Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

Caitlin Schmitt
Carroll University
“Marian was the good angel of our lives”: Feminine Power, Queen Victoria,
and the New Feminine Ideal In The Woman In White
In 1861 Wilkie Collins' friend, John Leech published a comic in Punch entitled, "Awful
Apparition!" (Peters Illustration 15). Leech depicts Mr. Tomkins as weak and effeminate. His shocked and
highly emotional face along with the activity of novel reading contrasts sharply with the powerful and
dominant masculine ideal. His back is turned away from his wife, and he hunches protectively over his copy
of The Woman in White. This comic is an allusion to the gender-bending that Fosco, Mr. Fairlie, and Marian
exhibit throughout the novel, for Collins constructs effeminate men and masculine women. The immense
popularity of The Woman in White demonstrates the Victorian readership’s fascination with breaches in
traditional gender roles. Breaking the role of the traditional angel in the house ideal, Mrs. Tomkins
dominates her husband, and he appears to be the fool while she is logical and intelligent. Mrs. Tomkins’
assertive masculinity along with her role as the lady of the house suggests the paradox of Victorian
femininity. I argue that both Queen Victoria and Wilkie Collins suggest the feminine paradox: Victoria was
an angel in the house in public and a feminist in private and Collins represents the paradox through the
angelic but progressive Marian Halcombe. I further argue that Victoria’s contradictory roles and Collins'
characterization of Marian as a masculine but domestic woman demonstrate that feminine power is
represented as a paradox.
My connection between Victoria, the seemingly ideal Victorian woman, and Marian, the openly
paradoxical female, brings to light the issue that the angel in the house ideal was a public persona and that
the supposed ideal Victorian woman was powerful and assertive at home. Elizabeth Langland argues that
Queen Victoria’s contradictory roles as a middle-class wife and mother and an independent monarch greatly
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