Dear Serial Readers,
If Oliphant and Lucilla resemble each other as designers, there is one way in which they part company: a sense of humor. I'm finding Oliphantine humor a delicacy I've come to relish. I'd place this humor somewhere between Dickens and Eliot, more subtle like Eliotian humor, but without the acerbic edge. As one example: the "web of pronouns" episode where Lucilla endeavors to make sense out of Mrs. Mortimer's rather imprecise jumble of words. I could not resist thinking of Flora Finching, whose prolix proclivities Dickens offers up as lexical fun, as we considered a while back in these screen-pages (Little Dorrit). Unlike Dickens, Oliphant turns Mrs. M's pronoun confusion into a reading lesson as we see Lucilla struggle to locate some sort of pattern in the story. To return to Lucilla's insistence that she lacks a sense of humor: does she? or what does this insistence suggest about her, about her---interiority--her self-scrutiny?
I really did admire this installment for cavorting with the genre of sensation fiction, once again. A subtitle for these chapters could be: "Mr C's Secret." It seems that Cavendish has several of the signature features of the sensation heroine: disguised or mistaken identity ("the impostor") complete with a name change, a suspicious inheritance plot, and last but not least, bigamous desires. Cavendish, if he might be "Kavan" too, has been associated as a possible husband for at least three women: Lucilla, Barbara, and now Helen Mortimer (at least in Lucilla's crafty suggestion to Beverley). Earlier, last week, he expressed the quandry that he desires Barbara but he knows that marrying Lucilla is the socially proper course to follow--if only he could marry two women at once!
Finally, I loved Lucilla's command performance, including the sobbing, with Mr. Beverley to test him out and to test out her hunch about this "Kavan" character. Our "genius" Lucilla now must keep "three different threads of innocent intrigue with the three different persons in the drama" all in motion and without confusion--much like the novelist of a multiplot serial!
Next week, chapters 26-28. I think I'm back on track with reading and posting by the start of each week. Since we're at about the halfway mark in this serial, I'd like to invite suggestions for the next. I was thinking about another Blackwood's serial--or rather series--SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE. I know these three loosely linked stories may not satisfy you suspense addicts, like Plotaholic, but these would offer another angle on the serial possibilities of Victorian fiction. Let me know if you have thoughts!
Serially simmering,
Susan
3 comments:
Hi Serial Readers -- I apologize for going AWOL. I've been having a hard time with the serial nature of the reading (the stop and start), which is actually quite reassuring since I spend a lot of time in my research arguing that serial reading is fragmenting! Ah, if only all our academic claims were so easily proven...
Oliphant seems to have been reading the blog as she takes the interiority question up on the first page of chaper 25 when Lucilla and Mrs Woodburn size each other up. Mimicry of course relies on the reproduction of the external -- "it was only the tricks of the surface for which she had any real insight" -- and so Woodburn provides an interesting context for a main character whose interiority is at question. I agree that this installment seems to give us more of the inner Lucilla. Maybe Oliphant's point is not that there is no there there, but that self-regulation triumphs (remember, she did study her political economy!). This passage suggests that Oliphant is making a choice in showing very little of Lucilla's interior, since she is quite capable of mining those depths in other characters. We have mentioned her rather painful characterization of Barbara's tiny self, but here Mrs Woodburn goes under the microscope. I thought it quite insightful that she represents Woodburn's passion for mimicry as a "safety-valve" that keeps her from "hysterics" or despair at the tangled web (her brother) has woven.
I have Darwin on the brain at the moment, and so may be seeing him where he isn't, but in addition to the language of military strategy, monarchy and political economy that are used to characterize Lucilla's "genius," I'm also seeing a suggestion that she might be more evolved that the other characters. Not only is she trying to update Carlingford (starting with redecoration projects), but she is described as having a "higher organisation" (volume 231).
I hadn’t thought of Darwin while reading but the description of Lucilla’s genius at the end of Ch. XXIV and beginning of XXV strikes me in that sense. As always, challenge stimulates rather than overwhelms her – and here her unselfish goal, “the good of her neighbor in its most sublime manifestation-the good of her neighbor who had injured her, and been insensible to her attractions, which, according to the world in general, is the one thing unpardonable to a woman” is good for the world and outside of its current social strictures or capacities. Yet the common readily available higher power that might be a motivating force is also denied: “it was not even the scriptural coals of fire she was thinking of as she pondered her great undertaking in her mind. The enterprise might not be free from a touch of human vanity, but it was vanity of a loftier description: the pleasure of exercising a great faculty, and the natural confidence of genius in its own powers.” Opening the next scene, we see “the steady force, the persevering energy—or, to sum up all in one word, the genius—of Miss Marjoribanks, who for her part, recognized the use of such an instrument of entertainment as Mrs Woodburn possessed.”
To me it seems like when political economy really, practically operates in accordance with its theoretical ideals it starts to look like the natural evolutionary force of advancing organisms.
The language of Lucilla’s genius makes me wonder about her lack of humor. Here we have the comparison to Mrs. Woodburn, and Oliphant often describes both the Thursday guests’ perception of her witty or pointed direction and Lucilla’s own, perfectly serious interpretation of her comments. Is the place of humor in an advanced social organism like Lucilla only one of widespread utility? If so, what do we make of Mrs. Woodburn’s particular use of mimicry that Prof. Reitz points out? It’s almost like humor is squeezed out of the picture when external and internal organization merge in Lucilla’s pursuit for social harmony – a goal not recognized by the self-interested Mrs. Woodburn.
Regarding Oliphant’s humor – I also loved Lucilla’s “command performance” – especially the description of the Archdeacon’s Low-church (“Not to say Dissenterish”) reactions.
My favorite part was when Lucilla—who is, we are told, “not faultless”—lost it Betty Draper style with the Lake twins, shaking the one who most resembled Barbara. But, rather than a cigarette, a walk around garden calmed her.
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