Narratives of Sexual Trauma in Contemporary Adaptations of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman
in White
Jessica Cox
1.
‘I HAVE BEEN CRUELLY USED AND CRUELLY WRONGED’1
Wilkie Collins’s 1860 sensation novel, The Woman in White, opens with an image of a woman
traumatized. Anne Catherick, the woman in white of the title and the illegitimate daughter of
a gentleman and a servant woman, has escaped from a lunatic asylum where she has been
imprisoned by Sir Percival Glyde, in an attempt to prevent her revealing the secret of his own
illegitimacy. Glyde subsequently marries Anne’s half-sister, Laura Fairlie, and, in an effort to
secure his wife’s inheritance and with the help of the villainous Count Fosco, he switches her
identity with that of Anne Catherick. When Anne dies (of natural causes), she is buried under
the name of Laura Fairlie, while Laura is imprisoned in an asylum under the name of Anne
Catherick. The novel thus focuses persistently on women traumatized by their encounters
with a repressive patriarchal system which enables, with relative ease, the systematic abuse
of the Victorian woman.2
In recent years, The Woman in White has become an important source text for neoVictorian authors, screenwriters and stage producers. The reasons behind the proliferation of
adaptations of Collins’s most famous novel are various: the continuing popularity of gothic
and sensation fiction suggests one possible explanation, while the some of the dominant
themes of Collins’s novel – the search for identity and the challenge to established gender
roles, as well as the effects of traumatic experience on an individual – continue to appeal to
modern audiences. The Woman in White is one of a number of Victorian novels repeatedly
subject to literary and filmic adaptation. Other works popular with neo-Victorian novelists and
screenwriters include Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens’s Great
Expectations (1860), and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898).3 Significantly, all these
novels contain images of traumatized women: Collins’s Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie,
Brontë’s Bertha Mason, Dickens’s Miss Havisham and James’s unnamed governess, suggesting
that contemporary writers are, at least in part, concerned with exploring trauma through a
return to the past.4
It seems apt that Collins’s woman in white, whose ghostly appearance in the middle of
a moonlit road in the dead of night enthralled Walter Hartright and a generation of Victorian
readers, should continue to haunt the literary imagination, providing the starting point for a
neo-Victorian return to a past which remains a spectral presence. In contemporary
adaptations and reworkings of Collins’s novel, trauma retains a central role. However, a
number of literary and filmic texts which draw explicitly on the novel introduce elements of
sexual trauma, which are significantly absent not only from Collins’s original sensation novel,
but from Victorian literature more generally. Amongst these recent reworkings are James
Wilson’s The Dark Clue (2001), written as a sequel to The Woman in White, Sarah Waters’s
Fingersmith (2002), Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006) and Linda Newbery’s Set in
Stone (2006), all of which adapt aspects of the Laura Fairlie-Anne Catherick plot from Collins’s
novel, and the 1997 television adaptation of The Woman in White, directed by Tim Fywell and
written by David Pirie. This essay explores some of the intersections between Victorian and
neo-Victorian narratives in terms of representations of sexual trauma, examining the
engagement with and motivation behind the theme of sexual trauma which features in these
contemporary adaptations of The Woman in White. I consider the extent to which these
narratives seek to highlight sexual abuse, which remained largely veiled in Victorian literature
and culture, and the apparent ongoing problems of articulation inherent in contemporary
portrayals of sexual abuse and trauma.
2.
TRAUMA NARRATIVES AND THE NEO-VICTORIAN PROJECT5
Trauma is a prevalent feature in contemporary literature – from post-colonial writing, to
trauma memoirs, to historical fiction. This reflects a broader trend within modern culture in
which trauma narratives – personal, political, national and international – are a persistent
presence in newspapers, magazines, soap operas and the cinema. This pervasive interest in
trauma is also evident in the neo-Victorian project, in which authors and screenwriters
repeatedly emphasize historical traumas. Laurie Vickroy suggests one possible reason behind
the historical author’s interest in trauma: ‘Testifying to the past has been an urgent task for
many fiction writers as they attempt to preserve personal and collective memories from
assimilation, repression, or misrepresentation’ (2002, p.1). Marie-Luise Kohlke identifies
trauma as one of the key features of neo-Victorianism when she proposes that trauma
functions as a central motif in neo-Victorian fiction:
the [Victorian] period is configured as a temporal convergence of multiple historical
traumas [...]. These include both the pervasive traumas of social ills, such as disease,
crime, and sexual exploitation, and the more spectacular traumas of violent civil
unrest, international conflicts, and trade wars that punctuated the nineteenth century.
(2008, p.7)
These traumas, Kohlke suggests, have clear parallels with contemporary culture, hence
providing another possible reason for the persistent presence of trauma narratives in neoVictorian texts and the apparent desire to rewrite Victorian ‘trauma’ narratives such as The
Woman in White.6
The adaptations of The Woman in White with which I am concerned focus not on
trauma in its broader historical sense – in relation to empire, trade wars, and conflicts, or
‘social ills’ in terms of disease or even the organized exploitation of Victorian women – but,
like the original novel, on individual, personal narratives of trauma, and (in a departure from
Collins’s narrative) specifically sexual trauma (sexual abuse, incest, rape). However, while
these works are concerned with individuals’ personal experiences of trauma, together they
suggest an overarching concern with the prevalence and representation – or rather, the lack
of representation – of sexual abuse in Victorian literature and culture. To this end, they can
be seen as an attempt to offer a ‘corrective’ to the Victorian past, to acknowledge the
widespread existence of traumas which were all too frequently concealed from public view.
As Vickroy observes, ‘[w]ider cultural traumas are contained in the psychological and physical
experiences of a few characters’ (2002, p.xv); ‘representative characters’ can ‘exemplify social
conflicts and wounds’ and ‘the individual body becomes a historical marker to unspeakable
experience but also a marker for potential change if healed’ (ibid, p.xiii). Further, the neoVictorian trauma narrative, in uncovering the repressed traumas of the past, has the potential
to ‘critique culturally dominant views of identity and marginality and resist suppression of
traumatic events’ (ibid, p.xiv). In this respect, there is a clear parallel between neo-Victorian
fictions (literary and screen), and one of the central aims of Victorian studies: to identify those
discourses which remain hidden within Victorian literature and culture, and to challenge those
narratives and views which assist in this process of concealment.
The persistent concern with individual experiences of sexual trauma in contemporary
reimaginings of The Woman in White thus suggests a broader concern with the Victorian
experience of such traumas, and the need to return to the past in order to uncover and
ultimately heal those wounds, to address and redress the fact that ‘much of traumatic history,
particularly that which affects the socially marginal, has remained repressed, unwritten’ (ibid,
p.167). Louisa Hadley notes that neo-Victorian novels often ‘incorporate narrative
descriptions of private acts and desires that would have been elided in Victorian fictional
accounts’ (2010, p.157), including sexual abuses. Paradoxically, however, the return to the
sexual traumas of the past suggests a displacement: the traumas of the present are obscured,
veiled even as they are reimagined within a historical setting. The repeated engagement with
the theme of sexual trauma in reworkings of Collins’s sensation novel raises further significant
questions: about contemporary narratives’ deviation from the original text, and more broadly
about the manner in which neo-Victorian texts seeks to revise both the Victorian sensation
novel and the Victorian past. These narratives offer a commentary on contemporary concerns
and anxieties, as well as indicating possible parallels between Victorian and contemporary
literature and culture in terms of the problems of representation inherent in narratives of
sexual trauma from both the past and present.
Narratives of trauma suggest the potential cathartic effects of writing trauma, and
point to a possible reason for the prevalence of trauma narratives in the neo-Victorian project:
the traumas of the past – so often ignored at the time – must be written in order for us to
come to terms with our collective history; we must write the traumas of the past in order to
confront and ultimately deal with them.7 In parallel to this, the act of writing functions as a
central motif in neo-Victorian trauma fiction: it is frequently through writing that characters
resolve, or at least confront, past traumas. This is evident in a number of adaptations of The
Woman in White. In both Wilson’s The Dark Clue and Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, the
protagonists are engaged in biographical projects, and through the act of researching and
writing about others’ traumatic experiences, confront their own repressed past and emotions,
while in Set in Stone and Fywell’s film adaptation, diaries, letters and the act of narration play
pivotal roles in the unfolding of the story.8 Discussing Setterfield’s novel in relation to Dori
Laub’s work on trauma, Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn note the importance of narrating
the past as a means of dealing with the past: ‘it is only in narrating the experience, and ‘being
listened to – and heard,’ that ‘the cognizance, the ‘knowing’ of the event is given birth to’’
(Laub qtd. in Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, p.54).
3.
WILKIE COLLINS AND VICTORIAN REPRESENTATIONS OF SEXUAL TRAUMA
Sexual trauma does not form part of Collins’s original narrative, though the narrative
references illicit sexual relations (Philip Fairlie’s affair with Anne Catherick’s mother, resulting
in the birth of an illegitimate daughter), and includes a portrayal of an abusive marriage
(between Laura Fairlie and Sir Percival Glyde). Although Glyde represents the figure of the
abusive husband who wields total control over his legally disempowered wife, the narrative
strongly implies that this abuse does not take a sexual form. His assertion that his wife is ‘not
in the least likely’ to bear children (Collins 2003, p.326), in light of the infrequent use and
unreliability of contraceptive methods at this time, suggests that the marriage is a celibate
one. Hence while the narrative is concerned with the offenses committed by the figure of the
abusive husband against his wife, sexual abuses – which, like the excessive control Glyde
wields over Laura, were effectively condoned by the Victorian legal system – are notably
absent from the text, hinting at their unspeakable nature within a Victorian context.9
In a later novel, Man and Wife (1870), Collins does offer a representation of the
sexually abused woman through his portrayal of the character of Hester Dethridge, a mute,
who suffers various abuses at the hands of her husband, culminating, the narrative implies, in
rape. However, hardly surprisingly in a mainstream Victorian novel, the nature of the abuse is
obscured, and it is left to the reader to interpret the true meaning of her confession. In the
narrative about her married life she writes, ‘No mortal eyes but mine will ever see these lines.
Still, there are things a woman can’t write of even to herself. I shall only say this. I suffered the
last and worst of many indignities at my husband’s hands’ (p.599; my emphasis). In order, no
doubt, to avoid outraging Victorian sensibilities, Collins’s text only hints at what has occurred;
thus the narrative masks the rape of Hester by her husband, just as nineteenth-century law
masked the abuse of women behind the veil of the sanctity and respectability of marriage.
Lisa Surridge reads Hester’s self-imposed muteness, following the murder of her husband, as
representative of ‘the unspeakable in the novel’ (1996, p.105), and suggests that ‘Hester’s
silence seems to represent society’s inability to listen rather than her literal inability to speak’
(p.106), indicating Victorian society’s tendency to ignore the (sexual) abuse of women for
propriety’s sake. It is further significant that what is ‘unspeakable in the novel’, is, as Hester’s
confession suggests, also unwriteable: Hester cannot bear to commit the details of her
husband’s abuses against her body to paper, even when there is no one to ‘bear witness’ to
her narrative. Unlike later protagonists in the neo-Victorian novel, she is unable to work
through her traumatic experiences, to find catharsis through writing. Her failure to adequately
deal with the trauma she has experienced ultimately results in an extreme reaction against
the patriarchal system which she views as responsible for the abuse she has suffered when
she murders her husband and later attacks the novel’s villain, Geoffrey Delamayn, who
subsequently dies. Though Collins cannot fully articulate the sexual trauma endured by Hester,
the effects of her inability to process her past are clearly apparent in his narrative: unable to
‘bear witness’ to her own traumatic experience, she enacts a violent revenge on those she
perceives as responsible for the systematic abuse of the Victorian wife. While her acts of
violence in themselves may represent a form of catharsis, a step towards healing the wounds
inflicted by the past, they ultimately inflict further damage on the abused woman: Hester is
rendered mute following her attack on her first husband, while the consequence of her attack
on Geoffrey is her lifetime imprisonment in an asylum.
While sexual abuse is rendered an ‘unspeakable’ act in Man and Wife, Collins
nevertheless succeeds in highlighting the existence of such crimes in Victorian Britain.
Furthermore, the narrative is significant in terms of its portrayal of the long-term results of
traumatic experience. This represents a significant development from his earlier novel, in
which these lasting effects are underplayed. Although The Woman in White opens with an
image of the traumatized woman, and subsequently details the traumatic events endured by
Laura Fairlie, including the loss of her identity and her false imprisonment in a lunatic asylum,
it concludes with no visible effects of the past apparent in any of the three central characters
(Laura, Marian and Walter),10 although the past remains something which must be forgotten,
suppressed, silenced. Laura Fairlie does not narrate her own story of traumatic suffering;
indeed, she rarely speaks in the novel. When, at the conclusion of the narrative, she threatens
to refer to the past, she is silenced by Marian:
‘My darling Walter,’ [Laura] said, ‘must we really account for our boldness in
coming here? I am afraid, love, I can only explain it by breaking through our rule,
and referring to the past.’
‘There is not the least necessity for doing anything of the kind,’ said Marian. ‘We
can be just as explicit, and much more interesting, by referring to the future.’
(p.626)
The end of the novel, then, looks to the future, rather than the past: the past is to be forgotten,
laid to rest; it cannot be seen to exert an influence on the present. Contemporary trauma
narratives, in contrast to this, suggest the impossibility of forgetting: the past will influence
the present and the future will rear its head through bad dreams, flashbacks, and other
manifestations. Indeed, Vickroy defines trauma as ‘a response to events so overwhelmingly
intense that they impair normal emotional or cognitive responses and bring lasting
psychological disruption’ (2002, p.ix). While Anne Catherick undoubtedly suffers ‘lasting
psychological disruption’ as a consequence of her treatment at the hands of her mother,
Glyde, and Fosco, the image of Laura at the end of the novel as contented wife and mother
would appear to call into question the extent to which she endures a significant degree of
trauma. In The Woman in White, the central characters are able to move beyond their
traumatic ordeals, and eventually to experience a ‘new sense of freedom from the long
oppression of the past’ (Collins, 2003, p.620).
In contradistinction to this, there are some indications in the novel that the events of
the past have had a significant effect: the refusal to talk of the past on the part of Walter,
Marian, and Laura implies that traumatic events have been deliberately suppressed as a
means of coping with them. Furthermore, while Laura is forbidden to speak of the past, others
speak of it through the construction of the narrative of The Woman in White, which is collated
by Walter Hartright after the events in the novel have taken place, a process which might be
viewed as a cathartic working through of past traumas.11 However, the exclusion of Laura
Fairlie from this process – the character at the centre of the novel’s traumatic events –
undermines its effectiveness as a means of processing the consequences of these traumas:
not only is she forbidden from speaking of the past, she is further silenced through the
presentation of a narrative consisting of multiple accounts with the notable exception of her
own. The image of the happy wife at the conclusion of the novel suggests that either she has
suffered no lasting effects from her experiences, or that she has repressed events to such an
extent that there is no outward sign of them. Either way, there is no evidence that she has
undergone a process of healing, which the neo-Victorian trauma narrative implies is so
important.
Collins’s refusal to explicitly acknowledge the long-term effects of traumatic
experience in The Woman in White, his representation of sexual abuse in Man and Wife as
something unspeakable/unwriteable, and the broader concealment of sexual abuse within
Victorian culture points to one possible reason for the inclusion of narratives of sexual trauma
in later adaptations of Collins’s work: an attempt to redress a historical injustice, and to
highlight the extent to which Victorian literature and culture sought to conceal the abuses that
took place. Indeed, the neo-Victorian concern with (sexual) trauma stands in direct contrast
to the Victorian refusal to acknowledge the widespread existence of such abuses. The refusal
to look to the past, to consider its influence, to work through its traumas, marks a point of
distinction with the neo-Victorian project, which is frequently concerned with revisiting,
acknowledging and working through the traumas of the past.
4.
REIMAGINING TRAUMA IN ADAPTATIONS OF THE WOMAN IN WHITE
Whereas allusions to sexual trauma are notable by their absence in The Woman in White,12
such abuses play a central role in recent adaptations of Collins’s novel: in Fywell’s 1997 screen
adaptation of the novel, the ‘secret’ which Glyde attempts to protect is his abuse of the young
Anne Catherick, rather than his illegitimacy; in Wilson’s The Dark Clue, Walter’s desire for
Marian (evident in the original narrative) culminates in rape; in The Thirteenth Tale, there is a
strong suggestion that the three sisters (the twins Adeline and Emmeline and the third sister,
whose identity is unknown but who is given the name ‘Shadow’) are the product of incest (the
twins) and rape (‘Shadow’); while in Newbery’s Set in Stone, the apparently respectable Ernest
Shadow is discovered to have repeatedly abused his daughter Juliana, who subsequently bears
a child by him. However, although reworkings of The Woman in White include an insistent
focus on sexual trauma, paradoxically, these acts are frequently obscured from the
reader/viewer: scenes of explicit sexual violence and abuse are omitted or veiled. While rape
and sexual abuse are almost entirely absent from the Victorian novel, neo-Victorian fiction
and film frequently references such abuses in no uncertain terms, yet it often does not fully
represent these traumas. These narratives seek to make visible that which the Victorian novel
obscures: the sexual abuse of women in Victorian culture (linked to the notions of repressive
patriarchy with which The Woman in White, and Collins’s other fiction, is so overtly
concerned). Paradoxically, however – like Victorian fiction – they struggle to fully articulate
the instances of sexual abuse which are so central to the characters’ lives, and which have
such profound effects.
The opening scene of Fywell’s 1997 screen adaptation hints at the trauma which lies
at the centre of the secrets revealed. In a deviation from Collins’s novel, and one which places
Marian, rather than Walter, centre stage, it is Marian’s narration that opens the film, with the
words ‘The bad dreams always come back again’ hinting at the traumatic nature of the
character’s experiences. The film includes several significant departures from the original
narrative: gothic elements are privileged; the three sisters all share the same father; and
sexual trauma forms a key part of the story. This theme is introduced initially by one of the
servants in Sir Percival Glyde’s pay, who accuses Walter of sexual harassment, asserting that
‘he tried to make me undress’ (Fywell, 1997, 00:03:02). The notion of false accusations of
sexual harassment as a source of power is further suggested by Marian forcing the doctor to
give her information about the imprisonment of Anne Catherick by threatening to accuse him
of improper behaviour. On the one hand, this speaks to a modern concern regarding the
problematic nature of accusations of rape and sexual abuse, but it also serves to highlight the
powerless position of the Victorian woman, whose body often represented her only limited
source of power. The problematic nature of such power is suggested by the inclusion of two
characters who suffer rape and sexual abuse at the hands of Glyde – Laura Fairlie, who, unlike
her original, is subject to sexual as well as other forms of abuse by her husband, and Anne
Catherick, abused by Glyde as a young child. Laura tells Marian: ‘I do not want children – not
the way he touches me when he...’ (ibid). The significant gap here is suggestive of the
problems of articulation relating to narratives of (sexual) trauma, though she continues, ‘I
never knew men could enjoy the act, even in hatred’ (ibid), making clear the nature of her
husband’s abuse.
Similar problems of articulation pervade Anne Catherick’s story. The doctor
responsible for her treatment informs Marian that ‘When she was twelve, she came to see me
because she was morally degraded’ (ibid), and later revelations confirm that this ‘moral
degradation’ was the consequence of the sexual abuse she suffered – emphasizing Victorian
attitudes towards victims of sexual abuse, who were generally perceived as ‘fallen’ regardless
of the circumstances which led to the abuse. Like other victims of sexual attacks, Anne has
problems articulating her traumatic experience: she records it in a diary paper, but then buries
it in her father’s grave – hinting at the unspeakable nature of her experience, and suggesting
significant parallels with the character of Hester in Man and Wife, whose inability to articulate
her experience of sexual trauma is, as we have seen, symbolized by her refusal to speak at all,
by her self-imposed muteness. In Fywell’s adaptation, the literal burying of the narrative of
sexual abuse has obvious symbolic connotations: unable to confront the implications of her
experience, Anne ‘buries’ the memory of it. The potential healing process offered by
articulating her experience through writing is disrupted by her subsequent burial of the
narrative, which suggests an element of regression in terms of dealing with sexual trauma:
details are recalled only to be repressed again. Exhuming the grave some years later in an
attempt to discover a missing will, Walter and Marian discover her confession, written when
she was twelve years old: ‘My own secret is I have one who comes to my bed at night as a
husband’ (ibid). The words anticipate those used to describe the abuse of Juliana in Newbery’s
Set in Stone (‘her father had been regularly coming to her bedroom during the night. He had
– in short, he had used her as a substitute wife’, 2006, p.252), while the burial of the diary
paper in the grave of the father emphasizes the expectation that the father should/will protect
the vulnerable daughter – an expectation which is entirely undermined in both texts.13
Problems of articulation in relation to sexual trauma are also evident in Wilson’s The
Dark Clue. Towards the end of the novel, the character of Walter, who has been engaged to
write a biography of the painter J. M. W. Turner, supposedly driven to madness14 by his
attempts to unravel the details of his subject’s life, rapes Marian. The incident is recorded by
Marian herself in her diary, but although the events immediately before the rape are detailed
in a manner too explicit for the Victorian reader, the rape itself is obscured by a significant gap
in her narration of events. At the point at which the rape takes place, Marian’s diary contains
her reflections on the event rather than a description of what actually occurs:
[W]as not this the hellish parody of something that – despite myself – I had thought
of? Had I not sometimes dreamed about it, even; and for a moment after I’d woken
fancied I felt him beside me? […] [M]ixed with the horror and the pain – I cannot deny
it – there was a throb of pleasure too. A mockery – an inversion, like a Black Mass – of
the joy I had imagined. So it was not enough that Walter should betray me, his wife,
his children, himself. I must betray them all, too. (p.367)
Hadley, commenting on the elision of the rape from Marian’s narrative, offers the following
explanation: ‘Given that the account is taken from Marian’s diary, it is perhaps not surprising
that she chooses to omit the terrifying moment and instead ponder Walter’s mental state as
he committed the act’ (2010, p.47). However, this explanation overlooks both the significance
of this omission in terms of trauma narratives (the repression of traumatic events) and the
importance of what replaces her description of the rape: an acknowledgement of her own
desire for Walter, and positioning of herself as perpetrator (betrayer) as well as victim in this
scenario. On a simplistic level, Wilson’s inclusion of Walter’s rape of Marian, and particularly
her admission that she experiences ‘a throb of pleasure’ during the act appears problematic,
raising questions about issues of consent which are common in contemporary discourses on
rape. However, in terms of the narrative’s portrayal of trauma, Marian’s admission links her
to images of trauma victims in contemporary culture, where feelings of guilt and responsibility
are acknowledged as common amongst victims of sexual abuse.
Wilson’s reimagining of Collins’s ‘hero’, Walter Hartright, as a rapist is also potentially
problematic in terms of the liberties contemporary writers take with Victorian narratives.15
However, Wilson reinvents Collins’s character in line with contemporary attitudes towards
sexual abuse: just as Marian perceives herself as both victim and betrayer, Walter is presented
as victim as well as criminal. Nevertheless, the manner in which not only the narrative as a
whole, but Marian specifically seeks to absolve him of responsibility for the attack (‘what he
had done to me was an act of despair’, p.378) makes for uncomfortable reading. While both
Marian and Walter are forced to deal with the personal traumas that result from the latter’s
investigations into Turner’s own ‘dark’ life, the narrative, like Collins’s original novel,
concludes with the suggestion that trauma will be repressed rather than confronted. Marian
records in her diary the agreement she makes with Walter regarding what has passed between
them: ‘You may talk to me of what happened between us if you will, but neither you nor I will
ever mention it to Laura or to any other living soul, and it will never happen again’ (p.386).
The postscript to the narrative refers to ‘the invisible threads that run between us [Marian
and Walter]’ (p.389), indicating that the traumas of the past are not as easy to suppress as
Collins’s novel appears to suggest, and yet, the problems of articulation and the desire to
suppress the past which are evident in the neo-Victorian novel links it to its Victorian
predecessors.
In Set in Stone, problems of articulation around the issue of sexual abuse persist.
Juliana Farrow, the victim of the abuse, like Collins’s Laura Fairlie, is effectively silenced in the
narrative. As in Collins’s novel, Newbery’s work presents multiple narrative voices, but
Juliana’s is not one of them. The story of her abuse at the hands of her father and the birth of
the child fathered by her father is not only related by other characters, but comes to them
indirectly as well. Samuel Godwin, based on Collins’s Walter Hartright, hears of Ernest
Farrow’s abuse of his daughter through his predecessor, Gideon Waring, in whom Juliana has
confided. The novel’s other central narrator, Charlotte Agnew, based partially on Anne
Catherick, becomes aware of the abuse through a conversation with her predecessor, Eliza
Dearly, who has learnt of it from the suicide note of Juliana’s mother, whom Juliana had also
told. When Samuel confronts Mr Farrow about the accusations, he is effectively unable to
speak of the act itself, which instead is initially conveyed through significant gaps in his speech:
‘You have – I – I know!’ (Newbery, 2006, p.276). Realizing that his ‘inarticulacy seemed to give
[Mr Farrow] relief’ (ibid), Samuel finally manages to convey his meaning: ‘Juliana has been
most foully abused, and by yourself –’ (p.277). Even here, however, the nature of the abuse is
veiled, obscured. It is, as Samuel notes, ‘something so repellent that I cannot bring myself to
give it words’ (ibid). The gaps in place of an explicit articulation of the act itself recall both
Fywell’s adaptation and Wilson’s novel, and indeed such instances are a distinctive feature of
trauma narratives.16 In all these works, then, significant narrative gaps stand in place of scenes
of sexual trauma, raising important questions about neo-Victorian articulations of trauma.17
While Newbery’s narrative, like Fywell’s and Wilson’s works, struggles to fully
articulate the scenes of sexual trauma which drive it, it is, nevertheless, concerned with the
long-term effects of traumatic experience. The setting for the main action of the narrative
shifts from the 1850s of Collins’s original novel to the final years of Queen Victoria’s reign,
with the first chapter dated June 1898. However, the central narrative is framed by a prologue
and an epilogue, both dated 1920. This neo-Victorian novel, then, speaks of its belatedness
not only through its own date of publication, but also through its emphasis on the time that
has passed for the characters of the novel, for whom the Victorian Age is constructed as a
distant memory. Through this narrative framing, the portrayal of the sexual abuses hidden
behind a facade of Victorian respectability is doubly contained: relegated to a past that is
distant for both reader and narrators. In its conclusion, Newbery’s novel shifts the focus to
the aftermath of the war, and presents an image of the traumatized soldier, allowing for a
shift in emphasis, a displacement even, in terms of the narrative’s portrayal of trauma. The
image that closes the novel is not of the traumatized victim of sexual abuse, but the shellshocked soldier traumatized by war, though it is significant that the victim of shell-shock is
also the product of an incestuous and sexually abusive relationship: the son of Juliana and her
father.18
The inclusion of sexual trauma in these narratives reflects contemporary concerns and
anxieties, but the replication of Victorian narrative conventions enables both displacement
and closure. As in the typical Victorian novel, the perpetrators of wrongdoing – with the
significant exception of Wilson’s Walter in The Dark Clue – are suitably punished: Juliana’s
father in Set in Stone is drowned,19 while in Fywell’s version, as in Collins’s original narrative,
Glyde dies in a fire. In both these later texts, however, the heroine is responsible for the
villain’s death: in Fywell’s adaptation, Marian acts the role of avenging angel, deliberately
locking Glyde in the burning building, effectively killing the figure of the rapist in an act of
vigilante justice, while in Set in Stone, Charlotte refuses to allow Mr Farrow, who has jumped
into the lake in an effort to save his daughters, into the boat and he subsequently drowns.
Both characters seek to absolve themselves of full responsibility for the abusers’ deaths:
Marian’s act of revenge is undermined by her realization that there is no other way out,
implying that his death was not premeditated, while Charlotte tells Samuel, ‘I did not mean to
kill him, it was not my intention’ (Newbery, 2006, p.290). Though Fywell and Newbery ensure
that justice is done – that the good survive and the wicked are punished – it cannot, it seems,
come at the expense of undermining the characters’ ‘goodness’. Further, this return to a
typical Victorian ‘ending’ counteracts the suggestion that trauma narratives rarely reach the
neat, conclusive ending that the Victorian novel suggests.
There are striking similarities between contemporary adaptations of The Woman in
White in terms of their insistent focus on trauma as part of their reworking of Collins’s novel.
Like the original narrative, all of these texts are concerned with family secrets and hidden
identities, but they also represent (even as they obscure) what remains largely hidden in the
Victorian novel – incest, sexual abuse, suicide – and portray the lasting effects of these
traumatic legacies. In mimicking the structure of The Woman in White, with its multiple
narrators and emphasis on storytelling as ‘truth’, these narratives articulate a desire to reveal
the ‘truth’ about the Victorian family, and the possible abuses concealed therein. Marian’s
final words in Fywell’s version suggest that the sisters’ traumatic experiences have lasting
effects, in contrast to Collins’s narrative: ‘I have one waking prayer – let it be over’ (Fywell,
1997, 01:51:14), implying that the effects of sexual trauma continue to permeate the lives of
the survivors and those close to them. These adaptations also suggest the importance of
telling the ‘truth’ as a form of catharsis through which trauma and its effects can be processed
and the ghosts of the past laid to rest. The introduction of narratives of sexual trauma into
these various adaptations of Collins’s novel reflects a central concern of western society today,
but simultaneously suggests significant parallels with Victorian literature and culture:
problems of articulation persist in contemporary narratives of sexual trauma, and indeed the
displacement of these narratives into a Victorian setting provides further evidence of this.
Works Cited
Collins, W. (2003/1860) The Woman in White (London: Penguin).
----- (1998/1870) Man and Wife (Oxford: OUP).
Freud, S. and J. Brauer (2004/1895) Studies in Hysteria (London: Penguin).
Fywell, T. (screenwriter) (1997) The Woman in White (Masterpiece Theatre).
Gutleben, C. and M.-L. Kohlke, eds. (2010) Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of
Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering (Amsterdam and New York:
Rodopi).
Hadley, L. (2010) Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Hardy, T. (2003/1891) Tess of the D’Urbervilles (London: Penguin).
Heilmann, A. and M. Llewellyn (2010) Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First
Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
LaCapra, D. (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP).
Newbery, L. (2006) Set in Stone (London: Random House).
Setterfield, D. (2006) The Thirteenth Tale (London: Orion).
Surridge, L. (1996) ‘Unspeakable Histories: Hester Dethridge and the Narration of Domestic
Violence in Man and Wife’, Victorian Review, 22.2, 102-26.
Ulman, R. B. and D. Borthers (1993) The Shattered Self: A Psychoanalytic Study of Trauma
(London: Routledge).
Vickroy, L. (2002) Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville: U of Virginia
P).
Wilson, J. (2001) The Dark Clue (London: Faber and Faber).
1
Collins 2003, 28. The words are spoken by Anne Catherick, during her initial encounter with Walter Hartright.
For a broader exploration of representations of trauma in Victorian fiction, see Jill Matus, Shock, Memory and
the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
3
Brontë’s novel is revisited in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair (2001) and
Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2007) as well as numerous film adaptations. Great Expectations is the
key source text for Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004), and Lloyd Jones’s
Mister Pip (2007) and also the subject of multiple screen adaptations. James’s novella is the inspiration for Joyce
Carol Oates’s short story ‘The Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly’ (in her collection Haunted: Tales of the
Grotesque, 1994), Alejandro Amenábar’s film The Others (2001), and A. N. Wilson’s novella A Jealous Ghost
(2005).
4
I return to the issue of this apparent displacement of trauma from the present to the past later in the essay.
5
I use the term ‘neo-Victorian project’ to refer not only to the plethora of neo-Victorian novels and films of
recent years, but also to the increasing scholarly criticism engaged with these works.
6
The centrality of trauma in the neo-Victorian project is also suggested by the recent collection of essays, edited
by Christian Gutleben and Marie-Luise Kohlke, Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma (2010). Ann Heilmann and Mark
Llewellyn discuss trauma in the neo-Victorian novel in their recent work, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the
Twenty-First Century (2010); see particularly Chapter 1, “Memory, Mourning, Misfortune: Ancestral Houses and
(Literary) Inheritances” (pp.33-65).
7
In Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), Dominick LaCapra hints at the necessity behind writing history’s
traumas: ‘There are reasons for the vision of history [...] as traumatic, especially as a symptomatic response to a
felt implication in excess and disorientation which may have to be undergone or even acted out if one is to have
an experiential or empathetic basis for working it through’ (2001, xi). The notion of writing trauma as a means of
catharsis can also be linked to psychoanalytic notions of catharsis, first developed by Josef Brauer in relation to
the case of Anna O. in the late nineteenth century, and more broadly to the process of psychoanalysis itself,
which is partially concerned with the uncovering and processing of repressed (often traumatic) memories (see
Freud and Breuer, 1895; for a more recent study on the role of trauma within psychoanalysis, see Ulman and
Borthers, 1993).
8
In this respect, the latter two adaptations echo Collins’s original novel, which takes the form of a series of
different narratives.
9
The novel’s portrayal of an abusive marriage goes some way to explaining the inclusion of sexual trauma in
recent adaptations and rewritings of the text: in this respect, The Woman in White lends itself to reworking as a
contemporary trauma narrative.
10
Anne Catherick dies during the course of the novel, so she cannot be included in the assessment of the long
term effects of the novel’s events on the various characters. However, like Hester Dethridge, prior to her death
she does display symptoms which suggest her experience has had a significant effect on her. In the contrast she
offers with Laura Fairlie in this respect, she anticipates the differences between Hester and Anne Silvester – the
heroine in Man and Wife. In both novels, the heroine not only survives her experiences, but is presented as happy
and content at the end of the narrative, in contradistinction to the marginalized – and significantly lower-class –
figures of Anne Catherick and Hester Dethridge.
11
The notion that the collation of the narrative serves as a cathartic means of addressing the traumatic events
of the past in Collins’s novel suggests parallels with the later neo-Victorian novel, in which, as previously
mentioned, writing frequently serves as an important means of catharsis.
12
The implication that Collins should address this issue in his novel is obviously problematic. However, the
representation of the abuse of women under a patriarchal system is central to the novel, hence the suggestion
that the absence of any reference to sexual abuse is in itself significant.
13
In Pirie’s adaptation, Philip Fairlie takes no responsibility for his illegitimate daughter, while in Set in Stone, it
is the victim’s father who is the actual perpetrator of the abuse.
14
Significantly the label of madness as a convenient excuse for sexual transgression echoes Victorian medical
discourses on women and sexuality.
15
Heilmann and Llewellyn propose that Wilson’s portrayal of Collins’s hero as a rapist ‘is but an example of how
contemporary writers use nineteenth-century texts as an imaginative repository’, and suggest that Wilson’s
portrayal of the artist Turner is ‘more ethically questionable’ (2010, p.21).
16
As Heilmann and Llewellyn note of Adeline’s inability to articulate her grief at the loss of her sister in The
Thirteenth Tale (‘There was a fire... I lost everything... Oh, Emmeline’, Setterfield, 2006, p.52-3), ‘Miss Winter’s
fractured speech reflects the impact of traumatic memory’ (2010, p.49).
2
17
Here we find a direct parallel with one of the few Victorian novels to hint at the possibility of sexual abuse: in
Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), the reader does not bear witness to Alec’s rape/seduction of Tess.
18
There is a parallel here with the simile Marian employs in the conclusion to The Dark Clue, in which she refers
to the ‘shared pain’ she and Walter experience, ‘such as soldiers may feel who have endured a battle together’
(Wilson, 2001, p.389). These allusions to war in the conclusion of the two novels, and the implication that the
personal trauma resulting from sexual abuse is in some way related or comparable to the broader traumas of
war, raise significant questions for? which there is insufficient space to explore here.
19
His fate echoes that of Collins’s Fosco in The Woman in White.