POOR MISS FINCH by Wilkie Collins

POOR MISS FINCH by Wilkie Collins

14 February 2010

Miss or Mrs? Scenes 1-6 (Christmas Number 1871, The Graphic)

Dear Serial Readers,

What a contrast to Gaskell's Wives and Daughters is this heavily-plotted Collins novella! Even in the first half, scenes one-six, I marveled over the compressed plot elements--presumed murder of foreigner on a boat, commercial fraud, arranged engagement vs. secret engagement, clandestine marriage, suspense that the clandestine marriage will be discovered in time, and the set-up for bigamy, even embedded in the title. By the way, I love titles of novels that are questions--such as Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? --because of the way they immediately engage the reader in the act of reading and judging. Can you think of other interrogative titles?

With all this suspense, it's interesting to note that the entire story was printed in one issue, the Christmas number of The Graphic, on Christmas Day 1871. And then, to emphasize this date, Natalie's birthday is Christmas Day, and of course the elopement plot is contingent on her sixteenth birthday, and her marriage to Turlington one week later on New Year's Day. I wanted to see the original Christmas Number online at least, but learned that the database for the Nineteenth Century British Periodicals (British Library) does not include Christmas Numbers! Still, I did see advertisements of this particular holiday gift volume, advertised as "A Christmas Story...equal in quantity to a one volume novel" with 12 illustrations and one large plate titled "Saved!"--all this for the price of a shilling. As you can see in the sidebar, I found one of the illustrations online, this one presumably of Natalie and Launce.

What did you make of the emphasis on "scenes" or places for each chapter, the melodramatic staging of this story? Unlike Gaskell's slow-paced serial, this story is about scenes and plot points, not much on character, here a list of "persons in the story" in the front matter. (By the way, why aren't the church clerk, the clergyman, and especially his wife who speaks in the story listed here?) Each setting is so different--the private yacht at sea, the London suburb, and the various locales of Victorian London. I was also intrigued by the attention to storytelling itself--the embedded tales told by Sir Joseph and his sister Lavinia, and their disagreements about the story, about how to tell it. I found all this amusing, and wondered even if Collins were offering a kind of parody of melodrama and sensation fiction (a form he is identified with creating). There is the damsel in distress here, Natalie the underage heiress, and two men battling to possess her via marriage, whether lawful or not--the one marked as villainous, namely Turlington, with his name very suggestive of Dickens' dastardly lawyer Tulkinghorn in Bleak House, and the other Launce, the doctor (maybe an allusion to Alan Woodcourt, also from Dickens' novel?) Yet (like sensation fiction) there is also attention to women not as hapless, passive victims (often the case in standard melodrama), but as entering actively into the intrigue--the second Lady Winwood (who is younger than her stepdaughters!) and the perspicacious clergyman's wife and perhaps even Lavinia.

So much conniving around marriage, and so much hilarity around different stock notions of marriage--the paper marriage of convenience (and the problem of a paper economy where value is mercurial at best--hence, Turlington's financial difficulties) and the love match (with a hero of the name "Launcelot"--is this a joke about the knight in shining armor who goes to some lengths to effect this clandestine marriage?)!! What do you make of Natalie's racial otherness, her ancestry associations to French Caribbean Martinique, not unlike Rochester's secret wife Bertha in Jane Eyre? One theory is that Natalie's "mixed blood" is to explain how a fifteen year old "girl could be sexually mature enough to attract these men, as if pure-blooded "English" girls could not be so erotically precocious. But it seems there's lots of emphasis on exploiting her youthful inexperience.

Eager for your responses! Next week we'll finish these scenes (7-12). Then I'd like to move on to Gaskell's magazine stories. But perhaps we can return to Collins later--perhaps even his novel Man and Wife. serialized in 1870 both in London and New York.

Scenically yours,
Serial Susan

3 comments:

readerann said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
readerann said...

It’s a melodrama of Money vs. Love (upper case!). I liked the invitation to identify in “The Money Market” scene: “If we have ever known what it is to want money….” ending with the image of the Fallen Angel, no less.

Adding to the melodrama, there are women with minds of their own, yes, but none of the men seem to notice. The precocious Natalie is nonetheless told by everyone, from Sir Joseph and R.T. to Launcelot and Lavinia, what she should do, will do. Even Mrs. Sancroft has decided for Natalie: “You shall marry the many you love.”
Her own father renders her a mere commodity, literally and through his patronizing attitude. “Wait a little while and you will alter your opinion [of R.T.], my love.” Not to mention the awful words of R.T. comparing girls to ripe fruit!

Seems the iconic mother appears (in a daughter’s mind, at least) as savior again, as in “Wives,” in what might have been, when Natalie says: “If only Mother were alive. If only I had a sister….”

Those are my scattered thoughts. I’m enjoying the story. The scenes or places for chapter headings make me think I’m playing “Clue,” as if any moment now Col. Mustard may appear.

My final post on “Wives and Daughters” didn’t take. I must have signed out before I clicked “Publish.”

Julia said...

I agree that Collins' novella feels especially fast moving after the slow pace of Gaskell's "provincial" novel. I thought it was telling that Collins' plot revolves on the "instant" telegraph rather than the slowly moving letter!

Like Susan, I was also interested in the way that Collins' story is obviously constructed in a theatrical manner. This too seemed antithetical to Gaskell's "realistic" approach to storytelling, although some of the plot elements (the young woman being pressured into marriage, for example) seem so similar. The theatricality of "Miss or Mrs?" reminded me a bit of later plays, too, like Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest." Perhaps drama (or a novella borrowing dramatic elements) is a particularly good way to parody social conventions because its brevity calls out for caricatures?

I was hooked by the suspense, and I'm wondering whether the plot will deviate from what the first half of the novella seems to set up--financial ruin for the villain (R.T.) when his anticipated marriage to Natalie doesn't turn out. Will Collins confirm our suspicions about where the plot is going, or surprise us in the end? I can't wait to find out!