THE WOMAN IN WHITE AND GRAPHIC SEX

Abstract

WALTER HARTRIGHT, THE primary narrator of The Woman in White (1859–60), commences the novel with a declaration – “This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve” – followed by a complaint that relative poverty drove that “story” out of the courts because “the machinery of the Law” relies so heavily on “the lubricating influences of oil of gold” (5). Despite this beginning, the novel's concern with legal procedure is playfully opportunistic. Here Hartright grumbles about the Law's avaricious practice, but Collins will make a lawyer, Mr Wansborough, the key agent in Hartright's enrichment and social elevation. By contrast the novel is deeply engaged with its own historical moment as a time when creative endeavors of all kinds were being transformed by the laws of machinery. And thus it is the vehicle for Collins's metaphorical legal system – the creaking and covetous machine – that points to my present argument: that The Woman in White is English literature's first industrialized kunstlerroman, a portrait of the artist which seeks to reconcile representation and reproduction by equating modern modes of illustration with the primal goals of biological creation.