The unreliable editor of The Woman in White

Abstract

A formal achievement that stands out in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) is the wide variety of narrators, presented in such a way as to turn each one of them into a witness who assists in solving the plot’s central crime, that is, the identity theft of Laura Fairlie and Anne Catherick. Although this feature adorns the text with a democratic mantle of selfless search for the truth and legitimized by the formal imitation of a Court of Justice, as if its sole intention were the unbiased reconstruction of the facts and as if the testimonies divergent from those of the protagonists had equal space and weight as the others, it is proposed that, in fact, the character Walter Hartright edits the accounts of other narrators, structuring the novel with mechanisms borrowed from journalistic and, mainly, legal practices, in order to support the organization and display of the evidence in the way that best suits him, and thus stand out as the hero of a Manichean conflict and as to justify his social ascension. In other words, it is proposed that Hartright is an unreliable editor, using high values, such as the search for truth for the sake of justice, and analogous discursive practices, journalistic and legal, to extol what was, ultimately, a personal gain.