1. Our Lady of Mile End

By Sarah Gilbert 

I'd first heard of Our Lady of Mile End via FB -- by seeing a friend flag that she was going to attend the book launch event at the D&Q bookstore.  I learned later she was actually good friends with author Sarah Gilbert, not to mention she'd also highly recommended that I read the book.  So when I was at D&Q to do some Christmas shopping, I decided to purchase a copy so as to support a local writer and fellow neighbour, even though I didn't know her personally.  I’ve lived in the Mile End for about 15 years while Gilbert has lived here since she was a university student in the 1990s. 

A bit of background about the author:

 

Gilbert started writing about Mile End while on maternity leave in 2008.  “I took a lot of walks with my daughter, and often I was pushing the stroller very slowly to get her to sleep,” she explains. “I got to observe my surroundings in detail.”

The immediate result was Mile Endings, a blog that recorded the people and places affected — for better or for worse — by the neighbourhood’s ongoing gentrification. It found an enthusiastic audience.

 

So it made sense for Gilbert to eventually segue into short stories about the neighbourhood she loves, and the collection became Our Lady of Mile End.  Already loving the cover illustration – Mile End residents "airing out their laundry" on multiple clothes lines strung between the neighbourhood's signature triplex buildings -- I was very much looking forward to reading the collection, assuming the stories would cover a various cross-section of intersecting lives of my fellow residents.

 

First up was “Material”, about a young artist, Alice, who cleans apartments in the Mile End for a living.  The story begins with Alice taking a shower at her client’s place.  Since she lives at her warehouse studio along with other artists, and it’s located in an industrial zone, the building isn’t fitted with kitchens and showers, and the Y was closed due to renovations.   In any case, Alice’s client comes home unexpectedly, surprised to see that Alice had used her shower.  Ok, so far an interesting situation that reflects the gentrification of the Mile End, which not that long ago, used to be very affordable for artists and musicians, but rising rents forced many move to cheaper areas.  Interestingly, Alice is a textile artist who likes to collect castoffs from her clients, namely the lint that collects in the dryer, to use in her artwork.  However, before anything of substance could take root in “Material”, the story was over after a few pages.  

 

The next story was “What If”, about a woman named Meg who left the back door ajar while WFH alone inside her apartment.  When she goes into the kitchen, she finds a strange man peering into her refrigerator.  He had splotches of blue pain all over his shirt and acted rather nonchalant about his appearance.   Since her bf was involved in theatre, for some bizarre reason, Meg assumed that Jason sent a friend over to perform some kind of prank on her, because why would a robber act like he’s just dropping by her place?  Later, after talking to her friend, Meg learned a bank heist had occurred in the area and one of the robbers fled the scene while the police went in search for him.  Meg realized that the man who was in her kitchen and used her bathroom was probably the bank robber!

 

This made me recall a fairly exciting news story some years ago about an armed bank robbery attempt which involved a police car chase, then the car crashed, a male suspect fled the scene and was still at large in the Mile End.  The police had cordoned off the entire area as they scoured the alleys and yards in search of the fugitive.  This happened back in 2016, but Gilbert re-situated the event six months before the pandemic, a time when no once visited people’s homes anymore.  “There was no possibility of strangers, no surprise encounters.”

 

Long after the blue paint-splotched man left her home without incident, and Meg realized she was put in a potentially dangerous situation, she got turned on as she recalled her chance encounter, hence the title “What If.”   This made me groan inside (not in a good way), and made me wonder whether Gilbert had this very same "what if" fantasy, ie. “what if a fugitive bank robber ended up hiding in my apartment?”  I didn't want to read about the author's sex fantasy, FFS!  Gimme some stories about people's real lives!!

 

By this point, I was getting a little wary.  I don’t read short stories often, but I know they can be wispy vignettes and fleeting sketches of life, yet taken together as a whole, they could form an over-arching idea, held together by common themes, etc.  This was kind of what I was hoping for in Our Lady of Mile End.  But after reading a story, it would leave me feeling unsatisfied, like consuming bland consommé for lunch instead of something more filling.  

 

There was one recurring character who appeared in several stories. Evelyn the English college professor first appeared in an early story “Introduction to College English” in which she gets into a conflict with a student named Maya.  The story delves into each person’s POV of the other, and ends up with Evelyn writing a nice reference letter for Maya.  

 

In “The Visit”, Evelyn is at her Mile End apartment when she gets a phone call from her brother Dominiq who had just arrived at the airport for a spontaneous visit.  She convinces him to meet her at her chalet in the Laurentians, so most of the story is about her and her brother having fairly mundane conversations about their lives.  At the end of the story, we find out that this visit as fabricated and all in Evelyn’s head as her brother never made it out to see her.  In reality, he had been diagnosed with late stage cancer and died a few weeks later.  Not only was the story barely had anything to do with the Mile End, it was a wish fulfillment fantasy.  The story ended with a “—for Bart” so it seemed to have personal relevance for Gilbert, at least.  And Evelyn Wilson seems to be a kind of cipher for the author as they are both English professors who live in the Mile End?

 

Another lacklustre story was “Green Eyes”, about a young woman named Amber somewhere four hours north of Montreal trying to hack tree-planting.  I couldn’t remember if her character had appeared in an earlier story, but this was yet another story that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the Mile End except for one paragraph:

     The Park Avenue grocery store where she’d worked for two university summers would be busy by now, with lines of shoppers snaking up to her cash… There had to be more to work than being a human robot. 

     She got the tree planting idea from a friend of a friend who was selling his bags and shovel.

Why couldn't the story be about her experience working at the checkout line instead? Personally, I wasn’t all that interested in reading about Amber tree-planting in some remote area of Quebec, even if she happened to work at the PA Supermarket.  I felt cheated somehow!

 

“Catch” was the final story in the collection based on a rather sensational incident of an attempted kidnapping of a teenage girl in adjacent Outremont.  Again, I remembered the news coverage of the incident and fortunately, the girl was able to escape unscathed.  Gilbert’s story used all the major facts from the incident:

“The girl, who is a minor and whose name is protected by a publication ban, was walking to her friend’s house Friday afternoon when a motorist pulled up beside her at St-Viateur and Durocher Sts.

The man identified himself as a police officer and said he had to arrest her because she was a suspect in a drug deal. She was handcuffed, placed in the back of the car and blindfolded, she told the police.

After screaming for several minutes while the man was driving, she managed to open the door and fall out onto the street.

A witness took a photo of the suspect’s licence plate as he sped off. Police arrested the suspect about an hour later on Montreal’s north shore…”

 

In Gilbert’s story, there were also a few witnesses, with the focus on a busybody woman named Irene, who kind of took charge of the situation.  She spoke to the police and seeing that the girl was in shock, and recognizing a nun who was living at the nearby Carmelite convent, she got an idea.  Irene approached the nun and asked if the convent would be willing to harbor the traumatised teenager until a family member arrived.  I think this is where Our Lady of Mile End gets its title from.

 

It’s clear that Gilbert drew some of her inspiration from local news articles over the years and tried to weave them into her stories.  The author didn’t seem to have any real connection to the kidnapped girl.  Nor did she seem to know anyone who may have had a run-in with the “sexy” bank robber.  I was left disappointed that Gilbert didn’t draw inspiration from actual locals, who either lived or worked in the Mile End.  What were their stories, I wondered?  I’m sure former bookseller SW Welch had many interesting stories about his colourful customers.  Pretty much all the characters Gilbert’s stories were white, Anglo, with similar socio-economic backgrounds.  Gilbert definitely followed the adage of writing what she knows.  With what she didn’t know, she got from news stories of bank heists and attempted kidnappings.  So rather than stories about actual insiders, it felt more like they were written by someone looking from the outside in, which is not so different from her early blog observations.

 

A good example is the third last story, “The Word”, which once again features Gilbert’s alter ego, Evelyn Wilson (Gilbert taught literature at Dawson College).  This time, Evelyn is trying to conduct a post-pandemic zoom class with her students.  She decided to read aloud a poem that had the n-word in it, thus promptly losing control of her class as it deteriorates into arguments about whether saying the n-word is racist or not.  Part of the story is also told from the POV of the student as the n-word was overheard by his younger brother and his mom, as they live in a small apartment.  The student and his family aren’t white, but their racial background isn’t specified.  This was the only story that featured people who weren’t white.

 

The student observes Evelyn as she vainly tries to defend herself:  “I read the words in the poem so we could examine the context in which Shire uses the n-word and see her specific purpose for doing so.  To clarify, I was not, I am not, using the n-word myself.”

 

In any case, the class was a failure, and a few days later, Evelyn runs into this student, who was visiting the area with a friend (he doesn’t live in ‘affluent’ Mile End).   The story makes it clear that Evelyn, despite being gray and frumpy, lives a privileged life (we should note that she also has a chalet in the Laurentians, as noted in “The Visit”.) and strongly hints that Evelyn has some thinking to do.  

Gilbert once again, probably got the idea for “The Word” as the use of the n-word in academic settings has been a hot button issue in recent years about whether freedom of expression can trump the freedom of being othered felt by various minority groups.  There have been media coverage of teacher and professors in Quebec and Ottawa being cancelled because they dared utter the n-word in front of students.

 

Again, like many of the stories, the theme was only lightly dealt with as the stories are limited in length.  I very much wanted to like OLoME, and at first it really looked like something I could relate to.  But most of the stories were unsatisfying or rather meh.  The Montreal Guardian described the collection as “warm-hearted and well-meant” which to me, is code for “safe literature”.  If I was a writer, I'd hate it if a critic described my fiction as "well-meant"!  I don’t mind if the stories are about ordinary people, like myself, but the content of the stories felt limited in scope and somewhat solipsistic in that it didn’t capture a diverse cross-section of the Mile End.  In hindsight, I should’ve just borrowed the book from the library instead of spending $20 on it!

22. Beautiful Darkness

By Fabien Vehlmann & Kerascoët. Translated from the French by Helge Dascher.

Drawn & Quarterly had a Black Friday sale of their books (the second book was half off).  I found two graphic novels: Are You Willing to Die for the Cause? Revolution in 1960s Quebec and Beautiful Darkness, with the intention of respectively giving them to Olman and my daughter for Christmas. 

 

Beautiful Darkness seemed like it'd be suitable for older kids.  The illustrations were so beautiful and dreamy.  I should have read through it first, but even so, I think my 11 yo daughter would’ve been able to handle the content.  For Christmas, she had requested new clothes for the first time and not a single toy (except for Nintendo games, obvs), so this book was one of the few non-clothing items I got her. 

 

She began reading it shortly after Christmas and at some point, reproached me with something to the effect of, “Mommy, I can’t believe you got this book for me!  It’s so disturbing!”    

It turned out that the main fairy girl ends up gouging the eyes out of a mouse!  She told me that she wasn't going to read any more and handed the book back to me!

Well, I admit I felt a bit bad for not pre-reading Beautiful Darkness before giving it to the kid.  When I flipped through it, I say pages like the one to the right 👉.  I did feel she was old enough to handle some unexpected violence portrayed in comics (as long as it’s not gratuitous nor sexual), but I understand that animal cruelty is hard to stomach.   

Earlier this month, I had taken my daughter to see Ellisapie live in concert and the venue (Usine C) was located in a dodgy area of downtown Montreal.  It was sketchy enough that, as we were leaving, my husband cautioned us to stay alert.  Even though we both believe in exposing our kid to the rougher parts of the city, we won't hesitate to exercise  precautions in case of the unexpected.

 

When the concert ended around 10pm, we walked back to the metro station on Ste-Catherine East.  There was an ambulance parked by the entrance and as we approached the stairs, an old homeless-looking man was being carried away in a gurney by EMTs, his head wrapped in several layers of white gauze with a visible bloody spot seeping through the bandages.  As we passed them going down the other side of the stairs, we encountered the bright pool of blood where he fell on the muddy steps.  We didn’t stop to gawk, though we may have slowed a little to take in the unexpected scene.  When we reached the bottom, I saw that my daughter looked a little stunned, and I asked if she was ok.  She nodded and I reassured her that the man was getting the help he needed and that he should be ok.  That was the most exciting incident during our one night in the downtown east side!

 

So yeah, even though it wasn’t great that my daughter encountered some violence in a graphic fairy tale, I knew she wasn’t going to be too traumatized by it!

 

                                                                   When I finally read Beautiful Darkness myself, I was absolutely entranced by this wonderfully subversive fairy tale and the dark, horrifying evil lurking beneath the gorgeously illustrated surface.  The aesthetics and content was right in my wheelhouse!  Beautiful Darkness has been described as "Thumbelina meets Lord of the Flies" and an anti-fairy tale.  Somehow I missed this when I initially flipped through the pages, but in the prologue, there were little people having tea inside the decomposing body of a young girl deep in the forest.  Setting a very creepy tone, it did.

 

I recently rewatched The Mist (2007) and thought how very similar it was to Beautiful Darkness (2009). Both Zelie and Mrs Carmody embodied the narcissistic psychopath who preys on the weaknesses of their followers and delights in inflicting pain upon the innocent.  Zelie’s unchecked bullying finally sent the sweet and trusting Aurora into a terrifying rage and her dear mouse friend suffered because he had betrayed her.  This was the horrible act of violence that upset my daughter so much.  

 

Like The Mist, Beautiful Darkness made me question, who are the real monsters?  Are they the strange beasts outside our door, or have they always been lurking inside every one of us, needing only a trigger or two to unleash the beast within?  What is more horrifying?  The faceless man who may have murdered the young girl?  Or Zelie, the beautiful yet sadistic fairy who plucks butterfly wings for her dress and buries misfits alive for fun?  Or the followers, who represent the moral abyss devoid of empathy and reasoning?  Perhaps the real tragedy is Aurora, who once radiated light and hope, has now finally succumbed to the darkness.

 

 

      

21. A Visit

By Shirley Jackson

First published as "The Lovely House" in 1950 and later reprinted  under the title "A Visit."  While a short story, Biblioasis reprinted it as a cute little book that's part of a series known as, A Ghost Story for Christmas, all of them designed and illustrated by Seth.  It's an attempt to revive a Victorian tradition of reading ghost stories on Christmas Eve.

So this technically counts as a book, right? I might as well end the year with a holiday book, though the actual story doesn't have anything to do with Christmas, nor winter, for that matter.

Margaret is invited to stay at her friend's estate for the summer holidays.  Carla and her parents, Mr and Mrs Rhodes, seem normal and welcoming enough, though Margaret is clearly not from money, but this difference is barely mentioned.  The house is filled with beautiful tapestries with at least one in every room, all embroidered by Carla's mother and the past generations of Rhodes women who have lived in that house.

Carla keeps talking wistfully and/or excitedly about her brother's impending visit, and he finally arrives one day with a friend.  Carla's brother is known only as "the captain", while Margaret finds it peculiar that no one calls the captain's friend by his name, so she asks him and he tells her that his name is Paul.  Margaret also later discovers an old eccentric aunt who keeps to herself (and her cat) high up in the tower.  There are hints that one or more of the characters are merely an apparition as the story goes on.  

The story is very sparsely written, and yet, even though every word is accounted for, it's what's left out that evokes a feeling of oddness and mystery, as befits a Jackson narrative.  But I wouldn't say that "A Visit" was very creepy nor unsettling, not at all like Jackson's other stories.  However, what I found most odd was that in the book, Carla's family name is Rhodes, while the Wikipedia keeps calling Carla's family as the Montagues.

20. Persuasion

By Jane Austen

19. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

By Kate Beaton

18. Women Talking

By Miriam Toews

Women Talking was one of a few random finds from my annual summer visit to Vancouver.

 

My brother moved to Abbotsford a few years ago, a minimum one-hour drive from Kits, so I was trying to find a way to visit him.  In the past, we’ve met up for lunch in Surrey, a good halfway point.  I recall my friend had recommended the Otter Co-op Outdoor Experience, a water park out in Aldergrove, a half hour drive from Abbotsford.

 

I thought my family could spend an afternoon at the water park, then meet my brother for dinner.  Admission was ridiculously inexpensive, like $10 for an adult and $5 for kids but the catch was you had to buy tickets online at least a day in advance, and we were limited to a 3 hour time slot.  Otter was a decent water park with slides that you ride down on inflatable tubes, a wave pool, hot tubs and swimming pools.  It was quite crowded too – no surprise, considering the low admission price.

 

When our time ended, we had about an hour to kill before meeting my brother.  There was a Salvation Army thrift store nearby where we browsed around.  It was there that I spotted a hardcover of Miriam Toews' Women Talking - a pristine library copy that still had labels stuck to it and the plastic cover, but had never been checked out.  It was only 25 cents!

 

What made this copy particularly interesting was that it once belonged to the “Middle and High Library of the Langley Christian School”.  I thought, how interesting that a Christian school would acquire Women Talking, as it deals with the very adult subject of sexual assault within a remote religious community!  I wonder if someone had caught on and removed the book so it wouldn't outrage young Christian minds... how else would this apparently unread copy end up at a thrift store?

 

I’d already watched the film adaptation (on Aug 30th to be precise, thanks to my Letterboxd history).  I was spurred on because some filmmaking friends of filmmaking friends were saying how good it was.  I was invited to join a 5a7 at Pelican’s astro-turfed terrasse.  The FFs of FFs shared an amusing story about attending the premiere (I assume in Montreal) where a couple was being very vocal about how much they disliked the film.  I think they were parents of Dave G?  I can’t remember.  At some point we clinked glasses.  Someone made a toast, to ‘Women Talking’.  Then as our glasses clinked, I exclaimed, “To parents talking!”  I got a few laughs! 

 

As mentioned earlier, Women Talking was based on true occurrences of systemic rape within a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia.  Between 2005 and 2009, over a hundred girls and women in the colony woke up to discover that they had been drugged and sexually assaulted in their sleep.

 

The novel begins after the suspects had been finally caught and apprehended by city police -- eight men from within the Molotschna colony (the fictional name for the actual Manitoba colony).  While the rest of the village men were away to post bail for the suspects, the women secretly formed an ad hoc meeting in the barn loft to discuss whether they should stay or leave the colony.  They only had a couple of days to decide before the men returned with the suspects to await trial. 

 

Most of the novel was structured as the minutes of their meeting, which were taken by August Epp, the colony's male schoolteacher who recently returned following a period of excommunication. August took the minutes at the request of Ona, the object of his unrequited love and his childhood friend, as the women cannot read or write (they speak Plautdietsch).  Some may take issue with the fact that the story was told from the viewpoint of a man, but August was also an outsider and considered by the men to be low status like the women, as he cannot farm. 

 

Here's an excerpt from August’s POV which pretty much set up the story:

When I arrived in the spring of 2008, there were only whispers, fragments of whispers, concerning the mysterious night-time disturbances. Cornelius, one of my students, wrote a poem called “The Washline” in which he described the sheets and garments on his mother’s washline as having voices, of speaking with one another, of sending messages to other garments on other washlines. He read the poem to the class and all the boys laughed. The houses are so far apart and there is no electrical light anywhere, inside or out. The houses are small tombs at night…

 

      In the year after I arrived, the women described dreams they’d been having, and then eventually, as the pieces fell into place, they came to understand that they were collectively dreaming one dream, and that it wasn’t a dream at all.

 

      The women in the Friesen and the Loewen families who have gathered for today’s meeting represent three generations each, and all have been repeat victims in the attacks. I’ve done some simple calculations. Between 2005 and 2009, more than three hundred girls and women of Molotschna were made unconscious and attacked in their own beds. On average, an attack occurred every three or four days.

 

      Finally, Leisl Neustadter forced herself to stay awake night after night until she caught a young man prying open her bedroom window, holding a jug of belladonna spray in one hand. Leisl and her adult daughter wrestled the man to the ground and tied him up with baler twine. Later that morning, Peters was brought to the house to confront this young man, Gerhard Schellenberg, and Gerhard named the other seven men involved in the attacks.

      Nearly every female member of the Molotschna Colony has been violated by this group of eight, but most (except for the girls too young to understand these proceedings, and the women, led by Scarface Janz, who have already chosen to exercise the Do Nothing option) have marked an X next to their name to indicate that they are content (and many ecstatic) not to attend the meetings about how to respond. Instead, they will contribute to the well-being of the colony by tending to the chores, which are manifold now while the men are away, and which if abandoned for as little as one day will result in mayhem, especially when it comes to the milking and feeding of the animals.

Having read the book after watching the film, I thought Sara Polley and cast did a great job bringing the book to life.  I thought how articulately the women spoke in the film, for Mennonite women weren’t very literate, let alone educated.  But I also noted how much the screenplay was heavily based on the dialogue written by author Toews.  There was so much talking in the novel that I suspect Toews didn't bother with the use of quotation marks!

Here's a sample of one of their many discussions/arguments:

Salome, more calm now, adds: So once again, we return to our three reasons for leaving, and they are valid. We want our children to be safe. We want to keep our faith. And we want to think.

  Agata splays her fingers on the plywood table as if to build a new foundation. Shall we move on? she asks.

  But, says Mariche, if there is any chance that the men in prison are innocent shouldn’t we, as members of Molotschna, be joining forces to secure their freedom?

  Salome explodes. We’re not members of Molotschna!

  The other women recoil and even the sun takes shelter behind a cloud.

  Greta, she says, are your beloved Ruth and Cheryl members of Molotschna?

  No, not members, says Greta, although—

  Salome interrupts. We’re not members! she repeats. We are the women of Molotschna. The entire colony of Molotschna is built on the foundation of patriarchy (translator’s note: Salome didn’t use the word “patriarchy”—I inserted it in the place of Salome’s curse, of mysterious origin, loosely translated as “talking through the flowers”), where the women live out their days as mute, submissive and obedient servants. Animals. Fourteen-year-old boys are expected to give us orders, to determine our fates, to vote on our excommunications, to speak at the burials of our own babies while we remain silent, to interpret the Bible for us, to lead us in worship, to punish us! We are not members, Mariche, we are commodities. (Again, a translator’s note about the word “commodities”: similar situation to above.)

  Salome continues: When our men have used us up so that we look sixty when we’re thirty and our wombs have literally dropped out of our bodies onto our spotless kitchen floors, finished, they turn to our daughters. And if they could sell us all at auction afterwards they would.

Narratively speaking, having articulate characters is convenient because if the women were not very articulate, it would be harder for the author to convey good quality prose.  I found the writing to be overly expository at times and it often felt like Toews was using the women as mouthpieces to get her points across re: patriarchal oppression.  Thus, the writing came across very heavy-handed at times.

 

However, much of the thoughtful, articulate dialogue was attributed to Ona, especially when confronted by an angry Salome (who attacked the perpetrators with a scythe to avenge her children) or a defiant Mariche (who’s in denial that she’s in an abusive marriage).

 

Ona was a bit of an outsider due to some unconventional personality traits (intelligence, melancholy).  Even though she was illiterate and uneducated like the other women, she was able to use big words like “pernicious ideology” in her discussions to try to explain why men are the way they are.

Ona’s Narfa (a term for depression), the colonists say, had been latent, simmering but not unmanageable, until her father died. Afterwards, she committed her life to dreamy eccentricity, and also to facts, curiously, and to her seemingly preferred status as a pariah, as the devil’s daughter, and God-given burden to the colony. I contend a lighter, less intrusive presence has never been known.)

Despite the need to suspend a great deal of disbelief, Toews did execute a great premise:  have a sensitive male outsider take minutes of a secret meeting of women who are divided between leaving an oppressive Mennonite colony to start anew, or staying and thus, being stuck in a situation that won't change for the better.  The women, despite being uneducated and illiterate, are smart, articulate and funny.  After much discussion, which takes up the bulk of the novel, they finally agree upon a decision.

End spoiler coming...   

 

When August is alone with Ona:

   I asked her what good the minutes would do her and the other women if they were unable to read them? (But she may well have asked me instead, What good is it to be alive if you are not in the world?)

  And that’s when she told me the story of the squirrel and the rabbit and of their secret playing, and said that perhaps she hadn’t been meant to see them playing—yet she had seen them. Maybe there was no reason for the women to have minutes they couldn’t read. The purpose, all along, was for me to take them.

  The purpose was for me to take them, the minutes. Life.

  I smile. I see the world turning in on itself, like waves, but without a sea or shore to contain them. There was no point to the minutes. I have to laugh.

Well, there was a point.  The author needed to find a way to tell the story!  

 

So yes, the style and format was rather self-conscious, yet Women Talking was very well-written overall. The minutes device was really an excellent way of telling this important story by giving a POV from someone within the community yet outside of it, while still being empathetic to the victims.  Still, the writing was often too affected for me to truly enjoy it as a whole, as it reminded me too much of a staged play. Come to think of it, Women Talking would be perfect for the theatre stage!

17. Revenge of the Librarians

By Tom Gauld

16. The Hot Spot

By Charles Williams

15. Son of a Trickster

By Eden Robinson

14. The Starlight Barking

By Dodie Smith

13. Affinity

By Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters’ first three novels explored the lives of lesbians in the criminal underworld during the Victorian era.  Two I’ve already read some time ago, and finally, Affinity when I spotted this used hardcopy at the People’s Coop Bookstore in Vancouver this summer.

Fingersmith remains my favourite, with Affinity a close second and Tipping the Velvet dead last.  Affinity (1999) shared many similarities with Fingersmith (2002).  It's my belief that after Affinity's success, Waters sharpened her writing skills even further to create the masterpiece that was Fingersmith.
 
Both novels featured a long, deliberate con game involving two women who have passionate feelings for each other and a terrible betrayal.  I admit I fell for the deceptive twist in Affinity (thus launching into major spoiler territory), mainly because Waters did such an excellent job deliberately misleading and/or withholding information from the reader.  

While Fingersmith ended with a hopeful future for our anti-heroines Sue and Maud, Affinity ended tragically with an utterly devastated Margaret Prior, with no hope for forgiveness or redemption.  Poor, poor Margaret!  Even though I didn't much like her as a character due to her failings and weaknesses, yet Waters managed to make her a sympathetic figure somehow.

Of the three Prior siblings (Stephen, Margaret, Priscilla), Margaret was closest to her father.  We learned via brief “flashbacks” that Margaret lead a fulfilling, intellectual life assisting her father’s scholarly studies.  It was accompanying her father to a lecture where she met the brilliant Helen, who was soon employed by Mr Prior as a second assistant.  Margaret and Helen fell in love, and under the guise of a close friendship, were able to carry on a secret affair.  It was also possible that Mr. Prior encouraged their relationship.  In fact, the trio were planning a trip to Italy to further their scholarly pursuits when Mr Prior became ill and died.  Helen lost the courage to continue her relationship with Margaret and at some point, accepted Stephen’s proposal of marriage, breaking Margaret’s heart even further, as she was still mourning the loss of her father. Soon after, Margaret tried to kill herself by overdosing in chloral.

Affinity began Margaret’s storyline about a year after her suicide attempt.  Margaret had been granted permission to visit Millbank, a rather bleak, Dickensian prison for women.  Since suicide was punishable by law (if one was unlucky enough to survive), Margaret was spared the penitentiary as she belonged to the upper-class.  Margaret’s motive for becoming a 'lady visitor' of Millbank was never clear; she could’ve been looking for a purpose after recovering from her self-poisoning, and an excuse to get away from her over-bearing mother and self-centred sister, Priscilla.  There could’ve been guilt and curiosity mixed in there too, and it’s possible she also wanted to see how miserable the prisoners were to make herself feel better (as Selina so bluntly pointed out to her later).

Margaret was also dealing with unresolved feelings for her ex-lover.  Helen was an example of a closet lesbian who could adapt by passing as straight and thus, find some measure of happiness within the confines of patriarchal Victorian society.  Her marriage to Stephen was a way of staying close to Margaret, not realizing how painful it would be for Margaret to interact with her ex-lover as a sister-in-law. Helen later admitted to Margaret how cowardly it was of her to leave her.  In contrast, Margaret was more of a romantic idealist; quiet yet full of passion beneath her meek exterior.  She was incapable of faking it by role-playing an upper class normie.  Since Margaret failed at taking her own life, she remained trapped in her situation.  This essay explains Margaret's predicament perfectly:

At this stage, Margaret is not yet, technically speaking, a spinster. She becomes so only when her younger sister Priscilla marries a dreamlike suitor, only one day after the official two years of mourning for her father. This marriage was doubly painful for Margaret, firstly because the couple chose Italy for their honeymoon and secondly because, as Margaret reflects, while her social status did not change after her brother married Helen, Priscilla’s wedding completely changed her position within the familial and social structure, transforming her from her ‘mother’s burden’ to ‘her consolation’ (Waters 199), that is, from still marriageable woman past her prime to spinster.

As a spinster, Margaret was doomed to live alone as a closeted lesbian with her disappointed and domineering mother, watching from the sidelines as Priscilla, Stephen and Helen get on with their conventional lives in Victorian society.  However, Margaret was not completely dependent, as she learned from Stephen that their father left her a sizable fortune that would allow her to live out the rest of her life comfortably—as long as she doesn’t marry.  Even Selina and Ruth were not able to swindle Margaret’s entire fortune.  But what was wealth, really, when you’ve been utterly betrayed, broken-hearted, and emotionally bereft with suicidal tendencies?

What made Margaret somewhat pathetic was how she made the perfect victim for Selina and Ruth's endgame.  Selina quickly deduced what her target most longed for and exploited that to her advantage. So much so that Margaret (and Mrs Jelf) became convinced that Selina could make miracles happen, if only she could believe!  The part where Margaret was crying out to Selina from her window at night was rather heart-wrenching.   

Now that I think about it, there was usually a rational explanation for all the supposedly supernatural things that occurred around Selina.  Like the little violet that Selina was holding when Margeret first saw her. We can assume that Selina already had Mrs Jelf under her influence, and Mrs Jelf was already relaying messages from Ruth to Selina, so Ruth must have gave the violet to Selina via Mrs J as a little gift to keep her spirits up.  It was a lucky coincidence that Margaret happened to see Selina with it – a coincidence that savvy Selina was able to exploit to her advantage.

I did go back some chapters to check the timing of events.  Soon after the Margaret’s initial meeting with the prisoner, Selina Dawes, Selina must have passed a message on to Ruth to look into Margaret to see if she’d make a worthy target.  Ruth promptly found out where Margaret lived (and that she was obvs wealthy) and bribed the maid Boyd to give her notice to the Prior family.  Before leaving, Boyd mentioned a ‘friend’ named Vigers who was willing to take up the post. Vigers only condition was to be given a small room of her own (to be near her ‘friend’ who lived near the river – a very tiny clue!).  Vigers was soon hired into the household and all the author had to do was to never mention the first name of the new maid!

That was exactly how Selina was able to “sense” the source of Margret's sadness, as Vigers had been regularly passing intel to Selina via Mrs Jelf!  Even if Selina did not possess ANY abilities as a spiritualist-medium, she was cunning and keenly observant (like keying in on the notebook that was peeking out of Margaret’s pocket).  She was also a talented method actress – convincingly spooking her prison inmates by mimicking the voices of ghosts.  Waters seemed to support the argument that spiritualists are mere tricksters and con artists!

Another factor that made the twist so successful (for me, at least) was using Selina Dawes as an unreliable narrator, which helped to deliberately mislead the reader.  Selina’s journal entries alternated with the chapters containing Margaret’s POV.  It was not until the final chapter that we learn how Selina’s accounting of events leading up to that fateful night had been completely falsified.  When they were back in Mrs Brinks house, Ruth asked Selina what she was writing, and Selina only responded, rather mysteriously, that she’s writing for her “Guardian’s eyes”. ‘Him’, Ruth said.

That was the only clue given.  And I have a few theories:  Selina may believe in a higher power and/or she has a modicum of conscience, and writing her journal was a way of justifying her deception.  However, it was mostly likely that Selina was thinking ahead in terms of the law.  If she was ever caught, her journal entries could be used as proof of her ‘innocence’, as she truly believed in her abilities as a spiritualist.

The only thing I wasn’t sure about was how Selina could've deceived Mrs Brinks when they were alone inside her room each night. It was clear Ruth had access to Mrs Brinks' personal items and could feed intel to Selina.  Perhaps Mrs Brinks longed so much to see her departed mother it didn't much for Selina to convince Mrs Brinks that she could summon the spirit of her mother.  It was also possible that Ruth drugged Mrs Brinks’ tea so she’d have mild hallucinations. When Margaret came under the spell of Selina, her imagination was heightened by her nightly doses of chloral hydrate and later, laudanum (pushed by her own mother).

As this reviewer wrote:  Waters’ captured some of the same Gothic tone of dread and unreality [associated] with Wilkie Collins. As I read it, I had almost as hard a time as the protagonist did figuring out what was real, what was supernatural, and what was skillful con.

Some further insight on the ending:

The big one: Ruth was Peter Quick.  I didn’t get this the first time, but re-reading it, it was so obvious.  Disguised as Peter Quick, Ruth could flirt with the ladies, sidle up close and touch them while Selina was tied up.  When the attendants of the seance were helping Selina recover, Ruth would take off her costume and dress in her maid's uniform again.  Mrs. Brink never attended the large seances so when she walked in on one and saw Ruth dressed up as Peter, she went into shock, unable to say anything to out Selina as a charlatan before dying of a heart attack.

Margaret’s ending was even more subtle but we decided from the end of her narrative that she had decided to commit suicide.  The line is “Selina…[y]our twisting is done- you have the last thread of my heart.  I wonder; when the thread grows slack, will you feel it?” (351).  We took the thread going slack as Margaret no longer being alive to hold it up.

And finally, from Lesbian Invisibility and the Politics of Representation of the Lady and the Humble Servant in Sarah Waters’s Affinity

Miss Prior’s incapacity to break out of the immaterial prison house of familial and social conventions while Selina and Ruth initiate a new life of freedom, sexual fulfilment, and social ascent, points to class as the decisive blocking element in Margaret’s quest for individuation. However, although her impending suicide provides a chilling picture of the physical and psychical traumas affecting upper-class lesbian women in the Victorian period, it should not be forgotten that Selina is the only convict who manages to break out of Millbank, a tenebrous Gothic prison, designed after Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon so as to keep all inmates potentially under constant surveillance by an unseen official.28 This awe-inspiring picture of the disciplinary mechanisms reserved for poor women in the Victorian era provides the counterpoint to the portrait of the Lady Visitor’s tragic fate. When both pictures are set against each other, it becomes evident that the difference in the punitive and disciplinary treatment of transgressive working-class and upper-class Victorian women was more apparent than real, a simple difference in the materiality or immateriality of the cell they were respectively condemned to inhabit. In the last reading, therefore, Ruth’s double invisibility as a humble lady’s maid and as an apparitional lesbian may be seen as representative of the general condition of late nineteenth-century working-class women forced to fend for themselves in a thoroughly hostile and pitiless patriarchal word. It is against this oppressive background that the ethicality of Selina and Ruth’s self-humbling tactics as a means to accomplish their picaresque quest for freedom and social ascent should be measured.

All in all, it was a very satisfying, if rather depressing, read.  And it more than made up for the dissatisfaction with Little Women, which I found even more depressing.