‘In the name of her sacred weakness’: Romance, Destiny, and Woman’s Revenge in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins's hugely popular novel, The Woman in White (1860), was published at a time when the British middle-class woman was denigrated and marginalized by her husband's or lover's patronizing, contemptuous worship of her in a self-aggrandizing version of the traditional romance prostration before the idealized woman. As a 'priestess of virtuous inanity' (Dijkstra, 4), nineteenth-century woman became the object of a 'male fantasy of ultimate power, ultimate control' (Dijkstra, 19). She achieved her dubious, frail, holy status in order to validate and ameliorate the necessary brutalities practised by the century's ambitious men in their pursuit of empire. From this state of affairs emerged the cult of the 'household nun' and the 'consumptive sublime' (Dijkstra, 176) with its apotheosis in the woman's half-welcomed death (half-welcomed, that is, by both partners). In The Woman in White Collins combines a treatment of the cult of the consumptive household nun with elements of traditional romance to prod...