The Crimson Petal and the White is the least Jane-Eyre-adjacent of our three peripheral texts. It's more Jane-Eyre-inverted. Jane-Eyre-photo-negative. Eckart Voigts-Virchow (who I swear I did not invent) suggests that many Neo-Victorian texts feature pickpockets and whores because they are trying to distance themselves from Victorian elitism and to suggest that Victorian sub-cultures are our mainstream, on account of we are so enlightened now. Faber, I think he's got your number.
Because so much of TCPatW is Victorian novelia in a funhouse mirror. Jane is a whore named Sugar, equally steely-spined but whose moral laxity doesn't just differ from Jane's inexorable righteousness, it stands in direct opposition to it. She is to deviant sex acts as Jane is to moments of hard-won restraint.
But if the prim, English governess is a lascivious English whore, what of the mad, half-caste, wildly sensuous first wife? Still mad, y'all. But delicately mad, with fainting fits and holy visions and a sweet little rosebud mouth. Silly aristocracy, so religious and frail (and potentially inbred [totally just my inference and not at all supported by the text except that aristocracy is all inbred, innit?]). Anyway, put that in your post-colonial pipe and smoke it.
Oh, and Rackham? No surly, tortured Rochester, him. Younger son, yes. Inherits too late to save self from disastrous marriage, yes. But instead of churlishly noble, he's pretty insipid. Youthful pretentions of being a writer, har har. Artistic aspirations overthrown once down to the business of...business! Occasionally impotent! The upper class is infinitely mockable.
And if you, dear Reader, were looking for your tidy Victorian ending, prepare to be enraged (and to send furious letters to the author so that he eventually caves and writes The Apple as a supplement [true story]). Prepare to feel enraged on purpose, because the narrative voice that has been 'dear Reader'ing you all along and keeping you out as much as letting you in, this voice flips you a verbal bird as it lops the story off. You wanted to know what happens to all and sundry, Middlemarch-style? This is a book, and books end.
Final qualification: as a novel, I quite enjoyed it, but as a loving 'fuck you' to Victorian literature, I got sick of being constantly picked at. Oh! Cautionary Whale: Crimson Petal adds in ALL the sex that every Victorian novel has left out, ever. There is hella sex, is what I'm saying. Don't read it on the bus, or you will feel shifty.
Drop your reviews in the Linky, I know you have them.
This novel segues nicely into Fallen Woman Week. Join us next Friday as we examine The French Lieutenant's Woman and Ruth, both of whom (I assume) fall.
