Endicott Mythic Fiction discussion
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Fingersmith
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I inter-library loaned this one, too! I had never heard of it before. I have high hopes for it, though!
Coincidently, I started this one last week. Since I'm listening to the audiobook, it'll take me at least another week to finish.
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there are 10 ahead of me! not much better!
i'm next in line for the library's one ebook copy!sadly, ILL didn't work out so hot for last month's book, but ebooks work better for me anyway.
Good lord, it just now got here. I'm going to speed-read it!
finished it last week, and i rather liked it. it has all the best parts of a "penny dreadful", what with dastardly rakes and improbable zaniness and madwomen. way fun, especially for "lit fic" (this was a booker prize hopeful). that being said...does anyone have the Endicott listing that talks about this one?? i don't think it was "mythic" fiction in any way at all. it was neither about magic nor about a mystical/spiritual/coming of age journey, and the characters didn't to me read like archetypes. i didn't dislike the book at all, and it was certainly not something i would have stumbled across on my own (so thanks, group!), but i don't know how it made it onto this particular list.
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I know that all the books Baobhan & I added to the group reading list were on the original Endicott journal website (we were really careful about that).
Unfortunately, the extended book lists that used to be posted are no longer there. Some of the reading list still are, but there used to be a LOT more, complete with mini-reviews and book cover images. I'm guessing Fingersmith was on one of those old reading lists. I wish they could be posted again but maybe there was a problem maintaining them because of all the book cover image links.
I haven't been able to get a hold of a copy of Fingersmith yet so I can't weigh in on this, but I think a discussion about why it should/should not be in a list of mythic fiction sounds really interesting. Hope someone else who's read the novel will respond.
I finished it a couple of weeks ago and I really liked it.It's sort of a faux-Victorian novel, with all the crazy, implausible plot twists and cliff hangers that label implies. I would have hated many of the individual plot elements if they were in a modern novel, but somehow all the penny-dreadful aspects combined into something that was really fun.
And I second the confusion on it being on a mythic fiction list. I don't think there's anything at all mythic about it.
The only connection I can think of is that mythic fiction is inspired by and mimics fairy tales and myths and this is inspired by and mimics Victorian lit? Maybe someone on the board just loved Charles Dickens.
i think that fingersmith is mythic fiction because it is playing with and subverting the myths around madness (the madwoman) and around queerness (the lesbian).the book is also a retelling of oliver twist, in which most characters have their analogues.
I'd classify madness (at least in this case) as more of a trope of the Victorian genre than a myth. There's no set story to a madwoman - it's just a common plot element of the time. No comment on the lesbian part - no Victiorian novel would ever mention that directly!I don't think it's a re-telling of one particular story as much as it's trying to mimic the genre/era as a whole. It shows almost as many paralells to Jane Eyre as it does to Oliver Twist. Though I do admit Waters plays up the similarities to Oliver Twist quite a bit - it is directly referenced in the begining, after all.
I don't think there's much debating that can be done without spoiling the book and I'm especially leery of doing with this book in particular since the sheer unexpectedness of the plot twists is half the fun.
madness is not a trope. madness is not a myth, either. it's that myths surround what it means to be mad and specifically what it means to be a madwoman. the madwoman is an archetype. bertha, in jane eyre, is an example of the archetypal mad woman. waters plays with the idea of women being angels or madwomen in fingersmith. she plays with the stories around what kind of characters females can be, as well as with the stories specifically around madwomen. one of the myths around lesbians that she is subverting is that lesbians have no place/space in the victorian novel/in victorian england.
i don't think she's trying to mimic the victorian novel. i agree that fingersmith has echoes of many victorian novels. i disagree that they are all working in the same way.
Melanti, as you said, no thorough discussion can be had without spoilers, so...BEWARE, MATEYS, SPOILERS AHOY BELOW HERE!
Emilie, I think we're about to get into a prickly ball of semantic thorns, but here goes. I agree there is most definitely a jungian-flavor archetype of "the madwoman", but I don't really find it much at all in this book. I'm much more in tune with Melanti's reading here, that madness as a concept (not actual real-world mental illness, which of course is a much more serious and sensitive topic) is indeed a standard trope of the Victorian novel. it's a concept used frequently enough as to be pretty standard, but oh yes, Waters plays with the trope and has a lot of fun with it. in playing around, she's also mixing in the "false imprisonment" trope, to add flavors of 'count of monte cristo' to the 'Jane eyre' mix. fun!
you also say, "one of the myths around lesbians that she is subverting is that lesbians have no place/space in the victorian novel/in victorian england." other than perhaps underground or pornographic novels, I'd say that in fact lesbians didn't have a place in a Victorian novel - homosexuality being the love that dare not speak its name and all. when you use the word "myth" here, I read that as "untruth" - there were of course lesbians in Victorian England just as there were at any other time, so to pretend they didn't exist is patently false. but myth = untruth is very different than myth = archetypical tale of legend or fable, so I'm back to my first thought that this book, to me, doesn't at all register as "mythic" fiction.
via a vis spoilers and playing with genre tropes, I'm kinda sad that this book gets shelved by a lot of people as LBGT or lesbian fiction...I would so have loved to stumble across the relationship of these two women as a total surprise. if this was your stereotypical novel of this flavor, both women would have fallen head over heels in love with gentleman, not knowing til the end he was fated for someone else (or some other implausible escape completely out of left field). the fact that they both instead fall for each other is a thoroughly interesting twist on the expected.
Michelle, I would have liked that particular twist to be as surprise as well. But since most of her work contains that particular element and she's well known for it, it still wouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has read about her other books or her.My first Sarah Waters book was The Little Stranger which is a gothic ghost story set in Britain just after WWII. Several people had made assumptions and applied the same tags/shelves to it, even though there was nothing of the sort in the book. So, I had the opposite issue with that book - I kept waiting for something to happen that never did.
Emilie, when you mentioned angels and madwomen were you referring to The Madwoman in the Attic? I must confess to never having read that. It's possible that if I had, I might look at this book differently. It is certainly true that a lot of the people classified as "mad" in that era just didn't conform to society and were looked at as being rather wanton. It was ridiculously easy to lock someone up at the time, and asylums or seclusion were often used as a tool to control women - especially those who didn't bow to their male relatives' whim.
I look at it as a trope in this case precisely because it was so common in literature (and really, in real life) in the Victorian era. It doesn't mean that Waters isn't saying something deeper with how she's handling it - just that I don't think it's really mythic in this particular case.
If she was writing about someone like Ophelia from Hamlet or even Miss Havisham from Great Expectations without all the other Victorian trappings and said the same things, I'd be more likely to call that mythic.
melanti wrote: Emilie, when you mentioned angels and madwomen were you referring to The Madwoman in the Attic? yes, exactly, i think the ideas in that inform this one. after i posted my comment, i thought that another way this book could be said to be mythic is that it's about myths around women. one of the ideas in that book is that women are represented as being either an angel or a madwomen. the way that (view spoiler)(which as you say, is often much more about the way a woman doesn't conform to society and often more about the whims of [often] male relatives), and the way that waters seems to me to be interested in showing the reader that (view spoiler)things aren't what they seem, they don't fit into those tidy boxes, but those are so often the boxes that women are put into.
that's why i mentioned that i think this is a retelling. i think she's recasts the characters (not the plot) of oliver twist. yes, i think she is doing many things at once, she is not taking an archetypical madwoman character to play her madwoman archetype. i think she's using her female oliver and the artful dodger, to me, oliver is a character identified by innocence, he is like an angel lost in a world filled with (metapahoric) monsters, so he fits into the metaphoric framework of angels and madwomen. and the artful dodger is a kind of mad character, a kind of distressed monster in training who is also an angel with few choices. to me, what dickens was doing with the artful dodger is some of what waters is doing with (view spoiler)
do you think the victorian style makes it read less mythic maybe?
michelle wrote: other than perhaps underground or pornographic novels, I'd say that in fact lesbians didn't have a place in a Victorian novel - homosexuality being the love that dare not speak its name and all...
the way that i was using the word myth was " a popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or someone" (m-w). i think we are all agreeing that lesbians were relegated to the margins of victorian spaces. so, it's a myth (popular belief and tradition) that lesbians exist only outside of the victorian novel/ space. the reason waters is subverting the myth (popular tradition) that lesbians don't have a place in victorian novel is because she writes the lesbians right into the centre of this text, which is a (kind of) victorian novel (a form of victorian representational space).
do you think the victorian style makes it read less mythic maybe?Yes, especially with the Penny Dreadful style here. Partly because the style means that there's so much going on at once. (view spoiler) There's so many elements to the story, and there's quite a few that could be mythic if explored alone or at length. But when each element is just one tiny part of a convoluted plot, I have a hard time seeing it as mythic.
Also, there's the fact that it was such a common plot element of the Victorian era. Nearly everything I've read from that era has some character touched by insanity - Bertha from Jane Eyre, Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, even Fagin from Oliver Twist in the end. There's so much historical precedence for insanity that I'd think it odd if Fingersmith didn't incorporate it in some fashion or another.
There's certain stories about insanity that are particularly mythic to me. Insanity resulting from false accusation or false imprisonment. Insanity after something happens on a wedding day. Insanity after childbirth. Insanity after being parted from a true love (be it death, rejection, or parental intervention). Insane in search of revenge. The unexplained mad relation locked away somewhere. But the way it's presented in Fingersmith (view spoiler) isn't one of those mythic versions in my view, especially since (view spoiler).
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Endicott Mythic Fiction
Books mentioned in this topic
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories (other topics)The Little Stranger (other topics)
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (other topics)
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters is the book for April 2012 - who's reading?
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