1. A Fashion Sensation: The Importance of Women's Dress to a Victorian Genre

Margaret Oliphant much preferred The Woman in White (published serially 1859–1860) to Great Expectations (published serially 1860–1861). This partiality emerges in a comparative treatment of the texts in her oft-quoted 1862 treatise on sensation fiction, and it rests on the desirability of authors producing thrills using “modest and subtle means” (“Sensation Novels” 569) instead of “by fantastic eccentricities” and “high-strained oddity” (“Sensation Novels” 574). While the existence of an argument against the allegedly regrettable excesses of fantastical narratives will not shock any reader familiar with contemporary criticism of sensation fiction, or, for that matter, Romantic-era novels or Gothic works in general, the primary evidence Oliphant uses to argue her case might come as a surprise. In order to discredit Charles Dickens's ghostly accounts of Miss Havisham's bridal tomb in favor of Wilkie Collins's eerie images of Anne Catherick appearing on a moonlit moor, Margaret Oliphant turns to clothing.

Oliphant's assessment of sensation literature relies heavily on her knowledge of the discourse and material reality of women's dress. In her review, Oliphant picks two scenes from The Woman in White that, in her estimation, exemplify Collins's success in generating thrills for his reader. These two scenes, Walter's encounter with Anne Catherick on the moor, and his chilling revelation of the wealthy Laura Fairlie's resemblance to the penniless Anne, depend on the visual discourse of clothing. Collins's novel wins Oliphant's approval through its ability to evoke sensation by incorporating recognizable aspects of women's lives – in this case, a familiar style of dress – in addition to what we might call “toning down” overly violent or fantastical episodes. Oliphant goes on to indirectly emphasize the importance of dress, of visual presentation, to sensation fiction by moving to a veritable fashion take-down of Miss Havisham. Oliphant complains, in a matter-of-fact way, that the “wedding-dress of Miss Havisham's. . .in five-and-twenty years, had only grown yellow and faded, but was still, it appears, extant in all its integrity, no tatters being so much as inferred” (“Sensation Novels” 576). In other words, Oliphant considers it positively unbelievable that Miss Havisham could actually wear one dress for twenty-five years without the whole thing falling to pieces. This apparently nit-picky point reveals a determination to hold writers accountable for their use of the material reality of women's lives in their fictional worlds. The tenacious desire to link fiction to fact, held so strongly by Oliphant, has a proper place in our examination of sensation novels, especially in our assessment of the role of representations of material artifacts such as dress.

Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White does not simply weave its clothing imagery out of thin air, nor does it restrict its interest in women's dress to one bizarre garment's sensational effects. Indeed, Collins's text uses representations of women's clothing to make deeply political statements about the social realities faced by Victorian women, statements that would participate in contemporary debates about gender roles and the consumption of clothing. Dress in The Woman in White serves as a viable discourse that cements a sisterhood of characters and helps them consolidate a supportive female community in the face of threatening male dominance, but clothing also serves to signal threats to personal identity. The latter function resonates with a popular theme in sensation fiction – the terrifying dissolution of selfhood either into the stark nothingness brought by death and disinheritance, or the boundless, and meaningless, excess accompanied by shifting social and interpersonal roles. The former function allows us to uncover buried statements about gender that feminist critics have yet to acknowledge in the text. Collins is engaged in an exploration of clothing's creative potentialities and restrictive dangers in a manner that keenly takes Victorian discourse into account.

Current critical models of female identity in The Woman in White that emphasize social blankness, legal nonexistence, and vulnerability to male inscriptionFootnote ¹ need to be revised. These readings have been so convincing and pervasive, in part, because of Collins's own acute awareness of the legal inequity between Victorian men and women.Footnote ² In addition, The Woman in White derives much of its narrative energy from a juridical “battle of the sexes” scenario in which powerful men exercise disturbing amounts of control over women who have little to no legal recourse. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, under the system of coverture women gave up their legal existence upon marriage, effectively turning their property and rights over to their husbands. While Collins was engaged in writing The Woman in White, married women lacked basic legal protection, even basic recognition of selfhood under the law. A reading of female identity in Collins's popular novel as determined largely by male relationships rightly responds to contemporary sociopolitical restrictions, but this paradigm fails to account for potential sources of self-affirmation, communal support, and positive models of selfhood for Victorian women.

Figurative and literal “sisterhood” in The Woman in White has seldom enjoyed extended critical analysis, but a focus on female relationships reveals heretofore unacknowledged sources of power for the novel's characters. Leila Silvana May's “Sensational Sisters: Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White” (1995) is a notable exception to the general silence surrounding these relationships. May argues that The Woman in White is “a treatise on sisterhood” (82) that demonstrates the latent power of female ties in Victorian society. According to May, the text strives to restrain the threat of domestic upheaval promised by subversive “sororal monstrosity” (83). Sharon Marcus's Between Women (2008) maintains a focus on female relationships but emphasizes that “friendships between women” often affirm conservative impulses and social stasis in standard Victorian marriage plots (12). If, as Marcus claims, “in Victorian England, female marriage, gender mobility, and women's erotic fantasies about women were at the heart of normative institutions and discourses” (13), gender studies approaches to Victorian literature must radically shift from a primary focus on issues of patriarchal oppression, male-female relationship dynamics, and female subversion to a vigorous, historically-grounded examination of the general functions fulfilled by female friendships. Collins criticism has yet to acknowledge the positive, productive, and perhaps even salvational, dimensions of his fictional communities of women and the cultural practices that tie them together. This is certainly not to say that Collins's text does not attempt to dramatize various dangers to female identity, but it performs this dramatization through a system of signification that offers the promise of safe sisterhood even as it symbolizes social threats to individual women: the semiotic system of dress.

2. The Anti-Anti-Fashion of Marian Halcombe

The novel's preoccupation with the importance of women's dress can be inferred from the visual rhetoric deployed by the character apparently the least concerned with fashion:Footnote ³ Laura Fairlie's half-sister, Marian Halcombe. Feminist critics have argued that Marian's “anti-fashion”Footnote ⁴ betrays a character with much more strength and agency than the passive, doll-like women who surround her.Footnote ⁵ Ironically, Marian's avowed dismissal of feminine charm has made her irresistibly charming for feminist critics interested in heterodox Victorian female characters. Relying on Marian's “anti-fashion” to establish her agency problematically reinscribes an understanding of Victorian women's fashion as emblematic of patriarchal oppression and feminine helplessness.Footnote ⁶ While it is certainly true that the popular styles of petticoats and corsets of the 1850s and 60s were not designed to facilitate physical mobility, liberty of movement does not necessarily equate to spiritual, emotional, or intellectual liberty. I mean to suggest not only that a rejection of “fashionable” clothing does not offer immediate liberation from oppressive systems of power, but that Marian Halcombe herself, far from rejecting fashion, is familiar with, and effectively utilizes, modish clothing styles to her advantage.

While Marian Halcombe's independence and avowed disdain for feminine traits might be cited to signal an apathy for fashion, she uses a rhetoric of clothing that was readily available to Victorian women to communicate important points about her character. Scholars have zeroed in on the notion that Marian places herself in a privileged position of agency or subversion by choosing to go without stays, a supportive undergarment designed to constrict the waist and create a bell-shaped torso. Though this may be, to some extent, true, we must also acknowledge that her decision was distinctly legible as a statement within contemporary discourse about women's fashion and that this discourse itself often reinscribed a cultural understanding of women as frivolous beings at worst, lovely art objects at best.

Marian's rejection of this fashionable appliance could indicate the sort of proto-feminist stance espoused by Enlightenment thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) chastises the undereducated for what she sees as a thoughtless, selfish preoccupation with fashion. Although Victorian philosophers and social critics seldom affiliated themselves with Wollstonecraft,Footnote ⁷ Collins's text signals her relevance when Marian recalls that Madame Fosco once “advocated the Rights of Women” (The Woman in White 256; “Miss Halcombe's Narrative Continued”). This likely allusion to Wollstonecraft invites readers to consider how her theories influenced gender discourse in the nineteenth century. Many Victorian social critics followed Wollstonecraft's lead in customarily knitting together frivolity, dress culture, and women, though these later diatribes were often made to lament the unalterable nature of the weak female mind rather than encourage cultural change and education reform. Wollstonecraft's rationalist discourse of universal subjectivity problematically characterizes most women as frivolous and flighty, too foolish to understand that the world of fashion has no real consequence. The appeal of this discourse rests in the intellectual respectability it offers to any woman reasonable enough to dismiss what we might call “girl culture” in favor of pursuits coded both worthwhile and masculine. Thanks in part to some of her own assertions, which I will address later, it is tempting to contextualize Marian as part of this tradition of anti-fashion discourse, but another strand of thought surrounding stays is more relevant to the text's stance on clothing as a serious symbolic medium.

Wollstonecraft actively rejects the pursuit of physical beauty and links any interest in fashion to the vain desire to be admired. Contra Wollstonecraft, many Victorian dress reformers mobilized the appeal of beauty to encourage new, less physically restrictive, styles of clothing. This rhetoric served to bolster, not topple, a societal emphasis on the female body as an object intended to draw the gaze. Indeed, one argument for dress reform borrowed from a striking clothing style designed for explicitly artistic purposes. In their paintings, members of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood sought to create “a purer and more naturalistic style” for the women they depicted (“Aesthetic Dress” 12). Other dress reformers using the discourse of aesthetics often referred to the beauty of classical statues, citing the “natural, or undeformed” charm of the Venus de Milo and the Venus de Medici in order to encourage women to imitate a style recognized as visually pleasing (Cunningham 116). Margaret Oliphant, Harriet Martineau, and Mary Haweis all advocated for the natural in women's fashion for the sake of healthiness and practicality, but also for its adherence to traditional ideals of beauty.Footnote ⁸

Although scholars tend to focus on the subversive or empowering elements within Marian's supposedly tacky clothing choices, the reader first encounters the strong-willed Miss Halcombe through the appreciative eyes of Walter Hartright. His aesthetic perspective severely complicates any critical reading that depends on distancing Marian from discourses of fashion or beauty. Ever one to paint an elaborate picture, the drawing master describes Marian's body (along with his unmistakably physical reaction to her) in thorough detail. He praises the “rare beauty of her form,” and her “perfectly shaped figure.” These abstract compliments seem to be largely inspired by “her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays” (74; “Hartright's Narrative Continued,” ch. 5). Even though Walter ultimately decides that her “masculine” features render her ugly, Marian's decision to forgo corsets initially makes her a more visually appealing art object. This appreciation troubles Auerbach's suggestion that “Walter transforms Marian's abandonment of stays from a defiant assertion of new space and scope for herself to a humble admission that her ugliness puts her beyond the pale of womanly accessories” (136). This dichotomy, from rebellion to rectitude, does not allow for the possibility that, despite opting to go without stays, Marian is consciously manipulating or working within the available semiotic system of women's fashion and with a discourse of dress reform that still relies on ideals of physical attractiveness.

The visual rhetoric that Marian constructs with her self-presentation, then, does not directly challenge an objectifying discourse of female beauty. Since Walter's admiring prose chronicles Marian's entry into the story, her clothing choices seem colored by his male approval. After all, the absence of stays makes her body “perfection in the eyes of a man,” a detail that subtly suggests an awareness of how to best mobilize certain standards of beauty while simultaneously asserting a rejection of other, more normative, standards. She also shows awareness of how to set off her own attributes when Walter later describes her in a gown of “delicate primrose-yellow colour, which matches so well with a dark complexion and black hair” (94; “Hartright's Narrative Continued,” ch. 7). A rejection of stays certainly does not signal a rejection of fashion in general, and the adoption of clothing that shows her to advantage reveals that Marian respects the world of female culture more than her ironic diatribes suggest and more than scholars have admitted.

This respect is evident in Marian's narrative power, her privileged position of possessing knowledge unbeknownst to other characters. In a novel largely about the struggle to unearth truths others strive to keep buried, Marian proves herself a formidable foe. At one point, Marian even extracts herself from the confines of her “cumbersome” petticoats so that she can slink onto a roof to eavesdrop on the novel's most pernicious villain, the devious yet charismatic Count Fosco (336; “Miss Halcombe's Narrative Continued”). Critics have considered this episode noteworthy for the sake of the female character's cleverness and bravery, but also tend to suggest that this action makes Marian exceptional or even masculine. Dress features prominently in the latter argument since Marian describes how standard women's dress would inhibit her from making the climb onto the roof of the veranda to overhear Fosco's plots against her half-sister. For example, Clair Hughes implies that Marian casts aside female fashions in a gesture of self-empowerment. During her discussion of Marian's stealthy espionage, Hughes suggests that “she compounds the unfemininity [of eavesdropping on Fosco and Glyde] by removing not only her silks but her petticoats. . .to stand in the rain in the more masculine colouring of dark flannel and a black cloak” (72), but the intrepid climber does not actually divest herself of petticoats. Marian specifies that she “removed the white and cumbersome parts of my underclothing, and replaced them by a petticoat of dark flannel. Over this, I put my black traveling cloak, and pulled the hood on to my head” (336; “Miss Halcombe's Narrative Continued”). Instead of removing her petticoats entirely, Marian simply changes them out for the sake of practicality. Suggesting that dark petticoats are “unfeminine” helps Hughes imply that, by dressing like a man, Marian enjoys liberties impossible to reach for women trapped by feminine gender norms. This argument necessarily obscures any flexibility or agency women could mobilize within gender norms in general and women's clothing styles in particular.

Furthermore, according a model of agency set up by several critical appraisals, one of Marian's self-avowedly “womanly” activities secures her a great deal of narrative power. While waiting for her honeymooning half-sister's arrival at Limmeridge House, Marian laments her inability to order a horse and ride out to meet Laura. Essentially, she finds herself stuck inside, writing in her journal. She sarcastically comments, “Being, however, nothing but a woman, condemned to patience, propriety, and petticoats for life, I must respect the housekeeper's opinions, and try to compose myself in some feeble and feminine way” (222-23; “Miss Halcombe's Narrative Continued”). The “feeble and feminine way” she decides to compose herself in is writing, an activity weighted with significance by the sensation genre and feminist critics alike. Marian's chronicle of events, her possession of knowledge, proves to be one of the most volatile weapons in the novel, and for her to so casually dismiss it positively drips with irony. Petticoats (along with patience and propriety), in this formulation, are linked to writing, to the apparently passive but highly potent creation of evidence from testimony. Were Marian to do the “masculine” thing and take to midnight horse rides, she would yield no journal and wield no narrative power. As Anne Gaylin has convincingly argued, The Woman in White is largely a story about struggling to control stories. If the reader recognizes the irony in Marian's disavowal of her writing's importance, we might also be able to question the sincerity of her general statement and seek to find some potency in petticoats.

As with the corset controversy, debates on the nature of crinoline petticoats actively buzzing in Collins's time reveal potential female agency in various sociopolitical subject positions. The crinoline controversy sprang up after several decades' worth of swelling skirt width. While the early nineteenth century was distinguished by women's fashion that imitated flowing, classical drapery, along with loose skirts and a waistline cinched just below the bust, in the 1830s, skirts began to expand. This fashion statement required some ingenuity to support, and in 1856 a new invention, the crinoline cage, edged out heavy layers of padded petticoats (Byrde 54). Newspapers of the time were full of diatribes against the crinoline. It became a focal point for sermons against frivolous fashions. Punch sported satirical illustrations that lampooned the crinoline as a foolish waste of space inspired by female narcissism. Periodicals even grimly reported on deaths caused by unwieldy crinoline-supported skirts catching fire. The staggering number of crinoline protesters suggests that, despite the oft-reported dangers, crinoline use thrived through the 1860s.

The widespread popularity of the innovative petticoat was not lost on Victorian authors. Elizabeth Gaskell pokes gentle fun at the crinoline craze in an 1863 Cranford story when several of her endearingly behind-the-times characters confuse the petticoat “cage” with a parrot cage. In Lady Audley's Secret (published serially 1861–1862), Mary Elizabeth Braddon treats crinoline less like a strange, slightly humorous object and more like a fixed feature of a woman's life. She lists the crinoline, along with “tea-tables,” “pearl powder,” and “cruelly scandalous and rather satirical gossip,” as charming tools in a woman's “legitimate empire” (222; vol. 2, ch. 7). Even though Marian herself would not have possessed a crinoline cage (Walter tells us the events of the text occur during and prior to 1851, the year of “the famous Crystal Palace Exhibition in Hyde Park”), Collins expressed interest in the crinoline petticoat debate, and his eye for contemporary controversy certainly colored his description of Marian's clothes, perhaps to the point of inviting an anachronistic mental image (559; “Part the Third Hartright's Narrative,” ch. 2). Collins's intervention in the crinoline controversy suggests that he understood women's fashion as not only a realm of potential female empowerment, but a fiercely contested arena of discourse between women in general and men in positions of cultural authority.

In “Give Us Room!” an 1858 essay penned for Charles Dickens's Household Words, Collins's narrator, probably meant to be the author himself, takes a moment's rest from social engagements to comment on “the subject of evening parties and ladies' dress” (193). The problem is one of space. Collins bewails the inability of society women in their crinolines to actually fit in the houses of hosts throwing parties. Despite a tongue-in-cheek praise of the crinoline's ability to conceal flaws in a woman's natural shape, praise that certainly suggests a dislike or disapproval of the crinoline, Collins does take the persistence of the fashion as a given. He opts instead to encourage families throwing parties to rent out public rooms to provide more space for guests. With good-natured sarcasm, Collins assures the reader not to “turn over this page impatiently alarmed at the prospect of another diatribe against Crinoline. I, for one, am not going to exhibit myself in the character of a writer who vainly opposes one of the existing institutions of this country” (193). Collins characterizes discourse over the crinoline petticoat as between “the Press, the Pulpit, and the Stage” on one side, and “the women of England” on the other. Collins describes various attempts to discourage the use of the crinoline but concludes that “each woman. . .sits, imperturbable, in the middle of her balloon, and lets the serious words or the comic words, go in at one ear and come out at the other” (193). Even though Collins mocks the use of crinolines in their artificial alterations of a woman's appearance, his rhetoric suggests a recognition of something powerful, even unifying, in women's dress culture. His description of all “the women of England” simultaneously united as a group and individually fortified against verbal assault, paints a rather martial picture that runs counter a depiction of vain, simpering, or weak-willed followers of fashion.

True to Collins's humorous vision of a unified female front, Marian does not abruptly dismiss culturally acceptable women's dress. Her description of her petticoats echoes Collins's humorous complaint about the crinoline. After she switches dresses to prepare for eavesdropping on Fosco and Glyde, she confides to her diary, “In my ordinary evening costume, I took up the room of three men at least. In my present dress, when it was held close about me, no man could have passed through the narrowest spaces more easily than I” (336; “Miss Halcombe's Narrative Continued”). Marian's statement neatly captures several key issues in debates about the crinoline cage. For one thing, like the layers of padded petticoats before it, the crinoline inhibited ease of movement for wearers, but the expansion of clothing also physically created personal space for individual women, relieved them of weighted petticoats, and gestured towards the idealization of femininity. Marian's ability to don and discard stylish dress at will indicates, rather than a rejection of fashion, a propensity for adroit manipulation of a complex system. If anything, Marian's rejection of stays and her practical understanding of the physical limits of a socially-appropriate petticoat signals a fine fluency in the visual rhetoric of Victorian women's dress. Women's fashion cannot be labeled as simply a source of subjugation. Indeed, several other female characters rely on the semiotics of fashion to meticulously make personal choices within and about social roles.

3. The Women in White: Class Defiance and Self-Expression

The well-known white dress(es) of The Woman in White directly reflect a recognizable, mainstream Victorian fashion, exploit sensational cultural and literary images, and, most importantly, enable the text to posit a unifying sororal force that transcends class consciousness. Anne Catherick, the arguably mad, eponymous “woman in white,” and Laura Fairlie, the considerate, soft-spoken daughter of a wealthy family, both frequently sport white dresses. Critics have argued that the sensational imagery, compounded by Laura's personal passivity and the ultimate confusion of her identity with Anne's, symbolically registers the inequity of relational Victorian gender politics, a politics that leaves women vulnerable and “blank.”Footnote ⁹ This convincing analysis of the whiteness of Laura and Anne's dresses has obscured another, more historically-grounded, reading of these women. The anonymous author of The English Gentlewoman: A Practical Manual for Young Ladies (1861) includes a chapter on dress in her guidebook for personal cultivation. In between giving advice on how best to follow London fashions and on how much to spend yearly on gowns, the author emphasizes, “A young lady is always wise, and, for the present year, likely to be in the fashion, in wearing white muslin, or tulle over satin or sarsenet; and this may be managed as to appear neither too gay nor too plain, by varying the ornaments, or by omitting or adopting anything worn in the hair” (207). A third edition of this guidebook came out of London in 1861, and the reprint suggests that it enjoyed a certain degree of popularity during the years The Woman in White was being serialized. Women reading Collins's novel would recognize the fashionable simplicity of Laura's white dress and recognize Anne as extraordinary for being all in white with no variation of color in her adornment. Instead of being a “shroud of the social self” (Gomel and Weninger 47), the white dress would resonate with Collins's readers as a fashion staple for younger, unmarried women. In the Victorian semiotics of fashion, Laura's choice of dress would have signaled refinement, youth, and a modest rejection of pomp and decadence.

Of course, proposing that Laura Fairlie's dress was au courant instead of unfashionable does not negate the sensational energies the text draws from Anne's garb. Collins does make shameless use of the mysterious pull of the phrase “the woman in white,” and to great effect. Several section breaks, for example, build suspense around the striking image of Anne's clothing: when Anne rushes away from Hartright in London, he laments, “the woman in white was gone,” and the asylum workers giving chase call out, “Don't forget: a woman in white” (70,71; “The Narrative of Walter Hartright,” ch. 3). Anne's function as a sensational figure also relies on common cultural associations with white dresses. The young boy who sees Anne in the cemetery and (mis)takes her for a ghost describes the apparition as “Arl in white – as a ghaist should be” (124; “Hartright's Narrative Continued,” ch. 11). Collins, in true gothic-sensational fashion, connects the marital to the deadly through Anne's warning and Marian's foreboding premonition of Laura's death. Anne dreams that Laura faces danger “in [her] white silk dress” on her wedding day (116; “Hartright's Narrative Continued,” ch. 10). Marian later feels as though “writing of [Laura's] marriage were like writing of her death (211; “Miss Halcombe's Narrative Continued”). Without taking the origin of Anne's preference for white into account, her dress classifies her as bridal and ghostly, a highly sensational image.

This image is complicated by Anne's treatment of her personal style as a means of expressing and strengthening a personal connection. Anne's, and Laura's, loyalty to a certain mode of dress indicates that the clothing should not be read purely as a cultural symbol. This preference actively constructs a sororal network of sympathy, understanding, and shared suffering. Crucially, dress culture provided women with the potential to establish relationships with one another, and this dress-linked web of women serves as a safety net for its vulnerable members. Marcus has demonstrated that female friendship enjoyed a cultural “idealization” that encouraged benevolence and selflessness but that it also “indicated a commitment to an intersubjectivity based on mutual fortification rather than on zero-sum competitions that leave one contestant depleted” (92). A network of women provides its members with “mutual fortification” in Collins's novel, and an analysis of this community can reveal alternative ways to read individual women, particularly Laura and Anne.

Laura Fairlie, for example, actively uses fashion rhetoric to reject class distinctions and link herself to her loved ones. During Walter's first dinner at Limmeridge House as drawing master, he remarks that Laura wears “plain white muslin. . .spotlessly pure [and] beautifully put on; but. . .the sort of dress which the wife or daughter of a poor man might have worn” (94; “Hartright's Narrative Continued,” ch. 7). Complicating the claim that white dresses signal “blankness,” Laura's fashion choice here indicates a staunch personal statement. Walter later learns that she intentionally dresses down, below her station, in “plain” muslin so that Marian and Mrs. Vesey are not outclassed by a display of her family wealth. This display, naturally, does not displace class concerns or eradicate social borders, but the attempt to construct a visual illusion of equality does effectively assert the possibility, if not the probability, of the formation of relationships for women that are independent of class. Walter informs the reader that “neither Mrs. Vesey nor Mrs. Halcombe could ever induce her to let the advantage in dress desert the two ladies who were poor” (94; “Hartright's Narrative Continued,” ch. 7). When he first sees Laura in such modest clothing, however, Walter betrays his own patriarchal prejudice by reaching for a reference to what a poor man's wife or daughter might wear. Laura displays herself not as a wife (or potential wife) or even as the elegant daughter of an affluent father, but as a friend and sister.

Laura's affections even assert the importance of female networks over the importance of the romance plot. Throughout the text, Laura's first loyalty is to Marian Halcombe, and her husbands serve as supplements to this primary relationship. It is Marian, after all, who tenaciously strives to save Laura from the machinations at Blackwater Park. Marian's insistence that Laura not sign Sir Percival's documents, along with the letters she subsequently writes seeking legal aid, helps thwart the initial plot to steal from Laura's fortune. Laura only falls prey to Fosco's scheming after Marian becomes gravely ill, and the narrative link between the two is strengthened even further when it effectively takes Marian's recovery to restore Laura to life. Marian is the one who rescues Laura from the asylum, but their omnipresent sororal bond, along with the thrilling actions it provokes, has been deemphasized in criticism. Walter's immediate misread of Laura's choice of dress embodies the tension between reading The Woman in White as a novel adhering to the standards of male-dominated family structures or as a novel gesturing towards the importance of class-defying communities of women linked by affection and the language of a distinctly female subculture.

The semiotic dimensions of sartorial arrangements were readily acknowledged by Victorian critics, so Laura's tactical use of the visual cues generated by her personal attire to signal her own allegiances and preferences would have been recognizable as such. For instance, the author of the “Art of Dress” (1847) claims that, for women, “dress becomes a sort of symbolical language – a kind of personal glossary – a species of body phrenology, the study of which it would be madness to neglect” (375). Even though the male essayist devotes most of his energy to affirming that fashionable women should be seen, and treated like, precious works of art, he also emphasizes that dress works as a material signifier for personal identity. In other words, a woman's adoption of certain clothing styles reveals deeper personal truths that would be inaccessible without the rhetoric of dress.

This need to “read into” apparently frivolous details in the physical world to find “higher” truths links women's dress to the genre of sensation fiction. This genre in particular seems designed to subtly (or not-so-subtly) prompt the reader to look for in-text clues, codes, and symbols that reveal subterranean plots or layers of meaning. D. A. Miller argues that an initial “feminine gender identification” for a reader of The Woman in White leads to a sense of paranoia and suspicion (163). We are encouraged to load minor events with meaning. Miller points out that “our judgments are often informed by no better than the silliest folk wisdom. When Laura's pet greyhound shrinks from Sir Percival, Gilmore considers it “a trifle” (156), though Nina later jumps eagerly enough into his own lap: in the strange court of justice over which we preside, her discrimination is unimpeachable evidence” (160). Miller goes on to suggest that the novel attempts to dismiss this hypersensitive epistemology by giving a newly-masculine Walter the narrative reins for the novel's final story arc. In the conclusion of The Woman in White, Miller sees sensation fiction's “wish to abolish itself” through “the dissolution of sensation in the achievement of decided meaning” (165). Even though the text certainly attempts to establish the normalcy and desirability of heterosexual, domestic romance, it does not surrender what Miller might call a “feminine” epistemology.

The implicit acknowledgement that seemingly insignificant details carry great weight contributes to the novel's general sense of the superiority of a sensitive, detail-oriented, interpretive mindset over the “rational” mindset associated with masculine characters like Mr. Gilmore. To return to the greyhound incident, Miller uses this instance of seemingly unimportant or coincidental evidence, misinterpreted by an authority figure in the novel, to suggest that the novel's readers are given a more paranoid code of knowledge than the logically-minded characters. Gilmore's failure to comprehend the importance of Nina's disapproval signals an acute separation of the practical (yet ultimately inadequate) methods of detection used by the character and the paranoid (yet effective) hermeneutics of suspicion adopted by the “feminized” reader. Ultimately, The Woman in White lauds this epistemology and does not strive to dismantle it. Decisions made based on small details or seemingly insignificant points, often by female characters, actually enable the novel's cheerfully domestic ending.

This sensational epistemology, separated from rationalism but still based on observation and close-reading, facilitates a coded system of communication used to great effect by several female characters. Gilmore's inability to adopt this epistemology also signals a breakdown in communication, in language, between the novel's male authority figures and its female victims. Even Walter fails to comprehend the social weight of a supposedly trivial, feminine nicety. Walter's comments on Marian's clothing and Laura's dress can be identified as mistakes based in an inability to properly “read” Laura's dress. Mr. Gilmore does not seem to understand the critical importance of a beloved pet's trust, and Walter is not privy to the visual code of women's clothing styles. Unlike these “rational” male characters, the reader fully understands the importance of these elements.

In this sense, the abundance of significance in sensation fiction's plot details mirrors contemporary discussions about women's fashion. Excessive attention to clothing was considered a trivial, feminine occupation (though many critics, like Harriet Martineau, argued that men were just as guilty of a passion for fashion as women). Georgiana Clark and other apologists for dress explicitly contested the notion that fashion was “important only to the frivolous and foolish” (92). The author of Blackwoods’ “Dress” (1865) went so far as to suggest that “a life without clothes. . .would. . .be a life without thought,” arguing that clothing facilitates an understanding of individuality and property and supplies an unexpected degree of mental cultivation (425). Collins's treatment of women's dress in The Woman in White suggests that arguably trivial or frivolous clothing choices could have deeply profound social, even psychological, relevance. Collins's depiction of women's dress, then, along with his choice of genre, challenges readers to locate meaning in the ostensibly meaningless, to appreciate signification in semantic systems previously unrecognized.

Anne Catherick's sensational character, composed by her striking visual appearance and by her mysterious behavior, is a direct result of her strict adherence to a code of dress she connects to a community of women. Her conscious clothing choices link her to the Fairlie family even before the secret of her birth is revealed. Anne explains to Hartright that she wears her white garments despite being mocked by others in order to preserve the bonds between herself, Mrs. Fairlie, and Laura. Despite being mocked, Anne continues dress to according to advice given to her in childhood by Mrs. Fairlie. She tells Walter, “[Mrs. Fairlie] often wore white herself; and she always dressed her little daughter in white” and goes on to ask, “Is Miss Fairlie well and happy? Does she wear white now, as she used when she was a girl?” (137; “Hartright's Narrative Continued,” ch. 12). In Anne's understanding, being “well and happy” springs metonymically from wearing white, or being a part of a like-minded collective of women, and, as the reader knows from Walter's descriptions of Laura's dress, Miss Fairlie has indeed continued to wear white.

Anne's emphatic rejection of socially acceptable garb in favor of a dress rich with interpersonal meaning further emphasizes the text's attempt to form communities of women that transcend economic separation. Like Laura's choice of dress, Anne's also symbolically undermines class hierarchies in order to construct a community based on friendship and shared experience. Of course, Anne and Laura cannot unproblematically be grouped together in a communal paradise that erases difference and assures protection from harmful societal practices. Critics like Ann Cvetkovich have pointed out the extreme disparity in socioeconomic standing between these characters. Cvetkovich traces Anne's state of mental and social impoverishment to her economic impoverishment, but Victorian readers might have understood Anne's pathetic situation as a reflection of maternal and sororal absence more than as the accident of social class. Anne's sole quest in the novel revolves around protecting female members of her lost surrogate family. The coldness and cruelty of her own mother compounds our sense of the character's loneliness. Anne tells Walter that she and her mother are “a trouble and a fear to each other,” a singularly unsettling characterization in a novel prominently featuring comforting female relationships (135; “Hartright's Narrative Continued,” ch. 12). The only stability Anne can acquire comes at the hands of Mrs. Clements, a kindly woman who looked after her in her childhood. If modern scholars can identify, and properly so, the struggles of lower-class life as a primary source of sorrow for characters like Anne, Anne herself understands her lamentable circumstances as springing from her necessary separation from Mrs. and Laura Fairlie, the supportive female community of kinship that her own family would not provide.

Mrs. Catherick's very inability to access it herself demonstrates the power and necessity of female community. After Sir Percival's death, Mrs. Catherick sends Walter a letter detailing her history as the keeper of the disgraced deceased's secrets. To secure Mrs. Catherick's silence about his illegitimacy, Sir Percival had given Mrs. Catherick a “handsome yearly allowance” and instructed her not to leave her little community (530; “Part the Second Hartright's Narrative,” ch. 10). Not only would this provision allow him to locate her immediately if need be, but it also guaranteed that Anne's mother would not form any close female friendships. Mrs. Catherick tells Walter, “In my own neighborhood, no virtuous female friends would tempt me into dangerous gossiping at the tea-table” (530; “Part the Second Hartright's Narrative,” ch. 10). Sir Percival seems to understand that networks of women threaten his social and political position. Furthermore, Mrs. Catherick herself metonymically links clothing choices to the formation of sympathetic female communities. She bluntly summarizes: “The dress of Virtue, in our parts, was cotton print. I had silk” (530; “Part the Second Hartright's Narrative,” ch. 10). Unlike Laura, who willingly adorns herself in cotton instead of silk to solidify her female relationships, Mrs. Catherick alienates herself by accentuating her class difference through clothing.

4. Sartorial Threats and Gothic Selfhood

While the semiotic system of Victorian fashion provided women with a way to connect to other women and make calculated declarations about their identities, Collins's novel also expresses great uneasiness with the malleability of selfhood implied by the donning and discarding of costume-like garments. Dress itself carries sinister implications that complement, and complicate, its creative and connective promise. In the rhetoric of the time, fashion becomes a threatening force in debates about class stability and personal autonomy. Many periodicals published tracts lamenting social confusion created by the lower classes dressing as well, or better, than the wealthy.Footnote ¹⁰ As Lou Taylor cautions in The Study of Dress History (2002), we should not simply take these abrasive treatises as evidence that those of modest means frequently purchased extravagant dress, but as indicative of a general sense of unease about the dissolution of firm class distinctions (95). Other conservative critics berated fashion for overpowering a woman's sense of domestic duty and self-respect, filling her head instead with trivial desires and the compulsion to conform. Sarah Stickney Ellis of moral manual fame argues that “one of the greatest drawbacks to the good influence of society, is the almost unrivalled power of fashion upon the female mind” (227). Ellis goes on to argue that fashion dictates uniformity where natural bodily differences demand distinction, effectively making women attempt to erase their age, their coloring, their social standing, and their body type. Fashion, for Ellis, can bring about not only the death of duty, but the death of self.

Collins plays with these fears about clothing-based threats to selfhood by granting garments a great deal of narrative agency or, to use Jane Bennett's terminology, “thing-power” (6).Footnote ¹¹ At several points in Collins's narrative, it seems as though clothing has indeed subsumed a character's individuality. For Madame Fosco and Laura Fairlie, clothing threatens to completely overwhelm and transform their characters. The reader is often reminded that Madame Fosco has undergone a startling change since her marriage. Marian articulates the strange shift in Madame Fosco's behavior through a clever, apparently innocuous, description of her dress. Marian notes that Laura's aunt, a woman formerly of high spirits, is now “clad in quiet black or grey gowns, made high round the throat – dresses that she would have laughed at, or screamed at, as the whim of the moment inclined her, in her maiden days – she sits speechless in corners; her dry white hands (so dry that the pores of her skin look chalky) incessantly engaged” (239; “Miss Halcombe's Narrative Continued”). Madame Fosco's dress itself is “quiet,” and since it is “high round the throat,” can impose a strangling, restrictive silence on its host. Marian's description makes the dress a vehicle of the Count's marital oppression and suggests the inescapability of his will. Fosco's supreme, we might say mesmeric, control over his wife hearkens back to eighteenth-century Gothic novels that feature tyrannical men imprisoning and exploiting their defenseless spouses. In the hands of a Victorian writer working in a mode heavily influence by the Gothic, locked rooms become dresses. Madame Fosco has not only internalized the Count's disciplinary gaze but is constantly kept in check by her garments, physical agents of her husband's strict marital regime.

Clothes’ unexpected ability to impose structure and control identity comes forward again when Laura Fairlie's very mental stability is compromised by a confusion (and conflation) of her selfhood with Anne Catherick's. Collins carefully frames this confusion with Fosco's plan to “revive” a dead woman by forcing her clothes onto another. Anne's dress has become such a powerful symbol, such a store of energies, that it metonymically contains its wearer's selfhood. This selfhood, then, is transferable if not precisely mutable, and Collins exploits anxieties about identity being vulnerable to exterior attack by describing Laura's arrival at the asylum.

At the asylum, interpolation works in tandem with possession to determine Laura's identity, but seeing that she owns and wears Anne's clothes seems to be more persuasive than hearing herself called by another woman's name. To possess a dress is to be possessed by it. The name on “your own clothes” must be “your own name,” and the truth of this transitive property can even outweigh personal testimony to the contrary. By giving Anne's garments and Madame Fosco's attire signs of agency, even frightening strength, Collins suggests the power of material artifacts to shape reality and mold identity.

Despite the dangers of the sartorial, we see the power of dress as a forger of community overwhelm the power of dress as an annihilator of individuality when Anne's sensational garment ultimately fails to utterly erase Laura's identity. Though severely traumatized, Laura does eventually overcome Fosco's deception and return to her former station. The key to Laura's persistence comes at the end of Collins's description of her dress-based transformation: “when Miss Halcombe examined the linen her sister wore” (my emphasis). Despite changes in Laura's appearance and bearing, Marian somehow manages to identify her. The nebulous selfhood of Laura Fairlie can be compromised by dramatic alterations in social standing, but Marian's sister cannot be so easily altered. Walter Hartright later explains that he and Marian recognized Laura while others did not because “the instinct implanted in us by. . .love [was] far more certain than any exercise of reasoning, far keener than any process of observation” (440; “Part the Second Hartright's Narrative,” ch. 3). The extreme devotion shared by the sisters not only rescues Laura from the asylum but rescues Laura's selfhood. Miss Fairlie can only be restored to herself by relying on the shared memories of a sororal community based on class-defying affection. Laura can be saved from possession by Anne's white dress because she cared enough to don understated white dresses for Marian's sake, thereby strengthening a network of sisterly sympathy. This network, supported by a semiotics of fashion and women's culture, trumps the identity slippage Collins mobilizes through an extended metaphor of dress-as-possession.

Looking to fashion as a means by which women communicated, rather than as a means by which women experienced patriarchal oppression, gives us a way to complicate our readings of other Collins novels, not to mention sensation fiction in general. The essays, articles, tracts, and treatises on women's fashion that flooded through periodicals in the vigorous heyday of the sensation novel invite us to explore the intersection of Victorian dress culture and the genre's modes of consciousness, gender systems and class structures. The supposed triviality of dress balanced by its hidden depths, coupled with its dual threat of empowerment and oppression, load it with particular significance in a genre obsessed with appearances and discovery. Regarded in this context Miss Havisham's dress becomes a key player in her twisted tragedy. No Name’s (1862-1863) Capt. and Mrs. Wragge come to light as allegorical characters working through a fashion controversy. Clothes and female servants might have more to do with Lady Audley's secret than previously thought. A criticism keenly attuned to the intricacies of contemporary dress discourse becomes much better equipped to accurately assess sartorial possibilities and dangers for female characters and to therefore better understand gendered identity in Victorian sensation fiction.