The Girl Who Couldn't Read

John Harding's One Big Damn Puzzler and Florence and Giles are both bookish novels, intrigued by literacy and their own acts of literary appropriation.  The former, a satire of postcolonial liberal do-goodism, gives pride of place to Hamlet, which one of the indigenous protagonists is attempting to translate into his own language; the latter relocates The Turn of the Screw to late-Victorian New York, and turns James' ambiguously innocent Flora into the dubiously sane (and murderous) Florence.  In both cases, a literary work associated with Englishness--one of the most famous tragedies by England's arguably most famous author; a novel set in England by an American who domiciled himself there--moves to a new context and finds itself warped in the passage.  The Girl Who Couldn't Read, Harding's sequel to Florence and Giles, is even more overtly about what literary appropriation can and can't do.  (I should note that the novel is perfectly intelligible without having read Florence and Giles, although those who have read it will have an advantage.)  Like most neo-Victorian novels about insane asylums, it inherits nineteenth-century concerns about abusive and predatory treatments--in addition to Nellie Bly's famous investigation, Wilkie Collins, J. S. Le Fanu, and Charles Reade, among many others, all wrote novels about characters undergoing confinement and torture--while using the setting to raise questions about authority, social norms, and power. 

The plot of The Girl Who Couldn't Read is simple enough: the narrator, a man who has switched identities with one Dr. John Shepherd (that's not a spoiler) in the wake of a terrible train accident, shows up at an isolated, Gothic insane asylum.  Attempting to take Dr. Shepherd's place, our narrator manages, sort of, to rub along with the tyrannical Dr. Morgan and the sadistic head nurse, O'Reilly, but truly comes into his own only when he discovers "Jane Dove," a teenager (perhaps) suffering from amnesia, illiteracy, and a strange form of wordplay in which she constantly turns nouns into verbs.  "Shepherd," intending to prove that kindness is a better form of psychotherapy than the torturous physical treatments on offer at the asylum (hydrotherapy, restraints, etc.), takes Jane as his experimental subject.  Unfortunately, events soon transpire that drive "Shepherd" to contemplate a rapid escape...

There's no way to discuss the novel in any detail without giving away some major plot points, so I'll hide the rest below the fold.


READER

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Although it's set in New York State, the novel relies heavily on a cluster of English classics, three in particular: Hamlet (once again), Jane Eyre, and Great Expectations.  These classics are all associated with a faint veneer of culture; the narrator, not what you'd call an angel, feels safe in sneering at Dr. Morgan for his lack of cultural literacy, but is clearly an auto-didact himself.  The Girl Who Couldn't Read references Hamlet more than once, but the problematic nature of Hamlet's insanity--yes? no? some of the time? maybe?--resonates strongly with both our narrator and Jane Dove, not least because the former is actually a serial killer (oops) and the latter, as readers familiar with the previous novel are aware, also has a body count.  John Shepherd/Jack Wells, an actor with a penchant for strangling women (we discover midway through that he played Othello) who had been destined for execution before the accident literally derailed that plan, spends much of the novel acting as John Shepherd, but also attempting to act "normal."   A brutalized orphan, John/Jack had been violently initiated into "manly" behavior by his abusive uncle, who taught him how to wring chickens' necks; as an adult, John/Jack translates chickens' necks into women's necks, like the "white and smooth" neck of Caroline Adams, the real Shepherd's fiancee, with its "silky white ribbon" (180).  John/Jack clearly finds strangling erotic--there's no hint that he's interested in other forms of sexuality--but he also appears to associate adult masculinity with dominating the weak.  In fact, his turn to "moral treatment" in the asylum, which is at odds with his own cruelty, suggests a kind of displaced therapy for himself.  Significantly, although his own memories hint that he may have murdered his aunt as revenge for his uncle's abuse, there's no mention of him murdering his uncle, just as he murders the horrifying Nurse O'Reilly but doesn't touch the equally unpleasant Dr. Morgan.  John/Jack, the professional actor acting as a sane mentalist, seems to belong in an asylum himself (and, ironically, concludes the novel in a straitjacket).  Jane Dove/Florence, meanwhile, plays Ophelia to John/Jack's would-be Hamlet, only to coolly reveal the trick at the end just before John/Jack attempts to murder her, too.  Like John/Jack and Hamlet, Jane/Florence is acutely aware of herself as a performer, as when she adroitly acts the role of a newly-literate reader for Dr. Morgan; this moment, which both reveals and re-conceals her actual literacy, functions as a subverted Mousetrap, as Jane/Florence neatly tricks John/Jack into believing that she has successfully tricked Morgan.  ("She had run rings around him, the silly old fool," Jack thinks, smugly, failing to properly apply the lesson [191].) In a nice reversal, after she and John/Jack escape the island on a boat, she delivers him back to the police for execution, suggesting that far from being Hamlet, he's more Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  

Jane Eyre and Great Expectations are equally significant.   Most blatantly, both John/Jack and Jane/Florence are abused orphans, but there are other overt allusions: not only does Jane/Florence compare the asylum to Lowood, but even more spectacularly, Dr. Morgan keeps his insane wife in the attic; similarly, John/Jack temporarily renames himself "Dr. Gargery" when Shepherd's fiancee reappears, and he murders O'Reilly much as Orlick attacks Mrs. Joe.  John/Jack's initially benevolent behavior towards Jane/Florence parodies Joe Gargery, along with Dickens' other quasi-paternal male figures (Brownlow, Jarndyce, etc.) and their nurturing relationships with forlorn orphans--indeed, his abusive violence as an adult inverts Joe Gargery, whose own experiences at the hand of a nasty father turn him into an profoundly gentle man.  More subtly, Jane/Florence's "illiterate" love of books with pictures evokes Jane Eyre's fascination with Bewick's British Birds (in fact, in an ironic nod to Jane Eyre, Jane/Florence refuses to look at a volume of Audubon); her desire to "make up her own stories" (99), instead of learning to read them for herself, resists other narratives in a way that ought to put John/Jack on his guard, but doesn't.  As it happens, she eventually destroys John/Jack with the information she gleans from a newspaper photograph, which she indeed turns into a (correct) story for the authorities.  When she develops a "fictional" past with which to trick Dr. Morgan, she in fact retells significant events from Florence and Giles, and John/Jack's laughing belief that "it was all a fiction" (238) is both true (Florence and Giles is a novel!) and false (but in the world of this novel, her fictions are facts).  John/Jack the self-made man, whose own explanations of his past can be equally bizarre, insists on verisimilitude in others.  (This is a classic fault of Shakespeare's villains, who expect other people to live up to the standards they ignore.)  

One of the things happening here is an interesting clash between a quintessentially American fantasy about a "free" self, erasing its past at will and reshaping itself through movement, and Pip's and Jane's narratives, in which both characters eventually root themselves (thanks to families makeshift and otherwise).  John/Jack is on a darker version of Pip's misguided quest for gentility, as we can see in his belief thinks that teaching Jane/Florence to read will help discipline her into a coherent subjectivity--which, obviously, he lacks himself.  But he has no intention of resting as "John Shepherd"; even before the snow begins to melt too early, threatening to reveal Caroline's body, he plans to keep moving westward (that most famous American compass direction).  Part of what makes John/Jack so dangerous is that he doesn't have a stable self, as we see when he becomes infected by Jane/Florence's unusual grammatical patterns; whereas Pip and Jane succeed (or, at least, don't fail) in understanding who they "really" are, John/Jack is always in search of a script to consolidate his onstage identity, whether that script be from Shakespeare or a book on the treatment of the insane.  When events threaten to deviate from that script, his murderous desires reappear.  Jane/Florence, who goes west instead of John/Jack, asserts control over storytelling in much the same way that Jane Eyre does, but nakedly indulges in the power plays that critics have often found lurking in Jane Eyre's narrative strategies.  Far from rushing to a romantic conclusion, the novel implodes into plotting and counter-plotting, and it is Jane/Florence's writing that will kill off the man who had sought to use her as both experiment and tool: "'It's exactly as the note said,' I heard one of the policemen say, 'lying here in a straitjacket'" (290).