2 novellas by Wilkie Collins: Miss Or Mrs? & The Guilty River
How difficult it shall be in our ‘woke’ future to read the literature of the past! For, after ensuring that our book is printed appropriately with soy inks upon hempen paper, and reading beneath an LED bulb powered by solar light stored in our landfill-friendly accumulator, we shall still have to face the textual problems that have always beset readers, all whilst confronting a new set of challenges thrown up at every turn by the then-current arbiters of mores, morals, and taste. Those future dictators of culture, the Jacobins-to-come of reasoned discourse, may find their task made difficult by the ever-increasing pace of anachronistic reflection upon the mistakes and woeful ignorances of the ever-nearer past, but we may be certain that they shall meet that challenge, given that their present cousins, the current batch of cultural judges, have shown no inclination to shirk from issuing diktat and condemnation of any action or person seen by the social mediatariat as violating the newly imposed norms of hypervigilant awareness of roles and responsibilities in spheres as diverse as the sexual, the commercial, the gastronomic, the symbolic, not to mention those of fashion, friendship, and language. The Sleep of Reason produces monsters, as De Goya proclaimed in his aquatint, but an ever-wakeful Reason made disjoint from imagination may create its own demoniacal offspring.*
But as the cycles of ‘awareness’ spin ever faster and faster only to dissolve into a discordant mass of graceless notes of angst and reaction, like the audience who clapping along with the performer speeds ahead of the tempo faster and faster until its applause breaks upon an inability to keep the beat, the social member finds himself (or herself, or <your preferred pronoun here>) unable to keep up with what’s what and who’s who and how’s about, unable to raise the correct amount of outrage at this activity while cheering unthinkingly the appeal to that other activity, unable to wear the right line of clothes while simultaneously disdaining that lifestyle brand now deemed not only déclassé but also recidivist. Like the poor fellow traveller trying to keep up with the changes after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the twists and turns required to be ‘with it’ and hipper-than-thou can cause whiplash and may lead to a need for a full spine replacement.
All of which is merely a very roundabout way of saying that reading Wilkie Collins in the aborning Twenty-First Century is fraught—fraught, I say—with perils and concerns that have little to do with the inherent material written by Mr. Collins in the closing decades of the Nineteenth Century. And it is difficult to determine how problematic that material is on its own terms, versus the controversies brought by us to Collins’s work from the oceans of zeitgeist drowning We Who Are Living Now. A sedulous understanding of the correct perspective on difficult societal issues seems to be the hallmark of Our Times, and our especial foreknowledge of the resolution of all formerly taboo subjects might just make it hard for We Living Now to appreciate the (misguided?) insights and ideas of Mr. Wilkie Collins, an old white guy who appears to have lost some of his audience when he became more preachy after losing his best friend, Charles Dickens, in 1870. The works I am considering today come from that post-Dickens period, for the most part, with Miss or Mrs? published in 1871 and The Guilty River some fifteen years later in 1886. Two very short pieces—“trifles”, as Collins called them—were appended to my edition of Miss or Mrs?: “‘Blow Up With The Brig!’” and “The Fatal Cradle”.
All these stories are perhaps impossible to read heedless of the accretions of time long since passed. This may be particularly true of Miss or Mrs?, a novella whose main action concerns the marriage, forced or volitional, of a fifteen or sixteen year old girl. Not to worry, however; our heroine Natalie Graybrooke is rather developed for her age:
At fifteen years of age (dating from her last birthday) she possessed the development of the bosom and limbs, which in England is rarely attained before twenty. Everything about the girl – except her little rosy ears – was on a grand Amazonian scale. Her shapely hand was long and large; her supple waist was the waist of a woman. The indolent grace of all her movements had its motive power in an almost masculine firmness of action, and profusion of physical resource. This remarkable bodily development was far from being accompanied by any corresponding development of character. Natalie’s inner was the gentle, innocent manner of a young girl.
The developing maiden around which the novella turns, doubtless grateful her ears have not grown as much as her bosom
Miss Natalie has two suitors, in effect, though one is secret and the other is a troglodyte. The latter, Richard Turlington, is a man of affairs whose desire for the lovely daughter of Sir Joseph Graybrooke is more than mercantile, perhaps less than entirely honorable. The former would-be lover is Natalie’s cousin (!), the unfortunately named Launcelot Linzie, a medico who is some fifteen years younger than Mr. Turlington. (Meaning, for the mathematically inclined among you, that Turlington is at minimum twice the age of his desired bride.) The story opens on board the yacht of the rich tradesman desirous of the much younger girl. A sea voyage has been prescribed as treatment for Natalie, who has shown “Signs of maturing too rapidly—of outgrowing her strength”, and Mr. Turlington has put his schooner at the disposal of the Graybrookes, the father and daughter, along with her maiden aunt. While on board, two things precipitate the action of the story: first, hints of a strange past for Mr. Turlington; and second, business exigencies which demand the businessman’s immediate attention. As he leaves the family aboard his yacht to manage his affairs, Turlington warns Sir Graybrooke away from Mr. Linzie, whom the older suitor suspects (rightly) of competing for the attentions of his desired prize.
[runs the original caption to this illustration from the book]
Twists and turns ensue, as often happens when a story is published in serial form, and Wilkie Collins demonstrates his excellence at foreshadowing and at weaving narrative threads into an intriguing and satisfactory pattern. Along the way, the author uses his knowledge of the law to navigate the more peculiar aspects of the English statutes, viz. the Law of Clandestine Marriage. For Natalie is not of age, not to mention the fact that by this time in the story her father has promised her to the ever more brutal Mr. Turlington, and so Launce Linzie (egads what a diseuphonious name) seeks out a legal loophole whereby he and she may be married without her father’s consent. Yes, you read that right: Miss or Mrs? tells how a man may legally marry a fifteen year old girl without letting her daddy know. One wonders if this law was changed after Wilkie Collins let slip this ‘life hack’. It is also indicative of the author and of his age that he delves into legal idiosyncrasies in the service of love, whilst the American focus on law in fiction is generally with regards to murder. Such is life. Fortunately, the creepiness factor is reduced greatly by the strongest character in the novel, the wonderful Lady Winwood, Sir Joseph’s niece (and therefore also Natalie’s cousin). This diminutive woman (as the author says, “But who ever met with a tall woman who had a will of her own?”) has made her own marriage to a lord and insists in her forceful way that Natalie follow her heart:
‘My dear, one ambitious marriage in the family is quite enough! I have made up my mind that you shall marry the man you love. Don’t tell me your courage is failing you – the excuse is contemptible; I refuse to receive it. Natalie! the men have a phrase which exactly describes your character. You want back-bone!’
The strongest woman in Miss or Mrs? speaks her mind
This titled spouse drives much of the remaining plot, and—through her approbation of Mr. Linzie—signals the reader that the young man might make a satisfactory husband for poor Natalie in spite of his lack of funds or position. And so the contest is engaged, fought with stealthy wedding wiles on the part of the want-to-be newlyweds and increasing domineering fury on the part of Sir Joseph and (particularly) Mr. Turlington. Alea jacta est, several times in fact, and the story moves quickly and passionately to its heart-stopping finale.
The other novella by Wilkie Collins that we consider, The Guilty River, is a much later work, which displays the same wonderful prose stylings of the author, though the plot is more turbid and the characters less engaging than those of Miss or Mrs? Unfortunately, the contrivances which flow from the author’s imagination quite naturally into the plot of the earlier work are here quite clunky, and this flaw combines with a hero portrayed in a heavy-handed and not entirely believable manner to create a somewhat ponderous tale of implied peril and almost incredible naïveté. The astonishing denouement of Miss or Mrs? has its parallel in The Guilty River, only here the ginned up closing falls flat. Whereas the first book considered keeps the reader guessing until the very end, the latter seems to telegraph too clearly how it will all turn out.
I stood alone on the bank of the ugliest stream in England.
The moonlight, pouring its unclouded radiance over open space, failed to throw a beauty not their own on those sluggish waters. Broad and muddy, their stealthy current flowed onward to the sea, without a rock to diversify, without a bubble to break, the sullen surface. On the side from which I was looking at the river, the neglected trees grew so close together that they were undermining their own lives, and poisoning each other. On the opposite bank, a rank growth of gigantic bulrushes hid the ground beyond, except where it rose in hillocks, and showed its surface of desert sand spotted here and there by mean patches of heath. A repellent river in itself, a repellent river in its surroundings, a repellent river even in its name. It was called The Loke.
But The Guilty River is not all bad, as this charming description of ugliness proves
The novella concerns a young squire, Gerald Roylake, returned from German schools to assume his inheritance, the manor and lands of Trimley Deen. He is out of place in England, unable to care about those things which seem of most import to his father’s widow (the old squire having remarried after sending his son to the Continent) and the social circle to which he belongs. As in the previous book, love is the driving force, though here the class discrepancy between the anode and cathode in the proposed marriage battery is even greater, as the master of Trimley Deen falls head over heels in love with the miller’s daughter, who can only owe him fealty, not affection. While his stepmother tries to defoliate his budding love and direct the young squire’s attentions towards a more acceptable direction, young Roylake engages in a strange relationship with a Lodger at the mill, a former doctor now become deaf who insinuates himself into our hero’s life, coming between the young man and Cristel, the aforementioned miller’s daughter.
I find myself unwilling to plod through a recitation of the twists and turns of this product of Wilkie Collins’s later years. Suffice it to say that Roylake is a babe in the woods who is manipulated into absurd stupidities, the Lodger is a monotonous (literally so, as his deafness apparently manifests itself by making his speech loud and lacking dynamics) foil, and Cristel is merely implausible.
‘He is very vain,’ she said, ‘and you may have wounded his vanity by treating him like a stranger, after he had given you his writings to read, and invited you to his room. But I thought I saw something much worse than mortification in his face. Shall I be taking a liberty, if I ask how it was you got acquainted with him last night?’
She was evidently in earnest. I saw that I must answer her without reserve; and I was a little afraid of being myself open to a suspicion of vanity, if I mentioned the distrust which I had innocently excited in the mind of my new acquaintance. In this state of embarrassment I took a young man’s way out of the difficulty, and spoke lightly of a serious thing.
‘I became acquainted with your deaf Lodger, Cristel, under ridiculous circumstances. He saw us talking last night, and did me the honour to be jealous of me.’
I had expected to see her blush. To my surprise she turned pale, and vehemently remonstrated.
Our three main characters in a first-person nutshell, showing young Roylake understands women no better than anything else
Though there are some good moments in The Guilty River, most of the tale is quite recalcitrant, shoved along like a fat old cat of disreputable mien towards its unsatisfactory conclusion. I liked it. Many of the same themes are present in both novellas, to wit, idiocies of the English class system and the hidden heart of dark brutality behind handsome masks. But The Guilty River also betrays a sluggish despondency which may be more evocative of the author’s increasing dependence upon laudanum than of the gothic tale he seeks to tell. Though the story is told with the young Squire Roylake as the first-person hero, the narration is of a man looking back years later at the mistakes and missed opportunities of youth, more maudlin than wistful, with a heavier heart than the more ebullient tale of the attempted clandestine marriage of Miss or Mrs?
Wilkie Collins himself had an iconoclastic view of marriage, spending most of his life in a relationship which defies definition with a widow, Caroline Graves, while also fathering three children with another woman, Martha Rudd. Thus, while it is easy to view these strange tales of matrimony as merely artifacts of the Victorian Age, Mr. Collins lived within the transgressive world which betrays the limits of society’s strictures. Also worthy of note is the mixed race of the ‘Amazonian’ heroine of the earlier novella, whose mother is frankly stated to have “a mixture of Negro blood and French blood”, for whatever that may be worth.
The edition of Miss or Mrs? which I have bears the subtitle And Other Stories In Outline, and the two very short stories appended to the longer tale are much better than ‘trifles’—as Collins names them in his introduction. “‘Blow up with the brig!’” is a one-scene story of a sailor facing death one long, long night. And “The Fatal Cradle” is a witty sea tale of fate and fortune, and the vagaries of birth. All three in the volume are tightly plotted, deftly described, and ultimately pleasing narratives. They do much more than “endeavour to interest [the reader] without making large demands on his attention and his time.” This reader was inspired by these tales to order a half-dozen more Wilkie Collins books. And though The Guilty River was as sluggish as the book’s titular waterway, the sparkles of wit and language were still present, in portions large enough to encourage further acquaintance with this very interesting author.
* The nuance of this most famous of De Goya’s etchings from Los Caprichos is often neglected or perhaps unknown, as the full epigraph is only seen in certain editions. Though the print itself always shows the common title “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos”, the Prado edition provides the artist’s plea for the importance of both Reason and Imagination: “La fantasia abandonada de la razon, produce monstruos imposibles: unida con ella, es madre de las artes y origen de sus marabillas.” Situated as he was on the cusp of the Romantic Era, and all too aware of some of the failures of the Enlightenment, De Goya sounded an all-too-prescient warning of possible horrors to come—predicted horrors he later witnessed and depicted in The Disasters of War. The death of God and faith, however, has brought a recrudescence of the numbing dominion of King Reason, as the ‘invisible hand’ of the so-called free market becomes one of the only three metaphysical forces appealed to in our Endarkened Age. (The other two, of course, are the Military-Patriot Industry and the Christian Brand.