Frederick Fairlie: could you really call that man healthy?
For those of you who don't know it, The Woman in White/ is a sterling example of a mid-nineteenth century "sensation novel", a sort of prototype of the mystery novel crossed with Gothic. Frederick Fairlie is the uncle of one of the main characters, and is one of the characters we all love to hate. He claims that he is terribly ill, is monumentally selfish, has everyone running rings around him while he sits leafing through art books in his room, treats servants as if they're not even human, and refuses to get involved with the grand drama of the novel because he says it would upset his nerves. Everyone assumes that he's a hypochondriac and loathes him. At the end of the novel, it's reported that he has died of paralysis, which is presumably meant to be symbolic: he sat around doing nothing until it killed him.
What I'm wondering is whether he's an example of someone who does in fact have a health problem, but has then seized on it as an opportunity to manipulate everyone. The symptoms he describes are surprisingly reminiscent of ME/CFIDS, a medical condition which is little-understood now and would have fared far worse a century and a half ago. He complains of fatigue, sensitivity to sound, sensitivity to light, inability to cope with stress. That said, I think it's possible that those symptoms could develop as a result of inactivity and lack of exposure to stimuli. Another possibility is mental illness, because really, what sane person would choose to live in a self-made prison, even with the benefit of being waited on hand and foot and being able to boss everyone about? Perhaps his social skills are so poor that early on in life, he pissed everyone off to the point where he had to take refuge in solitude, and became afraid to leave his room - again, not the act of someone in good mental health.
I should mention in passing that I think this character is well-drawn and a good source of comedy. It doesn't feel like Collins is attacking actual disability, just the faking of it. Collins was absolutely obsessed with disability and illness, they turn up as major themes in all of his work and apply to main characters, and he generally handles them sympathetically, if sometimes a little wackily (there's a novel in which people start turning dark blue as a result of a treatment for epilepsy).
What I'm wondering is whether he's an example of someone who does in fact have a health problem, but has then seized on it as an opportunity to manipulate everyone. The symptoms he describes are surprisingly reminiscent of ME/CFIDS, a medical condition which is little-understood now and would have fared far worse a century and a half ago. He complains of fatigue, sensitivity to sound, sensitivity to light, inability to cope with stress. That said, I think it's possible that those symptoms could develop as a result of inactivity and lack of exposure to stimuli. Another possibility is mental illness, because really, what sane person would choose to live in a self-made prison, even with the benefit of being waited on hand and foot and being able to boss everyone about? Perhaps his social skills are so poor that early on in life, he pissed everyone off to the point where he had to take refuge in solitude, and became afraid to leave his room - again, not the act of someone in good mental health.
I should mention in passing that I think this character is well-drawn and a good source of comedy. It doesn't feel like Collins is attacking actual disability, just the faking of it. Collins was absolutely obsessed with disability and illness, they turn up as major themes in all of his work and apply to main characters, and he generally handles them sympathetically, if sometimes a little wackily (there's a novel in which people start turning dark blue as a result of a treatment for epilepsy).