Seductive Visual Studies: Scientific Focus and Editorial Control in The Woman in White and All the Year Round

Abstract

The Woman in White is a text saturated with problematic desire. Walter Hartright’s desire for Laura Fairlie is forbidden due to their class difference. Marian Halcombe and Laura feel a mutual desire that is unsettled as it is extended to a triangulation that first includes Walter and then Sir Percival. Both Marian and Walter find that their fascination with Count Fosco — their simultaneous attraction to and repulsion by him — leads to a questioning of their own previously secure understanding of desire. Particularly in the case of Fosco’s effect on Marian and Walter, it is very often the visual study of another’s physical appearance that leads to these unsettling revelations about sexual desire. In The Woman in White, such visual studies take the form of over-written passages, obsessed with recording every detail the eye can absorb. These visual records hold an affinity with narratives of scientific investigation that purposely seek to unsettle previously accepted knowledge. Walter Hartright’s amateur detective work seeks to mimic the effect of such narratives as he compiles his evidence against Percival and the Count. The plot of the novel is indeed driven by Walter’s transformation from a poor detective, or poor observer of evidence, to a capable one. Early in the narrative, Walter is incapable of seeing the obvious meaning of Laura and Anne Catherick’s resemblance — that one of the two women must be the illegitimate product of adultery.