Anne Catherick Character Analysis

By Stephen Bray

Anne Catherick is the first of the heroines in 'The Woman In White' by Wilkie Collins to make an appearance. She is a more complex character than appears at first examination. She is so much a 'mirror image' of Laura Fairlie, the third heroine as to have enabled Laura to have been convincingly substituted for her in the plot.

If we are to believe the story as presented by Collins, she is also 'the sacrificial lamb', that is to say the good heroine who must die in order that the others may achieve the goal of redemption. Like all good sacrificed heroes her final resting place is a tranquil one in the grave, and so symbolically with, of the woman she idealised as a perfect mother figure. 

She is the illigitimate daughter of Laura's father Mr. Phillip Fairlie and Mrs Jane Anne Catherick, who at the time of their union had yet to marry the church warden Catherick and was in service to a Major Donthorne.

Her parentage is revealed only toward the end of the novel, and never admitted by her mother.

She makes her first appearance as Walter Hartright walks home across Hampstead Heath and greets him by placing her hand upon his shoulder. The author Collins refers to similar sensations in his own life, but in his case they are attributed by him to apparitions.

Anne Catherick dresses solely in white because Marian Halcombe and Laura Fairlie's mother met her as a child and admired her in a white dress. Mrs. Fairlie, (Marian and Laura's mother), also purchased some white dresses for the young Anne because the child so appreciated her kindness and admired the white dresses. The child pledged Mrs Fairlie that she would for ever more only wear white.

That Anne Catherick should have been so impressionable has been taken to infer that she was in some way mentally disabled, perhaps lacking in intelligence. This is partly as a result of the interpretation placed upon the child's state of mind by Mrs Fairlie, partly because she has escaped from (unjust) committal to a lunatic asylum, and also because she appears so mysteriously early in the novel.

One must question all of this material in the light of today's insight into child rearing. There is ample evidence to suggest that Anne was an emotionally neglected child, possibly even to the point of cruelty by her natural mother. She was subject to no fatherly influence, except perhaps that of Sir Percival Glyde, which would have been a negative one. She resembled Laura Fairlie in appearance, and also Laura resembled Anne Catherick as a personality after Laura was wrongfully imprisoned in the lunatic asylum. Is it therefore too great a leap to ponder irf a different upbringing would make Anne resemble Laura in her healthiest personality? This at best was subject to bouts of neurotic or migraine withdrawal.

Given her childhood it seems remarkable that Anne Catherick was able to pen the letter she sent warning Laura against Sir Percival Glyde. My conclusion is that Anne was less failing in wit, or native intelligence so much as tormented by a heartless mother and a history that denied the identity of her true father.

Despite these handicaps Anne persists in loyally attempting to aid Laura Fairlie in resisting Sir Percival Glyde, which given the potential consequences for her must be considered the sign of an obsessional personality, or a true hero. You must decide?