Endicott Mythic Fiction discussion

strangite (strangean?) or norrellite? (smiles)

hi, i'm sorry i didn't write anything here sooner. i'm hoping you want to discuss Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell with me.

and me, i'm neither, or a bit of both.

i thought i'd start off with a few questions from the link odette gave (thanks odette!) for the reading discussion guide.

3."magicians have no business marrying" says mr norrell, of Strange's relationship with Arabella. why does norrell take such a dim view of Strange's marriage to Arabella. what does the novel have to say about marriage in general and the nature of relationships between men and women in the society it depicts?

i was really struck when reading this by something one of the women said after being freed from entrallment to faerie (also called no hope, which seems to me both funny and significant). i didn't take notes while i read this book, which i regret, because i don't have such a great memory for details like who said it, so i can only say it was either Arabella or lord wellington's wife...but i remember that when asked if she planned to live with her husband again she said that to live as a woman in marriage (in regency england) was quite similiar to living as a woman captive to the faery in no-hope, and that she'd spent far too much time already doing that. she compared the false life of dancing herself to death and beautiful appearances as well as the helplessness to leave, to make her own choices of being captured within the faery realm to the life of being a wife in regency england.

i think this is a pretty strong statement about what it's like to be a woman in the society of regency england. and i think it's a pretty strong statement of the power imbalance in the relationships between men and women. i think that the woman who said this loved her husband, which to me, makes the statement even more powerful.

what do you think?

6. what part does madness play in the novel?

i think it's very interesting how madness is the doorway into seeing faery. madness is a kind of power in the novel, a way to see things as they truly are (since the faery realm exists, and only those who are mad see the true reasons for things such as the behavior of those who are bespelled). and at the same time, madness is something that is very difficult to control and so can lead to chaos and madness is very isolating.

the distilling of madness into a tincture is one of my favorite ideas/concepts in the book and it opens up a lot of questions.

lady wellington is perceived as mad when she is not mad. she is abandoned pretty much to her madness, and no one except Arabella pays her much attention at all. it's a brilliance on the part of the Faerie i think, to choose for enthrallment to look like madness, and it makes a commentary on people and how easily people write off those that appear mad, and don't pay attention and try to understand them.
and madness contains the seeds of true vision. in the novel, madness is a sensitivity to what's true. the mad need no magic to see things as they are, and this is a power. yet, the mad are isolated and can't communicate their experiences or connect with others because what they say is ignored and seen irrelevant and gibberish.
and then there is Strange, who takes too much madness into him. but one of the interesting things is that the murder he commits to create the tincture of madness, the murder that looks like something society would say is a mad act, he does this Before he has taken his essence of madness.

it's also interesting to wonder if madness is a way of understanding/seeing faery realm because the faery realm is a realm of madness (in contrast to the world that believes itself to be the world of reason). and after strange becomes mad, it seems like an extension of his personality which is one of passions and emotions,which is contrasted with that of norrell who is cold and calculating and reasoning.

what do you think about all this madness?