Mrs Clements Character Analysis

By Stephen Bray

Mrs Clements plays a small, but significant role in the story of 'The Woman In White' by Wilkie Collins.

Firstly she enables Anne Catherick to have a home and to move freely around the country after her escape from the asylum.

Secondly she is a narrator of the history of the connection between Anne Catherick's mother and Sir Percival Glyde.

Thirdly she provides information about the last days of Anne Catherick, and also provides some vital clues about how Laura Fairlie came to be tricked by Count Fosco into being substituted into Anne Catherick's identity.

She is in many ways the opposite of Jane Anne Catherick, Anne Catherick's mother, for Mrs Clements is a warm, well-meaning woman of considerable maternal disposition.

Such people frequently serve as foster mothers, and have a seemingly intuitive grasp of children's wants and needs. There is no fuss, or affectation too them, they are too warm-hearted for that. Indeed what they do they manage so naturally that they rarely take credit of reward for it. Indeed Mrs. Clements puts it thus:

"There's no great merit in (making sacrifices for Anne) . . . . "The poor thing was as good as my own child to me. I nursed her from a baby, bringing her up by hand-and a hard job it was to rear her. It wouldn't go to my heart so to lose her if I hadn't made her first short clothes and taught her how to walk."

Mrs Clements claims that Anne "was sent to console her for never having a chick, or child of my own."

No doubt Anne would have been a consolation, but the fact remains that many childless women lack the heart, and grasp of the care that children, particularly those with special needs, require. Mrs Clements willingness to help Anne from the beginning must then be attributed more to Mrs. Clements's warmth of character and natural abilities than her childlessness.

Mrs Clements is related to the family at Todd's Corner, a farm some three milers from Limmeridge. Her relationship to them is essential to the plot for it explains how Anne Catherick and she were able to lodge near Limmeridge when Anne Catherick sent the anonymous letter to Laura Fairlie in the fist part of the book. It also explains how Walter Hartright was so able to trace Mrs. Clements in order to interview her in the final part of the novel. Had Mrs. Clements not been related to 'the Todds' then the thread would have been lost.

In this context it is not surprising that Collins relates Mrs. Clements to the family at Todd's Corner. Indeed what is surprising is that he also saw a need to relate Mrs. Jane Catherick to the post-mistress at Limmeridge in order to explain Anne Catherick's visit there as a child. The same result could have been obtained simply by having Anne accompany Mrs. Clements on an earlier visit to the relatives at Todd's Corner.

For all of this, Mrs Clements isn't really a full character in the same sense as Fosco, Glyde, Halcombe or even Frederick Fairlie. Really she is allowed to serve many purposes from a characterisation lacking in substance.