Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Woman in White, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Evidence and Law
Morality, Crime, and Punishment
Identity and Appearance
Marriage and Gender
Class, Industry, and Social Place
Summary
Analysis
A servant leads Walter upstairs to Mr. Fairlie’s rooms. He is led into the room very quietly and discovers on entering that the room is very dim, with curtains over the windows, and that it is stuffed with statues and artworks. Mr. Fairlie is a languid, effeminate man who suffers from nerves. He tells Walter that he has grown up abroad and that it has given him a taste for art beyond the usual “English barbarity.”
Mr. Fairlie seems to be suffering from a “nervous complaint” and claims that he cannot stand loud noises or bright lights. This type of complaint or neurosis was mostly associated with women and considered a feminine issue in the 1800s. Mr. Fairlie is critical of English tastes and looks down on art that is popular with the British public. This attitude would have been considered insulting to Collins’s middle-class readership, as it suggests an allegiance to European culture and classical subjects rather than modern, affordable mediums, such as the novel, which were popular among the middle class in Britain.
Themes
Mr. Fairlie commissions Walter to examine a collection of English watercolors that he owns and decide their value, but continually interrupts Walter when he tries to give his opinion on them. Mr. Fairlie then dismisses him, and Walter, feeling offended by Mr. Fairlie’s haughty and aristocratic manner, decides not to visit his employer again unless he is explicitly asked for.
Mr. Fairlie treats Walter as though he is a servant rather than an employee who is equal to his employer. This further demonstrates Mr. Fairlie’s snobbish and old-fashioned attitude toward members of lower social classes. In the nineteenth century the middle classes grew wealthier and more numerous, and expected more and more to be treated as equals by the upper classes.
Themes
Literary Devices
