The true secret of Sir Percival in “The Woman in White” is both compelling and rich in significance—if we have the sensitivity as readers to perceive it.

“He’s obviously a werewolf.”

That was the unanimous opinion of the university students with whom I attended a performance of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of The Woman in White fourteen years ago. As I prepare to teach the novel to homeschooling high schoolers, I have found myself pondering this theatrical experience anew. In that summer of 2007, it did not matter what I attempted to explain about the sensation novel genre, about its half-sister genre the Gothic (where werewolves properly belong), or about the moral and social context of the novel. Those students insisted the werewolf hypothesis was the only one that would satisfy their expectations.

They were, of course, disappointed. The central secret of the novel is that the villain, Sir Percival Glyde, is illegitimate. He falsified a church registry to perpetrate the fraud from which he derives his baronetcy. To protect this secret, he systematically persecutes the mentally-ill Anne Catherick (the eponymous woman in white). Sir Percival goes on to marry the lovely heiress Laura Flyte, then swaps her for Anne, whom he has tormented to the point of death. With Lady Laura declared legally dead while physically incarcerated, Glyde pockets her fortune. Glyde eventually dies in a fire which he himself sets in an attempt to destroy the Church registry which will reveal his secret.

The story is rather different in Lloyd Webber’s adaptation. In the musical, Glyde’s secret is that he raped Anne, killed her unborn child, and, when Anne went mad with grief, imprisoned her in an asylum. His exploitation of the heroine is cast into the shade by angsty demonstrations of physical abuse. The final confrontation involves Lady Laura pretending to be the vengeful ghost of Anne Catherick, shrieking her wrongs. Sir Percival is run down by a train which rushes across the stage and into the audience, courtesy of a projector.

The transformation of Sir Percival’s secret is not the only liberty taken by Lloyd Webber. He introduces a love triangle with Lady Laura’s sister, the fascinating Marian Halcombe, thereby weakening a glorious and distinctive character—“the good angel of our lives”. The hero, who embarks mid-novel on a dangerous expedition to Honduras, instead languishes in London, drinking to excess and singing a maudlin lover’s lament.

Both the werewolf hypothesis and the Lloyd Webber sexual predator gloss illuminate a gross misunderstanding of the genre and moral framework of The Woman in White. Werewolves and preternatural threats belong in the Gothic genre. The sensation novel involves infamy at a moral and social level, though with a great deal of Gothic atmospherics thrown in. This may seem an unimportant distinction about genres which often veer into the realm of silliness, but this interpretive disconnect illuminates the constraints under which the modern reader too-often encounters literature. The heart of the sensation novel is marriage. We see this in two extremes—bigamy (too much marriage) and illegitimacy (too little marriage)—both of which are among the top themes of the genre. This is not merely a social concern; there’s a deep truth at play: the breaking of the social law signifies because it actually involves the breaking of the moral law and destabilizes society at the nuclear level: the family.

Consider the sequence: The illegitimacy of Sir Percival is the result of the abrogation of proper responsibility by his father. From this, Sir Percival learns selfishness, greed, and shame. He victimizes two unprotected women in turn. The fact that they are unprotected results from a similar point of parental irresponsibility: Anne Catherick is Lady Laura’s illegitimate half-sister. The same selfish origins of Sir Percival’s villainy are what lay Anne Catherick and Lady Laura open to becoming his victims. Anne Catherick and Lady Laura ought to be protected by their father. Lady Laura’s lack of protection, though less subtle than that of Anne Catherick, is as damaging: she is left to the supervision of her selfish, hypochondriac uncle, and burdened by her father’s deathbed urging that she marry Sir Percival Glyde. Sir Percival, Anne Catherick, and Lady Laura are all victims of the breaking of the social law. The two women remain victims until they are saved by the hero. Sir Percival takes his victimhood and weaponizes it in justification of his own villainy.

Of course, if we do not have the moral compass to guide our understanding of the social framework, we will not be able to appreciate the consequences of the breaking of social mores. Sir Percival risks all to conceal his illegitimacy. For the modern reader, this motivation is inadequate. In fact, the modern reader would likely consider the entire plot an expression of the backwardness and lack of progressive thinking of those straightlaced Victorians. What, after all, does Sir Percival do beyond seeking to recreate himself, breaking free of the constraints of social expectations? He is, in this light, practically the hero. This is the primary reason for the Lloyd Webber shift: the only way to avoid making Sir Percival the self-recreating hero therefore is to make him a sexual predator—while emasculating the true hero at the same time. Otherwise, the (largely American) audience for your musical won’t care about its central tension. That’s the one point Lloyd Webber gets right in his rather silly dramatic denouement: Sir Percival sneers at Anne Catherick (who is really Lady Laura, vaguely disguised), “You can save your prayers for no one truly cares.”

The dramatic tension of The Woman in White is sustained by the open questions of marriage and inheritance. To feel this dramatic tension one has to understand the subtleties of the social conventions and recognize them as consequential. Since the modern audience has dismissed the consequential nature of these social conventions, the only way to feel dramatic tension is through gross and dumb spectacle. Since the sensation novel, like the Gothic, already has an inordinate allotment of the spectacular (we have not even mentioned the most memorable character of the novel: the wicked but charming, obese, pet-mice owning Count Fosco), we need werewolves. Failing lycanthropes, we must have a massive projected train to mow down a sexual predator.

As I muse on this point, I do find myself smiling over the irony inherent in casting Wilkie Collins as an upholder of the moral law. The man, though a professed Christian, maintained two mistresses simultaneously for the last twenty years of his life. Marion Halcombe speaks scathingly of marriage at several points in the novel, likely expressing aspects of the author’s own opinion.

Nevertheless, Wilkie Collins knew his genre and the expectations of his audience, and this is shown throughout the novel and especially in its resolution. The hero of The Woman in White, Walter Hartright, is a diligent drawing master whose career is built upon the admirable work of his father. Hartright’s sense of justice and responsibility pervades the novel and unites with the fearlessness and unselfishness of Marion to overthrow the sinister machinations of Sir Percival and Count Fosco. The novel concludes with the solution not only of myriad mysteries but with the reassertion of the proper social order through the birth of the hero and heroine’s legitimate son, whom Marion joyfully introduces to his father as “The Heir of Limmeridge”. It is notable that, when Marion playfully asks: “Do you know who this is, Walter?” He replies: “I think I can still answer for knowing my own child.”

With a morally upright father who knows and acknowledges his own child, this young heir needs neither to falsify church registries nor to victimize unprotective females. “This is the story,” says Collins, “of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.” The result of endurance and achievement is the same: that happy resolution of the disruption introduced by the immorality of previous generations. Thus the true secret of Sir Percival is both compelling and rich in significance—if we have the sensitivity as readers to perceive it.

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The featured image is an illustration from the 1873 novel, The Woman in White, and has no known copyright restrictions, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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