Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

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PHILIPP ERCHINGER
tion, appears to be exceptionally “attractive” to Walter, as he informs
us after his friend Pesca has spread out the prospective situation
before him, “—and yet no sooner had I read the memorandum than I
felt an inexplicable unwillingness within me to stir in the matter” (11).
As in Walter’s reading of the job memorandum, the process of reading
Collins’s story is accompanied by a disquieting intimation of potential
meanings not yet divulged that seem to lurk “inexplicably” beside
and beneath the evident surface “matter,” warping and diverting the
successive unwinding of the narrative’s course.
Textually, the looming presence of this “unseen Design” (257) manifests
itself in a flickering “twilight” (3, 262) and nervous delay, invoking
an “ominous future, coming close” (257) whose very absence has
so famously exerted its spectacular, “chilling” (257) grip on many
readers’ nerves. 7 Thus, during Walter’s last night in London, when he
leaves the house of his mother and sister, whom he has just bid goodbye,
he does not go home straightaway, but hesitates and stops, feeling
reluctant to go to bed, and finally decides to walk “by the most
round-about way I could take” since this is the path he considers to
agree best with his “restless frame of mind and body” (14). Winding
his way “down slowly over the Heath”—the “prettiest part of my
night-walk”—, then passing “through a by-road where there was less
to see” (14), he eventually arrives at “that particular point of my walk
where four roads met” (14-15). Walter is deeply immersed in his own
thoughts by that time, mechanically turning towards London and
wandering along the “lonely high-road,” when he suddenly notices
that in front of him, “in the middle of the broad bright high road,” as
he puts it, “there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or
dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman,
dressed from head to foot in white garments” (15). The encounter has
become emblematic for the so called sensationalism of The Woman in
White whose narrative ways are characteristically prone, at all events,
to be obstructed and distracted by unforeseen hindrances, sudden
turns or the thrilling apparition of figures seeming to spring “out of
the earth,” such as Anne Catherick in this scene or Count Fosco in a