Dear Serial Readers,
Great comments on the first three installments! One idea I have links up with Barbara's several interesting observations about suspense and plot and time. It seems to me that the ends of each serial installment are marked by some dramatic incident designed to bring readers back for more: Jicks's white frock with the bloody words "help me!" and Oscar's epileptic fit, and finally with the sixth installment (ends with chapter 19), Oscar's treatment which will turn him into a "blue man." I'm curious how serial format (how the novel was first written with serial publication in mind--rather than volume publication) maps onto serial forms within the story--serial crimes, serial characters (the Dubourg twins, for instance, and then the unnamed "blue man" in Paris as a prequel to Oscar treated with silver nitrate), serial spaces (even with uneven borders or location) and other possibilities.
Barbara's comment on how the two parts of the house don't align (an observation also about forms and formats) dovetails with how topsy-turvy some elements of the story seem: Oscar's feminine hyper-nervousness, Lucilla's unfeminine lack of modesty and her boldness (which Mme P links to her lack of physical sight--clearly there are advantages for a woman who does not see the male gaze!), Jicks's wandering propensities and her precocious perception about the strange men who turn into robbers, and even Mme P's aged father who uses cosmetics, false hair and teeth, and even "stays" to make himself look younger for a woman. All these are inversions of some kind from the usual!
Tamara's observation about Mme P's appropriating the male (and narrating?) gaze is intriguing. If the novel seems to be discrediting Mme P's (masculine-linked) rationality, is it also opening up other possibilities for knowing the world? Collins seems to explore how Lucilla's acute sense of hearing and touch do matter, sensory knowledge offset by the narrator's litany of "my poor Miss Finch." Lucilla's blindness is not simply an impediment--instead, she's able to "see" in the dark, to apprehend the world (and people) around her in valuable ways. Mme P even notes how Lucilla leads Oscar around the house "as if it was he that was blind, and she who had the use of her eyes." There are also ways in which physical sight seems inferior to insight or other forms of knowledge--take Mr. Finch who only sees himself, and Mrs. Finch whose "watery blue eyes" don't seem to register much. Yet the language of vision, eyes, and sight seems to appear on nearly every page. Perhaps it's only my heightened awareness of this sensory capacity that has alerted me to how contingent the narration is on a lexicon of sight.
On the treatment with silver nitrate and the blue-black complexion--this also seems a doubling or kind of serial from another Collins serial--Ezra Jennings in The Moonstone, serialized only a few years before this one. Collins associates some physical disablements (or "disfigurement") with immaterial capacities.
I'm also curious about how Mme. P's "revolutionary" politics via her her husband matter to this story--I guess we'll "see"!
For next week: installments 7-9, chapters 20-25. Rachel will provide our lead post.
Serially yours,
Susan
POOR MISS FINCH by Wilkie Collins
28 April 2014
21 April 2014
POOR MISS FINCH (chaps. 1-10; serial installments 1-3; Cassell's Magazine in Sept. 1871)
Dear Serial Readers,
Welcome to the world of Poor Miss Finch! The first ten chapters
(and the first three installments) introduce many of our key players, but first
we have to get through Madame Pratolungo. Who on earth is this woman and why is
she our narrator?
I was drawn to the specific,
antagonistic rhetorical relationship that she sets up with her readers. We know
from chapter one that she does not think of herself as holding the same values
as her implied audience. Where she is “ultra liberal,” we are “monarchy-people,
sitting fat and contented under tyrants.” Moreover, she sets up a similarly
divergent relationship with the provincial, English characters that fill the
rest of the novel. Why, I wonder, is this person our guide to the world of the
novel? Why do we need a woman who is both completely certain in her views and
frequently wrong to be our guide? She explains why she’s such a proper
companion for Lucilla, but what is it about her that makes her our fit
companion? Why does she get to
translate this world for us, much like she attempts to translate the world for
Miss Finch?
We might want to consider how
Madame Pratolungo’s role as the narrator relates to Oscar’s narrative of
near-incarceration. In “The Perjury of the Clock” we learn that he was almost
convicted of a murder because of mistaken evidence, or more precisely, because
of a mistaken reading of evidence. The case against Oscar seemed
incontrovertible, based on the given interviews and material evidence, until
the housecleaner’s story came to light. If we add in fact that two of the ten
chapter titles are “Candlelight View of the Man” and “Daylight View of the
Man,” the novel seems to set up a discussion around accuracy and individual
perception. If the same set of evidence can be understood in two different
ways, is one of the two options necessarily correct? When and where is there a
right way of seeing, both metaphorically and literally?
Next time, look forward to
Susan’s post on chapters 11-18, which include “Discoveries at Browndown” and
another appearance of my beloved Jicks.
Serially yours,
05 April 2014
New Serial Reading Adventure: POOR MISS FINCH by Wilkie Collins--starting week of April 21, 2014
Dear Serial Readers,
Please join in reading Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch, first serialized in Cassell's Magazine in 26 parts (from Sept. 1871 to Feb. 1872). To speed up our serial reading schedule, we'll aim for three installments per week, beginning the week of April 21, 2014.
The first three installments include the first 10 chapters (with the serial divisions after chapters 4, 7, 10). You might use the Oxford World's Classics edition of the novel, or you may read it online by downloading Poor Miss Finch
Rachel Herzl-Betz will join me in this serial reading adventure by sharing the lead posts. We'll alternate in some fashion, so stay tuned! Please share this website link!
Serially starting soon,
Serial Susan
Please join in reading Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch, first serialized in Cassell's Magazine in 26 parts (from Sept. 1871 to Feb. 1872). To speed up our serial reading schedule, we'll aim for three installments per week, beginning the week of April 21, 2014.
The first three installments include the first 10 chapters (with the serial divisions after chapters 4, 7, 10). You might use the Oxford World's Classics edition of the novel, or you may read it online by downloading Poor Miss Finch
Rachel Herzl-Betz will join me in this serial reading adventure by sharing the lead posts. We'll alternate in some fashion, so stay tuned! Please share this website link!
Serially starting soon,
Serial Susan
26 October 2013
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE, #11, Book Fifth, chaps. 5-8 (Belgravia 1878)
Dear Serial Readers,
Many repetitions and building suspense in this penultimate installment. First, the date--fifth of November and bonfire night--echoes the opening installment of then novel and also echoes the month of this installment. Then the repetition of the communications by signals, the fateful knocking at the door, the female figures on the stormy heath at night--how Thomasin (with baby no less) and Eustacia follow or haunt each other, as Diggory Venn confuses one for the other. This installment also seems more accented with suspense that gets replicated in several ways--the weather, the crossed signals, the mistaken reading of Wildeve's assistance to Eustacia's escape as indication of planned adultery, and then the cliffhanger ending where Thomasin "could say no more." Things don't look promising for Eustacia's survival. The question remains about her method: the pistols (if not secured well), or some other way.
One of the most interesting bits to me was Susan Nonsuch's wax effigy of Eustacia, with all those pins and then the destruction of the Eustacia effigy through flames--like the burning of witches. Of this superstition, the narrator remarks: "It was a practice well-known on Egdon at that date, and one that is not quite extinct at the present day." This captures Hardy's sense of historical process--as a palimpsest or layering, or echoing or haunting so that the past, with its anachronistic practices, is still evident in the present. Egdon Heath is part-fossilized history and ongoing present, like the evolutionary process of steady-state and slow transformations. And yet, and yet--the drama of human actors on this scene! Is Eustacia's tragic end overdetermined like the long arc of deep time?
Only the time of the last installment will tell!
Serially suspended,
Susan
Many repetitions and building suspense in this penultimate installment. First, the date--fifth of November and bonfire night--echoes the opening installment of then novel and also echoes the month of this installment. Then the repetition of the communications by signals, the fateful knocking at the door, the female figures on the stormy heath at night--how Thomasin (with baby no less) and Eustacia follow or haunt each other, as Diggory Venn confuses one for the other. This installment also seems more accented with suspense that gets replicated in several ways--the weather, the crossed signals, the mistaken reading of Wildeve's assistance to Eustacia's escape as indication of planned adultery, and then the cliffhanger ending where Thomasin "could say no more." Things don't look promising for Eustacia's survival. The question remains about her method: the pistols (if not secured well), or some other way.
One of the most interesting bits to me was Susan Nonsuch's wax effigy of Eustacia, with all those pins and then the destruction of the Eustacia effigy through flames--like the burning of witches. Of this superstition, the narrator remarks: "It was a practice well-known on Egdon at that date, and one that is not quite extinct at the present day." This captures Hardy's sense of historical process--as a palimpsest or layering, or echoing or haunting so that the past, with its anachronistic practices, is still evident in the present. Egdon Heath is part-fossilized history and ongoing present, like the evolutionary process of steady-state and slow transformations. And yet, and yet--the drama of human actors on this scene! Is Eustacia's tragic end overdetermined like the long arc of deep time?
Only the time of the last installment will tell!
Serially suspended,
Susan
24 October 2013
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE #10 Book Fifth, chaps. 1-4 (Belgravia, Oct. 1878)
Dear Serial Readers,
I'm going to leave comments on this particular installment to others, and instead answer the question: why read this 1878 initial serial publication of this novel?
Thanks to the Oxford UP edition, based on the 1878 edition, I can offer some observations. Hardy revised his novels, this one in particular, for the 1895 edition and again for the 1912 edition. The later versions bear the marks of his more developed sense of Wessex and the parallels between his fictional names and actual places in Dorset and surroundings. Egdon Heath of the original serial version is much more indistinct and imprecise as a setting; even the map of Wessex Hardy used in the later editions differ from the 1878 edition, although I'm not sure if the map appeared in Belgravia with the installments. Also, while the divisions into six books appears in the magazine version of the novel, there are no book titles like "The Three Women" or "The Fascination" or "The Discovery." Instead there are abstracts of a few sentences as headnotes and previews for the installment. You can find these in Simon Gatrell's "Significant Revisions in the Text" section at the back of the Oxford edition.
It might be interesting to consider how the abstracts, along with the illustrations that appeared in the original magazine version, work to frame and guide reading the novel through these punctuated parts separated by a month. Beyond this, though, I think the earlier haziness of the heath in this 1878 version captures what I'd call Hardy's sense of a serial past and present--how Egdon Heath bears traces of a recorded, historical past (through proper names of people and events), but also to a past that's more inchoate, perhaps like the deep history of the geological record and evolutionary theory.
I'll be posting on the remaining three segments very soon! Any thoughts about what happens in this installment?
Serially situated,
Susan
I'm going to leave comments on this particular installment to others, and instead answer the question: why read this 1878 initial serial publication of this novel?
Thanks to the Oxford UP edition, based on the 1878 edition, I can offer some observations. Hardy revised his novels, this one in particular, for the 1895 edition and again for the 1912 edition. The later versions bear the marks of his more developed sense of Wessex and the parallels between his fictional names and actual places in Dorset and surroundings. Egdon Heath of the original serial version is much more indistinct and imprecise as a setting; even the map of Wessex Hardy used in the later editions differ from the 1878 edition, although I'm not sure if the map appeared in Belgravia with the installments. Also, while the divisions into six books appears in the magazine version of the novel, there are no book titles like "The Three Women" or "The Fascination" or "The Discovery." Instead there are abstracts of a few sentences as headnotes and previews for the installment. You can find these in Simon Gatrell's "Significant Revisions in the Text" section at the back of the Oxford edition.
It might be interesting to consider how the abstracts, along with the illustrations that appeared in the original magazine version, work to frame and guide reading the novel through these punctuated parts separated by a month. Beyond this, though, I think the earlier haziness of the heath in this 1878 version captures what I'd call Hardy's sense of a serial past and present--how Egdon Heath bears traces of a recorded, historical past (through proper names of people and events), but also to a past that's more inchoate, perhaps like the deep history of the geological record and evolutionary theory.
I'll be posting on the remaining three segments very soon! Any thoughts about what happens in this installment?
Serially situated,
Susan
03 October 2013
The Return of the Native #8 Book Fourth, chaps. 1-4 (Belgravia Aug. 1874)
Dear Serial Readers,
Given many of your comments about Hardy's poetic style, his hovering over the landscape and the slow drive of plot, I found myself thinking about the alterations between description and dialogue, between the immersion in local scenery and the frenzy of the accelerating collisions between mother and son, mother and daughter-in-law, aunt and niece and nephew-in-law, and most of all the brewing adultery plot between Eustacia and Wildeve. I find both Mrs. Yeobright and Eustacia similar in their sense of feeling enclosed: one resigned to her limited life, but hoping to escape vicariously through her son's adventures in Paris, the other also dreaming of the Parisian geographical fix. But the men seem much more wedded to Egdon, and Clym adjusts downward his aspirations as a schoolteacher into the furze-cutter, much to the dread of his young wife who wishes to escape her constricting life.
Most part of the landscape seems the reddleman, Diggory Venn, who seems almost like the furze itself (fustian furze maybe), always hovering and seeing all--a kind of analogue for the narrator. Is this reddleman a troublemaker or a peacemaker, a protective spirit especially for his beloved Thomasin?
As the adultery plot heats up by the end of this installment, I'm thinking too of Madame Bovary although there are marked differences between Emma and Eustacia. Still, for both, romantic fantasies seem the only escape possible.
How will the landscape, Hardy's poetry of place, work with or against all the human strife and drama and especially the unraveling marriage plots? Tune in.
Serially yours,
Susan
Given many of your comments about Hardy's poetic style, his hovering over the landscape and the slow drive of plot, I found myself thinking about the alterations between description and dialogue, between the immersion in local scenery and the frenzy of the accelerating collisions between mother and son, mother and daughter-in-law, aunt and niece and nephew-in-law, and most of all the brewing adultery plot between Eustacia and Wildeve. I find both Mrs. Yeobright and Eustacia similar in their sense of feeling enclosed: one resigned to her limited life, but hoping to escape vicariously through her son's adventures in Paris, the other also dreaming of the Parisian geographical fix. But the men seem much more wedded to Egdon, and Clym adjusts downward his aspirations as a schoolteacher into the furze-cutter, much to the dread of his young wife who wishes to escape her constricting life.
Most part of the landscape seems the reddleman, Diggory Venn, who seems almost like the furze itself (fustian furze maybe), always hovering and seeing all--a kind of analogue for the narrator. Is this reddleman a troublemaker or a peacemaker, a protective spirit especially for his beloved Thomasin?
As the adultery plot heats up by the end of this installment, I'm thinking too of Madame Bovary although there are marked differences between Emma and Eustacia. Still, for both, romantic fantasies seem the only escape possible.
How will the landscape, Hardy's poetry of place, work with or against all the human strife and drama and especially the unraveling marriage plots? Tune in.
Serially yours,
Susan
29 September 2013
The Return of the Native #7 (Book Third, The Fascination, chaps. 5-8)
Dear Serial Readers,
I returned to the very opening of this serial, where there is a long unwinding of the scene of Egdon Heath even before characters and dialogue appear--calm, poetic description. In this installment, in the thick of storylines, the balance shifts--dialogue and building suspense between the triangulated desires of mother, son, and his lover. The conflict between Mrs. Y and her son over what he will do with his life, and his choice of wife, is sharp and paired with Eustacia's demands on him--and the rush to marry. Interspersed are the scenes of landscape, Egdon almost the silent character, the presence that is something like a witness of human dramas. And I love how Hardy makes this environment out of deep evolutionary time--"The scene seemed to belong to the ancient world of the carboniferous period."
A corollary to this uniform, abiding presence of the landscape with its deep past is one character--the Reddleman, who seems Thomasin's guardian angel despite her declining his proposal (and now she's married to Wildeve). The movement of those 100 guineas from Mrs. Y to Christian (who is instructed to give half to Clym and half to Thomasin) to Wildeve to Venn who then gives them all to Thomasin--the "red automaton" is an interesting fixture whose home is constant movement through the landscape. At the close of "The Fascination" are two young married couples, but neither seems to have a rosy future, although Thomasin has those guineas.
Serially yours, Susan
I returned to the very opening of this serial, where there is a long unwinding of the scene of Egdon Heath even before characters and dialogue appear--calm, poetic description. In this installment, in the thick of storylines, the balance shifts--dialogue and building suspense between the triangulated desires of mother, son, and his lover. The conflict between Mrs. Y and her son over what he will do with his life, and his choice of wife, is sharp and paired with Eustacia's demands on him--and the rush to marry. Interspersed are the scenes of landscape, Egdon almost the silent character, the presence that is something like a witness of human dramas. And I love how Hardy makes this environment out of deep evolutionary time--"The scene seemed to belong to the ancient world of the carboniferous period."
A corollary to this uniform, abiding presence of the landscape with its deep past is one character--the Reddleman, who seems Thomasin's guardian angel despite her declining his proposal (and now she's married to Wildeve). The movement of those 100 guineas from Mrs. Y to Christian (who is instructed to give half to Clym and half to Thomasin) to Wildeve to Venn who then gives them all to Thomasin--the "red automaton" is an interesting fixture whose home is constant movement through the landscape. At the close of "The Fascination" are two young married couples, but neither seems to have a rosy future, although Thomasin has those guineas.
Serially yours, Susan
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