The Law and the Lady is a strange and compelling novel, written in 1857, one of the best by Wilkie Collins. Why is that?
For starters, it centers on a strong and stubborn woman (against the Victorian grain that women should be "dolls" and kept in the "dollhouse"). Collins (who himself avoided the pitfalls of conventional marriage) really thought about the domestic and legal position of women like almost no other Victorian male writer (with the possible exception of Trollope). He was very interested in female characters, especially their concerns and ambitions, and deplored the social restrictions placed upon them by society. Valeria, the independent-minded heroine of this novel, tells her own story, using letters, diaries, and trial transcripts as a central part of her sleuthing as she tries to prove her husband's innocence. She is not the ideal type of pliable Victorian woman with blonde or yellow hair, but is described as having "dark hair and heavy eyebrows."
a woman with dark hair from the same period as The Law and the Lady]
Valeria Brinton and Eustace Woodville met by chance and fell in love at first sight. Despite the misgivings of both their families, they marry within weeks of their first meeting, knowing almost nothing about each other. On their honeymoon, Valeria discovers that her husband married her under an assumed name (his true surname is not "Woodville", but "Macallan"), and despite his assurances that he loves her and his pleas for her not to delve further into the reasons for his name change, Valeria is determined to find out why her husband felt it necessary to hide his true identity from her. Soon she is in for an even greater shock when she learns that Eustace had been married before and was on trial for the poisoning of his first wife. The trial took place in Scotland where he lived at the time and Scottish law (as is still the case) has three options: Guilty, Not Guilty, and Not Proven (when guilt is presumed but cannot be legally proven). And that is the verdict Eustace receives. Valeria is shocked and confused - she can't believe her husband is capable of such a terrible crime, but why didn't the jury find him "not guilty"? And why did Eustace not trust her enough to tell her about his life before they were married? Determined to clear her husband's name (and thereby also her own life now linked to that name), Valeria sets out to find out as much as she can about the trial and to re-examine the evidence against Eustace, but in doing so she not only alienates her husband, but also steps outside the bounds of conventional social behavior.
Second, Collins' novel is a detective novel with an early example of a female detective (for more stories about female detectives, see my post "The Female Rivals of Sherlock Holmes" - the first female detective, Miss G, appeared in 1864). As a female amateur detective, Valeria is repeatedly discouraged by those she encounters, all of whom assume that, as a woman, she lacks the physical and mental strength to accomplish the task she has set herself. Dangerously stepping outside the realm of the respectable woman of the time, she must endure the unwelcome advances of a man she is interrogating (Dexter, see below). And in another case, where she has to charm an old Casanova type (Major Fitz-David, a delicious character with innumerable girlfriends who gets his comeuppance when he marries a young but very vulgar singer who keeps him on a tight leash and pockets his money), she uses make-up, which in 1875 was used only by "light women" - Valeria can be traditionally feminine enough when it suits her or when circumstances necessitate it.
The novel contains several features of modern detective fiction, including the amateur who succeeds where the professionals fail, a courtroom cross-examination, the use of an alibi, and the sequential elimination of various suspects. By boldly and unconventionally investigating a mystery that proved impenetrable to male lawyers, Valeria achieves much, but in the end also disappoints the modern reader because of her exaggerated respect and love for her unimpressive and weak husband. But we should probably see that as an aftereffect of the oppression of women so deeply rooted in Victorian society.
Third, the novel is a vehicle for the presentation of eccentricity, madness, and idiocy through the characters of Miserrimus Dexter and his cousin Ariel. Dexter, who consists only of the head, arms, and torso of a living human being with nothing below the waist is literally "half a man." Dexter embodies the most excessive elements of sensational fiction and is the most bizarre of all Collins's creations. His house, a pastiche of High Gothic in the desolate landscape of a half-built suburb, is decorated with paintings of gruesome scenes he has painted himself. He sadistically experiments on his mentally challenged servant, his cousin Ariel. He veers wildly between abject melancholy and narcissistic excess. When in a state of high mania, he impersonates Napoleon, Nelson, and Shakespeare. When he gets out of his wheelchair in excitement, he jumps on his hands like a frog.
As a friend of Valeria's husband Eustace, Dexter was a house-guest in his Scottish home at the time of the death of Sarah, the first wife of Eustace, and Valeria sees him as both a witness and a possible suspect. He fuels Valeria's jealousy by telling her about another house-guest, Mrs. Beauly, a sort of femme fatale with whom Eustace was in love at that time. More importantly, he suggests a pattern of perverse behavior in Eustace's choice of Valeria by noticing a disturbing resemblance between Valeria and Sarah. So perhaps he is not so insane after all... although he does defy all rational ways of understanding him, and thus disturbed not only Victorian critics but also some modern readers. For me, this is the character who "makes" the novel!
Dexter is also crucial to the plot. Before taking the poison, Sarah wrote a letter confessing her suicide to her husband. This letter has fallen into the hands of Dexter, who eventually throws it away in the wastebasket in his room - it is then taken to a rubbish heap in the garden of Macallan's house, which is apparently never cleaned up. Buried under other garbage, like a shameful act in the Freudian unconscious, Valeria has the fragments of the letter dug up and then restored by a specialist. This is the final solution that she decides not to show Eustace (see below).
Fourth, the novel weaves ambiguity around gender roles and even subverts them. The best example is again Dexter, who wears colorful clothes, plays music on a little harp, does needlework while talking to his visitors (so relaxing!), and even cooks a meal for Valeria like a true kitchen-princess. However, he is not completely feminized, as he tries to grab and kiss Valeria in a later chapter. His female cousin Ariel, who is his helper, has a completely inexpressive face and colorless eyes - she seems only half alive and in fact of indeterminate gender. And finally, Valeria's husband, Eustace, is described by Collins as "one of the weakest of living mortals," a complete contrast to his wife.
In the end, Valeria and Eustace are together again, and they even have a child. The results of Valeria's research, which Eustace still doesn't want to hear, have been put in a sealed envelope so that their son can read them if he wants to in the future. But I'm afraid I can't conclude that "they lived happily ever after." Thanks to Dexter, Valeria knows the contents of the diary Eustace kept at the time of his wife's death - it is full of mean observations about his first wife Sarah, and even hatred (no wonder Sarah committed suicide). On top of that, he had switched his affections to another woman, the above mentioned "femme fatale," Mrs. Beauly. In other words, Eustace is a weak and mean person... It is to be expected that these low character traits will surface again sometime in the future and destroy Valeria's happiness (the only thing I can say is that she is not the type to end her own life like Sarah did).
This is Collins at his best - different, of course, from The Woman in White and The Moonstone, with their labyrinthine threads of interwoven narrative found in Collins' novels of the 1860s, but it takes greater risks and pushes themes such as gender ambiguity far beyond earlier limits. In the 1870s and 1880s, Collins was not on a downward slide (as has been the verdict of brainless critics and superficial scholars), but continued to renew himself. It is possible that his true achievements of that period have been obscured both by his own two earlier blockbusters, as well as by the avalanche of other great English novels of the 1870s - so let us take care to restore The Law and the Lady to the position it deserves.
P.S. The Law and the Lady reminded me of the detective fiction of the Japanese author Edogawa Ranpo, who wrote in the ero-guro-nonsense or "erotic, grotesque, and nonsensical" style popular in Japan in the late 1920s and early 1930s. A bizarre character like Dexter, half man and half machine, would fit perfectly into one of Ranpo's stories and novels. Although Ranpo is now quite popular in the West, Europe and America didn't originally know about this style of literature, and that may be why the verdict on The Law and the Lady was so negative. See my blog articles about Edogawa Ranpo: The Ero-guro Mysteries of Edogawa Ranpo; Japanese Detective Novels, Edogawa Ranpo 1, and Japanese Detective Novels, Edogawa Ranpo 2; Edogawa Ranpo On Screen 1 and Edogawa Ranpo on Screen 2.