I’ve just gotten back from spring break—and it was amazing. The week began in Italy—Milan, Florence, Fiosole, and Lake Como, where I spent 5 days wandering the Italian countryside with my mother, my favorite person in the world. After that, I headed back to London to meet up with some friends that I met while I was volunteering in Costa Rica last May.
On the train to London, nestled in my barely-cushioned seat, I was obsessively reading my current school assignment, The Woman in White, a gothic novel by Wilkie Collins. The novel is a (somewhat long-winded) account of the mysterious pasts of Sir Percival Glyde and Count Fosco, following several cryptic warnings about them by a strange Woman in White. At one point in the story, Sir Percival, angry that his new wife will not trust him enough to sign an unknown document without any explanations, he angrily storms off to London. As I was sitting there, absorbed in my book, it suddenly dawned on me—I was there. I was on the train riding through London, much like Percival—and a few chapters later, much like his wife and her sister after they go down to catch a train into the city. I was there. Looking out the window, I was seeing the landscape that these characters would have seen, riding trains that ran along the same tracks as they would have ridden. Its always interesting to experience first-hand the influences and inspirations that made a writer inclined to write about any given topic.
In the beginning of the book, the hero is walking along a lonely road to London late at night when he feels a ghost-like hand on his shoulder. It turns out to be the woman in white, a lost soul searching for an escape, both a mental one and a physical one. She was just a lonely woman who was falsely imprisoned in a mental hospital because of her knowledge of a Secret that would jeopardize the freedom of the two villains. As I looked out the window at the setting sun, I shivered. The train was fairly quiet, and I had the row to myself. The more I thought about the story, the more it got to me. The text itself wasn’t necessarily scary—but the ideas that it presented, ideas of imprisonment, ideas of ways to “treat” mental illness that were but suggested in the book, ideas left up to interpretation—it was scary to think that people, people here, mere miles from where my train was barreling off towards, would lock a young woman up for the crime of knowing a secret, calling her mad.
I know that this was 150 years ago. I know that horror stories like this still exist today. But still—it was nerve-wracking to think about. You try to distance yourself from atrocities by time, by distance, by place. You try to say to yourself that it won’t, it can’t, happen to you, to the people around you. And when you suddenly find yourself walking alone through the streets of London as the sun sets, trying in vain to find the street that you are looking for—the plight of this young woman suddenly hits you. Not only was she unfairly forced to live in this asylum, not only did she survive there under unimaginable events, but she was forced to run for her life to escape, stumbling through the streets of London on her own.
Suddenly, I started to realize how that would feel. As I got off my train, I realized that I had no map, there were no taxis at this small station, and the friend I was staying with didn’t answer their phone. And of course the sun was setting.
Luckily, there was a map at the station, and the house was only a few blocks away, but the whole 10 minutes that it took me to locate the right house, all I could think about was the woman in white wandering through the streets of London after dark—much like I was doing—to enter a new phase of her life. I was glad when I got to the right door.
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