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

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

The questionable status of Walter's claim to "know" Laura at a moment when she barely knows herself is complicated by everything he stands to gain from that assertion. After all, his ability to recognize Laura legitimates their marriage on the grounds that, despite the class difference between them, he has a privileged attachment to and understanding of her. Further, it suggests his ability to speak for her and to intuit her needs. "In our present position I have no claim on [Laura] which society sanctions, which the law allows, to strengthen me in resisting the Count, and in protecting her," Walter tells Marian in defending his desire to marry her half-sister. "This places me at a serious disadvantage. If I am to fight our cause with the Count, strong in the consciousness of Laura's safety, I must fight it for my Wife" (559). The full implications of the equation Walter makes in this passage between his love for Laura and his ability to speak for her only become apparent when one considers that once they are husband and wife, Walter will not only be able to speak for his wife, he will be the only person with that ability. Even aside from the fact that, since she has little recollection of who she is or of what has happened to her, she has little power to identify her own needs, under the legal doctrine of coverture, upon marrying, Laura loses her ability to own property, to enter into contracts, to sue or be sued, or to leave her husband without his permission. Much therefore rests on Walter's ability to identify Laura's thoughts, needs, and interests.8

The difficulty of determining the exact grounds on which Walter claims to know and so to be able to speak for his wife begins to suggest the ambiguities inherent to the notion of sympathy, in general, and to the mid-nineteenth-century notion of the sympathetic bond between spouses, in particular.9 According to many nineteenth-century celebrations of domesticity, spousal sympathy constituted a necessary precondition for "female influence," and hence, too, for the supposedly ameliorative effects of the home. For someone like Sarah Stickney Ellis, for example, while in the public sphere male identity is continually under attack, the private sphere constitutes a space where sympathy with one's wife enables it to be healed and expressed. As Ellis wrote in her popular domestic manual, The Women of England, Their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits (1839), the marketplace may require that a man be competitive, selfish, and materialistic, but with the help of his wife, "he may faithfully pursue the necessary avocations of the day, and keep as it were a separate soul for his family, his social duty, and his God" (57).

From the outset, descriptions of female influence and marital sympathy were politically charged. Both those who sought to reform the legal doctrine of coverture and those who sought to preserve it identified marital "sympathy" as one of their chief goals. But ambiguities in the term's meaning enabled writers to come to very different conclusions as to how it could best be achieved. Conservative commentators, for example, usually understood female influence to depend on a form of marital sympathy that results from women's natural propensity to mold themselves to others, from their sequestration from the temptations and trials of the public sphere, and from the identity of their interests with their husbands'. As Mrs. Sanford wrote in Woman in Her Social and Domestic Character (1833), for example, woman "must, in a certain degree, be plastic herself if she would mould others" (11). "She may be ... a corrective of what is wrong, a moderator of what is unruly, a restraint on what is indecorous" (12). Sarah Lewis agreed, although in Woman's Mission (1839) she also emphasized the importance of women's immunity to the logics of the marketplace. "Woman, at present, [is] ... the regulating power of the great social machine," she argued (46). But that power depends on "the very exclusion complained of, [which gives them] the power to judge of questions by the abstract rules of right and wrong" (46). And finally, even as Margaret Oliphant admitted claims like those made by Sanford and Lewis, she also insisted on the role of coverture in producing marital sympathy. "The 'marriage of true minds' may be as rare as it is lofty and fortunate," she admitted in "The Laws Concerning Women" (1856), but because of existing laws, "[t]he marriage of interests, hopes, and purposes is universal" ("Laws" 380). Coverture makes sympathy possible, in other words, for it guarantees that husbands and wives have no choice but to share goals and interests.