Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

Secrets Not Revealed: Possible Stories in The Woman in White
larity, order and control to be simultaneously inhabited by a subsidiary
world of irregularity, disorder, madness and doubt.
As a consequence, the established framework of Walter’s worldpicture
becomes increasingly shaken, as he subsequently embarks on
his new job as drawing-master at Limmeridge house, causing his
narrative imagination to grow almost as hazy as the water-colour
portrait by means of which he attempts to re-create the first “vivid
impression produced” on him “by the charm” of Laura Fairlie’s “fair
face and head, her sweet expression” (42) and, above all, her “lovely
eyes” with their “clear truthfulness of look” that evokes nothing less
than the ideal “light of a purer and a better world” (41). Symptomatically,
in Walter’s perception, Laura’s “fair, delicate” demeanour (41)
with her “faint and pale” coloured hair and her “truthful innocent
blue eyes” is suffused with something remarkably enigmatic. The eyes
shed a “charm—most gently and yet most distinctly expressed” over
her “whole face” that “so covers and transforms its little natural human
blemishes elsewhere, that it is difficult to estimate the relative
merits and defects of the other features” (41). As a description this
remains notably nondescript: the individual characteristics of Laura’s
figure seem to be veiled by a vague allure that is effectively not characterised,
and the “relative merits and defects” of her “features” are
covered and transformed by something that does, by itself, not feature
among them. The fineness and beauty of Laura, it seems, is inextricably
linked to a tendency of letting her disappear; for the vivid account
of her presence is overshadowed by an unaccountable manifestation
of absence, a dislocating “sensation” of a sense not located (“out of
place”) (42), ultimately suggesting no more than the bewildering
“idea of something wanting” (42), but evidently not there. “At one
time it seemed like something wanting in her; at another, like something
wanting in myself, which hindered me from understanding her
as I ought” (42). Paradoxically, then, Laura’s character contains a
component that it does not contain and yet unavoidably seems to call
up. “Something wanting, something wanting—and where it was and
what it was I could not say” (42). This obvious lack in Laura’s appear-
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