Woman in White: Finished!

Not too many surprises after the 93%.

SPOILERS

 Count Fosco having conditions was a little surprising, and I was worried about him & Hartright dueling, but I also figured that guy with the scar would finish him off. And I was right! Everybody who was bad or annoying died. Everybody who was nice lived, except of course for somebody eponymous.

Here's a question: when you were in the middle of the book, were you ever worried that Walter & Marian were totally deluded and the woman they got out of the asylum really was Anne Catherick after all? It would have been interesting to retain that suspicion, don't you think? Even the Woman in White herself might not have known! It would have been very Inception.

Also I kind of wanted something to be done with Marian's resemblance to her mother, since they seemed like another pair of doubles that could have messed stuff up. Like what if the WiW was all affectionate and loving of Marian, so they thought that meant she was really Laura, but she was really the monomaniacal AC feeling her monomaniacal love for the dead mom? Things worked out better the way they happened, I guess, but it would have been spooooookier in my version.

END SPOILERS
and end entry, come to think of it. I'll put the rest of my blather in another entry.

Woman in White Part 3: Bargello

Warning: vague spoilers, which if you have not read The Woman in White you will very likely forget before you read it, because they are so vague. I'm 93% through, but wanted to pop in and comment now, for some reason!

Well things have gotten QUITE THRILLING. Fires in vestries and secret societies oh my! I must say that the Secret certainly did not meet most of my demands, but at least it was not the most obvious possible Secret. And it's interesting how a relatively banal action--writing something at the bottom of a page--can be considered as bad as murder. It's funny, but even though I think of myself as having a pretty clear sense of Victorian morality, I'm continually struck by how different it is in so many ways from ours. Specifically, I'm amazed by how important property is--very nearly as important, it seems, as human life. Again, I know this stuff, but in so many ways the Victorians seem to have such similar values to ours--our cozy middle-class values seem to have been based on theirs, even if we seem more OK with people having all different kinds of sex. But you know, so many modern-day Americans still hold on to a lot of that famous Victorian prudery.

But actually I think what's freaking me out is what I was reacting to at the beginning of The Woman in White--not the emergent middle-class Victorian morality, but the feudal/aristocratic values that are maybe on the downswing by the mid-nineteenth century, but are still a huge part of the legal system: the incredible importance placed on ownership, succession, legitimacy. In The Woman in White it's a dastardly deed to shut up a powerless girl in an insane asylum, but it's equally dastardly to prevent property from going to its rightful heir, even if that heir is blissfully ignorant of the property's existence, or in fact if that heir is unborn. When Marian writes to the family lawyer to ask if there's any legal pretext for Laura refusing to sign a document sight unseen, the lawyer writes back in horror that the document surely commits Laura to allow her husband to borrow against her principal, and that doing so would constitute a fraud against her unborn children. I guess we should think more about our unborn children (Paul & I have certainly not set up any kind of college fund or anything for ours! but also we live in an age where we get to decide not to have them, I guess), but I am interested that the worst crimes have to do with property rather than passion, or violence. I guess William Morris was right! There's also the idea that it's completely fine to have fathered a bastard, but completely the worst to pretend not to be a bastard. That's sexual-double-standard stuff again, but also the idea that sexual indiscretions, which we* think of as the thing the Victorians hated most, are nothing compared to a fraudulent claim to property.

This also makes me think of a hilarious debate we had in my Victorian Poetry class last year over a line from Aurora Leigh. I'm too lazy to look up the exact line, but Aurora runs into her little impoverished friend Marian (Marion? Marianne?) in Paris, and Marian has a baby with her, and Aurora knows Marian isn't married so she's like, "She must have stolen the baby!" I think the teacher and a couple of students read this literally: Aurora is naive, doesn't know where babies come from, thinks you can only get them if you're married, and so thinks Marian literally took someone else's baby. I think the rest of us thought Aurora was being metaphorical: she meant that any baby born out of wedlock was stolen, because it (and the presumed sexual pleasure that produced it?) hadn't been paid for by lawful matrimony. In either case there's an interesting connection between sex and money that's more complicated than, you know, worries about prostitution. Maybe this Aurora Leigh example contradicts what I'm noticing in The Woman in White--the idea that sexual indiscretions are not as bad as theft or fraud--but maybe it doesn't; maybe it suggests that the true sinfulness of adultery and sexual impurity only becomes clear when you link it to theft, to some kind of loss of someone's birthright. What do you think?

Anyway, the actual adultery in Woman in White seems kind of like a dumb afterthought, just to explain Anne & Laura's resemblance. I mean, we've been wondering about that, but what function does it have in the plot? What does it tell us about Anne, Laura, or any of the other characters involved? We just get the sense that all the Fairlie brothers are crumbs. Um, OK.

Now I will plunge back in to the novel! I just had to blog a little because I got to a part that was TOO THRILLING and I needed some relief. THE GUY IS IN FOSCO'S HOUSE. OMG so scary to just walk into the house of your adversary, ESPECIALLY when he wrote those scary things in your friend's diary. Watch out for mice, my friend!

Oh so I read some of this in the Bargello. It was the kind of boring, kind of exciting part where Hartright (is that his name? Is it really so allegorical as that?) is investigating Sir Perceval in the country, and having bad luck, but you think something exciting will happen and it does but is also kind of boring.

*by "we" I mostly mean some straw men. But someone thinks that way, I believe!

Woman in White Part 2: Fiesole

OK, I'm about halfway through The Woman in White. Just a couple of quick reactions before I go further:

• Count Fosco! What a character! The mice! But most shockingly, the postscript to Marian's journal. TERRIFYING. "I condole with her on the inevitable failure of every plan that she has formed for her sister's benefit. At the same time, I entreat her to believe that the information which I have derived from her Diary will in no respect help me to contribute to that failure. It simply confirms the plan of conduct which I had previously arranged." IMAGINE finding that written at the end of your diary. Who knows if Marian ever will! I am spooked.
• Also scary: Sir Perceval finding the note in the sand, digging up the piece of paper, reading it, putting it back, and writing the note back in the sand on top of it. Spooked again! (or rather, spooked before.)
• So rough to be girls on their own with no support. Why do girls always end up in situations where they have no masculine support? The sisters are doing it for themselves, but there's not that much they can do! Very "Bluebeard." Sister Ann, Sister Ann, is our useless uncle coming?
• The useless uncle's narrative! I am in heaven. Laura (real Laura, not Laura Fairlie) must super love this terrible uncle. Here are some gems just from the first page or so: "The last annoyance that has assailed me is the annoyance of being called upon to write this Narrative"; "I will endeavor to remember what I can (under protest) and to write what I can (also under protest), and what I can't remember and can't write, Louis must remember and write for me. He is an ass, and I am an invalid, and we are likely to make all sorts of mistakes between us. How humiliating!"; "I have asked Louis. He is not quite such an ass as I have hitherto supposed."; "I was resigned to see the Young Person, but I was NOT resigned to let the Young Person's shoes upset me"; "Why have we no variety in our breed of Young Persons?" I wonder if he is secretly the Scarlet Pimpernel, and will swing in between the flower pots on the flat roof of the verandah at Blackwater or whatever and scoop up feverish Marian and terrified Laura and on his way scoop up crazy Anne Catherick and take them all safely to London! Probably not. Anyway, I like how Wilkie Collins gets you all upset about the thrilling suspenseful terrible situations he creates, and then there is this comic relief built into the narrative, which doesn't make it less terrifying, but is a kind of relief. Like the Fosca stuff in the diary was terrifying, but also kind of funny. And this uncle stuff is so delightful, and isn't misogynist and sad and pathetic like the hilarious bluestocking tract-leaving lady in The Moonstone.
• SPOILERS PART 2: Okay, so I think the part I marked in the last entry as potentially spoilery is wrong, because it doesn't seem like Sir Perceval (is HE the Scarlet Pimpernel? Maybe he's pretending to be a financially-embarrassed, consumptive, murderous baronet in order to smuggle, um, victims of the 1848 revolutions out of France) had any grand plan for switching Laura for Anne or vice versa. He just wants to keep Anne in the asylum, and make sure his SECRET stays safe with Anne & her (evil?) (poor old?) mom. It doesn't even seem like he's been planning to kill his wife the whole time, which I had been pretty sure of from the beginning; in the secret conversation he has with Fosca on the terrace, Fosca's all insinuating all this King John/Throw Momma from the Train "I'm not going to come out and say this" murder stuff, and Perceval is like, "Gross, you have a motive to murder her too." Which is a weird reaction, so maybe he HAS been planning to murder her and he wants to point out that the Count has a motive too. But he definitely doesn't seem to be as crafty as the Count, and doesn't really seem to plan that far ahead; he reacts rather than acts, I guess? Anne Catheric finds out his Secret, so he puts her in an asylum. He incurs too many debts, so he tries to get his wife to sign away her fortune. People thwart him, so he throws a chair. Anyway, what is the Secret? I hope it's something awesome and convoluted that explains Anne's resemblance to Laura, the dry hacking cough, Anne's mental problems, and a bunch of other stuff. Maybe the scar on his hand, and his baldness. If it's just something dumb like Anne is the Baronet's daughter, I will be unimpressed.
• Also all the bad guys in Collins are bad because they are in debt, and they all try to get out of it by marrying rich ladies. Reasonable enough, I guess. Also gambling & keeping fancy women & being irresponsible with other people's money are totally gateway drugs to theft and fraud and MURDER. Maybe. Nobody's been murdered yet, except the dog. Addendum: I want the Secret to explain the murder of the dog. Also, I would like all the murder foreshadowing to come to nothing, and for all the bad people to be punished and all the good people to be happy and get married! Actually that might have happened in the Moonstone. Oh the mom died. Sorry, Lady ____ from the Moonstone!
• Oh yeah the title of this post: I read some thrilling sections of this novel in the lovely Tuscan town of Fiesole, while strolling around in its archeological excavations: a Roman theater, an Etruscan/Roman temple, some Roman baths, some lovely views of Florence. It was a thrilling & romantic place to be reading lots of thrilling stuff about heroines skulking around the edges of the lake and the boathouse and leaving messages in the sand. Also being in Italy is of course helping me to understand Count Fosco, as well as comical Professor Pesca from the beginning. Everyone here is so gracious to ladies and loves sugar water and also pretending to be English and also wearing embroidered blouses. NOT.

Woman in White Part 1: Santa Croce

I read the first 30% of The Woman in White today! So Laura may have been exaggerating that it could be read in 2 hours, or maybe she is a way faster reader than I am. But it is definitely delightful and fast-paced and amusing, like a book that can be read in 2 hours (which is maybe not even a Baby-Sitter's Club book, but maybe is one of the Alice books? not the ones by Lewis Carroll, which are actually on my list!) (nb I did not think it would actually take 2 hours.) I did some of my reading in the cloister at Santa Croce, so when the artist guy (I barely know his name because mostly he was the narrator of his own part of the story) was rhapsodizing towards the beginning of the book about the great time he was having in the drawing room overlooking the terrace, I could sympathize because I was having a great time on a terrace too! Well, not a terrace, but a colonnade of slim pillars around a green courtyard, with a tower rising into the blue sky over the wall, and rosebushes with something that might have meant "[do not touch] le rose" signs on them. Forbidden! And also eventually an Italian couple hanging out and being (unobtrusively) romantic. So while I cannot remember the first time I fell in love with a blue-eyed girl (and if I could it would be different from a male Victorian drawing master falling in love with his pupil, promise) and so cannot relive his first love with him, I _can_ relive how great it was to be in that drawing room with him, because it was great to read about being in that drawing room.

Rather than irritatingly recount the plot as I've been doing with Vanity Fair, I offer some scattered reflections on Woman in White, which may be slightly less spoiler-y for those who haven't read it & may be more fun to read for those who have:

• OK, what's up with Marian Halcombe's weird androgyny & amusingly sarcastic self-directed misogyny? (Ha ha look how similar "androgyny" and "misogyny" look. Weird!) What's the point of her having this drop-dead gorgeous figure and ugly, mannish, dark-skinned face? And what's with the artist guy (I promise I will learn his name for next time. Hardwicke? something like that) all lusting after her until he can see her face, and then just thinking she's smart and great, but falling for the other sister? I guess her hot (girly) bod and fugly (boyly) face symbolize her own divided nature, where she is smarter and funnier than most girls but aware of her (genetic?) (physiological?) (socialized?) female weaknesses, which make being smart and funny useless traits for girls. That's a pretty typical Victorian woman problem, but it is annoying! All the self-hating comments about women are getting pretty wearing, especially since they make it seem like Collins is making fun of her when otherwise she seems like a pretty likable and charming person. I guess likable characters in Collins always have amusing foibles, like liking roses. And also IS she so great? I had my suspicions when she was like, "Let's not tell Laura about the girl who looks just like her." Is she in on some secret? Now that I've gotten to the part where I'm reading her diary I think she isn't in on the secret, but it would be interesting if she were! Also it's fun reading these sensation novels and suspecting EVERYONE. 
• Now I'm trying to remember if any of the narrators in The Moonstone were bad, or concealed information. No, they were totally frank and mostly good, unless you count the religious lady's annoying tendency to give people tracts as bad. But it was well-meaning! (Remind me to tell you about the hilarious tracts in Vanity Fair; I forgot about them.) So I guess we can trust all the narrators. They've been contacted after the fact, anyway, so by the time they start writing the secret is already out.
• Oh, also, is Marian's dark face related to, like, Ezra Jennings's dark face? Or one of the Armadales? Is there a mixed-race colonial thing going on? Probably not--she is not mysterious enough--but we know WC likes this stuff.
• Doubles! That is another thing he likes. I had the main secret of Woman in White spoiled for me when I read some scholarly article about WiW and Lady Audley's Secret, but now I thankfully can't remember what it was. But I knew there would be doubles! But I did not suspect who the doubles would be until the narrator was beginning to suspect them himself, like maybe three pages before the doubling was specifically pointed out to us. OMG you guys I love doubles. Especially girl doubles, like Patty Duke! The best. But now I am tortured by the question of what is the point of this particular set of doubles. In Lady Audley there was actually a lot of foreshadowing about how Lady Audley and her maid looked very similar, except the maid was almost colorless and Lady Audley had high, fresh color, but you can replicate that with paint, and I was like, YES, I can't wait for this maid to put on paint and be Lady Audley, and also Lady Audley paints, or maybe the author is just trying to suggest the falseness of Lady Audley in general by implying how easily you could fake being her just by putting on lipstick (let's all do that today!) but you guys IT NEVER HAPPENED. My teacher suggested that Mary Elizabeth Braddon was writing week-to-week for the periodical press and probably put in a bunch of plot hooks early on but only followed up on some of them. I think in Woman in White it will happen, but I can't think how. Let's see: near-identical girls, one upper-class & rich, one lower-class & poor; one trusting and terrifyingly passive, one mentally-impaired in some way and possibly prone to rages and also extremely stubborn; one engaged to a baronet, one walled up in an asylum by that same baronet; one liking to wear white muslin to seem humble, one wearing white out of a monomaniacal devotion to the other one's mom. What can you do with that!
• POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT: some mixture of my own intution and possibly the lingering fumes of that article I read is inducing me to think that Laura will end up in Anne's insane asylum. There definitely needs to be a switcheroo! Maybe after they get married the baronet (I promise to learn his name too) will put Laura in the insane asylum and take out Anne (if he ever gets her back in) and . . . then what? uh, maybe he can convince Anne to kill herself or something, and then he can have all the money.
• SPEAKING OF WHICH: It doesn't bode well that that baronet is friends with the aunt and her Italian husband! They all stand to profit by Laura's death! Don't let those guys hang out.
• MARRIAGE SETTLEMENTS! Super interesting. Don't worry, lawyer guy, I don't think they are boring AT ALL. I found it very interesting when he said that no lawyer would make a settlement for a woman that would allow her husband to profit by her death. At first I was like, "but you always profit by your rich spouse's death!" but then I realized neither Paul nor I could profit from a spouse's death because your wage-earning spouse is always going to bring in more money alive and earning wages than the interest on whatever crummy 401(k) they leave behind. That is why being married to a wage-earner makes you a much more loving spouse than being married to an aristocrat. They had to fake that kind of devotion by making all these rules about life-interest and income. Maybe that is why the middle classes rose to become the Victorian ideal! because they were the best husbands and wives ever. SO COZY LET US SMOKE A PIPE AND ROCK THE CRADLE AND RULE THE WORLD!!!!! It turns out I really am the angel in the house.
• Anyway thank goodness women had dads and lawyers and stuff to look out for them with marriage settlements. Sometimes, I mean. Laura clearly doesn't; the lawyer is trying to get her a good deal, but the hilarious lazy uncle can't be bothered. Maybe he's in on it too! The lazy crumb. Where are you, Married Women's Property Act? Seriously, you are not until 1882? Well, there was an earlier version in 1870. But can you believe it was that late? The Woman in White is in 1859. The Victorian ladies couldn't believe it, either. I think even the least feminist ones--the ones who were like, "Why on earth would we want the vote?"--were like, "come on, guys, this is ridiculous. It does NOT make sense to let some guy you married have ALL your STUFF FOREVER." The antifeminist ones thought the state should take the money or something, but no one thought the husbands should have it. Interestingly, William Morris goes on in News from Nowhere about how the crazy utopian socialist society he invented didn't have feminists because all the "woman question" stuff had to do with property--whether women should hold it, earn it, be it--and all those questions are irrelevant when property has been abolished. Well, maybe they are! But the passage was still troubling, especially since the women in News from Nowhere all went around serving men lunch and inciting them to lust. One of them was a stonecutter, I guess.
• SUSPICION! That baronet fiance is SO SUSPICIOUS. Obviously he is terrible because the dog hates him. How old is that convention, that animals hate you if you're bad? Also the marriage settlement does not help. 
• EVIDENCE. Like The Moonstone (which I read last summer, and which I keep forgetting was written ten years after this--when Wilkie Collins eyes were bags of blood? Who told me that?) this novel is preoccupied with documentary evidence, and that preoccupation manifests in some interesting ways. For example, the artist guy's soliloquies about how hard it is to remember what it was like to first see the woman he loves, & how the place where he hung out with the woman he loves is different now that everything is changed and sad, seem like standard sentimental drivel, but I think they take on new significance if you think of them as attempts at gathering documentary evidence. How can you report objectively on falling in love? You can't! But it is important evidence for the story. Also, weird feelings that seem like crazy intuition are usually valid, but I guess they need to be backed up with evidence (oh yeah, she DOES look like the woman in white, and here's some evidence in a letter; oh yeah that guy IS bad, [evidence forthcoming?]). Then there's the dream Anne claims to have had, which is a crazy spiritualist feast of devils and angels and jumping insane arcs of light. At the beginning of the letter she's like, "in the Bible, dreams are true," and I'm pretty sure this dream is true, too, but it's going to have to be proved empirically; the dream isn't enough, although the dream itself may be psychological evidence of something real that has happened to Anne, that might make her have this kind of dream. See Robert Audley's distinction between circumstantial evidence and eyewitness evidence in Lady Audley. But enough circumstantial evidence can add up to something admissible.
• FINALLY, ON A RELATED NOTE: hilarious that a gentleman can just take your word of honor, but a lady needs PROOF (according to crummy baronet fiance.) Also that hard "proof" (a letter from Anne's mom) seems likely to have been forged, or to have something fishy at the bottom. But you've got to give a girl some hard evidence. Pragmatic, dishonorable, ESTJs that we are! Is that even a thing? What  is Miss Holcombe's Myers Briggs type? Fun new future activity for all novel characters, in once & future orals readings!
• Goodnight from a pragmatic, dishonorable, ESTJ hand-that-rocks-the-cradle angel in the house! I'll just finish my evening pipe and pop into bed, much later than I've gone to bed since I've come to Florence.
   

LET US SHUT UP THE BOX AND THE PUPPETS: VANITY FAIR 3

So! that was Vanity Fair. I seemed to remember that the Mira Nair movie ended delightfully, with Becky riding away on an elephant, so I wasn't too worried when everybody hit those crises. But! as I read the last 10% of the novel, I realized that sometimes movies change endings, especially when they are movies intent on highlighting the Indian/colonial aspects of Victorian novels, so I became genuinely worried about everyone. Which only goes to show that even movies and miniseries can't entirely ruin the pleasures of suspense.

After Rawdon goes off to be a governor of that unwholesome island (they say its name; I just can't remember it) and Becky disappears into oblivion or myth, we go back to Amelia & Georgy & the Osbornes. Amelia is continuing to languish in the suburbs with her querulous parents while her son is becoming a spoiled-brat replica of his dad at Grandfather Osborne's. We--not Amelia--are expecting Dobbin from Madras every day, and finally he shows up at Georgy's school, along with a mysterious fat fellow whom the narrator insists on not naming.

Thackery has used this device at least once before, when he segued from some Amelia-plot stuff to tell us about Miss Crawley's return from her brother's country estate to London, accompanied by "a young lady" who has usurped Miss Crawley's paid companions and has clandestine meetings with Rawdon Crawley. "Who could this young woman be, I wonder?" the narrator asked us, and then a few pages later reveals her identity "Miss Rebecca Sharp (for such, astonishing to state, is the name of her who has been described ingeniously as 'the person' hitherto.)" Thackeray's obviously having fun with some already-established goofy literary conventions, but it's hard to say why he picks the moments he does to use this one. I guess Becky's move to Miss Crawley's London house as her nurse is the first move she makes that isn't quite authorized by the boarding-school-genteel-but-impoverished-governess system she's been a part of for most of the novel: she went from school to Amelia's, and from Amelia's to Queen's Crawley to be a governess, and all that was planned from the beginning, and now she's starting to make her own way and we're supposed to be pleased and surprised and shocked? But I can't figure out why the identity of the fat man with Dobbin needs to create suspense, because it's so obvious that it's Amelia's brother Jos, also coming from India.

We find out eventually that Dobbin was so upset by the thought of Amelia getting married that he traveled toward England at a feverish pace, and so contracted a fever, and almost died at Jos's house in Bombay or whatever, but that they both got on a ship bound for Southampton (Jos needed to leave India for a while because of liver complaints, and too much pale ale and tiffin, which I'm starting to relate to since I've been eating nothing but pasta and pizza and gelato and red wine for a week), and on board Jos revealed that Amelia wasn't getting married after all (I think?) and Dobbin got a lot better. Dobbin meanwhile convinced Jos that he should go take care of his family, even though Jos was mad at Mr Sedley for always sending him bills and so on.

They both eventually show up in London and they save the day for the Sedleys (or what's left of the Sedleys, the mom having died at some point--it's the part of the novel where all the old people conveniently or pathetically die.) Dobbin effects a reconciliation between old Mr Osborne & Amelia, or good enough of one that when Mr Osborne dies he leaves a nice annuity to Amelia & half his property to Georgy, and now Amelia is a respected matron of property and she and Jos and Georgy have a nice house and nice dinners and all kinds of people come to see them. Then Mr Sedley dies and there is some stuff about is it better to die a failure or a man of property leaving lots of money to your dependents. I don't know, probably man of property? but Thackeray has some point that's like, "well, if you're a failure it's kind of nice to slip into death and be like, none of that matters anymore."

Dobbin the whole time is loving Amelia faithfully, but she's irritatingly faithful to her dead cad of a husband George, and the narrator's like, she knows Dobbin loves her but she's not going to bother saying anything about it unless he says something, because girls like to be admired and taken care of. Dobbin is at least a huge success with & a good influence on Georgy, who can tell that Dobbin is a _real_ gentleman and not to be bossed around like he bosses around everyone else. So those guys are all having a good time, and then for some reason they decide to go abroad, and everyone has fun on the ship and there are lots of hilarious German guys with hilarious accents, and it's very hard to figure out what they're saying because Thackeray has them speaking French with hilarious German accents, but this is not something the modern reader is accustomed to, since English is now the diplomatic language, not French, so we just hear German guys being like, "I vish to vash and vipe the vinders" and not being like, "bardonneh-moi" or whatever.

Hilarious German accents are necessarily accompanied by hilarious accounts of German spa-towns and duchies and "transparencies," which are either magic lanterns or a political unit in central Europe. Oh Mr Thackeray I am not getting your jokes. Lots of spoofs of court life at a tiny "transparency" and diplomatic foibles. We find out that the narrator was at the same German town as the Sedley-Osborne family, and that that's how he knows this story. So we get some stuff from the perspective of the narrator seeing the Sedleys at the opera, and participating in various festivities, but it's all kind of weird.

Thackeray has been playing with these kinds of truth claims throughout the novel; obviously framing stories and weird truth claims were important for earlier novelists--I should reread Michael McKeon's Origins of the English Novel, or at least the chapter I read, to get a better handle on epistemological uncertainty and "naive empiricism" in the 18th century, because all these truth claims are vestiges of that. And of course Wilkie Collins (I'm reading Woman in White next) loves the idea that the novel is a document, an assemblage of real evidence. But Thackeray's truth claims are pretty vague--"oh, I looked at this note myself the other day"--and don't really add up: he claims, for instance, to have gotten all of Becky's history from a British diplomat abroad who tells everyone Becky's whole shocking story at dinner, while the story Thackeray tells is much more detailed and sympathetic and close to Becky's consciousness than the British ambassador's account would have been. Also there's all the stuff about puppets and theatres and so on, which suggests fiction and artifice rather than biography and evidence. My suspicion is that the truth claims really are only vestigial, a conventional gesture you make in a novel even if you aren't really going with the conceit that this is a true story.

Anyway, everyone's having fun in the "transparency" with Thackeray and the English and French ambassadors, who are flattering Amelia and Jos and inviting them to court and so on. Then Georgy sneaks out to a gambling party and there is a mysterious masked, rouged lady in shabby clothes and she gets Georgy to bet for her (just like the high-roller in Venice!) and Georgy wins (unlike Rory and Alison in Venice! at least when the high-roller was betting on them) and then Jos shows up either to find Georgy or to gamble himself (I think the latter) and of course we find out the masked lady is Becky Sharp! putting on an absurd European accent, which she occasionally drops. She tells Jos a tale of woe and insinuates that she's always loved him, and he goes home determined to help Becky and get Amelia to be her friend and so on.

Then we find out what Becky's been up to all this time. Sort of. Thackeray's like, "I don't want to upset you with how terrible and wicked Becky has been; so far I've been able to disguise it, but this is going to be hard." Becky's been drinking and gambling and probably prostituting herself, but of course that's not explicitly said, and Thackeray's comment that so far he's been able to disguise how bad she is makes you think maybe she wasn't sexually "innocent" before after all, but I also still think that maybe Thackeray thinks that's beside the point. Her husband arranged for her to have an annuity and for a while she was trying to live on that, but then she kept getting kicked out of town for her bad reputation and she started getting up to her old tricks. At one point she runs into the Marquis of Steyne and he gets his agent to find her in the park and threaten her with assassination if she doesn't leave town, and imply that the reason she keeps getting kicked out of places is that he is going around ruining her reputation. He is very mad at her! So she keeps slinking around gambling and drinking, and sometimes giving concerts but her voice has been ruined by gin so they are disasters, but they are maybe just fraudulent concerts anyway to trick people out of money.

So Jos gets Amelia to go to see Becky and Amelia forgives her for all her tricky ways & for flirting with George when he was alive, because Becky tells Amelia about how her child was ripped crying from her arms, and that's the way to get to Amelia. Of course Becky has no pictures or locks of hair or anything belonging to Rawdon Jr., but she says that's because her luggage got lost at Baden or somewhere. Then the Sedleys invite her to live with them and Dobbin is like, "What? She's a monster!" and Amelia is like, "Dobbin, you don't own me; I don't love you anyway!" and Dobbin is like, "I've had enough of this; if you were a really strong person you'd get over George and love me" which seems harsh, but George was a tool. But also why should you love anybody if you don't want to, you know? So Dobbin leaves and Georgy is like, "what?" and Becky gloms on to Jos and starts introducing an undesirable element to their society.

BUT Becky seems worried about the influence the undesirable element will have on Amelia, and she tries to get Amelia to realize how great Dobbin is. It's hard to tell here whether Becky is genuinely concerned about Amelia and trying to help out, or whether she wants Amelia out of the way so she can totally take advantage of Jos. But she shows Amelia this note that she's kept since before Waterloo, which George Osborne put into Becky's bouquet at a ball, that is like "Becky let's run away together!" Amelia is horrified, but it actually makes her reverence for her stupid dead husband dissolve so now she can love Dobbin. And Dobbin comes back and he and Amelia and Georgy all go live with the Crawleys in the countryside, and Becky's son Rawdon and Georgy become best friends, and Rawdon inherits the estate when his uncle dies (his dad dies of malaria at Unwholesome Island around the same time, natch) and everyone is getting along great. And Becky is free to leech off of Jos, who takes out a life insurance policy on himself to benefit her, and Dobbin is like, "what! don't do that, Jos!" and Jos is like, "I'm scared of Becky, so I have to" and then he dies and Becky gets like a thousand pounds from that, who cares. Because she's already getting an annuity from her kid who wants her to stay away. And she ends up hanging out in Bath for the rest of her life being a Lady Bountiful.

Not quite as charming and adventurous as riding away with Jos on an elephant, and Becky comes off much worse--did she really kill Jos? Yikes! Probably she just let him tiffin himself to death. Interestingly, she makes the claim that she's innocent again after his death. So I'm starting to think the whole "innocent" theme is JUST ironic, and not interestingly subtle like I thought in the last post, but maybe this will bear more thinking about.

THE END! Maybe one more short, amusing post about Amelia & Becky as gossip girls.

IMPORTANT QUESTION!

Now that I'm almost done with Vanity Fair, what should I read next?

It's a tricky question because my orals lists aren't set in stone yet, so I don't want to read something that will eventually fall off the list (although once I read it I guess it will stay on the list.) And although I will probably have to re-read a lot of the books on the list, I think it's smartest to start with the books I've never read before.

The candidates are:

5) Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849-50)*
6) Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852-3)*
7) Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853)*
9) Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859)*

17) Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875)*
21) Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)*
23) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)*
25) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)*
28) Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918)*
33) Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)*

There are also some long poems that might be fun to tackle, including The Angel in the House and Tennyson's The Princess. But I feel pretty novel-y right now. I'm thinking I might as well keep going chronologically, and try out some Dickens: Copperfield or Bleak House. What do you think? What do you want to read long, boring blog posts about?

I need to decide super-soon! So let me know.

Vanity Fair on Trenitalia

I was on an intercity train yesterday between Venice and Florence, so I had a lot of time to read Vanity Fair. Now I'm almost done!

I guess if you actually plotted the plot of Vanity Fair on one of those charts--you know, rising action, climax, falling action/denouement--we have reached the climax of the two parallel stories we've been following throughout the novel.

Maybe "crisis" is a better word than "climax." I don't know. It seems strange to use terms like "climax" and "crisis" when talking about a novel that, while not quite picaresque--the choices characters make in one chapter push them inexorably towards the fate that awaits them several chapters later--is definitely more of a rake's progress than a Greek tragedy or even the kind of carefully-plotted modern novel for which that diagram was probably designed. Moments like these make me wish I were reading a book with an introduction, rather than a notes-and-commentary-free Project Gutenberg Kindle file. The Kindle files were so much easier to fit into my backpack, allowing me to be a true adventuress like Becky Sharp, but come exam time I may suffer from my lack of cultural and literary context for these books. Or I may be saved by wikipedia! At any rate, when I do get my hands on some criticism, I'll be curious to find out what commentators have to say about Vanity Fair and plot and the development of the classic Victorian novel. Vanity Fair was published pretty early in the Victorian period, and its satirical tone and hilarious amoral anti-heroine seem to owe a lot, as I've said, to 18th-century novels like Tom Jones & Moll Flanders & so on.

I did read the introduction to this book by Amanpal Garcha called From Sketch to Novel, where he argues that Thackeray, Dickens, and Gaskell all started their careers writing journalistic sketches, and that the static, non-plotted qualities of the sketch became important features of their novels. He talks about how in the twentieth century we've come to consider plot the most important element in a novel: we value tightly-plotted books over implausible, digressive, shoddily-constructed ones, and we're confused and amused when Mervyn Peake presents us with a series of bizarre characters seemingly just for the pleasure of inventing them rather than to advance the plot (the Mervyn Peake reference, of course, is mine & not Garcha's). And I guess twentieth-century critics have looked askance at Dickens's plots and wondered why anybody liked him. I don't know who these critics are, because it seems pretty obvious why people would like Dickens, but it's a useful reminder that even though we think of the Victorian period as the time when the Novel as we know & love it today, or rather as we knew & loved it in the twentieth century, was fully established as a form, that didn't happen (if it happened at all) until later in the century.

Anyway, although there have been a number of climaxes or crises so far in Vanity Fair--the discovery of Becky's secret marriage; the failure of the Sedley family; George's death at Waterloo; Sir Pitt Crawley's death--at three-quarters through the novel both Amelia and Becky seem to hit rock bottom. Now I'm mixing AA terminology with literary analysis: on the diagram, the climax is at the apex, the culmination of all that rising action and tension, rather than rock bottom. And maybe the climax is really what makes all this rock-bottomness inevitable? But with somebody like Becky (as I think we'll see) nothing is inevitable; she's always a toss of the dice away from everything changing completely. At any rate! Rock bottom.

As I suspected in my last post (and remembered from the movie), once Old Mr. Osborne spots his grandson in the park, he wants little Georgy to come live with him. Georgy can visit Amelia, and Amelia and her impoverished parents can have an annuity EVEN IF Amelia gets remarried, but Amelia can't come to the Osborne house because she's still the awful beggar who married his awful son. Amelia is like HOW DARE YOU especially about the remarriage stuff, but then her dad does a bunch of idiotic, cringe-inducing stuff that's just like all the idiotic, cringe-inducing stuff ruined people always do in nineteenth-century novels: he sinks all his money into terrible investments and schemes, and he trades the annuity he gets from his son Jos in India for a lump sum to use in a terrible scheme, so all the family has left is the little annuity that Amelia thinks she got from her useless husband George Osborne, but really got from his executor, the faithful William Dobbin. (Note to self: NEVER TRADE AN ANNUITY FOR A LUMP SUM. Except if you are the Madden girls in The Odd Women, in which case you should stop scrupulously refusing to touch the capital because you are dying and becoming alcoholics living on the capital, while if you just used some of the capital to get started in a sensible business like typing you would not become an alcoholic or die or make a terrible marriage. I guess because I am a Madden girl I should totally touch my capital. Oh dear.) So Amelia is forced to relent and send her son to his grandfather and spend all her time stalking her son and taking care of her terrible, ungrateful, querulous old parents. Georgy, of course, thinks it's great to be rich and have all these dandyish clothes and drink champagne at age 11, and having been raised by a ladylike and worshipful mother, he has become a true gentleman and lords it over his terrible oafish pretentious grandfather and everyone else he meets, and I guess that's good for Georgy but it's depressing for Amelia. He does get a miniature made of himself and presents it to Amelia, which is nice because Amelia LOVES it, but is also the vainest possible way in which you may be nice to your mom.

Becky Sharp, on the other hand, seems to be doing great: she's made up with her brother-in-law's family and has introduced her brother-in-law to high society in the form of her creepy patron Lord Steyne, and between Steyne & the new Sir Pitt Crawley she manages to get presented at Court; thanks also to both those guys, she gets to be presented wearing diamonds (a diamond clasp from the Crawley family jewels, to her sister-in-law's horror, and a whole extravagantly dripping set from Lord Steyne, which she pretends she borrowed from a jeweler, like actresses do at the Oscars.) Now everybody has to acknowledge her as respectable even though she's clearly a terrible little adventuress. At the same time, Lord Steyne seems to be chipping away at her respectability, systematically removing everyone in her household, I guess so he can be alone with her? It seems like it would be less scandalous, and therefore smarter, to conduct a clandestine affair with a lady who was always hanging around with her husband, kid, and lady's companion than it would be to always go to the house of a lady who lived completely alone. I guess Lord Steyne doesn't care, because he sends Becky's kid to a charity school, gets her companion Miss Briggs a job as a housekeeper at his country estate, and has her husband Rawdon Crawley arrested for debts. On the night of Rawdon's arrest, he and Becky participate in some charades at Lord Steyne's house: tellingly, Becky plays the part of Clytemnestra and mimes stabbing Agamemnon/Rawdon to death, while Lord Steyne is like, "ha ha ha, she'd do it, too!" Becky also dresses up like a little marquise and sings a charming song. She does not, however, bare her midriff and do an Indian dance like she does in the movie, but it amounts to the same thing: exoticism, exposure, sexual availability. Everyone is either very charmed or very shocked.

When Rawdon gets arrested, he confidently expects Becky to bail him out, but she comes up with some crazy excuses and he has to rely on his pious, nice sister-in-law. He comes home to find Becky dripping with diamonds and entertaining Lord Steyne tete-a-tete in their home. Rawdon flips out and thrashes Lord Steyne and throws all Becky's diamonds in a pile, and then he ransacks the house and finds Becky's secret nest-egg: thousands and thousands of pounds in bank-notes, the most recent a thousand-pound note she got from Lord Steyne by claiming she needed it to pay off Miss Briggs. Rawdon is like, "really? You couldn't spare a hundred pounds of this to get  me out of the spunging-house?" and she's like, "I'm innocent, I'm innocent!" and Rawdon is like, bullshit, and he goes off to challenge Lord Steyne to a duel. But part of Becky's plan with Lord Steyne was to get Rawdon a cushy government job, and the news of Rawdon's appointment as governor of some swampy little island with an unwholesome climate, combined with the toadiness of Lord Steyne's toadies, convinces Rawdon's second and his brother-in-law that Rawdon should call off the duel, and Rawdon is like, whatever, fine, I never want to see any of those jerks again, and he goes to the island and may or may not die of swampiness. Little Rawdon goes to live with his aunt and uncle in the country and is perfectly happy, and Becky is totally ruined socially and financially: she wakes up to find all her servants demanding payment, her landlord kicking her out of the house, and all her hidden money and piles of diamonds missing, stolen by her Steyne-appointed French maid. So Becky disappears; no one knows where, although mythical stories are told about her.

One of the questions that keeps coming up in this last episode is whether Becky is "innocent," meaning whether she's slept with Steyne or not. Thackeray tells us that she may well have been innocent, and I think we're supposed to believe him; like Lady Audley in Lady Audley's Secret, I don't think Becky is interested in sex in and of itself, and if she could get what she wanted out of Lord Steyne without sleeping with him, she probably would. But of course "innocent" doesn't only mean "hasn't cheated on her husband." Several characters point out that, if Rawdon is basing his claim against Lord Steyne on the fact that Steyne and Becky were dining alone together, they have been alone in the house "a hundred times" before; this struck me as kind of a weak argument, since who's to say they haven't just had sex a hundred times? But the mention of "a hundred times" raises the question of real versus perceived innocence: Becky's behavior with Lord Steyne could be perceived as guilty by society, which might be the only guilt that matters in Vanity Fair; and on the other hand, if society allows her to dine "a hundred times" alone with a man who isn't her husband, maybe that behavior is innocent after all.

Then there's the thousand-pound note, which brings the question of prostitution to the table: "this don't look very innocent," Rawdon says as he shows it to his second, and when Becky begs him to defend her innocence, Lord Steyne rages, "You innocent! Why every trinket you have on your body is paid for by me. I have given you thousands of pounds, which this fellow has spent and for which he has sold you. Innocent, by --! You're as innocent as your mother, the ballet-girl, and your husband the bully." For Steyne, money equals sex, and by accepting the money Becky has entered into a contract that, even if she hasn't fulfilled her part of it, renders her un-innocent. Or rather Rawdon has entered into the contract: it's interesting how Steyne in this passage takes away Becky's agency even as he rails against her guilt. He thinks Rawdon has been calling the shots this whole time, and so he turns Becky's crafty manipulation into a contract "between men" with Becky as currency; his reference to Becky's mother, meanwhile, suggests that her character was predetermined and not a result of her own choices.

And of course Thackeray wants us to think about the non-sexual connotations of "innocent." Even though sexual innocence sometimes seems to be the only kind of innocence the Victorians valued in women, characters like Becky and Lady Audley suggest that sexual peccadilloes are unforgivable but more natural, and maybe more womanly, than greed and manipulation and calculation. Becky may not have slept with Lord Steyne, and she may actually have been acting in the interest of her husband (although Steyne was probably trying to get rid of Rawdon with the governorship on the unwholesome island, it's unclear whether Becky was angling for that too, or whether she thought she could help herself and Rawdon at the same time by getting him out of the way, or what), but she's a liar and a cheat and a terrible mother. Is this revision of the sexual double standard--this suggestion that the bad women are the hypocrites who don't sleep around but do scheme for social advancement and diamonds and country houses--good for women or bad? Thackeray isn't saying that all women are like this, and he seems interested in the specific problems women encounter as they try to make their way through Vanity Fair. But it seems to me that demonizing the scheming woman is as dangerous as demonizing the sexually fallen woman. I think Thackeray might know this, and he might know that that's why Becky's so appealing: it's hard to be a self-made Victorian woman, and you seem to have to get your hands dirty (or diamond-y) to do it. And even then, those crummy lords won't give you the credit you deserve.

Next: denouements, or the Becky puppet continues to astonish us with her flexibility? I think?