“ANXIOUS TO KNOW”: EMERGENT EPISTEMOLOGY IN THE WOMAN IN WHITE

Abstract

Scholars understand legal shifts and growing industrialization of mid-Victorian culture as combining to give rise to sensational forms in journalism and fiction. Circling taboo topics (murder, forgery, adultery), sensation fiction’s narratives engage cultural struggles concerning new and old ways of knowing. The foundation of characters’ ability to acquire objective knowledge through sense perception becomes unstable while verification systems such as legal reliance on reputation and testimony are proving inadequate both inside and outside the novels. Populated with characters and events drawn from news reports of criminal activity, Victorian sensation fiction relentlessly calls epistemological discourse into question. Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), often pointed to as registering the genre’s birth, encodes cultural anxieties about knowing that sensation forms register. The centrality of knowledge and concern over its acquisition in The Woman in White demands an approach that adequately confronts the novel’s progressive epistemological dimensions, making the novel fit to demonstrate the productivity of reconceptualizing “philosophy and literature” approaches. My analysis of The Woman in White shows literature’s philosophical capacity through recourse to two so-called Gettier problems, which mark milestone developments in twentieth-century epistemology. I then show the literary critical potential of concepts from responsibilist virtue epistemology, a later, post-Gettier development. My thesis forges a “philosophy and literature” approach practiced as a conjunctive subdiscipline and characterized by disciplinary reciprocity. In deploying this approach, a detailed portrait of Marian Halcombe’s cognitive behavior emerges, and the ways in which her powers of intellection propel the novel’s resolution in restored “epistemic community.”