Woman in White Part 3: Bargello

Warning: vague spoilers, which if you have not read The Woman in White you will very likely forget before you read it, because they are so vague. I'm 93% through, but wanted to pop in and comment now, for some reason!

Well things have gotten QUITE THRILLING. Fires in vestries and secret societies oh my! I must say that the Secret certainly did not meet most of my demands, but at least it was not the most obvious possible Secret. And it's interesting how a relatively banal action--writing something at the bottom of a page--can be considered as bad as murder. It's funny, but even though I think of myself as having a pretty clear sense of Victorian morality, I'm continually struck by how different it is in so many ways from ours. Specifically, I'm amazed by how important property is--very nearly as important, it seems, as human life. Again, I know this stuff, but in so many ways the Victorians seem to have such similar values to ours--our cozy middle-class values seem to have been based on theirs, even if we seem more OK with people having all different kinds of sex. But you know, so many modern-day Americans still hold on to a lot of that famous Victorian prudery.

But actually I think what's freaking me out is what I was reacting to at the beginning of The Woman in White--not the emergent middle-class Victorian morality, but the feudal/aristocratic values that are maybe on the downswing by the mid-nineteenth century, but are still a huge part of the legal system: the incredible importance placed on ownership, succession, legitimacy. In The Woman in White it's a dastardly deed to shut up a powerless girl in an insane asylum, but it's equally dastardly to prevent property from going to its rightful heir, even if that heir is blissfully ignorant of the property's existence, or in fact if that heir is unborn. When Marian writes to the family lawyer to ask if there's any legal pretext for Laura refusing to sign a document sight unseen, the lawyer writes back in horror that the document surely commits Laura to allow her husband to borrow against her principal, and that doing so would constitute a fraud against her unborn children. I guess we should think more about our unborn children (Paul & I have certainly not set up any kind of college fund or anything for ours! but also we live in an age where we get to decide not to have them, I guess), but I am interested that the worst crimes have to do with property rather than passion, or violence. I guess William Morris was right! There's also the idea that it's completely fine to have fathered a bastard, but completely the worst to pretend not to be a bastard. That's sexual-double-standard stuff again, but also the idea that sexual indiscretions, which we* think of as the thing the Victorians hated most, are nothing compared to a fraudulent claim to property.

This also makes me think of a hilarious debate we had in my Victorian Poetry class last year over a line from Aurora Leigh. I'm too lazy to look up the exact line, but Aurora runs into her little impoverished friend Marian (Marion? Marianne?) in Paris, and Marian has a baby with her, and Aurora knows Marian isn't married so she's like, "She must have stolen the baby!" I think the teacher and a couple of students read this literally: Aurora is naive, doesn't know where babies come from, thinks you can only get them if you're married, and so thinks Marian literally took someone else's baby. I think the rest of us thought Aurora was being metaphorical: she meant that any baby born out of wedlock was stolen, because it (and the presumed sexual pleasure that produced it?) hadn't been paid for by lawful matrimony. In either case there's an interesting connection between sex and money that's more complicated than, you know, worries about prostitution. Maybe this Aurora Leigh example contradicts what I'm noticing in The Woman in White--the idea that sexual indiscretions are not as bad as theft or fraud--but maybe it doesn't; maybe it suggests that the true sinfulness of adultery and sexual impurity only becomes clear when you link it to theft, to some kind of loss of someone's birthright. What do you think?

Anyway, the actual adultery in Woman in White seems kind of like a dumb afterthought, just to explain Anne & Laura's resemblance. I mean, we've been wondering about that, but what function does it have in the plot? What does it tell us about Anne, Laura, or any of the other characters involved? We just get the sense that all the Fairlie brothers are crumbs. Um, OK.

Now I will plunge back in to the novel! I just had to blog a little because I got to a part that was TOO THRILLING and I needed some relief. THE GUY IS IN FOSCO'S HOUSE. OMG so scary to just walk into the house of your adversary, ESPECIALLY when he wrote those scary things in your friend's diary. Watch out for mice, my friend!

Oh so I read some of this in the Bargello. It was the kind of boring, kind of exciting part where Hartright (is that his name? Is it really so allegorical as that?) is investigating Sir Perceval in the country, and having bad luck, but you think something exciting will happen and it does but is also kind of boring.

*by "we" I mostly mean some straw men. But someone thinks that way, I believe!