The Woman in White

A key context for understanding the plot of The Woman in White is the contemporary treatment of mental health conditions. Anne is confined to a privately run psychiatric hospital by a wealthy man, Percival Glyde, to whom she has become inconvenient. Collins’s depiction of Anne is sympathetic; if she has a mental health condition or learning disability, Collins implies, it does not justify her incarceration. Instead, Collins focuses on the individuals and institutions that control and abuse her. Sir Percival has recourse to the same system when he attempts to inter and disempower Laura, a wealthy woman with a high social status who loses credibility when she becomes an inmate of the asylum. In this, Collins’s novel reflects and critiques Victorian definitions of “madness.” Mental health conditions were poorly understood at the time, and diagnostic criteria were vague and malleable; women were especially regarded as predisposed toward mental health conditions, and (as in The Woman in White) psychiatric diagnoses could be wielded to control women who flouted gender norms or were deemed troublesome.

Glyde claims that the private psychiatric hospital in which he places Anne and Laura is preferable to a public asylum. This raises questions about how people with mental health conditions (real or perceived) were treated by society at large.