Armadale Read Online Free Page B

might well wonder), does she keep a journal – something that may send her to the gallows:
    Why do I keep a diary at all? Why did the clever thief the other day (in the English newspapers) keep the very thing to convict him, in the shape of a record of every thing he stole? Why are we not perfectly reasonable in all that we do? Why am I not always on my guard and never inconsistent with myself, like a wicked character in a novel? Why? why? why? (p. 559)
    Lydia is similarly perplexed by her uncontrollable love for her victim,Midwinter. At other points in the narrative, she actually fears herself and wishes that – to spare the human race – she might be locked up. Why, she wonders, does she so hate Allan? Or does she hate him? Is it love gone wrong that makes her so vindictive? Do women love the men they poison? The ‘Why? why? why?’ is never satisfactorily answered.
    Lydia’s inability to fathom her own motives, her irrationalism and her fatal inability to control her temper (the typical weakness of redheads) leads her to commit a string of blunders – leaving her employment at Thorpe-Ambrose in a tantrum of rage against Neelie, for instance. Banished from the household, she has no hope of entrapping Allan in marriage. Steeping herself in laudanum is another inexplicable stupidity in one so calculating. Her strange refusal to shed her name for the purpose of disguise, which leads her into the absurdity of pretending to be ‘the other Miss Gwilt’, is bizarre. One of the most interesting and experimental sections of the novel is that in which Collins offers us a double perspective on the same crucial days in late July 1851: in the form of Lydia’s confidential (but actually very guarded) letters to Mother Jezebel, and in the form of her more candid journal entries for the same days. But even with this binocular insight, Lydia remains invincibly mysterious.
    The reviewers of
Armadale
hated Lydia Gwilt, and she was probably one of the reasons for the novel selling badly when it came out in volume form in May 1866. Mrs Oliphant (an inveterate foe to sensation fiction) had complained that in Gollins’s previous novel,
No Name
, the criminal heroine had been allowed to live. Collins would not make that mistake in
Armadale
(and his epigraph on the title page made it clear that Miss Gwilt was not to profit from her wrongdoing). None the less, his critics were unmollified. The
Spectator
foamed with rage at a novel which ‘gives us for its heroine a woman fouler than the refuse of the streets’. Collins had overstepped the limits of decency and ‘revolted every human sentiment’. This reviewer and others were particularly indignant that Lydia remained beautiful to the end – despite her evil ways. She would have been acceptable if, like Isabel Vane in
East Lynne
, she had been providentially disfigured (perhaps a rotted nose, or loss of teeth, or premature whitening of her red hair would have sufficed). In the
Athenaeum
, Collins’s erstwhile friend Henry Chorley was, if anything, even more apoplectic in his denunciation of Lydia: ‘one of the most hardened female villains whose devices and desires have ever blackened literature’. Wilkie, one suspects, was unrepentant (although he would doubtless have liked good sales). And most modernreaders will have a more generous and thoughtful reaction to the fascinating Miss Gwilt than the affronted moral guardians of 1866.
    If Lydia is the most interesting creation in the novel, Ozias Midwinter runs her close. He seems to have been initially conceived as a deliberate contradiction to elements in Thackeray’s novel
Philip
, which ran in the
Cornhill Magazine
a couple of years before (1861–2).
Philip
sets up a tendentious opposition between the manly, Anglo-Saxon, blue-eyed, hearty hero of the title and his odious rival, the mulatto, Captain Grenville Woolcomb. Woolcomb (who is West Indian by origin) is sexually