Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

Secrets Not Revealed: Possible Stories in The Woman in White
later one, when he surprises Marian by turning round a corner “from
the High Road” and suddenly standing before her “as if he had
sprung up out of the earth” (245). Even on the “way to Knowlesbury,”
the novel’s place of enlightenment, Walter is constantly pestered by
two nameless spies, one of whom had just been passing “rapidly on
his left side,” when the other “sprang” to his “right side,” as he tells
us, “—and the next moment the two scoundrels held me pinioned
between them in the middle of the road” (466). 8
Certainly, then, the roads and ways of Collins’s narrative are anything
but a safe and clearly demarcated place. Instead they seem to be
densely besieged, as it were, by other possibilities, lying in wait to
unbalance the different first-person narrators who are attempting to
walk, and thereby pave the textual paths. It is important, however,
that these possibilities are generated by something that exists in an
eminent mode of negativity or latency. 9 They are generated by something
that seems not to exist, in other words, so that the very possibility
of its sensational upsurge is precisely, if paradoxically, generated
by what is apparently not known, not perceived or not in view. This
trembling mood of impending revelations, latent possibilities and
negative specificities manifests itself when Laura and Marian are out
for a walk near Blackwater Park. Both women, in this instance, can
perceive something or someone wandering about in the misty
grounds around them, but neither of them is sure what it is exactly,
whether it is a man or a woman, or just a product of their nervous
fancy:
“Hush!” she whispered. “I hear something behind us.”
“Dead leaves,” I said, to cheer her, “or a twig blown off the trees.”
“It is summer time, Marian; and there is not a breath of wind. Listen!
I heard the sound, too—a sound like a light footstep following us.
“No matter who it is, or what it is,” I said; “let us walk on […].” (239)
This may count as a typical passage because it captures the permanent
feeling of “something behind” or around the characters—no “matter
who it is or what it is”—accompanying them in terms of an indeter-
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