The Water's Lovely

I picked up Ruth Rendell's latest in order to take a break from the life-threatening combination of reading academic prose and grading, but was quickly struck by how Victorian the novel was.  To begin with, Tess of the d'Urbervilles haunts The Water's Lovely, beginning with one character's explicit references to Tess and moving on through The Water's Lovely's intertwined stories of rape, women's conflicted attitudes to marriage and sexuality, and class conflict.  Moreover, Rendell borrows noticeably from Victorian narrative conventions, including coincidence and at least one instance of extreme poetic justice.    Over all of this, Rendell throws a heavy pall of the Gothic: insanity, a deep claustrophobia (in part because of the coincidences), a Dark Family Secret, and frequent instances of sexual perversion or violence. 

What interested me about both the coincidences and the supposed example of poetic justice, though, is that both fail to do their job "properly": that is, they neither signify a hidden, providential order in an otherwise morally chaotic universe, nor (as they would in Dickens) do they reveal that a supposedly divided society is, in reality, an interlocking whole.  Each coincidence merely ratchets up the mutual antagonism, driving characters further apart while cementing their hostilities.  And the "poetic justice" of the conclusion, far from restoring or even revealing order, in fact calls justice itself into question.  Heather, the character closest to Tess, is also the one character who actively insists on justice for herself and others--yet her willingness to fight back apparently dooms her, in the cosmological scheme of things.  (Or does it? Given the Tess connection, one wonders about the ending.)  All of the novel's other primary female characters are desperate for male companionship, weak, and/or conniving (one is a parody of the Victorian spinster-companion, another the quintessential Victorian female hypochondriac); victimized by men who are brutal rapists, emotional sadists, or simply inattentive, the women frequently "achieve" their hearts' desires by, in effect, collaborating in their own destruction.  Drinking wine, Heather's sister Ismay thinks to herself, "I shouldn't live like this, but I do and whem I'm married to Andrew I always shall.  To brace myself for the lies I shall have to tell him.  To fortify myself against the lies he will tell me.  For his infidelities and for my daily stress" (325-26).  Marriage and romance almost always prove to be bleak prisons built out of deceit and submerged violence, just as the families themselves are riven by lies and, sometimes, mutual contempt.  Tess of the d'Urbervilles ends on a note of some small hope for the future of male-female relationships; this novel offers none at all.