Page 115 - DENG202_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_III

Elective English—III

Notes 9.4 Wilkie Collins and the Form of the Novel

Collins’ depiction of his era is forcefully gripping. The novelists Balzac, Scott, and Cooper were
the favourites of his youth, and his works share with theirs the breaking of new ground in
fiction: Collins, reacting to Dickens and Thackeray, desired to be a trail-blazer.

Example: In The Moonstone, Collins precariously shifts narrative points-of-view,
anticipating such 20th century novelists as Conrad and Joyce. His keen eye for detail, his humanity,
and his sympathy for women are reflected in his letters, but these change abruptly in form after
the publication of The Woman in White (1860), which marks his perfection of the epistolary
technique. He measures up to Scott in structure, and to Balzac in innovation.
Collins changed the train schedule in The Woman in White after Times reviewer pointed out an
error in a serial episode: verisimilitude mattered very much to Collins. In his scrupulous attention
to such realistic details, he again anticipates later novelists. Eliot and others have credited him
with being the father of the modern mystery novel, even though he may not have been aware
that he was creating a genre—after all, The Moonstone is subtitled “A Romance.” However, he
consciously developed the mystery subgenre in new ways as he explored new realms.
9.5 Conclusion

At his best, Collins created a legacy of enduring characters. He uses the figure of the artist, such
as Walter Hartright from The Woman In White, in a variety of ways. He endows Hartright with
both masculine and feminine characteristics to make him seem more fallible and real. Walter is
able to serve a parental function, providing an outlet for the subconscious to reveal itself. He is
a more developed version of a character Collins originally creates in his short story “A Terribly
Strange Bed,” a tale, which was first published in 1852, eight years before The Woman in White.

In “A Terribly Strange Bed,” an artist, who remains unnamed, has been hired to paint the
portrait of a wealthy man named Faulkner. At the beginning of the story, the artist writes:
“Mr. Faulkner, like many other persons by whom I have been employed, took it into his head
that he must assume an expression, because he was sitting for his likeness; and, in consequence,
contrived to look as unlike himself as possible, while I was painting him”. The artist reveals that
many of the people he paints believe themselves to be something they are not. Mr. Faulkner
contrives “to look as unlike himself as possible” because he believes he is assuming the proper
pose for a portrait. Through an unnatural expression, he contrives to mask his true nature in
favour of an assumed one. It is up to the artist to find Faulkner’s true nature and subsequently his
true expression. Faulkner is “the most difficult likeness” the artist has “ever had to take,”
because he erects a barrier, keeping the artist psychologically and creatively at a distance from
himself.
Once the sitter begins to reminisce about his past, the barrier he put up between himself and the
artist collapses. The artist notes: “in the interest of his subject he soon completely forgot that he
was sitting for his portrait – the very expression that I wanted came over his face – I proceeded
towards completion in the right direction and to the best purpose”. The storytelling process
frees Faulkner from a controlled emotional state to an uncontrolled one, where he can assume
a natural expression. The artist is put into a position of power. He can manipulate his subject to
give him the pose he wants by taking the sitter from outside of himself to inside of himself.

While there are two distinct roles in “A Terribly Strange Bed,” that of the artist and that of the
storyteller, Mr. Faulkner, the framed narrative technique reveals the artist himself to be
a storyteller by relating to the reader the tale Faulkner has told him. He is similar to

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