This attitude – exemplified by the plausible but made-up slang that forms their titles – is an attempt to inhabit rather than transcend one’s sources, to do Victorian fiction as faithfully as possible but to include the bits that couldn’t be said or depicted at the time, thereby adding a modern sensibility. These books are characterised by a kind of pastiche – they do not try and hide their source material (Dickens, Mayhew, the sensation novel, social investigation, academic literary criticism), but instead flaunt their fictiveness and wear it proudly as a badge of honour, a kind of homage to Mrs Braddon et al. This is shown by the fact that Fingersmith was part of a wave of ‘neo-Victorian’ fiction which emerged in the 1990s, and includes Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), and Waters’ other two Victorian novels Tipping the Velvet (1999) and Affinity (2002), though she has since moved on to the 1940s ( The Night Watch, and The Little Stranger). The main reason that the motifs of Fingersmith are so familiar and enduring, I think, is that for all the fact-mongering of the professional historian, our view of the Victorian past owes far more to its literary heritage than to any learned footnote. It would of course be foolish to start measuring Fingersmith against the ‘real’ historical sources, as it is not my job here to demand that it be ‘more authentic’, more like the actual historical accounts presented by Ian Gibson and the like, but to examine the reasons why certain stories about the past and not others have come to the fore.
Any historian analysing a historical novel is bound to appear a little pedantic, taking a spade to the proverbial soufflé, but here goes.
0 kommentar(er)
