The Madwoman Outside the Attic: Eavesdropping and Narrative Agency in The Woman in White

Abstract

Frederick Walker's poster for the Olympic Theatre's 1871 dramatic adaptation of The Woman in White portrays a woman clothed in white who looks fearfully about her as she passes through a doorway or large, shuttered window. 1 The background's dark, starlit sky and the woman's frightened glance evoke a nighttime setting of mystery and suspense. The poster could represent any of several women in Wilkie Collins's 1860 novel The Woman in White: the first woman in white whom Walter Hartright and the reader encounter, later identified as Anne Catherick; Laura Fairlie, who, dressed in white as she walks on the terrace on the first evening of Walter's stay at Limmeridge House, possesses a striking resemblance to Anne; or as the black-and-white illustration suggests, a reversed image of Marian Halcombe as she embarks on her dangerous mission of aural surveillance in the middle of the narrative. The fact that the evocative woman of the title can refer to many of the text's female characters indicates the tenuousness of women's identities in the narrative. The ambiguity of the woman depicted and the fear she exhibits as she leaves a protected space reflect the novel's preoccupation with individual identity and with [End Page 303] the danger that women incur in leaving the spaces and activities deemed proper to them. 2 Eavesdropping--an improper activity on the border between inside and outside, private and public--figures transgression in the novel. An eavesdropper steals the secrets of private life and controls their dissemination in the public realm; by withholding or revealing people's secrets, the eavesdropper determines their social identity. In The Woman in White illicit overhearing reveals anxieties about the vexed relations between gender, identity, and narrative and social agency.