December review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, 1860. [Classic of genre fiction category]
I really, really wanted to like
The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins. It's the OG gothic horror novel, called the first "sensation fiction" and one of the first mystery novels, and there were parts of it that were really good! The mystery was fun (one of the reasons I actually finished it) but there were just some needling things that I could not get over. This was my December 2018 book, but I just needed such long cooling-off periods in between reads that it stretched over into the new year. (As did the penning of this blog post....) But here we go.
The Woman In White starts with "an eerie encounter on a moonlit road," according to all the summaries of it, but I'm going to be honest and say I just didn't find it quite that eerie. Maybe because I am distanced from the time in which it was written? But I digress. Walter Hartwright meets a woman on a road late at night, she tells him a story, and disappears into the darkness (despite wearing the brightest white the guy has ever seen). Then he hears a rumor she might've escaped from an asylum. My knee-jerk reaction is to always sympathize with women who claim unlawful incarceration, especially in asylums, especially with the imbalance of power that comes from taking away a human's agency and the stability of their mind. So I was already on this woman's side, and not Mr. Hartwright's, so I might not have been Mr. Collins's intended audience. I was forging my own path.
Things happen, Mr. Hartwright continues on to his job which (coincidentally) is tangentially related to that weird occurrence. He is to teach drawing to this young woman on an estate, whose uncle is psychosomatically incapacitated and particular, but thank goodness for the woman's sister, Marian, who could maybe fight for her if anything were to happen. But then enters my true rage. Marian begins to say things about her character as a woman being deficient for pretty much anything, all the while holding herself in high esteem.
Allow me to just summarize some of my feelings by treating you to a sampling of my rage-tweets on the matter:
So. the women are not allowed to be even full humans, let alone strong or capable or even fucking interesting. I have feelings. Continuing on with the mystery, enter new players that make me super skeptical, and another woman who just lives at the behest of her husband and is also portrayed as a viper and someone you should not like at all. Marian ends up spying on this husband and his friend (who is now married to her sister and trying to basically extort her but he's her husband so that's ok), and she overhears these things--cue more rage-tweets:
Marian of course catches her death while she eavesdrops and is PRETTY MUCH INCAPACITATED FOR A GOOD PORTION OF THE REST OF THE BOOK, allowing the next step of the shitty men's plan to come to fruition. AWESOME. But it's not like she could've done much, anyway, remember? She's just a woman.
The anger continued as I stubbornly made my way through the rest of the book. The twist was relatively interesting, and something that I only partially saw coming (the gist of it, not the particulars), and so I soldiered on.
The book is sort of an epistolary fiction, taking sections from each player and point of view, their diaries and correspondence, so it was interesting to move through different "versions" of the story, especially at the end when so much comes to a head and things are revealed. I can't really summarize the end because I am too tired for it and also no spoilers, but needless to say shit goes down, women get some measure of power, but ultimately it is the men who "fix" everything. Because of course. I would have liked this book more if the power the women got was sustained and appreciated. If Marian had actually used her strength to get her sister out after she, too, was wrongfully shut up in an asylum, instead of the men "allowing" her to do it behind the scenes. The suggestion that every move a woman made was foreseen and encouraged by the men around them was just infuriating, and the systematic denial of the women characters any sort of thought or even self-appreciation was just exhausting. I don't know if Wilkie Collins hated women or had complicated feelings about them and was just toeing the party line of the late 19th century, but the fact that this was a highly original type of story is diminished in my eyes by his treatment of these characters. In fact, the entire premise of the mystery depends on the subjugation and other-ness of the women involved, so really, this story could not have been told if he felt any differently about women.
Reader, I finished it. I suppose I am glad to have read it (something I always gauge myself on when I finish something I don't love), and I am glad to have had the outlet of Twitter and my friends to keep me sane through the reading of it.
