Angelica
At some times, Arthur Phillips' neo-Victorian novel Angelica (2007) is full-blown Gothic; at others, it's a work of psychological realism. In the end, it turns out to be both and neither of the two. Since I'm going to have to spoil several plot points, including the narrator's identity, I'll put the rest below the fold.
SPOILER
Phillips divides Angelica into four sections, each retelling the same events in third person but from a different character's point of view. The narrator of all four sections, as we discover in section three ("Joseph Barton"), is Angelica herself, who is only four at the time of the main action. Angelica's audience is a doctor, perhaps an early Freudian psychiatrist, and he has asked her to write this narrative as a means of studying her own mysterious, feminized symptoms (she's a "pretty hysteric" [331]). The stories of Constance Barton, Anne Montague, Joseph Barton, and Angelica Barton cannot be successfully reconciled by anyone, let alone Angelica or her doctor. There are clear overtones of Rashomon here (or, to be more Victorian, The Ring and the Book). And the dj copy is actually right for once: the narrator's strategy echoes Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, in which the narrator tells most of the story through the possibly unreliable POV of a single character. (In fact, Anne Montague seems like a hat tip to Jackson's "scientific" ghost-enthusiasts, Dr. Montague and his wife.) Because Angelica openly admits that she may have conflated, embellished, or outright invented events, and because she has reimagined the stories of the adults involved, strict notions of truth and falsehood ultimately fly out the window. It's no wonder that her doctor is frustrated: "While the objective truth of an event does not signify if the patient believes the event occurred, you are not accepting a belief in anything, only in everything" (330). While the reader can certainly identify a few narrative facts--the fate of Joseph Barton, for example--Angelica's outright refusal to jettison one POV in favor of another leaves the reader with a number of unanswered questions, and Angelica with her symptoms unexplained.
SPOILER
Phillips divides Angelica into four sections, each retelling the same events in third person but from a different character's point of view. The narrator of all four sections, as we discover in section three ("Joseph Barton"), is Angelica herself, who is only four at the time of the main action. Angelica's audience is a doctor, perhaps an early Freudian psychiatrist, and he has asked her to write this narrative as a means of studying her own mysterious, feminized symptoms (she's a "pretty hysteric" [331]). The stories of Constance Barton, Anne Montague, Joseph Barton, and Angelica Barton cannot be successfully reconciled by anyone, let alone Angelica or her doctor. There are clear overtones of Rashomon here (or, to be more Victorian, The Ring and the Book). And the dj copy is actually right for once: the narrator's strategy echoes Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, in which the narrator tells most of the story through the possibly unreliable POV of a single character. (In fact, Anne Montague seems like a hat tip to Jackson's "scientific" ghost-enthusiasts, Dr. Montague and his wife.) Because Angelica openly admits that she may have conflated, embellished, or outright invented events, and because she has reimagined the stories of the adults involved, strict notions of truth and falsehood ultimately fly out the window. It's no wonder that her doctor is frustrated: "While the objective truth of an event does not signify if the patient believes the event occurred, you are not accepting a belief in anything, only in everything" (330). While the reader can certainly identify a few narrative facts--the fate of Joseph Barton, for example--Angelica's outright refusal to jettison one POV in favor of another leaves the reader with a number of unanswered questions, and Angelica with her symptoms unexplained.
The novel's sections become more materialist as they move along. "Constance Barton" is openly Gothic: Constance believes that an evil spirit connected to her husband is not only cracking plates and furniture all over the house, but also assaulting her daughter; moreover, Constance believes that she and Angelica have some sort of a psychosomatic connection, through which Angelica experiences Constance's anguished sexual encounters with Joseph. With the help of Anne Montague, who offers a very traditionally Gothic--and apparently feminist--women's perspective on spirits, she finally manages to destroy the spirit with a special knife. Most readers will quickly figure out that a deluded (or is she?) Constance actually murders her husband, which calls her Gothic visions of mysterious spectres into question. In "Anne Montague," however, the connection to Gothic becomes much more tenuous, for Anne, an ex-actress down on her luck, combines the professions of charlatan and amateur counselor, even if she does believe in the possibility of visiting spirits. Her psychological insights derive from a careful attention to the details of everyday life; she qualifies, in both literary and intellectual terms, as a realist, despite her profession. But where Constance jumps to the conclusion thats she's seeing a ghost, Anne jumps to the conclusion that Joseph is a pedophile. Anne's quasi-erotic affection for Constance conflicts with her intention to milk her for as much cash as possible, and ultimately leads her to arrange for Joseph's murder (unnecessarily). God and the afterlife vanish entirely from "Joseph Barton," for Joseph is a full-blown materialist, whose childhood experiences with religion were deeply painful. Unhappy with his marriage and his career, Joseph toils away in a laboratory (of which more in just a moment). Like both Anne and Constance (a "counter-jumper," or poor salesgirl raised in rank by marriage), Joseph is playacting: he has apparently faked his role as a war hero, his scientific career is a sham, and he isn't the Englishman he yearns to be.
Taken as neo-Victorian fiction, the novel is most conventional in "Constance Barton." Besides drawing on a number of apparently unquestioned tropes from Victorian Gothic, such as the link between supernatural awareness and gender/class differences, the section also dwells heavily on male sexual monstrosity, which has become a standard issue plot point in neo-Victorian texts. Constance's problematic rise from lower-class girl to middle-class woman derives from the work of late-Victorian novelists like George Gissing, while Joseph's work as a vivisectionist similarly owes much to the Victorian interpretation of vivisection as a marker of sexual or psychological perversity (as in Wilkie Collins or Sarah Grand, for example). Between Anne Montague's celebration of feminine feeling and insight over male claims to scientific rationality--"The truth is not in the small details, Mrs. Barton. It is in the whole, which is perceptible by only one organ: the heart, seat of intuition" (90)--and Joseph's apparently unspeakable evil nature, the first section bears an unfortunate resemblance to novels like The Linnet Bird (which I groused about here).
But the sections that follow offer alternatives so radically different as to make these conventions visible as conventions. Anne Montague's "wisdom" resides in a combination of commonsense and pure fiction, and her sometimes unwilling devotion to Constance leads her to plot Joseph's death, without questioning the reality of Constance's basic intuitions about her husband's evil nature. Far from avoiding conclusions, Anne jumps to them. Moreover, despite Anne's apparently feminist rhetoric, her real purpose is to negotiate a "marital truce" (163); for abused women, she can suggest no more than "a talk with a sympathetic brother or a trusted policeman or a liberal vicar, but then she was rarely paid for her work" (151). Instead of establishing a feminized alternative to a monstrous, ungovernable world of male violence, Anne tries to reconcile her female clients to their more or less stressful lots. Even worse, Anne plots to sacrifice Angelica to Joseph's presumed incestuous desires, rather than allow Constance to suffer (189)--a troubling detail that makes the black-and-white morality of "Constance Barton" considerably grayer. If Anne's rhetoric proclaims the eventual victory of the weak over the mysterious powers that threaten them, her practice treats the weakest of all as the most expendable. Perhaps most tellingly, Anne admits that she sought "to profit from Constance Barton's pain" (195), which aligns her with Joseph the vivisectionist instead of against him.
While Anne proves to be less of an alternative to Joseph (or men in general) than she first appears, Joseph proves to be...an understandably unhappy bore. Besides being the illegitimate son of his Italian father and the equally Italian nurse (for whom Angelica is named, in an act of unacknowledged expiation), which stripes him of his claims to any English identity whatsoever, he has been denied the careers in medicine and science that he so desires. He has badly misjudged his wife. He feels angered by Constance's overt "preference" (213) for Angelica. He is rather peeved about four years of enforced celibacy, but apparently has not visited prostitutes in the meantime. An encounter with the mysterious "Lem," apparently an old army companion, suggests that Joseph has probably stolen someone else's military medals, but Joseph cannot remember either Lem or anything evil the two might have done together. (Repressed memories of a rape, or...nothing at all?) He first detests, then begins to idealize his daughter as the woman his wife is not. Nothing in "Joseph Barton" suggests that he is anything more than a tired, somewhat dull failure, whose scientific ambitions eventually give way before the reality that he is "an elderly messenger" (289). In fact, other men in the novel explicitly chastise him for failing as a man, for not dominating his wife or satisfying his erotic desires elsewhere. Joseph's growing belief that he must learn to dominate in order to be a man turns out to inadvertently cause his own murder.
The radical subjectivism of "Angelica Barton," in which Angelica that she cannot verify the truth of any explanation for what happened--including Constance Barton's likely molestation at the hands of her own father, the novel's truest ghost--may frustrate some readers, but it's the most logical outcome of a novel in which explanations lead to disaster. The dj announces that the novel "explores the timeless human hunger for certainty," but when Angelica chooses to reject certainty, it isn't clear if that solves the problem, either. Her unnamed psychoanalyst may be "ever eager to strap to my back the hypertrophied conscience your most successful customers bear the rest of their lives, those stricken limping camels you call the healthy" (330), curing her mysterious sufferings by making her accept her own guilt (for what she may have done when she was four?!), but her refusal to be reduced to a Freudian case study cannot resolve her ongoing "unease" (331). It's no wonder that she's uneasy, for--whether she was abused or not--her own narrative reveals that she perceives herself as the ongoing, unwanted pawn in adult desires. Joseph, Anne, and Constance all self-destruct once they arrive at a conclusion; Angelica, apparently, will continue to self-destruct, despite refusing to conclude.