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Mar. 28th, 2023 06:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsregshoe 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?
At first Lydia -- posing as a governess to Allan Armadale (II) (i)'s actual teen love interest who is just as much of a clueless lug as he is -- decides that she's going to try and marry Allan Armadale (II) (i), who has a reasonable inheritance, even though she thinks he is the Most Annoying Person in the World. Allan is so ready to be seduced into marriage, but then he accidentally stumbles on some terrible truths about her and then even more accidentally gets her fired and so that all goes up in flames.
Meanwhile, Allan Armadale (II) (ii) aka Ozias Midwinter has developed likewise a crush on Lydia, which Lydia attempts to make use of to get her way back into Allan Armadale (II) (i)'s good graces. Unfortunately she has reckoned without Allan Armadale (II) (ii) aka Ozias Midwinter's all-consuming fear of accidentally causing doom upon the only person he truly loves.
LYDIA GWILT: Ah, I hear they have quarreled over me last night! Today I shall go and generously make peace between them and then --
ALLAN ARMADALE (II) (ii) aka OZIAS MIDWINTER: my dearest Lydia, pray accept this note by my hand informing you that THE CURSE HAS COME UPON ME and I must LEAVE THE COUNTRY and NEVER RETURN, GOODBYE FOREVER!!!
LYDIA GWILT: .... that escalated quickly.
So then he ends up telling her the whole Horrible Truth about his real name and the backstory murders and everything -- which ends up giving Lydia a brilliant idea: what if she marries Allan Armadale (II) (ii), and then Allan Armadale (II) (i) were to conveniently die ... somehow .... and then she could come back and claim to be Allan Armadale (II) (i)'s widow by showing her marriage papers with Allan Armadale (II) (ii) and claim the Armadale inheritance! No problems ever. Except! then she forms the sympatico bond of Sufferers of Tragic Childhoods with Allan Armadale (II) (ii) aka Ozias Midwinter and decides maybe she is a bit in love with this sweet sad youth and will just marry him for real and perhaps not do any murder.
Unfortunately for Lydia, Allan Armadale (II) (ii) aka Ozias Midwinter seems to repent of his bout of heterosexuality a few months after they're married and starts pining once again for Allan Armadale (II) (i) -- and to be fair to both Allan Armadale (II) (ii) and the concept of bisexuality, it's truly never clear whether Lydia's perception that their marriage is dying and he doesn't love her as he once did is a genuine perception of the truth, or the result of her stress and depression, or the result of their mutual stress and depression, or what, and I do kind of love that we will just never know!
But the end result is that she descends once again into bitter despair and decides to embark on project Abandon Allan Armadale (II) (ii) aka Ozias Midwinter and Murder Allan Armadale (II) (i) after all, with the help of a genially evil doctor and a convoluted poison room in a sanotorium, except! Allan Armadale (II) (ii) aka Ozias Midwinter heroically switches rooms with his true love Allan Armadale (II) (i) to take the danger upon himself! and when Lydia finds she's almost murdered her sweet sad sort-of-husband Allan Armadale (II) (ii) aka Ozias Midwinter by accident she rescues him from the poison room and walks into it herself, mostly I think because it is simply not legal for women who have attempted murder to survive to the end of a Victorian novel but also because, as I have tried to emphasize, she has spent the entire book very depressed. :(( I am glad the Armadales make it out all right, and I am also glad that Lydia does not actually do the murder in the end because she really is pretty mixed-up about it and I do not think it would have made her happy, but I do think she could have had a little successful Adventuring, as a treat.
Meanwhile, the Allans Armadale go on to live together in domestic bliss forever (along with Allan Armadale (II) (i)'s actual teen love interest). Allan Armadale (II) (i) never does find out the Horrible Truth; when he's like "hey why did Lydia Gwilt have my name on the marriage certificate?" Allan Armadale (II) (ii) aka Ozias Midwinter is like "oh bro just do not ask" and Allan Armadale (II) (i) is like "okay!" and does not ask. Under most circumstances the fact that he's kept completely in the dark about the major motivating forces of the book from the beginning to the end would bother me, but for Allan Armadale (II) (i) I kind of think it's okay tbh ... I'm honestly not sure he has the capacity to process the Horrible Truth in a narratively satisfying way, I think he'd probably just want the Victorian equivalent of pizza about it and that would be that.
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Date: 2023-03-29 01:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-29 01:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-29 01:54 am (UTC):(((( about Lydia, however. One wants a happier ending for her!
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Date: 2023-03-29 02:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-29 02:04 am (UTC)I just checked the Wiki summary, and it's hard to credit how much more plot there is!
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Date: 2023-03-29 02:20 am (UTC)No eye for reading character, but such an eye as belongs to one person, perhaps, in ten thousand, could have penetrated the smoothly deceptive surface of this man, and have seen him for what he really was—the vile creature whom the viler need of Society has fashioned for its own use. There he sat—the Confidential Spy of modern times, whose business is steadily enlarging, whose Private Inquiry Offices are steadily on the increase. There he sat—the necessary Detective attendant on the progress of our national civilization; a man who was, in this instance at least, the legitimate and intelligible product of the vocation that employed him; a man professionally ready on the merest suspicion (if the merest suspicion paid him) to get under our beds, and to look through gimlet-holes in our doors; a man who would have been useless to his employers if he could have felt a touch of human sympathy in his father’s presence; and who would have deservedly forfeited his situation if, under any circumstances whatever, he had been personally accessible to a sense of pity or a sense of shame.
"actually I shouldn't invent this genre, perhaps"
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Date: 2023-03-29 12:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-29 02:26 am (UTC)what
i think i'm in love
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Date: 2023-03-29 02:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-29 02:54 am (UTC)stop it
Also "Gwilt" is amazing
hello I am Lydia D'oesCrymes
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Date: 2023-03-29 04:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-29 11:02 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2023-03-29 04:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-29 03:23 am (UTC)Congratulations, that may be a more dramatic parental backstory than Nisn and Sender.
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?
That just sounds great.
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Date: 2023-03-29 04:14 am (UTC)She's so good -- a complex noir heroine ahead of her time. Bacall would have nailed it tbh, if anyone would have let Bacall play an actual murderess.
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Date: 2023-03-29 08:39 pm (UTC)Lizabeth Scott, then, who did play actual murderesses and did it beautifully.
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Date: 2023-04-01 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-29 04:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-29 04:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-29 05:08 am (UTC)Now that I think of it, there was at least one request for Armadale fic in this past round of Yuletide. From this description, it's not at all hard to see why....
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Date: 2023-04-01 07:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-29 08:05 am (UTC)Lydia being only twelve years old - and her crime consisting of forging a letter on the urgings of an adult man - when she's vilified as a fiend from hell: personally, I always figured Ozias' father for a child molester in this regard and like many of those creeps completely blaming the kid.
Lastly, something about readers at the time - if you go by the reviews, what offended Victorian readerly morality most was that while Collins did his duty and killed Lydia off at the end, he let her keep her beauty (and her red, red hair) instead of disfiguring her. Seriously, apparantly it's not enough for a female character to die, she must be disfigured to show true morality triumphant.
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Date: 2023-04-01 07:34 pm (UTC)Thank you for the fic rec, I'm EXTREMELY excited to check it out >:D
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Date: 2023-03-29 03:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-01 07:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-29 04:12 pm (UTC)I laughed immoderately at all of Lydia Gwilt's comments about how Allan is SO ANNOYING, she can't believe that her evil plan requires marrying him. Actually it made me like him more that someone in the book was calling out the fact that his endless good cheer might be just a touch annoying to someone who doesn't love him adoringly like Ozias Midwinter.
Also you might be onto something with the idea that Allan just doesn't have the capacity to process the Awful Truth... he might get lost among all the Allan Armadales. One imagines Ozias Midwinter drawing a diagram while Allan, his face screwed up in Serious Thought, is all, "So wait, what are you saying about my beloved sainted mother?"
My take re: the Waning of Midwinter's Love for Lydia is that the initial honeymoon bliss was powerful enough to briefly submerge Lydia's despair, but once they settle into the less euphoric level of normal married life, the despair returns. So there is a real change in his feelings, but it's fairly slight.
Also the scene where he meets Lydia in the street and she just flat-out denies that they were ever married, oh my God. His wife! Whose head had rested on his bosom! His entire sense of reality rocking as she greets him like a presumptuous stranger!
Lydia's suicide is extremely convenient - I guess Collins just wasn't sure what to do with her otherwise. On the one hand one doesn't want her to walk out of it scot-free, but on the other hand no reader is going to want to see the law called down on her... a quandary.
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Date: 2023-04-01 07:42 pm (UTC)(I do think it's quite funny that everyone is very concerned about Allan finding out the Terrible Truth about his Beloved Sainted Mother -- she forged a letter one time! the horrors! -- but nobody's the LEAST worried about Allan finding out that his father poisoned his best friend ...)
Yeah, I think your read on Lydia and Midwinter is quite plausible; I really like how Collins sets it up, because we know they're both moody and prone to despair-spirals and you can see how easy it would be for small things to escalate and send their entire marriage off-kilter even without the Terrible Secrets That Lie Between Them. AND THEN, OF COURSE, THE GASLIGHTING.
Lydia's suicide is so convenient but on the other hand it is incredibly well established -- this is at least her second suicide attempt of the book (maybe the third?) not even counting her other attempts at complete self-sabotage like "what if I just annoy my crime friends into arresting me for debt?" So it's not perhaps a surprising end for her, given such a clear motive and opportunity in such a desperate situation, but obviously one would still like better! Let her get recruited at the last minute into a secret adventure syndicate or something!
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Date: 2023-03-29 11:05 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2023-03-31 01:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-01 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-31 04:02 pm (UTC)Your dialogue between the two Allans Armadale is hilarious and exactly what I love about their relationship and that entire part of the book. Aww, I love them both so much.
Ozias and Lydia's relationship is a sad and complicated thing. I do think they have some kind of real connection—as you say, they've got a lot in common backstory-wise, and perhaps in a better world where they could have understood each properly they might have been friends. But it's not True Love, and in between the mutual stress and depression and perhaps some perception from Ozias that Lydia is not being entirely honest with him, it was probably never going to work out.
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Date: 2023-04-01 07:50 pm (UTC)I love how messy and complicated and broadly ambiguous Collins lets the dynamic between Ozias and Lydia remain, even to the end. There are so many lies between them, and to what degree they really love each other in the romantic sense and to what degree they're deluding themselves into it is never really clear at all, but it's also clear they really do care about each other deeply, and Lydia is really the only person in the book outside of Allan who understands all of Midwinter's good qualities for what they are -- unfortunately, nobody ever really gets to be that person for her.
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Date: 2023-04-12 08:24 am (UTC)