Dear Serial Readers,
First, the news you're naturally eager to know: our next serial will be---Dickens' Little Dorrit!! I realize that the winner of the poll was a different Dickens serial, but for complex reasons I've decided to assert my serial authority and move ahead with this wonderful, favorite (for legions) Dickens novel. The first installment is chapters 1-4. You can download the novel from the two sites I've mentioned (and both linked in the sidebar on the right). I'll post my first entry on this novel the week of March 15th from London!
Now, to the story for today: Gaskell's "The Grey Woman." How different from Collins! The narrative gets off to a very slow start, a bit hard to latch onto--not much in the way of plotting at all. And the focus is so clearly on one character, who is also the embedded narrator (once we get through the framework of the German tourist who sees the portrait of a beautiful woman known as "The Grey Woman" because of some terrible terror she endured). The straight expository-narrative style, hardly broken by dialogue, is also tedious reading, at least compared with most serials that offer variation in styles across chapters. Collins' story with its "scenes" accentuates this feature.
That the long narration is in the form of a letter to Anna's daughter Ursula is also difficult to assess since we have no sense of the daughter or the nature of her estrangement from her mother. Yes, like Ursula, we're to judge for ourselves after we get Anna's account. That set-up, that the reader of the letter is to act as judge, is similar to other sensation novels--I'm thinking of The Woman in White, published around the same time as this story. But unlike Collins' novel, it seems unlikely that we're going to get Ursula's side (or any other side) of this story. The frame and embedded narratives are supposedly to heighten authenticity--this really happened since the outside narrator has no vested interest in the characters or events, and there's a document (the letter) that supposedly certifies the authenticity.
I can only hope that the Gray Woman's account is worthy of all this fuss--clearly we're getting a tale of a bad marriage to a foreigner (oh those French, always a problem from the British perspective, even if circuitous), and the new maid of middle age and from Paris is certainly going to spell trouble. The chateau seems like a ne0-Gothic setting with secret passageways, mysterious doors.
Next week: the final two "portions" (although each published in consecutive weeks) of this story. But do line up your copies of Little Dorrit now!
Serially stalling,
Susan
1 comment:
I am very excited to be reading "The Grey Woman" with everyone over these two weeks, as I am in the process of writing a short paper on Gaskell's gothic fiction! What luck.
I completely agree with Susan's observations that this is a hard story to go into. Gothic fiction is usually very dramatic, but here there's a self-consciously prosaic tone set right in the beginning--after all, "there is nothing particularly attractive in the situation of this mill" (p. 300). Not a particularly auspicious beginning for a story. After this, however, I noticed a checklist of traditional gothic elements--the eerie painting, the faded manuscript, the mystery and question of identity, the handsome but foreboding male character, the isolated chateau, the strange servants. It seems like we're going to have a typical tale of gothic horror.
What also caught my eye, however, is the newness of Anna's portion of the chateau. I just finished reading Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, and this scene in Gaskell's story reminds me so much of Catherine Morland's disappointment in the modernness of the Tilney's abbey. This makes me wonder whether we're going to be getting "legitimate" gothic in the next installments or mock gothic (as Austen gives her readers). The cliffhanger ending of this first installment definitely suggests that something is coming (in the guise of a French maid). The question is whether this will be a serious threat or an illusory one!
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