Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

PUBLICATION HISTORY:

Nights at the Circus was published in 1984 and is Carter's penultimate novel. It is generally considered to be her best work and won the James Tait Black Memorial award that year. Carter herself was both a novelist and a journalist.

SUMMARY:
Part I: This section is told through an interview conducted by Jack Walser, an American journalist, of a winged "aerialiste" named "Fevvers" in London, 1899. Fevvers, accompanied by her foster-mother, an old woman named Lizzie, generally get the better of the young American's predictably constructed questions. Fevvers has complete control of her narrative. She was hatched from an egg, found abandoned by Lizzie, and taken to Ma Nelson's brothel, a tight-knit community of sisterhood. Through Fevver's point of view, Carter's depiction of prostitution at Ma Nelson's signals that there is nothing shameful as long as relationships remain reciprocal and the freedom of choice is held up on both sides of the transaction. At Ma Nelson's brothel, Fevvers grew her wings, and slowly learned how to fly. As a young girl, her job would be to pose as Cupid at the brothel, and later, as "Winged Victory," carrying with her a sword. Ma Nelson's death in a terrible accident (she was run over by a carriage) led to the dispersal of the sisterhood. Fevvers tells how the former prostitutes do well, finding opportunities either in business or marrying, totally capable, having been fortified by their time at Ma Nelson's, to find their own way about the world. Fevvers, still an adolescent, goes with Lizzie to live with Lizzie's sister and brother-in-law, who have an ice-cream shop. When the family comes upon hard times, however, Fevvers decides to take up an offer of employment at Madame Schreck's establishment, a macabre place where men satisfy warped desires of their souls. This is a very different place from Ma Nelson's brothel, where men satisfy bodily desires. Madame Schreck's place is a kind of freak museum: its major characters include a Sleeping Beauty, the dwarfish Wiltsire Wonder, the transsexual Albert/Albertina, and Fanny with eyes on her nipples. There is also a black slave named Touissant who doesn't have a mouth but can write. Fevvers joins this crew, and learns all of their sad stories and how they each ended up at Madame Schreck's. One day, Fevvers tries to revolt against the enslavement of Madame Shreck, only to be carried away by a disturbed Rosicrucian man whom Madame has sold her for a high price. This man believes that if he should kill Fevvers in a sacrifice, he will be able to cure his own impotency. Luckily Fevvers escapes him because she has Ma Nelson's sword with her and she gets back to Lizzie and her family. She hears that the rest of the individuals back at Madame Schreck's have also effected their own escapes. Soon, an opportunity to join the circus arises, and Lizzie and Fevvers depart together. This is the end of the interview; exhausted and enchanted, Walser gets the idea that he will join the circus so that he might continue to get his scoop.

Part II: Narrated by a third-person omniscient narrator, this section follows the circus to St. Petersburg. The circus is headed by Colonel Kearney (accompanied always by his clairvoyant pig, Sibyl). Walser has joined as a clown. The circus camp is a lively, carnivalesque place. Its primary characters include apes that can learn in a classroom setting from a professor ape, a waifish girl named Mignon and a brutish Strong Man with whom she frequently has sex with, Buffo the clown (the leader of the clown troupe, who proselytizes about the privilege of how clowns "make [them]selves" and how clowns are even like Christ because they "subject [them]selves to laughter by choice), the Princess of Abyssinia and her tigers, and a host of elephants. Walser witnesses Mignon being brutally beat up by the Strong Man after he sees Walser attempting to save her from an escaped tiger. Mignon's story is given as a side narrative: it is a story of orphanhood, living on the streets, being taken up by the abusive charlatan Herr M. who had her impersonate dead daughters to fool grieving parents, and finally being passed on to the circus as the Strong Man's object of violence and sexual abuse. After being badly beaten up by the Strong Man this time around, Fevvers and Lizzie take her up, cleaning her up and, since she sings (without knowing what she sings, but nevertheless has a lovely voice), encourages the Princess to incorporate her into the act with herself and the tigers. The princess will play the piano, Mignon will sing and dance with the tigers. The women keep the Strong Man away from her. Walser is falling in love, meanwhile, with Fevvers. One night, Walser gets pulled into Mignon and the tiger's singing and dancing act, and afterwards, the Strong Man beats him to a pulp. On another night, Buffo goes crazy and nearly kills Walser. That same night, a tigress is shot to death because it was about to attack Mignon. Colonel Kearney's circus seems to be falling apart. Fevvers is still the most popular act, and she nevertheless pulls off success. Afterwards, the Grand Duke is so impressed with her that he invites her over. Fevvers, lured by his riches, decides to go and leave Lizzie behind. There, the Grand Duke very nearly succeeds in "diminishing" her into an egg and making her his toy (the narrative's use of the word "diminishing" highlights the relationship between his attempt to literally make her smaller and his demeaning her by seeing her as an object for his own use and pleasure). Luckily, she makes an escape, though barely: the Grand Duke manages to break her sword.

Part III: While on a train going through Siberia, there is a big explosion. Fevvers frantically searches for Walser but cannot find him. All of the other circus characters, minus the tigers and elephants, seem to have survived the explosion. Nearby the site of the explosion is a penitentiary started by one Countess P., who had murdered her husband. The aim of her panopticon-shaped penitentiary was to gather together all female murderesses and to try to make them penitent and reformed--her logic was that somehow that would transfer to her own reformation. Despite the extensive disciplinary system which she puts in place, one inmate, Olga Alexandrovna, finds a way to initiate contact with another inmate via a squeeze of the hand. Eventually, secret exchanges of glances and messages written in blood and excrement lead to a large scale revolution and the prisoners escape. They pass by the train wreck and see Walser amidst the rubble, still alive. They decide to continue on their way, intending to form an all-female Utopian community. Fevvers and the others soon find out that the terrorists who blew up their train were a group of peasant men who had heard a rumor circulated by the Colonel that Fevvers was marrying the Prince of Wales. The peasants thought that she might help them curry favor with the English royal family, who might then help them curry favor with the Tsar. The Colonel's rumor was just a publicity stunt, unfortunately; by now, the Colonel was already thinking about how to turn the train incident into good publicity for the circus. One of the peasant convicts decides to tell the party that the rest of his men will probably go on a shooting spree so the circus members decide to send in the clowns to entertain the men and to try to make them desist from violence. During a storm which hits as the clowns are performing, the circus members make their escape. They find an old music maestro in an abandoned conservatory who joins their party. Walser, meanwhile, has been caught up by a Shaman-led tribe and has lost his memory of who he is. The Shaman makes him drink his urine, and Walser has hallucinations. Though Walser remembers snippets of his past life--a song fragment, an epithet, for example--he is unable to piece together the whole. The tribe's mode of living is described as a kind of living in the present with no sense of history, and one of its central practice is the sacrifice of a bear. Walser becomes fully integrated into the tribe, and the Shaman even begins to think of him as a potential successor. Fevvers decides to go after Walser (Lizzie goes with her, but the Princess, Mignon, and the old maestro stay behind to form a musical group together) arriving on the scene of a sacrifice, however, interrupting the ritual and making quite an impression by spreading her wings (except one of them is broken, so she only spreads one of them). In the end, Fevvers and Walser consummate their love, with Fevvers on top smothering Walser below. Walser doesn't really recover his old self the American journalist, but this is a good thing: he now asks actually important questions of Fevvers like "What is your name? Have you a soul? Can you love?" There consummation then, is the true "interview." The novel ends with Fevvers's unrestrained laughter seeping out and infecting all the inhabitants across Siberia.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Female sexuality and desire: At the heart of Carter's novel is a strong, female character who is importantly erotically charged, unafraid of expressing her own desire (sexual or otherwise), yet not at all conventionally "feminine" about this eroticism and desire. Fevvers's eroticism is an overpowering one which makes Walser feel "vertigo"; their final consummation underscores her dominant position. She is big in stature, and comfortable as such. Her sexuality is also a much more expansive one than one which focuses on romantic attachment. I would describe it as closer to a maternal sexuality, which asserts its overwhelming power to comfort, to nurture, and to love all creatures, male or female.  
Gender performativity: The notion of gender performativity is strongly suggested in Carter's text (even if before Butler's formalization of this concept in Gender Trouble, 1990). The circus more generally suggests the importance of masks and therefore the constructedness and performance of identity. For the female characters in the novel, gender performance is an important means through which they may expand and/or question traditional constructions of femininity. Standing as "Winged Victory" in the brothel, Fevvers suggests the association of stalwart strength with the female body. Her trapeze routine proclaims a freedom of movement and being which ignores and is completely unfazed and unaffected by the gaze of the audience, whether male or female. The expansive, maternal actions of Fevvers, Lizzie, or Ma Nelson are also all gender performances which suggest that to be female is actually something which might contain male sexuality: it isn't a maternity that is confined to the small space of the domestic sphere, it actually can bring about the re-making of the world. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is Fevvers, Lizzie, and the Princess working together to make Mignon's soul/self and in doing so, also remaking the Strong Man's soul, who as a result of Mignon's transformation, himself becomes more compassionate and expansively loving.
Postmodernism: Like Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, Nights at the Circus ascribes to the fluidity and instability a levity and playfulness (which also often verges on the gothic; "carvinalesque" might encompass both levity and gothicism). The process of Walser's "deconstruction" from the young American male journalist out for a bold adventure, to Walser the clown hiding behind a mask which becomes more and more real as time goes by, and finally his amnesia in joining the Shaman's tribe is fairly humorous. The ease with which Fevvers whittles down his "masculine" journalistic confidence in the categories of fact versus fiction, and cows any notion he might have of virility as stronger than the female not only deconstructs him, but belittles and diminishes him in such a way that makes his initial confidence seem comedic and absurd. In the end, however, Fevvers gives him back a measure of control (since now he is a postmodern subject capable of taking charge of constructing his own identities, having realized identity to be fluid): "We told you no other lies nor in any way strayed from the honest truth. Believe it or not, all that I told you as real happenings were so, in fact; and as to questions of whether I am fact or fiction, you must answer that for yourself!"
Female socialism: There is a strong thread of female socialism in Carter's text, which jives historically with the late nineteenth century/early twentieth-century associations of the New Woman with leftist socialist reform. Ma Nelson's brothel, the female prisoner's going off to form their own utopia and less obviously, the community to springs up around Mignon, are each examples of all-female societies which are based on love, cooperation, and shared visions of effecting social progress through shared and mutual burdens.

Armadale by Wilkie Collins

Edition: Armadale (Penguin Classics)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:

Wilkie Collins's longest sensation novel Armadale was serialized in Cornhill Magazine from November 1864-June 1866. Cornhill Magazine was begun in 1860 by George Murray Smith (who employed Dickens's rival, Thackeray, as its editor) and aimed to be "safe" and "respectable" in its content. Armadale, then, was perhaps a mistake on Smith's part--its serialization alongside two conservative pieces of domestic realism, Gaskell's Wives and Daughters and Trollope's The Claverings indicates its significantly different register. Responses to Armadale, despite Collins's popularity through such previous works as The Woman in White (1859-1860), were generally negative and circulation of Cornhill actually declined significantly during Armadale's serialization. The respectable middle-class reading public particularly felt the character of Lydia Gwilt to be far too radically immoral for detailed depiction; in this later period, Collins's sensational fiction had reached more polemical heights than before. 

SUMMARY:

Armadale commences with the two travelers arriving at the town of Wildbad in 1832. They are a surly Scotsman by the name of Mr. Neal, and Allan Armadale, a man nearing his deathbed, accompanied by his wife and baby son. Armadale is an Engishman of the West Indies, and his wife a beautiful woman of mixed blood. Armadale is in a state of paralysis when he arrives in Wildbad and needs someone to help him complete a final letter addressed to his son, to be delivered to official representatives and read by his son when he is of age. Because he wants to hide the contents of this letter from his wife, Mr. Neal ends up being the only person around fluent enough in English to complete the task. He begrudgingly agrees, and reads aloud the completed portion of the manuscript first to make sure of any necessary corrections.

This manuscript reveals the story of how Allan Armadale was once Allan Wrentmore until he inherited the Armadale estate in Barbadoes from his godfather. His godfather had thrown off his own son on account of some misdemeanors he had committed. The stipulation attached to the inheritance was that Wrentmore would take the name Armadale. Afterwards, Armadale needed a clerk to manage the estate, and hired Fergus Ingleby, who is later revealed to be the original Allan Armadale. "Fergus" takes revenge by taking Allan "Wrentmore" Armadale's place in a marriage arranged by Allan's mother to the daughter of Mr. Blanchard of the wealthy Thorpe-Ambrose estate in England. When Allan arrived at Madeira where he was to meet his future wife, he finds that Miss Blanchard has already married "Fergus," thinking him to be her arranged lover. A young maid, Lydia Gwilt, helped forge letters from Mrs. Wrentmore in order to bring about the marriage. Allan Armadale challenges "Fergus" to a duel, but "Fergus" is a no-show; he and his new wife sail for Lisbon in a timber-ship called La Grace de Dieu. Armadale engages his services on another vessel which Mr. Blanchard hires to capture the couple. La Grace de Dieu is wrecked during its voyage, and the members of Mr. Blanchard's vessel go on board to make rescues. Armadale locks "Fergus" in his cabin and leaves him there to drown. Armadale was never prosecuted for murder and he went back to the West Indies, taking on his current wife and making his life over again. Here, the letter ends. Armadale enjoins Neal to write the rest of the letter, which tells his son to avoid contact with the son of the true Allan Armadale and his widow, who had been born after his death. As it turns out once again, both boys, Armadale's own son and the widow's, are named Allan Armadale. Armadale's warning exhibits his superstitious belief that no good can come from the second generation of Allan Armadales meeting.

The narrative skips here to focus on the original Allan Armadale's widow and her son. This portion of the narrative is given as memories of Mr. Brock, a bachelor clergyman. As this widow was estranged from her two brothers as a result of her marriage, she took her son with her to Somersetshire, raising him in isolation and allowing Mr. Brock sole responsibility for the education of her son. When her son reached the age of sixteen, Mr. Brock came across a strange advertisement asking for the whereabouts of Allan Armadale (placed by the party responsible for delivering the murderer's letter to his son). The widow knows that the advertisement doesn't refer to her Allan, and begs Brock to destroy the newspaper and keep it from her Allan. Soon after a stressful visit from a mysterious veiled woman (later revealed to by Lydia Gwilt), Mrs. Armadale dies, and makes Brock promise her that he will keep her son away from the other Allan Armadale, the son of his father's murderer, and also Lydia Gwilt, the maid who forged the letter to enable her marriage.

Prior to Mrs. Armadale's death, a swarthy young man stricken by fever arrives to Somersetshire, and he is taken in. Allan Armadale, because he has grown up in such isolation, is open to new acquaintances to a fault, generously paying the young man's medical bills. When the young man comes to his senses, he says his name is Ozias Midwinter, and it turns out he has enough money to pay his own bills. Nonetheless, Ozias feels great gratitute towards Allan, and a sort of friendship blossoms between the two young men. Ozias leaves for London after recovering, though at Allan's prompting, leaves Allan his London address.

After Allan's mother's death, Mr. Brock writes to see if her brothers will take up friendly relations with her son. One of the brothers refuses, and the other has died, but the son of this deceased brother agrees to let bygones be bygones. Allan, however, has very little interest renewing contact with relatives that had shunned his mother, and instead goes with Brock on some travels which Brock hoped would help the grieving young man. They begin their travels in Paris, and Allan insists on seeing Ozias in London. Ozias is away on business when Allan calls on him in London; later when they meet up, it is revealed that Ozias has inherited some estate from relatives. Almost simultaneously, Allan learns that he is the owner of the Blanchard estate of Thorpe-Ambrose because of three unexpected deaths in the family. In order to give the ladies at Thorpe-Ambrose some time to grieve and to get their things in order, Allan decides to go on a yachting-cruise (his passion was building his own yachts) for two months. Ozias and Brock accompany Allan on this trip, during which time Ozias receives the letter intended for him from his father--he confesses to Brock that he is in fact Allan Armadale, but had thought nothing of staying away from his new friend until this letter came into his hands. Indeed, Ozias has had a hard life: after the death of his father, his mother married Mr. Neal, and the two of them shunned him and treated him badly. He eventually ran away, taking a bunch of odd jobs here and there, receiving his new name from a gipsy man who took him in. For most of his life thus far, Ozias had been shunned and shown no pity or kindness; eventually he wound up in a bookshop, where he spent many an hour finding solace in books. The kindness of Allan Armadale, then, was one of the first he had experienced. Brock, though initially mistrustful of Ozias, accepts Ozias's confession to him as a sign of his goodness, and tells Ozias that he believes he will break the spell of his father's superstitious letter and be a friend to Allan, provided he didn't reveal his true identity. Meanwhile, Brock is called away for clergyman duties, and the two young men are left alone together for the remainder of the yachting cruise. In an incident during a moonlit night, the two of them wander out to check out a wreck, which turns out to be none other than La Grace de Dieu. Ominously, their own boat slips away and the two men are stuck on the same vessel where Ozias's father had murdered Allan's father. During the night that the two men spend on the wreck,  Allan has a frightening dream involving the following episodes: himself before a sunset and the "shadow of a woman," before a room with a "shadow of a man" where the man causes the shattering of a statuette, and finally before the "shadow of a woman" passing a glass to him via the "shadow of a man" and himself falling to the ground after holding the glass up to his lips. Ozias fears that this is a dream of the future, and that he himself is the "shadow of the man" and decides to write an account of Allan's dream down. Their friend, a Doctor Hawbury, puts Allan at ease by coming up with a "scientific" explanation for his dream consisting of linking elements of his dream to various everyday happenings Allan encountered in the last few days.

Coming upon his new estate, Allan decides to engage Ozias as his steward, not accepting a refusal. They learn that members of the town have contrived to throw a grand public reception on the occasion of Allan's arrival; Allan, wanting to avoid the ostentation goes to his new estate in secret. This turns out to be a bad idea, because the members of the town feel snubbed by him and he has much difficulty making amends. At his estate, Allan makes the acquaintance of Major Milroy, whom he has chosen to live as his cottage tenant over an old lawyer who has served his family for years--Allan peremptorily made his decision with the flip of a coin, without thinking he might offend the lawyer. Milroy has an invalid wife, and a young daughter, with whom Allan immediately begins a kind of flirtatious relationship. Meanwhile, Lydia Gwilt has been exchanging letters with an old woman named Oldershaw--these letters show a rather strained relationship between the two, but nevertheless, between them a plan to install Lydia as the governess for Milroy's daughter in order that Lydia might eventually win her way to becoming the new Mrs. Armadale is agreed upon. After all, Lydia looks young and charming for her age despite being thirty-five. When Mr. Brock sees Oldershaw and Lydia (recognizing Lydia in her veil from her visit to Mrs. Armadale in Somersetshire) in London speaking of Allan, he warns Midwinter that the veiled woman may be coming to Thorpe-Ambrose. Oldershaw sees Mr. Brock surveying them, and boldly comes up with a plan to waylay Brock: Lydia should dress up her Oldershaw's housemaid as herself in the veil, and this housemaid should pretend to get on steamer to Brazil. Oldershaw has a story for Mr. Brock: that her mistress was going back to Brazil to meet her husband, and that she was indeed the woman who had seen Mrs. Armadale and felt sorry for extracting money from her on her deathbed.

Midwinter meets with an old man named Bashwood, who has come for the purpose of coaching him in his stewardship duties. He seems unaccountably sneaky and obsequious, and Allan doesn't much like him. Allan soon decides to throw a picnic, inviting the Milroys, two of their friends, a widow and her curate son, and also the new governess since she is due to arrive on the day of his picnic. With the aid of Pedgift Jr., the son of the lawyer that Allan has taken into his service, the picnic is a great success, despite the somewhat unpleasant company provided by the widow and her son. Lydia Gwilt arrives during sunset, and Midwinter reminds him that the sunset and the "shadow of a woman" was part of his dream. Allan manages to maintain his levity, and is soon taken in by Lydia's great beauty. Midwinter has received a letter from Brock describing the features of the housemaid as Miss Gwilt's, and as a result, manages to allay Midwinter's anxieties because the Miss Gwilt he has met does not look like the woman of Brock's description.  Lydia Gwilt, meanwhile, manages to enchant both Allan and Midwinter (and Bashwood, who soon becomes a kind of pawn for her). After Allan confesses to Midwinter that he is in love with Lydia and wants to marry her, Midwinter decides to leave for a time, citing his own anxious composition as an excuse. After he leaves, the invalid Mrs. Milroy's jealousy of Lydia Gwilt grows, and she comes up with a plan to check her reference "Mrs. Mandeville" (really Mrs. Oldenshaw), hoping to dig up some dirt on Lydia. Having found out from her daughter that Allan seems interested in Lydia as well, Mrs. Milroy dispatches Allan to travel to London to try to speak with Mrs. Mandeville; because Mrs. Oldenshaw has reverted to her old name, Allan has a hard time finding her. Pedgift Jr., savvier than Allan, manages to suggest a connection between Lydia and a certain house of Pimlico, an unsavory establishment connected to a "beauty doctor." Wishing to save face for Lydia, Allan refuses to admit his findings to Mrs. Milroy, who then gets her husband involved.

Soon, Allan finds himself with a bad name as far as the estimation of everyone else in the town goes, between the Milroy's anger over his refusal to reveal what he has found, and everyone else finding his secret digging into a woman's past to be highly inappropriate. Lydia herself decides to discontinue her service with the Milroys, cunningly underscoring her own respectability even though she is unable to answer unspecified charges against her. Pedgift Sr. writes to Allan, who has remained in London during all of this, strongly suggesting that he come back and show his face so people don't think he's trying to avoid the situation. In London, Pedgift tells Allan that he does not trust Lydia, and as a result of his great experience as a defense lawyer working for the most hardened criminals, can say with no small degree of certainty that she is no innocent woman. Using the safety of Miss Milroy as pretense, Pedgift manages to convince Allan that they need to dispatch a spy to watch Lydia's movements. Allan is reluctant, but wanting to be chivalrous to the poor Miss Milroy, agrees. When Midwinter returns from his leave, he runs into Lydia, who tells him that Allan has sent a spy to watch her. Midwinter, because he is in love with her, is furious on her behalf and can't control himself when he meets with Allan who tells him she tells the truth. Despite Midwinter's remarkable amount of self-control thus far, the two men's tense disagreement over Lydia Gwilt leads to the shattering of the statuette in the drawing room, just as Allan had dreamed.

The next section is told primarily through Lydia's letters to Mrs. Oldershaw and her diary. Horrified at the statuette incident, Midwinter runs away, but still, he seems fatally drawn to Miss Gwilt, and the two acknowledge their love for one another. He also decides to tell her who he truly is and the entire story. Miss Gwilt, however, likes to Midwinter about her own identity, refusing to acknowledge that she was the former maid of Mrs. Armadale. Midwinter departs to London to get a job as a journalist, and alone and pushed to the wall with debts, Lydia comes upon an old letter from a man ("a villain") with whom she was once associated telling her about a resolute woman who once impersonated someone's widow. This sets the wheels turning in Lydia's head: she might marry Midwinter and take the name Mrs. Armadale since that is who he really is, do away with Allan, and then come back to Thorpe-Ambrose with the marriage certificate saying that she is Mrs. Allan Armadale. These nefarious plans Lydia Gwilt hatches all on her own, and for the time being, she withholds these plans from Mrs. Oldershaw.

Allan and Neelie have reached a point where they have regained such an interest in one another that they plot to get married. Lydia overhears them while they consult volumes of law to see if they might get married. They determine, finally, that Allan should go to London to consult someone for help. Lydia takes this opportunity to also go to London, and at the train station, she contrives to make Allan her travel companion, leading to rumors that she and Allan Armadale went away together to get married. Before leaving for London, Lydia sends an anonymous letter to Major Milroy warning Miss Milroy against Allan Armadale, suggesting that his affections may be elsewhere. The result is that Major Milroy stipulates that Miss Milroy will go to school for six months and cut off contact with Allan; if the two of them should still wish to marry at the time, he would condone it. Lydia suggests that in order to kill time, Allan should take his yacht and meet herself and Midwinter after they have married in Naples, where he will be working for a while as a foreign correspondent. 

Bashwood has happened to see Allan and Lydia at the train station and becomes extremely jealous and angry that Lydia has deceived him since he had thought he was on her side against Allan. Furious and yet still madly in love with her, he decides to consult his son who is in the spying business to uncover Miss Gwilt's past to him. Jemmy, Bashwood's son, learns that Miss Gwilt had in the past poisoned a husband, and gotten off with just the minor charges of robbery. Subsequently, she had married a Captain Manuel (who already had a first wife) but he ditched her. It was at this point that she had tried to drown herself (an incident which precipitated the deaths of Allan Armadale's relatives and his coming to own Thorpe-Ambrose). 

By the time Jemmy tracks Lydia down, she has already married Midwinter, but Bashwood and Jemmy don't know it is Midwinter because the wedding registry reads Miss Lydia Gwilt and Allan Armadale, Midwinter's true name. After the two of them are married, things aren't great between them because Midwinter ends up being a kind of workaholic at his journalism. He also becomes extremely nervous, renewing his fears about Allan's prophetic dream. Soon after their marriage, Mr. Brock dies, and leaves a letter for Midwinter encouraging him to stick by Allan because he believes in him, and his faith leads him to believe that all will be well should the two of them remain close friends. Thus, Midwinter is torn between needing to stay away from Allan because of the superstition and his father's letter, and sticking with Allan because of Mr. Brock's encouraging words. 

Allan's yacht actually does get wrecked on his way to Naples, but he survives. He then engages an old yacht, but has some trouble securing a crew for a cruise he wanted to take. It happens that at Naples, Lydia encounters her second husband, Captain Manuel, who has become an impoverished chorus singer. When he asks her for money, she lets him know that Armadale is a rich man, naive, and in need of a crew. When Manuel asks her what her interests as far as the Englishman Armadale goes are, she refuses to give him any more information. Luckily for Lydia, Midwinter's superstition has been at a high due to the third scene in Allan's dream playing out recently when Lydia mixed a glass of lemonade, handing it over to Allan via Midwinter (she doesn't quite confess in her diary that she has slipped something into the drink but it is strongly suggested--Allan doesn't drink, though, because he smells brandy, which he avoids). Because of his superstition, Midwinter thinks that he and Lydia should not going on the cruise with Allan lest they inadvertently harm him. Allan Armadale's fate indeed seems sealed as he sails off with Manuel and his band of cutthroats. 

During a storm, the crew nailed Allan below the decks and shattered the sea with the ship's wreckage, themselves taking off. News was borne that the yacht had been wrecked with all on board, and Lydia sets off for London intending to claim herself to be the widow of the late Allan Armadale. Despite some misgivings because of her true love of Midwinter, she still decides to act in her own self interest. In London, she finds Dr. Downward (of the house of Pimlico) involved with opening a sanitarium. Lydia manages to get him to sign that he had witnessed the marriage of Lydia and Allan, but as the lawyers were considering her claim, Allan Armadale wrote a letter declaring that he was alive, having escaped from the wreck with the aid of one man in his crew. He is recovering abroad, and will return soon to London. When Midwinter returns to London, Lydia repudiates him and declares herself the widow of Allan Armadale. Her last resort is to get Allan into the sanitarium the doctor has started--she sense someone to tell Allan at the station that Neelie was in the sanitarium. Since Midwinter also waits for Allan at the station, he too decides to go to the sanitarium with his friend. The men are each assigned to a room and Lydia's plan is to pump carbon dioxide into the room Allan is staying in. Things go awry when Midwinter has switched rooms with Allan, again because of Midwinter's superstitious forebodings. Lydia nearly kills Midwinter, rescuing him just in time. In despair for her evil acts, she actually closes herself into the room after pumping it full of the poisonous gas. Lydia dies, and in the end, Midwinter becomes a  successful writer, and Allan and Neelie get married and take up their place at Thorpe-Ambrose.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Armadale is told through a mixture of an unnamed narrator and letters. Beginning with the March 1865 installment (entitled, "Lurking Mischief") there is a marked switch of focus as Lydia Gwilt takes center stage: her exchange of letters to Mrs. Oldershaw and her own diary take over the telling of the story. Lydia's diary, which she says she begins in order to keep track of all her lies so that she won't mess up, is the perfect substitute for the semi-omniscient, unnamed narrator. Her diary does in fact become a kind of substitution for the narrator, who all but falls out of the second half of the novel. From the March installment onwards, it is Lydia Gwilt who controls the narrative more than any other character: she eventually even writes out Mrs. Oldershaw when she decides to withhold information about her plan to impersonate Allan Armadale's widow. With great skill, she maneuvers herself so that she has more information on others than she has on them, listening in on Allan and Neelie's plans, gaining Midwinter's confidence, and even reading Brock's final letter to Midwinter. Even the Bashwood episodes in the second half of the novel are just a kind of distraction, in which Bashwood's temporary ascendancy to privileged information about her is quickly neutralized by a few sweet words she doles out to him.
 
Lydia's scandalization of contemporary audiences may have been exacerbated by the omniscience which Collins allows her because of the way in which her omniscience changes the reader's relationship to her and to other characters. Through Lydia's eyes, for example, Allan Armadale seems more and more incompetent and vapid; her accounts of his inability to talk about anything except for yachts and love (for Neelie) are cutting and humorous, tending to seduce readers to sympathize with her. This seems to be Collins's project the whole way through, as Allan naivete is given from the start, but nowhere is it as negative of a trait as it is from Lydia Gwilt's perspective. More broadly, Collins's novel is scandalous because it perpetuates complicated reversals in the alignment between how sympathetic a character is and traditionally respectable social identities. Those of the most "respectable" backgrounds--Allan Armadale and Neelie Milroy--are highly unsympathetic: they are boring, they can barely understand books, they can't manage everyday affairs, they lack social graces, and they talk and think of nothing beyond conventional topics (leisure travel and marriage) for gentlemen and ladies (marriage). In contrast, those of more questionable backgrounds--Midwinter (whose racial otherness is another strike against him) and Lydia, find joy in books and writing, feel moved to depths by great music (Lydia listens to Beethoven) and works of art, and deftly manage their everyday affairs. Though these alignments explode conventional associations with respectability, in the end, Midwinter's capacity to turn his "smarts" towards good and Lydia's inability to do the same seems to return the novel to a more conservative middle-class myth of social upward mobility: though cast about by the world, the individual might triumph and win, through righteous means and his own ingenuity, a respectable place in the social hierarchy. Cornhill's readership, indeed, was all about classes of people who aspired to social advancement through honorable pursuits like education and industry. Yet, the very end, no consideration of Midwinter versus Lydia can cast aside the question of gender: in allowing readers access to Lydia's first person account via her diary, the reader gains insight into many instances where Lydia considers avoiding the evil act of doing away with Allan Armadale but then ends up sees no other way out of the miseries heaped upon her by her place as a woman. After her marriage to Midwinter, he has his career to focus on and she feels neglected and crushed by the abandonment--she really has nothing else to occupy her mind than to plot and plan in her diary. She confesses that there were times when she thought Midwinter's love might be enough to convince her to leave off her plans, but Midwinter's love fails because he does not prove to be a lively companion to her. A good marriage is the one thing that might save a woman, and having no other alternatives, she turns her unused "smarts" to something else, and in this way joins the ranks of many other smart Victorian female characters like Vanity Fair's Becky Sharpe, Middlemarch's Dorothea, or Miss Marjoribanks's Lucilla, who all manage to find different ways to spend their talents and intellectual energies within the constraints of their social position as women.

New Selected Poems by Stevie Smith (Florence Margaret Smith)

Edition: New Selected Poems of Stevie Smith
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The New Selected Poems (1988) of Stevie Smith were collected over a decade after her death in 1971. Interest in Smith's work was high in the 1980s; two different biographies of her were published, one in 1986 and the other in 1988.

SELECTED THEMES/COMMENTARY:
Death: Death figures in Smith's poetry as a frequently a kind of solace because of its certainty. Unlike God, Death when called will come, as the speaker asserts in "Come, Death." The speaker says, "I'd ask God to have pity on me, / But I turn to the one I know, and say: / Come, Death, and carry me away." In the short second stanza which forms the second half of this poem, the speaker finds Death to be sweet because of his sure subjection to the speaker's will: "Ah me, sweet Death, you are the only god / Who comes as a servant when he is called, you kno, / Listen then to this sound I make, it is sharp, / Come death. Do not be slow." The sense of Death as "sweet" rather than fearful makes it a companion charged with affect in other poems. "Tender Only to One" is a kind of love poem to death, in which the poet expresses her tenderness for only one, revealing at the end, "His name, his name is Death." "Company" is about how when other human company--friends, lovers, for instance--desert an old man, and he hears voices telling him, "Rely on yourself," Death comes as true company, who will surely not desert him at the end.   


Academia, Literature: Smith explicitly distances her poetry from the literary canon and academic institutions; when she makes allusions, they are often irreverent and speak back to canonical poets ("Thoughts Upon the Person of Porlock," for example, humorously welcomes Coleridge's "Person of Porlock" and neutralizes the poet's indignance, even suggesting that he had already been stuck in the writing of Kubla Khan before the person's entrance). Poems like "Souvenir de Monsieur Poop," written in the voice of a self-important academic, scathingly critique the institutionalization of the literary canon and academic hierarchies: "I am the self-appointed guardian of English literature," he proclaims, following with a litany of blind "beliefs" without justification. He is devoted, of course, to Shakespeare and Milton, and Housman in modern times. He degrades youth and dogmatically upholds old age and "established classics" as the measure of wisdom. "To School" critiques the kinds of poetry encouraged in institutions of learning, asserting that the "Muse" has flown away from these schools, knowing better.


God/Christianity: As mentioned above in the commentary on how death figures in Smith's poetry, God (and more specifically, Christianity) repeatedly fails to give comfort or satisfying answers. Much of Smith's poetry speaks back defiantly against this lack of comfort and satisfaction, even while aware of this defiance's egocentricity. In "Egocentric" the speaker asks, "What care I if good God be / If he be not good to me," lines which are repeated again at the end of the poem as if creating a kind of egocentric mirror. The egocentric speaker's question, however, is one Smith takes seriously; the speaker is trapped and forced into her egocentrism because of the lack of sufficient explanation from God. This yearning for satisfying answers is repeated in many of Smith's other poems, perhaps most poignantly in "Oh Christianity, Christianity" and How do you see?," a longer poem which contains lines from "Oh Christianity, Christianity" in it. "Oh Christianity, Christianity, / Why do you not answer our difficulties?" the speaker simply asks. She follows with a series of equally simply-stated and earnest questions about how Christ could take on our sins, if he felt guilty, how he is a "perfect man" if man is by definition sinful, and how the Trinity is supposed to be unchanging when clearly Christ altered things. These are big questions, and the speaker asks them here not at all defiantly, and just the same as in "Egocentrism," receives no answers. In "How do you see?" the speakers doubts and questions transform themselves from yearning and desire into a more radical statement that Christianity is a just a "fairy story" and can't be real. But, because it has been so often the reason for doing "good," the speaker realizes that there is a real urgency to make sure our children learn to be good without Christianity, since they might soon all realize that it is just a "fairy story": "I think if we do not learn quickly, and learn to teach children / To be good without enchantment, without the help / Of beautiful painted fairy stories pretending to be true...we shall kill everybody, / It will be too much for us, we shall kill everybody."

Perhaps because God is so absent to Smith, she takes the opportunity to envision what He might be like, given his intransigent absence. "God the Eater" posits a gluttonous God feeding on human feeling, an idea which finds repetition in "Childe Rolandine" where an artist forced to work as a secretary-typist, suddenly decides to speak out the truth on how "There is a Spirit feeds on our tears, I give him mine, / Mighty human feelings are his food / Passion and grief and joy his flesh and blood, / That he may live and grow fat we daily die / This cropping One is our immortality." "God and Man" presents another possibility of God as a kind of fickle, flakey lover to man. The poem is written in the voice of God, exaggeratedly drawling, "Man my darling, my love and my pain," while also stipulating harshly, "Do not come till I call, though thou weariest first."


Animals and people: Domesticated animals (as pets, or in captured in zoos) often serve as occasions for critiquing human treatment of animals. "Parrot" is about an "old sick green parrot / High in a dingy cage"; the speaker wishes that his death might come soon to put him out of its misery. "The Zoo" reveals, through irony, the lack of human awareness of what he does when putting away a lion in a cage. A voice of authority tells a little boy that the lion "does not like you, little boy, / It's no use making up to him," wisely asserting that "God gave him lovely teeth and claws so that he might eat little boys." The poet chimes in, commenting on the irony of how despite such professions of understanding the nature of lions, humans cause the condition wherein "[h]is claws are blunt, his teeth fall out, / No victim's flesh consoles his snout, / And that is why his eyes are red / Considering his talents are misused."

"Nature and Free Animals" provides an explanation (and interesting defense?) for why people warp the nature of their animals. The poem starts with a didactic voice criticizing human domestication of dogs: "You have taught them the sicknesses of your mind / And the sicknesses of your body / You have taught them to be servile / To hang servilely upon your countenance." Later, we find that this is the voice of God, and not of the poet. The human's response is a reproach to God, suggesting that this is kind of the same thing which He does to humans, and if we are in His image, it is natural for us to do the same to animals.


Gender Relations: Relations between men and women in Smith's poetry are hardly ever satisfactory; selfish cads seem preponderant in her poetry, and so are victimized women who often participate in the process bringing about their victimization. "In Felice" is a good example of Smith's portrayal of these two types in heterosexual relations. The speaker is a woman who no matter how much she is ignored or cheated on by "Sir Rat," imagines he loves her. She delusionally repeats, "my heart is singing," even in cases where it is clear that her heart should not be singing: "No Madam, he left no message, ah how his silence speaks / He loves me too much for words, my heart is singing." "Valuable" juxtaposes the situations of girls in society and panthers kept in cages. Unlike the panthers, however, whose eyes say, "I am too valuable to be kept in a cage," girls themselves say "yes" to often to their own debasement and subordination, and need to learn how to say no. The speaker laments that "Nobody teaches anybody they are valuable nowadays." The speaker imagines the common retort from girls, that "I shall be alone / If I say 'I am valuable' and other people do not say it of me / I shall be alone, there is no comfort there." The speaker points out the difference between comfortable versus valuable, and how the latter is more important. Furthermore, "if everybody says it in the end / It will be comforting." Smith seems to think Christianity responsible for some of the cruelty against women which she observes around her; this idea is directly suggested in "How Cruel is the Story of Eve" in which the poet ascribes to the story "reponsibility / in history / for misery. The poet contrasts the story's unreality, its "legend" status, with the very real, "historical" harm which it perpetuates, imagining how the story "colours / All human thought."  


"A House of Mercy" is one of Smith's autobiographical poems, on the house which she lived in with her mom and aunt and sister, in which she remained for much of her life. Smith has very positive associations of strength with their all female house, "For all its faults, / If they are faults, of sternness and reserve, / It is a Being of warmth I think; at heart / A house of mercy."


War: Romana Huk's recent study of Stevie Smith links her work to the two world wars which she lived through, reading against the grain of the assumption that because she spent most of her life in the suburbs, and styled herself as a bit of an eccentric, that her work doesn't really engage with the big questions of what poetry or literature more broadly had to bring to a post-war, traumatized western world. "The Poets are Silent" wrestles with the very question of the place of poetry after the trauma of war, providing the answer, in four short lines that silence is in fact a kind of poetic response in itself: "There's no new spirit abroad, / As I looked, I saw; / And I say that it is to the poets' merit / To be silent about the war." There is nothing to be said, but saying nothing is in fact saying something, and silence seems the most profound response to the experience of war. 


Smith's poetry expresses alienation before the wars which happened in her lifetime, often figured along gender lines. In "The Little Daughters of America" (subtitled, Pearl Harbor, 1941), the bellicose, virile "Admirals Curse-You and No-More" have nothing to do with "the little daughters of America"; the  poet points out the great gap between domestic images of patriotism and the combative spirit which carries on the operations of war. "I had a dream" similarly comments on the alienation of women from the battlefield, the speaker imagining herself as Helen of Troy, talking to the prophetic but cast-aside Cassandra. Helen becomes a kind of universal female figure, who views the men on the battlefield as possessing a spirit totally alien to her own: "Like the spirit of all armies, on all plains, in all wars, the men / No longer thinking why they were there / Or caring, but going on; like the song the English used to sing / In the first world war: We're here because, we're here because, / We're here because, we're here." Helen and Cassandra's positions in this poem are critical and intelligent before the drone-like mindlessness of the men on the battlefield. 


Misanthropy/Post-Human Point of View: Perhaps related to Smith's suggestion in "The Poets are Silent" that words probably can't bear the burden of the world shaken to its core by the experiences of war, is Smith's frequent reference to a perspective beyond a human one to account for the universe. This often takes the form of a kind of misanthropy, rather disturbing in poems like "The Suburban Classes" in which the speaker suggests a pamphlet, "Free for every Registered Reader's table" which will tell the suburban classes, "Your King and your Country need you Dead." "The Face" describes a common face which the poet encounters in modern England, someone with a "monkey soul" (presumably signifying imitative and unthinking) "that bangs about, that beats a gong," embodying conventions and platitudes, "utter[ing] social lies."  The poet concludes, much in the spirit of "The Suburban Classes," "You well may say that better far / This face had not been born." "The English," again, plays on a similar theme of how so many so-called "intelligent English / Of the Arts, the professions and the Upper Middle Classes, / Are under-cover men," signaling a modern-day loss of something deeper to humanity than such vocational and class designations as "of the Arts, the professions, and the Upper Middle Classes." Pessimistically, the poet notes that what is under the covers is often gone, and hence these men are now mere "corpse carriers" and what's worse, "infective" through their ideologies.

Smith makes the transition from misanthropy towards something potentially more uplifting in imaginings of a post-human perspective in a number of other poems. "The New Age" is probably the most explicitly post-human, decrying "how these crying people spoil the beautiful / geological scene." "Unpopular, lonely, and loving" problematizes love as a human emotion, the absence of which would mean less misery. "In Protocreation," the poet expresses a strong desire for the world before man's existence ("Oh had it but stopped then / Oh had there not come men") because with man came knowledge of good and evil: "There was no good deed and no crime / No oppression by informed mind / No knowledge and no human kind." These all are in existence because the human mind has created them. Smith turns often to the current animal world for a solacing perspective beyond the human one: in "Away, Melancholy," the speaker notes that nothing else in nature is melancholy, "The ant is busy / He carrieth his meat, / All things hurry / To be eaten or eat," continuing on to think about how "Man, too, hurries, / Eats, couples, buries / He is an animal also." Thus, if animal also, man ought to be able to banish melancholy, a mental construct of his own and not a necessary condition of existence. "Frog Prince" is one of Smith's more playful poems, in which the speaker is the frog prince, telling his non-human perspective of the fairy tale. Basically, the frog prince is happy before his "disenchantment" by the royal princess. He has been doing just fine as a frog: "I have been a frog now / For a hundred years / And in all this time / I have not shed may tears, / I am happy I like the life." The princess promises that with "disenchantment," he can be "heavenly," but as the frog notes, not happy.

Deerbrook by Harriet Martineau

Edition: Deerbrook (Penguin Classics)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Deerbrook was published in 1839 (in three volumes) and was Martineau's first serious work of fiction, having already made a name for herself as a journalist and social commentator. The novel met with lukewarm reviews, though George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte were among the novel's appreciators.

SUMMARY:
Having been recently orphaned, the two young women, Hester and Margaret Ibbotson, stay with their relations, the Grey's at Deerbrook. The two of them are from Birmingham, and are enamored with the beauty of the country landscape. The primary concerns of members of the village, however, seem to be local gossip. The girls' primary circle of first acquaintances include Mr. and Mrs. Grey, their daughter Sophia and son Sydney, Mr. and Mrs. Rowland and their children, Mrs. Enderby, Mrs. Rowland's mother, and Philip Enderby, Mrs. Rowland's brother and Mrs. Enderby's son, Mr. Hope, the doctor, and Miss Young, a governess. Mrs. Rowland is particularly malicious in her gossip, and generally does not get along with the Grey's because of they are religious "dissidents." Mr. Hope and Miss Young are distinguished from this crowd of people in that they seem to rise above the petty interests of the other villagers. In the early chapters there is an extended passage in which Miss Young reminisces in a manner of talking out loud, accepting her lot as a governess and limited pleasures because of her own position: once, she would have been accepted into society as someone's wife, but as a result of an accident, she had become lame and also lost her father. Miss Young, however, isn't bitter about her situation: instead, her acceptance has led her to embrace a marginal yet accepted position in Deerbrook society which has enabled her to live there and also retain a certain degree of independence. She delights, therefore, in observing the people around her in a deeper fashion than most. Margaret immediately takes to Miss Young and agrees to study German with her.

Eventually, both Mr. Hope and Mr. Enderby develop feelings for Margaret--Hope confesses his feelings to his brother Frank who is in India through a lengthy letter, and Enderby leaves a note for Margaret in the schoolroom. Miss Young shows the slightest hint of discomposure when she realizes that Enderby has feelings for Margaret; there was a time when he may have been hers before her fall and loss of her father. Meanwhile, Margaret and Hester continue to delight the people of Deerbrook, engaging in parties and teas. A freak accident in which Mr. Hope is thrown from his horse leaves him an invalid for a time, and the toll that this takes on Hester is seen by Margaret and others. Margaret and her sister have a candid conversation in which Hester reveals that she did not yet know how she felt about Mr. Hope until  discovering to herself how she felt after his accident. After Mr. Hope recovers, Mrs. Grey takes on the duties of matchmaker and points out to him how Hester has looked unwell with worry over him. Mr. Hope, though he is really in love with Margaret, feels pressured by expectations and, as the narrator gives, "he decided upon making the great mistake of his life," that is, to ask for Hester's hand in marriage. He asks Margaret's advice before doing so, and finding Margaret overjoyed on behalf of his sister, convinces himself that though he might not love Hester, she is certainly a noble and good choice for a wife in theory and that anyone should be proud to make her his wife.

Hester and Hope marry, and go on a brief honeymoon to Oxford. During that time, Margaret works to furnish their new home (she too will live with them) and spends some time with Maria. Among other things, the two women talk philosophically of love and the nature of marriage--Maria, in particular, has a rather startling understanding of true love as a kind of death for individuals, fraught with difficulty. When Hester and her new husband return, they settle into their new life as a married couple, giving their first dinner party. Soon, a rumor gets started in Deerbrook that Mr. Philip Enderby was engaged to a young woman named Miss Bruce, and had been so engaged for a long time. Margaret finds that she cannot take this news without a significant amount of discomposure, despite her notions of herself as being generally calm about the whole thing. In fact, though she didn't know it, she had been expecting that Enderby would one day ask her for marriage. Mr. Hope and Hester have their own troubles; because Mr. Hope voted for an unpopular candidate in the local election, many of his patients shunned him and he began to lose business. Hester met with cold attitudes from the local tradespeople, and loses her own composure. To make matters worse, rumors begin to circulate about Mr. Hope stealing bodies from graveyards in the name of science. As a result of all of these tensions, relations between Margaret and her sister also deteriorate a bit, though they both do much to try to prevent this from happening.

One day, Margaret falls into a frozen pond. Hope is too late to be among one of the men who pulled her out, but he arrives just as she was emerging from the pond and she sees the agony on his face, and witnesses his low cry, "My Margaret." His feelings for her rush back, but he soon suppresses them again. Eventually, things take a turn for the better when Philip comes to town and reveals that his connection to Miss Bruce was a full fabrication, likely by his own sister, Mrs. Rowland, who didn't want her own family marrying a relation of the Grey's, and poor relations at that. Philip chides Margaret for believing the rumor, but she says it is more that she believed that maybe he had never loved her in the first place and that she had been mistaken. The two reconcile and things look up for the time being. For Mr. Hope, however, troubles continue and culminate in a riot inspired largely by Mrs. Rowland's rumors about Hope. An unruly mob burns Mr. Hope's effigy, and destroy his property. Inside, Margaret, Hester, and the servants stand strong. After the ordeal, Mr. Enderby tries to convince Mrs. Rowland to renounce what she knows to be untrue, and to answer for why she said that he would marry Miss Bruce. Mrs. Rowland does not come around, however, and vows to fight her brother against the Hope's, Margaret, and the Grey's. Mrs. Rowland brings in another doctor, Walcot, to replace Mr. Hope, but Hope refuses to leave town. Meanwhile, Mrs. Enderby takes a turn for the worse and dies, but not before Margaret and Philip have had a chance to tell her of their engagement.

Mr. Walcot turns out to be rather young and easily influenced, a sort of tool for Mrs. Rowland's vendetta.  Thus, no one finds there to be much against him, so the Greys, the Hopes, and Margaret take him on a boating excursion. Enderby, who has left town to advance his career before marrying Margaret, returns during this excursion, and is oddly cold to Margaret. Mr. Hope ascertains that Mrs. Rowland has told him of Mr. Hope's initial attachment to Margaret rather than Hester, and Mrs. Grey confirmed Mr. Hope's initial surprise when she encouraged him to marry Hester. Mrs. Rowland has also fabricated that Margaret held an attachment to Hope previous to his marrying her sister. Devastated, Philip writes a letter to Margaret after his interview with Hope, vaguely berating her for not "trusting" him and revealing her past attachments. Margaret has no idea what he means, and says so much in a response, which is unfortunately intercepted by Mrs. Rowland and burned. Time passes, and Margaret resigns herself to such joys available as taking care of Hester and Hope's new baby, and takes on the cares of an increasingly impoverished household. They reach such a level of poverty that they must let Morris, the Ibbotson sister's old housekeeper, go. Still they manage to stand together through difficult times, and Margaret happily watches her sister and Mr. Hope develop a much healthier and mutually dependent and supportive relationship.

Soon, a fever comes to Deerbrook, and it is clear that Walcot is not up to the task of managing all of the cases. Though many leave the village, including the women and children of the Grey family, Margaret and Hester elect to stay behind to help Hope. Among the people that Margaret helps is a man named Platt and his family, a member of the country poor, whom Martineau depicts as highly superstitious, in addition to being desperately destitute. Margaret realizes as Platt dies that he was the man who came to their house one night when Hope was away to steal their food and money; she recovers from him a ring given to her from Philip. Among the villagers struck by the fever is Matilda, Mrs. Rowland's daughter. With her daughter on her deathbed, Mrs. Rowland allows Hope to come help, and renounces all that she has fabricated in the past. Philip has also returned to town, ostensibly because he still wants to make sure that Margaret and her family are okay. Mrs. Rowland comes clean, and Margaret and Philip reconcile. Matilda, sadly, doesn't make it. The novel ends with Margaret taking leave of Maria, about to begin her new life with Philip in London. Margaret confesses that she is now at ease with the state of Hester and Hope's marriage.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Martineau's task was to present a large-scale realist novel on middle-class country life, something hitherto unattempted. The indebtedness of Eliot's Middlemarch to Deerbrook is clearly evident. Besides the more superficial similarities like the characters Mr. Hope and Tertius Lydgate, both novels deal clearly with the limitations placed on an individual's capacity to act morally within the bounds of a particular social system. Mr. Hope's and Lydgate's struggle with continuing their profession is a direct result of their attempts to cast ethical votes, and to maintain an "independence" from petty gossip and politics which, they end up learning, is entirely impossible. Both men become deeply embroiled in what they have idealistically viewed as petty and beneath them, learning, humbly, that such petty things can end up meaning everything. For strong women in particular--Margaret, Hester, and Maria, the only social roles available are wife, if she should not lack both beauty or wealth, and governess if she should lack both. All three women struggle differently to live out socially acceptable lives given such constraints without losing sight of their own individuality. All three of these women end up finding solutions that "work" for each of them: Hester finds in Hope a husband that will temper her fiery flares of occasional jealousies such that she might freely live as her incredibly devoted and ardent self without fear of allowing her passions to get out of control, Margaret finds an apt partner in Philip (this relationship isn't really explored in depth in Martineau's novel, unlike Hester's and Hope's, so the only full picture of a successful marriage which Martineau offers is one in which the wife ends up under the "rule" of her husband, though she consents to this, and he is made better with her love and support), and Maria finds a way to hold a respectful position in society, earning her keep from a distance, which she comes to terms with as not loneliness to be pitied but a salutary solitude which grants her a more independent life than the likes of Margaret or Hester could live.  

One of the more interesting inventions of Martineau's narrative is Mrs. Rowland, who is also kind of a victim of social forces. Though Mrs. Rowland is clearly the "villain" of the story and the narrator reveals very little information that would encourage readers to sympathize with her. It isn't clear, in the end, why exactly she holds such malice for the Ibbotsons: after all, she isn't exactly a woman of strong religious or political commitments such that the Greys' "dissenter" status would really be behind her continued, obsessive machinations against those associated with them. At one point, very briefly, Hope tries to explain his theory of what might be behind Mrs. Rowland's evil:

"I take hers to be no uncommon case. The dislikes of low and selfish minds generally bear very much the character of hers, though they may not be pampered by circumstances into such a luxuriance as in this case. In a city, Mrs. Rowland might have been an ordinary spiteful fine lady. In such a place as Deerbrook, and with a family of rivals' cousins incessantly before her eyes, to exercise her passions upon, she has ended in being..."

Here, Hope leaves off and Margaret concludes, "what she is." This is a very clinical explanation of why Mrs. Rowland commits evil, one which is appropriately relayed by the doctor. Margaret, however, prevents Hope's final "diagnosis," preserving, in a way, Mrs. Rowland's humanity and not turning her into merely a "case." What Hope's assessment reveals, nevertheless, is that he believes some natures to simply be "selfish," and prone to competition--in a city, where capitalism is the rule of life, she might be neutralized by other competition. In the country, there is no check on her selfish competitiveness, and so its exercise becomes excessive and uncontrolled. Hope's view here checks out with Martineau's solution for Hester, who also has certain tendencies that need to be regulated by social institutions (in her case, jealousy by marriage). The difference with Mrs. Rowland's case is that she lives under the wrong social institutions necessary for the regulation of her selfishness. Deerbrook's faith in social regulation if applied "correctly" seems to me to be one of the essential differences which sets it apart from Middlemarch. Social institutions seem more like realities to live with and to continually struggle and carefully contend with in the latter work, whereas Deerbrook seems to really hold faith in the capacity of social institutions to regulate innate human sinfulness, if only they were applied appropriately to each "case" of the sinful human.

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

Edition: North and South (Penguin Classics)

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Gaskell's North and South was serialized in weekly parts in Dickens's Household Words from September 1854 to January 1855. Gaskell found the format limiting; she commented in a note to the volume edition that she felt that she had had to compress her novel. She added, therefore, expansions to the volume edition. In addition to narrative expansions, Gaskell also added epigraph quotations to the beginning of chapters.

SUMMARY:
North and South begins with the marriage of the main character Margaret's cousin Edith to Captain Lennox, and Margaret's subsequent departure from Harley Street in London to go back to Helstone, a country town in the south where she grew up. The wedding puts Margaret in contact with the lawyer and brother of the Captain, Henry Lennox. They exchange some niceties about Helstone, and Margaret feels that he belittles Helstone by making it out to be some kind of fairytale village and refuses to talk about it. To Margaret's surprise, Henry visits her back at Helstone a little while later, and after the enjoy an afternoon sketching together, he proposes to her. Margaret refuses him and he leaves. Meanwhile, Margaret feels that her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hale, don't seem quite as happy and at ease as she had remembered them to be. Mr. Hale, a parson, soon confesses to Margaret that he has decided to leave his post because of doubts that he had as to the true faith espoused by the Church of England. He proposes that they will move to a northern manufacturing town, Milton, where he will serve as a tutor. His own mentor at Oxford, Mr. Bell, had already connected him with a wealthy manufacturer named Mr. John Thornton, who will be his first pupil. Margaret is charged with the difficult task of revealing this plan to her mother, who is of generally weak constitution. Margaret accomplishes the task, and helps her father makes arrangements to move, suggesting that Mrs. Hale remove to a seaside town while she and her father figure out where they will live in Milton.

After settling into the smoky, gray environment of a manufacturing town, Margaret makes the acquaintance of Thornton, and thinks him rather coarse and inflexible. She also makes other acquaintances by chance in the street--Nicholas Higgins, a poor factory worker who is organizing a strike against factory masters like Thornton, and his ailing daughter Bessy who is sick from working at cotton mills. Thornton lives with his mother, with whom he is very close; after his father's failed speculations, Thornton, with the support of his mother built his business up and worked very hard to come to the wealth which he has now. His sister, Fanny, also lives with them, but she is rather vapid and snooty. Mrs. Thornton doesn't really take to Margaret, finding her to be ignorant of the ways of the north, a pampered southern aristocrat who does not appreciate or understand the strength of her son's industrious and manly character. Margaret, after all, is not shy to critique Thornton, especially when discussing the factory workers' strike, she takes a more humane position as to a master's responsibility for the well-being of his "hands." Thornton's philosophy is a capitalist par excellence, believing in the strength and efficiency of machines and ruthless competition, and maintaining a position of laissez-faire as far as the lives of his workers go: "But those hours [referring to the labouring hours of his men] past, our relation ceases; and then comes in the same respect for their independence that I myself exact."

Mrs. Hale's health at Milton continues to decline, and Dixon, Mrs. Hale's faithful maid and Margaret keep the news of her decline from Mr. Hale. Margaret continues to visit with the Higginses, sympathizing with their hardships, and also learning of the divisions amongst the working class: hearing about a poverty-stricken family (the Boucher's) and the difficulty posed by the holding out which the Union strikers require, Margaret begins to see the Union as just as tyrannical as the master's. Higgins respects Margaret for her so-called "plain-speaking," but does not agree. When Mrs. Hale takes a turn for the worse, Margaret is charged with the errand of asking Mrs. Thornton if they might borrow a water bed. At their estate, an angry, rioting crowd has gathered because Mr. Thornton had been attempting to use Irish workers to break the strike. Feeling the injustice which the crowd feels, Margaret charges Thornton to do his manly duty and speak to the crowd as a human speaks to his brother human. Margaret rushes out to face the crowd with him, and a pebble grazes her. Terrified at what they have done, the crowd retreats. After this incident, Thornton realizes that Margaret has taken harm upon herself while protecting him, and feels himself actually deeply in love with her. He asks her for her hand in marriage, which she insolently rejects; Thornton responds by saying that he will nevertheless love her, as a kind of defiance to Margaret's intransigence.

Mrs. Hale, feeling herself fast fading, makes a request that she might be able to see her son Frederick, who has been forced to take shelter in Spain because of his participation in a mutiny aboard a ship. Though Frederick's action was just, he will likely be hanged if he returned to England. Margaret and Dixon make arrangements for Frederick to visit his dying mother in secret. Mrs. Hale also requests of Mrs. Thornton to watch over Margaret as a mother might after she is gone; reluctantly. Mrs. Thornton agrees though she clearly resents Margaret for her pride and rejection of her own, dear son. Bessy dies before Mrs. Hale, and Margaret takes it upon herself to put Mr. Higgins in contact with her father in hopes that he might develop some faith in God which would have been so important to Bessy. The two of them strike an unusual sort of friendship through Margaret. Frederick's visit goes off without a hitch, and Mrs. Hale dies. Afterwards, Margaret suggests that Frederick go to London to seek out Henry Lennox to see if he might help him return to England legally. This turns out to be a mistake, because someone recognizes Frederick at the railroad station; Frederick pushes this man off the platform and boards the train for London and is for the time being safe. Unfortunately, the man dies (likely because he was a heavy drinker and drunk at the time) and Margaret is asked by an inspector if she had been witness to a young man pushing this man off the platform. Stoically, Margaret lies that she was not there, but Thornton has actually seen her. Thornton, thinking that Margaret was out with a lover, actually strives to protect her by canceling the inquest (he has the power to do this because he is the magistrate for the case). Margaret is devastated by this involvement because she realizes that Thornton probably thinks badly of her.

Tragedy soon strikes the Boucher family as well; John Boucher is found drowned in a brook, having committed suicide. Higgins feels badly for his own harsh treatment of Boucher and his pressuring him to maintain the strike. Boucher's widow is rather unsympathetically portrayed in the narrative; she is vulgarly selfish and not particularly responsible as far as tending to her own children goes after her husband's terrible death. On a visit which Mr. Hale makes to visit Bell at Oxford, he suddenly dies, leaving Margaret and Frederick orphans. Margaret is hastened to London, where she can stay with her Aunt Shaw and Edith. Eventually, Bell comes to take Margaret to visit Helstone, thinking it will do her good after the tragic experiences with which she has had to contend. Margaret finds Helstone changed from her idyllic remembrances, though of course, she too has probably changed from her experiences in the north. More tragedy follows when the old Mr. Bell also dies, leaving Margaret with considerable property as his heiress. In the end, Margaret becomes Mr. Thornton's landlord at Marlborough Mills, and also offers to give him some capital when he suffers financial losses. Margaret's own name is cleared when Higgins, who has decided to work for Thornton (now, a much more humanistic factory master), reveals to him that the young man on the railroad platform was Frederick and not Margaret's lover but brother. The novel ends with Thornton as a reformed master, figuring out a better system in which worker and master engage in greater human-to-human interaction and as a result, gain a more personal understanding of each others' roles and the value of these roles. Thornton and Margaret finally reconcile and decide to marry, symbolizing Gaskell's vision of a union between the ruthlessly capitalistic, industrial north and the more humanistic but somewhat stagnant south.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Gaskell's vision of a marriage between north and south crystallized by the marriage of John Thornton and Margaret Hale signals an acceptance of industrial power of machines as key to progress while also suggesting the need for human-to-human interaction between different classes in order for progress to work properly. Margaret's ability to find "human interest" and to connect people of different backgrounds and ideologies, whether Mr. Hale and Mr. Higgins, or Mr. Higgins and the Boucher's, is a corrective to Thornton's de-humanizing laissez-faire which sees his hired workers as merely "hands" (and even if he acknowledges their personhood, he wants nothing to do with that part of their existence). In turn, Thornton's powerful work ethic and faith in capitalism as a way of realizing greater heights of human productivity than ever-to-be imagined before is a corrective to Margaret's complacency in the stagnant, agricultural economy of the south. Though rich and poor might interact on a more personal, and less hostile relation in the south, hard subsistence remains a reality for large amount of poor southerners. The agricultural economy lacks projects backed by capital to carry society beyond this rather feudal state of relations between those who own land by birth and those who work on it in order to survive.

The title, North and South, however, was not Gaskell's original title: Dickens suggested it. Gaskell's title was Margaret Hale. While Dickens's title is useful insofar as it really pulls out the larger allegorical significances of Mr. Thornton and Margaret's marriage with respect to class and historical import, Gaskell's original title tilts the balance of this marriage in favor of Margaret's importance in the marriage. After all, Margaret ends up doing more than just helping to soften and humanize Thornton's capitalism; she also provides the capital for him to rebuild after suffering significant financial losses. In this sense, the "south" bears the greater burden, since not only does it correct the ideologies of a purely dehumanizing capitalist machine, but also pumps money into it so that it might continue to do the positive work of progress. Thinking of North and South as a story of an individual, too, underscores the importance of what an individual (and even more importantly, a woman) can do to contribute to wider workings of social progress.

The Hidden Hand by E.D.E.N. Southworth

Edition: The Hidden Hand (Oxford Popular Fiction)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Hidden Hand was serialized in The New York Ledger beginning in February, 1859. At the time, Southworth was the most widely-read woman novelist and also the Ledger was the most widely-circulated newspaper, making The Hidden Hand a clear best-seller. In 1857, Robert Bonner of the Ledger recognized Southworth's selling power and asked for exclusive rights to serialize her fiction. Furthermore, The Hidden Hand was serialized two more times before its book publication in 1888, and reissues continued for thirty years after that.

SUMMARY:
The old Major Ira Warfield, alternatively known as "Old Hurricane," lived alone at his mansion in the mountains of Virginia known as Hurricane Hall. The estate is surrounded by gothic natural surroundings. Warfield is a grumpy old man, who prefers not to leave the comforts of his home. At the beginning of the novel, he is telling his slave Wool to warm his bed as he will soon retire for the evening. It is late, but a parson arrives in the night, with the urgent message that Warfield must go with him to hear the last testament of a dying old woman. Warfield has been recently appointed a Justice of the Peace and his duty charges him to go. The two men go out then into the cold, stormy night. The old woman turns out to be Nancy Grewell, a mid-wife who has disappeared from the area for thirteen years. She tells a harrowing story of being caught up in the night by two villains. The villains charge her with delivering the twin babies of a masked woman: her baby boy dies, but the girl survives. The woman enjoins Nancy to hide and take away her living girl, bequeathing Nancy with a wedding ring of hers which reads "Eugene--Capitola." Nancy and the baby (whom she says she had hidden with her all along) are sold on board a ship bound for New York which is wrecked. The only survivors are herself, the baby (whom she has named Capitola), and a young sailor named Herbert Greyson. In New York, Greyson helps them get situated, and Nancy and her charge make do in an area called Rags Alley. The woman says that she raised the girl, and after thirteen years, has finally managed to make enough to come back to Virginia to tell this story. Before she dies, Warfield promises to take on Capitola as his own charge; it is clear that he is more intimately involved with this story than is revealed, since he and Nancy whisper knowingly about the house where the masked woman gave birth.

In New York, Capitola actually comes upon Warfield--dressed as a newspaper boy, since that was the only way she was able to make enough money to keep herself. The tenement houses in Rags Alley had been torn down for over a year so she had been cast out. Major Warfield also makes the acquaintance of Herbert Greyson through Capitola, who turns out to be Warfield's nephew--his mother had become estranged from her brother when she made a marriage which Warfield objected to. Warfield wanted to do well by Herbert, and promises to send him to West Point, and also to do well by a widow, Marah Rocke, and her son who had taken in Herbert and his mother long ago, and who had continued to care for him after his mother died. When Herbert tells Marah the good news, she is elated and seems to know more about Warfield than she will reveal at present. Meanwhile, back at Hurricane Hall, Capitola hears a ghastly story from Mrs. Condiment, the housekeeper, about how a former tenant, Henry Le Noir, had let six Indian warriors to their deaths through a trapdoor, and of how Le Noir's family was later murdered by the vengeful sons of these warriors and thrown into the same pit. Apparently one son of Le Noir's escaped.

Unfortunately, when Old Hurricane actually hears that the widow's name is Marah Rocke, he rages and takes back his offer. It turns out that she was once his young wife when he was an officer, and he had found her with a younger man, Gabriel Le Noir. Marah's version of the story, however, was that he had stolen into her room one night when Old Hurricane was out late and she had already been asleep. Marah is then thrown into despair once again that her lover does not believe her even after eighteen years, and begins to waste away. Concerned, Traverse goes to Doctor Day, who had been generously allowing Traverse to study with him for free. The doctor realizes that Marah was wasting away largely because of lack of human sympathy. With his beautiful daughter Clara's prompting, the doctor takes in both Traverse as an apprentice and Marah Rocke as a housekeeper. Naturally, by this time, Traverse has fallen in love with Clara. Capitola, meanwhile, feels trapped by her new guardian's rules; despite the bounty which he has lavished on her, she is used to having the freedom of roaming about. She breaks his rules and rides out further than she should have alone, and meets with an unsavory young man. She manages to outwit this young man and run away from him; back at Hurricane Hall, Warfield fumes and sputters. On another night when Warfield rides out on an errand alone, he comes home to Capitola parodying his fuming and sputtering.

The scene shifts to a meeting of outlaws, "Black Donald" and his gang, at an old woman's inn. This is the house where Capitola was born, and where Nancy Grewell had been taken many years ago. Gabriel Le Noir has stopped by to speak with Black Donald, telling him that his son (the young man outwitted by Capitola) had found Capitola Le Noir, apparently the daughter of the woman whom Nancy tended. The conversation makes known too that Capitola is a heiress to a fortune, and Le Noir says that Black Donald and his gang must hunt down and kill her. Black Donald manages to exact a large sum for the work: ten-thousand dollars, which he dreams he will put to go use in order to move west, join Congress, the Senate, and maybe even become president one day. Gabe reluctantly agrees. Black Donald hatches a plan to do some surveillance, pretending to stop by Hurricane Hall as a peddler of fine goods when the women are home alone. They get to talking about Black Donald, and Capitola bravely says that she'd like to see him. Black Donald takes off his disguise, and Capitola latches on to him screaming for his arrest. Black Donald runs away, though he could have killed her, he doesn't because he thinks her worth having some fun with before killing.

More is revealed about Gabe Le Noir's past when Old Hurricane tells the parson about the murder of Eugene Le Noir, Capitola's father and Gabe Le Noir's brother. Gabe killed Eugene and got his wife out of the way in order to secure his own inheritance of the large estate at Hidden House. Black Donald sends three outlaws to capture Capitola, who ends up being too smart for them, having seen them under her bed in her mirror's reflection. She manages to trap the outlaws in the house and call for help; luckily, Herbert has just come by and the three outlaws are carted off to prison. As all of these things were happening, Doctor Day had sent Traverse to Washington for college, and he manages to get a diploma in just three years. Doctor Day has plans for Traverse to set up his career further west, and to thereafter take Clara as his wife. The young couple is overjoyed. Black Donald soon manages a ruse to spring his comrades from jail by disguising himself as an elderly preacher. Tragedy soon strikes when the Doctor has met with an accident with a cart--eventually, he dies from his injuries, but not before telling Traverse that Gabe Le Noir is Clara's guardian (the will having been made years ago). Neither Traverse nor the Doctor know much about Gabe, and because he was the Doctor's wife's half-brother and a reputable man, the Doctor didn't think much of it. Verbally, though, the Doctor has told two people, Traverse and a Doctor Williams, that he would like Clara to continue to live with Marah Rocke. Marah of course knows Gabe, and worries about what to do when Gabe comes upon the scene.

Gabe refuses to honor the verbal directions of Doctor Day and the court decides in favor of him. Clara goes to live at the Hidden House estate. Capitola hears of a young woman staying at Hidden House and gets curious; she sneaks out and spends the night there. On her way, she runs into the clairvoyant old woman, "Old Hat" who tells her that she will destroy someone dear to her in order that she will rise in the world. Capitola scoffs. At Hidden House, Clara and Capitola (Day and Night) become fast friends, and luckily for Capitola, Gabe is not home. During the night, Capitola fancies she sees the ghastly figure of a woman who takes her ring. When she leaves Hidden House, she has indeed lost her ring.

At Hidden House, Clara fancies hearing a body being dragged downstairs, screaming. Soon, Craven Le Noir, Gabe's son, falls in "love" with Clara, or rather he and his father are plotting to get her inheritance.  She escapes matrimony by a plan hatched by Capitola in which the two of them trade places. Clara goes to Marah, while Capitola goes with a veil with Craven to the altar. In front of a large audience at the wedding, Capitol offers compelling testimony against Gabe Le Noir and his son; in court, she makes a similar statement which leads to Clara being restored to Willow Heights, her father's property, taking Marah with her. Unfortunately, Traverse who is trying to make his career in the West doesn't hear about this, and having been unsuccessful in establishing a practice, enlists to go into the army bound for the Mexican War in order to pay off his debts. Herbert and the Gabe Le Noir (who is a colonel) also go off to war.

Back at Hurricane Hall, Craven Le Noir has fallen in love with Capitola and eventually proposes to her. She refuses him, and he slanders her reputation. She then challenges him to a duel and shoots him in the face with split peas in order to teach him a lesson. Capitola triumphs yet again when Black Donald makes another attempt to carry her away: she manages to trick him into sitting in an armchair placed over  the trapdoor in her room. She springs it upon him and he falls, though he survives the fall (the trapdoor goes down to a cellar). Black Donald is taken to prison and receives a sentence for execution. Meanwhile, the scene shifts to the Mexican War, where Colonel Le Noir and another officer conspire to deprive Traverse of sleep, hence orchestrating his falling asleep at an important post and his execution. Herbert manages to eloquently defend Traverse in court, however, and Traverse goes free. At the end of the war, Le Noir is on his deathbed from his war injuries. He becomes repentant and gives Traverse's letters from Clara and his mother to him, raises him to the honor of ensign, and also gives a parcel to Herbert to be opened after his death.

Traverse doesn't go home, though, because he wants to return having made his career first. He goes to New Orleans, where he cures a rich Frenchman who heads a mental institution. It turns out that Capitola's mother is at the mental institution: she has been kept at Hidden House by Gabriel Le Noir for nearly eighteen years until dragged out of the house to the mental institution recently (hence the screams Clara heard during her stay). Gabe's confession in the parcel which Herbert opens upon his death concurs what Traverse learns from Capitola's mother. Traverse, Herbert, and Capitola's mom all return to Hurricane Hall, where Herbert is set to marry Capitola, Clara to marry Traverse, and Marah and Warfield are reconciled as well. Capitola, however, can't be happy because Black Donald is to be executed on their wedding day. At the last minute, she comes up with a plan to spring him from prison, giving him some tools that he had left behind in the woods. Donald becomes a reformed robber, and confesses to Capitola that he wouldn't have killed her anyways. The ending remarks that they didn't quite live "happily ever after," as each of the women would make necessary corrections of their men when they would be out of line.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:
Issues of serial publication: The success of periodical literature for a middle-class audience like The Hidden Hand was owed at least in part to the contexts of its circulation. Its serial publication was a closely-orchestrated event; it was common that before one novel's serialization was ended, advertisements would show up for the next. Specifically with respect to The Hidden Hand, the Ledger's Bonner sneakily bought room to print two installments of The Hidden Hand in the National Era, then announced that readers would need to buy the "great family paper," the Ledger, to read the rest.  

Yet, cliffhangers are perhaps not as common as what one might expect from serial fiction whose subject was sensational, melodramatic, and (respectably) lurid. For example, Black Donald's plunge down the trapdoor happened in the middle of an installment, and readers are let in on the secret that he has survived the plunge in this installment before Capitola finds out later. I argue that there is a certain satisfaction for readers in observing characters finding out truths that readers already know, perhaps akin to something like being excited for someone's reaction to their own surprise party. This is, I believe, a more often overlooked feature of serialization--withholding not the truth of a mystery, necessarily, but characters' reactions to the truth. The Hidden Hand employs this trick throughout; indeed, the narrator herself acknowledges at the end when everything is revealed to Capitola about her past that the reader already knows all of this. It doesn't make it any less satisfying to witness the revelation to Capitola, however.

Genre, audience, and respectability: Certainly the sensational aspects of crime, murder, hired outlaws, mental institutions, etc. rendered some readers critical of such literature. A character like Capitola, too, breaks gender stereotypes and is clearly the "heroine" of the story, equally effectual in neutralizing Major Warfield's strict patriarchal authority (usually by revealing it to be humorous with strategies like parody), countering marriage proposals, and capturing a feared outlaw. 

Yet Southworth's Hidden Hand is ultimately within the bounds of middle-class respectability. Readers are left to imagine what outlaws carrying away a young girl will do to her, what would be "worse" than murder, but these things are always left unsaid. In the end, any readerly assumption of Black Donald's lurid and sadistic tendencies is neutralized by his saying that he was not planning on killing her at all, and that he was just in love with her like any other honorable suitor. Capitola's gender-bending is often in the service of her own chastity, as Nina Baym points out in this article: she dresses up as a newsboy in order to protect her chastity, and this is why gender-bending ends up being okay. And ultimately, though she has boyish tendencies, she isn't just a boy with a girl's exterior, she is more sympathetic (and hence, womanly) than men, as evidenced in her capacity to love Black Donald and see him for who he was beyond his occupation as an outlaw. Her weapons against men are never violence but humor and strategem, and when she actually thinks that she has hurt Black Donald in springing the trapdoor, she is clearly distressed, like an "ideal woman" would be, if she had hurt someone. Thus, Capitola certainly crosses boundaries, but perhaps not quite as radically as one might perceive at first.