![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
‘We had not long been installed in Morley cottage before I grew certain that fossils were to be my passion. For I had to find a passion: I was twenty five years old, unlikely ever to marry; and in need of a hobby to fill my days. It is so tedious being a lady sometimes.’The quote above is made by Miss Elizabeth Philpot, one of the unmarried narrators of ‘Remarkable Creatures’ by Tracy Chevalier. Yes, ‘Remarkable Creatures’ is one of those rare books about single women who stay single. I think from the quote you can tell that unmarried women in the early nineteenth century didn’t claim their single status with happiness like many modern women do, instead they made the best of their situation and if they were lucky came out of life contented by other passions. Chevalier gets deep into the complicated mix of freedom and depression being unmarried brought at that time in her new historical novel.
Elizabeth and her sisters come from a large, middle class, London family. The Philpot women are not excessively beautiful, nor is their family rich. Marriage is an expensive business and only one sister, Frances, can afford to marry. Their brother inherits their London house, then marries and the three remaining sisters, Elizabeth, Louise and Margaret find themselves herded towards a quiet, inexpensive life away from London.
Historical fiction makes it hard for authors to provide kind fates for women who are perpetually single (we do not use the spin- word on this blog) and each sister must find a way to fill her life. The three settle in a small cottage in Lyme Regis, where Louise gardens, Margaret briefly becomes the centre of good society and Elizabeth takes an interest in the fossilised fish that can be found on Lyme’s rocky beaches. While Elizabeth and Louise are, if not continually content to be unmarried, at least able to absorb themselves in their own lives, Margaret is desperate to marry. She almost gets her chance, but her potential suitor is deterred by her sisters irregularities. Chevalier is bound by the constraints of the time period she is writing about and must reflect the cruelty of a restrictive British society towards unmarried women (and although I knew there could be no sex outside of marriage, when I realised unmarried, straight women might never even kiss a man I was pretty depressed). While Chevalier gives Elizabeth freedom and times of contentment, she doesn’t shy from showing little social details that constantly remind Elizabeth of her unmarried, unfinished status:
‘ “Do you like it, ma’am – miss?” Mary persisted.
I flinched. Was it so very obvious that I was not married? Of course it was. For one thing, I had no husband with me, looking after and indulging me. But there was something else about married women I had noticed, their solid smugness about not having to worry about the course of their future.’ .
She also contrasts Elizabeth’s life with Margaret’s, showing how hard an enforced single life was for a woman who desired a husband and a conventional life. I would have liked to see a little more development of Louise, as she tends to get left in the shadows as the calm, gardening sister and with two strongly developed sisters beside her, then later two other complicated female characters, Louise’s character and her feelings about her unmarried state feel incomplete.
Overall though I thought the realisation of the sisters predicament as unmarried women was well done in ‘Remarkable Creatures’. The sniggers, the frustrated dreams, the jealousy feels tragic and conversely the sister’s happy freedoms feel like a reason to fist pump. However, there were times when Chevalier’s portrayal of unmarried women felt repetitive. She often has Elizabeth openly muse on the problems of being an unmarried woman, then swiftly follows that up with a reference to the different freedoms being unmarried brings. Chevalier has done such a wonderful job of showing us how being unmarried affects the sisters that there’s no need for her to make Elizabeth self-consciously tell us about her situation.
Elizabeth’s interest in fossilised fish brings her into the path of Mary Anning. (Look this is what I really should have been talking about, but I got bogged down talking about the unmarried Philpot sisters). Elizabeth Philpot is a new historical character to me, but I read about Mary Anning recently in ‘A Short History of Everything’ by Bill Bryson. She’s the young, working class girl who discovered many significant examples of Ichthyosaur, Plesiosaur and ammonite fossils on her local beaches in Lyme Regis. I’ve always heard Mary Anning’s finds described in ways which imply that she was just lucky to trip across them. Chevalier emphasises Mary’s training in her father’s curie business, where he sold fossils to tourists, her mystical talent for finding fossils, which Mary calls The Eye (with Chevalier the assumption of the mystical always seems so obvious, I never think to question it) and Mary’s growing interest in the origins of the fossils she finds in the cliffs. I also thought all Mary’s discoveries were made when she was a child, but Chevalier shows Mary growing into a perceptive young woman with an awareness of her sexuality, not just an innocent, lucky child who finds ‘monsters’.
Mary and Elizabeth come together as fossil collectors and scientific enthusiasts, but they’re often divided by personal and professional jealousy, as well as class prejudice. Mary is the girl everybody knows about, even if they don’t always acknowledge her importance. Elizabeth has a scientifically interesting collection of fossilised fish but is a nobody. Mary attracts the eye of the rare men that visit Lyme Regis, men who would make more suitable matches for Elizabeth due to their status and age. It’s a complicated friendship that only gets harder as Mary grows up, where Mary’s blossoming looks begin to seem more important to her than Elizabeth’s higher social class. Looking at Chevalier’s previous books it’s clear that she examines history from a class perspective first . While ‘Remarkable Creatures’ is a novel written with a feminist filter, it is also a novel deeply divided by class tension and privilege. Not only is Mary and Elizabeth’s friendship undermined by class prejudice, Mary is excluded from the world of science that she contributes to because of her class. The scientists she help little realise the damage their words can do to her livelihood and must constantly be educated on their effect by Elizabeth, a woman of their own class, who harbours her own class prejudice. Chevalier’s perspective of class presents an exciting, different kind of historical fiction.
I feel like I need to advise caution when you’re reading this post. I’m a big fan of Tracey Chevalier’s books, in fact I’ve only got two left to read (‘The Lady and the Unicorn’ and ‘Falling Angels’ remain). This book was not my favourite Chevalier novel, but that’s like saying it was not my favourite baby animal – my least favourite, cute as heck, baby animal is more exciting to me than about a billion other things in the world. When I was reading ‘Remarkable Creatures’ I could see problems. Chevalier foreshadows like crazy, regularly throwing out overly portentuous lines like ‘There are worse fates’ and ‘It would matter later’ which is, in my opinion, extremely annoying. The self-conscious telling I noted in Elizabeth’s narration sometimes appears when Chevalier wants to explain the religious controversy surrounding the discovery of fossils:
‘This idea was too radical for most to contemplate. Even I who considered myself open-minded, was a little shocked to be thinking it, for it implied that God did not plan out what He would do with all of the animals He created.’
The mentions of the ‘freeing’ effect unmarried starts to sound repetitive after a while.
Although I noticed these bits of irritation, by the end of the book Chevalier had thrown me into her characters lives with such force that I simply didn’t care. To me, her characters seem so open to the reader, so vulnerable and yet so necessarily determined, or maybe their lives seem so passionately lived that by the end of the book their personalities overwhelm any problems the book may have. It doesn’t hurt that Chevalier’s favourite aspects of history fit with my favourite things to read about (religion, class, women’s lives) and she picks stories from different areas of history. I mean women fossil hunting – huzzah! I’m one of the few people that thought that ‘Burning Bright’ was tons of fun. So caution, because my reaction to ‘Remarkable Creatures’ is totally tied up with the emotional experience Chevalier lands on me when she writes.
I have an extra, unread copy of ‘Remarkable Creatures’ (that’s what happens sometimes when your family also likes to shop for books). If anyone wants it just say so in the comments (offer stands wherever you are in the world) and if more than one person would like it I’ll do a random drawing.
Tags:
