Mar. 28th, 2023

skygiants: Jane Eyre from Paula Rego's illustrations, facing out into darkness (more than courage)
[personal profile] regshoe posted recently about Wilkie Collins' Armadale, and it hit the button in the part of my brain that's always ready to devour an 800-page sensational novel whatever other commitments I have onboard. A great choice, as it turns out!

The protagonists of Armadale are two nice young lads named Allan Armadale (II) (i) and Allan Armadale (II) (ii), the unfortunate children of a pair of not-so-nice young lads named Allan Armadale (I) (i) and Allan Armadale (I) (ii) (both of them named after an original Allan Armadale who's almost entirely irrelevant) (it's a long story). Allan Armadale (I) (i) and Allan Armadale (I) (ii) were briefly very close and then became entwined in a complex series of betrayals that resulted in one Allan Armadale (I) murdered and the other Allan Armadale (I) writing a long and dire deathbed letter to his infant son warning him to ON NO ACCOUNT hang out with ANYBODY named Allan Armadale EVER, if you happen to meet a guy with your name simply LEAVE THE COUNTRY IMMEDIATELY AND NEVER RETURN.

However, by the time Allan Armadale (II) (ii) -- now thankfully going by a different name -- receives this letter and learns the whole backstory, he and Allan Armadale (II) (i) have already fallen into a passionate attachment after a tragic and friendless Allan Armadale (II) (ii) collapsed on the side of the road and was tenderly nursed back to health by an enthusiastic and understimulated Allan Armadale (II) (i) desperate to meet new people who are not The Same Five Guys he's known his whole life.

ALLAN ARMADALE (II) (ii) aka OZIAS MIDWINTER: cursed be that my only love should be sprung from such an evil fate ... I cannot bear to leave him nor can I bear it if I should in any wise be the cause of injuring him or bringing our inevitable doom upon him ...
ALLAN ARMADALE (II) (i): aww bro you look bummed! but I bet PIZZA will help!
ALLAN ARMADALE (II) (ii) aka OZIAS MIDWINTER: alas! he must never know the Awful Truth ... I must not bring any kind of shadow upon his life, for his is the only thing which has brought any light into mine ...
ALLAN ARMADALE (II) (i): btw I've decided you're moving into my house!!! PARTY ALL DAY PARTY EVERY DAY

And thus Ozias Midwinter, stressed and depressed and generally tormented by portents and his father's warning to LEAVE THE COUNTRY AND NEVER RETURN, somehow finds himself instead moving into Allan Armadale (II) (i)'s house, because he just can't help it when Allan Armadale (II) (i) gives him those puppy-dog eyes.

I should mention by the way that Allan Armadale (II) (ii) aka Ozias Midwinter is mixed-race -- which honestly I expected Wilkie Collins to be much worse and more racist about! Instead he kind of fascinatingly dodges the topic ... people are constantly taking against poor Ozias Midwinter on sight and Collins rushes to explain that it's because he's simply so stressed and depressed and haunted by the prospect of inevitable doom that it makes him very socially awkward, which, to be fair, it clearly does (there's a horrifically relatable passage about Ozias Midwinter desperately and painfully attempting to Be Good Company For Allan's Friends and falling straight into the Oh God I've Become Off-Puttingly Manic And I Can't Stop pit instead that made me want to sink straight into a sympathetic hole in the floor) but also there are clearly Other Reasons here that we are simply not going to discuss!

And, on the other hand, Ozias Midwinter is Too Superstitious (although all the portents of doom come via his white father) and I was constantly expecting Collins to make that about race (in much the same way that Baroness Orczy is constantly making Having Emotions about being French), but miraculously Collins does at least manage not to say it outright, and in all other respects Ozias Midwinter is broadly speaking both smarter and more narratively heroic than Allan Armadale (II) (ii) who is truly just a cluelessly affectionate chaos lug who makes bad decisions.

Anyway. Thus the Armadales. Then, halfway through the book, finally arrives the antagonist -- or, arguably, the third protagonist, or the antihero -- Femme Fatale Lydia Gwilt, who was twelve years old at the time that the Horrible Truth went down, and is now a devastatingly beautiful and incredibly depressed Adventuress who has decided to get a comfortable life for herself at last or die trying (or kill trying) (or something).

What I love about Lydia Gwilt -- well, I love a lot of things about Lydia Gwilt. I love that she is fully thirty-five and has given herself the exhausting task of juggling the seduction of a matched set of dramatic twenty-something youths: Oh, dear, how old I felt, while he was sobbing his heart out on my breast! How I thought of the time when he might have possessed himself of my love! All he had possessed himself of now was -- my waist. I love that she finds chaos lug Allan Armadale (II) (i) the most annoying and exhausting person in the world, god bless; I love that the idea of murder first occurs to her when she's wistfully asking herself what Lady Macbeth would do in her situation.

My favorite thing about Lydia Gwilt, though, is that we get all this build-up about her -- "No creature more innately deceitful and more innately pitiless ever walked this earth!" says Allan Armadale (I) (ii) to his son, about, let me emphasize, a twelve-year-old child -- and then she appears in all kinds of sinister warnings and portents for a while, and then we finally get her on page, in her own words, and she's suddenly a real and complicated person, who makes jokes and takes her landlady's kids out on little day trips and fantasizes about absurd crimes that eventually become terribly real, because she's desperate and angry and everything's gone wrong and what else is there for her?

ExpandObviously the Allans and Lydia end up in a narrative crash collision with each other! spoilers below )

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