
The Wizard of Oz
David Stuart Davies looks at this ever-popular book.
...
May
15
May
17
A key dramatic moment in
the novel The Woman in White is Walter Hartright’s first meeting with
Marian Halcombe, one of the most interesting female characters in
nineteenth-century fiction. It occurs in Walter’s first narrative, early on in
the novel, when he goes as art tutor to the two half-sisters Marian and Laura
at Limmeridge House:
I looked from the
table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her
back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the
rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her
figure was tall but not too tall; comely and well-developed but not fat; her
head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist ... visibly
and delightfully undeformed by stays.
So far, so accurate to
Marian as played by the striking Jessie Buckley, and on the page Walter permits
himself the pleasure of observing Marian for a few moments without alerting her
to his presence. When he does so, and she immediately moves towards him, he is
‘in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly’:
She left the
window – and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps
– and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer – and I said
to myself ..., The lady is ugly!
The erotic charge of the
passage pulls up short in a moment of deliberate narrative bathos which also
announces a significant moment in Victorian fiction: the creation of a heroine
who can be ugly but also profoundly attractive, and an agent of power rather
than a passive recipient of the agency of others. For so Marian continues to be,
overturning standard female stereotypes to which her half-sister Laura fully
conforms. If Walter’s attraction to her is sidelined by her being ‘ugly’,
Collins here is surely making some fun of the predictability of his male
protagonist, drawn more readily to the fair but anodyne charms of Laura. Yet
all his meaningful interactions are with Marian – with her he is on equal
terms, discussing what should be done, often deferring to her judgement; and
the novel ends with their remaining a ménage a trois, if a platonic one,
with Anne as a sort of child-woman whom they both protect like any parents.
In addition, all the
drama of that first meeting between Marian and Walter, which could have been
exploited so interestingly in the television medium, is sacrificed to the
decision to start the whole series in flashback. Thus we have already met
Marian recounting her story to a lawyer in the opening moments of the drama,
before we ever meet her in her original narrative moment. The viewer’s first
sight of Marian is at the very start of the drama, full face, in her mourning
veil (mourning for whom we don’t yet know), her splendid dark eyes liquid with
tears – quite the opposite of ‘ugly’.
I can see that casting an
‘ugly’ actor might have its difficulties; and perhaps there was a pulling away
from the judgement implied in that word. But that judgement itself is
consistently overturned throughout the novel as the reader becomes deeply
engaged by Marian’s strong personality. And within the realist frame of the
fiction, we also see Count Fosco strongly attracted to her; the one weakness he
concedes in his concluding account of events has been his instinct to preserve
her. She in turn fully admits, if in the privacy of her journal, her
unaccountable submission to this man:
He looks like a
man who could tame anything. If he had married a tigress, instead of a woman,
he would have tamed the tigress. If he had married me, I should have
made his cigarettes as his wife does – I should have held my tongue when he
looked at me, as she holds hers.
I am almost afraid to confess it, even to
these secret pages. The man has interested me, has attracted me, has forced me
to like him ... – and how he has worked the miracle, is more than I can tell.
Now we certainly would
not consider it miraculous if we found ourselves ready to be tamed by the
ludicrously handsome Riccardo Scamarcio, allotted to play Fosco in the
adaptation. But this Fosco was surely a traducement of Collins’ creation, a man
who is, we are told several times, ‘monstrously fat’ and whose closest
companions are the family of white mice who ‘crawl all over him, popping in and
out of his waistcoat’, while his pet cockatoo ‘hops onto his knee, and claws
its way up his great big body, and rubs its top-knot against his sallow double
chin in the most caressing manner imaginable’. Again Collins seems to be almost
parodically testing the reader’s belief in such an ostensibly cartoonish
character. But in spite of the fact that Marian avers ‘I have always especially
disliked corpulent humanity’, there is more true desire in her relations with
Fosco than any to be felt between Walter and Laura. The subtlety of that was
lost in the frank embraces between Fosco and Marian in the adaptation's third
episode; but I suppose every Sunday night period drama has to have its wet
shirt moment.
Marian and Fosco
recognise each other as worthy antagonists, and part of the originality of this
novel is that Collins doesn’t hang back from exploring the often uneasy
relationship between sexual desire and power. Sir Percival Glyde is a
too-obvious villain in this respect, throwing his weight about, literally, to
subdue the frail Laura. He is a blunt instrument, while Fosco is suave and soft
in the way he bends his will to subdue others. Yet, as Marian brilliantly
observes of his relationship to his wife, ‘The rod of iron with which he rules
her never appears in company – it is a private rod, and is always kept
upstairs.’ If there is any double-entendre here, it makes Collins’ observations
of hidden abuse all the more acute and chilling. The point is that it is key to
the unexpectedness of Fosco’s sinister power that he is such a strange physical
specimen, with elements of the feminine about his make-up, just as Marian has
elements of the masculine. To render him
as a smouldering Latin lover is to make him less rather than more fearful.
Where Carl Tibbets’
direction did get it right, whilst departing from the text, was in depicting
Marian as a cross-dressing, almost cross-gender figure. The costume department
had a whale of a time with her culottes and her handsome jackets, cutting a
colourful swathe as she strode across drawing room and moorland alike (while
poor old Laura and her alter-ego Anne were stuck with diaphanous white). Vita
Sackville-West would have given her eye teeth for some of those outfits. The
only basis for this in the text is that already-quoted mention of Marian’s not
wearing ‘stays’, and her thrilling venture out on the lead roof of the verandah
to eavesdrop on Fosco and Glyde on the terrace below. Even then, she doesn’t
don male costume, but does dispense with ‘the white and cumbersome parts of my
underclothing’, wrapping herself about instead in a thick cloak. Give or take
the slight frisson in the prose here, what this passage does make clear is the
way her change of dress liberates her: ‘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.’ So the adaptors were quite right to make Marian’s a trouser role, in
this respect at least true to the spirit of the book by not following the
letter – and visually pleasurable television to boot.