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.