Erotic narrative and voyeurism in Madame Bovary and The Woman in White

¶ … Madame Bovary and Woman in White

Generalizations and Comparisons of the Two Novels

When looking at these two works in the sense of comparison, one first must say that they are both delicately, brilliantly crafted, and they both have received at least their fair share of plaudits for the excellence they achieved in literature. They both, too, have been controversial.

Meantime, the central point of this review herein, is that Madame Bovary titillates with fascinating character developments involving sexual adventures, fantasy, with numerous trysts and - importantly - with an erotically woven narrative on fetishes. On the other hand, The Woman in White seems to titillate the reader with the prolific use of snooping, spying, to be frank, plain and unadulterated eavesdropping. Characters are often overhearing things that were not intended for them to overhear, and hence, the reader is thrust into the position of picking and choosing what to believe based on who heard whom say what about this or that.

This is not an unusual literary convention: indeed, Shakespeare's plays are chocked full of characters overhearing what others say; there is the frequent switching of identities, the complicating of relationships, the conflict caused by things said that certain ears were not supposed to hear, throughout Shakespearian drama.)

There are many examples of carnally-rich narrative in Madam Bovary - and indeed, plenty of sex and sensual allusions in The Woman in White - but the titillation factor for the person who loves hearing things that enrich his rich imagination but were not intended for him to hear.

Woman in White - by Wilkie Collins

Whereas the superbly written fetishes in Madame Bovary, and her carnal capers (her habit of moving from one affair to another) sets a series of sensual and fantasy-laced tones, The Woman in White - which, according to the Introduction, "was probably the most popular novel written in England during the nineteenth century" - is steeped in a struggle to define gender, the socially improper science of eavesdropping, and an acute wrangling for who will be the authority when it comes to the institutional status quo.

The Introduction also mentions that the author, Collins, "...had been a habitue of casual sex since his teenage years," which of course was an ideal series of rehearsals for which Collins to later capture the essence of these trysts in books, and sell them like hotcakes.

The "central crime" in The Woman in White is probably not, to the average reader, what Collins himself expresses in the opening line: "This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve." Rather, it is the "recurrent acts of illicit overhearing... [e.g., eavesdropping] suggest that this novel in particular, and perhaps novels in general, are composed of deviant activities and the attempts to suppress them" (Gaylin, 2001).

Indeed, in this novel, sexy though it is, readers are to become deviants too; a reader feels like he is also listening in on conversations that he should not be allowed to listen in on. "...Eavesdropping represents the intersection of such concerns and the transgression of conventional attitudes toward them in the novel," Gaylin explains, and her argument has a lot of weight when the entire context of the ebb and flow of interaction in the novel is put under a microscope.

This particular narrative device aids in the telling of the story," Gaylin continues, "and subtly comments on the story being told and its ideological implications." She goes on: "[Eavesdropping is] the usurpation of other people's private information for one's own ends, suggest the unsanctioned transfer and use of narrative information from speaking subject to listener, and from writer to reader within a text."

All writing in Woman in White "...falls in the public domain; private notes, letters, and diaries are subject to constant interception and circulation among a larger audience than the one for which they were intended," Gaylin asserts.

And so, while Madame Bovary is written, it would appear, in large part to entertain through sensual excitement; while Madame Bovary is constructed in order to titillate, based on fetish, fantasy, and downright sexy stylistic images, The Woman in White titillates in a more scheming, conniving way.

But "as individual characters eavesdrop upon each other and determine what pieced of information are relevant to them,"

Ironically, the art of eavesdropping, when conducted to perfection, is a well-kept secret; and in this story just as formidable as one of the novel's best-kept secrets, is that in fact that the central narrator, Walter Hartright, is the criminal behind the secret crime at the heart of the story. So, just as eavesdropping is sly and underhanded and remains a dark secret [except to the readers who are privy to it], so is the Hartright crime.)

Meanwhile, another fascinating aspect of The Woman in White - which sets it apart from Madame Bovary - is, according to a scholarly article in the journal Narrative (Griffin, 2004), that Collins is apparently the "most secular and sensational of nineteenth-century writers." The cultural training in "anti-Catholic characters, and narrative structures shared by The Woman in White's audience had been heightened by specific historical events at mid-century." The figures and stories of anti-Catholic discourse, easily discerned by experienced Victorian readers, serve Collins well in developing his sensationalist style," Griffin asserts.

The fact that Count Fosco and the Woman in White "wear, among their other costumes, those of the stock polemical characters of nun and priest..." gives Griffin's argument food for nourishment, too.