Capitalists, Castrators and Criminals: Violent Masters and Slaves in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White

Abstract

In his ‘Master and Slave Dialectic’ (1807), Hegel argues that the slave becomes a slave after capitulating in a ‘life-and-death struggle’ with the master; mastery and slavery, for Hegel, are constituted by, and as, absolute violence. In the Philosophy of Mind (1830), Hegel locates this kind of mastery and slavery in the ancient past, positing the life-anddeath struggle as an originary moment of history; here, he argues that violent forms of mastery and slavery are absent from the modern state, which has surpassed them. As Richard Norman writes, ‘the relationship of master and slave is seen as a first step from the state of nature to social life, typifying the societies of the ancient world, but subsequently giving way to a form of society in which all men are recognised as free.’ In Being and Nothingness (1943), however, Sartre rejects Hegel’s historicisation of the ‘Master and Slave Dialectic’ and detects its presence in all human relations. As Norman notes:

The fight for recognition, in its extreme form, can only occur in the natural state, where men exist as single, separate individuals; but it is absent in civil society and the State because here the recognition for which the combatants fought already exists.

(G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind)

Slavery is not a historical result, capable of being surmounted…. [It is] the permanent structure of my being-for-others.

(Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness)