Dear Serial Readers,
All your terrific comments take me in a different direction than I thought I'd go in response to this latest installment. I wanted to say (and so I do) that this monthly segment ends with the drawing-room suspense (perhaps a mock suspense, in keeping with the mock epic others have pointed out) about the "young-enough" Archdeacon's arrival on the scene, and the mystery of Mr. Cavendish's "green ghastly look"--as the narrator concludes, "The question was, What did it mean?" But mostly, for me, the mystery that I fear will never be answered is what *was* that "famous dish" Lucilla requested and Nancy provided?
I agree with TK that Lucilla's lack of humor may be consistent with her materialist practicality, but you have all convinced me, for now, that the narrator's tone is an intriguingly ironic contrast to her character. It also occurs to me that the doctor's wry amusement about his daughter's success--her unflappable self-composure in the wake of the scandal of Barbara Lake's play for Cavendish--perhaps is a model for how we are to read her with something like detached affection. We might consider this novel a mock-biography (the narrator refers to "Miss Marjoribanks's biographer") where Lucilla's character is less obvious than at first it seems, maybe like the garden she's remodeled with dark corners and a spot of strategic illumination. But where are her dark corners?
Here I wonder if Lucilla seems somewhat sexless. She is rather impervious to all the marriage plotting in her direction. And while Lucilla may remark to Tom (as Prof R noted) that he's lucky he spilled his heart to her rather than someone else who took marriage seriously, her lack of susceptibility to men might point to some hidden quality, some reserve or fear. I do think of a later Victorian heroine, namely Gwendolen Harleth, who enjoyed male adulation, but the indication of sexual passion toward her seemed a source of trauma or terror. In any case, Lucilla and Barbara are quite different in drawing power from their physical charms. Lucilla is larger than life, a woman with a commanding presence, but what else?
I was sorry to see Barbara reduced to a rather pathetic figure, someone belittled by the narrator for her desire to hurt Lucilla, who did not take the sting of Barbara's attempt to conquer Cavendish. At the same time, I admire the recognition of Barbara's class sensitivity over L's patronage. Lucilla's "sleeping the sleep of the just and innocent" also implies her social privilege, that she can afford to cast off the affront.
Next week, chapters 15-16 (a shorter installment than usual).
Serially sifting,
Susan
7 comments:
Hello everyone,
I'm very taken by Susan's suggestion that the Doctor's detached amusement might serve as a model for the different forms of distance, irony, and affection that this novel seeks to cultivate in its readers. The Doctor is perfectly happy to inhabit the narrative's sidelines (or so our narrator repeatedly insists, anyway!). In a sense, could we say the same for Oliphant's other male characters? I, too, am finding the true pleasures of this story *not* in the typical masculine plot drivers of courtship/ flirtation--nor in Mr Cavendish's potential conflict with the mysterious Archdeacon--but rather in the intricate feminine designs and negotiations surrounding these usual plot points: Lucilla's strategic coup with Nancy and her "plat", L's remarkable near-"Providential" foresight about the garden, and the wonderful portrait of sister Rose's angry disapproval toward Barbara, fittingly punctuated by thistles!
Everyone has thoroughly convinced me that with Miss Marjoribanks Oliphant has departed from conventional representations of marriageable young women in the nineteenth-century novel. This is surely no mean feat: it seems to involve a combination of Lucilla's lack of interest in marriage, her humorlessness, her apparent imperviousness to both flattery and jealousy, her focus on trivial details (like furniture) that nonetheless serve larger social purposes (the gathering of the community and making and breaking of social bonds), and the strategic choices that manage to make her seem both brilliant and magnanimous. I LOVE the passage where the narrator confesses to us that the prospect of a difficult social situation actually makes her feel more energetic and excited than usual. I want to use the term "centered" to describe her: unlike most conventionally feminine types, she doesn't need masculine attention, security, or peace of mind. She likes a challenge.
The other thing that really surprised me in this installment was the Lakes' class identification as artists--and therefore superior to the gentry. I didn't know artists ever thought of themselves this way until the avant-garde, though maybe some romantic poets did so (Shelley?). Still, it's a fascinating subject position--what sociologists would describe as a discrepancy between class and status, and again not a typical representational choice for the Victorian novel.
I'm so glad I'm reading this odd novel: it makes me think, like Franco Moretti, that our usual focus on only the most canonical fiction may be misleading us about what "the novel" does.
One last point: like Prof. Reitz, I got caught up in holiday obligations and also got caught up in a contemporary novel, both of which caused me to fall behind in reading Miss M by one installment. At first I was embarrassed, but then I realized that this might help me think about the rhythms of seriality: might the arrival of a long-awaited box from Mudie's cause a reader to gobble up a whole novel in volume form while letting her serialized fiction languish for a few installments? Did women have annual reading rhythms that might have meant less reading during the holiday season, for example? And one quick idle question in case anyone knows the answer: did Victorian readers tend to think of novel reading as a pre-sleep activity? That is, did they keep novels on their bedside tables?
Miss M. remains a mystery to me. Papa’s comfort and the conquering of Carlingford aside, what does she want? Despite her show of strength after the snubbing by Cavindish about whom she cared not a fig, she elicits reactions from Mrs. Chiley and other Carlingford women as if she’s some variety of fainting violet. They refuse to acknowledge that she is nothing like her “delicate” mother, and continue to look for signs of “how she’s holding up,” while the conqueror herself marches on. In terms of character psychology, I tend to think along the same lines as Susan. Lurking under Miss M.’s disinterest in marriage must be fear. I want at least a glimmer of her vulnerability. But Oliphant might not be telling that kind of story. Whatever she's up to, I’m still enjoying the read.
...and the discussion is stimulating!
Just a quick note to say I, too, am enjoying the comments on the novel and the novel itself. I have also enjoyed how Lucilla's grand work, while still referred to with the epic metaphors of victoriously ascending to a throne, now also is referred to with the metaphors of art and philanthropy. I guess it always was, but I find philanthropy ascending in this section.
And, though I envy Plotaholic's name because of my own plot addiction, I feel in reading this novel a variation, in a way, to TK's point: I'm less interested in plot points than in the descriptions of all the emotions that accompany each action. And I delight in Lucilla's inner triumphs as well as in her social triumphs.
And of course I'm gaining good leadership tips. I plan to work on my true candor and modesty, traits of every administrative genius.
Oh, and: Furniture? Trivial?
I think the characterization of Lucilla as an unflappable administrator tempts us modern readers to look for trauma or fear lurking underneath the surface. (And certainly other characters are represented as having inner demons, from Barbara to the recently-green Mr Cavendish.) But what if there isn't any there there? Then what is Oliphant about with this character?
One of the things that has been interesting me in reading this story is what might it mean to place a novel on the shoulders of a main female character and NOT focus on interiority, indeed to make her characterization completely outwardly focused (from furniture to her skillful direction of peoples' responses to her). What an interesting and unusual project in the world of Jane Eyre and Esther Summerson, who have such complicated inner lives. What would this mean for our gendering of public and private spaces if Lucilla gets to be the hero without any deep interiority?
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