Sir Percival Glyde Character Analysis

By Stephen Bray

Sir Percival Glyde is the first and most obvious villain to make an entrance in the story of 'The Woman In White'. One senses at once that there is something odious about him, and of course we have already been warned against him by the mysterious letter from Anne Catherick.

He is considerably older than Laura Fairlie, but as more than one character in the book remark this is neither unusual, nor necessarily bodes for a bad union. It is because Collins has set us up to want Laura Fairlie and Walter Hartright to enjoy the marital bed that Glyde appears as an interloper. In the order of things, and more especially in Victorian society, it is Hartright who has encroached on the status quo, rather than Glyde.

This is exactly why Marian Halcombe sends Hartright away, which in turn results in his banishing himself abroad for much of the book.

The notion of romantic love as the basis for marriage is a comparatively recent one. Pre-Raphaelite society saw it as essential, if not to marriage, at least to satisfactory domestic harmony. But they are really an exception for the period. We must remember that for all the similarities of language Victorian society is very different from, for example, those of California, or the mid western states of America. In England today romantic love is perhaps the virtue espoused by most of European ethnicity, but it is by no means normal amongst the England's Asian community. So although Glyde is undoubtedly a villain he should not be condemned simply because he is the male party in an arranged marriage, or the one who could withdraw from the arrangement with honour is he so wished.

It would also be hypocritical to condemn him 'out-of-hand' because a man of his years probably has a 'secret past'. In the early parts of the Book we are unsure of his relationship to Anne Catherick, and more particularly her mother Jane Anne Catherick. This issue is perhaps more contentious than that of 'the arranged marriage'. Today a Prince may marry a divorcee, and still be the heir to the throne of England, but as recently as 1936 a King was forced to abdicate in what seem very similar circumstances. Incredibly the reason the King was asked to abdicate was in order that the divorcee wouldn't be queen. The Prime Minister of the time Stanley Baldwin, a man of very 'proper' disposition and religious conviction asked the King to conduct his 'affair de cour' more discreetly.

So in 1936 an affair between a King and a divorcee was 'acceptable behaviour', but marriage to one wasn't!

The fact that Sir Percival Glyde might have had an affair with Mrs Catherick does not preclude him from marriage to Laura Fairlie, nor would it have set him beyond the bounds of upper-classs English society of the period. In such classes it was generally accepted that whilst the church preached against such behaviour, it was really quite normal.