Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

Secrets Not Revealed: Possible Stories
in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White *1
PHILIPP ERCHINGER
I. Preamble: The Law of Reading Fiction
Connotations
Vol. 18.1-3 (2008/2009)
Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, first published between 1859 and
1860, features no less than ten different narrators whose eyewitness
accounts, diary entries, letters and personal statements make up the
separate parts of what the drawing master and editor Walter Hartright,
himself one of the chief narrators, claims to have afterwards
arranged in terms of a conclusive whole or, as he puts it in his brief
“introductory lines,” “one complete series of events” (Collins 1). 2
According to Hartright, the completeness and integrity of this “series
of events” has been achieved by a faithful application of what he
initially refers to as “the machinery of the Law.” He uses this “machinery”
as a model for his own narrative organisation, suggesting
that “the story here presented” is told just as it might have been told
in a Court of Justice, that is, “by more than one witness,” but also
“with the same object,” namely “to present the truth always in its
most direct and most intelligible aspect” (1). Thus, right from the start,
this “Law” is introduced as an operative framework for the whole
novel, a powerful means of selection and justification that has been
used to implement both the regularity of the narrative design and its
reliability. It is introduced as a theoretical model, in other words, that
has been devised to structure the practical writing and reading of the
narrative text, ensuring the credibility of its statements and the economy
of its effects. At the same time, however, judging by the “intro-
* For debates inspired by this article, please check the Connotations website at
.