Reading Histories
Many Women in White: A Novel Evolves
Writing at the turn of the twenty-first century, D. F. McKenzie described the literary text as “always incomplete and therefore open, unstable, subject to perpetual re-making by its readers, performers, or audience” (55). McKenzie’s perspective may be familiar to you if you’ve ever sat through a friend’s ten-minute monologue about how superior the director’s cut of the 1982 film Bladerunner is to the theatrical release—or vice versa. Bladerunner is perhaps an extreme example of media’s instability: the 1992 director’s cut contained scenes originally removed from the movie, including a scene involving an origami unicorn. This additional scene shifted many fans’ fundamental assumptions about the main character in the film (Convergence 123). But a large proportion of literary scholars today think of all texts as unstable in a similar way. Media such as novels change in large and small ways over time, be it the addition of illustrations, publication in e-text format, or the release of a sequel that changes how readers view the first book. Likewise, as audiences’ attitudes change and new historical events alter social relationships, the same physical copy of a novel could land entirely differently on a different set of readers.
Because literary texts aren’t fixed objects, it can be useful for us to think about novels and communities of readers in historically-situated ways. To focus only on ‘what Wilkie Collins meant’ in 1859 and 1860 is to miss out on a rich tapestry of back-and-forth responses in the press, literary power grabs, and adaptations. As people wrote about, pirated, merchandized, and adapted the novel, conversations about the narrative changed over time. Although Collins tried to maintain authority over his text’s forms and cultural meanings, he was ultimately unable to do so. In the twenty-first century, we benefit. The variations that emerge in The Woman in White offer us a range of ways to think about reading and publishing throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.
Magazine Modifications: The Harper’s Weekly Serial Run
Variations among editions of the novel appeared before the first serial installment even reached any of its readers. In 1859, Wilkie Collins teamed up with the American magazine Harper’s Weekly to release the Woman in White in America at the same time that All The Year Round was running its serial in Britain. As Collins completed installments, he and his publishers took pains to align his two separate audiences’ encounters with the text, sending out each number to the United States in time to run the newest issues simultaneously accross the Atlantic. True, there were some slight differences in publication pace at the very end of the novel—All the Year Round published forty installments and Harper’s extended its run to forty-two parts—but by in large, readers in America and England experienced the serial on a similar timeline.
One of the key areas where these simu