earticle

영어

This paper aims to investigate the manner in which identity, eavesdropping and settings are portrayed in The Woman in White. Wilkie Collins demonstrates a plot and a melodramatic story of the sensation novels of the 1860’s. By adopting the form of the sensation novel, he could attempt to use the romance mode to deal with realistic problems. Especially that his settings should be frightened with not only psychological but also historical meaning shows a credible and necessary manner for the mid-victorian writer. The setting in The Woman in White is functioned as a signifier Blackwater Park, standing in so staunch an opposition to Limmeridge, takes on the characteristics of the marriages and the identity which it houses and begins to appear as a refuge/prison. I see Blackwater Park as a narrative in its own right, a narrative of an aristocracy which has moved from the medieval privilege to the modern panopticon. That’s why the house itself implies secrets of the people who lived in a long time ago and reveals the ugly desire through atmosphere, portraits, cracked walls and rotten lakes. Collins’s construction and ordering of the narrative is designed to create the narrative secrets for as long as possible and to maximize the sensational effects of the sensation novel. For this goal, male narrators struggle to have narrative authority and involve to control an individual’s identity. In contrast, female narrators use a narrative method which based on the irrational suspicious of the narrative that conceal far more than they reveal. Eavesdropping, the usurpation of other people’s private information for one’s own ends, suggests that women have very different narrative strategy than men do in the novel.