POOR MISS FINCH by Wilkie Collins

POOR MISS FINCH by Wilkie Collins

29 September 2008

Dombey #18 (chaps 55-57) March 1848

Dear Serial Readers,

There's a powerful tempo to these last numbers that I'm finding really compelling at a time with plenty of serious reading competition going on in my daily life! The three chapters of #18 provide that delicious tonal range, from the melodramatic and monomaniacal to the soothingly sentimental.

I've often commented on Dickens's verb-tense switching in DOMBEY. What I found especially astounding in chap 55 on Carker's mad flight from France back to England was the suspension of verb tenses altogether. I marveled here at Dickens's verbal (without verbs no less) brilliance, how his style beautifully captures the frenetic fugitive. Especially effective was the long section (pp 817-19, Oxford UP) of prepositional phrases starting with "of"--the possessive and compulsive syntax that conveys Carker's mental condition. Sections like these surely seem like a postmodern Dickens to me--a different strain of psychological realism than we get in Eliot's novels. While I wouldn't say that this chapter renders Carker a sympathetic character, still I'm fascinated by Dickens's adroit handling of Carker's frenzy, something that reveals the flipside of his otherwise iron-clad controlling nature that now drives himself rather than manipulates others.
This chapter anticipates a later Dickens monomaniac and his demise, namely Bradley Headstone. I'm sure other readers can think of more parallels, more doubles. And speaking of doubles, I thought the railway "monsters" provided a phantasmagoric touch, a frightening modern machine that Dickens seems to link with Carker and with Dombey at the end of the chapter. Here I thought of Frankenstein and his creature and their mutual pursuit and flight.

The other two chapters offer comic relief and softer tones, with the obvious contrast of Florence's wedding from not only the one briefly mentioned at the start of chap 57, but more pointedly from the earlier marriage between Dombey and Edith.

What do you make of Florence and Walter sailing away from England? What's the significance of this exodus, that their cross-class match can't be sustained in a traditional, class-bound, materialistic society? Since others here have mentioned Gwendolen and DANIEL DERONDA, I also thought of the ending of Eliot's later novel--only Daniel and his new bride don't set sail in the narrative, while this chapter ends with the newlyweds at sea, in the present tense of those whispering waves "not bounded by the confines of this world, or by the end of time."

Only one more number to go! In my ongoing commitment to "part-numberness," I won't divide my posts on this last double part-issue (#19-20, chaps 58-62). But I will likely take two weeks--and aim for Oct. 13th.

Remember that DROOD starts on a biweekly schedule on Monday Oct. 20th. The parts are shorter in length, and we'll take two weeks per number, and there are only six. Sign up via Mousehold Words (see link on sidebar of blog) and spread the word!

Serially yours,
Susan

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I was happy to see the sea symbolism return here in full force. I just finished reading a 20th-century American novel for my job as a TA, and so for a while I was juggling it and Dombey back and forth. And it helped me see just how extraordinarily rich that sea symbolism is -- it never feels heavy-handed or clumsy, and there's a deep pleasure in reading the flights of rhetoric that accompany it. In this other novel, by contrast, the symbolism feels thin and too heavily signposted; the author might as well have put in a blinking neon sign letting us know what his symbols amount to. Meanwhile, that sea keeps provoking reflections about its meaning long after the other book's symbols have been parsed out.

Julia said...

I was also spellbound by Dickens's description of Carker's frenzy during his attempts to evade Mr. Dombey. In addition to being moved by the effect of the prepositional phrases that Susan mentions--this section made me feel frenzied!-- I was struck by Carker's perception of Edith as "the woman who had so entrapped him and avenged herself" (646). In Carker's frenzied mind, Edith becomes the oppressor instead of the victim. Strangely enough, I feel that this substitution of roles in the original power play allows us to see a better picture of Edith's anguish, as well as Carker's. We learn that "Shame, disappointment, and discomfiture gnawed at his heart....The same intolerable awe and dread that had come upon him in the night, returned unweakened in the day" (647). And of course all of this gets amplified as the chapter moves forward. To me, this sounds very much like Edith's intolerable existence, and perhaps it shows the force of her character that she does not completely decompensate as Carker does.

Another point in this installment that really caught my attention was Florence's joyful rejection of material wealth. Florence seems to revel in being "nothing...nothing but [Walter's] wife" (661). Indeed, Florence seems to float away from her earthly existence when she continues: "I am nothing any more, that is not you. I have no earthly hope any more, that is not you. I have nothing dear to me any more, that is not you" (662). This seems to smooth the way for the voyage to China and the invocation of the "voices in the waves...not bounded by the confines of this world" (679) in the installment's final chapter. Losing her wealth seems to be the condition of gaining this happy marriage.