The Churchyard in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Issues of Madness and Illegitimacy
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Sidia Fiorato
Sidia Fiorato is Researcher of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages of the University of Verona. Her fields of research include the postmodern novel, detective fiction, Victorian fiction, law and literature, literature and dance. Among her publications, the monographsIl gioco con l'ombra. Ambiguita e metanarrazioni nella narrativa di Peter Ackroyd (Verona: Edizioni Fiorini, 2003) andThe Relationship between Literature and Science in John Banville's Scientific Tetralogy (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007), and essays on Peter Ackroyd, P. D. James, Angela Carter, R. L. Stevenson, Alasdair Gray, dance and Shakespearean works.
Abstract
The churchyard in Collins's The Woman in White represents an aesthetic metaphor for the Victorian social order and, in its enclosure, it seems to perpetuate its values and cultural tenets. In the course of the plot, however, it gradually transfigures itself into a gothic/fantastic space in which Anne Catherick's voice powerfully resonates and puts the Victorian legal system under discussion, in particular in her identification with madness and in her quality as illegitimate. Collins's sensation fiction thus mirrors the period's political and legal debates and powerfully destabilizes its acknowledged social relations, demonstrating that the role of literature is not only to create culture but to contest it as well.
About the author
Sidia Fiorato is Researcher of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages of the University of Verona. Her fields of research include the postmodern novel, detective fiction, Victorian fiction, law and literature, literature and dance. Among her publications, the monographs Il gioco con l'ombra. Ambiguita e metanarrazioni nella narrativa di Peter Ackroyd (Verona: Edizioni Fiorini, 2003) and The Relationship between Literature and Science in John Banville's Scientific Tetralogy (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007), and essays on Peter Ackroyd, P. D. James, Angela Carter, R. L. Stevenson, Alasdair Gray, dance and Shakespearean works.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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- Sovereignty Forever: The Boundaries of Western Medieval and Modern Thought in a Quasi-Symptomatic Reading of Schmitt's Definition of Sovereignty
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Focus: Genealogies of Laws and Justices
- Modifying the Past: Nietzschean Approaches to History
- Weeds in the Gardens of Justice? The Survival of Hyperpositivism in Polish Legal Culture as a Symptom/Sinthome
- Metamorphosis of the Ideals and the Actuals: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan and the Transplantation of Justice in British India
- The Churchyard in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Issues of Madness and Illegitimacy
- The Gothic Picturesque Garden and the Historical Sense
- Sovereignty, Faith and the Fall
- Sovereignty Forever: The Boundaries of Western Medieval and Modern Thought in a Quasi-Symptomatic Reading of Schmitt's Definition of Sovereignty
- Gollum's Sacredness and the Geopolitics of the Self: Reframing Tolkien's Normative World
- Culture, Language and Environmental Rights: The Anthropocentrism of English
- Finding The Guilty One: Media Sensationalism, Defendant's Performance, and Jury Equity
- Book Review
- Book Review
- Book Review
