Good Vibrations: The Sensationalization of Masculinity in The Woman in White

At the center of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White is a problem that masquerades as a solution. Walter Hartright's almost unique ability to identify his wife is presented as the answer to the question of how she will be restored to her rightful position in society. According to him, she is Laura, Lady Clyde, born Fairlie, heir to the house and estate of Limmeridge. Yet for most of the second half of the novel she has no legal claim to that name or to the property attached to it, she does not look like Laura, and she is unable to say who she is or what has happened to her. Consequently, almost of all Laura's friends believe what their eyes tell them and what the legal and medical documents associated with her case appear to prove: that Laura has died and that the woman Walter marries is her illegitimate and propertyless half-sister Anne Catherick. Walter's ability to recognize this woman as Laura enables him to pursue the villains responsible for her plight, to amass evidence of their nefarious plot against her, and to convince others of their crime. But this conclusion still leaves the problem: how does Walter know who this woman is?

Recent critics of Collins's novel have rarely examined this question in detail. For the most part, they have understood The Woman in White to revolve around Walter's development from a youth, nervously susceptible to the sensations of his body, into a self-disciplined and reliable adult member of society. D. A. Miller, for example, has described the goal of the novel as the stabilization of Walter's self-mastery. "[I]mmature [and] ... nerve-ridden" at the beginning of his story, Miller argues, Walter needs to learn to control himself so as to realize the "normative requirements of the heterosexual ménage whose happy picture concludes" the novel (165). Jenny Bourne Taylor has characterized Collins's novel similarly, as revolving around the problem of how "Hartright's new subjective identity is constructed" so that he may become "his own and Laura's moral manager" (108). In the context of readings like these, Walter's ability to identify Laura has usually been taken as proof of the sympathetic bond between them.1 Walter recognizes Laura, in other words, because he loves her and so has privileged access to the most basic grounds of her identity. Insofar as this sympathetic epistemology indicates Walter's ability to understand his lover's interiority rather than simply to register the surfaces that excite him as a youth, it has been understood to indicate his newly achieved maturity. And insofar as it demonstrates the existence of a nearly unique bond between him and his wife, it has also been understood to legitimate their marriage: his profound understanding of the woman he loves proves that they are connected in a way that makes the class differences between them irrelevant.

In this essay, I argue that even though such a reading of The Woman in White is invited by the novel's many invocations of the idea of sympathy, it is also impaired by the text's ultimate reformulation of the psychological models on which the possibility of sympathy depends. By decoupling sensation from understanding, this novel produces an epistemology that is less committed to knowing persons than to making them function in certain ways, a notion of sympathy that seeks less to enter into the feelings of the other than to attribute feelings to her, and a model of male identity that relies less on memory or experience than on the ability to feel sensations, to name them, and to convince others of those names' validity. Walter's successful identification of his wife as Laura-and thus of himself as the husband of a wealthy heiress-is thus made to seem as if it rests not on his privileged access to her interiority, but instead on the fact that, like the novelist, he is able to persuade other people that they should feel, that they do feel, and that they should effectively pay him for feeling, as he wants them to.

This account of The Woman in White seeks to revise recent accounts of the model of male identity posited by the first sensation novel. In so doing, it also insists on the specificity of this novel within the history of the sensation novel. Recent critics have too often tended to equate Collins's novel with the sensation novel in general, and have tended to situate all such novels in the context of the negative critical backlash against them.2 Thus, we have been told repeatedly that sensation novels were condemned for "'preach[ing] to the nerves'" (Mansel 251) and for "drugging thought and reason" ("Female" 210). What has often been obscured as a result is the fact that these condemnations only began to appear in 1863 and 1864, several years after the publication of The Woman in White in 1859-60. Initially, many critics liked sensation novels. Collins's novel, in particular, received many enthusiastic reviews from critics who praised it for its novelty, its compelling plot, and its sensational effects. Further, even critics who voiced reservations about the novel-largely for what they saw as its over-reliance on plot and its clumsy narrative form-did not condemn it on moral grounds. They discounted it as art, but they did not identify it as a source of danger. Such relative critical respect continued even after the genre of the sensation novel began to be attacked; however much critics might condemn "sensationalism," they almost never identified The Woman in White as an object of concern or hostility.