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.

Translations by Brian Friel

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Irish playwright Brian Friel's Translations was first performed in September 1980 at the Guildhall in Derry, Northern Ireland. Its production was managed by a theater company founded by Friel and actor Stephen Rea.

SUMMARY:
Act I: The action is set in a small Irish town called Baile Beag in August 1833. At the "hedge-school" held in an old barn in general disarray and filth, Manus, the son of the old schoolmaster, Hugh, is managing things before his father arrives. Manus tries to get Sarah, a woman with a speech impediment, to correctly pronounce basic phrases of introduction. Meanwhile, another pupil, Jimmy (also known as the Infant Prodigy) spouts phrases of Greek and Latin. Otherwise, we are to assume they are all speaking in Irish. Soon Maire, a young, attractive woman appears. Manus tells Maire about how someone named Biddy Hanna asked him to write a letter to her sister in Nova Scotia, and how Biddy Hanna was so clueless as to have asked Manus to write, "Thank God one of them new national schools is being built" without realizing that he was the son of the schoolmaster. Maire brings news of English soldiers living in tents in the town. Soon Doalty and Bridget arrive; Doalty is drunk and boasts about his ruse, shifting the poles of a "machine" that the English soldiers were using to confuse them. Manus explains that his father is late because of a christening he was attending. Maire and Manus seem to have intimate relations, and she asks him if he's going to apply for a job at the new national school. Manus says no because his father is going to apply for it and he doesn't want to be in the way of his father. Maire hints that she wants to go to America to escape from her rather large family ("There's ten below me to be raised and no man in the house.") The group talks about the new school, which will be mandatory for children 6-12 and which will operate in English. Hugh arrives, and conducts his "lesson" by imparting them news and stopping at certain words to ask his pupils about their Latin origins. He tells of the christening, the arrival of Captain Lancey of the Royal Engineers and his partner Yolland--the Englishmen, who are conducting an ordnance survey of the area, and of how he will be running the new national school. Suddenly, Owen, Manus's brother who hasn't been back in six years comes in and receives a hearty welcome for all. He is a "city man," and announces that he has brought with him Lancey and Yolland. Owen brings them in and serves as a (mis)translator as Lancey and Yolland explain their project. Lancey says that they will be making a comprehensive map of the entire country, in order that they might better assess taxation policies. Owen's somewhat lazy translations help the Englishmen to convince the Irish that the project will be for their own good. The act ends with Manus expressing concern that Yolland can't even pronounce Owen's name, calling him "Roland," and Owen reassuring him that it is just a "name."

Act II, Scene 1: The act opens with Owen and Yolland working together to Anglicize the names of local Irish landmarks. Owen criticizes Yolland's "romantic" view of the Ireland; unlike Lancey, whom Yolland describes as "[t]he perfect colonial servant," Yolland's imagination is prone to wandering, idealizing Owen's family and friends and ascribing a kind of Edenic status to the Irish landscape. He still can't pronounce Owen and proves generally unaware of Owen correcting him because he's so caught up in his own speechifying. An encounter between Hugh and Yolland ensues in which Hugh reveals that he has never heard of Wordsworth. This becomes an opportunity for Yolland to idealize Irish literature and myth. Yolland tells Hugh that he's learning to speak Irish, though Hugh doesn't much care. After Hugh leaves on some errands, Yolland confesses to Owen that he fears that the colonial project is "an eviction of sorts" and is ethically uncomfortable with his own part in the project. Owen shrugs off Yolland's "romanticizing" and essentially says that the old Irish place names are part of myths that people who live there don't even remember anymore. Yolland finally listens to Owen when he says his name isn't Roland. He is ashamed and horrified but Owen puts him at ease. Manus arrives and announces he has gotten a job at a school on an island called Inis Meadhon fifty miles away. Manus is reluctant to speak English even though he knows it because he resents colonialists like Yolland. Maire also comes by, and Manus tells her the good news as well. They all congratulate Manus. Maire and Yolland communicate with some difficulty, through Owen--she says there will be a dance at Tobair Vree, a name which Yolland has just learned and he is clearly overjoyed that he knows it. Drunk by this time, Yolland shouts out a bunch of Irish names of places and humorously throws in Bombay and Eden into the mix.

Act II, Scene 2: Maire and Yolland hold hands after the dance, and though they don't understand each other, they both talk. Maire comically tells him her only phrase in English: "In Norfolk we besport ourselves around the maypoll." Yolland lists off Irish place names, Maire corrects him. Eventually they kiss, and Sarah sees them.

Act 3: In the schoolhouse, Owen continues to work on place names. Manus comes in with a travel bag, about to leave. Apparently something has happened to Yolland because Yolland is missing. Manus asks Owen to tell the people at Inis Meadhon that he might be a while before going to the school. Manus leaves, and Sarah stutters sympathetically, "I'm sorry...I'm sorry...I'm so sorry, Manus." Doalty and Bridget arrive on the scene, bringing news of more English soldiers arriving and how Hugh, drunk, had been yelling out names at them ("Visigoths! Huns! Vandals!"). Maire comes in, talking of Yolland. She also doesn't know where he is, but caught in her own romance, starts listing off place names in England associated with Yolland. Lancey comes in and asks Owen to translate to everyone that if Yolland is not found in a day, they will shoot all the livestock in the town. In forty-eight hours, they will evict people and level their lands. Bridget rushes off to hide livestock while Doalty thinks about fighting the English. Jimmy and Hugh arrive, with Jimmy talking about how he's going to marry Pallas Athena. Hugh remarks while looking at James, how "it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language. James has ceased to make that discrimination." Hugh then concludes that they need to keep "renewing those images" to keep a culture alive. Hugh says he will teach Maire English because in his mind, he's made a kind of compromise wherein he wishes the Irish to claim English for themselves because it will be the only living language. James blathers on about endogamein and exogamein, marrying in and out of one's tribe (he's referring to himself in considering marriage with Athena, but also his comments clearly apply to Maire). The play ends with Hugh trying to quote ineffectually from the Aeneid, focusing on a passage telling of how Juno wanting to make her city the capital of all nations, but couldn't because of the destined rise of Troy.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Though Friel has been cited as saying that Translations is really just about language, it is clear that contained in the concern about language are very specific identity politics relating to Northern Ireland's encounter with England from colonial times into the times during which Friel was writing. Friel's own biography provides a useful context for the identity politics which Translations works through. Born in 1929 in Killyclogher (rural Northern Ireland), Brian Friel was actually registered as "Bernard Patrick," "Bernard" being a part of a trend to discourage Gaelic sounding names. "Bernard Patrick" might be a kind of symbol of a destabilized identity which mediates between his father's rural nationalism and his own move towards a more moderate "citified" position which critiqued, among other things, the backwards educational systems perpetuated by the Catholic Church which feared, above all, Anglicization. Translations certainly comments on the inadequacy of the kind of education which Hugh and Manus provide; the students learn in a filthy barn, the snippets of Latin and Greek which Hugh throws out at his pupils are meaningless and farcical. But at the same time Friel critiques a position which gives in entirely to the Anglicization processes promoted by the imperialists. Maire's budding Anglophilia is deeply satirized by her equally meaningless romance with Yolland, and Lancey's extreme measures deployed to find Yolland are absurdly punitive. Yolland's romanticization of Ireland and conflation of the poor, rural landscape with Eden is also satirized. It seems hat Hugh's idea at the end of the play that the English language must be accepted but re-colonized/re-appropriated by Irishmen is the moderate position towards which the play finally settles on. The image of Greece's destruction and the inevitable rise of Troy provides an allegory for Northern Ireland's destruction and inevitable Anglicization. Friel seems to advocate, finally, some kind of compromise position, but perhaps Hugh's forgetfulness as he recites the lines signals that this is in no way an easy compromise to hammer out.

Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys

Edition: Voyage in the Dark (Norton Paperback Fiction)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Voyage in the Dark was Jean Rhys's third published novel, appearing in 1934 (but set in 1914, unlike her previous two novels which reflected contemporaneous times). The novel features portions from an earlier unpublished novel, Triple Sec. Rhys's original ending was to have Anna die, but her publisher thought this was too dark.

SUMMARY:
The novel is narrated in four parts first-person by eighteen-year-old Anna Morgan, who spent her childhood on the island of Dominica in the West Indies. She now lives in England as a touring actress with uncertain work opportunities. She begins with an account of her difficulty settling in England, where she always felt cold, and the towns seemed always alike, drab, and dark. At the opening of the novel, she lives with Maudie, an actress of twenty-eight years old. One day, she and Maudie meet two men on the street who work in "the city," signaling that they are pretty well-off. Anna becomes involved with one of them, Walter Jeffries. She becomes fairly attached to him even though she sees him only intermittently. He gives her money with which she is able to buy new clothes, and also takes care of her when she is sick. Anna is disappointed that she won't spend her birthday with him, because her birthday falls on a Sunday when he won't be around. Instead, she goes out with Maudie, who advises that Anna get as much money out of him as possible.

Walter introduces her to his cousin, Vincent, who connects her with a singing instructor. Patronizingly, Walter tells Anna that she should "get on" and that he would like to help her. One night, when drunk, Anna tells Walter of Dominica--of her father, a list of slaves which she had once seen, their church services--but he isn't too interested. Anna's stepmother Hester visits London, and shows Anna a letter from her uncle back in Dominica berating Hester for not sharing her deceased father's wealth with her. Hester doesn't respect Anna's uncle because he drinks, and because he has fathered many illegitimate children with natives. She reveals too that she feel she has done right by Anna. Anna tells Hester that she does not need her help and can do on her own, thinking she can depend on walter. Hester brings back many home memories to Anna; she thinks especially fondly of a native caretaker, Francine, whom she remembers eating mangoes and telling her stories. Soon, Walter decides to take Anna to the countryside with Vincent and his girl, Germaine. The trip is cut short because Germaine argues with Vincent. Anna is silent for much of the conversations, and the three of them often talk about her as if she is not there, infantilizing her. In one moment of anger, Anna smashes a cigarette but on Walter's hand, but she is sorry for it afterwards.

Walter eventually tires of Anna and drops her, charging Vincent with writing her an impersonal and patronizing letter telling her that he is "sure she is a nice girl" and that she should, simply move on. Walter has promised, however, to take care of her financially should it be necessary. Crushed, Anna sort of floats from one thing to another. She first runs into a woman named Ethel Matthews, a masseuse, who offers her to share rooms with her and to earn her keep as a manicurist. Anna also runs into Laurie, another of her actress friends, who introduces her to two men, Carl and Joe. Carl eventually pursues her, and they sleep together, but it turns out that Carl has a wife and must leave. Anna then spends one night with an unnamed man with a bandaged wrist, by whom she accidentally gets pregnant. Meanwhile, Ethel has decided to drop Anna because she has not really been a good business partner; Ethel writes a letter to Laurie telling her that Anna owes her money. Laurie takes care of Anna and suggest that she write to Walter to get money for an abortion. Walter sends Vincent over, who gives her the money but also asks for the letters that Walter has sent her back. Anna is sickly during her pregnancy and eventually gets a abortion; the whole ordeal occurs in a sort of haze for Anna, amidst more nightmarish memories of the Caribbean such as of being frightened of zombies and soucriants (devil women).

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Rhys's Voyage in the Dark bears some similarities to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (Rhys had a brief affair with Ford Madox Ford in 1924) in that it features a first-person narrator writing in such a way as to suggest an absence of artifice or pre-meditated structure. Both narrators write as if their words flow freely from them with very little sense of constructing a coherent story.

The form of Rhys's novel is significantly more radical, however. While the narrator of The Good Soldier gives a reason for the fragmented nature of his account--he is writing because of a retrospective psychological need to do so in order to deal with the trauma of his botched relationships--it isn't clear how or why Anna is writing her fragmented first-person account. Presumably, the account is also retrospective (in past tense), but it really feels more like she is speaking of what happens to her pretty much as it happens to her. The associations that she makes between her surroundings and what happens to her and her childhood experiences in Dominica give the narration a sense that somehow she is able to communicate to us what feelings and associations she had in the moment of her experiences. There is a strange tension, then, between the apparent lack of artifice in Anna's account, and the necessity of this being a crafted retrospective account in order for it to make sense as to when she would have the opportunity of writing. After all, Anna seems to passively allow things to happen to her and different people to come into her life, and the assertive act of writing hardly seems in keeping with the passive affect which her simple diction, flash-backs, associations, and stream of consciousness writing calls up.

And what are we to make of Anna's inclusions of letters--from Vincent, her uncle, and Ethel? It seems the first-person narrator is doing some kind of scrapbooking, which also seems pretty inconsistent with the Anna who describes finding the greatest relief in sleep. Finally, just to add one more complication to the notion of the narrative as a telling-as-it-happens first-person account: how would Anna have narrated her own death in Rhys's original version?

Perhaps these difficulties suggest a need to suspend disbelief, to recognize that it is not important that Anna probably couldn't have written this account. What simply accepting that we're able to enter into her first-person consciousness as things happen to her does is to allow us access to the impressions of an individual normally evacuated of all agency in telling her own story: the young, emigrant, working class chorus girl. This is partly Rhys's unusual recovery of her own autobiographical past (as she was from Dominica, and worked as a chorus girl for a time), not as a retrospectively constructed, reflective account which is the most "usual" type of memoir, but as a re-imagining of what that life was like as it was being lived.

Blake, or the Huts of America by Martin Delany

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Martin Delany was born to a free mother and enslaved father in West Virginia in 1812. He was a prominent figure in the work of black newspapers, serving as the editor of The Mystery in the earlier part of the 1840s, and co-editing The North Star with Frederick Douglass from 1847-1849. In February of 1859, African-American Martin Delany appealed to William Lloyd Garrison to help him find a publishing house for his work, "Blake or the Huts of America" which was, at the time, being serialized in the Anglo-African Magazine (January through July). Only twenty-six chapters were published; 1-23 and 28-31 and it is unclear exactly as to why the complete novel was not printed. The complete novel was later serialized in weekly installments from November 1861-May 1862 in The Weekly Anglo-African. The black nationalistic orientation of the newspaper was particularly suited to Delany's work. By this time, however, the Civil War had begun and fears of an organized slave-rebellion came to be eclipsed by other concerns. Thus, though Delany's novel is easily "the most important black novel of this period," scholarly attention has been slow in coming (SOURCE: Floyd Miller, Intro).

SUMMARY (Anglo-African Magazine serialization, brief sketch of the other chapters in parentheticals):
The first chapter opens on Natchez, Mississippi prior to the Civil War, shortly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. Mrs. Franks is forced to sell Maggie, a faithful slave whom she treated more like a younger sister than anything else to her cousin Mrs. Ballard. Mrs. Ballard was to take her with her to Havana, Cuba as a maidservant. The deal had been settled between the two husbands--Colonel Franks and Judge Ballard. Maggie's husband, Henrico Blacus, a West Indian brought as a slave to the South comes back from an errand and needless to say, is furious. "Henry" (Henrico was re-named Henry Holland in America) expresses his disavowal of the other slaves' patience largely inculcated by what he perceived to be the false Christianity of their masters, embodying a sort of "the time is now" rhetoric.

Henry's rebellious attitude against Mr. Franks leads to his decision to sell him. Mrs. Franks, more sympathetic to the slaves, tells Henry that one Mrs. Van Winters is going to Cuba and she will arrange for him to be sold so he can go to Cuba. Colonel Franks manages to find out about this plan, however, and arranges for Henry's private sale to a particularly inhumane master, Richard Crow. Henry finds this out, and decides to be a runaway. Meanwhile, at the slave huts, Mamma Judy, Daddy Joe, and their friends celebrate and praise Franks as if they believe his ruse that he is giving Henry another chance.

Henry steals away, managing to send his and Maggie's baby son off to Canada. Before leaving, he tells his friends Andy and Charles that he is going to start a large-scale slave rebellion, and that he will make sure there is an organized movement in every state. He gives himself a maximum of two years to lay the groundwork for this rebellion. Soon after Henry runs away, slaves from other plantations start to disappear, and the white masters realize that there seems to be a broader movement. Amidst these happenings, one Major Armsted (a southerner) and Judge Ballard (originally a northerner) meet and converse about race and slavery. It turns out that the northerner is actually more fastidious about race, evincing his disgust about the ways blacks and whites mingle in Cuba. The men later meet up with Mr. Franks and one Captain Grason at Grason's plantation. There, they watch a slave boy being whipped for not readily entertaining them with antics. The slave boy was hemorrhaging from the lungs, and upon seeing this, Ballard couldn't take the sight and involuntarily grabs the whip from Grason to stop the beating. The slave boy ends up dying, and a footnote gives that this was a true incident.

Henry starts spreading the word about the slave rebellion. Able to read and write, and with much practical know-how about the plantation networks, Henry is able to get around without much suspicion. He makes a tour of southern states and speaks to slaves in their huts, inspiring them. Generally, Henry is able to garner much support for his plan, and realizes that many have already been looking forward to the day that someone would come to organize them. Among the things he witnesses is how the slave system inculcates mulatto and black overseers to treat blacks poorly (somewhat like what Stowe describes of black overseers trained for cruelty in Uncle Tom's Cabin). Henry becomes a revolutionary figure described epically and religiously by the narrator: "From plantation to plantation did he go, sowing the seeds of future devastation and ruin to the master and redemption to the slave, an antecedent more terrible in its anticipation than the warning voice of the destroying Angel in commanding the slaughter of the firstborn of Egypt." Henry's own rhetoric is high, preaching that "now is the accepted time, today is the day of salvation," Henry even goes amongst the Indians in Arkansas, who though also slave-holders, end up being sympathetic to Henry's cause after he speaks with an old chief. There is a slight hiccup in plans in New Orleans. Fifteen slave men gathered awaiting him as their leader, and Henry at first successfully lays the foundation for organization, but one man can't wait to be out for blood and makes a ruckus that night. The backlash is harsh, and this incident becomes a cautionary tale of sorts against disorganized, hot-headed rebellion which has not laid its foundations properly and intelligently. New Orleans subsequently laid "municipal regulations...most rigid in a system of restriction and espionage toward Negroes and mulattoes, almost destroying their self-respect and manhood, and certainly impairing their usefulness."

Having made his tour through these states, Henry returns to help get Mammy, Daddy, Andy, and Charles to Canada. He teaches him how to find the North Star, how moss grows on the north side of trees, and about compasses. On their journey, they meet up with two other runaways, one who looks white, so they pretend he was their master in order to get aboard a yawl to Missouri. While crossing Mississippi, Henry manages to convince a poor white ferryman that he should not be doing work for the rich southern slaveholder. Henry militantly threatens those in pursuit with a rifle. Unfortunately, however, they are soon captured.

[Here the Anglo-African Magazine serialization ends. In Part II, Henry goes to Cuba as a manservant, finds Maggie, and buys her freedom. There, he leads a revolutionary force aided by Placido, a Cuban poet and rebel. They plan to overthrow the Cuban government and prevent its annexation to the United States]

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Delany's separatist, black nationalistic politics directly speaks against Harriet Beecher Stowe's portrayal of the perservering Christian slave whose ultimate destiny is to resettle in Liberia and transform Liberia into a nation of Christian principles. For Henry, Christianity which teaches slaves to "stand still" awaiting salvation (usually, the rhetoric refers to salvation in the next world) is yet another tool used by masters to keep slaves down. For Delany, slaves must rise up and claim their own freedom in the current time; they are not to wait for a God supposedly asks for their patience through unimaginable suffering on earth. It isn't, however, that Henry doesn't believe in God--Blake is a critique of religious ideology espoused by white masters and passed on to their slaves which keeps slaves from realizing their human dignity here on earth. Henry's own rhetoric and the rhetoric of the narrator is often religious (Moses is a recurring figure in the narrative) and there is a sense throughout that Henry fulfills a spiritual destiny in his revolutionary leadership.

Perhaps one of the more controversial aspects of Henry's characterization is just how different he is from the other black slaves. He doesn't talk in dialect, he is described as a "scholar," and above all, his not having internalized the abjection of slavery perpetuated by an ideology of Christian patience and suffering means he even carries himself differently. This is evident to both blacks and whites alike. He is virile, intelligent, cunning, militant, and strongly principled, an opposite "type" to the gentle, persevering, loving, Bible-quoting (but unscholarly and limited in his literacy) Uncle Tom. The "Uncle Tom" figures in Delany's characterizations are revealed as delusional and naive. Delany tackles Stowe's abolitionism by boldly leveraging his own position as a black writer to show figures like Mammy Judy or Daddy Joe to be woefully inadequate to the task of realizing their humanity.

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Edition: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Norton Critical Editions)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Although Jekyll and Hyde has since won critical attention for its literary merits, its original publication as a shilling paperback led to audiences questioning the work's merit and morality, linking it to the sensationalistic, "low" fiction that tended to be published in the same format. Indeed, Jekyll and Hyde appeared in January of 1886, just a year after Stevenson's story called "Markheim" was published, a sensational Christmas "crawler" which critics have linked to Jekyll and Hyde. Stevenson's own account as far as the writing of Jekyll goes is that a nightmare gave him the primary idea for his plot.

SUMMARY:
The account opens with a character sketch of the lawyer, Mr. Utterson, who isn't particularly warm or interesting but "somehow lovable." He had a "catholicity of good-nature" which made him the welcome companion of many, including his kinsman, Richard Enfield, briefly described as "the well-known man about town." On a walk one day in the evening, Enfield and Utterson approach an abandoned house, and Enfield tells a story in connection with that house (The geography of where they are in London is unspecific). One night, Enfield witnessed a strange man trampling over a young girl child. Needless to say, this caused a ruckus, and Enfield collared the man, demanding reparations from him. The man's name is "Hyde" and he takes out a key, goes into the abandoned house, and returns with a check in someone else's name. Enfield doesn't reveal whose name the check is in, because it is a respectable one--Utterson says, however, that he knows what name Enfield refers to because of some prior information that he had.

Back at home that evening, Utterson re-reads a will he has drawn up for his childhood friend, Dr. Jekyll, which bequeaths all of his money and estate to this same "Hyde" which Enfield has mentioned. Disturbed, Utterson thinks that he should find out more about Hyde. Utterson manages to make Hyde's acquaintance, and is struck by his aversion to Hyde even though he can't quite pin down what is wrong with him. Before confronting Jekyll about this unsavory character, Utterson visits Dr. Lanyon, a close mutual friend. Lanyon talks about how he doesn't know what has been going on with Jekyll in recent years; only that the two friends had been estranged for some time. When Utterson ventures out to Jekyll's house, he sees Hyde going into Jekyll's laboratory through a back door. Jekyll isn't home, and this disturbs Utterson. When Utterson finally gets to confront Jekyll about Hyde, Jekyll assures Utterson that it isn't a case of blackmail, saying that he might be rid of Hyde whenever he might choose to be rid of him. Jekyll enjoins Utterson to promise that he will carry out his wishes as far as his will went.

Approximately one year elapses, and the illustrious M.P. Thomas Carew is brutally beaten to death in the street. Carew had in his possession a letter for Utterson. It turns out that a maid has seen Hyde beat Carew to death with a club which belonged to Jekyll. Utterson again visits Jekyll, who shows him a letter from Hyde that informs Jekyll he has escaped and will not return. Mr. Guest, a clerk, compares this letter to a letter of invitation which Utterson receives from Jekyll and suggests that the handwritings are similar. Utterson suspects Jekyll of forging a letter to cover up for Hyde. For a time after Hyde's disappearance, Jekyll seems to have recovered his former spirits, entertaining friends and even reconciling, it seems, with Lanyon. Suddenly though, Jekyll is out of sorts, and refuses to see his friends. Utterson is further disturbed when Lanyon falls ill and dies. Before his death, Lanyon had left Utterson with two letters: one in his own hand to be opened only by Utterson, and the other specifying that it should only be opened upon Henry Jekyll's disappearance or death.

One night, Poole, the Butler at Jekyll's house, calls on Utterson, fearing that something has gone wrong--specifically, that Hyde has murdered Jekyll and taken over his place. Banding together, Poole and Utterson break into Jekyll's lab, and find the dead body of Edward Hyde, apparently having commited suicide by ingesting cyanide. Near the body is Jekyll's will, altered to leave all of his money to Utterson. Utterson also finds a letter from Jekyll addressed to him which directs him to read Lanyon's account because he has "disappeared, under what circumstances I have not the penetration to foresee." Back in his study, Utterson reads Lanyon's account, which tells of how he was called upon to do a favor for Jekyll via a letter: he was to break into Jekyll's lab and to retrieve some items from a drawer and to deliver them to someone who would come for them at midnight. That "someone" is Hyde, who mixes the contents of the drawer (some powder, and red liquid) and drinks it. Upon drinking this concoction, Hyde is transformed into Jekyll. Lanyon says that the sight of this transformation has shaken him to the core such that he will die soon. The final document that is revealed is Henry Jekyll's own account, which fully reveals how Jekyll tried to divide the "good" and the "evil" sides of his humanity through a potion. At first, his transformation into "Hyde," his evil counterpart, offered him the liberty to live a sordid, underground life of vice in London without repercussions to Dr. Jekyll's good name and character. Soon, however, Dr. Jekyll would find himself spontaneously and involuntarily turning into Hyde--his purely evil self was getting stronger and stronger. At one point, he locked himself out of his lab, and so needed Dr. Lanyon's help to retrieve his potion. In the end, Hyde proved too strong for Jekyll, and he ran out of potion (he was unable to replicate the potion because the first batch contained an unknown impurity which turned out to be effective for the transformation). Jekyll has written this letter while on the last draughts of the old potion, and he ends saying that he will not know what will happen when he becomes Hyde permanently: "Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? Or will he find the courage to release himself at the last moment?"

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Understandably, much of the critical work on Jekyll and Hyde has focused its energies on the titular figures: is Hyde a kind of racial "other" of Jekyll? A doppelganger whose enjoyment of freedom, and liberty comments on the limits Victorian social roles have on Jekyll? A lower figure on the evolutionary scale than Jekyll (especially as Utterson described Hyde as "tryglodytic" or ape-like)? Or simply, the evil part of man's nature because of being tempted by Satan during the fall?

I want to turn my focus, then, on some of the other characters and how they function in the narrative. In other famous late Victorian stories like Stoker's Dracula, upstanding members of society assemble documents together for the purpose of successfully discovering and then defeating the monster. Stevenson's group of respectable "professional men"--Utterson, Lanyon, Guest, and also Poole might be included as one who occupies a specific professional role, though not middle-class as the rest--fail, however, to discover anything at all and in the end, the monster destroys himself. Yet the narrative's inclusion of documents in the form of Jekyll's will, his letters, and chapter headings and subject matter that like official accounts like newspaper articles or court testimony ("The Carew Murder Case," "Incident of the Letter," "Remarkable Incident of Dr. Lanyon") reminds us of works like Dracula, sensation fiction novels like Collins's Woman in White, or detective fiction. These official or official-like accounts, however, are impotent as far as solving the mystery goes. The mystery is controlled to the very end by the possessor of the secret: Jekyll (and then Lanyon, in Jekyll's service) compels Utterson not to open the letters which reveal the full truth to him until after everything has been fully-played out. The reason given for Utterson's following these directions is the bond of friendship, of male camaraderie of early years. This camaraderie and close bonds of male friendship, however, prove to  ensure Jekyll's final isolation. He is alone from beginning to end.

The impotence, then, both of the documents/testimony and of male friendship (and furthermore, the complete absence of female characters in the novella) might comment on the limits of middle-class bachelors living respectable, professional lives. Before the great struggles of human import (good versus evil), these men are rather useless: Lanyon broke off ties with his supposedly close friend Jekyll because Jekyll was thinking about ideas beyond the scope of what was acceptable for the polite scientific community, and Utterson's rather bland inclination to follow the rules of male homosociality prevents him from getting to the truth sooner so that he might help his friend. Perhaps, actually, the very first lines that sketch out Utterson's character are the most damning: he is fond of saying, "I incline to Cain's heresy," in that he would "let [his] brother go to the devil in his own way." This, exactly, is the whole problem with men like Utterson: he is well-liked because he has a "catholicity of good-nature" but as far as connecting with others on any level more than a superficial and tolerant friendliness (which polite society expects from him), he is fearfully inept.

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Uncle Tom's Cabin was originally published as installments in an abolitionist newspaper of small circulation called the National Era based in Washington D.C. It was edited by a friend of Beecher Stowe's, Gamaliel Bailey. The original subtitle for the installments was "The Man that Was a Thing," but when the first installment appeared on June 5, 1851, the subtitle was changed to "Life Among the Lowly." Uncle Tom's Cabin was not slated to be more than three or four numbers spanning two or three weeks, Stowe having previously only written a few sketch-like pieces. It ended up being more than forty numbers, stretching over a period of a year, gaining a wide and loyal readership. The book edition met with considerable success on both sides of the Atlantic; during the first year of publication in America, over 300,000 copies were sold (though Stowe and her husband did not end up making much from the profits because they didn't have enough money to invest in the copyright at the time of the publishers approached them).

Stowe's arguments in Uncle Tom's Cabin became a rallying point for the abolitionists after the recent passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850.

SUMMARY:
Mr. Shelby, a kind slave-owner in Kentucky, is indebted to a slave-trader, Mr. Haley and must sell his most loyal slave, Tom, and a young woman named Eliza's little boy. Eliza overhears that the transaction will happen, and decides to run away. Recently, Eliza has just heard from her husband George, who works under a cruel master and was no longer able to take it. George told Eliza that he would be running away to Canada and that he hoped to buy her and his son one day. With the help of Mrs. Shelby and the other slaves working for Mr. Shelby, Mr. Haley misses catching Eliza, who jumps into the frozen river and escapes to Ohio just in time. On the other side, she is directed by a friend to the house of the senator Mr. Bird and his wife, who have just been discussing the Fugitive Slave Law, which Mr. Bird supported but his wife did not. When Eliza arrives at their house, cut up and in need of help, Mr. Bird abandons his principles and agrees to help her, driving her in a carriage to safety at a man's house in the woods. This man used to be a slaveowner before his conscience led to his freeing all of them.

Tom takes leave of Aunt Chloe (his wife), who cooks him a final meal. Tom bears up against his fate. At a tavern in Kentucky, there is a notice out for George. George, who is white enough to pass as Spanish, disguises himself and runs into Mr. Wilson, a manufacturer whom he had worked with at some point. Mr. Wilson had taught George how to read, and taken a kind interest to him, so he does not blow George's cover. Meanwhile, Mr. Haley takes Tom on boat to the slave market. On the boat, a young woman drowns herself after her child is taken away from her and sold. The account flashes back to Eliza, who has arrived at a Quaker settlement. There, she has the great luck of being reunited with George, who has also taken refuge there. Traveling down Mississippi towards New Orleans, Tom makes the acquaintance of a little girl named Eva and her father Augustine St. Clare while on the boat. Eva is a kind and playful child who takes a liking to Tom. When she falls overboard, Tom saves her. Eva begs her father to buy Tom. St. Clare is an indulgent father, and trusting the good instincts of his rather exceptional little girl, he buys Tom to be their coachman. St. Clare lives in a mansion in New Orleans with his high-maintenance and vain wife Marie who imagines herself to have numerous sicknesses and is generally confined to bed. He had been in love with a woman before who ended up being forced to marry someone else. When he had found out that she still loved him and had been forced, it was too late and he had married Marie. St. Clare is kind and genial towards his slaves, and allows Eva to love them as her own family. Marie is of a very different opinion, and thinks that distinctions ought to be maintained between classes of people. In order to help out with raising Eva and managing other duties on the mansion, St. Clare brings his New England cousin Miss Ophelia to New Orleans: though the very opposite of St. Clare in terms of her strict, orderly, and industrious New England ethics, the two seem to appreciate each other and work well together in a kind of complementary way.

George and Eliza make their way towards Canada, but are stopped by Tom Loker and his gang hired by Haley to pursue them. George wounds Tom, and in the scuffle, the other men desert him. The injured Tom is taken to a Quaker settlement to recover, and George and Eliza continue on their way. Meanwhile, at the St. Clare's, a sad story is revealed about a slave in a neighboring estate, Prue, who gets drunk in order to alleviate her pain. Prue ends up whipped to death by her master; the story has a great effect on Eva. St. Clare and Ophelia engage in a lengthy debate on their beliefs, Ophelia berating him for being part of such an unjust system as slavery, and St. Clare showing up Ophelia as an unknowing and righteous northerner who doesn't know just how ingrained the system is. St. Clare feels that to keep his slaves happy and well-provided for is the best he can do. As a kind of challenge to Miss Ophelia, St. Clare mischievously buys a young, wild, and fiery girl named Topsy who has been mistreated, charging Ophelia with reforming her and essentially bringing her up. Topsy overwhelms Miss Ophelia, stealing things and asserting that she is just "bad" because she is black, something which she has had drummed into her. 

In the meanwhile, Chloe receives a letter from Tom, and decides to makes cakes to sell in order to earn money to go towards buying Tom back--Mrs. Shelby agrees to this plan. Back at the St. Clare's, Eva has contracted tuberculosis, and her health wears away. Even as she weakens, however, the child's goodness has a healing effect on those around her. For example, when the St. Clares summer at Lake Pontchartrain, Eva manages to soften her cousin Henrique towards his slave, Dodo. At Lake Pontchartrain, St. Clare and his brother Alfred argue over their views on slavery--Alfred takes the view that Africans are lower on the scale of human development and hence are rightfully subjugated. Back at home, Eva reforms Topsy by telling her that she loves her, and that Topsy must be good for her sake though she will soon be gone to heaven. Eva gives a lock of her hair to Topsy and also to all of the slaves on her father's estate, asking them to remember to be good to one another and to love one another when she has gone. Miss Ophelia overhears the conversation between Topsy and Eva and realizes she has not loved Topsy, and strives to be more like Eva. Eva dies, with a vision of heaven on her lips. After her death, St. Clare tries to come to the faith which has been so natural to his child, but try as he might, fails. Tom very nearly convinces him, and Tom promises him that he will not leave him until he comes to know God as well. Miss Ophelia, inspired to make Topsy her own, asks for legal custody of Topsy. Things seem to be going well as St. Clare prepares to free Tom (since it was Eva's wish), but unfortunately St. Clare is stabbed at a cafe while breaking up a fight. He dies, and true to Tom's word, he comes to God in his dying moment while Tom is around. St. Clare calls out to his mother in his dying breath, a woman with a Christ-like capacity to love, much like Eva.  

After St. Clare's death, Marie sends the slaves to a slave warehouse, despite Miss Ophelia's pleas. At the warehouse with Tom are two women named Susan and Emmeline, mother and daughter, who become separated in the auction. The tyrannical and cruel Simon Legree buys both Tom and Emmeline. Legree runs his place with an iron fist, brutalizing his slaves and teaching them to brutalize each other as well. He has two trained overseers, Sambo and Quimbo, whom he pits against each other in order to maximize his own power. Legree tries to make Tom into a brutal overseer as well, but Tom remains true to his faith. When he refuses to whip a woman named Lucy who hasn't filled her cotton sack quota for the day, Tom takes a brutal beating from the overseers, ordered by Legree. A half-black, half-white slave by the name of Cassy comes to make him feel better, bringing him water and nursing his wounds. Cassy is intensely cynical and doesn't believe in God because of what she has suffered--she was brought up well, only to marry a young lawyer who ditched her. Subsequently, she and her children were separately sold into slavery. She ended up at Legree's as kind of his mistress; Emmeline has come to replace Cassy since she is now older. Legree is revealed as not such a brave man, and highly superstitious: when the overseers bring to him Eva's golden lock (confiscated from Tom), he is deeply afraid because his pious mother once sent him a lock of hers upon her death, hoping that he would mend his evil ways.

George Harris and Eliza reach Canada, and Tom Loker becomes a reformed man after being nursed back to health by the Quakers. At Legree's, Cassy wants to kill Legree but Tom prevents her, telling her that the Lord has enjoined them to love all fellow men. Cassy and Emmeline hatch a plan to escape instead, which capitalizes on Legree's fear of ghosts. Cassy installs a bottle hanging from a rope in the garret so that howling sounds are made when the wind blew through the garret. Cassy and Emmeline then run away conspicuously, returning to hide in the garret, where Legree will not venture. Legree sends all of his men on a wild goose chase, thinking Cassy and Emmeline have taken towards the swamp. Legree in his rage tries to get an answer out of Tom and failing to do so, essentially beats him to death. In his dying breath, however, Tom manages to make converts out of Sambo and Quimbo. The young George Shelby too, has finally managed to locate Tom, and manages to have a final exchange with Tom before he dies. George gives Tom a good burial, and leaves to go home. It turns out that he is on the same boat as Cassy and Emmeline and some important discoveries are made: Cassy is Eliza's mother, and another woman on the boat, Madame de Thoux, is George Harris's sister. The group hatches a plan for a reunion in Canada. The reunited family eventually decide to resettle in Liberia and Emmeline goes with them as well, having found a good husband. The narrative includes an eloquent appeal from George as to his reasons for resettling: he wants to be a free man who also has his own African nation to be loyal to. Back in America, George Shelby frees all of his slaves and has them work for him as freemen receiving wages. Topsy also does well, eventually becoming a missionary to Africa.  

The final chapter is a kind of epilogue in which Harriet Beecher Stowe affirms that the stories she has given are drawn from real life examples. She provides various testimonies of true events which parallel the stories which she has given. She ends with an appeal to both northerners and southerners to band together to eliminate the unjust, un-Christian institution of slavery. She also stresses the importance of giving a Christian education to the freed slaves in order that they may then return to Africa and establish their own free Christian nation.  

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Uncle Tom's Cabin offers a really interesting case of how the periodical press shaped the content and purposes of the work as it was being published. As I mentioned above in the publication history section, Stowe's original ambitions for her text seemed much smaller. In terms of how the story unravels, the small-scale appeal of the work as a series of "sketches" (see Irving, an inaugural sketch-writer in America) is much more apparent in the earlier part of the work; the idea that a larger work of fiction might have weighty moral and political effects doesn't really crystallized until in the work. The earlier sections contain more addresses to the reader, and a sense that the narrator is taking the reader through the various scenes in order to show him/her the different aspects of slavery in the south. Later sections of the book contain fewer direct addresses to the reader since the work becomes markedly more novelistic, concentrating more on dialogue, characterization, and the unraveling of the plot, but the addresses that remain are markedly more bold in suggesting a correct Christian morality.
 
Stowe's preface for the first edition of the book publication interestingly tries to link together the small-scale beginnings as a series of "sketches" with its eventual large-scale impact. She writes directly that "The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race." Her decision to maintain that Uncle Tom's Cabin is a collection of mere sketches, I argue, importantly has to do with the sketch's closer connection to the "real life" element. Novels are the realm of romance and unreality, while journalistic sketches show a reader what happens in everyday life where s/he may not be able to experience it directly. Elsewhere in the preface, Stowe makes clear the importance of the connection between her fiction and real life: "The poet, the painter, and the artist now seek out and embellish the common and gentler humanities of life, and, under the allurements of fiction, breathe a humanizing and subduing influence, favorable to the development of the great principles of Christian brotherhood." In the final chapter, she offers testimonies of the real life characters including an "official" account from reformer Horace Mann and her husband's documentation of successfully educated blacks to stress the reality on which her fiction was based. In this final chapter, she calls fiction a "dramatization of reality" which would lead to healthful, moral effects--markedly distancing her fiction from anything romanticized or sensational.

The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon

Edition: The Lonely Londoners (Longman Caribbean Writer Series)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Lonely Londoners was published in 1956, a time when Britain was beginning to close the door to Commonwealth citizens. Prior to the mid-1950s and after WWII, the British government encouraged immigration to help fill in labor gaps created during war; the mass immigrations during this period from Afro-Caribbean areas became known collectively as the "windrush generation." Selvon's text thus registers the disheartening arrival and subsequent experiences of immigrants coming after Britain was closing its doors. Selvon's characters are of working-class background.

The sequel to The Lonely Londoners is Moses Ascending.

SUMMARY:
The novel is narrated in third person, in a West-Indian inflected dialect of English. Though the third person narration enables focalizations of different characters throughout, it most closely follows Moses Aloetta, a rather jaded older man who has lived in London longer than any of the others. At the start of the novel, Moses goes to meet "a fellar named Henry Oliver" at Waterloo station who has just arrived from Trinidad. At the same time, Moses's friend Tolroy is at the station meeting his family who have just arrived from Jamaica (it turns out that more of them have arrived than he has bargained for). Tanty, Tolroy's mother, is an outspoken woman who from the moment of arriving, gets her way in having a reporter take a picture of her whole family when he had planned to just take one of her.

Upon his arrival, Henry Oliver seems overly confident about his prospects, and Moses thinks he is naive.  Moses gives him the epithet "Sir Galahad" and offers him a place to stay for the night. Moses offers to help him find work, but Galahad, wanting to give off the impression that "everything all right," decides to go find work for himself. Once he sets off to the employment exchange, Galahad begins to feel out of place and confused: "Everybody doing something or going somewhere, is only he who walking stupid." He doesn't get far before he runs into Moses again and so Moses ends up going with him to the exchange, where Galahad obtains an unemployment card.

The next section of the novel introduces Cap, a Nigerian who came to London to study law but who ended up instead spending money on cigarettes and women. Cap manages to get along in London on his charm, at times getting into trouble and needing Moses to bail him out. Cap is dating an Austrian girl, who tells him he should try harder to get a job. Cap pretends that he gets a job at night, but instead he "went off to hustle woman as usual" and lies to her. At another point, he steals a watch from an English girl to finance a relationship with a German girl. He also ends up marrying a French girl, and borrowing money from his friend Daniel in order to take her out until fortuitously, she gets a job at a store. Sometimes, Cap gets himself into comical situations. In a particularly humorous episode, once Cap and Moses went out on Bayswater Road between the Arch and the Gate, and Cap accidentally takes home a "woman" who was actually a man. In short, Cap gets in all sorts of trouble, but "still Moses have compassion on him."

The following section tells about another character, Bart, in a similarly episodic manner. Bart, lighter skinned than the others, seems to have an easier time assimilating. He jealously guards his own money, and rarely lends it out. Bart gets into a relationship with a white girl and he is invited to meet her parents. Before Bart can tell the lie that he is Latin-American, the girl's father kicks him out because he "don't want no curly-hair children."

Meanwhile, in Tolroy's family, Lewis (Tolroy's sister's husband) finds work alongside Moses at a factory and imagines that his wife, Agnes, is unfaithful to him while he is away. When he returns home every night, he beat her and so eventually she left him. Tanty, shunned by her family for her naivete about London, actually scores some successes of her own: at a local store, she manages to get her way, insisting on paying on credit, and then later even setting up a system for other visitors to the store to do so as well. In another successful episode, Tanty rides the tube to retrieve a key from Agnes at her work.

Galahad is getting on better than might have been expected, and Moses looks on knowingly as Galahad revels in the dropping the names of landmarks in London (like "Charing Cross") to signal a sort of ownership over the city. Galahad manages to get a night job, and even take a white girl, Daisy, on a date to a movie and dinner. Afterwards, he has her over and though she's a bit prejudiced against his way of making tea and his West Indian English, Galahad tells Moses that the date has gone swimmingly.

Big City, also from Trinidad, likes to cuss a lot and to tell people that he is no small town fellow (hence his nickname). Big City has trouble with English forms after he gets into a car accident involving himself and a bus and needs help from Moses to "full" them up.

After this particular episodic character sketch, the narration switches into a lengthy passage in stream of consciousness without punctuation. This passage gives impressions of London nightlife in the summer, and tells of various adventures the men have (usually with women), including one in which Moses takes a girl home and is terrified of what the police will do to him when she seems to be getting sick under his watch. The narration's blurring and accelerated effects might be encapsulated in these final lines: "and Moses sigh a long sigh like a man who live life and see nothing at all in it and who frighten as the years go by wondering what it is all about."

The narrative then snaps back into character sketches, introducing a character from Barbados called "Five Past Twelve" because he is blacker than midnight itself. In this section, Harris who likes to think he is in the know as far as English customs go, throws a party at St. Pancras. At the party, Harris is embarrassed by his fellow immigrants, afraid that they will "make rab and turn the dance into a brawl." Tolroy brings his whole family including Tanty, and once again, Tanty is her outspoken self when she puts Harris in his place about his shame.

In a particularly bad season for work, Galahad's hunger reduces him to catching a pigeon in the park to roast. A white woman is horrified, and insensitively calls him a monster and calls the police. Moses and Galahad talk about their difficult lives in London, yet oddly once they've been there for a while, they don't want to go back to their home countries. They wonder if it has to do in part with the mistaken notion of London as a place of opportunity. In a "p.s. episode," Cap also catches seagulls from his windowsill for food.

The final scene is slightly more uplifting; the boys go to Moses's place every Sunday as if it were a kind of church, showing that in their talking over girls, the difficulty of getting work, and feelings of alienation, there is a kind of valuable community that coheres. The novel closes with Moses looking out upon the Thames and sensing a kind of sublimity while thinking about the vastness of London life: "it had a greatness and a vastness in the way he was feeling tonight, like it was something solid after feeling everything else give way." He even imagines whether he might ever write a book.  

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS: (A previous essay I wrote on print culture in The Lonely Londoners and its sequel, Moses Ascending)

As noted by James Procter in Dwelling Places, the characters in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners use the discursive power of naming (and re-naming) places in London to derive a sense of belonging. For characters like Galahad who are new to London, to be an Englishman in London is a matter of recognizing and using a number of sign systems in relation to categories such as “music and song, film, literature, conversation.”[1] In this essay I wish to highlight the importance of one particular sign system in Selvon’s fiction, namely, the sign system of newspapers and print-journalism. With Benedict Anderson’s idea of print-culture’s power in the facilitation of imagined communities in mind, I suggest that Moses Aloetta’s eventual displacement within the house that he owns in Moses Ascending is paralleled by his resistance to newspapers and print-journalism and consequent resistance to imagined communities that are made available to him.

London’s vastness as a metropolis necessitates an imagined community; in The Lonely Londoners, West Indians with memories of tight-knit communities in their home nations are acutely aware of this necessity. To the new, West Indian Londoner, the metropolis “divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers.”[2] Selvon’s boys recognize that newspapers allow strangers in the metropolis to form links with one another by way of a shared readership.

For the most part, Selvon’s characters in Lonely Londoners believe in the power of shared-readership as a means for gaining at least partial acceptance into the larger community. Big City tells his friends that he attended a party with “bigshots” that one would read about in the Evening Standard, thereby legitimating the very imagined community that would never print his name.[3] Though Big City is aware of his own exclusion, he suggests that his involvement with a print-worthy event signifies at least partial belonging. The narrator’s description of how Harris, meticulous about significations of Englishness, dresses, with “bowler hat and umbrella, and briefcase tuck under the arm with The Times fold up in the pocket so the name would show” demonstrates newcomer complicity in legitimizing the power of print-culture’s signage in representing the dominant, white, literate, imagined community.

In Moses Ascending, however, Selvon’s boys become more critical of the white monopoly over print-culture and the imagined community which it produces. Galahad, more confident now in his place in the metropolis, has joined the Black Power movement, whose members aspire to produce their own newspaper to counter the “untruths” borne from the traditionally accepted, white newspapers. “You know these English papers does only have contorted views of the scene. If we get our own, we can tell people the truth.”[4] What Galahad does not realize is that in supporting the new paper, he is merely complying in the creation of another imagined community, whose print-narrative may be as “contorted” as that of the white newspapers.

Moses demonstrates that he is critical of both representation white-London print and Black Power print. Of newspapers written by whites, Moses remarks, “The first crocus in the spring is seen by a black man, and he harks to the cuckoo long before all them other people what write to newspapers to say they was the first.”[5] On the other hand, Moses wants nothing to do with Brenda’s Black Power newspaper either, preferring that his white man-servant appear on the front page instead of himself. Galahad tells Moses that in writing a memoir, he must report on “what’s happening” socially and politically, but Moses resists because he wants to write something “personal and intimate” which does not cling to the imagined communities of social and political happenings, the stuff of print-culture.[6] To be sure, Moses is ambivalent—he proudly boasts about reading the Times, News of the World, and the Observer while his white man-servant reads comics and he also gives Galahad’s suggestion a try by taking his reporter’s pad to the Paki’s sheep slaughter and the Black Power rally. However, his ambivalence renders him unable to whole-heartedly embrace either the imagined community of white-London or that of Black Power.

Unfortunately, because he resists both imagined communities that are available to him, Moses ends up without a comfortable place in his own house. Brenda’s success in creating a new imagined community in opposition to the one of white-London by printing a newspaper for Black Power is followed upon by her ascension to a more desirable place in the house. Bob, who has gained acceptance into this newly minted imagined community by getting his picture onto the front page of the first issue, has also ascended in the house. Moses, who resists accepting the imagined communities made available (or partially available) to him, is “displaced” into the basement of his own home.

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[1] James Procter, “Dwelling Places,” in Dwelling Places, Postwar Black British Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 52.

[2] Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (New York: Longman Publishing Group, 1985), 74.

[3] Ibid., 101.

[4] Sam Selvon, Moses Ascending (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1984), 13.

[5] Ibid., 7.

[6] Ibid., 42.