The Significance of Silence: The Muted Voices of Count Fosco and Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White
Date
4-2012
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Master of Arts in English (MA)
Chair
Emily W Heady
Primary Subject Area
Literature, English; Literature, General; Language, Rhetoric and Composition
Keywords
Narrative Theory, Reader-response Theory, The Woman in White, Voice, Wilkie Collins
Disciplines
English Language and Literature | Literature in English, British Isles | Rhetoric and Composition
Recommended Citation
Page, Melanie, "The Significance of Silence: The Muted Voices of Count Fosco and Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White" (2012). Masters Theses. 229.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/masters/229
Abstract
This thesis examines the intricacies of voice using narrative theory and reader-response theory with Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White. Since Collins first wrote this epistolary novel serially, he wrote aware of his audience as he printed segments with different narrators. This novel allowed Collins the opportunity to reveal an internal set of narrators' responses to other characters' voices--responses that sometimes conflict with and modify one another. At the same time, Collins' contemporary audience's responses to the novel reveal the role of characters' voices in shaping reactions of members of the novel's reading public. Two opposing figures--Laura Fairlie and Count Fosco--aid this examination of understanding voice through multiple lenses as both of these characters are relatively silent in the context of the narrative while still remaining essential to the plot. Their distance from the narrative makes the interpretations the readership and narrators of the novel have of these two characters imperative to consider.
