This 1911 novel holds many views we take for granted as self-evident but which were radical for its time, especially coming from a woman. More than a This 1911 novel holds many views we take for granted as self-evident but which were radical for its time, especially coming from a woman. More than a century after it was written, ‘The Visioning' seems only to be a tired potboiler. It is easy to forget that this was not only one of the first, but probably the first novel in America by a woman questioning the right of inventors to create weapons of mass destruction ("Father," he was saying, imagination under the stimulus of things he had been seeing, "I suppose our gun will kill 'bout forty thousand million folks—won't it, father?”) or a kind of veiled approval for a man who was willing to go to prison rather than forfeit his right to act according to his lights. And yet, in retrospect, Glaspell’s views today do not seem radical at all, but simply more in tune with her times than the rest of her generation.
‘The Visioning’ is a Bildungsroman: an absurd idea, given that our main protagonist Katherine Waynworth Jones is over twenty-five. But it is not her blooming from childhood to adulthood we are looking at. Rather, it is the shedding of complacency, of self-indulgence and a world of privilege, of dances and dinner parties, spent with smart young courtiers whose life in the army is also one of privilege, caste and snobbery. In her voyage of self-discovery, Katie Jones wakens to a much darker reality, one in which survival is more important than self-respect, or in which tradition and the polite conventions of society mean little in the face of the freedom to dream of a different reality. She meets more and more people her world despises, people who have escaped the world she admires so much, yet amazingly, have found the contentment and even happiness she has been seeking, but which her pampered life can never give her.
The search for reality, or rather for unconventionality over the hidebound principles of her uncle the Bishop, the quest for the freedom to determine one's actions and choices, the fight for the rights of women, honouring values like tradition, honour, valour for the sake of their antiquity, while despising those of equality, justice, and manual labour simply because they are new, these are what form the themes of this book.
Written in a deliberately fluffy, frilly girlish style to disguise the underlying currents of despair, degradation and ruin, as well as the horrifying levels of spite that Katie can dream up is to see Glaspell at her best. Feminism, modernism, divorce (in 1911!) social and human rights, child up-bringing, army caste and morality – all so iconoclastic! – are what Katie finds through mistakes, misunderstanding, a hitherto unplumbed level of meanness in herself, all of which lead her to an equal relationship with the man she has come to love – a man, naturally, quite out of the pale!
In ‘Effi Briest’ Theodor Fontane presents Calvinist nineteenth century Prussian society in one of the then popular books about adultery written at theIn ‘Effi Briest’ Theodor Fontane presents Calvinist nineteenth century Prussian society in one of the then popular books about adultery written at the close of the century. As the novel unfolds, a time frame of some ten years is encapsulated in a few short chapters, making this a lengthy novella rather than the three volumes in standard nineteenth century European fiction. Fontane’s aim seems to be rather that his characters come to understand the consequences of their actions, than to assign blame upon any one of them for their attitudes. At the same time, Fontane shows himself to be at once a realist, a modernist and a humanist. His characters behave either with an appalling blindness to social and moral codes, or an equally blind obedience to society's opinions. At the end, we are left with a feeling of dissatisfaction, with a sense of something left incomplete.
‘Effi Briest’ (published in 1895) has often been compared to the earlier adultery novels, ‘Madame Bovary’ (1857), and ‘Anna Karenina' (1878), but Effi has neither the terrible hunger eating at Emma Bovary, nor the violent passion that rages in Anna Karenina. Her little affair is soulless and passionless, a pastime, forgotten, as her lover is forgotten, almost as suddenly as it started, so completely forgotten that even his letters lie neglected in a corner of her desk. Not love-letters either, speaking of a deathless passion: mere details of the time and place of the next meeting. And her ending is both pointless and needless, except to cut a long story short.
‘In the matter of marriage, Effi at least was very clear: she would marry anyone her parents suggested, provided he was wealthy and titled. And so at the age of seventeen, she is married to a man twice her age.’ And then, her later reflections:
“And I shall have this guilt on my soul,’’ she repeated. “Yes, I do have it. But is it really weighing on my soul? No. And that’s why I’m appalled at myself. What weighs on me is something quite different: fear, mortal fear, the constant fear that I’ll be found out some day after all.”
But not shame at my guilt, I don’t feel that, or not properly, or not enough, and that’s what’s crushing me, the fact that I don’t feel it.”
At seventeen years old, Effi knows quite well what she wants, and it isn't love. The three statements quoted above summarise her attitudes to marriage, adultery and the final realisation of herself from a seventeen-year old to the time of her death at age twenty-seven.
The man she marries does not love her either; twenty years ago, he courted (and perhaps even loved) Effi’s mother, who turned him down because he was a nobody with no money. So is Innstetten now actuated by a species of revenge? Perhaps; though he is too cold-blooded to have a warm passion like revenge running in his veins. “Revenge isn’t admirable, but it’s human, and has a natural human right,” he says later, in a quite different context.
Instetten is certainly a man who knew how to control people by manipulation and intimidation. He uses an absurd “ghost” story to frighten his wife into having her maid sleeping in her room when he is away on “business.” ‘A young wife is a young wife, and a Landrat is a Landrat. He’s often on the road in his district, and then the house is alone, uninhabited. But a ghost is like a cherub with a sword…’
Instetten’s business is with no less a person than Otto von Bismarck, with whom he appears to be in favour. As a result, the Empress makes Effi a lady in waiting, while the great Kaiser Wilhelm himself addresses the young wife with gallantry: a delicate way of telling the reader that Instetten is a rising politician with a bright future as well as a position in society that his wife cannot be allowed to compromise.
A few behavioural acts of Instetten do not appear to be in keeping with his nature: he suspects something of the affair between Effi and Major Crampas, but he warns Crampas off, rather than Effi: “But someone like you, Crampas, who's grown up under the banner of discipline and knows very well that obedience and order are of the essence, a man like you really shouldn’t talk like that, not even in jest.”
That Johanna, the maid through whom Instetten controls his household, is in love with Instetten is obvious to Roswitha, the child’s nurse who is Effi’s loyal friend upto the very end, but apparently not to Effi. And yet Instetten looks upon Johanna with something near loathing.
Though he is deeply conflicted about the action he is to take after the discovery of the letters from Crampas, it does not deter him. As he tells his colleague, who acts as his second, Herr Wüllersdorf: “We’re not just individuals, we’re part of a larger whole and we must constantly have regard for that larger whole, we’re dependent on it, beyond a doubt.” And of course, while he might have restrained himself earlier, now that Wüllersdorf knew, this line of action was closed to him: “I am from this moment on, and there’s no going back on it, the object of your sympathy – not in itself a pleasant thought – and you will weigh every word you hear me exchange with my wife, whether you intend to or not, and if my wife were to talk about fidelity, or sit in judgement, as wives do, on what other women get up to, I wouldn’t know where to look.”
As for Effi, he tells Wüllersdorf, “I’m still so much under the spell of her delightful nature, of that vivacious charm which is all her own that in spite of myself I feel inclined, in my heart of hearts, to forgive her.’’ But returning to Berlin after the duel in which he fatally wounds Crampas, his thoughts are: “And now I have to carry on with the act, and send Effi away, and be the ruin of her, and myself too… I should have burnt the letters and the world should never have found out about them.”
Instetten, having comported himself ‘honourably’ is suitably rewarded after a brief spell in prison, but the promotions and honours are Dead Sea fruit to the embittered man. For her part, after three lonely years, Effi is allowed by her parents to return to them. Her thoughts about her ex-husband towards the end of her life, when she sees her daughter’s alienation, are sour: “I thought he had a noble heart and I always felt small beside him; but now I know he’s the one who’s small. And because he’s small, he’s cruel. All things small are cruel. He’s taught it to the child, he was always a schoolmaster.”
But Effi also acknowledges, at the end, “Everything he did was right. The business with poor Crampas – what else could he possibly have done? And then – that was what hurt me most – bringing my own child up to ward me off, hard as it is for me, and painful as it is, that was right too. Let him know that I died convinced of that. It will console him, strengthen him, perhaps reconcile him. There was a lot of good in his nature, and he was as noble as anyone can be who lacks the real capacity for love.”
If there can be sympathy for anyone in this sad little tale, it is for Madame Crampas, the adulterer’s wife, who is never allowed to appear in the book. Crampas keeps her hidden away as firmly as Instetten does Effi. Yet, when Effi had, in one of her letters to Crampas raised the idea of an elopement, an escape for both of them from unhappy marriages, Crampas replies, with astounding callousness to both women: “…away, you write, escape. Impossible. I can’t leave my wife in the lurch, in poverty on top of everything else. It can’t be done, and we must take these things lightly, otherwise we are poor lost souls.”
After the duel, when the news is broken to Madame Crampas, Wüllersdorf writes to Instetten: “And then the scene at the Major’s house – terrible.” Nothing more. But the pain of that woman is something far beyond Effi's comprehension.
And is no blame to be attached to anyone? Well, Society itself, to start with, for being so scrupulous about a woman's adultery, but passing over Major Crampas’s infidelities with a kind of indulgence. The three persons concerned, for different reasons. And why not, while we're about it, the maid who collaborates with her employer to frighten Effi, or the nursemaid, who turns a blind eye to her mistress’s meetings with her lover.
But Fontane lays the blame squarely upon Effi’s parents: “Whether perhaps it was our fault after all?’ asks Frau von Briest. “Nonsense, Luise. What do you mean by that?” “Whether we should perhaps have brought her up more strictly. Us that is. And then Briest, I’m sorry to have to say this… there were your constant risqué remarks… and finally, and this is what I reproach myself with, for I don’t want to seem blameless in the matter, I wonder if perhaps she wasn’t too young.” “Ah Luise, that’s enough… that’s too vast a subject.”
It is so difficult to comment on a book that overpowers the reader with the stark realities of being black in a hopelessly colour-conscious state. AbsIt is so difficult to comment on a book that overpowers the reader with the stark realities of being black in a hopelessly colour-conscious state. Absolutely and almost literally mind-numbing. ...more
Zugzwang: forced move in chess, where no legal move is possible (Oxford English Dictionary)
It seems to me that ‘The Golem’ is one long Zugzwang, as thZugzwang: forced move in chess, where no legal move is possible (Oxford English Dictionary)
It seems to me that ‘The Golem’ is one long Zugzwang, as the main protagonist, Athanasius Pernath, moves through a Kafkaesque, Daliesque nightmare landscape of characters who bear no apparent link to each other, multiple identities, multiple scenes in Old Prague, from ramshackle drinking halls and junkshops through the maze of cobbled streets of Prague. But where is the golem? As the realisation dawns on you that the golem and Pernath are probably the same person, you don't really know whether you are coming or going. Add to this is the fact that the original Pernath is, if he is still alive, about ninety years old. The narrator-protagonist, who remains unnamed, on a whim, puts on Pernath's hat – and lo, things happen. In the past? In the present? In gaol? In a gemcutter’s shop?
This is one book that reads as magically the first time as the third, and possibly make less sense the third time than the first, but losing yourself in it is the great secret of ‘The Golem.'
‘Jubilee,’ in addition to its fine portraits of memorable men and women, deals with three strands of plot which may be separated into the social (clas‘Jubilee,’ in addition to its fine portraits of memorable men and women, deals with three strands of plot which may be separated into the social (class), the intellectual (education) and gender (feminism, equality). It is one of Gissing's most bitter criticisms of progress without the backbone of values born of education and principles. Finally, as an exercise in misogamy, it stands peerless.
That education is the leveller between the classes, Gissing leaves us in no doubt: else how could a slovenly, slatternly woman like Mrs Peachey afford a nursery maid, a kind of housemaid and a cook, who are as well or as ill-educated as she herself? "I can’t see much difference between her and the servant girls," says the Pasha, when his daughter appeals to him to let her attend the Jubilee day celebrations in the evening, and a few minutes later the housekeeper brings in an identical request from the kitchen maids. The only difference between them is that the daughter gets an hour's extra grace time to stay out.
Jubilee Day itself, designed to celebrate Victoria's fiftieth year on the throne, serves rather to highlight how human ideals have been degraded and vulgarised, while mechanical and scientific progress have certainly made unprecedented advances. Were the past fifty years worth the celebrations of the day? Not if the drunken, roistering crowds are anything to go by.
Mrs Peachey's sister Beatrice, more intelligent than she, and certainly more malevolent, is the one woman in the book to strike out for herself, pandering to the tastes of the poor and ignorant aspiring to a class to which they can never belong. Take the case of Nancy Lord, a girl who believes herself superior to others of her acquaintance, but who in fact went to school with the flighty Fanny French, the youngest of Mrs Peachey’s sisters: Nancy believes herself not simply to have been educated, but to be cultured, when in fact, “Her education had been chiefly concerned with names.” Thus, to impress an arrant rascal, she picks up a volume of the German scientist Helmholtz's work, but has never read a line of Keats’s poetry: an omission that is to cost her dearly. Nancy, for all her superior airs, when push finally comes to shove, takes a job as a glorified shop assistant in the chain of shops run by Beatrice French. Her literary ambitions are quashed by her husband, who while admitting that her manuscript is “good”, advises her against submitting it to a publisher because “it isn't literature.”
Or, since it's the women whose education Gissing seems to be excoriating, take the case of Jessica Morgan, whose studies towards a bachelor's degree drive her to the brink of madness: surely there were other women candidates for the same exam whose brains didn't collapse quite so dramatically? Yet, of all the educated women, Jessica turns out to be the least refined, the least sensitive, and the most vindictive. There are two other women, direct opposites to each other and yet whose lives have strangely impinged on each other: the mysterious Mrs Damerel and Mary Woodruff, the housekeeper and devoted and utterly rock-loyal friend to her employers the Lords, and Stephen Lord in particular. Mary Woodruff is not educated as Nancy Lord is, but she has a strong foundation of common sense and no fear of hard physical labour, though she must be at least fifteen years older than Nancy. And in Gissing's eyes, and thus in the eyes of men in the book, it is she who is the ideal of feminine perfection (other than her lack of a child.)
But to be fair to Gissing, it is not the women he despises, it is the kind of brutalisation that runs hand in hand with railways, ideas of scientific progress, and general gimcrackery, exemplified by a “liberal education” and by Luckworth Crewe’s sadly prophetic visions of a future where nature is blotted out by hoardings. Luckworth Crewe stands in direct contrast to Lionel Tarrant, the so-called landed gentleman, and to a lesser degree, to Samuel Barmby, the pompous equal of Nancy and Horace Lord in “social rank, only just above that of wage-earners.” Luckworth Crewe’s greatest virtue is in his total lack of self-deceit: or to put it another way, his absolute honesty, even when he is deceiving the public. All three men are attracted to Nancy Lord, it matters not why. Of the three, she picks on the one man who, despite his superior education and natural grace (he can quote Greek and Latin, sports the oak for privacy, and as long as he has a dress suit, is ready to face the world), has the weakest moral fibre and courage. Perhaps, of all the men who figure in the book, it is Horace Lord who should command our respect the most. It is he who finally finds the courage to stand up to his father in direct confrontation; who defies his apparently wealthy aunt; who breaks his heart over an unworthy woman, and later, overcome by ill health, marries that same woman, but is unable to drag her back from the degradation she seems to enjoy. And dies with absolutely nothing to reproach himself.
That finally brings us to the institution of marriage. Gissing's personal experiences on the subject cannot be written out. Although only the marriage of the Tarrants is dealt with in detail, it leaves one with a very odd idea of the married state. Are we to believe that living apart and maintaining two households is the best way to achieving marital bliss? It certainly does not paint Tarrant in any agreeable light. To the end, he insists on his personal freedom and right to live apart - and be unfaithful if he chose, though that same freedom is denied to his wife: the suppression of her manuscript, her removal from her place of employment, her right to be ‘free.’ Asked point blank if he is ashamed of his wife (he is), he denies it. Eventually, Nancy’s strength of character is sure to bring this marriage at least to safe harbour, unlike that of the weak Mr Peachey or Horace Lord. Beatrice French is sure to get her man, Luckworth Crewe, though with Crewe’s views on the subject: “Let women be as independent as they like as long as they’re not married. I never think the worse of them, whatever they do that’s honest. But a wife must play second fiddle, and think her husband a small god almighty!” it is a toss-up as to who will murder the other first!
Gissing moves away from one of his favourite themes - socialism - and focuses on that of quality versus mediocrity, and why the latter sells. The ideaGissing moves away from one of his favourite themes - socialism - and focuses on that of quality versus mediocrity, and why the latter sells. The idea brings into play the growing dichotomy between writers with a classical education and a dedication to an exalted, impossible dream of writing pure literature, and publishers with far more practical concerns of what is likely to sell. In the process, a great many writers of greater or lesser talent are reduced to utter poverty and at times, an abject humiliation. Families break up under the strain of maintaining a show of respectability with no money to pay the landlord. Other writers, perhaps with equal talent, happily chase the money dream at the cost of everything else - talent, self-respect, honour - even personal relationships. Among all of them exists a bitter, cut-throat rivalry, competition and the inevitable jealousies and petty backbiting.
Its characters might be exaggerated for effect, but they are all only too true to life. The violence that poverty engenders in men with such different temperaments as Alfred Yule and Edwin Reardon is the mark of the despair in which they are sunk. Women like Amy Reardon, unthinkable in a Dickensian setting, are simply the vanguard of a new kind of woman, as unlike poor Mrs Alfred Yule as it is possible to be. The women that Gissing portrays might not all be likeable, but they are, each in her own way, strong, self-confident and often employed and financially independent, and impel the plot forward as a result of their decisions.
The question of respectability is a serious one to a class-conscious society like the Victorians. The outward seeming of a gentleman was that he should do no work that brought with it a wage - that is, daily or weekly payment of cash. Thus, an impoverished gentleman really had no alternative but to write for a living. A moment only is needed to reflect that the very last profession that young men and women graduating from professional universities today would choose is that of a freelance writer. (Except that of a professional journalist with an accredited periodical, for which they undergo rigorous - and expensive - training.) For an earnest and idealistic young man of Victorian England, it was almost the first - and only - career that he could undertake respectably as a gentleman: the church, the law, medicine were closed to him without any qualification, while the Army was too expensive. Any other job was “trade” - even the suggestion of a clerk's weekly wage makes Amy’s blood boil.
With characters so clearly divided into the have-nots and the will-haves, the novel progresses inevitably to its tragic conclusion and deeply pessimistic views. Much of the philosophy behind the book is a result of Gissing's personal experiences, and cannot be dismissed as altogether dramatic and unrealistic. Despite its tenor, however, ‘New Grub Street’ stands out as one of the author’s finest works. Its stark realism marks the end of Victorian sentimentality and more than a slight hypocrisy in literature. After Trollope, perhaps Gissing was the writer most able to judge the effects of money upon men and their moral centre. ‘New Grub Street' is the true bridge between the old century and the new, old values and new, old ideals and new pragmatism....more
‘Demos’, one of Gissing's earlier works, marks the fruition of the man into the novelist. True to Gissing's ideas at the time, the novel is an exposit ‘Demos’, one of Gissing's earlier works, marks the fruition of the man into the novelist. True to Gissing's ideas at the time, the novel is an exposition of socialist idealism, which fails as soon as the ideal socialist becomes a capitalist. Richard Mutimer, a working class man, newly unemployed because his political and economic views are unacceptable to his employers, faces a bleak future where he will remain unemployable so long as views are radical. Just at the moment when things look very black, he comes into possession of a large estate, dispossessing the man until then the heir-presumptive, Hubert Eldon, as well as marrying the woman with whom Eldon was in love.
Mutimer is a very complex character, unlike his counterpart, Hubert Eldon. To start with, he is a very strong man intellectually, who is utterly convinced that socialism is the only way to better the lives of the working class. He is kindly and generous to his friends and deeply attached to his family, for whom he has assumed a kind of paternal authority. He is engaged to Emma, a girl of his own class, who loves him, but who cannot as yet abandon a family that is almost completely dependent on her. He is industrious and sober. His defects lie in part in his education - he does not see the need for information not directly pertaining to either socialism or labour. All cultural refinements he rejects as an adjunct of the entitled classes. Similarly, he rejects official religion on the grounds that people must first be fed, housed and given rest before they can think of religion. On the other hand, if religion means the brotherhood of men and women working and living together in harmony and with freedom from slave labour, disease and want, then he practises it daily and has no need to make a show of it in a special building.
Mutimer determines to use his new-found wealth for the common good, and starts well, but with the sudden access of wealth and property, one by one his principles fall by the way as they clash with newly discovered social ambitions. His lack of refinement make him self-conscious, while as an employer (though he insists he is not an employer in a co-operative), he is overbearing and harsh. He is ashamed of his working class friends, and drops them effortlessly. His mother and his brother both assert their independence in their own remarkable ways. His greatest act of blackguardism, however, comes when he uses his sister to inform Emma that he is already married. This is almost true, for he has acted on Mrs Waltham, a widow without money, to marry her daughter Adela. He admires their ‘class’, and Mrs Waltham admires his money. Adela does not love him, but when scurrilous tales are printed about the man she does love, she accepts Mutimer’s offer.
Mutimer's socialist dreams fade, his once-brash personality now call for a moderate approach to his political views, while the radical elements of his party force a schism within the movement, vilifying his moral turpitude with the story of his jilting of Emma, and calling for assassination as the only means of achieving their aims. Mutimer's parliamentary dreams come crashing down in face of the existing Socialist candidate and conservative interests.
The ending is weak, but in a way inevitable. Mutimer's younger brother ‘Arry has been ruined irredeemably by prosperity, but before his final disappearance, ‘Arry has found out that his sister has been married to a bigamist, and is ultimately the instrument by which the bigamist is convicted, for financial fraud as well as bigamy. Mutimer's own death at the hands of angry rioters is sudden and unsatisfactory, but it leaves his family free to move out of his shadow.
The novel’s greatest strength is in the personalities of the Mutimer family, and in that of Adela Mutimer. While she does not love her husband, her inbred pride in herself impels her to support him in all his plans, repressing her own preferences. It does not make her very pleasant, and there is a reason why both Mutimer's mother and his sister detest her. The weakness in ‘Demos’ seems to be that it equates the working class with ignorance and vulgarity, and civilisational and cultural attainments the exclusive prerogative of the propertied class. This is not always the case, as the Vicar points out, but the animosity between Hubert Eldon and Richard Mutimer lies deeper than rivalry over a woman or dispossession of ancestral property. The novel also suggests that when the labouring man comes suddenly into money, the inner man shows up as a vulgar, crass parvenu. ...more
These few stories are a good introduction to the later works of Woolf. Each displays the beginning of the so-called stream of consciousness, when the These few stories are a good introduction to the later works of Woolf. Each displays the beginning of the so-called stream of consciousness, when the whole action is seen through someone's mind, with little or no dialogue. Thus, a Duchess visits a jeweller (and former lover, perhaps?) to sell some of her jewellery (and maybe also her daughter), or a new party dress in which the wearer feels as completely out of place as a diner in formal evening dress at a nudist dinner. Or the young man, John, with a brilliant career ahead of him, is diverted from his life's path by a lump of glass on a beach.
Not all the stories are easy to read or understand, but Virginia Woolf was – and is – a writer who demanded that extra effort. Contemporary writers were straightforward, with stories that had a beginning, middle and an end : a Plot, in other words. Their omniscience told us mostly what they did or said, leaving the reader to infer their private thoughts from this (she blushed, and said, "Oh, Mr Bates!" = she was in love). Woolf's reaction to the conventional was to explore the way her characters thought – exactly the way we do ourselves: disjointed, fragmentary and with the speed of light.
That said, a writer like Virginia Woolf, who turned a whole language and literature on its head, cannot be reviewed, only studied....more
It is most presumptuous to think I could review this classic. There is so much, so many layers to every sentence; you get so involved with every deadbIt is most presumptuous to think I could review this classic. There is so much, so many layers to every sentence; you get so involved with every deadbeat, every tertulio in every café, that it is hard to tear yourself away from the brutal infidelities of Juanito Santa Cruz, or the cloying and exasperating sweetness of Jacinta.
Since this book is written with such fluent idiomatic ease, and my Spanish is of the basic textbook kind, I read it in the Agnes Moncey Gullón translation. There is an earlier translation by Lester Clark, published by Penguin. The Gullón translation itself was clear, very pleasant to read, and conveys the meaning without losing any of the nuances of the Spanish original (I checked with the Spanish version for adding to the quotations), but it is, after all, a translation only.
The vast array of characters, and the attention given to every detail, is impressive, as is the picture of turn-of-the-century Madrid following the abdication of Don Amadeo I. The portraits of the lesser characters are no less detailed than those of the three principals, with an almost Proustian intensity. Everything is observed: from the street children to the shopping habits of Jacinta's mother-in-law to the deceptive baby talk of childless married couples, the dignities of the ladies in a ducal household or the nuns at a convent where Fortunata is sent to be reformed. The political complications of Spain at this period, always a tangle at any time in history, but particularly confusing immediately following the abdication of Amadeo I, is just one of the great pleasures of the book. Sly Spanish humour runs like a gold thread throughout the several layers of plot and subplot, against the overall tragedy.
Jacinta and Juanito Santa Cruz ('The Dauphin'), a scoundrel with no moral compass whatever, are caught up in a troubled, if not exactly loveless, marriage. (He does, however, realise how far beneath her he is, and says so to Fortunata.) Although Jacinta is predisposed to love her husband, he shatters her illusions during the honeymoon itself with tales of his love affair with another woman. For many years childless, Jacinta is horrified to learn that her husband has an illegitimate son, running wild in one of the poorer barrios of Madrid.
When Jacinta eventually tells her husband that she has adopted a street urchin remarkably like him, and believed to be his son, he denies having any illegitimate children at all, then changes his story – he had a son by Fortunata, yes, a boy who died of the croup. Finally, the family makes a decision to send the boy away to an orphanage and Jacinta is devastated both by her husband's lies and the wildness of Pituso, the boy believed to be Juanito's illegitimate son.
As the story develops, and Jacinta discovers her husband's serial infidelity, she is also seen by Juanito's mistress, Fortunata. Now Fortunata is a woman who effortlessly attracts all men to herself, including her husband's brother, a priest. And yet it is her misfortune to love one man dearly, and that man is none other than Jacinta's husband, Don Juanito Santa Cruz. And Juanito is, true to character, as faithless to her as to his wife. When Fortunata eventually meets Jacinta at a friend's deathbed, she hates her as Juanito's wife, despising her for her barrenness. Since she herself has borne a son, she feels that she is Juanito Santa Cruz's true wife, and that Jacinta has "stolen" him from her. To her dismay however, she finds herself admiring the poised and lovely lady she sees, with only a hazy guess at Jacinta's own despair at being tied to Juanito.
But take into account also the wretchedness, the gradual degradation, particularly after being soundly thrashed by his wife's lover, the slow slide into schizophrenia and imbecility of Fortunata's husband, Maximiliano Rubin, and you get the measure of this book, when you consider the lengths to which his rage leads him into taking revenge....more
Loading...
