Dear Serial Readers,
Kari will launch us for this week's installment, and I'll chime in later with a brief comment. For next week, chaps 23-25 (vol edition; or chaps 22-24 original installments).
Thanks to Kari for what follows! Yours, Serial S.
I enjoyed these chapters so much! Not one, but two not-quite proposals.
Let's start with the end, when Lucilla is surprised, which in itself is so unusual. It seems that it is she who feels "the earth had suddenly given way under her feet." The sentence is surprising, and perhaps that is why its grammar is also a bit confused. And I, this reader, was surprised that Lucilla had been providing for this school, such an idyllic setting for her in which to be posing when the Archdeacon runs into her. I had completely forgotten about Mrs. Mortimer, perhaps the first character for whom I've felt there might be real risk, and therefore, for the first time, I feel suspense. Since I can't wait for the next installment, I agreed to write this so we can get started blogging and I can keep reading!
This seems the most interiority we've seen of Lucilla. Perhaps that is because as contemporary readers, we are trained to see the unexpected, the unwanted, and the undesirable as the most inner and the most "true." In any case, that's how my students talk, and I often hear myself say the same thing. I do wonder what the notion of interiority was at the time of this novel, and how much literary uses of interiority were setting the stage for Freud's notions of repression and the unconscious.
And, in other drawing rooms, Lucilla's "self-devotion" is what can't help but convince Rose (and others) to follow Lucilla's will. I find that quite intriguing. I'll leave Barbara for others to dsicuss, aside from mentioning that it makes me a little sad to see the vast difference between Barbara's and Cavendish's desires. I'm probably giving more sympathy to Cavendish than Mrs. Oliphant is.
The other room that figures often so far in this novel is Lucilla's bedroom, which seems to my memory to be regularly referred to as "maidenly," although it is her "womanly" feelings that naturally wish she could have received Cavendish's proposal as a another tribute to her successes, but not to necessarily accept. This contrast between "maidenly" and "womanly" also reminds me of her vast wisdom compared to that 18-year old young man in the last installment.
I'm eager to hear what other serial readers noticed in this chapter. What shifts in tone do you all notice? What did you think of the lovely rural portrait of the schoolhouse in the midst of Carlingford? How did you see Lucilla's comparison between herself and Rose? Or . . . ?
4 comments:
I like the comparison Kari draws between contemporary readers’ often preconceived notions about interiority and what we have here – Lucilla guiding her mind to its well regulated and composed state after a series of disruptions or surprises that threaten to untangle her social scheme or the fulfillment of her duty. (At which point she (unlike Barbara and Cavendish, at the end of Ch. 21), can rest peacefully).
We’ve seen Lucilla’s composure as a foil before – and I think in this section it helps follow up on Susan’s comment about sensation fiction and parody from the previous installment. Mrs. Woodburn’s overreaching caricature of Mr. Beverly, in itself I think a discussion-worthy reaction, opened me up to this idea and seems fit, as he plays an important role in the most suspenseful plotline. And the contestation over her previous acquaintance with his character, or at least her intense fixation on him, makes the premise all the more sensational. What do you make of his reverse “instinctive want of confidence” – “I have not studied her sufficiently to give an opinion of her” – and the pun on “studied”? I love Mrs. Woodburn’s annoyance at her brother for not facing up to Beverly – “As if no on had ever heard of mistaken identity before!” She both scoffs at and upholds the identity confusion… Does her and Cavendish’s commentary on mimicry and sympathy, not to mention their actual roles, bring out another version of a family artistry?
And whether or not Mrs. Woodburn’s caricature predisposes us to think about parody, the way the Archdeacon “struck down another victim, without ever so much as a glance” as Mrs. Mortimer’s “basilisk,” filling her with blood-draining wonder, and the way they stare at each other as he grips her sleeve in disbelief – the slow deliberateness of these actions’ description - certainly seems to invoke sensation or even gothic fiction. I’m also thinking here of Mr. Beverly’s mysteriously overstayed welcome – is it a sort of domestic or clerical English version of itinerant, in-and-out plot shakers in Italian or Spanish country-side homes, and his meeting with Mrs. Mortimer comically delayed from the first “meeting” with Cavendish? Maybe that’s too much – but as it is, the prolonged and still unending stay of an oversmart outsider whose motives trouble or baffle the other characters and a balanced social understanding does seem right in line with sensation fiction.
To come full circle, it feels like for Carlingford society to achieve “grand unity” out of chaos it will have to externally reflect more and more closely the dynamics of Lucilla’s mind/interiority – momentarily in peril at the end of this installment, as Kari points out! Could we read others' responses to L's self-devotion in this light?
I’m curious about all this talk about contemporary readers. Are we so different from readers of earlier times, when it comes to interest in interior lives? Do we see fear or trauma or their consequences as demons, rather than facts of existence? Do we consider interior lives truer? I don’t know, but I tend to think not. The farther into to the book we go, the more complexity below Lucilla's surface character may be revealed, as Kari sees beginning in this installment. I was interested that Lucilla was annoyed with herself for her undesired expectation that Mr. C might indeed return, as Mrs. Chiley predicted. In that very human way, the girl seems to want to control herself to protect to fend off hurt. Then how quickly she turns her attention to the “possible bishop.” (I love that reference to the Archdeacon. Status rules!) Was anyone else’s interest caught by the reference, way back at the beginning of chapter 19, that Lucilla did not shrink from “sacrifice…as will yet, in the course of this history, be still more seriously and even sadly evolved”? Not to mention the later reference to the less than spotless history of Mr. C. Will we hear more about that? Both bits keep me, serially speaking, alert.
I'm not sure what Victorian readers would have understood about interiority, but I do know that this novel was published after Eliot's "Natural History of German Life," which reproaches Dickens for focusing on "external traits" instead of "psychological character," so I would bet this was an active and energetic debate at the time.
I think Kari's absolutely right to say that this is the most interiority Lucilla's shown. Interestingly enough, it seems to me that the novel's protagonist has less interiority than some of the characters surrounding her (Barbara and Cavendish most obviously). But maybe that will change now that Lucilla is genuinely surprised about what's happened here!
On the Interiority Question: I'm thinking about the analogy from last week between Lucilla and Oliphant as designers of their respective plots. I wonder about the element of surprise or not knowing too much as a necessary ingredient in such design work. Often we think novelists plot out in advance many details of character and plot, but then the unexpected happens. Or maybe it's useful not to know too much (or to keep one's own interiority at some remove) in order to design well. What might be the relationship between interiority of designers and their designs of interiority?
There is something delightfully comical to me about Lucilla as the focus of so many proposals (or almost-proposals)--from her cousin, from Cavendish, and now the almost-proposal from the young--enough Archdeacon who is diverted at the crucial hour to an old--enough other woman. It seems the marriage plotting around Lucilla is both something she does and does not fully manage. What could this have to do with interiority?
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