The Woman in White

“This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.”

The first sentence of the novel is a stark and attention-grabbing declaration that has an almost epigrammatic tone. It balances opposites and, through their juxtaposition, sets up The Harm of Gender Inequality that will resonate throughout the novel: Women must passively “endure” their circumstances, whereas men can actively shape their lives. The pithy statement also raises questions that will be central to the plot that follows—e.g., who the woman and man in question are.

“There, in the middle of the broad bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.

I was far too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this extraordinary apparition stood before me, in the dead of night and in that lonely place, to ask what she wanted. The strange woman spoke first.”

This is Walter’s—and the reader’s—first encounter with the eponymous woman in white. The language Walter uses to describe her implies a supernatural aspect to her appearance. She is an “apparition” and seems to appear from nowhere. This effect will be heightened in subsequent meetings when her resemblance to Laura accentuates the uncanny impression.

“The view was such a surprise, and such a change to me, after my weary London experience of brick and mortar landscape, that I seemed to burst into a new life and a new set of thoughts the moment I looked at it. A confused sensation of having suddenly lost my familiarity with the past, without acquiring any additional clearness of idea in reference to the present or the future, took possession of my mind. Circumstances that were but a few days old faded back in my memory, as if they had happened months and months since. Pesca’s quaint announcement of the means by which he had procured me my present employment; the farewell evening I had passed with my mother and sister; even my mysterious adventure on the way home from Hampstead—had all become like events which might have occurred at some former epoch of my existence.”

This passage describes the first morning when Walter wakes in Limmeridge. The landscape transforms Walter’s perspective so that his past life becomes distant. Though the time he passes at Limmeridge House will be happy, its almost supernatural influence on his memory creates a slightly foreboding atmosphere.