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

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

For reformers, by contrast, sympathy was less the product of women's peculiar nature or of common interests as defined by the law, than of a kind of mutual understanding best achieved in a context of equality. As early as 1825, for example, William Thompson argued that because of coverture, there can be no identity of interests between husbands and wives. "[E]ven if these dissimilarities [of views and tastes] did not exist," he insisted, "the very act of placing the means of happiness or the command of the actions of the one in dependence on the pleasure of the other, would break the charm and destroy this identity of interest" (47). As a result, there can effectively be no sympathetic bond between husband and wife: "the less of resemblance, of equality, the less there will be of sympathy; the less power to resist and the less of controul [sic], the greater will be the temptation to, the more infallible will be the certainty of, abuse of power" (12). J. S. Mill expanded on this claim in his Subjection of Women (1869), arguing that "[e]ven with true affection, authority on the one side and subordination on the other prevent perfect confidence" (141). Whether because they are intimidated or ashamed, he insisted, wives have every incentive to conceal their true thoughts and feelings from their husbands. For writers like these, Oliphant's defense of the marriage law could best be understood as a sentimentalization of Blackstone's famous formulation, "[b]y marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing" (1:430). As Eliza Lynn Linton argued in 1854, translating this account of a legal situation into claims about a psychological or emotional state of affairs serves only to obscure the very real disadvantages experienced by married women. Hence, while she claimed that conservatives mistakenly described marriage as involving a "beautiful ... ideal" in which husband and wife were "united by bonds none could break-their two lives welded together, one and indivisible for ever," for her, under existing laws, marriage should instead be understood to involve "the absorption of the woman's whole life in that of the man's ... the entire annihilation of all her rights, individuality, legal existence, and his sole recognition by the law" (257). The identity of interests produced by the law, she argued, is nothing more than a "legal fiction" having no necessary correlation to the emotional lives of the two parties.

In the context of these debates, Walter's claims to know, to sympathize with, and to be able to speak for his beloved seem like a nearly parodie exploitation of the slippage between conservative and reformist notions of sympathy. His example demonstrates, first, the irrelevance of female interiority to marital sympathy: he does not need Laura to be anything other than the beautiful object of his desire in order to use her as the agent of his amelioration or his subjective self-production. His identity is produced less in relation to her, in other words, than in relation to what he says about himself in relation to her. Second, Walter's example indicates the ambiguity that so often arose in discussions of marital sympathy regarding whether husbands and wives sympathize with one another because they have the same interests or whether "sympathy" is merely the name given to married women's inability under the law to articulate any interests other than their husbands'. Walter's example thus calls attention to the impossibility of distinguishing sympathy from projection, in general, and its particular impossibility in a situation in which there seems to be so little available to sympathize with. As one popular saying put it, under the law, "'Husband and wife are one person' and that one is the husband" (qtd. in Besant 8). The fact that in Laura's case there is no there there only literalizes such an assertion. As a result, we are left with a strangely doubled vision of Walter's marriage to Laura that makes it seem simultaneously like an affirmation of his claim to love her and so to know her in a way that legitimates his marriage to her, and also like a demonstration of the extent to which sympathy can function autonomously from its purported object.