Dear Serial Readers,
You'll see the illustration for this installment alongside this post. That's Molly with the long dark hair, and Cynthia will her lighter hair piled up high. The caption, "Oh! it is no wonder!" are Molly's thoughts in chapter 34 when Cynthia comes to Molly's room after Roger's confession of love to Cynthia in the drawing-room below, and his departure on his scientific expedition for two years. The text suggests that Molly has just seen herself alongside Cynthia reflected in the mirror and compares herself unfavorably to "Cynthia's brightness and bloom." The episode makes clear that Molly is one who loves Roger and that the engagement *ought* to be between Molly and Roger if--Mrs. G wasn't so meddlesome to encourage that match or if Roger was a better reader of female character. One favorite textual bit for me was the long passage at the end of the previous chapter where the narrator recovers Roger's thoughts about his long voyage and Cynthia--the latter all filled with romantic platitudes: "the thought of her would be a polar star, high up in the heavens, and so on, and so on...." those "so on"s capture a certain impatience with Roger's obtuseness here, I think!
At the same time, it was gratifying (although frustrating for this to happen too late) for the scales to finally fall from Mr. Gibson's eyes about his wife's character and about the error of his "act" of marrying her. So perhaps Roger will correct his vision in a more timely fashion. Still, this novel anatomizes two uneasy, complicated households--Hamleys and Gibsons. The men (Hamleys) with their unwillingness or inability to truly communicate with each other in contrast to the inane and even harmful chatter of Mrs. G. Molly and Cynthia keep more to themselves too, especially Cynthia whose determination to keep her engagement to Roger a secret surely points to some other secret--perhaps a secret engagement to Preston?
There is one other lovely drawing for this #12 installment in the magazine--a small one at the very start of chapter 33, but pointing toward the moment in chap 34 when Molly throws open the windows longing to catch sight of Roger leaving. I have a softness for Victorian images of girls at windows looking outwards (as some of you know already). I'll put that image up too for you to see.
Next week, #13, chapters 37-40. Your thoughts about our next serial novel (or stories)? And this Slow Reading pace? How slow can you go?
Serially signing off,
Susan
5 comments:
I'm so sympathetic for Molly, here, who seems to not even want to admit her own regret--she's so kind that it's becoming painful. I have a hard time believing in her, and yet I adore her at the same time. It's so touching that she thinks first of "lazy Cynthia" and picks blackberries for her, which later are part of the cause of her sense that she blooms so much less than Cynthia.
I'm not sure that being engaged to Cynthia is such a bad thing--except that she is clearly just trying to escape something, probably whatever Preston is threatening, which is probably marriage, as Susan suspects. And, I guess, Molly is clearly more valuable than Cynthia, though Cynthia is very pleasant and lovely. Intriguing that readers should all agree that pleasant and lovely is less valuable than loving and good.
I do feel a bit bad for Mr. Gibson, but also that he should have known earlier that their were folks with such different value systems--and honesty and integrity just aren't part of Mrs. G's concerns. I think Mr. G. hadn't really imagined folks such at this before. But I find it interesting that Mrs. G. seems just not to even understand that someone might see her actions from a different perspective--she seems incredibly stupid in Chapter 36.
So, Roger is the character modeled on Darwin?
I wish Molly and her father got to spend some time together. They used to have an open and not harmful conversation--you could perhaps say that the problems started to arise when Mr. G. didn't tell Molly about the calf love, that we can all tell she would have handled quite sensibly.
I'm interested in how Osborne has fallen in love with a foolish and romantic choice, and that he is being romantically (and honorably) true--but it seems a bit odd that the observant Roger would make what is really a quite similarly foolish and romantic choice--the "and so on"s that Susan notices suggest a certain reliance on popular culture for one's notions of love, a reliance that seems not much like Osborne.
I’m interested the economic considerations that go into these first marriages, and, if not economic, at least the practicalities that went into Mr G’s second marriage. It hasn't panned out for him. Mrs G has been a handful, from the get go, and in Chapter 34, Gaskell finally circles the wagons round her for her “deviations from right.” To do so, she has increased Mr G’s emotional IQ from its low point when he took his new wife. He tried to overlook, for the sake of peace, her less than pleasing ways. In these chapters he is, I think, returning to himself. Gaskell is showing us this, I think, not only in his confrontation with Mrs G, but also in his handling of the squire (he tempers his reaction by remembering their friendship, acknowledges partial truths in what the squire says, but does not coddle him: “Tell the lads yourself!”), and in being so tender with Molly.
Back to a previous post. I’ve since looked up the phrase “Philip drunk to Philip sober. Seems it goes back to King Philip of Macedon. A poor woman “importuned” the king to grant her justice, which he refused. The woman exclaimed, “I appeal.” The astonished king asked, “To whom?” She replied, “From Philip drunk to Philip sober,” implying two moods, of course. It comes up in Emerson, etc. It was new to me.
Neither have I thoughts on our next book. But I like our pace.
I'm just now catching up after a Christmas vacation that kept me about 800 miles away from my copy of the novel, so I don't have much to add here. But it did occur to me that the title of chapter 36 -- "Domestic Diplomacy" -- would make a pretty good alternate subtitle for the novel. We're reminded, time and again, that there's so much at stake in what seems on the surface to be pretty uneventful.
And I liked that the squire is able to appreciate Molly for being exceptional -- one in a thousand, as he says. This bodes well for the eventual Roger/Molly connection.
I have noticed a few things in this week's reading--first of all, the way the squire complains of Cynthia's name as "outlandish a Christina name as I 'd wish to hear"--so does this name come off as so bad, I wonder, to all English readers at that time.
Mr. G's characterization kept reminding of me Lydgate in Middlemarch--especially, his emotional obtuseness that the narrator implied in the sentence "surgeon thougoh he was, had never learnt to anatomize a woman's heart" (416). I wonder all the surgeon characters are like this in Victorian novels or do we know of any doctors or surgeons who are emotionally more fined-tuned?
I was also struck by the way Mr.Gibson refers to the Black folks (maybe in Africa? I wonder where Roger exactly went on his scientific expedition)as lacking the power of reasoning and having "peculiarity of complexion" (411). What do we make of these rather racialized remarks by Mr. Gibson, presumably the most reasonable and scientifically-minded character in this novel?
By the way, I do want to try sensational novelist, either Collins or Braddon. I never read Collins before and want to give it a try, The White Woman or No Name.
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