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SOURCE: “A Man's Resolution: Narrative Strategies in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XXII, No. 4, Winter, 1990, pp. 392-402.
In the following essay, Perkins and Donaghy examine the subtle critique of Victorian gender conventions in The Woman in White.
The unsuspecting reader of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White1 may well be tempted to dismiss the novel as little more than a meticulously-plotted melodrama. Certainly, Collins' Victorian critics focussed almost exclusively on the novel's entertainment value.2 Influenced by these earlier critics, many twentieth-century scholars have persistently regarded Collins as a lightweight novelist. Lately, some studies have attacked these assumptions about Collins and have begun to recognize his genuine desire to expose the inequities of Victorian gender and social conventions.3 Yet even those who argue that Collins is more than a shadow of Dickens conclude that his novels ultimately back away from the serious...
This section contains 5,011 words (approx. 17 pages at 300 words per page) |
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