; he emphasizes the complex weave of cause and effect surrounding sensation fiction, asserting that there is not “any really extended pattern of imitation of real-life crime from the newspapers. So these are not ‘non-fiction novels’ or ‘true fiction’” (146). However, Boyle acknowledges that “almost all the writers used newspapers as sources of information in one way or another” (146).

7. Braddon founded Belgravia in 1866 and Ellen Price Wood acquired The Argosy in 1867.

8. Vicinus points out that most surplus women during this period were from the working class, because the middle class comprised only fifteen percent of the total population. Nevertheless, most contemporary discussions of surplus women focused on the plight of middle-class spinsters. “The conviction shared by all middle-class commentators that the number of unmarried middle-class women was steadily increasing was due to their increase in absolute numbers and their increased visibility, brought about in part by their acceptance of paid work and in part by the public discussion of their plight” (27).

9. Laura Fairlie is the legitimate and Anne Catherick is the illegitimate daughter of a dissolute aristocratic father. Besides passing on his looks, one can infer that Philip Fairlie also passed on his mental instability, the other trait that Laura and Anne share. That the Fairlies represent a kind of physical, mental, and moral degeneration of the upper class may be further seen in the still-living Mr. Frederick Fairlie (Laura's uncle) whose nervous disorder, intensely fey mannerisms, and cruelty to servants are persistently pointed up by Collins. The other representative of English aristocracy in this novel, Sir Percival Glyde, is, of course, an out-and-out villain: a coarse, brutal drunkard who does not stick at the notion of killing his wife to claim her inheritance, nor of confining Anne Catherick to an insane asylum to keep her from revealing his life's guilty secret.

10. Lambert suggests that Marian has lesbian designs on her half-sister (13). The evidence does not seem to support this, especially in light of what we know about the strong bonds of Victorian sisterhood and the effusive expressions of love permissible between sisters (and brothers) during this period. (The relationship between Florence and Paul Dombey in Dickens's Dombey and Son (1847-48) had been similarly misread by late twentieth-century critics.) For more about the relationships of Victorian female siblings, see Helena Michie.

11. Collins never married, but he supported two mistresses, Caroline Graves credited by Davis as the original “woman in white”) and, later, Martha Rudd. Collins formed a liaison with Rudd after Graves left him to marry a plumber. When she returned, disenchanted with her marriage, Collins supported both his mistresses au même temps. The untenable legal status of illegitimate children—Collins had several—is a minor theme in The Woman in White (Sir Percival Glyde's terrible secret is that he's a bastard) and a major one in No Name (1862).

12. Laura's inability to compose—to tell her own story—is underscored by the structure of the novel itself. Marian writes two of the narratives, but Laura does not write any. Laura can never, therefore, be the author of herself, but is dependent upon the way other narrators represent her.

13. Nor did the divorce act provide for spouses who wanted to get divorced for reasons other than adultery. Charles Dickens, one of the Victorian era's greatest spokesmen for the sacred bonds of marriage and family life, found himself in an uncomfortable position in the same year that Parliament ratified the Matrimonial Causes Act. Desperately unhappy with his wife of twenty-two years, Catherine Hogarth Dickens, the novelist longed to break out of his marriage. But according to the new act, he would have to prove Catherine's adultery to divorce her legally, and Catherine had committed no such crime. Her crimes were that she was fat, fortyish, complacent, and no intellectual match for her brilliant husband. In 1858, Dickens separated from Catherine. He gave her a house and settled 600 pounds a year on her for maintenance. For the rest of his life he also maintained Ellen Ternan, the mistress whom the law did not permit him to marry.

14. Besides the other logical problems with Mrs. Oliphant's argument, it begs the initial question. By invoking historical precedent, Oliphant avoids the grievance itself: the limited employment opportunities for single women who had to support themselves.

15. Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies appeared in 1865, and included the essay entitled “Of Queens' Gardens.” This essay is one of the most persuasive pieces of writing celebrating the angel-in-the-house myth and its attendant fantasies of the idyllic family and happy home that one can find in the Victorian period; as such, it is frequently cited by scholars studying the stereotypes and realities of Victorian family life. What renders it additionally fascinating, however, is that Ruskin should have been the man to write it. Ruskin's own wife, Effie Gray, succeeded in annulling their marriage in 1854 on the grounds that it had never been consummated. Ruskin, who admitted that he found his wife's adult body “disgusting,” later fell in love with the young girl he tutored, Rose La Touche—a passion that was unrequited. At no point did Ruskin's real life resemble the familial fantasy he sketched so poignantly in “Of Queens' Gardens.”

16. To those who would argue that Marian Halcombe cannot really represent the impoverished surplus women of the 1850s and '60s because she does not need a job, let me say this: Collins in this novel was not striking at the issue directly—as did Cobbe, Martineau, Oliphant, and many other commentators—but obliquely. What Collins was doing was reducing the power of a potent icon—the angel in the house—by contrasting her with a strong lovable, laudable new version of womanhood: the androgynous spinster. In his next novel, No Name (1862), Collins treated the issue of single women's employment more overtly but less successfully. Magdalen Vanstone and her sister, Norah, the heroines of No Name, lose their inheritance and are forced to work—one as a servant, the other as a governess. But No Name did not capture the imagination of the public as its predecessor had done; its lessons were not disguised enough.

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