Misfortune

The inner flap bills Wesley Stace's Misfortune as "[a] spirited and mischievous reinvention of the English adventure novel," and I'm tempted to suggest that it reinvents "the English adventure novel" so completely as to leave all the adventure out.  (At least they didn't use the adjective "Dickensian"!) The attentive reader, however, will note that the novel is many other things: a play on the Gothic, complete with an inheritance plot, an old manor, and decrepit aristocratic families; a tale of literary scholarship, reminiscent of A. S. Byatt's Possession; a historical romance, with an ironic twist on the Georgette Heyer mode; and a meditation on first-person and omniscient narrators, in line with much contemporary metafiction.  Strictly speaking (and, again, despite the promises on the dust jacket), Stace makes few attempts to recreate period feel and none to recreate period style; the plot may stretch from the late King Georges to the early Queen Victoria, but its prose and thematic concerns are very much of the early twenty-first century.  In that sense, Misfortune counts as a "costume novel" or "historical romance" in the conventional manner--and yet, the novel manages to turn itself into a meta-costume novel (if such a thing can be said to exist; it does now, at any rate).  This is, in fact, a novel about costumes: the relationship between clothes and selfhood, the social meaning of fashion, and, indeed, what it means to be fashioned. 

Our protagonist and narrator, Rose Old, is rescued from the streets by Lord Loveall, a man suffering from a near-incestuous obsession with his deceased sister, and raised as his female heir.  As "Rose" is, alas, male, this causes some difficulties; however, Loveall's former governess and eventual (celibate) wife, Anonyma Wood, is a devoted believer in the androgynous utopian thinking of a mysterious poet, Mary Day.  Anonyma believes that, despite Rose's sex, she can craft him into a girl:

And with me, little Rose--or RoseMary, as she sometimes called me--she had literally in her hands, in her arms, a chance to test her theories.  A baby's inner sense of itself was neither male nor female, until society taught it which role it was to assume.  (Has this been entirely discredited yet? If not, it will be.)  Boys and girls were therefore made and not born, and I would be made.  I would without a doubt be the most adorable and original child ever born, and an even more successful adult.  Perhaps I would be the most perfect person in the world, a symbolic challenge to every assumption on heaven or earth.  My mother was giving me the greatest gift she could offer.  (98)

While it's a little much to describe the novel as a (anachronistic!) diatribe against social constructionist theories of gender, that's certainly one of its running themes, as the parenthetical suggests; indeed, John Colapinto appears in the bibliography.  Anonyma's devotion to her "theories," no matter how loving in intent, obliterates the baby's humanity.  For Anonyma, a child's gendered selfhood becomes a kind of clothing, subject to design and craft.  By transforming Rose into a figurative hermaphrodite--Ovid's Metamorphoses play a significant part in this novel--Anonyma hopes to become the Georgian equivalent of Judith Butler.

As one might expect, matters do not quite go as planned.  The pubescent and adult Rose discovers that his biology tells him that he's a man, but one incapable of engaging in truly emotional sexual relationships and, above all, unable to conceive of himself as visually male.  Once again, costume comes into play.  Rose attempts repeatedly to adopt "proper" masculine dress, but he finds such clothing not only painful and restrictive, but also inimical to his sense of self; in a sexual encounter about 180 pages or so before the novel's end, Rose swims in sexual self-loathing and horror until he puts on a dress again.  Finally, he develops his own visual mode, combining women's clothes with an elaborate moustache and what we nowadays call a "soul patch."  Rose's happy ending, complete with wife and child, may be unambiguously heterosexual, but it literally comes wrapped in a different guise.  His role as a man who wears all the social signifiers of womanhood is not an upbeat endorsement of gender "play," but a compromise position adopted by a traumatized individual.

Still, at the end of the novel, Rose writes that "[f]or our family, plots could be different from this moment on.  I had been put on earth to challenge convention, and the least I could do was see the challenge through" (518).  The novel, which we discover is actually Rose's memoir, plays around with plots and narrative voice: the opening, apparently the product of an omniscient narrator, is Rose masquerading as "God" (his term), and we are reminded on occasion that while Rose may not be an unreliable narrator, he does not always tell us (or have access to) "the truth."  Moreover, in a nod to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fiction, Stace incorporates a number of poems into the narrative.  Some are by "Mary Day"; others are popular street ballads, one of which holds the clue to Rose's true identity.  Unlike the poems in a novel by, say, Ann Radcliffe, these turn out to be instrumental instead of purely expressive lyrics.  Last but not least, the final twists in the narrative themselves constitute a wry reflection on the multitudinous coincidences that inform novels like Jane Eyre or Bleak House--but without the sense of providence that inflects those earlier fictions.  To suspend disbelief at the end, we have to remember that we're in a romance, but a modernized one.  (The somewhat labyrinthine family tree that resolves everything is also vaguely reminiscent of Charles Palliser's much more complicated The Quincunx.) 

The novel does take a false step at the end, I think, but that's because its self-reflexivity rarely extends to thinking about history per se (except in the fashion one normally sees in the Gothic).  In the final few pages, we discover that Rose has given Love Hall to England, and it is now incorporated into the heritage industry.  The "guidebook" offers a tourist-y and fragmented vision of the house's past, with psychological trauma--not to mention outright crime--transformed into romantic mysteries.  There are a number of ironic reflections on the problems of historical reconstruction, not least when it comes to Rose's sex.  It's a clever idea, but just not tied closely enough to the novel's other preoccupations.  That aside, though, this is an intelligent take on the Gothic and historical romance traditions.