Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

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PHILIPP ERCHINGER
minate potential of mischief and covert activities whose exact purposes
and motives are still unclear. “In this dim light it is not possible to
be certain,” as Marian expresses it, unwittingly compressing the text’s
default mode into a single phrase (238). Something seems to be going
on secretly, but one can never be quite sure what. It is wholly appropriate,
therefore, that the novel is called The Woman in White because it
is this emphasis on something that lacks colour and shape but appears
to be positive that becomes embodied in the title character. In fact,
from the moment of Anne’s “sudden appearance in the road” which,
to Walter’s “rather startled” mind, seemed to be perfectly “empty the
instant before I saw you” (16), the narration proceeds in the lingering
presence of something conspicuously, almost tangibly absent that
tends to obfuscate and blur the meaning of whatever there is to read
or understand. Importantly, this want of insight also questions the
accuracy of Hartright’s narrating voice, as he walks “on together” (17)
with the white woman “whose name, whose character, whose story,
whose objects in life, whose very presence by my side,” as he wonders,
“were fathomless mysteries to me” (18). From this moment,
then, the narrating of the story is literally accompanied by an intellectual
deficiency, an experience not, or not fully, understood, a crime
not noticed, a blank not filled, a metaphorical whiteness that mars the
evidence and the reliability of what is deemed to be positively known.
It was like a dream. Was I Walter Hartright? Was this the well-known, uneventful
road, where holiday people strolled on Sundays? Had I really left,
little more than an hour since, the quiet, decent, conventionally-domestic
atmosphere of my mother’s cottage? (18)
After the woman in white has dramatically appeared in the middle of
the road, the familiar ways of making and perceiving the world can
no longer be trusted. Entering the narrative highway through a “gap
in the hedge” (16), Anne’s white figure cuts open the possibility of
other, alternative stories, suggesting that even the conventional and
domestic may not be what it appears to be. Having just escaped from
a medical asylum, her appearance shows the accepted sphere of regu-