White garments, petticoats and straw hats: analysing sartorial clues in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

Abstract

The aim of the research is to present and discuss the symbolic dimension clothes acquire in relation to the mains characters of Wilkie Collins’s novel, The Woman in White. The clothes examined reveal the characters’ emotions, intent and personality. Anne and Laura’s white clothes will be the first to be examined as means used by the villains to both change and control their identities. The research will then shed a light on the clothes Marian and Fosco, two ambiguously gendered characters, wear to discuss their gender liminality and the impossibility to categorise them within traditional markers of gender. Ultimately, clothes as symbols of patriarchal authority will be considered, with reference to two marginalised female figures, Madame Fosco and Mrs Catherick.