Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

Secrets Not Revealed: Possible Stories in The Woman in White
unseen Design in the long series of complications which had now fastened round
us” (257).
8 “The genre [of the sensation novel],” D. A. Miller writes, “offers us one of the
first instances of modern literature to address itself primarily to the nervous
system” (146). Because sensation seems to be something that is primarily received,
though, Miller points out, it has often been refused to be read, which is why the
sensation novel has been “relegated to the margins of the canon” (147). Contesting
this refusal to read sensation, Miller argues that it is important to take into
account “the novel’s implicit reading of its own (still quite ‘effective’) performative
dimension” (149). Although his interpretation of The Woman in White focuses
specifically on the relationship between sensation and gender, it may certainly
complement mine. For an introduction to the historical dimension of the genre see
Nemesvari and Pykett.
9 For an overview of this theme see the essays in Budick/Iser.
10
On this point, see also Hutter “Fosco Lives!” This essay collects a large
amount of textual evidence to demonstrate “the gradual breakdown of Walter’s
clarity of purpose, even his clarity of mind, as the novel moves toward his encounter
with Count Fosco” (212). Ultimately, Hutter argues that Fosco does not
die at the end of the novel, as Walter tells us. Even this, it seems, is a legitimate
possibility.
11
One of the most fascinating contemporary re-writings of Collins’s novel is
Sarah Waters’s Neo-Victorian novel Fingersmith, first published in 2002, which
explicitly develops many of the themes and elements that are implicit in The
Woman in White. For example, Waters’s novel dwells wittily on how exactly the
doctors, who had to supervise and confirm Laura’s referral to the asylum, are
made to believe that she is mentally ill, a detail that Collins’s text quickly circumvents
by referring to Laura’s complete, but rather unjustified, loss of memory
(443).
12
Extensive and well-argued treatment of the impact of evolutionary theory on
nineteenth century literature is offered by Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots and
George Levine’s Darwin and the Novelists, two books which have by now, and
rightly so, become classics in Victorian studies. For an example of the interaction
between evolutionary psychology and literary fiction see Erchinger, “Nascent
Consciousnesses, Unaccountable Conjunctions: Emergent Agency in Herbert
Spencer’s Principles of Psychology and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.”
13
A more extensive treatment of some of the theoretical issues related to this
claim can also, for example, be found in Iser’s Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre and in
Lobsien (31-49; 172-74).
14
I owe this point to Maurice Charney.
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