Wilkie Collins Critical Essay | Critical Essay by M. Kellen Williams

Critical Essay by M. Kellen Williams

SOURCE: “‘Traced and Captured By the Men in the Chaise’: Pursuing Sexual Difference in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White,” in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 28, No. 2, Spring, 1998, pp. 91-110.

In the following essay, Williams analyzes The Woman in White in the context of Victorian gender ideology.

Immediately after he learns that the woman in white is in fact a woman at large, Walter Hartright asks himself this question:

What had I done? Assisted the victim of the most horrible of all false imprisonments to escape; or cast loose on the wide world of London an unfortunate creature whose actions it was my duty, and every man's duty, mercifully to control?

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From first to last Anne Catherick, the eponymous woman in white, plays the part of a fugitive sign whose significance every one of the novel's persons is determined to secure. Tracked by a series...
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