The Woman in White

Collins wrote in the preface to this book, "It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognisable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about m

Collins wrote in the preface to this book, "It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognisable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women--for the perfectly obvious reason that they are men and women themselves." There, in a nutshell, are the strengths and weaknesses of Collins' writing, in The Woman in White as well as The Moonstone.

Collins could write a hell of an absorbing novel. But once you've actually finished the book, and you start thinking about what to say, you wonder how you could have been so enthralled by such silly plot machinations and, less forgiveably, such objectionable characters. Collins' faults as a novelist appear in his rigid lack of imagination about "recognisable" men and women: they're stereotypes. There's an unfortunate strain of phrenological characterization at work here, so that villainous Englishmen look brutish and are distrusted by lapdogs, and villainous foreigners look grotesque and silly and effeminate but have gigantic heads if they're also intelligent, and hard people *look* hard, and stupid people *look* stupid, so that you wonder how anybody in the nineteenth century ever made a false character judgment at all. There is a strong, charismatic, intelligent female character, Marian--possibly a portrait of George Eliot--whose "manly" mind--and FACE, because by God she's ugly!--render her effectively sexless (it's a little more complicated than that, but it would take an essay to describe the gender dynamics there), so she doesn't threaten any of the binaries at work here. So the hero (profoundly uninteresting but devoted and penniless) falls in love instead with (the profoundly uninteresting but rich and beautiful) Laura, who's characterized chiefly by her "kindness" and "truthfulness," which she manifests solely by having blue eyes. And there are the comic characters: Count Fosco and his mice; Pesca "quietly coiled up" at the bottom of the sea; Mrs. Catherick's final, amazingly ironic line--"My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody"--but unfortunately these wonderful characters are marred by ethnic, class, and gender stereotypes, not to mention a great deal of tiresome moralizing. The sanctimony is sickening, when a great deal of the virtuous women's virtue consists in negative values, and the virtuous men are virtuous mostly by dint of being inspired by women's beauty and calling it virtue. Meanwhile, have any of these virtuous people noticed that a young woman, who happened to be wearing white, has died pitifully on their account? Only insofar as her death inconveniences Laura!

I'm trying to figure out what exactly makes Collins so enthralling after all. Because the plot is silly. And the characters are revolting, without much to counteract that impression (unlike in the works of Charlotte Bronte, who also loved her some phrenology). I think perhaps there's something so thoroughgoing about his revolting characterization that you can't *not* want to know more. Collins believed in his characters, and that conviction carries through to the reader. He said, "Is there any way to make a limp, brainless, virtuous beauty even MORE so? Why yes! I WILL WIPE OUT HER MEMORY WITH THE DESPAIR OF BEING WRONGFULLY LOCKED IN AN ASYLUM! Can I make my wily fat foreign gentleman, the incarnation of depraved evil, even more depraved? Why, yes! I WILL MAKE HIM FEED A FRUIT TART TO A HURDY-GURDY MONKEY!" You can't believe he's willing to take it there, but he does, over and over, and you can't stop reading.

I waited where I was, to ascertain whether his object was to come to close quarters and speak, on this occasion. To my surprise, he passed on rapidly, without saying a word, without even looking up in my face as he went by. This was such a complete inversion of the course of proceeding which I had every reason to expect on his part, that my curiosity, or rather my suspicion, was aroused, and I determined, on my side, to keep him cautiously in view, and to discover what the business might be on which he was now employed. (p. 503)