Ghent University:
Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
“Terrible plots? Laughing villains? Stolen fortunes and girls made out
to be mad? The stuff of lurid fiction!”
Neo-Victorianism and the Sensation Novel: Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor
Paper submitted in partial
fulfilment
of
the
requirements for the degree
of “Master in de Taal- en
Letterkunde: Engels”
by Tine De Schryver
July 2010
Acknowledgements
The quotation in the title of this dissertation is taken from Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, page
421.
I am grateful to my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor, for her assistance and her support
of my research.
I would like to thank my parents for giving me so many possibilities in life, and for their
support, love, care, and patience throughout the years – you are the best!
Many thanks to Hildegarde Mariman, who has read this dissertation and has given her opinion
on its language and content.
Thanks to my friends, who have been very patient and very kind every time I let them go
partying by themselves because I had to write my dissertation. I cannot name you all for fear I
would forget someone, but thank you so much – for the advice, the lively discussions, the
late-night text messages, and the diversion whenever I needed it.
Very, very special thanks to Karen. I love you, always.
This dissertation is dedicated to the loving memory of my grandfather.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1
2. Neo-Victorianism
4
2.1. Recently Developed Domain
4
2.2. Difficulties of Terminology
5
2.3. What Is Neo-Victorianism?
10
3. The Sensation Novel
13
3.1. The Victorian Fascination with Sensation
13
3.2. The Sensation Novel
18
3.3. Sensation Novelists
23
4. Characters in Fingersmith
28
4.1. Sue Trinder
28
4.2. Maud Lilly
39
4.3. Mrs Sucksby
53
4.4. Mr Lilly
55
4.5. Gentleman/Mr Rivers
57
4.6. Minor Characters
59
5. Fingersmith as a Sensation Novel
60
5.1. Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White
61
5.2. Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret 68
5.3. Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas
77
5.4. Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations
82
6. Fingersmith as a Neo-Victorian Novel
87
7. Conclusion
106
8. Appendix: Sarah Waters: Biography
109
9. Appendix: Fingersmith: Plot Summary
113
10. Works Consulted
119
De Schryver 1
1. Introduction
In the last decades, many writers have in some way returned to the days of our
Victorian predecessors. Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith is an example of this practice: even
though the novel is written in the first years of the twenty-first century, its focus lies on the
Victorian era. The novel is set in the 1860s, and its characters, plot, style, and themes are
distinctly Victorian. But Fingersmith is more than simply a novel that pastiches Victorian
literature – it is part of the general neo-Victorian surge of the last decades. In a number of
fields, ranging from literature to “fashions and furnishings” (Sadoff and Kucich xii), the
Victorian era is being reinvented and reinterpreted – a practice indirectly inherited from the
Victorians as well:
The Victorians had a habit of adapting just about everything – and in just about every
possible direction: the stories of poems, novels, plays, operas, paintings, songs,
dances, and tableaux vivants were consistently being adapted from one medium to
another and then back again. We postmoderns have clearly inherited this same habit,
but we have even more new critical materials at our disposal – not only film,
television, radio, and the various electronic media, but also theme parks, historical
enactments, and virtual reality experiences. (Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation xi)
Writers of neo-Victorian literature use characteristics of Victorian literature, culture, and
society at large, often with the purpose of adapting them to address certain present-day
concerns.
This dissertation aims to prove that in Fingersmith, Sarah Waters similarly
appropriates the classics of Victorian sensation fiction to serve her purposes as a neoVictorian writer.
The first chapter, “Neo-Victorianism”, therefore provides a theoretical
explanation of the neo-Victorian phenomenon. The struggles of this newly developed domain
within postmodern literature are disclosed, and an attempt at definition of neo-Victorian
De Schryver 2
literature is offered. The second chapter, “The Sensation Novel”, focuses on the sensation
phenomenon and the Victorian sensation novel in particular. The importance of sensation to
Victorian every-day life is illustrated, and its influence on the development of sensation
fiction is exposed. Additionally, the characteristics of the sensation novel at its heyday and the
main sensation authors are discussed. The third chapter, “Characters in Fingersmith”, treats
the origins and evolution of the main characters throughout the novel. This hinge chapter
contributes to the further discussion of Fingersmith in the fourth and fifth chapter. In the
fourth chapter, “Fingersmith as a Sensation Novel”, an overview of the main similarities
between Fingersmith and several sensation novels is given – Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in
White, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas and
Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations1 are discussed alongside Fingersmith. The fifth and last
chapter, “Fingersmith as a neo-Victorian novel” analyses how Sarah Waters uses and abuses2
the conventions of Victorian sensation fiction to address contemporary issues that she
personally feels very strongly about. In the appendix, a biography of Sarah Waters and a plot
overview of Fingersmith are added.
The methodology applied during my research is fairly straightforward. For the
discussion of the theoretical backgrounds of neo-Victorianism, the online journal NeoVictorian Studies proved particularly helpful. I have endeavoured to reconcile different
opinions on the neo-Victorian phenomenon, and to create a rather coherent theoretical
framework. The discussion of Fingersmith’s characters is based on Sarah Waters’s own
indications in interviews and articles, accompanied by a few research articles and my own
insights. The analysis of the similarities between Victorian sensation novels and Fingersmith
is mainly based on recurrent plot structures, characters, themes, and ideas. Linda Hutcheon’s
1
The reasons for including Great Expectations, obviously not a sensation novel in itself, are listed in the chapter
proper.
2
An expression used by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism.
De Schryver 3
theory of historiographic metafiction as explained in A Poetics of Postmodernism has been
especially utilizable in the discussion of Fingersmith as a neo-Victorian novel. As the neoVictorian domain is still so distinctly new, research and insights are regularly added to it.
Theories about neo-Victorianism, and consequently the analysis of neo-Victorian novels,
change rapidly. Sometimes suitable theories are still missing, which complicates the attempt
at analysis by the researcher. Moreover, Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith is a novel that derives its
power and its effect from its marvellously intricate plot. Therefore, any attempt at discussion
of the novel is complicated by the reluctance to spoil the experience for other readers, for, as
Julie Myerson says in a review for the The Guardian: “There are always novels that you envy
people for not yet having read, for the pleasures they still have to come” (n. pag.).
De Schryver 4
2. Neo-Victorianism
2.1. Recently Developed Domain
The literary domain that is frequently called “neo-Victorian” is a relatively new one.
However, novels that are retrospectively categorised as “neo-Victorian fiction” were written
long before the term was coined, or before people were even thinking of coining it. Scholars
on the subject disagree when it comes to delineating the “start” of the neo-Victorian surge in
British fiction. Some, such as Andrea Kirchknopf, argue that the trend emerged in the 1960s
(53), others, such as Marie-Luise Kohlke, claim that applying chronological boundaries on the
movement is not that easy (2). Often, scholars propose the 1960s as a boundary, because of
the publication dates of some influential neo-Victorian novels, such as Jean Rhys’s Wide
Sargasso Sea (1966) and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) (Kohlke 3).
But as Kohlke argues, everything that was written on the Victorians after the Victorian era –
which ends in 1901, with the Queen’s death – should in fact be investigated within the field of
neo-Victorianism (4). As this field is still struggling with severe growing pains, the earliest
neo-Victorian writings are still largely undiscovered lands. But Kohlke does admit that there
is a “perceptible disjunction between the current fashion for all things Victorian and what
might be called the relative unfashionableness of earlier twentieth-century works already in
conversation with the resurrected Victorians” (4).
The novels were there already, but as mentioned before, the domain has developed
only recently. “Neo-Victorianism: The Politics and Aesthetics of Appropriation”, the first
large-scale international conference dealing with neo-Victorianism, took place in September
2007, at Exeter University. Influential books dealing with the topic were mainly published in
the new millennium – for example Christian Gutleben’s Nostalgic Postmodernism: The
Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (2001) and John Kucich and Diane
F. Sadoff’s Victorian Afterlife (2000). The first issue of the e-journal Neo-Victorian Studies
De Schryver 5
was released in the autumn of 2008. Apart from providing articles that deal with the many
examples of neo-Victorianism in novels and on the screen, the journal is very much concerned
with discussing and establishing the theoretical backgrounds of neo-Victorianism. Creating
firm boundaries is still precarious, as Marie-Louise Kohlke, general and founding editor of
Neo-Victorian Studies, explains.
Neo-Victorian Studies is still in the process of crystallisation, or full materialisation so
to speak; as yet its temporal and generic boundaries remain fluid and relatively open to
experimentation by artists, writers, and theorists alike, a state of affairs that forms part
of its strong attraction. What properly belongs in and to this emergent, popular, interdisciplinary field of study remains to be seen. (1)
The undefined boundaries of neo-Victorianism might be attractive to researchers and readers
alike, but they have their downsides as well: “Neo-Victorian Studies is being held back by its
diffusiveness, which currently undermines efforts to get to grips fully with the subject matter
and with why it matters” (Kohlke 1). Trying to provide a description of the neo-Victorian
phenomenon is therefore not straightforward, and inevitably partly inaccurate.
2.2. Difficulties of Terminology
The neo-Victorian domain is so distinctly new that even its terminology is not entirely
figured out yet. Throughout the last decades, different possible names for the phenomenon
have been proposed, of which historiographic metafiction, historical fiction, Victoriana,
Victoriographies, retro-Victorianism, neo-Victorianism, post-Victorianism, and pseudoVictorianism are the ones discussed by Andrea Kirchknopf.
Historical fiction is the broadest category that can be applied to the modern rewritings
of history. The term refers to a particular type of fiction that uses characters, events, social
conditions, and the likes from a period in history and fictionalizes them. The narrator seems to
De Schryver 6
tell a historical story, but he or she obviously is not. Historiographic metafiction is a term
coined by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism. Hutcheon categorizes
historiographic metafiction as part of postmodernism, and defines it as “those well-known
and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay
claim to historical events and personages” (5). Historiographic metafiction always works
within the conventions of history and fiction, but tries to challenge and subvert them (5). The
genre tries to fix attention on the fact that “the past once existed, but that our historical
knowledge of it is semiotically transmitted” (Hutcheon 122). Parody, critical irony,
playfulness, and the use and abuse of literary conventions and techniques point to the fact that
“the truth” does not exist; there are only versions of the truth, truths (Hutcheon 3-13).
Historical fiction, as well as historiographic metafiction, engages in a dialogue with the past;
therefore, the genre is essentially discursive (Kirchknopf 60). However, both terms refer to a
much broader category than just rewritings of the Victorian past. A more accurate term should
thus include some reference to the Victorian era.
Obviously, names that include a prefix or suffix and Victorian require a clear
definition of Victorian. In its strictly temporal sense, Victorian refers to the reign of Queen
Victorian, stretching from 1837 to 1901. However, the periods preceding and following the
Victorian era are often included under the heading Victorian, so that sometimes it covers most
of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century, up to World War I. But
Victorian has acquired a connotative meaning as well, which is not so easily pinned down, as
it has undergone changes throughout the decades. Immediately following the Queen’s death in
1901, Victorian was used to separate the nineteenth-century attitudes from those of the
Edwardian and modernist eras (Kirchknopf 56). Victorian came to stand for rigid, suffocating
values, double standards, and opposition to everything that was new, modern, and exciting.
By the 1950s, “the threatening fatherly nature of Victorian gives way to a more tender grand-
De Schryver 7
or great-grandfatherly remoteness” (Kirchknopf 56).3 Throughout the sixties and eighties,
binary oppositions in discourses concerning Victorian politics and sexuality surfaced.4
Nowadays, we return to the Victorian era to unearth the untold stories of the past, or to look
for the foundations of our modern culture. The binary oppositions in our evaluation of the
Victorians have remained. On the one hand, we acknowledge that the Victorians shaped who
we are now, that they built our world and life as we know it, but on the other hand, we deny
the affiliation between our culture and that of the Victorians (Kirchknopf 56).5 Kirchknopf
emphasises that the plurality of relationships with the Victorian era causes the term to
“summon . . . a diachronic understanding, simultaneously inviting a synchronic one of
multiple interpretations” (59) – Victorian is a term that has undergone gradual change, but the
synthesis of the different meanings can still be interpreted harmoniously.
Retro-Victorianism, the term introduced by Sally Shuttleworth, refers to the enormous
popularity of the historical novel in these days, while at the same time paying attention to the
merchandising of all things Victorian - and all things past in general, because in the
advertising industry “styles of the past swiftly replace one another, without any sense of the
cultural and social baggage they had previously carried” (255). Such an emphasis seems to
imply that the neo-Victorian phenomenon has much to do with nostalgia for days gone by, but
Shuttleworth nuances her claim by making the distinction between the historical novel in the
United States and the novel in Britain – the latter displaying “a deep commitment to
recreating the detailed texture of an age, to tracing the economic and social determinants
which might structure these imaginary lives” (255). Simply stated, retro-Victorian fiction
3
Andrea Kirchknopf uses the metaphors from J.B. Bullen’s introduction to Writing and Victorianism.
In the sixties, two contrasting views on Victorian sexuality emerged. While believing that Victorian referred to
“everything that stood in the way of sexual freedom”, “the deconstruction and reassessment of the coherency of
the Victorians’ supposed sexual repression began to take place” (Kirchknopf 56, using ideas derived from Cora
Kaplan’s Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism). In the eighties, Victorian politics were represented in two
opposing ways: the conservative Tatcherians coined terms such as “progress” and “prosperity”, while the labour
spread the description of exactly the same concept by using “the likes of drudgery and squalor” (Kirchknopf 56,
using ideas from Simon Joyce).
5
Andrea Kirchknopf refers to Matthew Sweet.
4
De Schryver 8
according to Shuttleworth is “a type of historical novel”, while “the category of historical
novel is broadly understood and thus inclusive of historiographic metafiction” (Kirchknopf
62). No further attempt at definition of the genre is provided.
The term neo-Victorianism was first coined by Dana Shiller, in her seminal paper “The
Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel” (Kirchknopf 62). According to Shiller, the neoVictorian novel is “at once characteristic of postmodernism and imbued with a historicity
reminiscent of the nineteenth-century novel” (538). She argues that neo-Victorian fiction
“present[s] a historicity that is indeed concerned with recuperating the substance of bygone
eras, and not merely their styles” – consequently, neo-Victorianism is more than simple
pastiche6. Neo-Victorian fiction uses “a revisionist approach to the past”, in that it tries to
explore how our present day influences and shapes historical narrative, while at the same time
being “indebted to earlier cultural attitudes towards history” (Shiller 540). Shiller claims that
neo-Victorian fiction tries “to reconstruct the past by questioning the certitude of our
historical knowledge”, by showing that the historical record is fictional, because it has already
been turned into a narrative, and by presenting marginalised voices to the reader (Shiller 540541). Although the past is considered as something fluid and consisting of various truths, the
desire for knowledge of the past pervades the neo-Victorian novel (Shiller 542-557).
Pseudo-Victorian fiction, an expression used by both Gutleben and Letissier, refers to
these novels’ “convergence with, and divergence from, their source” (Kirchknopf 60).
Kirchknopf predicts that the term will only be granted a short life, because of a supposed
parallel development with the deconstruction of history as essentially narrative that deprived
the term pseudo-historical of its heuristic power (60).
Dianne F. Sadoff and John Kucich describe post-Victorian as “a term that conveys the
paradoxes of historical continuity and disruption” in their Introduction to Victorian Afterlife
6
Pastiche, according to Fredric Jameson, is “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of
random stylistic allusion” (qtd. in Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 26-27).
De Schryver 9
(xiii). Based on Brian McHale’s interpretation of the prefix post- in postmodernism,
Kirchknopf argues that post- in post-Victorianism is used as “a modifier of Victorian
underlining the presence of the Victorian tradition in everything that comes after”, and as a
signaler that “contemporary practices are perceived to stem more from the Victorian than the
modernist era” (Kirchknopf 64). Kirchknopf prefers the term post-Victorianism over other
possible denominations of the phenomenon, because it refers to both present and past, without
showing preference for one of them (65).
The term Victoriana was originally used to denote objects from the Victorian era
(Kirchknopf 65). Cora Kaplan mentions that by the end of the 1970s, Victoriana’s reference
“had widened to embrace a complementary miscellany of evocations and recyclings of the
nineteenth century” (Victoriana 3). Nowadays, Victoriana indicates “the whole phenomenon,
the astonishing range of representations and reproductions for which the Victorian . . . is the
common referent” (Kaplan, Victoriana 3). Victoriographies is the title of a book by Julian
Wolfrey, in which he defines reworkings of Victorian texts as “cultural writing formed out of
interpretations and translations of the high ground of nineteenth-century culture” (qtd. in
Kirchknopf 61). Victoriography and historiography share the same sound pattern, showing
that Victoriographies need to be examined “as part of the already established postmodern
discourse of historiographical metafiction” (Kirchknopf 61). Both Victoriana and
Victoriographies refer to more than just fiction, since they relate to different representations
of the Victorian, not just novels (Kirchknopf 66).
In this dissertation, I will denominate the contemporary phenomenon of literary
representations of the Victorian era as neo-Victorianism. This term emphasises the relative
newness of the phenomenon and focuses mainly on the present, because however hard these
novels try to recreate and redefine the Victorian past, they will always be influenced by a
De Schryver 10
modern point of view and the changes that cultural interpretation of the past has undergone
since the Victorian era.
2.3. What Is Neo-Victorianism?
In her article “(Re)workings of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Definitions, Terminology,
Contexts” in the inaugural issue of Neo-Victorian Studies, Andrea Kirchknopf tries to
summarize the main characteristics of neo-Victorian fiction. First of all, she clearly indicates
that neo-Victorianism is a postmodern phenomenon. Secondly, she compares the neoVictorian and the Victorian novel, by saying that the former sticks to the average length and
structure of the latter – neo-Victorian novels are often “the bulky 500 pages”, arranged in
books or chapters, preceded by an epigraph or a few summarizing lines (54). They are often
imitations of the main genres of the nineteenth century, examples including Bildungsromans,
social, industrial, and sensation novels, “creatively intermingled with conventions of the
(auto)biographical and (pseudo)historical novels” (54). The result is a mixture of hybrid
genres, often using all ranges of parody and pastiche that are “so characteristic of postmodern
novelistic discourse” (54). The plot of these new “large, loose, baggy monsters” as Henry
James called them (14), deals invariably with the nineteenth century, or alternates between the
nineteenth and the twentieth or twenty-first centuries (54). The setting of these novels is
distinctly British – London, the industrial cities of the Midlands, the countryside, or Britain’s
nineteenth-century territories overseas (54).
Neo-Victorian novels address certain anxieties that have their roots in the nineteenth
century and are still influential in our contemporary society. Sarah Waters herself uses this
explanation to account for the recent popularity of the nineteenth century:
I’ve sometimes thought that it’s a way of addressing issues that are still very, very
current in British culture, like class and gender, and submerged sexuality or sexual
De Schryver 11
underworlds. Things that we think we’re pretty cool with, and actually we’re not at all,
and we keep on wanting to go back to the nineteenth century to play these out on a
bigger scale, precisely because they’re still very current for us. (qtd. in Dennis 45)
Indeed, for Waters, and probably for many other writers of neo-Victorian fiction, the return to
the Victorian age is “a conscious choice of a historical moment in which the contemporary
discourses of economics, politics, and sexuality have their roots” (Costantini 36). Recently,
scholarly research has started to analyze the Victorian age as “a harbinger of our own trauma
culture” (Kohlke 7). The nineteenth century saw the rise of the Industrial Revolution,
accompanied by social ills such as child labour and rapid urbanisation leading to awful living
conditions, including diseases, crime, sexual exploitation and the likes. Additionally traumatic
were “violent civil unrest, international conflicts, and trade wars” (Kohlke 7). Moreover, the
many and diverse -isms that spread rapidly in this period – the most famous examples include
feminism, socialism, radicalism, individualism, and nationalism – address issues that still
matter nowadays (Palmer, Colton, and Kramer 443-457). Especially since the 9/11 attacks,
the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the interference of the superpowers in the
affairs of the Middle East, we are suddenly confronted with the seeming repetition of
“nineteenth-century Western histories of empire-building, atrocities of colonialism, and the
clash of opposing cultures” (Kohlke 7).
Neo-Victorian novels thus deal with typical Victorian concerns and controversies scientific, religious, moral, national, personal, political, and cultural (Kirchknopf 54).
Deliberately or unconsciously, the narratives that employ these concerns create a dialogue
between the nineteenth century and our age (Kirchknopf 54). Neo-Victorian fiction is
therefore actively involved in “consciousness-raising” and “witness-bearing” (Kohlke 9).
Apart from telling the stories that we know, neo-Victorian fiction wants to add something to
our conception of the Victorian age – it wants to reinterpret, re-imagine, and re-evaluate the
De Schryver 12
era by trying “to unearth – or invent – material not part of the official historiography of the
nineteenth century” (Kirchknopf 58). The genre wants previously marginalised voices to tell
their side of the story, and to foreshadow a future that can never be, simply because those
original voices have almost never made it to our time. Sarah Waters proves an excellent
example of this theory; in Fingersmith, she aims to “trace a genealogy, to bring back to life
the secret yearnings and the anxieties that plagued the Victorians’ minds and, in different
ways, still haunt our existence in the new millennium” (Costantini 20). She tries to fill the
gaps in history by imagining the elements that are missing and recreating the voices of
women, lesbians, pornographers, criminals, and ordinary people struggling to get through the
day. Other examples of neo-Victorian novels presenting the unheard stories of the time are
Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, that uses Jane Eyre’s “madwoman in the attic” as its
protagonist, or Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly, that invents the story of the maidservant in
Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
De Schryver 13
3. The Sensation Novel
3.1. The Victorian Fascination with Sensation
The Victorians were very fond of sensations. The 1860s was “the sensation decade; a
decade of sensational events and sensation writing” (Pykett, The Sensation Novel 1). The
1850s and 1860s saw “an unprecedented development of the press”, as Michael Diamond
explains (1). The removal of all kinds of taxes – on newspaper advertising in 1853, on stamps
in 1855, and on paper in 1861 – made newspapers affordable to everyone, even the poorest
(Diamond 1). The most important newspapers, such as The Times, Era, Reynold’s Newspaper,
and Pall Mall Gazette, were concentrated in London, and thus creating a sensation was easiest
in the capital (Diamond 2). The press was extremely powerful at the time, and well aware of
its unique position. Sensation journalism popped up, and was seen by many as “a form of
creeping contagion” (Pykett, The Sensation Novel 2). Additionally, sensations were fostered
and ridiculed in Punch and other comic magazines, as well as announced in theatres and
music halls (Diamond 3). Many music hall songs dealt with sensational events, and were
avidly sung on every street corner (Diamond 90).
The 1860s was the age of “sensational advertisements, products, journals, crimes, and
scandals” (Edwards qtd. in Pykett, The Sensation Novel 1); the age of sensational “poetry, art,
auction sales, sport, popular science, diplomacy and preaching” (Edwards qtd. in Pykett, The
Sensation Novel 1-2). Victorian sensation can be split up in different broad categories –
royalty, politics, religion and morality, sex scandals, murder mysteries and, to a lesser extent,
sports and disasters. (Diamond 3). The Victorian sensation novelist Charles Reade listed the
subjects that, in his opinion, his contemporaries were most interested in: “an aristocratic
divorce suit, the last great social scandal, a sensational suicide from Waterloo Bridge, a
woman murdered in Seven Dials, or a baby found strangled in a bonnet-box at Piccadilly
Circus” (Reade qtd. in Diamond 124).
De Schryver 14
“The rigid social hierarchy of the Victorian age meant that a sensation was all the
greater if the protagonist enjoyed high rank,” says Michael Diamond (6). Indeed, a murder
case became ten times as interesting when a baronet was involved, and a sex scandal
including members of the Royal Family caused unprecedented sensations. Births, marriages,
deaths and other important life events “inspire[d] strong emotions in the Queen’s subjects”
(Diamond 7). The rise in nationalist and imperialist feelings in the nineteenth century was
accompanied by a keen interest in and pride of the Royal Family – the latter quickly waning
in the 1870s and 1880s. Great royal occasions often resembled show business events, from
which both the devisers of royal entertainments and the Royal Family itself benefited
(Diamond 7-8). Notwithstanding the fact that Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1838 led to
sensational celebratory festivities, the greatest sensations tend to be the unexpected ones –
attempts on the Queen’s life, for example (Diamond 10).
Political sensations were mainly caused by both nationalism and the drive for reform7
(Diamond 41). The British were proud of their country, feeling that they belonged to the
greatest nation on earth, but were aware of the fact that “the political system failed to further
their interests” (Diamond 41). Chartism8 was one of the movements that gathered strength in
the middle of the nineteenth century and led to social reform, through marches, protests,
petitions, and so on. Regular outbreaks of violence during those actions led to sensations
accompanied by fear amongst all classes. Sensations involved large crowds expressing their
opinions on the streets or at other gatherings, and supporting or opposing certain politicians
7
When revolutions roared over the continent in 1830 and 1848, the Britons asked for reform, which was
achieved without revolution.
8
A working-class movement, consisting of socialist anticapitalists, who agreed that the working-class needed to
be represented in Parliament before social reform could be obtained. Their name is derived from the People’s
Charter they drafted in 1838. The Charter consisted of six points, demanding:
(1) the annual election of the House of Commons by (2) universal suffrage for all adult males, through
(3) a secret ballot and (4) equal electoral districts; and it called for (5) the abolition of property
qualifications for membership in the House of Commons, which perpetuated the old idea that
Parliament should be composed of gentlemen of independent income, and urged instead (6) the payment
of salaries to the elected members of Parliament, in order that people of small means might serve.
(Palmer, Colton, and Kramer 480)
De Schryver 15
(Diamond 41). Moreover, as Diamond states, “the Victorian taste for melodrama, where
characters were either gloriously heroic or deeply villainous, certainly extended to political
figures” (41).
Most Victorians were proud Protestants and cultivated a deep hatred of the Roman
Catholic Church. As Diamond explains, “Protestantism was seen as an essential element of
the national identity, and an inspiration behind Britain’s emergence as the most powerful
country in the world” (83). Many sensations were caused by religious issues and the
Victorians reacted vehemently to them (Diamond 83). The tendency to dramatize everyday
life was extended to religion as well – the heroes of religious sensations were invariably
Protestants, while the villains were Catholics (Diamond 87). Exactly like belief, unbelief
could cause major sensations (Diamond 101). Religion and morality were closely intertwined;
certain subjects were simply considered immoral and any discussion of them was considered
inappropriate at all times (Diamond 102). Sexual topics, even if they dealt with matters of
serious importance, such as birth control, child prostitution or venereal diseases, caused true
sensations, and moral campaigners, especially if they were women, were ridiculed (Diamond
102-113).
Although the public considered any discussion of sexual morality revolting, there
certainly was a widespread interest in sex scandals (Diamond 120). The courts, and especially
the Divorce Court established in 1858, provided the masses with spicy details, because
embarrassing questions put to the people involved had to be answered (Diamond 120).
Homosexual scandals, adultery, and divorces were readily offered to the sensation-seeking
public, and were even more popular when they involved members of the aristocratic classes.
In previous times, “class loyalty and social cohesion made leaks from their circle
unthinkable” (Diamond 153), but the Divorce Court splashed out their secrets as readily as
those of the masses. As a result, detailed press coverage, even by respectable newspapers, was
De Schryver 16
often spicier than novels, and debates about what newspapers could publish ensued (Diamond
120).
Of all scandals occurring in the Victorian era, murders were perhaps the most popular
ones – the personal belongings of famous murderers and murderesses were sold for high
prices to sensation-seekers, and they were popular subjects for waxworks (Diamond 163-184).
Individual cases aroused strong emotions in the public, and the sensation grew even larger “if
the accused had an interesting personality” (Diamond 155). As Diamond explains, the ideal
murder drama in Victorian Britain consisted of three acts – the crime itself, the trial, and the
hanging (155). The crime itself invariably led to different responses in people – some were
suddenly frightened to be poisoned by their wives, to have their throats slashed by their
servants at night, or to murdered by a serial killer; others wanted to visit the crime scene or
tried to solve the crime mystery themselves (Diamond 154-188). Murder trials were
immensely popular as well, to such an extent that people bought tickets to enter court and rose
halfway during the night to have a good spot in the courtroom (Diamond 155-157). The
hanging offered people a free spectacle, so thousands poured out on the streets to watch the
accused pay for his or her deeds (Diamond 155-157). Especially murderesses “on the dock
and on the scaffold” held a particular “sexual attraction” (Diamond 161). Murders were so
popular and sensational that broadsheets often invented parts of the story, such as the
murderer’s confession, to appeal to the public taste (Diamond (156-157). Diamond even
emphasises that “there is no doubt that the press inflated the sensation for its own benefit”9
(Diamond 184). Sensation novels, rising to prominence in the late 1850s and 1860s, often
used material derived from actual murder cases.10 Although “horrific crime posed a threat
9
A generalisation based on several murder cases presented in Diamond’s Victorian Sensation, in which the press
exaggerated certain elements of the case to make it even more spectacular.
10
Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret both use elements from the
Manning case – a murder case in which Mr. and Mrs. Manning were accused of murdering and hiding a family
friend that caused great sensation in 1849.
De Schryver 17
even to the self-confidence and optimism of the Victorians” (Diamond 164), they willingly
went along in every sensational murder they were presented, and especially in what would be
known as the greatest murder sensation of Victorian England: the Jack The Ripper-case.
Disasters happened far more in Victorian Britain than they do nowadays (Diamond 3).
Regular outbreaks of deadly diseases such as cholera caused many deaths. Accidents like
mining disasters, railway crashes, or fires in theatres and music halls often occurred and took
many lives (Diamond 3). These events were splashed out in newspapers, causing the public to
attribute sensational dimensions to them. Sports sensations were limited, as “only horse
racing, cricket and pugilism11 can really be considered as national sports throughout the
period” (Diamond 4).
In general, Victorian men disapproved of women in the sensation-seeking public – a
fact that can clearly be seen in print (Diamond 4). Women, however, were “particularly
fascinated by cases that centred on a woman”, as Diamond claims (4). They read the
newspaper accounts of murders and suicides, attended trials and hangings, and they were
ravished by sensation fiction (Diamond 4-5). Women often wrote sensation fiction as well,
and portrayed “strong-minded females” in their stories, clearly showing that women started to
rebel against their position in society (Diamond 5).
Clearly, the majority of sensations were the result of events occurring in real life
(Diamond 286). Many people derived great pleasure from the discomforts and sufferings of
others – “particularly if they were rich, famous, powerful, or any combination of the three”
(Diamond 287). Even the newspapers eagerly reported “what they claimed to deplore”
(Diamond 287). Most sensations were rather short-lived, causing great stirs for a few weeks
or months, and were then entered into the collective memory. Only two sensations were large
11
Boxing.
De Schryver 18
enough to live through the decades and even continue to fascinate us nowadays: Oscar
Wilde’s trial and subsequent fall and the Jack the Ripper murder mysteries.
3.2. The Sensation Novel
The sensation novel is a particular type of novel that emerged in the late 1850s and
reached its height of popularity during the 1860s. Sensation novels had their origins in the
sensation-fostering culture of the middle of the nineteenth century, combined with elements
from the gothic tradition of the eighteenth century (Pykett, “Sensation and the Fantastic” 192).
The traditional gothic, as written by Horace Walpole or Ann Radcliffe, however different in
“style and emphasis”, does have certain characteristics in common: its setting is mysterious,
or archaic, with “isolated and possibly haunted castles, dungeons, or sublime landscapes”
(Pykett, “Sensation and the Fantastic” 195). Through visions, dreams, hallucinations,
metamorphoses or psychologically dual characters, the gothic novel expresses its interest in
the monstrous and supernatural. Its plot involves “violence, tyranny, imprisonment, and
persecution (especially of women)” (Pykett, “Sensation and the Fantastic” 195). The gothic’s
main preoccupation is with feeling: it both shows the feelings of its main characters and aims
to arouse feelings in its readers – terror and fear in particular (Pykett, “Sensation and the
Fantastic” 196). The main difference between the traditional gothic and the sensation novel
is that the latter takes the terror and horror into “the English country house, or the bourgeois
villa” (Pykett, “Sensation and the Fantastic” 202). And indeed, sensation novels “were also
close to home in their subject matter”: authors often borrowed “their plots from sensation
newspaper reports of criminal or divorce cases” (Pykett, “Sensation and the Fantastic” 202).
Additionally, Winifred Hughes associates the rise of the sensation novel with more
than simply a continued popular taste for the gothic; she claims that the sensation novel was a
sort of elaborated continuation of the Newgate novel (qtd. in Allingham, “Victorian Sensation
De Schryver 19
Novel” n. pag.). The Newgate novel enjoyed an extraordinary popularity during the 1830s and
1840s and derived its name from the Newgate Calendar, “which . . . satisfied the popular
fascination with crime and criminals by gathering together accounts of the lives, trials,
confessions, punishments and/or escapes from, or evasions of the law of celebrated criminals”
(Pykett, “Newgate Novel” 20). Exactly like the Newgate novel, the sensation novel was partly
a journalistic construct, but while in the former crime was emphasised, the latter focused more
on detection (Pykett, “Newgate Novel” 33-34). Moreover, Newgate novels were written
exclusively by male authors, while popular sensation novels were written by men and women
alike, prominently featuring female criminals and female detectives (Pykett, “Newgate
Novel” 35).
Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White is generally considered to be the first sensation
novel and its serialisation between November 1859 and August 1860 is seen as the official
birth of the genre (Pykett, “Collins and the Sensation Novel” 50). In The Sensation Novel
Lynn Pykett provides a definition of sensation fiction:
[Sensation novels] were mainly distinguished by their devious, dangerous and, in
some cases, deranged heroes and (more especially) heroines, and their complicated
plots of horror, mystery, suspense and secrecy. The sensation plot usually consisted of
varying proportions and combinations of duplicity, deception, disguise, the
persecution and/or seduction of a young woman, intrigue, jealousy, and adultery. The
sensation novel drew on a range of crimes, from illegal incarceration (usually of a
young woman), fraud, forgery (often of a will), blackmail and bigamy, to murder or
attempted murder. . . . The typical sensation novel was a catholic mixture of modes
and forms, combining realism and melodrama, the journalistic and the fantastic, the
domestic and the romantic or exotic. (4)
De Schryver 20
Indeed, as Pykett mentions, women take up a very special role in the sensation novel. They
are often the heroines of the story, assuming one of two main roles: the strong, active woman,
who tries to break free from society’s constraints, or the passive woman, imprisoned and
driven to the extreme by those same constraints (Pykett, The Sensation Novel 49). Central to
almost all sensation novels is the feminine, which is often turned into a real spectacle (Pykett,
The Sensation Novel 6-7). As Pykett adds in The Sensation Novel, “at least one of the female
protagonists is . . . likely to be assertive, transgressive and a creature of passion, in other
words bad, mad, or otherwise dangerous to know” (7). Female passion can be discussed in the
sensation novel, and is even exaggerated in the fiction of G W M Reynolds, whose work is
often associated with that of sensation novelists, but with additional sex and violence
(Diamond 191). Sensation novels take a close look at “gendered social and familial roles” as
well (Pykett, “Sensation and the Fantastic” 203). Marriage for example, which had been the
ultimate goal of romantic or domestic fiction, becomes a concept that causes trouble and is
even contested. The use of bigamy in the plots of sensation novels highlights issues such as
the unequal position of men and women within marriage, while providing narrative
complication at the same time (Pykett, The Sensation Novel 46).
Women played a central part as readers and writers of sensation fiction as well (Pykett,
The Sensation Novel 7). Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen (Mrs Henry) Wood were
important sensation novelists alongside their male colleagues. Many critics deplored the
presence of women in the development and consumption of sensation novels. Pykett points
out that to the nineteenth-century critic,
Sensation novels were, in the main (or so it was thought), written by wicked women,
about wayward girls and wicked women, for consumption by women whose
waywardness and potential for wickedness was signalled by the very fact that they
read such material. (The Sensation Novel 40)
De Schryver 21
The prevailing idea was that an attractive depiction of the female sinner would lead many
other women astray (Diamond 200).
Nineteenth-century critics also claimed that the sensation novel concentrated “too
much on plot and not enough on character” (Diamond 216). Because the sensation narrative
relies so heavily on “surprising events and extraordinary coincidences” to create its particular
effect, the characters are often “subordinated to incident and plot” (Pykett, The Sensation
Novel 4). Only villains and other mysterious characters are fully and vividly realised, while
ordinary people are “scarily passive” victims (Dolin 18). Surprise, mystery, deviations, and
entanglements occurred in rapid succession and particular narrative techniques were used to
contribute to the uncovering of the central secret (Pykett, The Sensation Novel 5). Employing
different first-person narrators, who each only knew part of the whole story, having key
events occur “off-stage”, and using “narratorial coyness” in declining to narrate certain
events, contributed to narrative concealment, delay and deferral (Pykett, The Sensation Novel
5). The narrator is no longer the trustworthy companion of the reader, who can only make
“provisional moral judgements as the narrative unfolds”, resulting in “narrative ambiguity”
(Pykett, The Sensation Novel 5). All sensation novels shared certain recurring plot elements,
such as “bigamy, adultery, illegitimacy, disguise, changed names, railway accidents, poison,
fire, murder, concealed identity, false reports of death, and the doubling of characters or
incidents” (Mitchell qtd. in Diamond 190). Another extremely popular plot feature was
madness – its construction, origins, and social production were particularly fascinating to
Wilkie Collins, and by the mid-1860s madness had become almost synonymous with
sensation fiction (Pykett, “Collins and the Sensation Novel” 52). According to Pykett, “the
effect of sensation plotting is to suggest the duplicitous nature of social reality, and to make
both readers and characters into detectives” (“Sensation and the Fantastic” 203). Their main
De Schryver 22
aim was to “shock, trill and surprise” by using nerve-racking subject matter (Pykett, “Collins
and the Sensation Novel” 50).
The sensation novel’s plot was intricately bound up with its mode of publication. The
genre has to be looked at against a changing literary background in which periodicals, serial
publication, railway bookstalls and mass-print were all en vogue (Pykett, “Collins and the
Sensation Novel” 51). Authors aimed at the unprecedented broad public that could be reached
because of these changed circumstances of publication. Sensation novels blurred the
boundaries between different groups of readers and different social classes (Pykett, “Collins
and the Sensation Novel” 51). Most sensation novels appeared in illustrated serial instalments
in popular magazines or newspapers, such as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone in All the Year
Round in 1868 (Allingham, “Victorian Sensation Novel” n. pag.). Exactly like writers of the
soap opera nowadays, writers of serialised writing had to make sure their readership remained
interested and looked forward to the next episode. Unexpected twists of plot, concealment,
switched identities, obscure characters, incarceration of the innocent and the like made up
much of the plot of the sensation novel, and these “cliff-hangers”, as they are called
nowadays, had to entice the readers to buy the next periodical or newspaper. Following their
serialisation, sensation novels – exactly like most other Victorian novels – were published as
three-volume novels. Often, the total number of pages of such a novel ran up to several
hundreds or even over a thousand (Buelens 20). Some novels were reprinted in cheap singlevolume formats, such as “yellowback” versions, and “for sale at railway bookstalls for the
diversion of the railway reader” (Pykett, “Collins and the Sensation Novel” 51).
Typical for sensation novels was their hybridity. They mixed journalism or realism
with the fantastic and with melodrama (Pykett, “Sensation and the Fantastic” 203). On the one
hand, sensation authors often used elaborate descriptions, like Wilkie Collins, who wanted to
recreate “the way in which each witness made a contribution to the chain of evidence” during
De Schryver 23
a criminal trial in his novel The Woman in White (Diamond 197). But on the other hand, they
enjoyed and readily used the fantastic, in “hallucinatory or uncanny scenes”12, “unconscious
projections of various kinds”, or “representations of madness” (Pykett, “Sensation and the
Fantastic” 205). And, as mentioned before, the sensation novel retained certain exotic and
romantic elements that featured in the gothic novel as well, but inserted them into everyday
English life. Lyn Pykett’s summary of sensation fiction clearly indicates its cultural meaning
as a hybrid genre: “In short, sensation fiction disturbingly blurred the boundaries between the
classes, between high art, low art and no art (newspapers), between the public and the private,
and between the respectable and the low life or demi-monde” (The Sensation Novel 9).
3.3. Sensation Novelists
The uncrowned king of the sensation genre was undoubtedly Wilkie Collins. His novel
The Woman in White and many of his following works are great proponents of the sensation
genre. Collins was at the time “a popular and prolific novelist whose career spanned most of
the second half of the nineteenth century” (Bourne Taylor 1). His life and career reflect his
“unusual degree of mobility between . . . distinct cultural networks . . . as well as an unusual
degree of mobility between generally remote social classes” (Dolin 10). Despite the mobility
within his career as a writer – he went through three distinct phases, in which he respectively
enjoyed the company of artists, triumphed as a journalist and a novelist, and pursued a career
in the theatre – he is mainly remembered for the work he wrote in one decade: the 1860s
12
For example the scene in Collins’ The Woman in White, in which Walter Hartright’s first encounter with the
mysterious “Woman in White” is described:
I had mechanically turned in this latter direction, and was strolling along the lonely high-road – idly
wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like – when, in one moment,
every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly
on my shoulder from behind me.
I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick.
There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road – there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the
earth or dropped from the heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in
white garments; her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over
London, as I faced her. (20)
De Schryver 24
(Dolin 10). Within this decade, he published The Woman in White (1859-1860), No Name
(1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868). Collins became a close friend of Charles
Dickens after they were introduced in 1851 (Allingham, “Wilkie Collins” n. pag.). The two
men collaborated and influenced each other’s work – for example, several of Collins’s novels,
including The Women in White, were serialised in Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round
(Pykett, “Collins and the Sensation Novel” 50). Pykett summarizes Collins’s importance for
the sensation genre in a few lines:
Collins was the master of all of the main elements of the sensation genre: the
construction and unravelling of an intricate, crossword puzzle plot, the atmospheric
scene, the mysterious, prophetic dream, obsessive and disordered mental states,
overtly respectable villains, and bold, assertive and/or devious and scheming heroines
and villainesses. Moreover, his fragmented, multivocal narratives were the boldest
experimentations with narrative form to be found in the sensation mode. (The
Sensation Novel 14)
Wilkie Collins might have been the king of the sensation genre, but Mary Elizabeth
Braddon was known from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards as the “Queen of
the Circulating Libraries” (Allingham, “Victorian Sensation Novel” n. pag.). Her mastery of
the sensation genre was certainly fuelled by her earlier life experiences – as an actress, she
had a broad knowledge of the melodramatic repertoire, and used “effects of her practical
experience of staging” in her writing, and as a writer of penny pulp, she was accustomed to
recycling previous plots and developing endless variations on a single theme (Pykett, The
Sensation Novel 51-52). Braddon’s own life somewhat uncannily resembled the plot of a
sensation novel; she wrote to sustain herself, her partner, their five illegitimate children, and
the children of his legal marriage to a wife locked away in a lunatic asylum (Pykett, The
Sensation Novel 51). Throughout her long career she wrote prolifically, publishing over
De Schryver 25
eighty novels (Mullin n. pag.). Within the 1860s alone, she wrote seventeen novels, over half
of which could be said to belong to the category of sensation literature (Pykett, The Sensation
Novel 52). Moreover, two of her best-known novels, Lady Audley’s Secret (1861) and Aurora
Floyd (1862), are amongst the founding texts of the sensation genre. Braddon was a witty
satirist as well; she mocked social and literary modes and “parodied and satirized
sensationalism, and she was a commentator on the genre’s power and foibles” (Pykett, The
Sensation Novel 52).
Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood had been anonymously publishing short stories for several
years, but was still fairly unknown when her first commercial novel, East Lynne, surprisingly
became a true bestseller (Mitchell, “Wood, Ellen” n. pag.). According to Sally Mitchell, East
Lynne’s extraordinary success stemmed from “Wood’s skill in interweaving two genres which
became mainstays of popular fiction, the sentimental woman's novel and the sensation novel”
(“Wood, Ellen” n. pag.). The novel is considered to be “the most outrageous of the sensation
novels of the early sixties” (Pykett, The Sensation Novel 60). The story features a beautiful,
refined woman, who abandons her caring husband and children, to commit adultery with an
aristocratic seducer, whose illegitimate child she subsequently bears (Pykett, The Sensation
Novel 60). The novel was pre-eminently attractive to women in subject matter and voice,
because it deals with motherhood, the suffering of a mother, domestic life, and the dangers of
conforming to the expected feminine ideals (Pykett, The Sensation Novel 63-65). In the years
following the success of East Lynne, Wood published many more novels, often serialised in
periodicals. Additionally, she published hundreds of short stories, for example the Johnny
Ludlow stories that appeared in The Argosy, the magazine she owned and edited herself from
1867 on (Mitchell, “Wood, Ellen” n. pag.).
Different sources add different writers to the list of sensation novelists or authors
influenced by the sensation genre. Lynn Pykett insists that Rhoda Broughton, who was the
De Schryver 26
author of numerous three-decker novels with sensational influences before she turned to more
successful single-volume publication, was a sensation novelist as well (The Sensation Novel
3). Pykett additionally claims that Sheridan Le Fanu and ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée)
were “often, perhaps misguidedly, treated as sensationalists” (The Sensation Novel 3). In
“Sensation and the Fantastic in the Victorian Novel”, however, she offers another list of
authors to the reader: “As well as Collins, those counted among the sensationalists in this time
included Dickens . . ., Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood, Rhoda Broughton,
“Ouida” (Marie Louise de la Ramée), Sheridan Le Fanu and Charles Reade” (201-202). She
nuances this claim by adding “in fact the sensation label fits some of these authors better than
others” (“Sensation and the Fantastic” 202). Sheridan Le Fanu is mainly known for his
serialised novel Uncle Silas, “a masterpiece of construction and subversive sexual
characterization”, which combines several characteristics of sensational works, such as a
female narrator and the use of spiritual material (McCormack n. pag.). Ouida wrote exotic
novels of high life that could be considered a spicy update of the older romance novel (Pykett,
“Sensation and the Fantastic” 202). Pykett argues that “many contemporary critics regarded
Dickens as the founder of the ‘sensation school’” (The Sensation Novel 69). Dickens’s interest
in crime, criminals, women with a secret, and problematic marriages was already obvious in
his novels of the 1840s and 1850s, such as Dombey and Son (1848) and Bleak House (1852)
(Pykett, The Sensation Novel 69). His Great Expectations (1860) was reviewed alongside The
Woman in White, and shares much of its concerns that respectable society conceals a darker
underworld, inhabited by criminals and wicked, secretive women (Pykett, The Sensation
Novel 69). Dickens was not a true sensationalist, like Braddon or Collins, but his novels
certainly influenced and were influenced by the age. Other novelists referred to in sensational
contexts are Charles Reade, who used sensation techniques derived from melodramatic
De Schryver 27
theatre, Edmund Yates, Henry Kingsley, James Payn, author of By Proxy (1878), and William
Black (Allingham, “Victorian Sensation Novel” n. pag.).
De Schryver 28
4. Characters in Fingersmith
A discussion of Fingersmith as a sensation novel and as a neo-Victorian novel requires
some more insight in its structure, development, and interests. An overview of the main
characters and their evolution can provide this insight, as Fingersmith is a novel in which
characterisation and plot are closely intertwined. Therefore, this chapter features a lengthy
overview of the lives and experiences of Sue and Maud, Fingersmith’s protagonists, and some
other important minor characters.
4.1. Sue Trinder
Sue is one of the two young heroines featured in Fingersmith. Sarah Waters herself
describes Sue in one sentence as “poor and wily and prepared to do a very dark deed”
(“Sensational Stories” n. pag.) Sue’s origins are described in the opening sentences of the
novel and are rather obscure: she does not know when she was born, or who her mother was –
let alone her father. For more information, she relies on the memories of Mrs. Sucksby, the
baby-farmer who raised her with extraordinary care and love, and Mr. Ibbs, the locksmith and
petty thief who acts as her stepfather. Mrs. Sucksby has often told Sue the story of her mother,
a criminal who left her baby with Mrs. Sucksby to finish one last job, but got herself arrested
and was hanged as a murderess. People in the neighbourhood treat Sue with respect because
of her mother, saying that she is a brave girl. Sue feels obliged to live up to the memory of
this unknown mother – she must be brave, reckless and fearless, although this does not seem
to be her natural disposition. From the death of her mother on, Sue has lived in Mrs.
Sucksby’s house in Lant Street, the heart of which is the kitchen, through which all kinds of
stolen goods, babies, criminals and the likes pass. Little else is known about Sue’s
whereabouts or character before the arrival of Gentleman, except for a description that she
provides herself:
De Schryver 29
I think the people who came to Lant Street thought me slow – Slow I mean, as
opposed to fast. Perhaps I was, by Borough standards. But it seemed to me that I was
sharp enough. You could not have grown up in such a house, that had such businesses
in it, without having a pretty good idea of what was what – of what could go into what;
and what could come out. (Fingersmith 14)
When Gentleman explains his plot to swindle a rich heiress and lock her away in a
madhouse, Sue is hesitant at first whether she wants to be involved or not. Her uncertainty is
mainly due to her disbelief in her own abilities to disguise as a maid, combined with the
bleakness of the prospect of having to leave home and her beloved “family”. Later on, she
begins to doubt the moral correctness of the plan, wondering “Ain’t it a very mean trick, and
shabby?” (Fingersmith 47). Nevertheless, she leaves for Briar, Mr. Lilly’s manor in the
country, and finds Maud Lilly to be an ignorant, unworldly girl, who will be easily persuaded
into marrying Gentleman – or Richard Rivers, as he calls himself. But soon, Sue finds out that
Maud is “only pretty lonely, and pretty bookish and bored – but who wouldn’t be, in a house
like that?” (Fingersmith 78). The loneliness and dreariness of their situation at Briar makes
the girls bond quickly, and Sue grows genuinely concerned about frail Maud, caring for her
with kindness:
At first I would say to myself, ‘When Gentleman comes I’ll do this’; or, ‘Once he gets
her in the madhouse, I’ll do that.’ But I’d say it, then look at her; and she was so
simple and so good, the thought would vanish, I would end up combing her hair or
straightening the sash on her gown. It wasn’t that I was sorry – or not so much, not
then. It was just I suppose that we were put together for so many hours at a time; and it
was nicer to be kind to her and not think too hard about what lay before me, than to
dwell on it and feel cruel. (Fingersmith 96)
De Schryver 30
Sue quickly develops an independent opinion, fuelled by her conscience and newborn
love and concern for Maud. When Gentleman arrives and seems to seduce Maud, Sue
suddenly realizes that Maud does not care for him at all. “Only now I saw, she was not
stroking the flesh so much as rubbing at it. She was not nursing the kiss. She felt his mouth
like a burn, like an itch, like a splinter, and was trying to rub the memory of it away. She
didn’t love him at all. She was afraid of him” (Fingersmith 125). Sue then encourages Maud
to rebel against Gentleman’s expectations.
‘What can I do?’ She shivered. ‘He wants me. He has asked me. He means to make me
his.’
‘You might – say no’
She blinked, as if she could not believe I had said it. I could not believe it, either.
‘Say no to him?’ she said slowly. ‘Say no?’ Then her look changed. ‘And watch him
leave, from my window? . . . [O]h, Sue, don’t you think I should wonder, over the life
I might have had? Do you suppose another man will come visiting, that will want me
half as much as he? What choice have I?’ (Fingersmith 126)
Sue then sees the truth in Maud’s words and quickly agrees, persuading Maud to marry
Gentleman. Both women are confined by their sex – they feel as if they do not have another
choice but to comply with male expectations. Both need Gentleman’s plot to gain
independence – Maud from her uncle’s confinement, her mother’s hereditary madness, and
the pornographic taint left by her work as her uncle’s secretary; Sue from her poverty and
class confinements, in addition to her gender. But Sue does not stay convinced to obey
Gentleman for a long time – her sense of dignity and independence, however little, make her
see Gentleman as he really is: a thief and an impostor.
Now I thought suddenly, Who did he think he was? He might pretend to be a lord; he
was only a con-man. He had a snide ring on his finger, and all his coins were bad ones.
De Schryver 31
I knew more than he did about Maud’s secrets. I slept beside her in her own bed. I had
made her love me like a sister; he had made her afraid. I could turn her heart against
him if I wanted to, like that! It was enough that he was going to marry her at last. It
was enough that he could kiss her, whenever he liked. I wouldn’t leave her now to be
tugged about and made nervous. I thought, ‘Damn you, I’ll get my three thousand just
the same!’ (Fingersmith 129)
Sue asserts her own independence by disobeying an order from Gentleman, who is in their
twisted situation in all possible ways her superior. Her thoughts reveal a certain jealousy of
Gentleman as well – he is the one that is allowed to touch Maud, to kiss Maud, and marry her,
while Sue herself is nothing more than a cogwheel in his plan. The next time Sue is alone with
Gentleman, she confronts him about Maud’s obvious unwillingness to participate in his
marriage plans. Gentleman reminds her of the fact that the plot has already been carried out to
too far an extent: Mrs. Sucksby expects her to return with the money, Maud would be as good
as ruined if he leaves her now, and when Sue would tell the truth, nobody would listen – she’s
just a girl and a servant, while he is a gentleman. Ultimately, she decides to do nothing, and
act as if she cannot prevent what will happen: “and I hated it, but turned away. I thought, It
can’t be helped. I thought, It’s their business” (Fingersmith 136).
Everything changes when Sue realizes one day that she is in love with Maud:
But, here was a curious thing. The more I tried to give up thinking of her, the more I
said to myself, ‘She’s nothing to you’, the harder I tried to pluck the idea of her out of
my heart, the more she stayed there. All day I sat or walked with her, so full of the fate
I was bringing her to I could hardly touch her or meet her gaze; and all night I lay with
my back turned to her, the blanket over my ears to keep out her sighs. But in the hours
in between, when she went to her uncle, I felt her – I felt her, through the walls of the
house, like some blind crooks are said to be able to feel gold. It was as if there had
De Schryver 32
come between us, without my knowing, a kind of thread. It pulled me to her, wherever
she was. It was like –
It’s like you love her, I thought. (Fingersmith 136)
Sue is ashamed of her feelings, nervous and afraid, wondering what everyone back
home would think of them if they found out – not even to mention Maud herself. One night,
when Maud asks her what will be expected of her on her wedding night, Sue and Maud end
up making love. The darkness of the room conceals their actions, but the next morning, Sue is
confronted with the truth: “[I] remembered what I had done, and thought, My God’
(Fingersmith 142) and “I went to my room. I began to feel ill. Perhaps I had been drunk. . . .
Perhaps I had a fever” (Fingersmith 143). Her love for Maud weakens her determination to go
through with Gentleman’s plan:
[A]nd I think, that if I had drawn her to me then, she’d have kissed me. If I had said, I
love you, she would have said it back; and everything would have changed. I might
have saved her. I might have found a way – I don’t know what – to keep her from her
fate. We might have cheated Gentleman. I might have run with her, to Lant Street –
(Fingersmith 144)
But her fear and shame hold her back from performing any such actions, and eventually, it is
too late to prevent Maud from being married off to Gentleman.
I felt that thread that had come between us, tugging, tugging at my heart – so hard, it
hurt me. A hundred times I almost rose, almost went in to her; a hundred times I
thought, Go to her! Why are you waiting? Go back to her side! But every time, I
thought of what would happen if I did. I knew that I couldn’t lie beside her, without
wanting to touch her. I couldn’t have felt her breath come upon my mouth, without
wanting to kiss her. And I couldn’t have kissed her, without wanting to save her.
De Schryver 33
So, I did nothing. I did nothing the next night, too, and the night after that; and soon,
there were no more nights: the time, that had always gone so slow, ran suddenly fast,
the end of April came. And by then, it was too late to change anything. (Fingersmith
145)
Sue then helps Gentleman to carry out the rest of his plan, although she despises him more
and more every day, and tries to make Maud’s supposed last days of freedom as agreeable as
possible. Right before her wedding night with Gentleman, Maud kisses Sue again, and no
matter how much Sue loves this, she draws away out of fear that someone will discover their
“affair”.
At the madhouse, the swindle becomes clear to Sue, and at first, she is enraged and
gripped by a terrible fear. “I was not thinking, now, of Gentleman and Maud. I was thinking
of myself. I was growing horribly afraid. . . . I had an idea that, once they got me into a room,
they would kill me” (Fingersmith 397). After a while in the madhouse, she is so influenced by
what is told to her by the doctors and the dreariness and tortures, that she starts to doubt her
own sanity. “I suppose I really seemed mad, then; but it was only through the awfulness of
having said nothing but the truth, and being thought to be deluded” (Fingersmith 416). She
does not even recognize her own reflection in a window:
I looked, as the lady had said, like a lunatic. My hair was still sewn to my head, but
had grown or worked loose from its stitches, and stood out in tufts. My face was white
but marked, here and there, with spots and scratches and fading bruises. . . . The tartan
gown hung on me like a laundry bag. From beneath its collar there showed the dirty
white tips of the fingers of Maud’s old glove, that I still wore next to my heart. You
could just make out, on the kidskin, the marks of my teeth. (Fingersmith 433)
Nevertheless, she desperately tries to find a way to escape the madhouse, so she can return to
Mrs. Sucksby and have her revenge on Gentleman. She grows afraid of the dreams she has
De Schryver 34
about her love for Maud, fearing that they will give away her sexual orientation. A short while
later, Sue is physically assaulted by the nurses at night, and she has a hysterical attack when
she realizes that Maud must have told the doctors about her lesbianism.
The thought that she had said it – that she had said it, before Gentleman, as a way of
making me out to be mad – struck me like a blow to the heart. I had had many blows,
since I left Briar; but this, just then, seemed the worst. It was as if I were filled with
gunpowder, and had just been touched with a match. I began to struggle and to shriek.
. . . Then, I can’t quite say what happened. I think the nurses that were holding me let
go; but I think I kept on struggling and shrieking, as if they had me still. Nurse Bacon
rolled from me; I think that someone – probably, Nurse Spiller – hit me; yet still my fit
kept on. (Fingersmith 442-443)
After that, she is given “the plunge”, a series of long submersions in a basin filled with icecold water, until she gives up all resistance and accepts her fate.
I cared for nothing, now. . . . Suddenly, my memories of Mrs Sucksby and Mr Ibbs, of
Gentleman, even of Maud, seemed to grow dim. It was as if my head were filled with
smoke, or had a fluttering curtain across it. . . . I began to answer to Maud and Mrs
Rivers; sometimes it seemed to me I must be Maud, since so many people said I was.
And sometimes I even seemed to dream, not my own dreams, but hers; and sometimes
to remember things, from Briar, that she had said and done, as if I had said and done
them. (Fingersmith 444-445)
Sue is rescued from her wretched situation when Charles, the knife-boy from Briar,
arrives at the madhouse and helps her to escape. They hurry off to London together, driven
along by Sue’s desire to find Gentleman and Maud. When she sees both of them in Lant
Street, she is terribly enraged and afraid:
De Schryver 35
I saw him, and quivered right through. But my feelings were queer. ‘The devil!’ I said.
I should like to have killed him and struck his face. But the sight of him had also made
me afraid – more afraid than I ought to have been – as afraid as if I were still at Dr
Christie’s and might at any moment be taken, shaken, bound and plunged in water.
(Fingersmith 472)
‘— Oh! She has taken everything and made it hers, in spite. She has made Mrs
Sucksby love her, as she made – Oh! I’ll kill her, tonight!
I ran in a kind of fever, back to the shutter, to look at the face of the house. I said,
‘Now, might I climb to the window? I could force the bolt, creep in, and stab her as
she lies sleeping? Where is that knife?’ (Fingersmith 476)
However, she keeps calm and develops a plan to reach Mrs Sucksby and explain the truth
about the swindle to her. Unfortunately, the plan fails, and Sue decides to confront the
conspirers in the kitchen in Lant Street. When she sees Maud there, she is angry and
strangely confronted with their – supposedly gone-by – love.
‘If you hated him, why did you do it?’
‘There was no other way,’ she said. ‘You saw my life. I needed you, to be me.’
‘So you might come here, and be me!’ She did not answer. I said, ‘We might have
cheated him. If you had told me. We might have –‘
‘What?’
‘Anything. Something. I don’t know what…’
She shook her head. ‘How much,’ she asked quietly, ‘would you have given up?’
Her gaze was so dark, yet so steady and true; but I grew aware, all at once, of Mrs
Sucksby – of John and Dainty, Mr Ibbs – all of them, watching, silent and curious,
thinking, What’s this…? And in that moment, I saw into my cowardly heart and knew
De Schryver 36
that I would have given up nothing up for her, nothing at all; and that, sooner then be
shamed by her now, I would die. (Fingersmith 496)
After Gentleman’s death and the ensuing imprisonment of Mrs Sucksby, Sue feels lost
and forlorn. People in the Borough despise her, but that is nothing to her, compared to the
pending loss of Mrs Sucksby. Her return to the empty house in Lant Street has made her
melancholic:
And I did not say how, as I swept and scrubbed the kitchen, I chanced on a thousand
little reminders of my old life – dog-hairs, and chips of broken cups, bad farthings,
playing cards, the cuts on the door-frame made by Mr Ibbs’s knife to mark my height
as I grew up; nor how I covered my face and wept, at every one. (Fingersmith 514)
At Mrs Sucksby’s trial, Sue sees Maud again for the first time since Gentleman’s murder.
Although she is still mad at her – “I knew she never came to Lant Street. . . . for of course, I
would have throttled her if she had” (Fingersmith 515) –, the unexpected reunion makes her
remember their love for just a minute. “It was Maud. I saw her, not expecting to see her: and
I’ll tell you this, my heart flew open; then I remembered everything and my heart flew shut”
(Fingersmith 518). However, the two girls lose sight of one another after the trial, and Sue is
left with no one but Dainty, to wait for Mrs Sucksby’s hanging.
When Sue discovers the real truth about her birth and ancestry, and about the role that
Mrs Sucksby played in the swapping of Sue and Maud, she is shaken beyond belief.
I began to shake. I began to shake as a rusted lock must shake, when the tumblers lift
against their groaning springs, and the bolt is forced loose and flies. ‘My mother –‘ I
said. I could not finish. It was too much to say – too much, even to know! My mother,
Maud’s mother! I could not believe it. (Fingersmith 533)
De Schryver 37
Sue suddenly realizes that Maud must have been unaware of the truth and lied to as well.
While the consequences of this discovery sink in, Sue regrets every bad thing she has ever
said to or even felt towards Maud.
But then, I grew still. I was thinking of Maud, starting up with the knife. I was
thinking of Maud, letting me hate her. I was thinking of Maud, making me think she’d
hurt me, to save me knowing who had hurt me most… . . .
I saw it, sharp and clear as a line of lightning in a sky of black. Maud had tried to save
me, and I had not known. I had wanted to kill her, when all the time –
‘And I let her go!’ I said . . .
‘If I had said – If she had turned – If I had known – I would have kissed her –‘
‘Kissed her?’ said Dainty.
‘Kissed her!’ I said. ‘Oh Dainty, you would have kissed her, too! Anyone would! She
was a pearl, a pearl! – and now, and now I’ve lost her, I’ve thrown her away – !’
So I went on. Dainty tried to calm me, and could not. I would only walk and wring my
hands, tear my own hair; or else I would sink to the floor and lie groaning. At last, I
sank and would not rise. (Fingersmith 534)
Sue is not ashamed of her feelings towards Maud anymore, now that they are perfectly
justified. Maud is not the innocent goose that must be tricked anymore, nor the villainess that
deliberately hurt Sue. She is exactly Sue’s equal: tricked, used, but pure and good on the
inside. The people that would have judged Sue’s love for Maud harshly or thought it deviant –
Gentleman, Mrs Sucksby, Mr Ibbs, John Vroom – are all gone. The only one left is Dainty, a
simpleton who loves Sue as a sister. Confessing her love for Maud to Dainty unleashes every
feeling that she had locked away in her heart. Sue falls ill severely, and has nightmares and
delusions about her horrible experiences in the madhouse. In one of her feverish dreams, she
De Schryver 38
asks for Maud’s old glove and weeps over it. While she recovers gradually, she grows more
aware of her love for Maud.
I still wept, and cursed and twisted, when I thought of Mrs Sucksby and how she had
tricked me; but I wept more, when I thought of Maud. For all this time I had had as it
were a sort of dam about my heart, keeping out my love: now the walls had burst, my
heart was flooded, I thought I should drown … (Fingersmith 535)
Sue decides to go looking for Maud, wherever she is, and whatever it takes. Where she
was afraid and ashamed of her love for Maud before, she becomes very calm and very sure of
what she has to do next. Upon her arrival at Briar, she finds the house deserted and wasted, as
an exact representation of her own feelings. When she unexpectedly walks in on Maud in the
library, the reunion is almost too much for her.
I turned away, and hid my own face in my hands. It was still wet, from my falling
tears. Now other tears came and made it wetter. ‘Oh Maud!’ I said. ‘Oh, Maud!’
I had never spoken her name to her before like that, I had only ever said miss; and
even now, even here, after everything, I felt the strangeness of it. I pressed my fingers
hard into my eyes. I had been thinking, a moment ago, of how I loved her. I’d
supposed her lost. I had meant to find her out, through years of searching. To come
upon her now – so warm, so real – when I had ached and ached for her – It was too
much. (Fingersmith 542)
Maud tells Sue that she can have the house, and all of the money, but now that Sue has
realised the extent of her love, she simply says: “I only want you” (Fingersmith 544). Maud
then tells her the truth about her involvement in her uncle’s pornographic work, but nothing
can change Sue’s mind. Determined as she is, she kisses Maud, and they sit together by the
fireplace, resolved never to leave each other.
De Schryver 39
Sue’s character undergoes a significant change throughout the narrative. She develops
from an insecure, easily manipulated girl into a determined, strong woman. Her bond with
Maud – whether by love or hate – makes her survive the worst trials: imprisonment and
torture at the madhouse, the betrayal by the love of her life, the loss of her family, scandals
and gossip, and the hanging of her adoptive mother. However much these ordeals strengthen
her personality, it is only her acceptance of her own sexual orientation and her recognition of
her love for Maud that make her a complete, balanced person.
4.2. Maud Lilly
The other protagonist in Fingersmith is Maud, described by Waters as “rich but
trapped and desperate” (“Sensational Stories” n. pag.). As Sue starts her life as an insecure,
timid girl, Maud starts hers as a brutal, strong-willed one. Born in the madhouse, to a mad,
dying mother – or so she is told –, she is raised by the nurses until she is old enough to move
to her uncle’s country manor. There, she is brutalised and forced into submission by her
nurse, Mrs Stiles, and her uncle.
I think it a terrible thing to do to a child; I think it terrible, even now. I lie, in agony
of misery and fear, straining my ears against the silence – wide awake, sick, hungry,
cold, alone, in a dark so deep the shifting black of my own eye-lids seems the
brighter. My corset holds me like a fist. My knuckles, tugged into their stiff skin
gloves, are starting to bruise now. (Fingersmith 190)
Maud still remembers these abuses – beatings, bindings, imprisonment, pinches, and the likes
– as an adult, and she believes that they have turned her into the person she has become.
Eventually, the knowledge that her uncle will be patient and drag on this horrible treatment
for years and years to come, makes her give in. Her previous life at the madhouse grows
dimmer by the day, and she takes up the habit of hating her own mother, simply because she
De Schryver 40
has abandoned her. Once, she thinks: “I wish – as I have wished many times – that my mother
were alive, so that I might kill her again” (Fingersmith 277). After two years at Briar, she is
introduced to her uncle’s library and his work as a compiler of an index of pornographic
works. As he tells her, the work is very uncommon, and she is a very uncommon girl. Her
extensive knowledge of pornography has caused her to lose her innocence, or as her uncle
says upon her introduction: “I have fed you poison, by scruple and grain. Now comes the
larger dose” (Fingersmith 199).
Throughout the years, she becomes an oddity, kept imprisoned in a house filled with
endless worldly filth.
I am as worldly as the grossest rakes of fiction; but have never, since I first came to
my uncle’s house, been further than the walls of its park. I know everything. I know
nothing. You must remember this, in what follows. You must remember what I cannot
do, what I have not seen. I cannot, for example, sit a horse, or dance. I have never held
a coin in order to spend it. I have never seen a play, a railway, a mountain, or a sea.
(Fingersmith 204)
We are not meant for common usage, my fellow books and I. My uncle keeps us
separate from the world. He will call us poisons; he says we will hurt unguarded eyes.
(Fingersmith 219)
Maud has to wear her gloves at all time. As Miller claims, they “act as a barrier, preventing
the heroine from leaving her fingerprints on her surrounding world” (1). Maud should be her
uncle’s secretary, but nothing more – not a person, but an object. Even as a little girl, she
understands her uncle’s motives: “Some men have farmers to raise them veal-calves. My
mother’s brother has had the house of nurses raise him me. Now he means to take me home
and make me ready for the roast” (Fingersmith 182-183). When Mr Rivers comes to Briar, he
confronts her with her imprisonment and abuse. He refers to her past – her mother’s madness,
De Schryver 41
and her life at the madhouse. His words make her doubtful and slightly rebellious again. “Do
you think of your mother, he said, and feel her madness in you? Do I?” (Fingersmith 220).
That night, Mr Rivers comes to her room with the previously unknown story of her
inheritance and an interesting proposal; he will take her away from Briar, marry her, and then
grant her freedom – in exchange for half of her fortune.
‘I am offering you something very great and strange. Not the commonplace subjection
of a wife to a husband – that servitude, to lawful ravishment and theft, that the world
terms wedlock. I shan’t ask you for that, that is not what I mean. I am speaking, rather,
of liberty. A liberty of a kind not often granted to the members of your sex.’
(Fingersmith 226)
Maud will be entirely free indeed, for he means to swindle a poor girl and put her in the
madhouse – with Maud’s entire past.
‘And with her, Miss Lilly,’ he says finally, ‘they keep close your name, your history as
your mother’s daughter, your uncle’s niece – in short, all that marks you as yourself.
Think of it! They will pluck from your shoulders the weight of your life, as a servant
would lift free your cloak; and you shall make your naked, invisible way to any part of
the world you choose – to any new life – and there re-clothe yourself to suit your
fancy.’ (Fingersmith 227)
This is exactly what Maud has wanted for years – a possibility to regain her innocence and to
take control of her own life. Of course, Mr Rivers can persuade her to join his plot. At first,
Maud is concerned that the girl will suspect something, or that she will ruin everything in
some way, but the fact that Mr Rivers has designed the entire scheme especially for her,
makes her give in. In her uncle’s house, she has not been used to individuality – she is an
engine, her uncle’s eyes and hands.
De Schryver 42
He is watching me, waiting to know if he has won me. He has. Not by what he has told
me, about my future at Briar – for he has said nothing that I have not, long ago,
already concluded for myself; but the fact that he is here, telling it all – that he has
plotted, and travelled, forty miles – that he has stolen his way to the heart of the
sleeping house, to my dark room, to me. (Fingersmith 229)
Now that freedom looms, Maud does not care about the other girl – freedom is simply what
she wants most. However, she is afraid as well. Being locked up in the house has made her
accustomed to its ways, and the prospect of serious changes makes her tremble. “It’s true I
shudder in fear – fear of his plot – fear of its success, as well as of its failure” (Fingersmith
235). Soon, Mr Rivers returns to London and seeks out the right girl for the plan.
She’s ours, he writes.
I read it, then fall back upon my pillow and hold the letter to my mouth. I put my lips
to the paper. He might be my lover, after all – or, she might. For I could not want her
now, more than I could a lover.
But I could not want a lover, more than I want freedom. (Fingersmith 243)
Surprisingly enough, these words already foreshadow Maud’s future feelings – soon, she will
indeed want Sue as a lover. But as she says, however much she wants her, her desire for
freedom remains stronger – as long as she is locked up at Briar, at least.
Sue arrives a few days later, and Maud is determined to dislike her; after all, she is the
girl that has come to Briar to ruin her. She remembers that Sue has to take her place, and so
she sets to turning Sue into herself.
Of course, though she does not know it, it is she who must be plump – she who will
learn, in time, to sleep, to wake, to dress, to walk, to a pattern, to signals and bells. . . .
She learns the ways of the house, not understanding that the habits and the fabrics that
bind me will, soon, bind her. (Fingersmith 250)
De Schryver 43
At night, she murmurs to her mother’s portrait. “That’s her, I whisper. That’s her. She’s your
daughter now!” (Fingersmith 248). Again, this is a queer reference to the future, when
Maud’s mother will indeed turn out to be Sue’s. That night, Maud is haunted by her dreams
again – she often has nightmares about her presumable hereditary inclination towards
madness. This fear of the past as something that cannot be escaped is linked to her
employment as a copier for her uncle: she cannot “write her own text, for she merely copies
the words of male writers” (Miller 19). Thus she feels that previous narratives – even in life –
are bound to repeat themselves, without a possibility of transgression. Sue soothes her and
sleeps by her side, and Maud becomes quite accustomed to her.
I oughtn’t to do it. I cannot help it. I am too compelled by her idea – her idea of me as
a simple girl, abused by circumstance, prone to nightmare. No nightmares come, while
she sleeps at my side; and so, I find ways to bring her to my bed, a second night and a
third. (Fingersmith 251)
Despising Sue is not as easy as it would have seemed. To Maud, Sue provides a fascinating
alternative history – to Sue, Maud is the girl that remained innocent and uncorrupted, that has
a life, tastes, ideas, and feelings of her own. Compellingly enough, it is exactly the
individuality and personality that Sue, as well as Mr Rivers, returns to Maud, that will lead to
the execution of the plan. The two girls grow quite close and intimate, as they have no one but
each other in the remote manor. Maud first discovers a hint of lesbian desire when Sue
smoothens her sharp tooth with a thimble. “May a lady taste the fingers of her maid? She
may, in my uncle’s books. – The thought makes me colour” (Fingersmith 256). However,
when Mr Rivers announces his return, Maud resumes her duties and tries to subtly transform
Sue into a lady. But somehow, following through with the plan seems harder, now that Sue is
a girl in the flesh.
De Schryver 44
I have grown used to her, to the life, the warmth, the particularity of her; she has
become, not the gullible girl of a villainous plot – not Suky Tawdry – but a girl with a
history, with hates and likings. Now all at once I see how near to me in face and figure
she’ll come and I understand, as if for the first time, what it is that Richard and I mean
to do. . . .
I think of that; and I am gripped with what I take to be pity. It is hard, painful,
surprising: I feel it, and am afraid. Afraid of what my future may cost me. Afraid of
that future itself, and of the unfamiliar, ungovernable emotions with which it might be
filled. (Fingersmith 259)
Maud becomes hesitant; she wants to postpone leaving Briar, taking a plunge into the
unknown, entrusting Mr Rivers with her fate and deceiving Sue. Mr Rivers, however, grows
impatient and watchful. One day, he discovers that Maud is in love with Sue. “’Oh, Maud,’ he
says. That is all he says. But in his face I see, at last, how much I want her” (Fingersmith
274). He tries to convince Maud to go on with the plan, reminding her of the fact that Sue is a
thief, and threatening to tell her the truth about Maud’s feelings.
‘ . . . You remember our plan?’
I nod. ‘But –‘
‘What?’
‘I begin to fear that, after all, I haven’t the heart for it…’
‘You’ve a heart, instead, for little fingersmiths? Oh, Maud.’ Now his voice is rich with
scorn. ‘Have you forgotten what she has come to you for? Do you think she has
forgotten? . . . ‘
He looks me over. ‘She would laugh in your face, if she knew.’ His tone grew sly.
‘She would laugh in mine, were I to tell her…’ (Fingersmith 276)
De Schryver 45
Now that Maud has realised her true desire for Sue, everything changes. She has only
ever known desire, passion, and love as dead things filling the pages of her uncle’s books. The
real feeling haunts her, takes over her other senses, and clouds her judgement.
Is this desire? How queer that I, of all people, should not know! . . . This feeling
haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. It covers me, like skin.
I think she must see it. Now he has named it, I think it must colour or mark me – I
think it must mark me crimson, like paint marks the hot red points, the lips and gashes
and bare whipped limbs, of my uncle’s pictures. I am afraid, that night, to undress
before her. I am afraid to lie at her side. I am afraid to sleep. I am afraid I will dream
of her. I am afraid that, in dreaming, I will turn and touch her… (Fingersmith 277)
However, Maud has a very strong personality. It took her uncle months to break her will when
she was only a child, and as an adult, she likewise tries to force every threatening feeling out
of herself. Her imprisonment and treatment as a child have made her hard and immovable.
She is not used to feeling love, or being loved. Exactly at the decisive moment, she starts to
feel love, tempting her to change her mind.
She has come to Briar to ruin me, to cheat me and do me harm. Look at her, I tell
myself. See how slight she is, how brown and trifling! A thief, a little fingersmith –! I
think I will swallow my own desire, as I have swallowed down grief, and rage. Shall I
be thwarted, shall I be checked – held to my past, kept from my future – by her? I
think, I shan’t. The day of our flight draws near. I shan’t. The month grows warmer,
the nights grow close. I shan’t, I shan’t – (Fingersmith 278)
Maud can no longer read her uncle’s books and remain unmoved by them. “Even my uncle’s
books are changed to me; and this is worse, this is worst of all. I have supposed them dead.
Now the words – like the figures in the walls – start up, are filled with meaning” (Fingersmith
279). One night, she feigns sexual ignorance, and Sue shows her what is expected of her on
De Schryver 46
her wedding night. To Maud, eroticism now becomes a force of its own, not simply a dead
matter filling the books that keep her mute and locked up. Eroticism and love are things that
she can write herself, in a new, personal, creative way.
And at first, it is easy. After all, this is how it is done, in my uncle’s books: two girls,
one wise and one unknowing… ‘He will want,’ she says, ‘to kiss you. He will want to
embrace you.’ It is easy. I say my part, and she – with a little prompting – says hers.
The words sink back upon their pages. It is easy, it is easy… (Fingersmith 281)
To Maud, everything has changed. She imagines telling Sue the truth, saving her from Mr
Rivers’ awful plot, and starting a life with her. “My heart beats hard again. I am filled, as with
colour or light, with a sense of the life we will have, together” (Fingersmith 284). But then
she notices that Sue is ashamed. Nothing has fundamentally changed, in the end. Both girls
are still unable to openly articulate their desire for each other. The plot is still in motion, and
nothing can be done about it.
I meant to save her. Now I see very clearly what will happen, if I do – if I draw back
from Richard’s plot. He will go from Briar, with her at his side. Why should she stay?
She will go, and I shall be left – to my uncle, to the books, to Mrs Stiles, to some new
meek and bruisable girl… I think of my life – of the hours, the minutes, the days that
have made it up; the hours, the minutes and days that stretch before me, still to be
lived. I think of how they will be – without Richard, without money, without London,
without liberty. Without Sue.
And so you see it is love – not scorn, not malice; only love – that makes me harm her,
in the end. (Fingersmith 285)
Right before attaining her literal freedom through the elopement that night – or so she
believes –, Maud symbolically frees herself by destroying her uncle’s books.
De Schryver 47
Still, it is hard – it is terribly hard, I almost cannot do it – to put the metal for the first
time to the neat and naked paper. I am almost afraid the book will shriek, and so
discover me. But it does not shriek? Rather, it sighs, as if in longing for its own
laceration; and when I hear that, my cuts become swifter and more true. (Fingersmith
290)
In cutting up the books that have bound her to her role as a secretary, she severs all ties with
the past in a few swift moves. Books have almost become subjects with emotions of their own
to her, and “murdering” them, sets them, and Maud herself, free (Miller 23). Destroying her
past as a copier, she clears the way for a future as a writer, an active participant in life and
love. The entire flight from Briar and the days at the cottage pass in a haze. Maud seems to
decide to shut out as many emotions as possible, especially those relating to Sue. When the
madhouse doctors come, she has to tell the story that Mr Rivers has prepared for her, but
when he adds details about Sue and Maud’s love, she is shocked.
‘Susan,’ he says, ‘you do well to feel shame in behalf of your mistress. You need feel
none, however, in behalf of yourself. No guilt attaches to you. You did nothing to
invite or encourage the gross attentions my wife, in her madness, attempted to force on
you –‘ . . .
I think of Sue. I think of her, not as she must be now, in the room beyond the wall –
satisfied to have betrayed me, glad to suppose herself about to return at last to her
home, the dark thieves’ den, in London. I think of her holding herself above me, her
hair let down, You pearl…
‘Miss Smith?’
I have begun to weep. (Fingersmith 301)
Very plainly, Maud admits that she truly hates herself for what she is doing. She realizes that
she will destroy the most beautiful thing she will ever have, but that she has to do this to gain
De Schryver 48
her independence. In her male-dominated environment, she believes that she can have either
love or freedom – never both.
‘I hate you.’
‘Hate yourself, then. We’re alike, you and I. More alike than you know. You think the
world ought to love us, for the kinks in the fibres of our hearts? The world scorns us.
Thank God it does! There was never a profit to be got from love; from scorn, however,
you may twist riches, as filthy water may be wrung from a cloth. You know it is true.
You are like me. I say it again: hate me, hate yourself.’
His hands are warm upon my face, at least. I close my eyes.
I say, ‘I do.’ (Fingersmith 302)
When they have fooled Sue and left her at the madhouse, Maud does not think of her freedom
– she does not even feel as if she has regained a new personality, but still sees herself as a
machine, controlled by male society. “I sit like a stone, until Richard takes my arm and
presses, hard, upon my wrist. ‘Speak,’ he whispers, ‘damn you.’ Then I sing out, clear,
mechanically . . .” (Fingersmith 304). Maud can only think of the love she has lost: “I gaze
through the lozenge of glass at the road we have travelled – a winding red road, made cloudy
by dust, like a thread of blood escaping from my heart” (Fingersmith 305). Not even the
excitement of approaching London, the city of her dreams, can keep her thoughts away from
Sue: “Look, Maud, I think. Here is your future. Here’s all your liberty, unfolding like a bolt of
cloth… I wonder if Sue is very much injured. I wonder what kind of place they have her in,
now” (Fingersmith 307). She has to persuade herself to go on: “I cannot say, when we stop,
how long we have driven for – so preoccupied am I with the desperate stir of my senses and
heart. Be bold, I am thinking. God damn you, Maud! You have longed for this. You have given
up Sue, you have given up everything, for this. Be bold!” (Fingersmith 309).
De Schryver 49
A short while later, Sue and Mr Rivers arrive at Sue’s home in Lant Street. Maud
almost becomes paranoia when she realizes where she is, fearing that she is double-crossed as
well. She behaves very haughty towards Sue’s family, demanding that they should let her go
immediately. Mrs Sucksby then tells her about her mother, Marianne Lilly – she was never in
the madhouse, but the story was conjured up to keep Maud afraid and docile.
‘ . . . My mother was mad – was kept in the cell of a madhouse; and I was made to be
mindful of her example, lest I should follow it.’
‘She was certainly, once they had got her, put in a cell,’ says Richard; ‘as we know
girls are, from time to time, for the satisfaction of gentlemen. – Well, no more of that,
just yet.’ He has caught Mrs Sucksby’s eye. ‘And you were certainly kept in fear of
following her, Maud. And what did that do to you? – save make you anxious,
obedient, careless of your own comforts – in other words, exactly fit to your uncle’s
fancy? Didn’t I tell you once, what a scoundrel he was?’ (Fingersmith 330)
Maud is enraged, realizing that her uncle oppressed her even more than she knew: not only by
turning her into an impersonal machine to use at his fancy, but by psychologically scaring her
into submission for all those years as well. Little by little, she is told the rest of the story. She
is not the daughter of a madwoman, not the niece of a pornographer, but an orphan without a
past, with an entire untainted future ahead of her. She almost seems mad when she imagines
the freedom and possibilities laid at her feet – she is a blank sheet, waiting to be inscribed
with her very own words:
I am laughing – I am gripped with a terrible laughter – and my look must be ghastly.
‘Oh, but this,’ I think I say, ‘is perfect! This is all I have longed for! Why do you
stare? What are you gazing at? Do you suppose a girl is sitting here? That girl is lost!
She has been drowned! She is lying, fathoms deep. Do you think she has arms and
legs, with flesh and cloth upon them? Do you think she has hair? She has only bones,
De Schryver 50
stripped white! She is as white as a page of paper! She is a book, from which the
words have peeled and drifted—‘
I try to take a breath; and might as well have water in my mouth: I draw at the air, and
it does not come. I gasp, and shake and gasp again. (Fingersmith 336)
Soon, however, she finds out that even without her background as her uncle’s niece, she will
not be free at all. Mrs Sucksby means to imprison her in the house for three months, and raise
her as a companion once she has acquired the money. She feels as if she is entirely broken.
I have been bold and determined. I have bitten down rage, insanity, desire, love, for
the sake of freedom. Now, that freedom being taken from me utterly, is it to be
wondered at if I fancy myself defeated? I give myself up to darkness; and wish I may
never again be required to lift my head to the light. (Fingersmith 345)
She loses all her spirits and thinks only of escaping and finding Sue again: “I must get out. I
must get out! I must get out of London – go anywhere – back to Briar. I must get money. I
must, I think – this is the clearest thought of all – I must get Sue!” (Fingersmith 347-348).
Wearily, she waits until everyone will be off their guard, and grows more like the canary that
is hanging in a cage in the kitchen: “It will not sing, however – the room is too dark – it will
only beat and pluck at its wings and bite the bars of its cage. At last they forget it”
(Fingersmith 361).
When Maud manages to run away one day, she learns for the first time that she truly
knows nothing about the world outside Briar and the kitchen in Lant Street. Mr Hawtrey, one
of Mr Lilly’s friends and owner of a pornographic bookshop, fears for her reputation and
refuses to help Maud, sending her to “a home . . . for destitute gentlewomen” (Fingersmith
388) instead. However, her fear to be locked up again is too violent – “The door is high –
divided in two, like the great door at Briar. I see it, and am gripped by panic” (Fingersmith
388) – and she has no other choice but to return to Lant Street. Realizing that she has no
De Schryver 51
home, no love, and no friends, she lies in bed, until Mrs Sucksby tells her about her true
parentage. Mrs Sucksby and Marianne Lilly switched their baby daughters, because they both
hoped that the children would have a better future – a future away from poverty and hardships
for Maud, and a future away from male oppression and abuse for Susan. However, as Miller
argues, “[t]hrough Mrs. Sucksby and Marianne’s attempts to subvert and control male
institutions of sexuality and exchange by switching their daughters, they inadvertently
condemn their children to the guardianship of mad pornographers, abusive grifters, and insane
asylums” (16). Maud and Sue’s mothers fail to overcome “patriarchal ideological systems”
and cannot liberate their daughters from the inheritances of the past (Miller 16). Maud and
Sue themselves will have to find a way to attain freedom.
When Maud sees Sue again after her escape, she admits that she is a liar. “’Because
you were right, before: my face is a false one, my mouth is an actress mouth, my blushes tell
lies, my eyes – My eyes –‘ She looked away. Her voice had begun to rise (Fingersmith 494).
Somehow, she tries to explain covertly to Sue that her feelings for her have not altered,
despite her marriage to Mr Rivers and her betrayal.
‘Sleep with – with Richard? She looked astounded. ‘You don’t suppose –?’ . . .
‘Sue,’ said Maud at the same time, leaning across the table and also reaching for me.
‘You don’t suppose him anything to me? You don’t think him a husband to me, in
anything but name? Don’t you know I hate him? Don’t you know I hated him, at
Briar?’ (Fingersmith 495)
Maud tries everything to prevent Sue from discovering the truth about the plot, and
particularly about Mrs Sucksby’s involvement, their switched identities, and all other details
that will upset her.
De Schryver 52
‘Richard,’ said Maud. She had got to her feet and was leaning upon the table. She said,
‘Listen to me. Think of all the filthy deeds you’ve ever done. This will be the worst,
and will gain you nothing.’ . . .
But Gentleman snorted again. ‘Tell me,’ he said to Maud, ‘when you first started
learning to be kind. What’s it to you, what Sue knows? – Dear me, how you blush!
Not that thing, still? And do you look at Mrs Sucksby? Don’t say you care what she
thinks! Why, you’re as bad as Sue. Look how you quake! Be bolder, Maud. Think of
your mother.’ (Fingersmith 500-501)
During Mrs Sucksby’s imprisonment and subsequent trial and hanging, Maud seems to
disappear from the pages of Fingersmith. Her presence is just a shadow, hinted at now and
then by Sue. When Sue and the reader encounter Maud again, she has undergone serious
changes.
Maud is now working as a writer – a writer of pornographic and erotic fiction – in her
uncle’s old study. However, the room has been stripped of much of its former attire: “The
paint had all been scraped from the windows, the finger of brass prised from the floor. The
shelves were almost bare of books. A little fire burned in the grate” (Fingersmith 541). As
Miller claims, Maud “creates her own literary space, by destroying the source of her uncle’s
power and taking his place” (24). Miller argues that Maud is now an active author and a
participant in the process of creating creative fiction, rather than a mechanical copier (25).
She no longer wears her gloves, but her hands are covered with smudges of ink, so that she
can “leave her fingerprint marks on the pages of Victorian bibliography and pornography”
(Miller 25). Mr Lilly’s pornography was a power tool and a symbol of male oppression of
women, but Maud’s – and later on Sue’s – is a pornography of love, one that values women’s
dignity, equality and individuality (Miller 3). Exactly like Sue had to acknowledge her love
for Maud and come to terms with her sexual orientation to develop an individual, independent
De Schryver 53
personality, Maud had to release herself from the chains of her past and create her own voice
to overcome her weakness. Maud’s writing “empower[s] both women, . . . enable[s] them in
constructing their sexual identities” (Miller 28). Moreover, Maud’s novels provide her with an
independent income as well: “Then I said quietly, ‘Is there money in it?’ She blushed. ‘A
little,’ she said. ‘Enough, if I write swiftly.’” (Fingersmith 547). Maud has become “a
fingersmith” herself: someone who can use her own hands for her own purposes.
Additionally, “her narration of the events from her own perspective” frees her from her
previous subjection and objectification as well (Costantini 35). The end of the novel clearly
implies that Maud and Sue will share both a physical and a textual, creative relationship in the
future (Miller 29). Miller concludes: “Whereas Maud used to believe she must choose
between a lover or freedom, a life with books or a life of liberty, Waters offers her heroines
both” (29).
Maud’s struggle throughout the entire narrative is the struggle for a personal voice, a
struggle against objectification and domination by her masculine surroundings. Whereas she
was prepared to give up everything to attain freedom, she learns that freedom can come along
with other benefits as well – love, independence, intimacy, a professional life. Love, respect
and freedom temper her violent character and leave a room for creativity and individuality.
Freed from the constraints of the past – her supposed proneness to madness, the subjection by
her uncle, the male-dominated world of pornography that left her without a personality –, she
can start a life of her own, with the one she wants.
4.3. Mrs Sucksby
Mrs Suckbsy’s character is modelled upon that of the Victorian baby-farmer. Sarah
Waters explains in an article how she developed Mrs Sucksby’s literary personality:
De Schryver 54
Mrs Sucksby emerged only slowly as a sort of female Magwitch, her part at the centre
of the whole dark project almost the last thing to fall into place. I imagined her simply,
at first, as another jolly Borough thief. Then, one day while walking up the
Queensbridge Road, east London, I saw an elderly woman minding a child in a
pushchair, and thought of Victorian baby-farmers. After that – well, not for nothing I
was once in the chorus of a school production of HMS Pinafore: it seemed like a
shocking waste of a baby-farmer not to have her, Little Buttercup-style, swap
infants… (“Sensational Stories” n.pag.)
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a baby-farm is “a derogatory term for a place
where the lodging and care of babies is undertaken for profit” (“Baby-farm”). Consequently,
baby-farming is “the keeping of such a place” (“Baby-farm”) An honest woman would never
use the term “baby-farmer” to refer to herself, as the word already had negative connotations
during the second half of the nineteenth century (Homrighaus 3). Baby-farming was a
widespread and almost ineradicable social vice in Victorian England. Baby-farmers cared for
unwanted babies, often bastards children of “humiliated and alienated mothers” (Haller n.
pag.). The main occupation of a baby-farmer was to “adopt the infants for a set fee and get rid
of them as quickly as possible in order to maximize their profits” (Haller n. pag.). Drugging
children with laudanum, alcohol or other poisons and keeping them continually
undernourished was common practice, so that they died quickly of “trush induced by
malnutrition and fluid on the brain due to excessive doses of strong narcotics” (Haller n.
pag.). Other baby-farmers had less cruel intentions and cared for unwanted babies to sell
them later on as house slaves, servants or jacks-of-all-trades (Costantini 30).
Mrs Sucksby is described as a regular Victorian baby-farmer from the pages of a
penny magazine:
De Schryver 55
And all about the house – laid top-to-toe in cradles, likes sprats in boxes of salt – were
Mrs Sucksby’s infants. They might start up whimpering or weeping any hour of the
night, any little thing might set them off. Then Mrs Sucksby would go among them,
dosing them from a bottle gin, with a little silver spoon you could hear chink against
the glass. (Fingersmith 6)
She doses the unwanted infants with gin, and does not really care about their well-being: “’I
have seven babies about the place, just now. Make it six, if you want. Make it’ – with a
gesture to the tin box beneath the table – ‘make it five. It is all the same to me. I fancy I am
about to give the business up, anyway’” (Fingersmith 316). Mrs Sucksby describes her
philosophy of life very clearly: “My idea was, if it wasn’t going to kill you on its way out,
then have it, and sell it; or what’s better, give it to me and let me sell it for you! – I mean, to
people that want infants, for servants or apprentices, or for regular sons and daughters”
(Fingersmith 326). Obviously, Mrs Sucksby does not mention to Maud, her long-lost
daughter whose love she has to win back, that she murders babies as well – “She loses
children all the time” (Fingersmith 227). Sue is one of the few babies that Mrs Sucksby raised
and treated with love and devotion, simply because she has to survive to make her fortune
later on (Homrighaus 4). By the end of the novel, Mrs Sucksby “suffers the inevitable fate of
a baby farmer when she is hanged for murder” (Homrighaus 4).
4.4. Mr Lilly
Mr Lilly, Maud’s uncle, and his occupation are based on historical facts, as Sarah
Waters mentions in the Notes to Fingersmith: “[t]he index upon which Christopher Lilly is at
work is based on the three annotated bibliographies published by Henry Spencer Ashbee
under the pseudonym Pisanus Fraxi . . . Mr Lilly’s statements on book-collecting echo those
of Ashbee, but in all other respects he is entirely fictitious” (n. pag.). However fictional Sarah
De Schryver 56
Waters’s representation might be, Miller mentions that “the world of Victorian bibliography
and pornography in which she situates the figure of Christopher Lilly shares many similarities
with Ashbee’s world” (8). Henry Spencer Ashbee published an index of pornographic works,
entitled Index Librorum Prohibitorum: being Notes Bio-Biblio-Icono-graphical and Critical,
on Curious and Uncommon Books, quite like Christopher Lilly’s The Universal Library of
Priapus and Venus (Marcus 34). Ashbee belonged to a group of “conservative forces – the
cultured, educated and moneyed” (Miller 10). These men were devoted to a male-centered,
objectifying pornography, through which they “reaffirmed the rigid social divisions and
gender hierarchies that were being challenged elsewhere in late-Victorian intellectual circles”
(Miller 11).
Christopher Lilly often gathers a group of admirers and fellow-pornographers at his
library, like Ashbee did, to admire his collection: “I’ve said it was my uncle’s custom,
occasionally to invite interested gentlemen to the house, to take a supper with us and, later,
hear me read” (Fingersmith 205). Mr Lilly keeps up the appearances that his collection is
meant solely for scientific, bibliographical purposes:
The world calls it pleasure. My uncle collects it – keeps it neat, keeps it ordered, on
guarded shelves; but keeps it strangely – not for its own sake, no, never for that; rather,
as it provides fuel for the satisfying of a curious lust.
I mean, the lust of the bookman. (Fingersmith 199)
He corrects Maud when she blushes at the content of the works: “Here is work, not leisure.
You will soon forget the substance, in the scrutiny of the form” (Fingersmith 200). Henry
Spencer Ashbee and his fellow ‘researchers’ “claimed to study pornography as a way to
uncover scientific, empiricist truths” (Miller 10). They justified their scrutiny of pornographic
matter by referring to its value as an indicator of changes in social history (Marcus 44). These
justifications and references to scholarly activity were necessary since the Obscene
De Schryver 57
Publications Act of 1837 stated that “magistrates could destroy obscene printed materials”
(Miller 11). However, the erotic pleasures and fantasies hidden behind these high-brow claims
were obviously still present – “when broached in the auspices of the Anthropological
Society13, the topic could be scholarly, but when privately printed, anonymously written, and
hidden behind a discreet blue cover . . . the topic clearly became pornographic” (Sigel 72).
Christopher Lilly’s own ulterior motive behind his pornographic collection is only hinted at:
“‘Your uncle,’ she says. ‘Now I know all about him. Made you look at a lot of filthy French
books. And did he touch you, dear, where he oughtn’t have?’” (Fingersmith 318). Mr Lilly’s
cruelty towards and subjection of women is abundantly referred to: he tortures Maud into
submission, punishes her for everything he considers a digression, treats her as an object, and
hits and imprisons his sister. His last letter to Mr Rivers, who in his opinion has seduced his
niece and eloped with her, finally shows his true character: “Her mother was a strumpet, and
she has all her mother’s instincts, if not her face . . . I fancy you, sir, a man who knows the
proper treating of a whore. – C.L.” (Fingersmith 365).
4.5. Gentleman/Mr Rivers
Gentleman is the prototypical Victorian villain – involved in swindling, plotting,
blackmailing, trying to rob innocent heiresses, or general “thievery and dodging”
(Fingersmith 21). Throughout the novel, he plays several roles: he is Gentleman, the
impoverished upper-class man; and he is Mr Rivers, the assistant of Mr Lilly and “saviour” of
Maud. He claims to be a regular gentleman, who gambled his fortune away and was
13
An all-male society, established in London, of which the inner circle was called “The Cannibal Club”. The
society was “at the forefront of Britain’s imperial ventures” (Sigel 51). From the 1860s up to the 1880s, the
members of The Anthropological Society “claimed to study pornography as a way to uncover scientific
empiricist truths” (Miller 10). They did so by projecting “their erotic fantasies onto depictions of the colonized
other” (Miller 10). Sigel notes that “these men – who defined themselves by their openness to geographical,
physical, sensual, and intellectual exploration – used a scientific platform to justify the need for the free
exchange of ideas about their diverse interests” (52).
De Schryver 58
consequently disinherited by his father. By the end of the novel, his true descent – a third role
– is illuminated: like everything else, the story of him being a gentleman was invented; in
reality he is a random middle class man with high aspirations. His main aim in life is to enrich
himself and rise above his class, through the use of his wit, charm and coolness. He despises
life in poverty: “’Fuck this cheap life, in all its forms – eh, Suky? No more of that for you and
me, soon’” (Fingersmith 51). To reach his goals, he is prepared to do anything, seemingly
untouched by his conscience. Everything, even the newborn love he detects between Maud
and Sue, has to give way to his plans to acquire money.
Gentleman’s character is slightly nuanced by the allusions to an uncommon trait for a
Victorian villain – homosexuality. The boys in Lant Street think he is gay: “Phil said, to noone, ‘Come in the back way, did he?’ – and another boy laughed. Boys like that always think
that men like Gentlemen are nancies” (Fingersmith 19). On his wedding night, he is not at all
interested in Maud: “’Did you think I wanted you?’ he says. ‘Did you?’” (Fingersmith 293).
Rupert Evans, the actor playing Gentleman in the 2005 BBC version of Fingersmith, clearly
explains that in his opinion, Gentleman is certainly homosexual:
My perception of him… He’s actually homosexual, so consequently, I think also in
this time, the Victorian time, it was seen in a very bad light and he had to hide and
suppress those feelings. And I think that’s brought about a very angry and a very
interesting character to play. Particularly where he interacts primarily with two young
girls, and the fact that he doesn’t physically have any feelings for them, and the way
he has to deal with that, but yet has to be around them and has to seem as if he’s in
love with them. (Behind the Scenes: Fingersmith)
Indeed, this knowledge makes Gentleman a little more sympathetic – as no single character in
Fingersmith is entirely good or bad, and thus all characters are in a way charming to the
reader.
De Schryver 59
4.6. Minor characters
All other characters – the poor wretches, petty thieves and criminals in the Borough,
the sedated and abused madwomen in the asylum, and the almost backward servants at Briar –
are described in such vivid detail in Fingersmith that they seem Victorians in the flesh. Many
of these additional characters are based on fictional or true accounts of life in the Victorian
era. The Lant Street kitchen and its inhabitants were inspired by Dickens and Oliver Twist,
with additional “grotesqueries” derived from Charles Manby Smith’s Curiosities of London
Life (“Sensational Stories” n. pag.). Historical details on hangings, incarcerations in
madhouses, and the likes were derived from studies and novels as well (Fingersmith, Notes).
De Schryver 60
5. Fingersmith as a Sensation Novel
Sarah Waters emphasises in an interview with John Mullan on Fingersmith that she
aimed to write a sensational novel as a tribute to the great authors of the nineteenth century:
You might call [the book] an homage to sensation fiction. But it’s . . .
it’s a
celebration of all the things that I have enjoyed about Victorian fiction – the scale of it,
the complexity of it, the plotting, the fact that everything kind of links up . . . the
wonderful narrative moments, twists . . . And so, it was really that sense of the verve
of Victorian fiction that I wanted to kind of take on.
After the publication of her previous two novels, Waters still had “a tremendous sense of
relish for the nineteenth century and its fictions” (Mullan). In the months preceding the
writing of Fingersmith, Waters was ensnared by sensation novels by Wilkie Collins, Sheridan
Le Fanu and Mary Elizabeth Braddon (“Sensational Stories” n. pag.). She vaguely began to
“piece together a melodramatic plot of [her] own, drawing on all these aspects of Victorian
culture which still fascinated and intrigued [her]: asylums, pornography, bibliophilia, the
world of servants, the world of thieves” (“Sensational Stories” n. pag.). Moreover, she used
certain narrative devices typical of Victorian fiction and sensation fiction in particular.
Halfway throughout the story, the reader is suddenly confronted with a cliff-hanger, as if the
first part of the story was a first instalment in the larger narrative, and a change of narrator and
focaliser – a way of recreating a story from the past by using different “testimonies”, like in
The Woman in White. Waters happily agrees that her novels always contain “an element of
pastiche” (qtd. in Dennis 47). Some of the influences of several well-known sensation novels
are quite obvious in the narrative of Fingersmith. But there are other, smaller and seemingly
more insignificant references to Victorian literature as well.
De Schryver 61
5.1. Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White
Waters herself clearly refers to her indebtedness to Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman
in White: “The moment at the madhouse door when Sue discovers the true, dreadful nature of
the swindle she’s caught up in was based on a similar twist in The Woman in White”
(“Sensational Stories” n. pag.). The imprisonment in a madhouse or madness in general is
almost a stock characteristic of Victorian sensation fiction: Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu,
Charles Reade and Mary Elizabeth Braddon among others frequently use madness in their
novels. In The Woman in White, Sir Percival Glyde, an impoverished esquire, and Count
Fosco, “the sinister and flamboyant ‘Napoleon of Crime’” (The Woman in White, cover).
conspire to rob Percival’s young wife of her large inheritance – a trick achieved by changing
the identities of Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie. Anne Catherick, who is allegedly mad and
dying of a heart disease, is buried under the name of Laura Fairlie, while Laura – as Anne
Catherick – is locked up in the madhouse, leaving 20.000 pounds to her swindling husband.
This trick is only possible because Laura and Anne look almost identical – due to the fact that
they are half-sisters, as is revealed by the end of the book –, exactly like Sue and Maud, who
are made to look like each other as well. At Gentleman’s instigation, Maud makes Sue look
like a real lady: she feeds her abundantly, gives her silk dresses of her own, rings and
brooches, until the maid looks like the lady, and vice versa: “Now all at once I see how near
to me in face and figure she’ll come” (Fingersmith 259). Exactly like Laura and Anne in The
Woman in White, Maud and Sue are more related than they had ever expected: as infants they
had already been swapped by their mothers, and they should have lived each other’s lives –
Sue the life of a lady and Maud the life of a thieving pauper.
The “delusions” that Laura and Sue supposedly suffer from are the same: they both
claim that they are someone else than the person that is registered at the madhouse. Laura,
De Schryver 62
who is imprisoned as Anne Catherick, keeps insisting that she is Laura Fairlie. Sir Percival
Glyde invents an explanation for Anne Catherick’s behaviour:
The unfortunate woman’s [Anne Catherick’s] last idea in connection with Sir Percival,
was the idea of annoying and distressing him, and of elevating herself, as she
supposed, in the estimation of the patients and nurses, by assuming the character of his
deceased wife; the scheme of this personation having evidently occurred to her, after a
stolen interview which she had succeeded in obtaining with Lady Glyde [Laura
Fairlie], and at which she had observed the extraordinary accidental likeness between
the deceased lady and herself. It was to the last degree improbable that she would
succeed a second time in escaping from the Asylum; but it was just possible she might
find some means of annoying the late Lady Glyde’s relatives with letters; and, in that
case, Mr Fairlie was warned beforehand how to receive them. (The Woman in White
425)
Sue’s identity at the madhouse is that of Mrs Maud Rivers, but she maintains that she is Susan
Smith:
‘I am not Maud Rivers!’
He raised a finger, and almost smiled.
‘You are not ready to admit that you are Maud Rivers. Hmm? That is quite a different
thing. And when you are ready to admit to it, our work shall be done. Until then –‘
...
‘I am not Maud Rivers! My name is Susan –‘
‘Yes?’
But here, for the first time, I faltered.
‘Susan Smith,’ I said finally
‘Susan Smith. Of – where was it, Dr Graves? Of Whelk Street, Mayfair?’
De Schryver 63
I did not answer.
‘Come, come,’ he went on. ‘That is all your fancy, is it not?’ (Fingersmith 414)
When she tries to explain the plot to the madhouse doctors, they even refer to her madness
and delusions as caused by an over-indulgence in literature. They insist that she has gone bad
and mad because she has read too much sensation fiction, and followed the example of its
wayward female characters – a development that some people indeed feared in the 1860s.14
‘Fancies, Mrs Rivers. If you might only hear yourself! Terrible plots? Laughing
villains? Stolen fortunes and girls made out to be mad? The stuff of lurid fiction! We
have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been
encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of
fancy.’ (Fingersmith 421)
One particular scene returns in both The Woman in White and Fingersmith. The madhouse
nurses try to convince Laura and Sue of their “true identities” by showing them their “true
names” written in their clothing. The power of the written word seems enough to ascertain
their identities:
The nurse, on the first night in the Asylum, had shown her the marks on each article of
her underclothing as it was taken off, and had said, not at all irritably or unkindly,
‘Look at your own name on your own clothes, and don’t worry us all any more about
being Lady Glyde. She’s dead and buried; and you’re alive and hearty. Do look at your
clothes now! There it is, in good marking ink; and there you will find it on all your old
things, which we have kept in the house – Anne Catherick, as plain as print!’ (The
Woman in White 436)
14
See Chapter “The Sensation Novel”, p 20-21.
De Schryver 64
When they took off my petticoat, that glove of Maud’s fell out. I had had it under the
waistband. I bent and caught it up. ‘What’s that?’ they said at once. Then they saw it
was only a glove. They looked at the stitching inside the wrist.
‘Here’s your own name, Maud,’ they said. (Fingersmith 406)
Laura and Sue are powerless victims at the mercy of the men who incarcerated them.
Sue hears upon her imprisonment that she can only be released when her husband gives
permission. The madhouse proprietor notices that Anne Catherick has “some curious personal
changes in her” (The Woman in White 428), to the extent that even her outward appearance is
slightly different, but does not doubt Sir Percival’s explanations and instructions, even when
the woman keeps insisting that she is someone else. They both need help from the outside to
escape their terrible fate. However, Laura’s escape is carried out particularly smoother than
Sue’s. Laura’s half-sister Marian Halcombe simply has to bribe Laura’s nurse and custodian
to save her. Sue, however, has to convince Charles to smuggle the necessary requisites into
the madhouse and subsequently arranges her own sensational escape at night. Wilkie Collins
does not give a description of Laura’s treatment in the madhouse itself; he merely refers to the
fact that her stay changed her entire personality:
. . . the sad conclusion was inevitable, that the change produced in Lady Glyde’s face
and manner by her imprisonment in the Asylum, was far more serious than Miss
Halcombe had at first supposed. The vile deception which had asserted her death,
defied exposure even in the house where she was born, and among the people with
whom she had lived. (The Woman in White 438)
Every little caution that Marian and I practised towards her; every little remedy we
tried, to strengthen and steady slowly the weakened, shaken faculties, was a fresh
protest in itself against the risk of turning her mind back on the troubled and terrible
past. (The Woman in White 443)
De Schryver 65
Sue’s suffering, maltreatment and abuse, however, are described in great detail. After her
escape, she is haunted by her experiences as well: “But the sight of him had also made me
afraid – more afraid than I ought to have been – as afraid as if I were still at Dr Christie’s and
might at any moment be taken, shaken, bound and plunged in water” (Fingersmith 472).
Another resemblance between The Woman in White and Fingersmith are the
references to lesbianism – in the former love between women is only indirectly hinted at, but
in the latter it is an important subplot to the narrative. Simon Usborne of The Independent
claims that Sarah Waters easily recast The Woman in White into “a tale of lesbian sexual
politics”, because “the relationship between Marian and Laura, and between numerous other
heroines in Victorian fiction is already so suggestively close” (n. pag.). Indeed, Laura Fairlie
and Marian Halcombe are half-sisters, but the description of their deep affection for each
other sometimes contains almost sexual references:
I heard her speaking, and I knew by the tone of her voice that she was comforting me –
I, who deserved nothing but the reproach of her silence! . . . I was first conscious that
she was kissing me; and then my eyes seemed to wake on a sudden to their sense of
outward things . . .
‘It is late,’ I heard her whisper. ‘It will be dark in the plantation.’ She shook my arm,
and repeated, ‘Marian! it will be dark in the plantation.’
‘Give me a minute longer,’ I said – ‘a minute, to get better in.’ (The Woman in White
266)
I unclasped her hand from my gown while I spoke; but she slipped both her arms
round my waist at the same moment, and held me more effectually than ever. (The
Woman in White 183)
As Sarah Annes Brown remarks, “their passionate devotion is made more suspect by Marian’s
masculine appearance” (141): Collins repeatedly describes her as dark, mannish, strong,
De Schryver 66
independent, with a complexion that was “almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip
was almost a moustache” and “altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness
and pliability” (The Woman in White 32). When Laura will be married off to Sir Percival,
Marian writes in her diary: “In less than a month she will be his Laura instead of mine! The
bare thought of it throws my mind into such a confusion that I can neither look back nor look
forward . . .” (The Woman in White, explanatory notes 677). As Sutherland’s notes to The
Woman in White claim, Collins may have left these lines out in the final version of his novel,
because he “may have felt this was rather too erotic between sisters” (678). Marian almost
feels as if she must protect Laura like a husband: when she senses that Laura does not want to
marry Sir Percival, she wants to “fight her battle for her at once with Mr Fairlie” (The Woman
in White 182). Brown even suggests that Marian sends Walter away and initially supports
Laura’s marriage to Sir Percival, because “her union with her sister is far less likely to be
disrupted by Laura’s marriage with a middle-aged man whom she does not care for than it is
by a true love match” (141). The love between Laura and Marian is not one-sided: after
Laura’s marriage to Sir Percival, she asks her sister not to remind her or to ask anything about
her marriage, because “we shall both be happier and easier with one another, if we accept my
married life for what it is” (The Woman in White 214). Laura even wishes that her sister will
never marry: “promise you will never marry, and leave me. It is selfish to say so, but you are
so much better off as a single woman – unless – unless you are very fond of your husband –
but you won't be very fond of anybody but me, will you?” (The Woman in White 215). Brown
indicates that when Walter and widowed Laura will eventually marry, Walter does not ask
Laura, but mentions his plan to Marian, who will then tell Laura (141). The implication is that
Marian is his masculine equal, and the one who has to give permission to another man to
marry Laura. Marian does not leave the newlyweds alone to enjoy each other’s company, but
continues to live with them in a kind of ménage à trois. The Woman in White does not end
De Schryver 67
with the blissful happiness of Walter and Laura, whose son has inherited the large ancestral
estate, but with Marian: “Marian was the good angel of our lives – let Marian end our Story”
(643). And there Collins leaves them “apparently all on course for an extremely unorthodox
happy ever after” (Sutherland x).
Other minor references to The Woman in White can be discerned in Fingersmith. Sue
and Maud meet each other in a lonely mansion in the countryside, like the lovers in The
Woman in White. Both Gentleman and Walter Hartright meet a girl as drawing masters – the
former means to marry her to get hold of her fortune and ends up with neither, the latter
arrives with no special intentions, but unexpectedly gains a loving wife and an estate by the
end of the story. The setting of both novels alternates between the countryside and London,
the bustling metropolis of Victorian England. Additionally, in both novels one of the main
characters is not allowed to enjoy the pleasures of the city – Maud Lilly is imprisoned by Mrs
Sucksby, and Laura Fairlie is kept inside the house for her own safety. Maud’s uncle in
Fingersmith lives a secluded life, surrounded by his treasured books, and does not really care
about his niece’s well-being: she is simply an object to him, robbed of her own voice and
personality. Laura’s uncle, Mr. Fairlie, is an invalid, who delights in his precious objects and
coins, and cares only about himself. When Marian writes him with the urgent plea to invite
Laura to his estate for a while to escape from her husband’s violent behaviour, he does not
immediately agree, but thinks of himself at first:
If I opened Limmeridge House as an asylum to Lady Glyde, what security had I
against Sir Percival Glyde’s following her here, in a state of violent resentment against
me for harbouring his wife? I saw such a labyrinth of troubles involved in this
proceeding, that I determined to feel my ground, as it were. (The Woman in White 353)
In both Fingersmith and The Woman in White, the true deceiver and inventor of the plot turns
out to be someone else than the one who was suspected at first. In Fingersmith, Maud and Sue
De Schryver 68
are made to believe that Gentleman is the one who has planned the entire swindle – a different
swindle for each of them, the result of which is unexpected to both –, while Gentleman is
simply a pawn of Mrs Sucksby. In The Woman in White, the narrative that Count Fosco writes
for Walter reveals that Fosco was the one to figure out the entire plot, and that Sir Percival
Glyde was merely an accomplice.
5.2. Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret
When Sarah Waters refers to the Victorian sensation novels that served as sources for
Fingersmith, she often mentions Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Especially for “upper-class
Maud”, she looked to “Braddon’s insanity blockbuster” (“Sensational Stories” n. pag.). Lady
Audley, Sir Michael Audley’s beautiful but deceiving wife, and Maud Lilly resemble each
other in a peculiar way: both are terrified of the hereditary madness from their mother’s side
(Letissier, “Le Texte Victorien à l Âge Postmoderne” 284). Maud Lilly is raised under the
impression that she was born at the madhouse, where her mother was imprisoned:
‘My mother,’ I say doggedly, ‘was mad. She bore me, strapped to a table. – No.’ I put
my hands to my eyes. ‘That part, perhaps, was my own fancy. But not the rest. My
mother was mad – was kept in a cell of a madhouse; and I was made to be mindful of
her example, lest I should follow it.’ (Fingersmith 329)
Consequently, she is terribly afraid of turning out like her mother, a fear that her uncle
exploits to keep her quiet and that Gentleman abuses to persuade her to join his plan: “Do you
think of your mother, and feel her madness in you?” (Fingersmith 219). Maud’s main
objective in joining the plot is the possibility to erase her past. The part of the plan that
bothers her the most is that the girl has to go to a madhouse. Double-crossing her, abusing her
trust and changing their identities all seem less horrible than the idea of putting an innocent
girl through the torments of psychological torture at the madhouse. But, as Gentleman points
De Schryver 69
out, madness is expected from Maud, and thus the girl shall go to a madhouse: “But your own
reputation – your own mother’s reputation – will work for us there” (Fingersmith 228).
Similarly, Lady Audley learns as a young girl that her mother is not dead, as she has been told
for years, but staying at a madhouse. Ever since this discovery, she is haunted by the image of
her mother:
I brooded horribly upon the thought of my mother’s madness. It haunted me day and
night. I was always picturing to myself this madwoman pacing up and down some
prison cell, in a hideous garment that bound her tortured limbs. . . . and the image that
haunted me was that of a distraught and violent creature, who would fall upon me and
kill me if I came within her reach. This idea grew upon me until I used to awake in the
dead of the night, screaming aloud in an agony of terror, from a dream in which I had
felt my mother’s icy grasp upon my throat, and heard her ravings in my ear. (Lady
Audley’s Secret 348-349)
When she finally meets her mother for the first time, she is relieved to see that the madness is
not as she had expected it, and that her mother seems relatively innocent. However, she
discovers the fate that awaits her:
Her madness was an hereditary disease transmitted to her from her mother, who had
died mad. She, my mother, had been or had appeared, sane up to the hour of my birth;
but from that hour her intellect had decayed, until she had become what I saw her.
I went away with the knowledge of this, and with the knowledge that the only
inheritance I had to expect from my mother was – insanity!
I went away with this knowledge in my mind, and with something more – a secret to
keep. . . . I was to keep the secret of my mother’s madness; for it was a secret that
might affect me injuriously in after-life. (Lady Audley’s Secret 350)
De Schryver 70
As she grows older, she feels the madness within herself for the first time: “The hereditary
taint that was in my blood had never until this time showed itself by any one sign or token;
but at this time I think my mind first lost its balance, and for the first time I crossed that
invisible line which separates reason from madness” (Lady Audley’s Secret 353). Lady
Audley then leaves her first husband, erases her past identity – as Maud tries to do – and starts
a new life, far away from the people that know her or her mother. She fulfils her childhood
dream, escaping from the awful denigration of poverty, by marrying a rich widower, Sir
Michael Audley. However, Robert Audley’s careful retracing of his aunt’s past life leads to
the discovery of her secret and the crimes that were committed to keep it hidden. Lady Audley
is identified as slightly prone to madness by a doctor, and locked away in a madhouse in
Belgium – or “Buried Alive”, as the title of the Chapter adequately indicates (Skilton xvi).
In both Fingersmith and Lady Audley’s Secret, the madness running through the veins
of the protagonists is diminished or lost altogether in the course of the story. When Maud
discovers that her mother was not a madwoman at all, she feels totally freed from all the
constraints of her former identity: “’No madness, Maud,’ he says, with a look of distaste.
‘Remember, you have no excuse for it now.’ ‘I have excuse,’ I say, ‘for anything!
Anything!’” (Fingersmith 336). Maud goes through trials and tribulations, but does not lose
her sanity, because she knows now she is not prone to it, and will never be. Similarly, a new
light is shed on Lady Audley’s madness when the doctor responds to Robert Audley’s account
of Lady Audley’s life story:
“Because there is no evidence of madness in anything that she has done. She ran away
from her home, because her home was not a pleasant one, and she left it in the hope of
finding a better. There is no madness in that. She committed the crime of bigamy,
because by that crime she obtained fortune and position. There is no madness there.
When she found herself in a desperate position, she did not grow desperate. She
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employed intelligent means, and she carried out a conspiracy which required coolness
and deliberation in its execution. There is no madness in that.”
“But the taints of hereditary insanity –”
“May descend to the third generation and appear in the lady’s children, if she have
any. Madness is not necessarily transmitted from mother to daughter . . .” (Lady
Audley’s Secret 377)
Lady Audley seems a fairly reasonable character to the reader as well: her deeds can all more
or less be accounted for. Skilton explains that “she commits crimes only in order to ensure her
own survival and prosperity in her male-dominated world” (xvi) and refers to Elaine
Showalter’s judgement that “Lady Audley’s real secret is that she is sane, and, moreover,
representative” (qtd. in Skilton xvi). However, after the examination of the patient, the doctor
offers different conclusions to Robert Audley:
There is latent insanity! Insanity which might never appear; or which might appear
only once or twice in a life-time. It would be dementia in its worst phase perhaps:
acute mania; but its duration would be very brief, and it would only arise under
extreme mental pressure. The lady is not mad; but she has the hereditary taint in her
blood. She has the cunning of madness, with the prudence of intelligence. I will tell
you what she is, Mr. Audley. She is dangerous! (Lady Audley’s Secret 379)
The implication of this speech is that Lady Audley is a danger to her surroundings because
she is an intelligent woman, who uses her intelligence for dubious purposes. Rather than
revealing her crimes, Robert Audley decides to lock Lady Audley away in a foreign
madhouse. Showalter accounts for Braddon’s need to oppress Lady Audley:
Lady Audley’s unfeminine assertiveness must ultimately be defined as madness, not
only to spare Braddon the unpleasant necessity of having to execute an attractive
De Schryver 72
heroine with whom she identifies in many ways, but also to spare the woman reader
the guilt of identifying with a coldblooded [sic] killer. (qtd. in Skilton xvi)
Justice needs to be done and the criminal needs to be punished, but without evoking a scandal.
Therefore, Lady Audley is quietly disposed of in a madhouse:
“From the moment in which Lady Audley enters that house,” he said, “her life, so far
as life is made up of action and variety, will be finished. Whatever secrets she may
have will be secrets for ever! Whatever crimes she may have committed she will be
able to commit no more. If you were to dig a grave for her in the nearest churchyard
and bury her alive in it, you could not more safely shut her from her world and all
worldly associations . . .” (Lady Audley’s Secret 381)
Lady Audley is simply silenced, but protests against her imprisonment with the
insinuation that she is the victim of male dominance. She is at the mercy of Mr. Audley, who
may do with her as he pleases: “You have brought me to my grave, Mr. Audley,” she cried;
“you have used your power basely and cruelly, and have brought me to a living grave” (Lady
Audley’s Secret 391). As the story draws to an end, the reader learns that Lady Audley has
died in the madhouse. Thus, she is completely erased from the lives of the protagonists, who
do not seem to feel remorse for the cruel fate bestowed on her. However, while the ending of
the novel paints a pretty picture of domestic happiness, the doctor’s description of Lady
Audley’s madness still lingers: “[Madness] may descend to the third generation and appear in
the lady’s children, if she have any” (Lady Audley’s Secret 377). Her son, George Talboys Jr.,
may already be considered a potentially disruptive force. Lady Audley’s exile to the
madhouse reminds us of how Sue is abandoned by the conspirers – to be locked away and
never to be heard off again. Maud notices that the people in the Borough, and even Sue’s
former cohabitants, forget her rather quickly: “It is a short-memoried house, after all. It is a
short-memoried district. . . . What is Sue, to them?” (Fingersmith 362-363). Exactly like
De Schryver 73
Maud’s reputation of madness will help to keep Sue locked up, Sue’s own reputation as a
thief will keep her friends from suspecting anything: “ Especially if she [Mrs Sucksby]
supposes – as I mean that she will – that the child has turned out swindler. Do you see? Her
own reputation will help to bury her. Crooked girls can’t expect to be cared for, like honest
ones” (Fingersmith 228). But Sue refuses to stay buried – Maud’s memories are haunted by
Sue, their love, and her own remorse. Sue even manages to escape from the madhouse and to
come back to the Borough, to confront Maud and Gentleman. Towards the end of
Fingersmith, order is restored as well: the villains, Gentleman and Mrs Sucksby, have been
murdered and executed, and the victims – although the distinction between both is not always
straightforward – have gained their own voices. Maud, an object at the mercy of her uncle and
later on a representation of easy money to a bunch of petty thieves – writes her own erotic
literature, and leads an independent life, earning her own money. Sue and Dainty, both
previously oppressed women – the former by her imprisonment in a madhouse, the latter by
her aggressive companion John –, live by themselves in the house in the Borough. Sue
embarks on a search for Maud and finds her in her uncle’s former library, along with the truth
about her life. The last scene of the novel leaves the reader with the idea that Maud and Sue
will stay in the large house, and will continue to provide for themselves by means of their
writings:
She took up the lamp. The room had got darker, the rain still beat against the glass.
But she led me to the fire and made me sit, and sat beside me. Her silk skirts rose in a
rush, then sank. She put the lamp upon the floor, spread the paper flat; and began to
show me the words she had written, one by one. (Fingersmith 548)
Both Sue and Maud were made to believe that they were mad at some part of the story,
because that was the easiest way for men to silence them. Similarly, Lady Audley is silenced
to clear the path to the future for the people surrounding her. But while Lady Audley’s own
De Schryver 74
voice is lost rather effectively, Sue and Maud are the only remaining voices at the end of their
story – they are the ones that will write the future.
Another recurrent element in both Fingersmith and Lady Audley’s Secret is the use of
marriage as a means to accumulate wealth (Letissier, “Le Texte Victorien à l Âge
Postmoderne” 284). Lady Audley marries Sir Michael Audley because he can offer her a life
in luxury, and a complete escape from poverty. Even when she was a little girl, she realised
that she had to use her extraordinary beauty to make a successful alliance: “I learned that my
ultimate fate in life depended upon my marriage, and I conclude that if I was indeed prettier
than my schoolfellows, I ought to marry better than any of them” (Lady Audley’s Secret 355).
Obviously, she does not love the man whom she marries, but she cannot ignore the offer made
to her:
Poverty, poverty, trials, vexations, humiliations, deprivations! You cannot tell; you,
who are amongst those for whom life is so smooth and easy; you can never guess what
is endured by such as we. Do not ask too much of me, then. I cannot be disinterested; I
cannot be blind to the advantages of such an alliance. I cannot, I cannot! (Lady
Audley’s Secret 11)
As soon as Lady Audley and Sir Michael Audley are married, the latter spoils her with
everything she desires. She can play the widely admired benefactor to her relatives and
neighbours, a part that she enjoys thoroughly. When her secret is revealed to her husband, and
it becomes clear to her that she will lose the grandeur of her life, she only thinks about that,
not about the havoc she has wreaked on the lives of those who love her:
She looked around at all the costly appointments of the room with a yearning lingering
gaze before she turned to leave it; but there was not one tender recollection in her
mind of the man who had caused the furnishing of the chamber, and who in every
precious toy that was scattered about in the reckless profusion of magnificence had
De Schryver 75
laid before her a mute evidence of his love. My lady was thinking how much the
things had cost, and how painfully probable it was that the luxurious apartment would
soon pass out of her possession. (Lady Audley’s Secret 373)
Similarly, no love or kind feelings are involved in Maud and Gentleman’s marriage. For
Gentleman and Sue, the marriage is simply the only way to unlock a fortune, while for Maud
it is the only way to escape her old life. The victim of this marriage is someone who must be
cold-heartedly disposed of. When Gentleman explains his fake plot to Sue, he represents
Maud as the obstacle that has to be cleared away afterwards:
‘ . . . Once I have married this girl, I shan’t want her about me. I know a man who will
take her off my hands. He has a house, where he’ll keep her. It’s a madhouse. He’ll
keep her close. So close, perhaps…’ He did not finish, but turned the card face down,
and kept his fingers on its back. ‘I must marry her,’ he said, ‘and – as Johnny would
say – I must jiggle her, once, for the sake of the cash. Then I’ll take her, unsuspecting,
to the madhouse gates. Where’s the harm? Haven’t I said, she’s half-simple already? .
. .’ (Fingersmith 27)
To Maud, he similarly proposes to abandon Sue at the madhouse doors. Thus, the marriage
will provide Gentleman and Maud, whose money will eventually be claimed by Mrs Sucksby,
an escape from poverty, for which all feelings must be put aside.
However, for both Lady Audley and Maud, the marriage means leaving a former lover
as well. To Lady Audley the necessity is not too hard: she makes no scruple about breaking
all bonds with George when he can no longer provide money for her extravagance. When he
returns from Australia as a rich man and meets her unexpectedly at Audley Court, she even
pushes him down a well and leaves him to die when he threatens to reveal her secret. Lady
Audley is an opportunist: her allegiances lie with the man that can offer her the greatest
wealth. Maud is completely the opposite of Lady Audley. The decision to leave Sue behind
De Schryver 76
and to safeguard her own future is the hardest she has to make in the entire story. As soon as
the carriage drives away from the madhouse, Maud regrets her choice, especially when she
finds out that she was cheated as well. She is anxious about Sue’s well-being and tormented
by the idea that she is staying in a madhouse. When she meets Sue again, she tries to prevent
her from discovering the true nature of the swindle, and to bother her as little as possible, by
moving back to Briar and claiming none of the money. In the last chapter, Sue and Maud
declare their love for each other and embark on what seems to be a happy life together – a
clear example of true love overcoming all obstacles.
Other likenesses between Lady Audley’s Secret and Fingersmith can be observed. The
switching of identities between Maud and Sue reminds the reader of the switched identities of
Lady Audley – then still known as Helen Talboys – and a dying girl that resembles her
enough to make the affair believable. Braddon of course used Wilkie Collins’s trick in The
Woman in White as an example (Letissier, “Le Texte Victorien à l Âge Postmoderne” 284),
and Sarah Waters used both Victorian predecessors to develop the story of Maud and Sue’s
intricately intertwined identities. The close, intimate relationship between a lady and her maid
is emphasised in Lady Audley’s Secret:
Amongst all privileged spies, a lady’s-maid has the highest privileges. . . . She has a
hundred methods for the finding out of her mistress’s secrets. She knows by the
manner in which her victim jerks her head from under the hair-brush, or chafes at the
gentlest administration of the comb, what hidden tortures are racking her breast – what
secret perplexities are bewildering her brain. . . . and she knows other and more sacred
secrets than these. (Lady Audley’s Secret 336)
Lady Audley’s relationship with her first maid Phoebe was particularly close: they were
friends and companions. Sarah Waters noted this intimacy while reminiscing about being a
lady in the nineteenth century:
De Schryver 77
Of the developing erotic relationship between Maud and her maid, Waters – who quips
that one of the main reasons for writing about the 19th century [sic] was ‘the corsets’ –
says that when you really start to think about the reality of having a lady’s maid, ‘you
recognise the enormous intimacy which must have grown up between you. She was
washing and dressing you, and brushing your hair; sorting you out. I suppose what I
like there is also the power dynamic, the class thing – and . . . that dynamic can shift.’
(“Her Thieving Hands” n. pag.)
According to Letissier, the play with doubles between the lady and the maid that Sarah
Waters will use eagerly in Fingersmith, is already present in Lady Audley’s Secret (“Le Texte
Victorien à l Âge Postmoderne” 285):
“Not at all, Phoebe,” said the little lady superbly; “you are like me, and your features
are very nice; it is only colour that you want. . . . Why, with a bottle of hair dye, such
as we see advertised in the papers, and a pot of rouge, you’d be as good-looking as I
any day, Phoebe.” (58)
Madness, the abuse of marriage, and switched identities are general themes occurring in
sensation fiction, and are clearly present in both Fingersmith and Lady Audley’s Secret.
5.3. Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas
Although Sheridan Le Fanu is often not included in the canon of sensation authors,
and he refused the label “sensationalist”15, Sarah Waters does include him in the list of
15
Le Fanu writes in “A Preliminary Word” to Uncle Silas:
May he be permitted a few words also of remonstrance against the promiscuous application of the term
‘sensation’ to that large school of fiction which transgresses no one of those canons of construction and
morality which, in producing the unapproachable ‘Waverley Novels’, their great author imposed upon
himself? No one, it is assumed, would describe Sir Walter Scott’s romances as ‘sensation novels’; yet in
that marvellous series there is not a single tale in which death, crime and, in some form, mystery, have
not a place. . . . The author trusts that the Press, to whose masterly criticism and generous
encouragement he and other humble labourers in the art owe so much, will insist upon the limitation of
that degrading term to the peculiar type of fiction which it was originally intended to indicate, and
De Schryver 78
novelists that inspired her: “I was hooked on the ‘sensation’ novels of writers like Wilkie
Collins, Sheridan LeFanu [sic] and Mary Elizabeth Braddon” (“Sensational Stories” n. pag.).
She describes Uncle Silas as one of “the classics of sensation fiction itself” (“Sensational
Stories” n. pag.). Sarah Waters firmly establishes Fingersmith in the tradition of Victorian
sensation novels in naming one of her protagonists Maud. Both Uncle Silas and The Rose and
the Key, novels by Sheridan Le Fanu, feature unhappy heroines named Maud (“Sensational
Stories” n. pag.). Fingersmith and Uncle Silas have more elements in common. In each novel,
an abusive uncle with dark interests haunts the lives of the heroines. Maud Lilly’s uncle is a
cunning pornographer, who emotionally and physically forces his niece into submission,
robbing her of her identity and personality. Maud Ruthyn’s uncle, a dark, sinister man with
mysterious secrets, devices a marriage plot to rob his niece of her inheritance. When this plot
fails and time is running out, Maud’s uncle does not hesitate to use other, more violent means
to gain access to his niece’s wealth.
The heroines of both Fingersmith and Uncle Silas are in positions of extreme
vulnerability, “emblematic of the position of women prior to the Married Women’s Property
Act16” (White viii). They are completely dependent on the benevolence of their male relatives,
who control their interests until they come of age or marry. Maud Ruthyn has to live with her
uncle Silas until she is twenty-one, and if she should die earlier, her inheritance will be
bequeathed to the next of kin – that same uncle. If she should marry, all her possessions
instantly become the possessions of her husband, a legal reality that incites her uncle to
arrange a marriage between his son and his niece. Similarly, Maud Lilly can only access the
prevent, as they may, its being made to include the legitimate school of tragic English romance, which
has been ennobled, and in great measure founded, by the genius of Sir Walter Scott. (3-4)
16
The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 that replaced the earlier Act of 1870, through which women’s
property could only be partially secured. The Married Women’s Property Bill of 1880 proposed the status of
“feme sole” with relation to property, wages, and earnings for every married woman. Additionally, women
should be responsible for their own unlawful deeds and should have the right to sue and to be sued. The
subsequent Act of 1882 largely expanded women’s rights, but several restrictions were included. Married
women were protected by the law, but not equally adjudicated (Van Melkebeek 182-185).
De Schryver 79
inheritance of her mother when she marries. The original arrangement between Marianne
Lilly and Mrs Sucksby, well aware of women’s vulnerable position in society, intended to
unlock the inheritance when Maud and Sue turned eighteen:
. . . she folds it and seals it with the ring off her finger, and puts on the front that it
ain’t to be opened till the day her daughter turns eighteen. Twenty-one, she wanted to
make it: but my mind was running ahead, even as she was writing, and I said it must
be eighteen – for we oughtn’t risk the girls taking husbands, before they knew what
was what. (Fingersmith 334)
However, Maud’s uncle and grandfather change the will, to prevent Maud from gaining
independence through her fortune: “For now her pa and her brother, having got her home,
made her change her will. – You can guess what to. No penny to go to the daughter – meaning
you, dear girl, so far as they knew – till the daughter marries” (Fingersmith 338). With
Maud’s story, Sarah Waters remembers the social injustices of the Victorian era that many
sensation novelists addressed as well: a woman was nothing to the law, and could be used and
especially abused at will by men.
Class issues are dominant in Uncle Silas: one of the main reasons for the discord
between uncle Silas and Maud’s father is the fact that uncle Silas married a poor girl, the
daughter of an innkeeper. When Maud hears about this, she is shocked: “‘What! – a
gentleman of fashion and refinement marry a person –‘ ‘A barmaid! – just so,’ said Lady
Knollys. ‘I think I could count half a dozen men of fashion who, to my knowledge, have
ruined themselves just in a similar way’” (Uncle Silas 148). In Victorian England, a rigid
social hierarchy dominated the main aspects of everyday life (Diamond 6). Crossing class
boundaries was thus not evident, and especially cross-class marriages between a member of
the upper-classes and a member of a lower class were to be avoided at all cost. Sensation
novels often “addressed contemporary anxieties and fantasies about marriage and the family,
De Schryver 80
and about changing gender and class relations” (Pykett, “Sensation and the Fantastic” 203). In
Fingersmith, Sarah Waters explains, class issues are addressed as well: “. . . Fingersmith was
interested in transvestism of a different sort, as its characters swapped the trappings of class,
passed themselves off as things they weren’t – or, more disturbingly, were passed off as them
by other people without being aware of it” (“Sensational Stories” n. pag.) The most obvious
example of class-crossing is the switching at birth of Maud and Sue. Mrs Sucksby, a woman
from the lowest classes, who is accustomed to poverty, misery, and suffering, and Marianne
Lilly, an oppressed upper class lady, each hope that their daughters will have a better future
belonging to another class. Marianne Lilly names her daughter Susan, a common name, to
defy her descent:
“As for being the daughter of a lady,” says the poor girl next, “you tell me this: what
does being a lady do for you, except let you be ruined? I want her named plain,” she
says, “like a girl of the people. I want her named plain.” . . . “I will. There was a
servant that was kind to me once – kinder than ever my father or my brother was. I
want her named for her. I shall call her for her. I shall call her –“
...
‘Susan.’ (Fingersmith 332)
Gentleman lectures Maud, who despises the entire swindle and subsequent plotting, claiming
that Mrs Sucksby saved her from a much harder life than the one she has led: “‘Look about
you, Maud. Step to the window, look into the street. There is life, not fiction. It is hard, it is
wretched. It would have been yours, but for Mrs Sucksby’s kindness in keeping you from it. –
Christ!’” (Fingersmith 341). The contract between Mrs Sucksby and Marianne Lilly, dealing
with the splitting of the latter’s fortune, mentions their respective intentions:
De Schryver 81
‘This paper to be a true and legally binding statement of my wishes; a contract
between myself and Grace Sucksby, in defiance of my father and brother; which is to
be recognised in Law.
‘Susan Lilly to know nothing of her unhappy mother, but that she strove to keep her
from care.
‘Maud Sucksby to be raised a gentlewoman; and to know that her mother loved her,
more than her own life. (Fingersmith 532)
The result of the swapping of the infants is not what their mothers intended: Maud and Sue’s
futures are ultimately not better. Maud, the girl that was saved from a life in poverty, is turned
into an objectified, abused secretary to her wicked uncle and raised in seclusion in a house
filled with pornography. Sue, the daughter of a lady, has initially known Mrs Sucksby’s love
and care and has grown up in relative happiness, but is cruelly disposed of in a madhouse
because of her fortune. As Miller explains, “patriarchal ideological systems prove too
entrenched, and all four women fall victim to problems of gender and social class” (16).
Ultimately, both girls face a prosperous future when all secrets have been unearthed and they
have acknowledged their backgrounds. Additionally, Gentleman is also a character that draws
attention to the importance of class. As the son of a middle class man, he wants to escape his
social class and pretends to be a gentleman. His main object in life is acquiring wealth and
social status by means of a successful marriage to a rich heiress. Gentleman slips from one
class into another and his acting is often so convincing that the characters and the reader
hardly know who Gentleman really is.
Uncle Silas contains many elements that are considered characteristic of the sensation
novel, and that occur in Fingersmith as well. The threat of being considered mad lurks over
some of the female characters – both Maud Ruthyn and Madame de la Rougierre are
described by other characters or by the narrator, Maud herself, as behaving like “madwomen”.
De Schryver 82
Both Mauds are at some point prisoners in their own house – Maud Lilly more
psychologically, Maud Ruthyn literally. Not typical of the sensation novel, but alike in both
novels is the intimate relationship – although different in degree of intimacy – between a lady
and her maid.
5.4. Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations
Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations is not a sensation novel. However, it is often
discussed alongside sensation novels, because it shares “many of the sensationalists’ subjects
and methods” (Pykett, The Sensation Novel 3). Great Expectations deals with criminals, men
and women with dark secrets, uses many twists of plot and “like many sensation novels it
contrives to suggest that respectable society conceals and is supported by a dark, criminal
underlife” (Pykett, The Sensation Novel 69). Its serialisation between 1860 and 1861 has lead
to it being reviewed alongside Collins’s The Woman in White – and it being considered “a less
accomplished example of the [sensation] genre” (Pykett, “Sensation and the Fantastic” 202).
Sarah Waters herself has indicated the connection between Fingersmith and Great
Expectations, in describing Mrs Sucksby, the centre of a dark project, as “a sort of female
Magwitch” (“Sensational Stories” n. pag.). Therefore, Great Expectations will be included in
the discussion of Fingersmith alongside sensation novels.
Letissier draws attention to the similarity between the first paragraph of Great
Expectations and that of Fingersmith (“Le Texte Victorien à l Âge Postmoderne” 287):
My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue
could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So I called myself
Pip, and came to be called Pip.
De Schryver 83
. . . As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of
them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies
regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones.
. . . My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to
have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. (Great
Expectations 9)
My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder. People called me Sue. I know the year I
was born in, but for many years I did not know the date, and took my birthday at
Christmas. I believe I am an orphan. My mother I know is dead. But I never saw her,
she was nothing to me. I was Mrs Sucksby’s child, if I was anyone’s; and for father I
had Mr Ibbs, who kept the locksmith’s shop, at Lant Street, in the Borough near to the
Thames.
This is the first time I remember thinking about the world and my place in it. . . . The
play was Oliver Twist. I remember it as very terrible. (Fingersmith 3)
Both novels start out by establishing the identities of their protagonists – both are called
another name than their official one, both are orphans and quite unaware of their descent, and
both begin their life stories with a peculiar event that they remember from their youth. But, as
Letissier indicates, essential differences between Sue and Pip are established as well (“Le
Texte Victorien à l Âge Postmoderne” 288). While Pip clearly thinks about his past and
ancestry, Sue immediately indicates that her mother “is nothing to [her]” (Fingersmith 3). The
first time that Pip thinks about himself and how he is related to the larger world, is when he is
threatened by an escaped convict in the churchyard – when he is confronted with the raw
reality of the world. Sue’s first memory of that kind, however, is a memory of going to the
De Schryver 84
theatre to see a theatrical version of a novel – a memory focusing on the fictionality of reality,
a typical postmodern idea17 (Letissier, “Le Texte Victorien à l Âge Postmoderne” 288).
Young Pip regularly visits his father and mother’s graves, exactly like Maud has to do
at Briar. However, Pip genuinely regrets the premature loss of his parents, while Maud does
not care about the unknown people that created her: “When I am old enough to reason I . . .
understand that I am an orphan; but, never having known a parent’s love – or rather, having
known the favours of a score of mothers – I am not greatly troubled by the news”
(Fingersmith 180). Moreover, she takes on the habit of cursing and despising her mother:
“My proper mother I hate. Didn’t she forsake me, before anyone? I keep her portrait in a little
wooden box beside my bed; but her sweet white face has nothing of me in it, and I grow to
loathe it” (Fingersmith 197). When Maud learns that her real mother is Mrs Sucksby, who is
then sentenced to death, she does start to care, and is present at her mother’s trial and visits
her at the gaol. Sue, who finds out that her mother was not a hanged criminal, but a real lady,
is suddenly interested in her ancestry, and shocked that she did not know where she came
from all this time:
My mother, Maud’s mother! I could not believe it. I thought of the picture of the
handsome lady I had seen in the box at Briar. I thought of the grave that Maud had
used to rub and trim. I thought of Maud and Mrs Sucksby . . . Why had she kept the
secret so long? Why had she lied about my mother? My mother was not a murderess,
she was a lady. She was a lady with a fortune, that she meant to be split …
(Fingersmith 533)
17
Postmodern metafiction, written since the 1960s, is used to lay bare the processes of construction within
fiction. Reality is mediated by language and consequently, every representation of reality is never entirely
accurate. Similarly, we construct the past on the basis of narratives. All history writing uses emplotment, and is
therefore never an immediate representation of reality. According to Hayden White, historical narratives are
verbal fictions whereby events are made into a story. The historian selects, orders, and interprets events from the
past, and therefore, all historical narratives are subjective (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 105-106).
De Schryver 85
Maud and Sue’s stable identities have been overturned completely. Suddenly, both are eager
to find out who they really are, and where they really came from. Both need to spend some
time in solitude – Maud at Briar, where she lives with the only two servants that are left, and
Sue during a period of severe illness – before they can accept who they are and open up to
each other.
When Sue goes back to Briar to seek out Maud’s whereabouts, the house is seemingly
abandoned. She enters the dining room for the first time, the state of which to a certain limit
resembles that of Mrs Havisham’s dining room at Satis House: filled with decaying and dying
things.
I stepped to the table. It was still set, with candlesticks, a knife and a fork, a plate of
apples; but it was covered all over with dust and cobwebs, and the apples had rotted.
The air was thick. Upon the floor was a broken glass – a crystal glass, with gold at the
rim. (Fingersmith 540)
The most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it . . . An
épergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily
overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable, and, as I looked
along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow like a black
fungus, I saw speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and
running out from it . . . (Great Expectations 69)
Within the decaying mansion, Sue and Maud are finally reunited. The old identity of the
house, that of a place of oppression and abuse, is crumbling away, and as Sue and Maud –
with their new-found identities – start a new story together, the house will change too. This
reunion resembles that of Pip and Estella amidst the ruins of Satis House, as Letissier
mentions briefly (“Le Texte Victorien à l Âge Postmoderne” 289).
De Schryver 86
Lastly, Mrs Sucksby is based on the character of Magwitch – the escaped convict that
Pip encounters as a young boy, and who turns out to be his benefactor years later –, as Sarah
Waters briefly mentions in “Sensational Stories” (n. pag.). In Great Expectations, Magwitch
seems a cold-hearted villain at first, but then turns out to be a kind benefactor. Mrs Sucksby
evolves in the opposite direction: she is a caring mother to Sue as a child, but disposes of her
as a regular criminal to seize Sue’s fortune. By the end of the story, both Mrs Sucksby and
Magwitch are unexpectedly revealed to be the parent to one of the characters – Mrs Sucksby
is actually Sue’s mother, and Magwitch is Estella’s father.
De Schryver 87
6. Fingersmith as a Neo-Victorian Novel
In Fingersmith, Sarah Waters does not simply parrot Victorian sensation fiction. She
uses certain characteristics of the sensation novel to create a story that honours and cherishes
the past, but questions that past at the same time. Fingersmith is a novel containing the paradox
of parody, as Linda Hutcheon’s theory of postmodernism explains: it uses and abuses
conventions, characters and styles of past literary forms, but always with a specific goal (A
Poetics of Postmodernism 126). Waters uses the sensation medium to establish a frame in
which she can address issues that she feels very strongly about. Additionally, the inscription of
the sensation genre indicates a collapse of the boundaries between high and low literature
(Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 61).
Characteristic of Victorian sensation novels is their almost scientific, journalistic
description of events. Often, the story is told by an omniscient third-person narrator, or one or
more first-person narrators. But, as Patrick Brantlinger quite rightly points out, the narrator is
no longer a reliable companion to the reader: “at the same time that the narrator of a sensation
novel seems to acquire authority by withholding the solution to a mystery, he or she also loses
authority or at least innocence, becoming a figure no longer to be trusted” (15). As a
consequence, the detective, or a protagonist that assumes the role of a detective, “emerges as a
substitute for the forthright narrative personae of more realistic novels, or as a personification
of the morally ambivalent role of the narrator” (Brantlinger 16). A detective-like character
becomes the ally of the reader, the one who – at the best of his or her ability – tries to fill “the
vacuum created by the at least partial abdication of authority by the narrator” (Brantlinger 18).
In Lady Audley’s Secret, for example, Robert Audley gathers evidence of Lady Audley’s past
like a real detective, thus accumulating proof that will inevitably lead to the truth. By the end
of the novel, the entire intricate plot is put back together, without loose ends. In The Woman in
White, a series of characters contribute to the story, told retrospectively and resembling a trial.
De Schryver 88
Instances of mystery or seemingly supernatural involvement occur as well, but these are
always solved by the rationality of one of the protagonists. Typically, “the plot unwinds
through the gradual discovery – or, better, recovery – of knowledge, until at the end what
detective and reader know coincides with what the secretive or somehow remiss narratorauthor has presumably known all along” (Brantlinger 19).
Fingersmith, as a neo-Victorian novel, uses two narrative voices. First, Sue’s version
of the events is inscribed. The reader, who at this point identifies very strongly with Sue, is
made to believe that the swindle will indeed end with Maud shut up in the madhouse, and the
triumphant return of Gentleman and Sue in Lant Street. However, the entire narrative world
that the reader has created in his or her mind is subverted when Maud’s version of the events
is presented. Every action, dialogue, or detail is now described and interpreted in an
unexpected way. The “truth” – Sue’s truth – is no longer the truth at all, thus emphasising the
postmodern idea that there is no truth; there are only versions of the truth (Hutcheon, A
Poetics of Postmodernism 109). Soon, the problem of reliability arises: Maud and Sue are
both characters with a limited worldview – the former has lived in seclusion for years and
does not know how the world works, the latter is uneducated and only accustomed to the ways
of the lowest classes. Moreover, the reader might assume that Maud’s judgement is
sometimes clouded by her dependence on her “drops”, as Gentleman indicates:
He pats at his pocket, at the bottle of drops. ‘Think of London,’ he says. ‘There are
druggists on every street corner, there.’
My mouth trembles in scorn. ‘You think,’ I say, ‘I shall still want my medicine, in
London?’
The words sound weak, even to my ears. He turns his head, saying nothing, perhaps
suppressing a smile. (Fingersmith 298)
De Schryver 89
To what extent these characters provide an accurate version of the past is not known. The
reader simply has to trust them as companions throughout the story, because there is no one
else to rely on. In the madhouse, the confusion of identities goes on to such extremity, that
even the author’s reliability and sanity seem to be questioned, when a nurse asks: “Eh, my
lady? Mrs What-is-your-name? Mrs Waters, or Rivers?” (Fingersmith 398). The characters,
with all their subjectivity and limited viewpoints, seem the most stable voices to the reader.
Maud and Sue often believe that they have found out the truth, but then discover that
they were wrong. Maud initially thinks that the truth is that her mother has died in the
madhouse, where she was raised until her uncle fetched her to use her as a secretary. When
Gentleman arrives at Briar and explains the plot, the story of the inheritance is added to her
truth. She is made to believe that the plot will end with Sue in the madhouse, and she and
Gentleman living in London “separately, of course, . . . when the door of the house is closed”
(Fingersmith 228). However, upon her arrival in Lant Street, she learns that her past, her
ascendance, that she has always accepted as the plain truth, is actually a different one. She is
made to believe that her real mother was a murderess, and that she was swapped with the
child of a lady, to be raised in that child’s place. But, as the story unfolds, her truth is
subverted again, when Mrs Sucksby confesses that Maud is her own daughter, not the
daughter of a murderess. In the end, the various versions of the truth have alternated to such
an extent, that the reader is left with the idea that some other truth might come out at any
moment, and change the course of the story again. However, because of the analogy with the
sensation novel, the reader can be quite sure that the last scene closes the novel, and that the
story is quite finished then. Gentleman’s murder is the only part of the story that remains
unresolved, indicating that the past can never be fully known. Like Maud and Sue, the reader
never attains true knowledge of who committed the murder:
De Schryver 90
I cannot say for certain what came next. I know that, hearing his words, I took a step
towards him, meaning to strike him or make him silent. I know that Maud and Mrs
Sucksby reached him first. I do not know if Mrs Sucksby, when she darted, darted at
him, or only – seeing Maud fly – at her. I know there was the gleam of something
bright, the scuffle of shoes, the swish of taffeta and silk, the rushing of someone’s
breath. . . . Maud stood a little before him, but now moved away; and as she did I
heard something fall, though whether it fell from her hand, or from his – or from Mrs
Sucksby’s – I cannot tell you. (Fingersmith 502-503)
Sometimes it seemed to me that I had seen Maud take up her knife; sometimes I even
seemed to remember seeing her use it. I know I saw her touch the table-top, I know I
saw the glitter of the blade. I know she stepped away as Gentleman started to stagger.
But Mrs Sucksby had been there, too, she had moved as quick as anyone; and
sometimes I thought it was her hand I remember seeing dart and flash… At last I told
the simple truth: that I did not know what I had seen. (Fingersmith 510)
Thus, Gentleman meets his end in a way very much like the rest of his life – ambiguous.
Throughout the story, Gentleman presents several versions of himself and never clarifies
which version is the real one, and which version is an act. When his death is announced in the
newspapers, the reader and Sue are both left wondering if the man that is described is actually
that same heartless villain that they thought they knew. Gentleman goes to his grave as a man
that will always remain unknown.
Sarah Waters elaborately uses the stock characteristic of the sensation novel: madness.
Unlike The Woman in White or Lady Audley’s Secret, where characters are disposed of in
madhouses with as few scruples as in Fingersmith, Waters provides an elaborate description
De Schryver 91
of Sue’s treatment within the asylum18. As she mentions in the Notes to Fingersmith, the
madhouse scenes are based on a true account: Marcia Hamilcar’s Legally Dead: Experiences
During Seven Weeks’ Detention in a Private Asylum (London, 1910). In Waters’s hands, the
madhouse becomes a symbol of disintegration of the stable identity: the inhabitants go mad,
simply because they are imprisoned in it: “‘But you see, I’m afraid you must be mad, since
you are here’” (Fingersmith 432). The building itself is even described as a respectable,
normal house that somehow went crazy, representing the fate of its inhabitants:
And finally it broke upon me that this was the madhouse after all; that it had once been
an ordinary gentleman’s house; that the walls had used to have rugs; but that now, it
had all been made over to madwomen – that it was, in its way, like a smart and
handsome person gone mad itself.
...
The room she took us into was not a proper room, but had been made, by the building
of a wooden wall, inside another. – For, as I said, that house had been all chopped up
and made crazy. (Fingersmith 408)
Waters takes a simple element from the sensation plot, and turns it into an element to support
characterisation. While the Victorian sensation novel was often criticised for its inattention to
character in favour of plot, Sarah Waters cunningly escapes that trap by presenting fully
developed protagonists and by using plot to support characterisation.
Apart from referring abundantly to the sensation novel, Sarah Waters includes many
other textual references to place Fingersmith firmly in the literary tradition of the nineteenth
century. Samantha Matthews claims that such intertextual references, as part of metafictional
18
The only Victorian novel associated with sensationalism that thoroughly discusses the terrible conditions in
private insane asylums is Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (Brantlinger 20-21).
De Schryver 92
formal traits, are typical of the neo-Victorian novel (287). In Sue’s narrative, especially,
elements of popular culture are mentioned. Sue’s first conscious memory is attending the
performance of a dramatised version of Oliver Twist. In another early memory, she recalls
listening to a story of Mrs Sucksby’s about Nancy from Oliver Twist. After the murder of
Gentleman, Mrs Sucksby is arrested and described as the only type of murderesses Sue knows
– the ones from the pages of the sensation-seeking papers: “Her taffeta dress was soaked in
his blood, the brooch of diamonds at her bosom turned to a brooch of rubies. Her hands were
crimson, from fingertip to wrist. She looked like the picture of a murderess from one of the
penny papers” (Fingersmith 508). Maud’s narrative, especially when she is still employed by
her uncle, abounds in references to pornographic literature, which is obviously lesser-known
nowadays, because of its controversial subjects. Sarah Waters mentions in the Notes to
Fingersmith that all the pornographic texts that Maud reads are authentic, nineteenth century
material. A remarkable fact is that the novel reflects certain nineteenth-century opinions on
the education of women and the exposure of women to sensation fiction. Sue’s madness, for
example, is attributed by the doctors to the fact that she has “overindulge[d herself] in
literature” (Fingersmith 421). They even force her to write her own name, so as to reconnect
her with literature, as a paradoxical way of curing her disease. Of course, they believe that the
mad girl – Sue – is Maud, as Gentleman has told them, and that she should not have helped
her uncle, as regular contact with literature is bad for women:
‘My wife,’ he says, ‘was born to a literary life. Her uncle, who raised her, is a man
dedicated to the pursuit of learning, and saw to her education as he might have seen to
a son’s. Mrs Rivers’s first passion was books.’
‘There you have it!’ says the doctor. ‘Her uncle, an admirable gentleman I don’t doubt.
But the over-exposure of girls to literature – The founding of women’s colleges –‘ His
brow is sleek with sweat. ‘We are raising a nation of brain-cultured women. Your
De Schryver 93
wife’s distress, I’m afraid to say, is part of a wider malaise. I fear for the future of our
race, Mr Rivers, I may tell you now. . .’ (Fingersmith 300)
This anxiety about the founding of women’s colleges is of course a reference to Alfred Lord
Tennyson’s poem The Princess, in which the writer addresses this subject. Mariaconcetta
Costantini claims that Sarah Waters in total “incorporates explicit references to Christina
Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Mrs Henry (Ellen) Wood, Joseph
Sheridan LeFanu [sic], Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and other writers, including the lessknown (often anonymous) authors of Victorian pornographic literature” (18).
All these
literary and cultural intertexts create the idea that this narrative is a “real” story. The
references place Fingersmith firmly in its nineteenth-century context and they provide
authority to the story. Waters applies a “vividly realized socio-historical context and dense
realistic detail” in Fingersmith (Matthews 289). Thus, the reader can develop the idea that the
voices in the story, those of women, lesbians, and thieves, have historical authority as well. Or
as Maud says before she learns the dirty secrets of her uncle’s book collection: “I suppose all
printed words to be true ones” (Fingersmith 186).
Typical of the neo-Victorian novel, and of the postmodern novel at large, is “the
inscribing into history, of previously “silent” groups defined by differences of race, gender,
sexual preferences, ethnicity, native status, class” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism
61). Sarah Waters indeed provides a voice to previously marginalised groups in society:
women, lesbians, pornographers, and criminals in particular. According to Matthews, the
“privileging of marginal identities and voices . . . implies a rather ‘Victorian sensationalism’,
as well as a determination to project contemporary social concerns on to the past” (287). The
former is exactly what Sarah Waters wanted to create – a tribute to the great Victorian
sensationalists – and the latter is the almost inevitable result of such an enterprise.
De Schryver 94
The women in Fingersmith, especially Maud and Sue, need to reclaim their voices.
The novel is told retrospectively; both Sue’s story – “My name in those days, was Susan
Trinder” (Fingersmith 3) – and Maud’s story – “The start, I think I know too well. It is the
first of my mistakes” (Fingersmith 179) – start with a reference to the past. Only by the end of
the novel, the women have sufficiently developed their own voices to tell their versions of the
past. Maud, on the one hand, was of course initially silenced as her uncle’s niece, as a
powerless young woman in the hands of a manipulative villain. When Gentleman elopes with
her, she does not receive the freedom that she had expected. They move to Lant Street, where
she is oppressed by both Gentleman and Mrs Suckbsy – who loves her so much that she
cannot let her be free. Maud is an anonymous girl in an enormous metropolis, and when she
escapes from Lant Street, she realises that she has no chance in the world on her own:
‘I have nowhere else,’ I answer, slowly and hopelessly. ‘I have nowhere and no-one. I
thought I knew it; I never knew it till now. I have nothing. No home – . . . No friends –
. . . No love . . .’
She draws in her breath; then speaks, in a whisper.
‘Dear girl, don’t you know? Ain’t I said, a hundred times –?’
I begin to weep – in frustration, exhaustion. ‘Why will you say it?’ I cry, through my
tears. ‘Why will you? Isn’t it enough, to have got me here? Why must you also love
me? Why must you smother and torment me, with your grasping after my heart?’
(Fingersmith 391)
Sue, on the other hand, is silenced by her class: she is a thief, a poor commoner that cannot
even write. When she is locked up in the madhouse, she literally loses her own voice: nobody
pays attention to her side of the story because everyone believes Gentleman’s version.
De Schryver 95
‘Help! Help!’ I cried. My voice sounded strange. ‘Oh, help! They have put me in here,
thinking I’m mad! Call Richard Rivers!’ I coughed. ‘Help! Doctor! Help! Can you
hear me?’ I coughed again. ‘Help! Can you hear me –?’
And so on. I stood and called, and coughed, and beat upon the door – only stopping,
now and then, to put my ear to it, to try to tell if there might be anyone near – for I
can’t say how long; and no-one came. (Fingersmith 400)
Despite all adversity and opposition, both women succeed in establishing their own voice by
the end of the novel. Maud’s uncle has died, leaving her – or rather, Sue – the house and the
inheritance. Maud destroys or sells most of his books and installs her own working space in
her uncle’s former library (Miller 24). Thus, she finally reclaims her own, creative voice when
she starts writing pornographic novels, “filled with all the words for how I want you …”
(Fingersmith 547). Miller notices that Maud no longer wears her gloves when she is writing,
and smudges herself and Sue, who wants to clean her up, with ink (25). With this act, Maud
and Sue’s bodies become “texts” as well, promising “joy and fulfillment [sic]” (Miller 25).
Maud has become a self-supporting woman, writing books that are no longer linked with
subjection and objectification, but with freedom, love, and independence. Sue establishes her
own voice when she finally recognises her love for Maud. She understands that she and Maud
were equally tricked and fooled, and all her arguments for hating Maud vanish. She lies ill for
some time – a symbolical transitional period between her old and new self – before she
undertakes the journey to Briar – all by herself this time. All the former constraints that
prevented her from speaking out, such as her poverty, her class, and her illiteracy, are no
longer confining her. The novel ends symbolically with Maud and Sue sitting together in front
of the fireplace in their regained consensual intimacy, reading books about their own love and
sexuality.
De Schryver 96
Fingersmith’s women belong to the traditional canon of sensation fiction’s heroines,
but at the same time they often subtly cut themselves loose from conventions. In The
Sensation Novel, Lyn Pykett provides an overview of the ways in which the sensation novel
made “a spectacle of ‘Woman’” – even the novels that were not written by female authors
were considered highly feminine (41-45). Typically, women in sensation fiction were
portrayed as full of “potentially uncontrollable feeling” (Pykett 45) – like Maud and Sue, the
former believing that she is hereditary inclined towards madness, and the latter for a brief
period considered a madwoman. However, Maud and Sue both free themselves from the idea
that they might be mad. In sensation fiction, marriage is often “the source of many of life’s
trials” for women (Pykett 45). To Maud and Sue, the marriage that the former believes will
provide her independence, is a source of many future problems and misunderstandings.
However, when Gentleman dies, both women are freed and they commit themselves to a love
bond that transcends marriage. The bigamy plot, an important subplot in sensation fiction, can
be traced in Fingersmith in the guise of a “spiritual or imagined bigamy or adultery plot” – “in
which heroines are legally married to one man while feeling themselves to be spiritually or
emotionally married to another” (Pykett 47): Maud commits herself to a marriage with
Gentleman, while her heart lies with Sue. However, their lesbian love, and the fact that they
cannot marry complicates and parodies the concept of bigamy. Additionally, the bigamy plot
often results in morally complex characters, “both innocent and guilty” (Pykett 46). Exactly
like Sue and Maud, who are not good girls, but not bad ones either – their transgressions and
crimes are mainly the consequences of their entrapments by gender, class, or society at large,
not of “innate” villainy. Pykett claims that the “most remarkable and remarked-upon criminals
and wrong-doers” in sensation novels written by female authors are women (49). Ultimately,
in Fingersmith, the main criminal is Mrs Suckbsy – however much she repents her mistakes at
De Schryver 97
the end of her life. But Waters leaves us under the impression that Gentleman is the villain for
more than 300 pages, until he reveals the true nature of the swindle:
‘You do everything, at her word?’
‘Everything in this case.’ He says it meaningfully; and when I hesitate, not
understanding, he goes on: ‘Listen to me, Maud. The scheme was hers, all of it. From
start to finish, hers. And, villain that I am, I am not so great a swindler that I would
swindle her of that.’ (Fingersmith 323).
In sensation fiction, two types of heroines can be distinguished: “active, assertive women,
who convey a sense of the threat of insurgent femininity trying to break out of the doll’s
house of domesticity, and passive, dependent women, who are imprisoned by it, unable to
articulate their sense of confinement, and driven to desperate measures” (Pykett 49).
Remarkable is that Sue and Maud both transform from one type of woman into another. They
both start out as passive women, whose lives are governed by the stronger forces surrounding
them, but throughout the novel they gain independence and become active participants in
society. Motherhood is another frequent theme in sensation fiction, especially absent mothers
and motherless girls are prominent sensation characters (Pykett 50). With Sue and Maud,
Waters produces two motherless girls, two heroines who are “both more assertive and
independent and/or more vulnerable than the woman who has been conventionally socialized
under the surveillance and guidance of a mother” (Pykett 51). Sue has had Mrs Sucksby as a
foster mother, but Maud has indeed grown up with no one else but her uncle and his mean
housekeeper. But, Sue and Maud’s lesbian relationship undercuts the conventional importance
of motherhood as well: in the nineteenth century, it is highly unlikely that two lesbian women,
living solitary in the countryside, would ever become mothers themselves.
As Samantha Matthews remarks, “the extent to which Waters recovers or invents
occluded lesbian history is complicated by the novels’ [Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and
De Schryver 98
Fingersmith] vividly realized socio-historical context and dense realistic detail” (289). For the
contemporary reader, it is almost impossible to say where the boundary between historically
plausible and implausible lesbianism lies. The knowledge that Sarah Waters has done doctoral
research on historical lesbian and gay writing is even more complicating to the informed
reader (Matthews 289). Waters wrote three novels “featuring lesbian protagonists finding
various ways to engage with their sexuality in Victorian England, a culture in which the
concept of lesbianism supposedly did not exist” (Dennis 41). She considers Fingersmith “an
act of theft”, because it is about “appropriating all the stuff I most love about 19th-century
[sic] fiction for a lesbian agenda” (“Her Thieving Hands” n. pag.). She wanted to give a voice
to the Victorian lesbian women, whose stories can seldom be retrieved, for, as Terry Castle
points out, “lesbianism has been manifest in the Western literary imagination primarily as an
absence” (King 4). Cora Kaplan claims that “the story she [Waters] tells is always a parallel
universe; counterfactual, imaginary, confected out of a range of materials that include
Victorian fiction, and a modern rewriting of the Victorian by feminist historians and critics,
among others” (“Fingersmith‘s Coda” 53). Fingersmith is not history as it was – because to
the postmodern author, there is no certainty about the past –, but a version of history; one of
several different possible histories. The story is a projection of lesbianism on to the past, in a
setting that is based on our knowledge of the Victorian era, but always influenced by modern
insights.
But Sue and Maud’s voices are present in the novel, and cannot be ignored. They bear
witness to their difficulties of accepting themselves and being accepted as lesbians in the
Victorian era. Contrasting with Tipping the Velvet, in which an entire range of lesbian
characters of all backgrounds and interests are presented, Fingersmith’s lesbian couple find
themselves quite alone in the story. The only other lesbians featuring in Fingersmith are
De Schryver 99
characters in Maud’s uncle’s pornographic books – characters invented to satisfy men’s
pleasures:
I think of the books I have lately read, to Richard and to my uncle: they come back to
me, now, in phrases, fragments – pressed her lips and tongue – takes hold of my hand
– hip, lip and tongue – forced it half-strivingly – took hold of my breasts – opened with
the lips of my little – the lips of her little cunt –
...
‘If she were any girl but Sue! If she were Agnes! If she were a girl in a book –!
Girls love easily, there. That is their point.
...
And at first, it is easy. After all, this is how it is done, in my uncle’s books: two girls,
one wise and one unknowing… (Fingersmith 280-281)
Consequently, lesbianism to Maud is something that is associated with pornography, with her
uncle’s vulgarities, such as “the Lust . . . of Men for Beasts” (Fingersmith 211). To Sue, her
feelings for Maud are simply unlike anything she has seen in the Borough, where she has
grown up with certain expectations of life: “I thought I knew all about love, in those days. I
thought I knew all about everything. If you had asked me how I supposed I should go on, I
dare say I would have said that I should like to farm infants. I might like to be married, to a
thief or a fencing-man” (Fingersmith 13). The thought that she might be different provokes
ambiguous feelings in Sue: on the one hand, loving Maud is something completely natural to
her, but on the other hand, her love disturbs her conventional ideas. Their love-making is a
first step towards the recognition of their lesbian identity, but society’s constraints –
represented by the intricate rules of the plot – are still too strong. They cannot break free from
tradition, to establish a new one. Cora Kaplan’s idea that the women in Sarah Waters’ fiction
are not always simply oppressed by men and male dominated society, but by women as well –
De Schryver 100
“an undertow of same-sex betrayal and sadism, psychological and sometimes physical” –, can
indeed be applied on Maud and Sue. Maud does not dare to act on her feelings and to
withdraw from the plot, thus condemning Sue to the madhouse, because she thinks that Sue
would do the same to her. Both Maud and Sue are willing to sacrifice the other to gain liberty.
By the end of the novel, however, Maud and Sue develop their independent voices, as women,
and as lesbians. They acknowledge their love for each other and accept their lesbian identity.
In Fingersmith, pornographers, who traditionally work in the margins of acceptability,
move towards the centre of literary attention. When Maud moves away from the fire during
one of her uncle’s readings, she says: “I like the shadows” (Fingersmith 213). Her utterance
can be interpreted figuratively in two ways: on the one hand, that she knows that she is not an
ordinary lady and is accustomed to life in the margins, but on the other hand, that she likes the
shadows from the viewpoint of her life, of which pornography is the centre. Maud is very
much aware of her marginal – and unique – position in society: “They say that ladies don’t
write such things. But, I’m not a lady…” (Fingersmith 546), and “Like me? There are no girls
like me” (Fingersmith 547). Indeed, “in the world of Victorian publishing there are no girls
like Maud, or if there were girls like Maud, they have been written out of history” (Miller 26).
As Lisa Z. Sigel remarks, finding evidence of the production, distribution and reception of
pornography in the Victorian era is hard: “Because of its illegality, the trade in pornography is
profoundly hidden” (6). Moreover, what was considered pornographic material often varied
according to the reading public and circumstances (Sigel 4). For example, in Victorian
England, “it was presumed that certain people could look at representations with limited
emotional, social, and legal consequences while others could not” (Sigel 4). Maud’s uncle, for
example, as a book collector and scholar, could collect and discuss pornography relatively
freely, under scientific pretences:
De Schryver 101
I am a curator of poisons. These books – look, mark them! mark them well! – they are
the poisons I mean. And this . . . is their Index. This will guide others in their
collection and proper study. There is no work on the subject as perfect as this will be,
when it is complete. I have devoted many years to its construction and revision; and
shall devote many more, as the work requires it. I have laboured so long among
poisons I am immune to them, and my aim has been to make you immune, that you
might assist me. (Fingersmith 198-199)
His voice, the voice of the scholarly bibliographer, is based on the preserved works and
opinions of Henry Spencer Ashbee: “Mr Lilly’s statements on book-collecting echo those of
Ashbee, but in all other respects he is entirely fictitious” (Fingersmith, Notes). Sarah Waters
uses this “erotomaniac” (Forman 777) as the basis for a fictional character whose ideas can
reach a wider public than Ashbee himself nowadays. Fingersmith displays two approaches to
the subcultures of the Victorian era; pornography is at the same time a mainstream and an
underground phenomenon. The visitors at Briar discuss pornography and eroticism freely,
because they all belong to an intimate circle of connoisseurs. To Maud, the world beyond
Briar seems at ease with the matters that are discussed constantly in her daily life. However,
when she finally goes to Holywell Street in London, where the pornographic shops are settled,
she is disappointed by its obscurity: “How have I imagined it? Not like this perhaps – not so
narrow, so crooked, so dark. The London day is still hot, still bright; in turning into Hollywell
Street, however, I seem to step into twilight” (Fingersmith 375). Sigel indeed claims that
Victorian pornography is such a complex system – not so much the “underworld” of Victorian
literature, but so intricately bound up with other social and cultural factors, that “the attempt
to segregate it as such does an injustice to the complicated world of British society and
cultural production” (10). Waters symbolizes the complexity and obscurity of pornography in
Maud’s character. Maud is initially disgusted by her uncle’s erotic books – “The books fill
De Schryver 102
me, at first, with a kind of horror: for it seems a frightful thing, that children, in becoming
women and men, should do as they describe” (Fingersmith 200) –, but eventually she
becomes a pornography writer herself. Exactly like pornography is inextractibly and
indiscernibly linked to life in general, it is part of Maud’s life as well. At the same time, Maud
is accepted by the people in Lant Street, part of the underworld themselves, – “Never mind it
now. Never mind it, here” (Fingersmith 318) –, but shunned as she tries to find shelter in
respectable society:
‘Be calmer. You know how queer this will look? Do you? What are my staff to think?
A girl comes asking for me urgently, sending up a riddling name…’ He laughs, not
happily. ‘What would my daughters say, my wife?’ (Fingersmith 379)
‘You know I am rich. If you’ll only help me, now. If you’ll only keep me –‘
‘Keep you! Do you know what you are saying? Keep you, where?’
‘Not in your own house?’
‘My house?’
‘I thought –‘
‘My house? With my wife and daughters? No, no.’ He has begun to pace.
‘But at Briar you said, many times –‘
‘Haven’t I told you? This is not Briar. The world is not like Briar. You must find that
out. . . .’ (Fingersmith 383)
The criminals in Fingersmith largely function as part of the setting. They are presented
to the reader as the people that surround Sue and Maud, but their characters are not analysed
in depth. As Costantini indicates, “Waters is not much interested in dramatising the passional
and pathological aspects of deviance. Rather, she aims at investigating the sociological causes
of crime, which could prompt any individual to violate the law without being constitutionally
evil” (32). The characters in Fingersmith often operate in a moral grey zone: they are neither
De Schryver 103
good nor bad. The one thing that the inhabitants of Lant Street have in common is the belief
that they are “honest thieves”: “we were that kind of thief that rather eased the dodgy deed
along, than did it” (Fingersmith 7). Sue, of course, is one of the criminals, but she indicates
herself that she is different than the others: “I think the people who came to Lant Street
thought me slow. – Slow I mean, as opposed to fast. Perhaps I was, by Borough standards”
(Fingersmith 14). Mrs Sucksby keeps her close and shields her from harm and abuse, so that
her life is never wretched or hard. Initially, the Lant Street kitchen is described as the epitome
of warmth, homeliness, and cosiness, where happy, ordinary people live together: “It was like
stepping out of heaven, I always thought, to leave our kitchen on a winter’s night”
(Fingersmith 45). While Sue is staying at Briar or in the madhouse, she constantly longs for
Lant Street: “I lay and shivered, and longed with all my heart for Mrs Sucksby, Lant Street,
home” (Fingersmith 62). But when she finally arrives back home after her heavy journey
from the madhouse to London, she discovers that Maud has simply usurped her place in the
household. As soon as the murder of Gentleman drives them apart, the cohabitants of Lant
Street try to save themselves and the household disintegrates. Dainty is the only one that stays
with Sue and looks after her when she is ill. Just like the stable household appears to be
nothing more than a cohabitation for convenience, Mrs Sucksby’s love for Sue turns out to be
a sham. Sue is the representation of money, and has to be kept safe and sound, to be
exchanged for Mrs Sucksby’s own daughter and her fortune. By the end of the novel, she
regrets her deeds and realises that Sue’s true nature could never be suppressed: “That she and
your mother had been wrong. That they meant to make you a commonplace girl. That that
was like taking a jewel, and hiding it in the dust. That dust falls away…” (Fingersmith 543).
Sarah Waters has derived background information for her criminals from “the Victorians’
documentary interest in their own underworlds”, such as “those worldly, plangent, poignant
voices captured by social investigators such as Henry Mayhew, author of the mammoth
De Schryver 104
London Labour and the London Poor” or “Charles Manby Smith’s Curiosities of London
Life” (“Sensational Stories” n. pag.). “The London Street-Folk” (3), whose lives and habits
Mayhew describes, “the curiosities of roguery” from Mansby’s pages (148), and the kitchen
from Dickens’s Oliver Twist are all mixed together in a tale that tries to provide attention to
the voices of the criminals, although these are only minor characters. Often, the criminal
characters seem to risk becoming caricatures, but most of them at some point break
expectations. John Vroom, a very dislikeable, aggressive character, surprises the reader when
he first thinks of Dainty’s safety after the murder: “‘The blues!’ said John. He turned, and
came to Dainty. ‘Dainty, run!’ he said. She stood for a second, then went – the back way –
tearing the bolts from their cradles. – ‘Go on!’ he said, when she looked back” (Fingersmith
507).
The neo-Victorian novel uses conventions of past literary forms to “project
contemporary social concerns on to the past” (Matthews 287). Cora Kaplan explains that
Fingersmith has “a considerable indebtedness to feminist, gay, lesbian and queer critics and
social and cultural historians of Victorian Britain” (Fingersmith’s Coda 42). Feminist
intervention into the field of Victorian studies began in the 1960s, and became mainstream by
the late 1980s (Kaplan, “Fingersmith’s Coda” 43-45). Initially, most women novelists were
more concerned with their own time than with the past; a situation that changed dramatically
in the 1980s and 1990s, “with the revival in popularity of historical fiction in general” (King
2). The present-day concern for gender and sexuality is obviously present in Fingersmith,
which retraces the voices of women and lesbians in the nineteenth century. Moreover, neoVictorian novels create “a dialogue between narratives of the present day and the nineteenth
century” (Kirchknopf 54). The contemporary versions of Victorian novels, abounding in
intertextuality, “manage to supply different perspectives from the canonised Victorian ones”
(Kirchknopf 54). The voices of marginalised groups that never mattered in the Victorian age
De Schryver 105
do matter now. The experiences of Maud and Sue as women and lesbians are still topical in
the twenty-first century. Women nowadays are interested in the origins and development of
their emancipation, and in many countries, their struggle to gain independence is ongoing.
Social vices such as “the children market, the diffusion of pornography, the underworld of
thieves and the consequences of urban decline” (Costantini 30) currently still preoccupy
present-day interests. Fingersmith’s themes resonate long after the reader has closed the book,
and this is exactly one of its strengths.
De Schryver 106
6. Conclusion
Fingersmith shares many characteristics with the most prominent representatives of
the sensation genre. Sarah Waters places Fingersmith in the tradition of sensation fiction by
including numerous references to Victorian sensation novels in her narrative. From Wilkie
Collins’s The Woman in White, she borrows the theme of madness in general: the supposed
madness of the female protagonists and their weak positions as women, and especially the
narrative twist at the madhouse. Certain characters in both novels and their interpersonal
relations can be linked as well. From Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Waters
derives the motif of hereditary madness, marriage as a solution to life in poverty, and the
switching of identities between two women. Both Fingersmith and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle
Silas deal with the precarious situation of women in Victorian England and with certain class
issues. Waters uses the image of the decaying mansion from Charles Dickens’s Great
Expectations, and parodies the opening lines of this novel.
Sarah Waters honours the great Victorian sensation novels, but goes beyond simple
adaptation of the sensation theme. She appropriates the characteristics of the sensation novel
to enshrine the past, but to modify our traditional view of that same past as well. As a
postmodern novel, Fingersmith uses multiple voices and narrative unreliability to undermine
the idea that the historical truth is knowable. In the nineteenth-century sensation novel, the
true facts of the matter could always be retrieved by the efforts of one of the protagonists.
Sarah Waters does present a closed narrative to her readers, but throughout the story, she
subverts the truth to such an extent, and creates so many versions of it, that doubt about the
possibility of truthful knowledge arises. Madness – already thoroughly explored in Victorian
sensation fiction – becomes a symbol for the disintegration of stable identities – and thus part
of characterisation rather than of plot – and the power of men over women in Waters’s hands.
De Schryver 107
Fingersmith shatters the illusion that the version of the past that has reached our era is the
only version that existed at the time.
In Fingersmith, Sarah Waters creates the opportunity to unearth the lost voices of the
nineteenth century. As a female and a lesbian author, she is very much concerned with trying
to retrieve the voices of women and of lesbians from behind the pages of nineteenth-century
history and fiction. Pornographers and criminals, mainly part of the underbelly of Victorian
society, receive attention too. By means of Sue and Maud, she illustrates the difficulties that
women and lesbians still experience today, but clearly emphasises the happy ending that is
possible for both women – although their opponents are disposed of rather easily. Ultimately,
the reader must keep in mind that Fingersmith is a possible version of the truth as well – not
the truth as such.
Sarah Waters succeeds in creatively intermingling low and high literary genres,
something she had achieved earlier in Tipping the Velvet and Affinity. Fingersmith rewrites
sensation fiction, a mainstream and extremely popular, but not a high literary genre in the
nineteenth century19 – Sheridan Le Fanu’s reluctance to apply the label “sensation novel” on
his works speaks for itself. Other popular nineteenth-century intertexts are present in the
narrative as well. Fingersmith is at the same time a work of literature, shortlisted for The Man
Booker Prize in 2002, and simply tremendous fun for the reader. Or, as Julie Myerson says in
a review for The Guardian: “Long, dark, twisted and satisfying, it's a fabulous piece of
writing, but Waters's most impressive achievement is that she also makes it feel less like
reading, more like living: an unforgettable experience” (n. pag.).
19
“The sensation novel has been regarded, almost from the moment of its inception, as a minor, marginal and
short-lived form” (Pykett, The Sensation Novel 12).
De Schryver 108
Eventually, the real “fingersmith20” throughout the novel is Waters herself – she is the
one that “pilfers from the past to produce utterly contemporary lesbian fiction” (“Her
Thieving Hands” n. pag.). Waters’s hands – her fingers – direct the entire novel; like a
puppeteer she controls the story, from its sensational indebtedness to its contemporary
transformations.
20
Sarah Waters claims that “fingersmith” is “nineteenth-century slang for thief”, and Sue uses the word with
this meaning (Miller, Endnotes 1). However, as Miller indicates, “in light of the novel’s discussion of Victorian
pornographic literary subcultures, the term also carries a sexual connotation” (Endnotes 1).
De Schryver 109
Appendix: Sarah Waters: A Biography
Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966 (Sarah Waters Website). Her childhood was
“very ordinary, very traditional”, as she describes it herself in an interview with The Guardian
(Allardice n. pag.). As a child, she liked to read and write – “Gothic stories of people meeting
grisly ends and ghost stories with diabolical twists, all of which I’d stolen from other writers”
(Waters qtd. in Allardice n. pag.). Waters went to three British universities, and obtained a
PhD in English Literature. Her PhD dissertation, “Wolfskins and togas: lesbian and gay
historical fictions, 1870 to the present”, provided the necessary inspiration for several of her
novels, including Fingersmith (Sarah Waters Website).
As soon as her PhD was finished, Waters started working on her first novel, Tipping
the Velvet, set in the late nineteenth century. It tells the story of young oyster-girl Nan Astley,
who falls desperately in love with a male impersonator, Kitty Butler, whom she sees
performing at a nearby theatre. They become intimate friends, and when Kitty asks Nan to
come away with her to exciting London, Nan follows her immediately. One icy night, they
admit their love for each other and start an affair. When Nan finds out later that Kitty cheats
on her with her manager, she runs off and soon finds herself entangled in a range of
picaresque, lesbian adventures. Living through the greatest possible bliss and the worst
possible humiliation, Nan eventually has her happy ending – although a quite different one
than she initially set out to get. The novel was published in 1998 and won several prizes in the
following years. In 2002, Tipping the Velvet was adapted into a successful TV series for the
BBC by Andrew Davies (Allardice n. pag.). It introduced Waters to a wider public, and
explicitly displayed lesbian sex in living rooms all over Britain and the world.
Affinity is Sarah Waters’s second novel. She returns to Victorian London, but chooses
a completely different setting: a vast, monstrous women’s prison near the Thames, where
Margaret Prior, the Lady Visitor, finds herself strangely fascinated by the spiritualist medium
De Schryver 110
Selina Dawes. Whereas Tipping the Velvet was “fun to write” (Sarah Waters Website),
Affinity presents “a very gloomy world to have to go into every day” (Powell’s Books n. pag.).
The novel deals with quite a few serious themes: death, suicide, spiritualism, imprisonment,
addiction, and the hopeless situation of a middle-class spinster in nineteenth-century England.
At the same time, its plot is very complex, with deviations and unexpected turns, already
foreshadowing her third novel, Fingersmith. Affinity was adapted for the screen as well;
Andrew Davies provided the screenplay.
In 2002, Sarah Waters’s third novel, Fingersmith, was published. Set in the middle of
the nineteenth century and clearly based on the 1860s sensation novel, with its complicated
plot, multiple points of view and lively characters, Fingersmith tells the story of two orphans,
Susan Trinder and Maud Lilly. After being switched at birth, one grows up in a den of petty
thieves in vibrant London, and the other in a quiet, restricted country house amidst an
enormous erotic library. Through intricate scheming both are tricked, and find out that
cheating on someone is not that easy – particularly not when love takes over. The novel was
critically acclaimed and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Orange Prize. Moreover,
Waters won the CWA Ellis Peters Dagger Award for Historical Crime Fiction and The South
Bank Show Award for Literature. In 2003, the year following the publication of Fingersmith,
Sarah Waters was granted the Author of The Year award three times and she was chosen as
one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists as well. Fingersmith was turned into a TV
series in 2005, starring among others Sally Hawkins, Imelda Staunton, Elaine Cassidy and
Rupert Evans.
In 2006, Sarah Waters turned away from the Victorian era and tried her hand at
something else. Her fourth novel, The Night Watch, is set in the 1940s in London, and tells
the stories of four protagonists, Kay, Helen, Viv, and Duncan. The Night Watch is very
different from her other novels in different respects: first and foremost, it does not deal with
De Schryver 111
the Victorian era. Secondly, she started writing with only “a mood, a sketchy sense of my
characters, and a general idea about the novel's backward structure” (Sarah Waters Website),
whereas her previous novels were largely planned beforehand. Thirdly, it took Waters quite a
while to write the novel, simply because so much new research had to be done. Like
Fingersmith, The Night Watch was shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize and the Orange
Prize. Waters herself confirms that the BBC is currently developing a project to turn The
Night Watch into a TV series (Sarah Waters Website).
Waters’s fifth – and last up till now – novel, The Little Stranger, was published in
2009. Again, she breaks away from her previous writing, by leaving the lesbian theme behind,
and introducing us to a male protagonist in postwar Britain. One day, Dr. Faraday is called to
Hundred’s Hall, the deteriorated eighteenth-century estate of the Ayres family, to treat a
young maid, who claims that strange events are happening at the house. Faraday soon
becomes the family’s physician and friend, and his life becomes intertwined with that of
Roderick, Caroline, Mrs Ayers and “the little stranger” that starts haunting the house. The
novel was received with mostly positive reviews, praising mainly Waters’s amazing
storytelling skill and detailed descriptions. The film rights to The Little Stranger were sold
shortly after its publication, and rumour has it that the movie might come out in 2011.
Sarah Waters lives in South London, where she has bought an old house with a big
garden. “She exudes a quiet humility and broadcasts little of the enormous success she has
reaped in the past decade”, as one interviewer of The Sydney Morning Herald remarks, but
does enjoy the additional money that allows her to live comfortably the way she likes it (n.
pag.). And that way of life includes gardening and pottering with her partner Lucy, watching
television, and writing, of course. Being a writer is a full-time job for Waters, and now that
the promotion tour for The Little Stranger is finished, she is “giving [her] brain a rest”
De Schryver 112
(Sydney Morning Herald n. pag.), before starting new research. Her next book will probably
be set in the 1920s or 1930s, but that is not even sure (Sydney Morning Herald n. pag.).
Apart from being known as a historical novelist, Sarah Waters is often regarded as a
lesbian novelist. Waters was a university student when she fell in love with a woman for the
first time – although she always believed that she might be bisexual (Allardice n. pag.).
Logically, lesbianism is a subject that she fondly discusses in her work. Four of her five
novels indeed feature lesbian protagonists and minor characters. Waters sees herself as “a
historical novelist first and a lesbian writer second” (Allardice n. pag.) Being so strongly
identified as a lesbian writer, however, does not bother Waters. She is well aware of the fact
that her novels are so distinctly lesbian, and is proud of being a lesbian herself. Nevertheless,
she says:
I don't sit down at my desk every morning thinking, ‘I am a lesbian writer'. Most of
my working life is spent grappling with words and stories – and at that point I am
simply ‘a writer', like any other writer. In other words, lesbian passions and issues are
there in my books in the same way that they are there in my life: they are both vitally
important to me, and completely incidental. (Sarah Waters Website)
Sarah Waters’s novels are often set in London, because she has a special relationship
with London herself. “I live in London, I love London, and I feel very attached to London’s
topography, and my characters tend to as well”, she says in an interview with Abigail Dennis
(49). Dennis emphasises that London has “such a grasp on the historical imagination” (50),
which Waters certainly agrees to. “You can’t walk down a city street without being conscious
of the layers of history”, she claims (Waters qtd. in Dennis 50). And that is exactly what her
novels express: an awareness of history being all around us, always.
De Schryver 113
Appendix: Fingersmith: Plot Summary
Part One
London 1862. Susan “Sue” Trinder, a 17-year-old orphan, lives in Lant Street along
with the people she considers her family, a group of petty thieves, who use the kitchen of the
house as their hideout. Mrs. Sucksby, who raises little abandoned babies to sell off later on,
has raised Sue as well, and takes extraordinary good care of the girl. Mr. Ibbs, her “adoptive
father”, is involved in illegal coin-melting and swindling stolen goods. The other people
inhabiting the house, John and Dainty, are both small criminals. One rainy day, “Gentleman”
arrives in Lant Street. As on old family acquaintance, he has a special task for which he has
singled out Sue. Calling himself Richard Rivers, he is currently in the service of an old man
who lives very secluded in the countryside and has one niece. This niece, Maud Lilly, will
inherit a fortune left to her by her mother, when she marries. Sue has to become Maud’s
personal maid, and convince her to marry Gentleman. Once they are married, the new Mrs.
Rivers will be disposed of in a madhouse, and Gentleman and Sue will cut the shine.
After some initial hesitation, Sue agrees to Gentleman’s proposal, and Dainty prepares
her for her work as a lady’s maid. Sue travels to Briar, where she meets Maud, who is indeed
the sheltered and unworldly girl that Gentleman described to her. Like Sue, Maud is an
orphan, who has no one else but her uncle, who keeps her close and uses her as a secretary to
assist him in the compilation of a large dictionary. Sue and Maud only have each other in
Briar House, and find that they rather like each other’s company. Sue soon realizes that she is
falling passionately in love with Maud, and starts to regret her involvement in Gentleman’s
plan. Nevertheless, she does convince Maud to marry him, out of fear for what Gentleman
might do to her and what people back home would think of her.
And thus, the plan is carried out: the three conspirers flee away at night and
Gentleman and Maud get married in a small church. The couple and Sue lodge in a nearby
De Schryver 114
cottage, waiting for their affairs to be arranged in London, as they tell Maud. Poor Maud is
getting sicker and thinner each day, suffering from the sudden escape from her secluded life
and the marriage to Gentleman, whom she does not love, according to Sue. Gentleman
arranges for some doctors of an asylum to come and see Maud, and Sue reluctantly plays
along. They decide to take Maud away the next week, and the three of them take a closed
carriage towards the asylum. Upon their arrival, the doctors seize Sue instead of Maud, and
Sue suddenly realizes that she has been fooled herself. As the carriage with Maud and
Gentleman drives away, Sue’s final thoughts are: “You thought her a pigeon. Pigeon, my arse.
That bitch knew everything. She had been in on it from the start” (Fingersmith 175).
Part Two
Maud Lilly is born in the madhouse where her mother dies giving birth to her. She
spends the first ten years of her life as the pet of the nurses and is encouraged to be cruel
towards the troublesome madwomen. Suddenly, her uncle appears and takes her away to live
with him and become his personal secretary. She is treated cruelly by her uncle and his
household staff, until she learns to obey his orders. From then on, she is introduced to his
library and his dictionary, which turns out to be a large compilation of pornographic books
and pictures – “The Universal Library of Priapus and Venus” (Fingersmith 201). Embittered
by the turn her life has taken, she bites, bruises and kicks her maid Agnes and her uncle’s
housekeeper, Mrs Stiles, and she curses her mother’s portrait daily.
One day, years later, Richard Rivers arrives at Briar to help Mr. Lilly mounting his
pictures. Maud reads parts from erotic novels to the gentlemen that visit her uncle, and one
night after her performance, Mr. Rivers comes to her room with an enticing proposal: he will
bring a girl to Briar that they will use and fool for their own benefit. Mr. Rivers tells Maud
about the inheritance, the existence of which she was unaware. His plan is installing a girl as
De Schryver 115
Maud’s maid and making that girl believe that she will trick Maud for a trifle. She will
suppose Maud an innocent goose and will persuade her into a marriage with Mr. Rivers. As
soon as they are married, the girl will take Maud’s place and will be put in the madhouse,
together with Maud’s name and past, leaving Maud a fortune and an entirely clean slate for
the future. Maud suppresses her conscience and decides to grasp this one chance at freedom.
A short while later, Sue arrives at Briar and Maud pretends to be a simple, ignorant
girl. Sue’s belief in Maud’s inherent goodness and her true kindness catch Maud unaware, and
she quickly falls in love with her maid. One night, pretending she does not know a thing about
sex, Maud asks Sue what a woman must do on her wedding night. They spend a passionate
night together, and Maud starts to doubt whether she will be able to carry out Mr. Rivers’s
plan. Eventually, she keeps on telling herself that Sue is her only chance to get out of this life
and that Sue wanted to cheat on her as well, and the plan is carried out. Sue is left in the
madhouse, and Maud leaves with Mr. Rivers, to London, where he has promised to live with
her in a large house in Chelsea.
Maud indeed goes to London, but when she arrives in the kitchen in Lant Street, she
soon realizes that she has been fooled as well. Gentleman’s plan was to take her to Lant Street
and Mrs. Sucksby from the beginning. After her initial surprise with London and the
unexpected arrival in Lant Street, Maud starts to rebel against the people that keep her
imprisoned in the house. She wants to know who they are, and why they brought her there.
Mrs. Sucksby tells Maud that seventeen years ago, a lady in trouble knocked at her door. She
was pregnant, abandoned by her lover, and pursued by her cruel father and brother. When
they suddenly showed up in Lant Street, she begged Mrs. Sucksby to take her newborn child
and trade it for a “farmed” infant of hers. In that way, her own child would never be
imprisoned in the large house, chained to her brother and father. The lady gave her baby a
plain name, Susan, and traded her for another orphan, Maud - a name appropriate for a lady.
De Schryver 116
To right the wrong done to the poor orphan, the lady decided to write a will in which she
splits up her fortune: Maud and Susan will each receive one half when they become eighteen.
By having Sue committed to the madhouse, and bringing Maud to Lant Street right
before her eighteenth birthday, Mrs. Sucksby and Gentleman, as Sue’s – or rather Mrs.
Rivers’s – husband, will be able to claim the entire fortune for themselves. Maud has no one
she knows in London and resigns to her situation. She makes one escape attempt, in which
she runs across the entire city on bleeding feet, to find a friend of her uncle’s, Mr. Hawtrey.
Unfortunately, Mr. Hawtrey is ashamed of Maud and the scandal she has fallen into, and fears
that her visit will harm his own reputation. He tries to bring her to a home for “destitute
gentlewomen” (Fingersmith 388), and she has no other choice but to return to Lant Street.
Mrs. Sucksby welcomes her home and tells her the last part of the story: Maud is not just an
ordinary orphan, but her own daughter.
Part Three
Sue’s story is resumed at the moment she is double-crossed at the madhouse, furious
at the betrayal. She shrieks desperately that she is Susan Smith, and not Mrs. Rivers, and that
they have taken the wrong girl. But Gentleman and Maud have told the doctors that this is
exactly Sue’s mental illness – she is Mrs. Rivers, the legal wife of Mr. Rivers, but she has
delusions in which she believes that she is a servant. Moreover, Gentleman has found out that
Sue and Maud were romantically involved, and has told the doctors that his supposed wife has
sexually harassed her servant, Maud.
Sue is treated appallingly by the nurses at the asylum; they beat her, pinch her, sow her
hair to her head and disparage her continuously. After a while, Sue begins to doubt her own
life and story, and starts to believe that she has truly gone mad. The only two things that keep
De Schryver 117
her going are the certitude that kind Mrs. Sucksby will come for her, and the will to take
revenge on Gentleman and Maud, whose glove she hides in her bosom and bites daily.
One day, Charles, the jack of all trades at Briar, shows up at the asylum. He pines for
the attentions of charming Mr. Rivers, and has run away from Briar to find him. Via the
owner of the cottage where Maud, Sue and Gentleman slept after the marriage, he found out
the address of the asylum, where he thought to come across Maud. Charles’s visit helps Sue to
recover her sanity, and she convinces him to return with a blank key and a file. He does so,
and Sue manages to escape with the lock-picking skills she learnt growing up in the Borough.
Charles and Sue set out on a journey throughout the English countryside, to London, to Lant
Street, and to Mrs. Sucksby.
Upon arrival in London, Sue stoops halfway Lant Street when she sees Maud looking
out of her own bedroom window. She believes that Maud has taken her place in Lant Street,
by deceiving every one, especially Mrs. Sucksby. Sue and Charles take up lodgings at the
decrepit house across the street, from where Sue watches her old home continuously. She
sends Charles with a letter to Mrs. Sucksby, still believing that Mrs. Sucksby is not involved
in Gentleman’s and Maud’s plot. Charles’s letter is intercepted by Maud, who sends Sue a
playing card, the two of hearts – representing love and reminding her of one afternoon when
Sue predicted Maud’s future. Sue is half-mad with rage, believing that Maud is making fun of
her after all she has been through, grabs a knife and bursts into the Lant Street kitchen.
Mrs. Sucksby is astonished, but listens to Sue’s story, meanwhile pretending she does
not know a thing of what has truly happened. Sue takes up the knife and swears she will kill
Maud, despite Mrs. Sucksby’s attempts to calm her down. Gentleman enters the kitchen and
tries to reveal Mrs. Sucksby’s role in the plot, shocked by Sue’s sudden appearance. Maud
tries to silence Gentleman physically, fearing that Sue would suffer too much from hearing
about Mrs. Sucksby’s involvement. Mrs. Sucksby tries to hush Gentleman as well, afraid that
De Schryver 118
he will tell the truth about Maud being her own daughter. When Gentleman starts making
allusions to Sue and Maud’s secret love affair, Sue lurches towards him and in the fight with
the three women, Gentleman is stabbed by the knife that Sue had brought with her. He
quickly bleeds to death in the kitchen, and terrified Charles runs out on the street, screaming
for help. The police enter the kitchen, and Mrs. Sucksby, covered in Gentleman’s blood,
immediately pleads guilty, saying that the two girls are absolutely innocent bystanders.
Mrs. Sucksby is hanged for killing Gentleman. who turns out to be an ordinary fraud,
instead of an impoverished gentleman. Sue visits Mrs. Sucksby daily in the weeks leading up
to her trial and execution. Maud disappears without trace, but Sue sees her for a moment in
the court room and finds out that Maud is visiting Mrs. Sucksby as well. A few weeks after
the hanging, devastated Sue finds a letter tucked away in Mrs. Sucksby taffeta gown.
Surprised, she finally learns the truth about herself, Maud, and Mrs. Sucksby. She realizes that
Maud was deceived as much as she was, and sets out to find her. On the journey back to
Briar, she learns that Mr. Lilly has died, and that the house is abandoned. Nevertheless, she
finds Maud in Mr. Lilly’s old library, and learns the nature of the books that he collected and
that Maud is writing now to earn a living. Maud and Sue admit that they are still madly in
love with each other despite everything that happened, and finally kiss.
De Schryver 119
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