Armadale (Penguin Classics) (original 1866; edition 1995)

My favourite Victorian sensationalist novel - full of melodramatic twists but also a thoughtful exporation of the nature of heredity and destiny. Very much a book for lovers of the genre - it can be a bit slow at times. ( )

Way, way back in the early 70s, German TV channel ZDF ventured into costume drama by giving us mini-series of some Collins novels. Armadale was my absolute favourite and remains so even after reading the novels on which they were based, which cannot be due only to the superb actress who played Lydia Gwilt.
The striking thing about Collins is how much more interesting his female characters are than those of Dickens. Not always the heroines like insipid Nelly Milroy or Laura Fairlie, but the sisters, aunts, cousins etc. The conventions of the Victorian novels obviously forbid that this type of woman should find happiness or even a fulfilled life, but you can always sense that Collins is on their side. ( )

In Armadale, considered one of Wilkie Collins's four greatest novels, he explores his favorite themes of the supernatural, destiny, murder, tortured love, revenge, deceit, and addiction. It's a complicated tale that relies heavily on coincidence, as is usual in sensational novels of the period. By an extraordinary set of circumstances too convoluted to detail here, there are two young men with the same name of "Allan Armadale," and their lives are linked (unbeknown to them) by murder and revenge in their parents' generation. One Allan Armadale is fortune's favorite, rich and handsome, while the other has had a life of unusual privation and suffering. Who can explain why their destinies are so inextricably entwined? And who casts the shadow of the Woman over them both?

Usually I love Wilkie and find his Victorian thrillers still wonderfully thrilling today. His writing is fairly good (I loved a phrase he uses in this novel, "the sexual sorcery of her smile"), and his melodrama, punctuated by moments of both humor and pathos, is of the entertaining variety. And he has a real gift for carrying his stories along with different narrative voices. Some of this novel is narrated by Lydia Gwilt in letters and diary entries; some is told in the omniscient third-person narrative style; and other tidbits of letters and notes from other characters give us insight into their motives and goals.

But this time I found the supernatural elements and the characters' overwrought responses to those elements—dare I say it?—the slightest bit tiresome. I wanted to tell the characters that it wasn't inevitable, they didn't have to live out the fearsome warnings of the Dream, that they should rebel against their own genre and be sensible, stolid Victorians. I suppose this still means that Collins has triumphed, as I was engaged with the characters and cared about what happened to them. But I wonder if his use of ominous supernatural signs is overdone, or if I am simply losing interest in it.

His characters, however, are memorable. Lydia Gwilt reminds me of Austen's Lady Susan and Collins's own Count Fosco. Lydia loves music and plays the piano beautifully, often losing herself in Mozart... but she is harshly practical at her core. The reader senses he cannot trust her, but she fluctuates throughout the novel, believing herself to be entirely without a heart and then weakening, weakening under the affection of a singular man. We hope she will reform (and stay reformed), but we know that this is a Wilkie Collins novel, after all, and he has to get in his share of angst before a few of the characters are permitted to enjoy happy endings.

Armadale is one of Collins's least humorous novels and there is a sense of oppression—suppression?—pervading its atmosphere. There is a sort of black humor in Mr. Bashwood's elderly vanity (that Collins says is really despair) and Mother Oldershaw's canting conversion to Christianity, but it isn't the sort to make you laugh. No indeed. I suppose Pedgift (and Pedgift's Postscript) is funny, as is the description of the disastrous picnic. But these little moments are overshadowed by the larger themes.

But despite the lack of light comedic moments, I agree with T. S. Eliot, quoted on the back of my copy, who wrote that this novel is never dull. For all its length (and it's over 650 pages of small type), it never bored me and I was always eager to pick it up again. And that's why I keep reading Wilkie Collins, melodrama and all. Master storytellers have that effect. ( )

Allan Wrentmore takes his wealthy cousin's name (Allan Armadale) as a condition of inheriting his wealth. Armadale has a son of his own, but the son is in disgrace and Armadale thus decides not to leave his money and property to him. From the introduction: "In Armadale it is for once the men, rather than the women, who struggle to identify themselves - to themselves as well as to others - in relation to the name." Additionally, "The idea of property, of possession and dispossession, is intimately connected with this theme of identity." Traditionally women found status through marriage and the assumption of someone else's name. However, in this novel it is a woman - Lydia Gwilt - who defiantly keeps her original name. She "stands out as the character with a steady identity" (from the Introduction). She is also "connected with every aspect of the Armadale fortunes". Her rival for Allan, Eleanor Milroy, is known by a nickname, Neelie. She explains to Allan that, 'There are some unfortunate people in this world, whose names are...Misfits. Mine is a Misfit.' She thinks Lydia's surname 'dreadfully unpoetical'.

The son of the original Allan Armadale returns under the assumed name of Fergus Ingleby. He ingratiates himself with the man who has taken his name (and his father's fortune), tries to poison him, and marries the woman Allan wanted. He is facilitated in his short reign of evil by a maid, who forges a letter from Allan's mother - 'Woe betide the people who trust her!' Ingleby tries to escape, but the ship he's on founders. Allan boards the ship and murders Ingleby. In a letter to his infant son (also an Allan Armadale), Allan tells him that he must avoid, all his life, the other Allan Armadale - the posthumous child of Fergus Ingleby and his wife.

A man with the 'ugly' name of Ozias Midwinter turns up in Allan's village. Allan's mother dies shortly after a visit from her former maid. Both of Allan's cousins, and his uncle, die (the deaths precipitated by a woman's attempted suicide leap), leaving Allan heir to the estate of Thorpe-Ambrose. It becomes clear that Ozias Midwinter is really the son of Fergus Ingleby. A key event in the book is Allan's dream, featuring the 'Shadow of a Woman' and the 'Shadow of a Man'. Ozias is convinced that the shadow of a man is himself, and the shadow of a woman the former maid who forged the letter to Allan Snr's mother. The dream is interpreted rationally by the doctor, Mr Hawbury, in a manner that makes "narrative patterns from events encountered in the waking world", but it convinces neither Midwinter nor the reader. "In Armadale the 'shadow of a man' is interpreted by Ozias as himself; the 'other' dark-skinned, alient, 'primitive' Armadale". Lydia, the 'shadow of a woman', "prefigures certain of the less benign aspects of Jung's 'anima', or soul-image". "Collins's terms embody a startling anticipation of Jung's theories of 'the shadow', the dark part of a personality that is repressed from consciousness, but which must be recognised if self-knowledge is to be acquired."

Lydia Gwilt is first mentioned by name on page 189, in a letter to her from a Mrs Maria Oldershaw, who is based upon a real-life person, Rachel Leverson, whose cosmetics and beauty treatments shop provided a cover for her criminal activities. Oldershaw is yet another character who uses a pseudonym - she does so in order to provide a fraudulent reference for Lydia. In her real name she shares her premises with those of Dr Downward, a 'ladies' medical man' (an abortionist, presumably). We learn that Lydia is thirty-five and 'hates women'. Maria encourages Lydia to marry Allan, and suggests a plan whereby Lydia could become governess to the 16-year-old daughter of Allan's new tenants, Major and Mrs Milroy. ["The figure of the governess, in fiction and in the popular imagination, was changing from that of the downtrodden victim to a more ambiguous, attractive, and dangerous image." - from the Introduction. As Allan puts it, "A governess is a lady who is not rich...and a duchess is a lady who is not poor"]. There is no doubt but that Lydia is pure poison - "I want a husband to vex, or a child to beat, or something of that sort. Do you ever like to see the summer insects kill themselves in the candle? I do, sometimes."

Allan and Lydia finally come face to face on page 322. We learn that Lydia is a redhead (she refers to her 'horrid red hair'). Ozias is lulled into a false sense of security because Mr Brock, who had been spying on Lydia, has been tricked into believing that Maria's maid is the 'real' Miss Gwilt. Brock isn't the only spy in the novel - in fact they are everywhere, professionally employed or otherwise. "Spying is an attempt to usurp another person's freedom of action and autonomy, literally his or her self-possession" (from the introduction). Lydia spies on Allan and Neelie, and employs poor besotted Bashwood to spy on things at Thorpe-Ambrose. Pedgift Snr sets a spy on Lydia, but again Lydia is canny enough to see through it.

Allan thinks he's in love with Lydia, but Ozias really is. Although Ozias had tried to convince himself that he was being superstitious in setting so much store by Allan's dream, his illusion is shattered when he and Allan argue about Lydia (who has easily persuaded Ozias to believe in her innocence): "The rain drove slanting over flower-bed and lawn, and pattered heavily against the glass; and the two Armadales stood by the window, as the two Shadows had stood in the second Vision of the Dream, with the wreck of the image [the Statuette] between them." Ozias is fascinated by Lydia, who has beguiled him absolutely. He realises the danger he is in: "I believe that if the fascination you have for me draws me back to you, fatal consequences will come of it to the man whose life has been so strangely mingled with mine..." He cannot fight her. Not only does he propose to her, he also tells her who he really is. We have a hint, from Lydia's diary, of the reasons why she is the way she is, when she reads some old "letters of the man for whom I once sacrificed and suffered everything; the man who has made me what I am." The truth of her past comes out via Bashwood's son, who works at a Private Inquiry Office. Lydia had been tried for the murder of her first husband, but the guilty verdict was overturned by the Home Secretary. She did, however, serve two years for robbery. Captain Manuel was the man with whom she was in love, and who fleeced her of all her money, married her bigamously, then disappeared from her life.

Lydia's attempts to murder Allan are compromised by her love for Ozias. The scene of the final confrontation is a Sanatorium, presided over by the former Dr Downward, now calling himself Dr Le Doux. The madhouse is of course "the Victorian equivalent of the gothic castle, or convent, a place of terrifying incarceration from which there seems to be no escape" (from the Introduction). Lydia's error is in putting poison gas into the room in which Ozias sleeps rather than into Allan's room. She realises her error, makes sure Ozias lives, then decides her only course ("Even my wickedness has one merit...I have never been a happy woman") is to kill herself. All ends well: Lydia is dead, Armadale and Neelie marry, and Ozias preserves the secret of the two Allans. However, "though the active female principle may once again have been subjugated and destroyed, Armadale is Lydia Gwilt's book, and it is she who dominates the story to the end" (from the Introduction) [August 2004] ( )

Trouble following who's who ( )