The Epistemic and Material Violence Exerted Against Women in The Woman in White from a Posthuman Feminist Perspective

Abstract

Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman in White (1860) can be taken as an embodiment of patriarchal dominion over-sexualized others of the discourse. In line with women’s holding a “less than” status when compared to men in the text, they are reduced to disposable bodies in posthumanist critic Rosi Braidotti’s sense of the term. The male characters’ representation as the universal representative of the human falls short in embracing the female characters. Hence, Anne’s imprisonment and Laura’s forced marriage in the text demonstrate the working mechanism of epistemic and material violence exerted against the ones who are deprived of the politically representable status by stripping them off their agentic potentialities. In tune with these considerations, this paper aims to find an answer if male and female characters in the novel are human to the same degree against the backdrop of feminist dimensions of posthumanism by highlighting exceptionalist politics as a consolidation of patriarchal logic. By extension, this study proposes to demystify how hierarchical binary thinking excludes more than what it includes in relation to woman. The article also interrogates if a bond of solidarity among women based on nondialectical relations of the self to the other might offer a solution by instilling feminist orientations of posthumanism.