(no subject)

[skygiants]

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?



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.

Comments

[regshoe]

Yay, I'm glad to have introduced you to this book, and this review is very entertaining :D It is such a thoroughly good wacky 800-page sensation novel.

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.

[skygiants]

Thank you so much for posting about it, I had such a great time! The Armadales Two are such a blast, odd couple extraordinaire.

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.