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

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2003 by Ablow, Rachel

The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise. The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls. Then, and then only, has it passed beyond the narrow region on which light falls, in this world, from the pencil and the pen. (52)

The claims that Laura gives form to shadowy conceptions, that she makes Walter aware of a void in his nature, and that she raises the mystery of women to a new height utilize a language of deep interiorities associated with sympathy. But since Walter's is the only subjective life described, "sympathy" comes to look more like projection than understanding. Laura's ability to fill a void in his "spiritual nature" has nothing to do with her inner life, in other words; it is instead the result of the extent to which she embodies his shadowy conceptions of beauty. This implied autotelism is made still more problematic by its close association with sensationalism. As Walter tells the reader, the most accurate way to understand his feelings for Laura is to imagine one's own sensations in the presence of the first woman one loved: "Think of her as you thought of the first woman who quickened the pulses within you that the rest of her sex had no art to stir" (52). Walter's understanding of his lover thus comes to seem as if it revolves around his perception of her as an especially exciting set of surfaces.

One obvious question raised by the consistent sensationalism of Walter's epistemology is the extent to which we can trust his claims to know the woman he ultimately marries. The plot of The Woman in White hinges on Walter's ability to know that the woman he meets in the graveyard is Laura Fairlie Glyde rather than Anne Catherick, as almost everyone else believes. Yet as soon as one allows that Walter only ever uses a sensational epistemology in relation to these two women, the grounds on which he distinguishes between them collapses. After all, Laura is not the first woman to alter Walter's pulses. She may be the first to stir them, but by the time he meets her, his heartbeat has already been arrested by her half-sister on the moonlit highway. As a result, the very attribute that Walter claims is unique to Laura serves to associate her with the woman he claims to know she is not. The inextricability of the means by which he understands each of these women is underscored by the fact that Walter finds Laura most exciting at the moment when she reminds him most forcefully of her other. As he tells us, in his first meeting with Laura, he is struck by the fact that "[m]ingling with the vivid impression produced by the charm of her fair face and head, her sweet expression, and her winning simplicity of manner, 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" (53). This "something wanting" is supplied a few scenes later when he recognizes "the ominous likeness" between Anne and Laura (62). At this moment, a "thrill of the same feeling which ran through me when the touch was laid upon my shoulder on the lonely high-road chilled me again" (62). As a result of the physical resemblance between the two women, Laura is able to make him feel the same thrill that Anne had-a circumstance that raises real questions as to his ability to distinguish between them.7