Abstract
In “Essay Upon Epitaphs—I” (1810), William Wordsworth defines the epitaph as a form of writing “intended to be permanent and for universal perusal.” Yet the tombstone, like any other text, can be miswritten or can lie. The inscriptions of tombstones, as Peter Brooks recognizes, are “authoritative texts that nonetheless require decipherment.”3 Tombstones appear often in the nineteenth-century novel, for instance, in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), in which Scrooge uncannily reads “upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name, EBENEZER SCROOGE,” and most memorably in Great Expectations (1860–1), which overlapped publication with The Woman in White in All the Year Round.4 As Brooks has notably interpreted, the opening scene of the novel dramatizes quite remarkably the role of the epitaph, not only as narrative but also as a visual marker. Here young Pip confronts his parents’ graves:
As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first
fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, “Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. ( 3)
Every great writer senses the presence of death in the act of creation he performs through written language. During the act of writing, every artist becomes, momentarily, a carver of gravestones.
—Karen Mills Campbell, “Poetry as Epitaph”1
Taking the epitaph as a paradigm for writing is one of the great power plays in humanism’s history.
—Cynthia Chase, “Reading Epitaphs”2
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Notes
Karen Mills Campbell, “Poetry as Epitaph,” Journal of Popular Culture 14, no. 4 (1981): 659.
Cynthia Chase, “Reading Epitaphs,” in Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 52.
Peter Brooks, Readingfor the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1981), 297.
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 512.
See studies such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979)
Diane Elam, “White Narratology: Gender and Reference in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White,” in Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature, ed. Lloyd Davis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993)
Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). My reading is indebted to the work of Carolyn Dever whose work examines the feminist, Freudian, and deconstructive implications of the Victorian dead mother.
Walter M. Kendrick, “The Sensationalism of The Woman in White,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 32, no. 1 (1977): 35.
Kathleen Tillotson, “The Lighter Reading of the Eighteen-Sixties,” in Introduction to The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins, ed. Anthea Trodd (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), viii–xxvi. Tillotson further remarks that “By 1870, ‘dead, yet not dead’ had become such a stereotype that it is difficult to imagine Dickens adopting it” (xxv).
John Sutherland, Introduction to Armadale, by Wilkie Collins (London: Penguin, 1995), vii–xxvi.
Ira B. Nadel, Introduction to The Dead Secret, by Wilkie Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xxiii.
Wilkie Collins, The Dead Secret (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873), 34. In his Introduction to the Oxford edition, Ira B. Nadel notes, “For added, realism, Collins reproduces the inscription of the headstone, as he will do later in The Woman in White” (xiv). The Oxford edition does not reproduce the accurate spacing or font as printed in the serial version in Household Words.
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 15. Subsequent references will cite this edition. In the Introduction to Collins’s Mad Monkton and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) Norman Page notes: “The chance meeting with a mysterious woman, always a potent stimulus to Collins’s imagination, recurs most famously in The Woman in White (1860), though Collins had used it earlier, and crucially, in Basil” (xvii). The theme was also used in Collins’s short story “The Ostler” (1855).
One of Dickens’s sons recalled his father saying that the description was “one of the most dramatic descriptions he could recall.” The other was the account of the march of the women to Versailles in Carlyle’s French Revolution. See William Heinemann, The Recollections of Sir Henry Dickens (London: Heinemann, 1934), 54. The Woman in White was published serially following Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Both novels revolve around doubled figures that are substituted for each other. In the Introduction to Collins’s Mad Monkton and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) Norman Page remarks: “‘The Lady of Glenwith Grange’ (1856) is a particularly good illustration of Collins’s general tendency to anticipate in his short stories elements that would reappear more prominently in his—and sometimes not only his—longer fictions” (xix). Its double identity plot antedates the double identity plots of both A Tale of Two Cities and The Woman in White. See Laurie Langbauer, “Women in White, Men in Feminism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 2, no. 2 (1989) for a comparison of several literary “women in white.”
Carolyn Dever, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 115.
For a discussion of Anne’s power in erasure see Gwendolyn MacDonagh and Jonathan Smith, “‘Fill Up All the Gaps’: Narrative and Illegitimacy in The Woman in White,” Journal of Narrative Technique 26, no. 3 (1996): 274–91. For a more recent discussion of the novel’s blank spaces see Aria Chernik, “‘Identity, Ideology, and Inscription: Narrative Acts as the Site of Resistance’ in The Woman in White,” in Gender and Victorian Reform, ed. Anita Rose (Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 141–150.
John Sutherland, “Wilkie Collins and the Origins of the Sensation Novel,” Dickens Studies Annual 20 (1991): 255. Sutherland asks, “Why not just poison Laura? She is chronically delicate” (255). The corpse-substitution plot was subsequently used by several sensation novelists. Of course, later deployed by Collins in The Haunted Hotel (1879) and in his last completed work, Blind Love (1889) where Lord Harry substitutes a consumptive victim for himself in order to collect his own life insurance. Mary Elizabeth Braddon went on to further popularize the burial-plot in Lady Audley’s Secret (1861–2). J. D. Coates remarks, “Lady Audley’s Secret even uses what is, perhaps the most striking of Wilkie Collins’s dramatic devices in The Woman in White, that of the false grave dug and the headstone put up during the life-time of the person supposedly buried there.”
See J. D. Coates, “Techniques of Terror in The Woman in White.” Durham University Journal 73, no. 2 (1981): 181.
Philip O’Neill, Wilkie Collins: Women, Property and Propriety (New Jersey: Barnes and Novel, 1988), 124.
Kenneth Robinson, Wilkie Collins: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 324.
Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 432.
Clyde Hyder, “Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White,” PMLA 54 (1939): 299. See Hyder’s seminal article for his discussion of Mme. de Douhault’s court case in Maurice Mejan’s Recueil des Causes Célèbre and the similarities to the plot of Collins’s novel.
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© 2012 Jolene Zigarovich
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Zigarovich, J. (2012). Wilkie Collins, Narrativity, and Epitaph. In: Writing Death and Absence in the Victorian Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007032_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007032_4
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