Ocular Poetics of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore the critical role of vision and act of seeing in the poetics of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White in the context of the ocular dynamics of the nineteenth-century in general and the generic markers of the sensation novel in particular. The conceptual equivalence Collins builds between the agencies of seeing and knowing will be explored by paying particular attention to the ways in which power is exercised on the axis of the modality of the visual. Taking visibility and invisibility as the controlling agencies in The Woman in White, the discussion will focus on exploring the scopic aspects of the novel in its historical and theoretical context, and reading the semiosphere of the novel as a dynamic space of interaction between and vision and ocular power.