74 pages • 2-hour read
The Woman in White
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Background
Sociocultural Context: Victorian Treatment of Mental Health Conditions
A key context for understanding the plot of The Woman in White is the contemporary treatment of mental health conditions. Anne is confined to a privately run psychiatric hospital by a wealthy man, Percival Glyde, to whom she has become inconvenient. Collins’s depiction of Anne is sympathetic; if she has a mental health condition or learning disability, Collins implies, it does not justify her incarceration. Instead, Collins focuses on the individuals and institutions that control and abuse her. Sir Percival has recourse to the same system when he attempts to inter and disempower Laura, a wealthy woman with a high social status who loses credibility when she becomes an inmate of the asylum. In this, Collins’s novel reflects and critiques Victorian definitions of “madness.” Mental health conditions were poorly understood at the time, and diagnostic criteria were vague and malleable; women were especially regarded as predisposed toward mental health conditions, and (as in The Woman in White) psychiatric diagnoses could be wielded to control women who flouted gender norms or were deemed troublesome.
Glyde claims that the private psychiatric hospital in which he places Anne and Laura is preferable to a public asylum. This raises questions about how people with mental health conditions (real or perceived) were treated by society at large. State-run institutions had their origins in the early 19th century with the passing of the 1808 County Asylums Act. This act of parliament empowered magistrates to build “asylums” (so named because their precursors were religious institutions). Alongside these public institutions, a parliamentary committee was established to investigate private institutions like Bethlem Hospital, also known as Bedlam, which had become a byword for chaotic and inhumane conditions. In 1828 “Commissioners in Lunacy” were given responsibility for overseeing private hospitals to prevent abuses. The Lunacy Act of 1845 sought to further improve conditions by defining people with mental health conditions as “patients” for the first time and therefore requiring that they receive treatment. A national association for hospital superintendents, called the Medico-Psychological Association, was founded in 1866, six years after The Woman in White was published. When Collins was writing, these reforms, and the debates about the care of people with mental health conditions that informed them, were underway. Nevertheless, abuses in the form of both cruel treatment and questionable hospitalizations persisted well into the 20th century.
Authorial Context: Wilkie Collins
Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was an English novelist. His most famous works include The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868). The former is considered a “sensation novel” because of its suspenseful and “scandalous” elements. The latter is an early example of the detective novel. Collins, then, is known for pioneering the development of popular literary forms.
Collins was born in London but moved to Italy when he was 12, living in Europe for two years. This experience is significant given his interest in “foreignness” in The Woman in White, which features two Italians, supposed to be political exiles, and various shades of xenophobia. Collins began studying law at Lincoln’s Inn in 1846, gaining knowledge about legal matters. This too would inform his fiction, not least The Woman in White, which critiques the legal system in its exploration of The Nature of Justice.
By Victorian standards, Collins’s personal life was as scandalous as his fiction. Collins never married but had long-term romantic relationships with two women: Caroline Graves, a widow with whom he lived, and Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children. Collins’s dim view of marriage is likewise evident in The Woman in White, in which a socially advantageous marriage is favored over a love match—a tacit critique of the institution’s socioeconomic underpinnings.
Literary Context: Sensation Fiction
Sensation fiction was a genre of fiction particularly associated with the Victorian novels of the 1860s and 1870s. In her introduction to The Woman in White, Kathleen Tillotson—a prominent scholar of Victorian literature—defines the sensation novel as “novel-with-a-secret” (Dover Publications, 1969; p. xv). As this description implies, these novels are defined by mystery and its unraveling. The mystery at the heart of these novels tends to be salacious by the standards of the day: Bigamy and other forms of sexual “impropriety” are common features.
Sensation fiction’s most direct predecessor was the Gothic novel, a subgenre of Romanticism that built an atmosphere of dread and mystery, often relying on the same archetypal figures—damsels in distress and predatory men—that would populate novels like The Woman in White. In Gothic fiction, however, the supernatural tended to be a more visceral presence, whereas The Woman in White merely evokes the supernatural via intimations of hauntings and prophetic dreams. Moreover, Gothic fiction often took place in “foreign” regions or other eras, distancing its events from the everyday lives of readers. By contrast, sensation fiction locates its strangeness squarely in contemporary English society, implying a critique of institutions like marriage.
Historical Context: Victorian Women’s Legal and Property Rights
The Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 was an act of parliament that allowed married women in Britain to legally own money they earned and to inherit property for the first time. Before this act was passed, a woman surrendered her money and property to her husband when she married and had no legal say in how it was used. Married women had few legal rights in 19th-century Britain in general, to the extent that the law considered them a mere extension of their husbands. This seems to be alluded to when Count Fosco refuses to allow his wife to witness Lady Glyde’s signature, arguing that she is not a distinct person in the eyes of the law.
In contrast, single and widowed women were treated as independent legal beings with the right to own property and earn money in their own names. The difference in status between married and single women is a prominent part of Collins’s novel. This can be seen, for example, in the unmarried Marian’s “mannish” qualities and the dramatic transformation of Madam Fosco’s character with marriage: Before she married, she was outspoken and flamboyant, but afterward, she became submissive and silent. Collins uses these personality differences to suggest the relationship between traditional womanhood, with its emphasis on passivity, gentleness, selflessness, etc., and women’s subordinate legal status, tacitly commenting on The Harm of Gender Inequality.
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