The Observations

As I noted a few months ago, prostitutes seem to be in these days--at least when it comes to neo-Victorian fiction, that is--and unusually gifted prostitutes even more so.  Luckily, Jane Harris opts to steer a more difficult literary course than usual with her narrator, Bessy/Daisy, who manages to be both disturbed and disturbing.  When we meet Bessy, a.k.a. Daisy (and sometimes Rosebud), she is a teenager on the run from Glasgow to nowhere in particular; a brief stop at "Castle Haivers," which is not a castle at all, opens up the opportunity for a life as a domestic.  As we eventually discover, Bessy is a former teenage streetwalker and mistress, abruptly shoved back out onto the street after her elderly Jewish "employer," Mr. Levy, dies.  Yearning for the love of her neglectful (and sexually abusive) mother, Bessy attaches herself instead to her new "missus," Arabella Reid--herself suffering from the sheer boredom of life on a run-down estate.  In order to entertain herself, Arabella works on Observations on the Habits and Nature of the Domestic Class in My Time, a pseudoscientific analysis of the maids who come and go (usually, go).  While snooping around in The Observations, Bessy discovers a) that she herself is simply another experiment, and b) that there is a mystery surrounding Nora, a dead maid to whom Mrs. Reid seemed remarkably attached.  And Bessy's simultaneous jealousy of Nora and rage at Mrs. Reid's betrayal results in a remarkably nasty practical joke, one that results in Mrs. Reid's ultimate incarceration in an insane asylum...

The Observations alludes to a number of Victorian texts and literary conventions, ranging from a conclusion rife with poetic justice to two deaths that appear to have meandered over from Dickens' Dombey and Son.    In addition, Bessy mentions reading a number of texts--"Bleak House, Great Expectations, Pilgrims Progress, Justified Sinner" (56)--that offer direct or indirect parallels to the novel's plot and themes: insanity, quests for the equivalent of the Celestial City, transgressions of class boundaries, and problematic or dissolving identities.     There's also a special guest appearance by, appropriately enough, Samuel Richardson's Pamela (another writing servant), although Harris leaves it unnamed. But the plot's main action, in which Bessy successfully tricks Mrs. Reid into believing that Nora is haunting the house, bears some interesting resemblances to Gaslight. 

Like many neo-Victorian novels, then, The Observations is, in part, a pastiche.  What makes it more interesting, however, is the extent to which it calls our attention to its storytelling mechanisms.  Bessy's retrospective narrative is written for a specific audience of "gentlemen," who, in the end, turn out to be the men in charge of the insane asylum (where Bessy now works).  Within her own narrative, there are excerpts from the journal she keeps at Mrs. Reid's bequest--a journal that, as Bessy's stunt proceeds, becomes more and more "fictional."  There are also excerpts from The Observations--a title that could just as well fit Bessy's own story--and Nora's journal.  And then there are a couple of Bessy's own poems, which are plagiarized by a down-on-his-luck gentleman poet.  In this novel, narratives frequently fail to find readers, or are written to suit the audience's preconceptions, or circulate illicitly.  Audiences and authors are frequently at odds.  (Bessy's attempts to sell The Observations meet with amusing failure at the end.)    Even more importantly, the reader never quite knows how much (if any) of Bessy's tale to take at face value: she lies convincingly throughout the novel, alters her self-representations so as to impress her current audience, and sometimes abruptly slips out of her conversational dialect into a suspiciously formal register. 

That last problem is simultaneously the most subtle and the most significant clue that something is not quite right here.  Here, for example, are a few sentences from near the novel's end:

I will pass swiftly over my departure from Stoneydyke.  Suffice to say that as well as the thanks I offered to Helen and a promise to return her shoes as soon as I had my own boots, I silently vowed to repay her and Chick for the kindness they had done me.  However, the flipping shoes were that stiff they might as well have been made of metal.  (384)

There's a jarring difference between the first two sentences, with their slightly stultified diction and correct grammar, and the third, which abruptly reintroduces Bessy's usual conversational and bawdy language.  Most of the text resembles the third sentence, not the first two, and incorporates both working-class slang and minor errors in grammar and punctuation (missing apostrophes, comma splices, run-on sentences, and the like).  Bessy confesses that "I do believe my style may have improved as the months went by but there are still some mistakes for unless I keep my wits about me I tend to write as I speak" (410)--but, while the writing indeed improves, it's not clear how Bessy manages her occasional and sudden stylistic transitions.  (There's a longer example in chapter 17.)  Is this, too, a trick? Similarly, Bessy's enthusiastic reading seems to lend itself to narrative borrowings of one sort or another; the novel's pastiche may well be Bessy's own pastiche. 

The gaslighting trick at the heart of the novel, however, suggests something potentially more inimical about Bessy and her creative powers: her ability to change reality so as to gain a new, beloved mother while ridding herself of the old one.   Bessy is understandably upset to discover that "I was no more than a 'thing' to Arabella, a thing that might be experimented upon, toyed with and cast aside at a whim when it had outgrown its use" (102), but her initial rage at this objectification soon sits side-by-side with her implied attraction to/desire for Arabella.  (The novel subtly links Bessy's confused desire for her mistress to her forced incestuous relationship with her own mother.)  In choosing to turn the "experiment" back upon her mistress, Bessy effectively seizes control of her own plot--and, as it happens, eventually rewrites the very terms of Arabella's existence.  But having written a new plot for Arabella, Bessy discovers that she cannot erase it and return Arabella to sanity.  Yet even when the ghost story spins out of Bessy's control, it still works to her advantage: Arabella murders Bessy's mother in order to protect Bessy; Bessy, in turn, finds work at the asylum, where she not only remains close to Arabella but also seeks to publish The Observations.  If the former grants Bessy pride of place over the deceased Nora, the latter reminds us that Bessy has always understood the close connection between authorship and authority.