Faulks on Fiction.
Sebastian Faulks.
INTRODUCTION.
To a large extent the villain, like the hero, is out of place in the novel. While the hero came from epic poetry, the villain sprang from the theatre. As realism became the dominant form in fiction, however, his histrionic ways began to become an embarrassment; that he survived at all is a testament to how useful he could be.
In a novel, the villain is the one who knows what's going on; he has the gen; he holds the keys to the plot, in both senses of the word. Barbara Covett in Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal not only manipulates her victim, she literally controls the story for the reader: 'The task of telling it has fallen into my hands'. Fosco in The Woman in White demonstrates the glamour of superior knowledge; the challenge for Wilkie Collins was to retain or release the details of what Fosco alone knows in a way that kept his readers agog. Fosco is also a foreigner, which lends him extra mystery: he may have weird Continental powers (chemistry, Mesmerism . . .) that will be beyond his English adversary, Walter Hartright. What's more, Fosco is a count a title that doesn't exist in Britain but was much favoured for villains, including Bram Stoker's Count Dracula and the villain of Ann Radcliffe's Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, Count Montoni.
The villain is a seducer. Sometimes, as with Fagin, this is in an asexual way he seduces Oliver Twist with laughter, food and occasional kindness. Long John Silver in Treasure Island seems to be a kind of hypnotist: 'He fixed his unfathomable gray eyes on me, with that cold, clear, irresistible glitter in them . . . An unutterable suspicion that his mind is prying into mine overcomes me at these times . . .'. With Fosco, it is the sexual fascination he has for his most worthy adversary, Marian Halcombe, that prevents her from seeing his deviousness more clearly. In Robert Lovelace, Richardson's villain in Clarissa, sex is the explicit driving force for a million words of seduction and rebuff. However, Lovelace's schemes for sleeping with Clarissa Harlowe so thrilled the readers of the novel that Richardson had to rewrite the book to underline Lovelace's immorality. There is always the danger that the villain will be so attractive to a reader hungry for intrigue that he will suspend his moral judgement and so thwart the high-minded author. It was quite a coup, I always felt, that Howard Kirk, the apparently irresistible seducer of Malcolm Bradbury's novel The History Man, remained in all ways repulsive to the reader.
Villains often have not only the power of knowledge and sex but of language, too. Lovelace is high on poetry for much of the time. Richardson consulted an anthology of verse to keep the quotations coming, and it sometimes seems that Lovelace needs this rhetoric to maintain the heat of his desire. Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita relies on his high-flown language to make his illegal urge seem tenable. Barbara Covett uses tart phrasing to expose the vacuity of her colleagues and of her prey.
When I wrote a novel called Engleby in 2005, I didn't know when I began it that Mike Engleby, the narrator, was going to be a villain. I knew that his voice was not quite right, like a radio turned slightly off-station, but I had no idea where he was taking me. Readers' reactions brought home to me the different standards they apply to people in books. One reader told me she loved Mike Engleby. I said, 'Well, it's fine to sympathise until you find out what he's done.' 'No,' she said. 'Even when I found out, I still liked him.'
At the start of the twentieth century, the dramatic inheritance of the villain became more cumbersome, as a value system emerged that was based on new ideas of psychological exploration. If every human motive could be explained, the idea of villainy could look clumsy. In France, Emile Zola's novels adhered to a dogma of character determined by social circumstance, and this made moral distinctions marginal; while in Emma Bovary, Flaubert had already presented a day-dreaming adulteress as a person to be viewed not as a caution but as a fascinating and suggestive case. Zola's Therese Raquin in 1867 told the story of a woman who, with her lover, murders her husband, but tried to present her as a 'scientific' case study. Mauriac's Therese Desqueyroux, in the 1927 novel of the same name, tries to poison her husband, but the stifling nature of her marriage and the dreaded life of the bourgeoisie15 were presented as exculpation. In some ways these are post-moral books; they are certainly post-religious.
The idea that a criminal should be explained found few takers among British novelists, which is puzzling when you consider that the natural drama of such a situation the tension between outer and inner life, between social norm and personal reality was elsewhere the mainstay of the serious novel. For British writers, the villain tended to remain the servant of the plot, the instigator of the action par excellence. In Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, Ronald Merrick is a post-Freudian villain. He is a bad man, but he is bad for given reasons; he has, in fact, a complete psychopathology and is presented to us as someone wholly explicable in these terms. This is clearly quite different from Fagin or Fosco, where we are not given any childhood experience or analysis of motive. The shape of Merrick's darkness is not ours, but it finds an echo. We all know that the distinctive shapes of our personalities our strengths as well as our desires and weaknesses could, in the wrong circumstances, become deformities. The interesting thing about Merrick, however, is that although he is a modern character in the tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner sense, Paul Scott does not actually ask us to forgive. Merrick, for all the scrupulousness with which Scott makes his unconscious and conscious desires known to the reader, remains a villain.
Barbara Covett is Merrick taken one step further. She is our contemporary, and her circumstances are much less bizarre than Merrick's. With Merrick you feel that, with a flex of your imagination, you can understand him; with Barbara you feel that, had the cards of your life fallen a little differently, you could be her.
The trajectory of the British villain is complete. Lovelace is so indebted to the theatre that sometimes his letters to his friend Belford include stage directions. The highpoint of the villain, as with so much else, is in the work of Dickens, where the stage background is fully assimilated into novelistic plot, as in Quilp, the dwarfish villain of The Old Curiosity Shop, who, with a liking for hot brandy, has a way of 'making himself more fiery and furious . . . heating his malice and mischievousness till they boil'. By the end of the Victorian period, the theatrical inheritance is starting to unbalance the villain again, leading to such melodramatic creations as Bram Stoker's Dracula and Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde; the secondary villain of The Woman in White, Sir Percival Glyde, seems to have strayed out of pantomime. Freud and his followers, though at first ignored in Britain, eventually gave a helping hand to novelists by stressing scientifically or otherwise the universal knowability of motive.
You can argue that the principal difference between a twenty-first and an eighteenth-century villain is that the modern one is much harder to spot. You would look askance at Lovelace and run a mile from Fagin, but you wouldn't give Barbara Covett a second glance which is a large part of her awful charm.
Clarissa refuses the advances of Robert Lovelace (1748 edition) VILLAINS.
To a large extent the villain, like the hero, is out of place in the novel. While the hero came from epic poetry, the villain sprang from the theatre. As realism became the dominant form in fiction, however, his histrionic ways began to become an embarrassment; that he survived at all is a testament to how useful he could be.
In a novel, the villain is the one who knows what's going on; he has the gen; he holds the keys to the plot, in both senses of the word. Barbara Covett in Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal not only manipulates her victim, she literally controls the story for the reader: 'The task of telling it has fallen into my hands'. Fosco in The Woman in White demonstrates the glamour of superior knowledge; the challenge for Wilkie Collins was to retain or release the details of what Fosco alone knows in a way that kept his readers agog. Fosco is also a foreigner, which lends him extra mystery: he may have weird Continental powers (chemistry, Mesmerism . . .) that will be beyond his English adversary, Walter Hartright. What's more, Fosco is a count a title that doesn't exist in Britain but was much favoured for villains, including Bram Stoker's Count Dracula and the villain of Ann Radcliffe's Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, Count Montoni.
The villain is a seducer. Sometimes, as with Fagin, this is in an asexual way he seduces Oliver Twist with laughter, food and occasional kindness. Long John Silver in Treasure Island seems to be a kind of hypnotist: 'He fixed his unfathomable gray eyes on me, with that cold, clear, irresistible glitter in them . . . An unutterable suspicion that his mind is prying into mine overcomes me at these times . . .'. With Fosco, it is the sexual fascination he has for his most worthy adversary, Marian Halcombe, that prevents her from seeing his deviousness more clearly. In Robert Lovelace, Richardson's villain in Clarissa, sex is the explicit driving force for a million words of seduction and rebuff. However, Lovelace's schemes for sleeping with Clarissa Harlowe so thrilled the readers of the novel that Richardson had to rewrite the book to underline Lovelace's immorality. There is always the danger that the villain will be so attractive to a reader hungry for intrigue that he will suspend his moral judgement and so thwart the high-minded author. It was quite a coup, I always felt, that Howard Kirk, the apparently irresistible seducer of Malcolm Bradbury's novel The History Man, remained in all ways repulsive to the reader.
Villains often have not only the power of knowledge and sex but of language, too. Lovelace is high on poetry for much of the time. Richardson consulted an anthology of verse to keep the quotations coming, and it sometimes seems that Lovelace needs this rhetoric to maintain the heat of his desire. Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita relies on his high-flown language to make his illegal urge seem tenable. Barbara Covett uses tart phrasing to expose the vacuity of her colleagues and of her prey.
When I wrote a novel called Engleby in 2005, I didn't know when I began it that Mike Engleby, the narrator, was going to be a villain. I knew that his voice was not quite right, like a radio turned slightly off-station, but I had no idea where he was taking me. Readers' reactions brought home to me the different standards they apply to people in books. One reader told me she loved Mike Engleby. I said, 'Well, it's fine to sympathise until you find out what he's done.' 'No,' she said. 'Even when I found out, I still liked him.'
At the start of the twentieth century, the dramatic inheritance of the villain became more cumbersome, as a value system emerged that was based on new ideas of psychological exploration. If every human motive could be explained, the idea of villainy could look clumsy. In France, Emile Zola's novels adhered to a dogma of character determined by social circumstance, and this made moral distinctions marginal; while in Emma Bovary, Flaubert had already presented a day-dreaming adulteress as a person to be viewed not as a caution but as a fascinating and suggestive case. Zola's Therese Raquin in 1867 told the story of a woman who, with her lover, murders her husband, but tried to present her as a 'scientific' case study. Mauriac's Therese Desqueyroux, in the 1927 novel of the same name, tries to poison her husband, but the stifling nature of her marriage and the dreaded life of the bourgeoisie15 were presented as exculpation. In some ways these are post-moral books; they are certainly post-religious.
The idea that a criminal should be explained found few takers among British novelists, which is puzzling when you consider that the natural drama of such a situation the tension between outer and inner life, between social norm and personal reality was elsewhere the mainstay of the serious novel. For British writers, the villain tended to remain the servant of the plot, the instigator of the action par excellence. In Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, Ronald Merrick is a post-Freudian villain. He is a bad man, but he is bad for given reasons; he has, in fact, a complete psychopathology and is presented to us as someone wholly explicable in these terms. This is clearly quite different from Fagin or Fosco, where we are not given any childhood experience or analysis of motive. The shape of Merrick's darkness is not ours, but it finds an echo. We all know that the distinctive shapes of our personalities our strengths as well as our desires and weaknesses could, in the wrong circumstances, become deformities. The interesting thing about Merrick, however, is that although he is a modern character in the tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner sense, Paul Scott does not actually ask us to forgive. Merrick, for all the scrupulousness with which Scott makes his unconscious and conscious desires known to the reader, remains a villain.
Barbara Covett is Merrick taken one step further. She is our contemporary, and her circumstances are much less bizarre than Merrick's. With Merrick you feel that, with a flex of your imagination, you can understand him; with Barbara you feel that, had the cards of your life fallen a little differently, you could be her.
The trajectory of the British villain is complete. Lovelace is so indebted to the theatre that sometimes his letters to his friend Belford include stage directions. The highpoint of the villain, as with so much else, is in the work of Dickens, where the stage background is fully assimilated into novelistic plot, as in Quilp, the dwarfish villain of The Old Curiosity Shop, who, with a liking for hot brandy, has a way of 'making himself more fiery and furious . . . heating his malice and mischievousness till they boil'. By the end of the Victorian period, the theatrical inheritance is starting to unbalance the villain again, leading to such melodramatic creations as Bram Stoker's Dracula and Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde; the secondary villain of The Woman in White, Sir Percival Glyde, seems to have strayed out of pantomime. Freud and his followers, though at first ignored in Britain, eventually gave a helping hand to novelists by stressing scientifically or otherwise the universal knowability of motive.
You can argue that the principal difference between a twenty-first and an eighteenth-century villain is that the modern one is much harder to spot. You would look askance at Lovelace and run a mile from Fagin, but you wouldn't give Barbara Covett a second glance which is a large part of her awful charm.
Clarissa refuses the advances of Robert Lovelace (1748 edition).
'BUFFETING THE MOON'
ROBERT LOVELACE.
Clarissa is the longest novel in English and Robert Lovelace is its dominant character. Over the space of a million words, twice the number in War and Peace, his high spirits, erotic ambition, wit, stratagems and manic determination overshadow all else including the eponymous heroine. The book is a battle of wills that ends with the death of both combatants. Lovelace is a criminal villain in deed because he rapes a woman; he is a villain in the conception of his Puritan author because his lustful urges embody the low nature of the fallen human being. But in his own eyes, he is a villain only for his 'contrivances' the word he gives to his deceits and trickery. He is inclined to excuse himself even these, however, because they are no more than a slightly unpalatable means to an end the seduction of Clarissa in which he sees no shame. He is a villain in the literary sense, in that he has all the traits that novelists who followed Richardson would incorporate into such characters: he alone is in charge of the plot and its momentum; he is dynamic, charming and superficially attractive; and his sense of his own superiority finds an expression in his delight in language, which he uses more effectively than the other characters. Most villains are good with words, as Humbert Humbert noted in Lolita: 'You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.'
Yet there is a paradox at the heart of Lovelace: is he really a villain to the reader? It is a matter of historical fact that many of Richardson's readers responded sympathetically to Lovelace, arguing that he was not that bad, that he was clearly capable of reform and that if Clarissa had had a greater degree of self-knowledge she could have avoided the violence that befalls her. Richardson was appalled by this response, and extensively revised the book between editions to underline Lovelace's villainy, trying to remove any instances of behaviour where he might establish a sympathetic foothold in the reader's imagination. Some of the additions strike an odd note, as for instance a plot to trick Anna Howe (Clarissa's friend and correspondent), her mother and maid on to a boat and have his way with them a plot that lacks any of Lovelace's tense poetry and seems shoved in merely to blacken his name.
What we have as a result is a very conflicted character, a man who appears at times so nervously driven as to be unstable, perhaps almost unwell. For all his intellect and his charm, there is a void in Lovelace. He is good at using other people, but seldom understands them. There is a trace of the sociopath. This seems to be partly because of internal stresses as imagined by the author, but may also derive from a tension between what Richardson moralistically required of Lovelace and the effects that the character's autonomous energy, once unleashed, begins to generate in the open-minded reader. The genie is out of the bottle, and one sometimes has the sense of an author running a step or two behind his creation, trying to limit the damage of his exuberance.
Richardson builds up the expectation for Lovelace's delayed entrance into the novel by having Clarissa quote the opinions of others in her letters to Anna Howe. If Richardson had been trying to write a romance, he could hardly have made his hero sound more raffishly attractive. He is spendthrift, but generous; he is capable of financial self-control and jealous of his independence from family financial ties. He is sexually dangerous to the extent that his tenants lock up their prettier daughters when he visits but has no single mistress, preferring 'newelty' or constant challenge. He has a group of close male friends, some 'as bad as himself'; he has a good head for drink and a great way with words. While he is an inveterate plotter, he is also good-humoured and loves 'as well to take a jest as to give one'. He would be a challenge for a romantic heroine as formidable as Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Bennet, but, alas, Clarissa Harlowe is only eighteen years old. She lacks the sparkle, wit or maturity to be a match for Lovelace; such gifts for flirtation and friendship as she timidly displays in the early part of the book are withdrawn as she becomes reduced to a single position that of resilience under siege. While this process seems psychologically sound it is probably how a girl of her age and background would react it robs the novel of a dynamic complexity and throws the spotlight more and more on to Lovelace to provide the narrative energy.
Spotlights are what he likes, and he has a theatrical heritage in Jacobean and Restoration drama (plays which Richardson as a Puritan may not have seen though there is evidence he had been to see tragedies but as a professional printer would have read). Lovelace's first appearance at the Harlowe household involves him wounding Clarissa's brother James in the arm with a sword after James has attacked him. The Harlowe family, embodiments of a new and powerful middle class made rich by 'trade', close ranks against Lovelace, the decadent aristocrat, and steer their prized Clarissa towards a repulsive but respectable local landowner called Roger Solmes. Lovelace is delighted by the Harlowes' response, as he knows that such parental clumsiness can only inflame Clarissa's interest in him.
When we first meet Lovelace in his own words (not until Letter 31), we see how conniving, nervous and brilliant he is. 'All my fear arises from the little hold I have in the heart of this charming frost-piece', he tells his fellow rake, Belford. Clarissa represents the greatest challenge womanhood has yet held out to him; he will take her and have her as his revenge upon the only woman he loved, who was unfaithful to him. 'To carry off such a girl [as Clarissa] in spite of her watchful and implacable friends; and in spite of a prudence and reserve that I never met with in any of the sex; what a triumph! What a triumph over the whole sex!'
As Clarissa fights off her family and their plans for her, Lovelace offers her hope, escape and vague offers of marriage. He writes to her from the 'Ivy Cavern in the Coppice', at the end of the Harlowes' garden, where he spends the night outside. He signs himself 'Your ever-adoring, yet almost desponding Lovelace', and you would think that any eighteen-year-old's head would be a little turned. And indeed, his little 'frost-piece' does melt a fraction. She agrees to meet him in the garden and is tricked away with him in a coach to St Albans, where the gravity of what she has done sinks in. She writes to Anna: 'You will soon hear . . . that your Clarissa Harlowe is gone off with a man!'
Now we hear much more from Lovelace, as he gloats over his prize. 'She is in the next apartment! Securely mine! Mine for ever!' He can't quite believe his good luck, particularly in the way the Harlowes have unwittingly fallen in with his plot: 'The whole stupid family were in a combination to do my business for me.' With Clarissa, he now becomes a model of earnest delicacy, undertaking to 'reform' himself by a study of religion, to make himself worthy of her. In his letters to Belford, however, he is triumphalist: 'In short, my whole soul is joy. When I go to bed I laugh myself asleep; and I awake either laughing or singing . . . For why? I am not yet reformed enough!'
The awful thing is that this is really quite funny. Clarissa is a nice enough girl, but can hardly remain a virgin for ever. What would be so dreadful in becoming another of Robert Lovelace's 'conquests'? Clarissa's problem is that she has been manoeuvred into an impossible position. She can face neither the prospect of returning home and being compelled to marry the absurd Roger Solmes nor that of becoming Lovelace's travelling mistress. Lovelace's famous plotting is not quite as good as it seems. Clarissa might very well 'give' herself to him if it were not under such duress; he needs to contrive a choice for her in which sleeping with him would not be the lesser of two evils, but something the natural woman in her could choose freely.
By now Clarissa is confused. 'What concerns me is that every time I see this man, I am still at a greater loss than before what to make of him . . . He looks with more meaning, I verily think, than he used to look; yet not more serious; not less gay I don't know how he looks'. Words fail her but not him. Lovelace has 'never had a more illustrious subject to exercise my pen upon': he is a writer if not by profession at least by occupation; and he does it well. 'How it swells my pride, to have been able to outwit such a vigilant charmer! I am taller by half a yard in my imagination than I was. I look down upon every body now. Last night I was still more extravagant. I took off my hat, as I walked, to see if the place were not scorched, supposing it had brushed down a star; and before I put it on again, in mere wantonness and heart's ease, I was for buffeting the moon.'
With no indelicacy, Richardson takes the reader close to the workings of desire. 'Many a one have I taught to dress, and helped to undress', Lovelace reflects. He talks about Clarissa's clothes a great deal, as a true womaniser would; men less devoted to the chase tend not to notice such things as shoes and dresses. By having Lovelace talk about Clarissa's clothes, Richardson can, without indelicacy, invite the reader to think of her body. Not that Lovelace is shy to talk about her skin, too, and the veins he sees beneath. 'Oh Belford! What still more inimitable beauties did it [a handkerchief over the cleavage] not conceal!' He apparently sees her heart beating beneath her dress . . .
Lovelace is convinced, almost quoting Alexander Pope's Epistle to a Lady, that every woman 'is a rake in her heart', and that 'what they think, I act'. In other words, the demure female exterior is a sham, put up for social reasons; women are as lustful as men. His reason for thinking so is that while rakes prefer a woman with the appearance of modesty, such women 'generally prefer an impudent man'. And, he argues, 'Whence can this be, but from a likeness in nature?' Later, in Letter 228, he writes, 'Show me a woman and I'll show thee a plotter.' He thus projects his own two dominant qualities, rakishness and plotting, on to the female sex as a whole; he really identifies with women, and this is one thing that makes him so convincing as a womaniser. Yet he can also be a professional seducer, detached and opportunistic. He recounts how he tries a risque joke in female company or even shows a lewd picture and gauges from the reaction of the women present how deep their sensual knowledge is and thus how easy a prey they may turn out to be. He loves their clothes, their hair, their manners in a devoted way. It reminded me of Mickey Sabbath, the main character of Philip Roth's extraordinary novel Sabbath's Theater. Sabbath does not have a job because he cannot spare the time from chasing skirt; it is far too serious and time-consuming a business to leave room for something as petty as work. What Sabbath and Lovelace have in common is the ability to identify with women, really to adore their femaleness, and yet, when necessary, to stand apart and view them as the polar attraction.
What an extraordinary man Robert Lovelace is. Excess appears to be his norm. He thinks little of spending the night in a bleak coppice adjoining the Harlowes' grounds, where, with his wig and linen frozen, kneeling on the 'hoar moss' on one knee, he writes a letter to Clarissa with frozen fingers, resting the paper on the other knee. His feet lose their circulation so badly that for some minutes they won't bear his weight when he tries to stand again. But 'love and rage' eventually get his circulation moving. The neurotic, obsessive detail of his descriptions of Clarissa's clothes and skin, and the manic longing of his imagination for 'what lies beneath' combine to make him appear at times quite seriously unbalanced. Yet he never allows his undoubted good nature which lies in a commingling of judgement, wit and generosity to get the better of him. When he has managed to persuade Clarissa to flee with him by telling her she will be discovered in a compromising situation by her parents, having met him in the garden, he begins to laugh at the thought of his triumph: 'Flying from friends she was resolved not to abandon to the man she was determined not to go off with? . . . I must here lay down my pen to hold my sides.' There is something diabolic in this laughter because the hilarity has become detached from circumstance; it is what psychologists call 'inappropriate'. Yet the reader cannot quite condemn a man with the ability to reflect a la Wilde: 'I fancy, by her circumspection, and her continual grief, that she expects some mischief from me. I don't care to disappoint anybody I have a value for.'
He moves Clarissa to lodgings in London, though the house is, unknown to her, a genteel brothel. One night, a fire breaks out, and Lovelace flies to Clarissa's room to 'save' her; he discovers her 'with nothing on but an under-petticoat, her lovely bosom half-open, and her feet just slipped into her shoes'. There is something comic in this carry-on, as the seducer is defeated by the chill of his 'frost-piece' while simultaneously surprising her in increasing stages of undress: 'This assemblage of beauties offered itself to my ravished sight', he writes, where the word 'ravished' pleads for sympathy, yet seems sinister in context. He 'spares' her, though he believes he had a 'right' not to. Then he is ashamed to go downstairs without having made love to her for fear of the mockery that his failure will excite in the madam of the house, two of whose whores are previous 'conquests'. The ebb and flow of feeling, from dark to absurd and back again, is precisely caught by Richardson in this scene, which evokes some sympathy for Lovelace and looks hard at the complicated machinery of desire.
As if this tension were not enough, there is sometimes a sense in which Lovelace's breadth of reference and facility with words make him seem enslaved not just by sex but by rhetoric. He compares himself to Hannibal and Clarissa to a doe or bird, likely to be caught in a snare; he is a word-driven man, and we are free to wonder whether someone who had fewer of Rochester's poems by heart would be able to keep himself at such a pitch of passion. He uses flighty verbal constructions to avoid facing uncomfortable judgements. ''Tis a plotting villain of a heart; it ever was and ever will be, I doubt. Such a joy when any roguery is going forward! I so little its master! A head likewise so well turned to answer the triangular varlet's impulses.' By portraying his impulses as organs of the body (head/heart) and then personifying one into a 'varlet', he distances himself from them, as though they were somehow independent beings, not subject to the control of a unified personality. Lovelace's life is lived by the lights of the much-quoted poetry of others, so much so that he sometimes seems estranged from his true self. The critic Ian Watt suggested that Clarissa is equally divided, unable to locate or trust her warmer feelings for Lovelace because of externally acquired restraint. But even were it otherwise, even if she had grown up in a less middle-class and Puritan family, with some of the laissez-aller of her social superiors or inferiors, would she specifically have warmed to Lovelace? It seems a large presumption, though there are many suggestions that she is, to use a Wildean phrase, 'far from indifferent' to him. When Lovelace is apparently taken ill in London with a 'vomiting of blood in great quantities', Clarissa finds herself concerned and tells Anna Howe that this new feeling for him 'has taught me more than I knew of myself'. In this letter (212), she seems on the point of 'falling in love' with him. 'I hope my reason will gather strength enough from his imperfections . . . to enable me to keep my passions under- What can we do more than govern ourselves by the temporary lights lent us?' The break in the sentence after the word 'under' gives a graphic idea of how close she is to 'succumbing', and this letter as much as any in this huge book gives a sense of the DNA of the eighteen-year-old girl and makes her seem interestingly more than the 'frost-piece' of Lovelace's jibe or the flirt-in-denial of Anna Howe's projection. (Clarissa's surname, with its uncomfortable suggestion of 'harlot', meanwhile, seems chosen to complicate matters to suggest subliminally that there could be a price for which she would comply the name of that price being, in my view, independence: in other words, the option of sleeping with Lovelace of her own free will, without the thought that it is a choice between the Scylla of sex with him and the Charybdis of life with Roger Solmes.) The reason we keep reading this immensely long story of a deadlock is that we sense there is room for manoeuvre. Dr Johnson remarked that 'there is always something [Clarissa] prefers to the truth', but we feel she could yet recognise it. Clarissa may well be almost 'in love with' Lovelace at the beginning, but is not aware of her own emotions because her self-knowledge is clouded by her fear of sex. By the time she can admit such feelings, Lovelace's behaviour has disqualified him from being loved. There may also be a moment at which Lovelace's feeling for Clarissa stops being a mixture of lust, challenge and contempt, and purifies itself into something close to love; but by then Clarissa can no longer reciprocate. It is this sense of emotional harmony destroyed by time that gives the novel a tragic dimension.
When the pulse of Lovelace's rhetoric gives him peace to confront his own moral position reasonably, he exonerates himself of bad faith or evil intent. His 'contrivances', he admits, are deceitful, but his aim is a single seduction and think of all the girls he has not seduced while working on Clarissa. Furthermore, she is an unmarried girl; so he is not cuckolding anyone. He suggests that far from being a bad man, he is merely an honest and self-aware one; most men, if they were truthful, would like to do what he is attempting to sleep with Clarissa Harlowe.
Such intervals of calm are rare, however, and become more so when Clarissa escapes from Mrs Sinclair's. Lovelace is demented to think that 'some villain, worse than myself, who adores her not as I adore her, may have seized her' (Letter 228). He tracks her down to Hampstead and visits her (in a scene complete with stage directions that shows much of Richardson's theatrical conception of the character), disguised as a gouty old man. Clarissa is tricked back to Mrs Sinclair's bawdy house, where Lovelace reveals to Belford that he is considering the use of force. 'But would I not have avoided it if I could? Have I not tried every other method? And have I any other recourse left me?' He convinces himself that once he has taken her virginity, she will be too ashamed to tell how it took place but will be content to marry him. Again, he is not quite the plotter he believes himself to be. In a formidable moment, Clarissa later tells him, 'That man who has been the villain to me that you have been shall never make me his wife.'
The detail of what takes place is, to put it mildly, slight. When I first read this book at the age of nineteen, I was only aware of a change in the attitudes of the characters some pages after the event. Had I missed something? Yes. It was Letter 257, which reads in its entirety: 'And now, Belford, I can go no farther. The affair is over. Clarissa lives. And I am Your humble servant, R. Lovelace.' I was probably not the first reader, dizzy with nearly 900 pages of intermittently feverish prose, to blink and miss an understated climax. I was annoyed with myself. It was like reaching the summit of Mount Everest in the dark and only finding out that one had passed over it when almost back at base camp.
Yet reading the letter again this time, I thought its brevity effective. It may have been imposed by reasons of propriety and by Richardson's religious scruples, yet how eloquent it is. All post-coital tristesse is in those few words. Lovelace's passion, wit and erudition have been inflated by the great bellows of his rhetoric; and now the air has all gone out of him. One senses his disappointment, not perhaps so much with the sexual experience itself, but with the fact that he has wrongfully obtained something whose unobtainability had given shape and momentum to his life.
'SOME LOATHSOME REPTILE'
FAGIN.
The first thing you notice about Oliver Twist is the mock-heroic style, indebted to Fielding, and the slight lack of confidence by Dickens's standards it suggests. It is an early book, Dickens's second, and started to appear in serial form, in 1837, before The Pickwick Papers had finished its periodical publication. Some of what he learned from writing Oliver Twist may have made its way into the later parts of Pickwick so that, as one critic wittily remarked, there is the remarkable phenomenon of an author whose second book influenced his first.
While hesitant in some ways and mechanical in others, the novel shares with the best of Dickens the odd sense of portraying something that was always there. The workhouse, the child at large on dusty roads, the gang of thieves, Bill Sikes swinging from a rope on a chimney pot . . . It is as though these people and scenes were part of a collective memory, needing only the brilliant beam of Dickens's imagination to illuminate them. Of course, we sigh, Dodger, Nancy . . . How are you? The character who seems most archetypal, the figure who has outgrown and outlived the rattling machinery of the inheritance-based plot, is Fagin.
This is odd, because Fagin is not an archetype at all; it is merely the conviction and ferocity of Dickens's presentation that makes him seem so. He runs a gang of boy thieves who pick the pockets of rich gentlemen for watches and handkerchiefs; he is also the agent for a housebreaker, Sikes, and a prostitute, Nancy. He is part uncle to the boys, part pimp, part fence and all Jew. This last aspect of him is the oddest. It is not shown in any religious devotion or dietary observance indeed, the very first glimpse we catch of Fagin is of him frying sausages, which we presume are made of pork. He is a Jew only in that Dickens repeatedly and insistently calls him one. There is no evidence to suggest that pimping and thieving were particularly Jewish occupations in the mid-nineteenth century, though the historic denial of full voting rights and citizenship to Jewish people would certainly have meant they were over-represented in crime figures. But Dickens's conception of Fagin as a Jew seems impulsive, almost random. Perhaps it sounded exotic or colourful; maybe it stood as a contrast to the older London of Bill Sikes. The odd thing is that it adds nothing to Fagin; his religious and cultural background is probably the only part of him that has no bearing on how he behaves.
This is not all that surprising. Novelists who work at the pitch of imaginative frenzy that Dickens enjoyed for most of his creative life, publishing serially, don't always plan out all the implications of every creative decision, even those primary, character-creating ones. Fagin seems Jewish just because he is; that's the way the idea of him burned itself into Dickens's mind: scraggy beard, long greasy unkempt hair, uncertain avuncularity, intermittent kindness, cunning, lack of sexuality and Jewishness all seem to have come together, all of a piece. It's possible that, consciously or otherwise, Dickens wanted to tap into people's idea of Jews as money-lenders when they see Fagin's avaricious love of what has been stolen for him by the boys. Usury, unlike thieving and pimping, was an area of activity in which Victorian Jews were indeed prominent; by sneering at Fagin as he fondles his stolen goods, the reader might discharge some anger at the high rate of interest he was paying to a real-life Jewish money-lender. My sense of it, however, is that Dickens was not interested in Fagin's Jewishness, and that to become obsessed by it is like entering into a long debate about the breed of Sikes's dog. It doesn't matter. Dickens couldn't even be bothered (as later he would with Riah in Our Mutual Friend) to give him a Jewish name. Fagin is an Irish name. It was also the name of a boy Dickens had known when working in his famous blacking factory. The important thing and, I think, the only thing that mattered to Dickens is that the name works so well for the character; it could be forename or surname, and it pulls together all the disparate parts of him. It works, it's how he was; and being a Jew is as intrinsic yet ultimately random to Fagin as are plentiful teeth to the villainous Carker in Dombey and Son.
There were, however, protests from some readers. Dickens's repeated use of the phrase 'the Jew' rather than 'Fagin' to identify him, particularly at his worst moments, seemed to some people an attempt to suggest that his villainy was representative of a whole people. It can't have been helpful to Dickens's position that there is a second Jew in the book, Barney, a tapster in a grimy tavern, 'younger than Fagin, but nearly as vile and repulsive in appearance', who speaks through his adenoids and in answer to Sikes's question 'Is anybody here?' replies, 'Dot a shoul.' It is a documented fact that in the second half of the novel, Dickens, responsive to the criticisms, stopped calling Fagin 'the Jew' so often and called him instead by his proper albeit Irish name. It is possible that the kindly Riah in Our Mutual Friend was offered as an olive branch to offended readers, but your guess is as good as mine as to what Dickens 'really' felt or intended in Fagin; mine, for what it's worth, is that he was simply carried away by the exuberance of his own creation and intended no racial slur. That does not mean to say that what he wrote is inoffensive: it does grate; and he must have thought so, too, in order to change at least the nominal way in which he refers to Fagin. It is also reported that in the last public readings of his life, Dickens dropped any hint of an East European or Yiddish inflection when he did Fagin's voice.
Dickens's usual way with villains was to present them as long-distance plotters who deceive the upright characters. He elicits our moral condemnation by first mobilising our anger. We gloat and exult over the ultimate fall of Uriah Heep in David Copperfield or Casby in Little Dorrit because we have seen the suffering their hypocrisy has over the years inflicted on people we like, such as Dora's trusting father or the poor tenants of Bleeding Heart Yard.
Fagin is not like that. His opening words constitute the first civility ever shown to Oliver Twist 'We are very glad to see you' and, still better, his first actions are to provide Oliver with sausages, hot gin and coffee. He is also the first person in the child's life actually to play with him, and, while it's only a game of steal-the-handkerchief, it's hard to overstate how touching this scene is. By its presence, it suggests a previous world of absence: the workhouse full of children with no games, ever. We learn that Fagin can be a hard master, though, sending Dodger or Charley to bed with no supper or even knocking them downstairs if they have returned from the streets empty-handed. Even here, though, Fagin has a kind of charm because he presents his plight not as that of a criminal with no loot to sell, but as that of a poor home bird dependent on the unforgiving world outside to make ends meet. If there is anything of the Jewish stereotype in Fagin, it is of the mother.
The reason Fagin works so well for Dickens is that he is unstable and unpredictable. There is something warm in him he, not the 'good' characters, is the only provider of real laughter in Oliver's life but he is a coward. We don't know which of these two qualities, if it came to it, might prevail, though we have a cold premonition from an early exchange with Sikes about how to deal with any leak of information Oliver might make while at large. Sikes is of the view that Oliver must 'be taken care on'. And Fagin agrees. 'If he means to blab us among his new friends, we may stop his windpipe yet.'
At other times, it seems that Dickens is forcing himself to make Fagin appear more villainous than he naturally is. 'It seemed just the night when it befitted such a being as the Jew to be abroad . . . The hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness . . . crawling forth by night in search of some rich offal for a meal.' It is not just a sense of anti-Semitism that makes this passage troubling, but the feeling that the novelist-as-controller is forcing a predetermined shape on a living character. We almost dare to feel that we know Fagin better than Dickens does.
However, the evidence mounts against Fagin. He gives a sly kick to the sleeping Sikes. He has a plan to 'own' Oliver, to make him his own creature 'Once fill his mind with the idea that he has been a thief, and he's ours ours for his life!' He gives him reports of true criminal cases, 'Tyburn tales', to read, as though he will be impressed by their glamour. He conspires with Oliver's half-brother, Monks. He has moved Nancy from thieving into prostitution, and there are even suggestions that the young thieves may be more than pickpockets. In real life such gangs would probably also have been rent boys, drawing custom from the West End; though in Fagin's defence we should say that Dickens is not able to make this suggestion explicitly. Worst of all, Fagin inflames Bill Sikes to do what is necessary to keep Nancy quiet after she has been heard interceding on Oliver's behalf. His half-hearted plea as the enraged Sikes stalks off murderously into the night only makes matters worse. '"You won't be too violent, Bill?" . . . "I mean," said Fagin, showing that he felt all disguise was now useless, "not too violent for safety. Be crafty, Bill, and not too bold."' He is like a version of the apparition who tells Macbeth to be 'bloody, bold and resolute' but a cowardly one.
Fagin is a bad man, though there is not much effort by Dickens to understand why or how he is bad. There are social and political questions raised by the lives of Fagin, Sikes and Nancy that Dickens does not care to examine. Nancy is given the chance to reform by Rose Maylie and by Mr Brownlow, but chooses to return to the life she knows ('I am too chained to my old life') as though it is fated as though she hardly wants to better herself or be happy. Perhaps 'happy' scares her; perhaps she doesn't know what happy is. 'When such as me,' she tells Rose, 'who have no certain roof but the coffin-lid, and no friend in sickness or death but the hospital nurse, set our rotten hearts on any man, and let him fill the place that parents, home and friends filled once, or that has been a blank through all our wretched lives, who can hope to cure us?' Here is a deterministic view of society so deeply embedded that even its victims embrace it; though here, too, is the profound instinctive sympathy that Dickens would develop in his later books; here, in fact, is the exhilarating sight of a writer discovering his genius. Whatever Dickens's reputation as a social reformer, it is always in the anger of his compassion not in the detail of his politics that he is most compelling. Historians have pointed out that in any case the repressive aspects of child and poor laws depicted in Oliver Twist had already been repealed by the time Dickens wrote it.
In the novel, meanwhile, goodness seems to exist only outside the structures of society. The law and its officers, the state and its workhouses, are as unfair and unkind as the outlaws Sikes and Fagin. The magistrate Fang, Mr Bumble the beadle or the workhouse madam Mrs Corney are state civil servants, but are as bent as the freelance criminals. The only way to justice is to bribe the Bow Street Runners, bribe Mrs Maylie's servants and kidnap Monks to make him confess his plots. Goodness must use criminal means to prosper, and in the London of Oliver Twist it is not possible to be happy, and good, and law-abiding. In this anarchic world Fagin must find his way, and the reader is left with the sense that life is a dreamlike Grand Guignol, in which states of degradation such as those inhabited by Sikes and Fagin flash alternately with states of perfect virtue chez Maylie or Brownlow. In both worlds, law and morality are separate.
Fagin is a character who in some senses overpowers the novel he appears in. He carries not only the narrative of the book both in its day-by-day momentum and, simply by knowing it, the complicated backstory but also the heart, the spirit, the flavour of Oliver Twist. Even while Dickens was meant to be taking a rest from writing it, he admitted: 'I have great difficulty keeping my hands off Fagin and the rest of them.' Not 'off Oliver', one can't help noticing or 'off Rose Maylie' . . . It can't have been hard to resist the idea of writing another scene with Mr Brownlow being kindly.
Novelists tend to feel warm towards the characters that perform best for them in books; and Fagin is in this sense by far the most successful character in Oliver Twist. Dickens's own morality is not that of the Victorian church; in fact, the last sentence of the book makes a plea for Oliver's spurned mother, even though she was 'weak and erring' in having a love child. Because Dickens can be generous and flexible, it sometimes seems to us that the distancing effects he uses when dealing with Fagin are exaggerated. In the tale of an orphan lost in the criminal underworld it must have seemed important to Dickens the public man to keep the moral lines clear even if it was sometimes against his own novelistic judgement to do so. The harshness with which he feels obliged to deal with Fagin makes for an unhappy tension in the reader, and arguably shows Dickens's inexperience. In Our Mutual Friend, at the other end of his career, Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone are allowed to develop under the same passionate impulses, free of authorial manipulation, to the extent that either could turn 'villain' under his own steam.
Dickens seems to have had trouble when he came to terminate Fagin's story: 'The Jew is such an out and outer', he wrote, 'that I don't know what to make of him.' He therefore did what he always did when in a difficult corner: he summoned up an extra effort, he rose to the occasion and the results of it are in the remarkable chapter 'The Jew's Last Night Alive'. For the first time in the book, Dickens uses Fagin's point of view, as we witness the scene in court, the details of which Fagin, with hours to live, picks out with hallucinatory sharpness of detail. He sees a young man making a sketch of him; the point of his pencil breaks and he sharpens it with a knife. Fagin wonders if the likeness is any good. When he looks at the judge, he speculates how much his clothes cost, and how he put them on. These are among the last sights his eyes will see on earth. The guilty verdict is a popular one in court, and Fagin can only plead in mitigation that he is 'an old man'. What charge he is guilty of is not quite clear, and the critic John Sutherland has pointed out that none of his crimes carried the death sentence. But Dickens takes the law into his own hands, so when Fagin is taken down, his fellow convicts treat him not as a sad old fence, but as evil incarnate, rattling their bars as he passes, screeching and hissing at him.
Alone in the condemned cell (a scene unforgettably depicted by Cruikshank), Fagin thinks of those he has seen hanged. Their ghostly presence oppresses him and he beats the door and walls with his hands. A warder brings a light; another is to spend the night with Fagin, presumably to make sure he doesn't kill himself. Wounded in the head by a missile thrown by the mob, he passes an interminable day on his wooden bed, while Dickens turns the rhetorical screw. People come to the gates of Newgate prison, not to demand a reprieve but to make sure there will be none! Mr Brownlow and Oliver visit him in his cell. Oliver asks him to say a prayer, but we already know that Fagin has no religious belief because 'Venerable men of his own persuasion had come to pray beside him, but he had driven them away with curses. They renewed their charitable efforts and he beat them off.' Angrily disowning his own faith, he is not much of a Jew in the end.
The book closes with the revelation that the local church of Oliver's new home with his foster-father Mr Brownlow has a simple tablet on the wall that bears the name of Oliver's mother, Agnes. The closing lines take the novelist's traditional view of morality in the case of Oliver's mother that human love and goodness override social norms and religiously determined ethics. The comforting liberal glow of the words is somewhat diminished by the ruthless despatch with which the novel's largest character has just been sent to meet his maker on the Newgate scaffold.
Fagin in the condemned cell (1910 edition).
'HIS PRIVATE ROD'
COUNT FOSCO.
In the twentieth century, plot-driven novels fell from critical favour. Even Dickens was viewed suspiciously, not only on the grounds that his novels were sometimes sentimental, but also that they had simply too many events; F. R. Leavis, the most influential mid-century critic, was prepared to admit only Hard Times into his canon of English novels. The anti-plot tendency seems to have begun with the high reputation of the late novels of Henry James, where the interest lies in the thought processes that shape motive two steps, in other words, away from action itself. It must have seemed logical that if this was high art, which it was, then the opposite anything with story in it must be low. The tendency had picked up speed by the time of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. One of the obvious points about Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses is that nothing much happens; the underlying aim of both these novels was to reproduce on paper the experience of being alive and their secondary aim was to refashion those sensations into something less molecular and more shapely. Such impulses had previously been the territory of poetry, but the insight of Woolf and Joyce was to see how prose could do the job as well or better, provided the narrative was freed from the tyranny of plot. There was a further dividend, as all literature students were taught, in that a non-linear structure seemed appropriate to a world broken by war; it imitated the poetic fragmentation of The Waste Land and the breaking up of the picture plane by modernist painters in Paris before 1914.
Through the twentieth century, the stock of plot-based novels continued to fall. Story seemed to become the preserve of 'lending library' authors such as Charles Morgan, Hugh Walpole and J. B. Priestley, then to be taken further downmarket by genre writers, into thrillers and detective stories, until, by about 1970, few 'literary' novelists allowed incident of any serious kind to put its big foot on their lawns. The uneasy reputation of John Fowles is an example of this consensus. Fowles's great talent as a writer, despite a certain literary tricksiness, lay in his feel for narrative. Sometimes, as he himself admitted, this was so intoxicating that he could barely control it; he cited The Magus as an example. The gift made him no friends in British mainstream critical opinion where, in the 1960s and 70s, the whole idea of story was considered dubious, though American universities took a different view of Fowles's standing.
It's hard to say when plot began to be rehabilitated. Perhaps when more thoughtful writers looked again at Tolstoy, where the 'idea of things happening', as Virginia Woolf called it, is central to the artistic purpose. Some of the great moments in Tolstoy are events or anticipation of events: Prince Andrei in War and Peace lying wounded at Austerlitz, looking up into the eyes of Napoleon; Pierre setting off in peasant disguise to assassinate the French emperor; Levin in Anna Karenina glimpsing the face of Kitty through the carriage window as she is driven past; Vronsky breaking his horse's back during a race; the death of Anna at the railway station . . . though of course such incidents only become powerful if they are part of an orchestrated whole. Thus in many ways the most effective plot moment is not in one of these big scenes but in a prefiguring of them, as when Prince Andrei on the balcony of a hunting lodge happens to overhear Natasha and Sonya chatting in the warm evening below him and a thrillingly muted drumbeat of future connections is sounded.
Or perhaps the reconsideration of plot came with a second look at Proust, and with the acknowledgement that, although it may take a very long time to happen, an awful lot does get done in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. Zola's most widely admired novel for a long time was L'Assommoir, because it has the least amount of plot and seems to develop more 'organically' than his other novels; but by the end of the century there was a growing admission that not only were Therese Raquin and Germinal very thrilling books, but that their achievement lay in the way that event was handled. Flaubert was almost as much a modernist model as Proust, but again reflection showed that not only does a good deal happen in Madae Bovary, but some of it is of a sensational kind. So by the end of the twentieth century a rough new consensus was emerging among writers, if not necessarily critics, that event was not necessarily vulgar per se; it was a question of how it was handled.
In the hands of a master, such as Tolstoy, plot development can be more than just event, it can be symbolic; it can dramatically embody the inner life. An English example of this is in David Copperfield, when the body of Steerforth is washed up on the beach at Yarmouth after Ham, the noble-hearted fisherman, has died in trying to rescue him from a shipwreck. What Dickens achieves in this heart-stopping scene is something Proustian: he makes time disappear. As he does so, we see through the events of the present and deep into the past, into the connectedness of all things and into the transitory nature of human affection. Steerforth has run off with Little Emily, the child of the fishing family, and brought disgrace on them all. David's own relationship with the Peggotty family, a source of such life-sustaining joy to him in childhood, now brings deep remorse, because it was he who introduced Steerforth to them. Steerforth was the object of David's hero-worship at school and David misjudged and indulged him because he had lacked a father of his own to admire; he should never have allowed the dangerous Steerforth into the world of these decent people and their adored, pretty daughter. Eventually David stands above the drowned body of his friend washed up on the sand, 'among the ruins of the home he had wronged I saw him lying with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school'. The ground seems to open up beneath one's feet as all the terrible inevitability of past and present is laid bare. But it is important to accept that the way the effect in one of the most sublime scenes in Victorian literature is achieved is not by a direct or psychological approach to the abstract questions in hand, but by the tightly controlled use of a violent event.
Dickens's friend Wilkie Collins was less ambitious in his use of narrative, in that he seldom uses it to resonate beyond the event it relates; but The Woman in White is a tour de force of storytelling, almost pure and almost simple. It was viewed at the time as a 'sensation novel', a pejorative term for stories designed to give regular shocks at the end of each published instalment. As a piece of plot design, it was nevertheless mould-breaking at the time of publication, in 1860, because of the way it pieced together the contributions of different narrators from letters, formal statements and diaries. Yet there is clearly (too clearly for Trollope: 'The construction is minute and wonderful. But I can never lose the taste of the construction') a single storytelling intelligence with overall control, and the book never loses its strong forward momentum. As a child of anti-plot twentieth-century literary education, I had not read this book before 2009, and what a treat I had missed. It is a thrillingly enjoyable novel, and there is just enough repressed sexuality and twisted psychology to add a sense of something darker at work beneath the hectic rush of events.
Count Fosco does not appear until more than 200 pages into the story, though his entrance has been much anticipated. To build up a character in such a way to tell the reader how fascinated he is going to be is something more often done by airport novelists. For a writer of Collins's skill to risk anticlimax in this way argues a great confidence in the character and trust in the attention of his periodical readers. There is a sense of relief in Fosco's appearance because the main villain up to this point, Sir Percival Glyde, is a disappointment. There is too much of the vaudeville baronet about him, with his moustache and walking stick. And although he is there to disrupt the central romance of the book by exercising his agreed right to marry beautiful Laura Fairlie in place of the man she, and we, prefer the drawing master Walter Hartright Sir Percival fails in two villainous essentials: although bad-tempered, he does not seem very clever; and although we flinch at the thought of him in bed with Laura, he exudes little sexual danger.
For the task of introducing Count Fosco, Collins uses the most reliable of his many narrators Marian Halcombe. Marian is Laura's half-sister and is one of the most compelling of Victorian heroines, being loyal, quick-witted, passionate, ugly and surprisingly hairy. She has a swarthy complexion, an incipient moustache, a low forehead, a manly jaw and thick black hair all set on a trim, feminine figure. She has all the qualities of vigour and intelligence that are lacking in the aptly named Laura Fairlie (blonde, insipid) and Walter Hartright (honest, dull). This is more like it, we think. Sir Percival, Walter and Laura can play their parlour game like cut-out puppets in a Pollock's Theatre; but Marian is operating on a different level and requires a worthy counterpart.
Enter Fosco. 'I am becoming anxious to know the Count', Marian reflects. 'I wonder if I shall like him?' Fosco in prospect interests Marian 'infinitely more than his wife', though Laura, who knows them both, won't say what Fosco is like; she wants Marian to form her 'own opinion first'. We are grateful for this reticence, since Laura's opinion would almost certainly be anodyne. All we know is that Fosco and his wife are friends and travelling companions of Sir Percival, the baronet who is to steal away pretty Laura and who seems in some way implicated in a plot to keep Anne Catherick, the eponymous woman in white, locked up in a county lunatic asylum.
When Fosco finally appears, the practical Marian is bowled over. 'This, in two words. He looks like a man who would tame anything. If he had married a tigress, instead of a woman, he would have tamed the tigress. If he had married me I should have made his cigarettes as his wife does'. The first thing sensible Marian does is imagine being married to him this despite the fact that he is old enough to be her father, that he is 'immensely fat' and she has an admitted prejudice against corpulence. Unable to confine herself to 'two words' on the count, Marian gushes over almost ten pages.
Fosco is portrayed by Collins, chiefly through Marian's eyes, as a character who embodies polarities. This is what makes him attractive; this is what makes him untrustworthy. He is obese, yet very light on his feet. He looks like Napoleon, yet is a creature of the salon a fancy man with a sweet tooth and no Grande Armee to command. He is Italian and a count (a doubtful title to English Marian, since it does not exist in British society), but he speaks English so well that it is 'almost impossible to detect, by his accent, that he is not a countryman of our own'. He is 'foreign' but familiar. His hair is dark brown, but his complexion is fair: no swarthy Neapolitan he. Is his hair dyed? Or is he just of 'superior' breeding in some way? He wears fancy waistcoats of effeminate display, yet emits a heterosexual charge to Marian. And as for his eyes . . . 'They are the most unfathomable grey eyes I ever saw; and they have at times a cold, clear, beautiful, irresistible glitter in them, which forces me to look at him, and yet causes me sensations, when I do look, which I would rather not feel.'
Fosco's contradictions mirror Marian's. She is ugly, yet attractive. We like her mind, her character and her trim figure. What is in her hormones that makes her so feminine yet so mannish? Her attractiveness is literary, because in real life that low, hairy brow would be a killer of lust. But on the page we don't see it; we hear her voice and follow the movement of her clever mind; we remember her slim hips as first seen from behind by Walter. A sensualist such as we believe Count Fosco to be might well contrive a way of making love to Marian that excluded her swarthy face from view. It is almost as though she appeals to the latent homosexuality of the heterosexual man; but her allure is even more interesting, because less resolved, than that. Many aroused bachelors wrote to Collins asking if Marian had a real-life counterpart they might be introduced to.
Fosco is, Marian thinks, 'close on sixty years of age', yet active and virile; he swiftly establishes himself as the pack leader at his friend Sir Percival's house. He seems to have all that is needed to be a Lothario or a Romeo, yet is uxorious in the extreme, doting showily on his cold and repulsive wife, who in turn is like a servant to him. What must he be doing with her in the bedroom to maintain such control and such devotion? Or as Marian puts it: 'The rod of iron with which he rules her never appears in company it is a private rod, and is always kept upstairs.' Marian thinks a good deal about the fat man's 'private rod' and, to judge from Collins's relaxed and playful attitude to sexual matters, he was probably aware of the double entendre.
For all his 'Napoleonic' qualities, Fosco appears as nervous as a filly. 'He starts at chance noises as inveterately as Laura herself does', says Marian; but anyone can fake a start. Is he really that nervy? He doesn't like it when Sir Percival beats his spaniel, and that is fine and noble of him, yet almost his first act is to put his hand on the head of a vicious chained bloodhound to tame and humiliate the creature, as though by hypnotic force. He has the 'fondness of an old maid' for his cockatoo, to say nothing of the canaries that perch on him and the pet mice that crawl over his waistcoated folds of flesh. It is one thing to be kind-hearted towards our dumb friends, another to be sentimental. Late in the story, he indulgently gives most of his fruit tart to a monkey, but spurns the organ grinder's request for a penny. He does not know at that time that he is being watched, so we may assume that Collins wants this incident to show us the 'real' Fosco. A man who cares more for animals than for humans is not a good man.
More often, by a continuing use of half-reconciled polarities, Collins is underlining the question of un/trustworthiness. We don't know how much of Fosco is a show and how much is real. While he exerts a sexual power over his wife and over Marian, there is something in his love of fruit tart, cream and sugar plums, his weeping at the sound of music, that is meant to suggest a quality far from machismo. 'How much I seem to have written about Count Fosco!' says Marian after her initial descriptions. 'I can only repeat that I do assuredly feel, even on this short acquaintance, a strange, half-willing, half-unwilling liking for the Count.'
The reader does not share Marian's indecision. We dislike the count. He is pompous, condescending and bombastic. We are told by Marian how fascinating he is, but we do not really share this fascination. Little of what he says seems arresting or original. He is long-winded; he takes up too much space in the narrative as well as in the room. We want to know more about Anne, the woman in white, and about Sir Percival's unspeakable 'Secret'. Fosco vexes us; he is annoying. However, the feeling we do share with Marian is one of fear: he is successfully unknowable. Although we incline to the view that he is a villain, we don't know how his villainy will show itself.
The main reason we don't like the count is that he brings out the worst in Marian, whom we love. We need her at her forthright best to keep evil from prevailing; we don't like to see resourceful Marian succumbing to the 'charm' of this ridiculous count. She says that she 'distrusts the influence' he has on her. She talks of the pet mice creeping over his fat body, a sight 'for some reason not pleasant to me. It excites a strange, responsive creeping in my own nerves'. For some reason! The Marian we know and admire is cleverer than this.
Then Fosco gives a famous speech about how clever criminals are not caught by plodding policemen; and in 1860 the idea that the recently formed detective force could be outwitted was alarming to readers. Yet this is also Fosco at his most bombastic and obviously untrustworthy: 'Ah! I am a bad man, Lady Glyde, am I not? . . . I say what other people only think!' Honourable Marian, meanwhile, clings to the idea that so long as you don't antagonise him he will behave well towards you. 'Don't make an enemy of the Count', is her advice to Laura. Play fair by him, is her implication, and he will play fair by you. Her blindness towards the count is her only weak point, and Collins exploits it to add tension to his all-important plot.
It is not long before Marian records that Fosco 'permitted me . . . to make his acquaintance, for the first time, in the character of a Man of Sentiment' in a very fancy waistcoat, 'as if there was some hidden connexion between his showiest finery and his deepest feeling'. He comes upon her with his 'horribly silent tread' and asks: 'Surely you like this modest, trembling English twilight . . . Observe, dear lady, what a light is dying on the trees! Does it penetrate your heart, as it penetrates mine?' Modest English penetration is on his mind as well as hers.
There are times when Fosco and Marian seem to embody opposing principles: the effeminate man and the hairy woman, each proud of his/her intellect, each to be 'completed' in some odd or sadomasochistic way by the other. The battle they fight is over the liberty and life of Anne Catherick, the well-being of Laura Fairlie and the sum of 20,000. Yet it often feels and this is where the novel seems more than mere storytelling that their real battle is a personal one that touches on quite archetypal forms of gender and identity.
In a famous scene, Marian listens from an outdoor balcony to Fosco and Sir Percival as they plot in the room below, with the French doors open. Fosco praises her intellect and compares her to a man, though oddly enough his admiration for her makes him sound homosexual. He prefers Marian to Sir Percival's 'flimsy, pretty blonde' (Laura), but then, as one might almost warm to his robust judgement, he drinks Marian's health in sugar and water, there being, presumably, no sarsaparilla in Sir Percival's drinks cabinet.
The sexual tension reaches a breaking point when Wilkie Collins lets us see that Fosco has been reading Marian's private diary. Fosco handwrites a 'Postscript by a Sincere Friend', in which he comments on the journal approvingly, especially the depiction of himself. He regrets that they are on opposite sides as in another life 'how worthy I would have been of Miss Halcombe how worthy Miss Halcombe would have been of ME'. In a novel whose fascination derives, first, from its multiple narrative strategies and, second, from the inverted sexual tensions between its two chief protagonists, this moment of inter-textual penetration is a masterstroke.