Woman in White Part 1: Santa Croce

I read the first 30% of The Woman in White today! So Laura may have been exaggerating that it could be read in 2 hours, or maybe she is a way faster reader than I am. But it is definitely delightful and fast-paced and amusing, like a book that can be read in 2 hours (which is maybe not even a Baby-Sitter's Club book, but maybe is one of the Alice books? not the ones by Lewis Carroll, which are actually on my list!) (nb I did not think it would actually take 2 hours.) I did some of my reading in the cloister at Santa Croce, so when the artist guy (I barely know his name because mostly he was the narrator of his own part of the story) was rhapsodizing towards the beginning of the book about the great time he was having in the drawing room overlooking the terrace, I could sympathize because I was having a great time on a terrace too! Well, not a terrace, but a colonnade of slim pillars around a green courtyard, with a tower rising into the blue sky over the wall, and rosebushes with something that might have meant "[do not touch] le rose" signs on them. Forbidden! And also eventually an Italian couple hanging out and being (unobtrusively) romantic. So while I cannot remember the first time I fell in love with a blue-eyed girl (and if I could it would be different from a male Victorian drawing master falling in love with his pupil, promise) and so cannot relive his first love with him, I _can_ relive how great it was to be in that drawing room with him, because it was great to read about being in that drawing room.

Rather than irritatingly recount the plot as I've been doing with Vanity Fair, I offer some scattered reflections on Woman in White, which may be slightly less spoiler-y for those who haven't read it & may be more fun to read for those who have:

• OK, what's up with Marian Halcombe's weird androgyny & amusingly sarcastic self-directed misogyny? (Ha ha look how similar "androgyny" and "misogyny" look. Weird!) What's the point of her having this drop-dead gorgeous figure and ugly, mannish, dark-skinned face? And what's with the artist guy (I promise I will learn his name for next time. Hardwicke? something like that) all lusting after her until he can see her face, and then just thinking she's smart and great, but falling for the other sister? I guess her hot (girly) bod and fugly (boyly) face symbolize her own divided nature, where she is smarter and funnier than most girls but aware of her (genetic?) (physiological?) (socialized?) female weaknesses, which make being smart and funny useless traits for girls. That's a pretty typical Victorian woman problem, but it is annoying! All the self-hating comments about women are getting pretty wearing, especially since they make it seem like Collins is making fun of her when otherwise she seems like a pretty likable and charming person. I guess likable characters in Collins always have amusing foibles, like liking roses. And also IS she so great? I had my suspicions when she was like, "Let's not tell Laura about the girl who looks just like her." Is she in on some secret? Now that I've gotten to the part where I'm reading her diary I think she isn't in on the secret, but it would be interesting if she were! Also it's fun reading these sensation novels and suspecting EVERYONE. 
• Now I'm trying to remember if any of the narrators in The Moonstone were bad, or concealed information. No, they were totally frank and mostly good, unless you count the religious lady's annoying tendency to give people tracts as bad. But it was well-meaning! (Remind me to tell you about the hilarious tracts in Vanity Fair; I forgot about them.) So I guess we can trust all the narrators. They've been contacted after the fact, anyway, so by the time they start writing the secret is already out.
• Oh, also, is Marian's dark face related to, like, Ezra Jennings's dark face? Or one of the Armadales? Is there a mixed-race colonial thing going on? Probably not--she is not mysterious enough--but we know WC likes this stuff.
• Doubles! That is another thing he likes. I had the main secret of Woman in White spoiled for me when I read some scholarly article about WiW and Lady Audley's Secret, but now I thankfully can't remember what it was. But I knew there would be doubles! But I did not suspect who the doubles would be until the narrator was beginning to suspect them himself, like maybe three pages before the doubling was specifically pointed out to us. OMG you guys I love doubles. Especially girl doubles, like Patty Duke! The best. But now I am tortured by the question of what is the point of this particular set of doubles. In Lady Audley there was actually a lot of foreshadowing about how Lady Audley and her maid looked very similar, except the maid was almost colorless and Lady Audley had high, fresh color, but you can replicate that with paint, and I was like, YES, I can't wait for this maid to put on paint and be Lady Audley, and also Lady Audley paints, or maybe the author is just trying to suggest the falseness of Lady Audley in general by implying how easily you could fake being her just by putting on lipstick (let's all do that today!) but you guys IT NEVER HAPPENED. My teacher suggested that Mary Elizabeth Braddon was writing week-to-week for the periodical press and probably put in a bunch of plot hooks early on but only followed up on some of them. I think in Woman in White it will happen, but I can't think how. Let's see: near-identical girls, one upper-class & rich, one lower-class & poor; one trusting and terrifyingly passive, one mentally-impaired in some way and possibly prone to rages and also extremely stubborn; one engaged to a baronet, one walled up in an asylum by that same baronet; one liking to wear white muslin to seem humble, one wearing white out of a monomaniacal devotion to the other one's mom. What can you do with that!
• POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT: some mixture of my own intution and possibly the lingering fumes of that article I read is inducing me to think that Laura will end up in Anne's insane asylum. There definitely needs to be a switcheroo! Maybe after they get married the baronet (I promise to learn his name too) will put Laura in the insane asylum and take out Anne (if he ever gets her back in) and . . . then what? uh, maybe he can convince Anne to kill herself or something, and then he can have all the money.
• SPEAKING OF WHICH: It doesn't bode well that that baronet is friends with the aunt and her Italian husband! They all stand to profit by Laura's death! Don't let those guys hang out.
• MARRIAGE SETTLEMENTS! Super interesting. Don't worry, lawyer guy, I don't think they are boring AT ALL. I found it very interesting when he said that no lawyer would make a settlement for a woman that would allow her husband to profit by her death. At first I was like, "but you always profit by your rich spouse's death!" but then I realized neither Paul nor I could profit from a spouse's death because your wage-earning spouse is always going to bring in more money alive and earning wages than the interest on whatever crummy 401(k) they leave behind. That is why being married to a wage-earner makes you a much more loving spouse than being married to an aristocrat. They had to fake that kind of devotion by making all these rules about life-interest and income. Maybe that is why the middle classes rose to become the Victorian ideal! because they were the best husbands and wives ever. SO COZY LET US SMOKE A PIPE AND ROCK THE CRADLE AND RULE THE WORLD!!!!! It turns out I really am the angel in the house.
• Anyway thank goodness women had dads and lawyers and stuff to look out for them with marriage settlements. Sometimes, I mean. Laura clearly doesn't; the lawyer is trying to get her a good deal, but the hilarious lazy uncle can't be bothered. Maybe he's in on it too! The lazy crumb. Where are you, Married Women's Property Act? Seriously, you are not until 1882? Well, there was an earlier version in 1870. But can you believe it was that late? The Woman in White is in 1859. The Victorian ladies couldn't believe it, either. I think even the least feminist ones--the ones who were like, "Why on earth would we want the vote?"--were like, "come on, guys, this is ridiculous. It does NOT make sense to let some guy you married have ALL your STUFF FOREVER." The antifeminist ones thought the state should take the money or something, but no one thought the husbands should have it. Interestingly, William Morris goes on in News from Nowhere about how the crazy utopian socialist society he invented didn't have feminists because all the "woman question" stuff had to do with property--whether women should hold it, earn it, be it--and all those questions are irrelevant when property has been abolished. Well, maybe they are! But the passage was still troubling, especially since the women in News from Nowhere all went around serving men lunch and inciting them to lust. One of them was a stonecutter, I guess.
• SUSPICION! That baronet fiance is SO SUSPICIOUS. Obviously he is terrible because the dog hates him. How old is that convention, that animals hate you if you're bad? Also the marriage settlement does not help. 
• EVIDENCE. Like The Moonstone (which I read last summer, and which I keep forgetting was written ten years after this--when Wilkie Collins eyes were bags of blood? Who told me that?) this novel is preoccupied with documentary evidence, and that preoccupation manifests in some interesting ways. For example, the artist guy's soliloquies about how hard it is to remember what it was like to first see the woman he loves, & how the place where he hung out with the woman he loves is different now that everything is changed and sad, seem like standard sentimental drivel, but I think they take on new significance if you think of them as attempts at gathering documentary evidence. How can you report objectively on falling in love? You can't! But it is important evidence for the story. Also, weird feelings that seem like crazy intuition are usually valid, but I guess they need to be backed up with evidence (oh yeah, she DOES look like the woman in white, and here's some evidence in a letter; oh yeah that guy IS bad, [evidence forthcoming?]). Then there's the dream Anne claims to have had, which is a crazy spiritualist feast of devils and angels and jumping insane arcs of light. At the beginning of the letter she's like, "in the Bible, dreams are true," and I'm pretty sure this dream is true, too, but it's going to have to be proved empirically; the dream isn't enough, although the dream itself may be psychological evidence of something real that has happened to Anne, that might make her have this kind of dream. See Robert Audley's distinction between circumstantial evidence and eyewitness evidence in Lady Audley. But enough circumstantial evidence can add up to something admissible.
• FINALLY, ON A RELATED NOTE: hilarious that a gentleman can just take your word of honor, but a lady needs PROOF (according to crummy baronet fiance.) Also that hard "proof" (a letter from Anne's mom) seems likely to have been forged, or to have something fishy at the bottom. But you've got to give a girl some hard evidence. Pragmatic, dishonorable, ESTJs that we are! Is that even a thing? What  is Miss Holcombe's Myers Briggs type? Fun new future activity for all novel characters, in once & future orals readings!
• Goodnight from a pragmatic, dishonorable, ESTJ hand-that-rocks-the-cradle angel in the house! I'll just finish my evening pipe and pop into bed, much later than I've gone to bed since I've come to Florence.