Abstract
The churchyard in Collins's The Woman in White represents an aesthetic metaphor for the Victorian social order and, in its enclosure, it seems to perpetuate its values and cultural tenets. In the course of the plot, however, it gradually transfigures itself into a gothic/fantastic space in which Anne Catherick's voice powerfully resonates and puts the Victorian legal system under discussion, in particular in her identification with madness and in her quality as illegitimate. Collins's sensation fiction thus mirrors the period's political and legal debates and powerfully destabilizes its acknowledged social relations, demonstrating that the role of literature is not only to create culture but to contest it as well.
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