The Woman in White: Whistler, Hiffernan, Courbet, Du Maurier

Abstract

This article examines the links among Whistler's epochal White Girl (1862), Courbet's infamous L'Origine du Monde (1866), and George Du Maurier's best-seller, Trilby (1894). The most obvious connection is Whistler's one-time model and mistress, Johanna Hiffernan, the original of the White Girl, but also the probable model for Courbet's painting, and, I suggest, for Du Maurier's heroine, Trilby O' Ferrall. I argue that (a) Whistler's 1862 painting is a "sensation" painting, a visual assault that rejects narrative content for painterly abstraction, shocking the viewer out of a contemplative attitude to the art work, and thus part of a more general 1860s sensation culture that attempts to process modernity; and that (b) Du Maurier's novel is a piece of art theory in narrative form that demonizes his one-time room-mate, Whistler, as Svengali (his "abstraction" of Hiffernan into a "symphony in white" appears as Svengali's turning Trilby into an unconscious singing machine), but also that the recurring fetishism of Trilby in the novel (her much-worshipped feet, for example) suggests that Du Maurier knew of Courbet's "secret" painting of Hiffernan, and that he theorizes Whistler's modern abstraction as disingenuous—as another kind of fetishism that depends on harnessing Hiffernan's sexuality just as much as L'Origine does.

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