SOURCE: “Reading Blackwater Park: Gothicism, Narrative, and Ideology in The Woman in White,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XXV, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 291-305.

In the following essay, Bernstein considers the gothic setting of The Woman in White and its relation to the novel's “historical narratives of class, gender, and genre.”

With The Woman in White Wilkie Collins wrote, Peter Brooks notes, a “slightly perverse, dilatory, almost fetishistic text of narrative pleasure,” one replete with “readers and writers constantly reading one another, even when they weren't meant to” to such an extent that the novel suggests “a prelapsarian age of unlimited storytelling and the unlimited consumption of story: a world in which narrative, whatever the subject, enormously mattered.”¹ Walter Kendrick, similarly, has referred to the novel as an “endless chain of text on text,” a “second-degree text” by virtue of its “arrangement of realistic writing” from numerous narrators...