LARGELY OVERLOOKED in Collins scholarship, the 1872 novel Poor Miss Finch: A Domestic Story describes the complicated relationships between a young blind woman, Lucilla Finch, and twin brothers, Oscar and Nugent Dubourg. Lucilla's blindness results in her aversion to dark colors, and as she and Oscar fall in love, he must deploy a series of elaborate deceptions in a desperate attempt to keep from her his own dark secret–that his skin has been turned blue by medication prescribed for his epileptic condition. Following an extraordinary operation, Lucilla's eyesight begins to return, and Oscar's carefully guarded secret of blueness threatens to destroy their relationship. The plot of Poor Miss Finch explores the ways in which Oscar hides his blueness from Lucilla as well as the duplicitous function of his twin, Nugent, who stands in for Oscar as Lucilla begins to regain her sight. At every turn, Poor Miss Finch mines issues of identity and investigates the ways in which identity becomes withheld and disclosed–closeted and uncloseted–through a series of spectacular deceptions that enable the keeping of secrets.
My reading of Poor Miss Finch explores the ways in which the novel may be shown to demonstrate a late twentieth-century understanding of the mechanisms of the closet. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues throughout Epistemology of the Closet, such operations are usually marked by a playing up of ambiguity, of flux in identity. “Closety” issues frequently get displaced into other arenas of discourse, such as anxieties about good and evil, light and darkness, and health and illness. The interplay between each term in these binary oppositions results in the systematic devaluation and exclusion of the second term, the so-called “other.” Poor Miss Finch is saturated with the kinds of binary oppositions Sedgwick finds historically specific to the moment of the binarization of the divisions “hetero-” and “homo-sexual” near the end of the nineteenth century. That Collins's novel anticipates this phenomenon by a quarter of a century suggests that the epistemology Sedgwick describes may be shifted to an earlier historical moment, since it may be shown to “fit” Poor Miss Finch quite convincingly.1
While I recognize the roughly contemporaneous occasions of the publication of Collins's novel and the introduction of “the medical category of homosexuality” that Foucault describes (43), I shift my attention away from homosexuality per se to consider more directly Sedgwick's model of the closet, a device for mediating (self-)knowledge of homosexuality, for such a model of homosexuality's effects parallels Collins's novel's interests in secrecy, concealment, presence, and power.
Any reading of a text in terms of Sedgwick inevitably raises expectations of the revelation of the secret–homosexuality. While I do find homosexuality vaguely present in Poor Miss Finch, I am more interested in the ways in which the “homo-” element of the novel has less to do with sexual preference than with questions about other kinds of closetedness, secrecy, and identity; to this end, I will argue that while Poor Miss Finch remains quite queerly engaged, one problem the novel presents is how to understand the term “homo-” with regard to other binary codings of otherness, how to remove “homo-” from the realm of the specifically sexual while leaving in play the mechanism of the closet and the deployments of ambiguity that have so much to do with queer identity. Oscar Dubourg and his brother Nugent stand in for each other throughout the novel: aside from Oscar's blueness, they are absolutely identical in body and voice, so that for “Poor Miss Finch,” each proves infinitely substitutable for the other. In this way, the novel dramatizes the anxieties that arise over the disclosure of secrets that center around female figures: above all, the secret of Oscar's blueness must be kept from Lucilla. In its mediation of identities through secrets and around the figure of a “dumb” or “pseudo-dumb” female figure (Sedgwick, Epistemology 251), Poor Miss Finch may be shown to demonstrate exactly the epistemology of the closet Sedgwick describes. The usefulness of reading Collins's novel in terms of such an anachronistic model is that it pluralizes the term “homo-” to demonstrate how a variety of marginalized figures–a whole host of “others”–may appropriate Sedgwick's epistemology in order to make sense of their own negotiations of secrets and identities in and around the figurative space of the closet. Such a readerly use of Collins's novel makes particular sense in the context of its dedication, in which Collins explains that “I have tried to present human nature in its inherent inconsistencies and self-contradictions–in its intricate mixture of good and evil, of great and small–as I see it in the world about me” (6).
POOR MISS FINCH appeared serially in Cassell's Magazine from October 1871 to March 1872 and as a three-volume novel in 1872 (Marshall 145). In the years since, the novel has been dismissed as a low point in Collins's powers, an aberration in his career–an early assessment that the relative paucity of scholarship about the novel perpetuates.2
For a review of such assessments of Poor Miss Finch, see Andrew (231–33), Ashley (128–29), Davis (270, 296), Marshall (20), Melville (144–45), and Sayers (61).
Yet
Poor Miss Finch interrogates issues central to all of Collins's work. William H. Marshall argues that much of Collins's work centers on questions and problems of identity (25). For Collins, conflicts in identity–alienation–derive from readings and misreadings of the body, from the ways an individual's responses to the world and its responses to him make meaning and create identity. Marshall characterizes all of Collins's work as primarily invested in a world in which “the social relationship, interpersonal and intersubjective, becomes all, the source of value and of fulfillment” (134). If, following Marshall, we place Collins's alienated man in relationship to his social context,
Poor Miss Finch may be shown to suggest links both to Sedgwick's work and to Judith Butler's ideas about how aliens, bodies designated as other by their societies, attempt to assimilate in order to realize social value and achievement, or, more simply, to become meaningful, to claim presence, if not power. In the world of a Collins novel, one's worth is measured according to the identity one creates for oneself in terms of others, particularly those in one's immediate social circle. Repeatedly, Collins's alienated characters, such as
Poor Miss Finch's Oscar Dubourg, struggle to move into the societies whose company they wish to keep. But the move from alienation to acceptance, from outside of society to inside, ultimately depends upon other people's perceptions about an individual's identity and upon the concealment or the bringing out of one's secrets, one's very alien-ness. Such a move depends upon how one is regarded by the members of the community one wishes to join. In their attempts to assimilate, Collins's aliens come to depend almost entirely on the mechanisms of spectacularity and perception, on ways of seeing and being seen.
Poor Miss Finch manifests these mechanisms in and around negotiations of blindness, sight, and knowledge.
For Collins, blindness operates as a barrier, a boundary that separates one from the world at large, a site at which one assumes the position of “other” and gets set apart from the “normal” world of those-who-can-see. Like the many physical and mental “afflictions” that pepper Collins's novels, blindness “furthers plot, [and] at times crucially, it also sets up a situation symbolizing, particularly in the modern context, one aspect of the human condition” (117). In general, Collins's “afflicted” characters resolve their differences in one of two ways: they move into a sort of “solipsistic universe” to become “the ultimate alien,” or they appropriate their (socially) devalued conditions as tools through which they may “establish for themselves the means by which life can be made purposeful” (117). Unfortunately, Collins's novels fail to differentiate the physically disabled from the insane: both types are pampered, coddled, and worried over, reduced to mere recipients of seemingly benevolent actions that devolve into the very conditions through which they are disempowered. In Poor Miss Finch, for example, Lucilla is effectively made “dumb” through the elaborate layers of secrets that keep the “sight” of Oscar's blueness away from her. Honest and honorable, Lucilla functions as a “good” character, yet even her name suggests the conflicting nature of her identity: her first name is the Latin diminutive for “sight,” and her surname, “Finch,” suggests “a songbird that can accommodate itself to the confines of a cage” (Lonoff 133). Lucilla Finch thus proves the ultimate prisoner, for even in her blindness she is able to “see”–to perceive –the limitations coincident with her condition. Poor Miss Finch demonstrates the ways in which blindness functions at once as a means of freedom from the disappointments of representation as well as a condition by which one is forever limited, caged, kept “in the dark.”
“Closet: Skeleton in the closet (or cupboard): a private
or concealed trouble in one's house or circumstances
ever present, and ever liable to come into view.”
(from the OED qtd. in Sedgwick, Epistemology 65)
Sedgwick's notions of an epistemology of the closet proceed from her attempts to account for the ways in which Western culture creates meaning through binary oppositions and to expose the systems of thought that throw such relationships out of balance as one (privileged) side effectively erases the other. The binary Sedgwick consistently engages is “homosexual/heterosexual,” but throughout her work she suggests direct mappings of that binary onto a variety of pairings (11). For Sedgwick, any notion of “homo-,” though bound to engage issues of sexuality, affords the construction of “a permanent avenue of potential slippage” (159); thus, the “homo-” sexual issues that inform Sedgwick's epistemology of the closet may be displaced and mapped onto other spaces of ambiguity, where direct representation cedes to free play across the seemingly fixed axes of binary oppositions. A host of categories may thus be read alongside the hetero/homo binary, among them secrecy/disclosure, knowledge/ignorance, masculine/feminine, natural/artificial, and same/different (11).
The closet is perhaps best described as the site–or sight–of the secret. If inhabiting the closet represents having access to some sort of knowledge (knowledge as the site of the closet), so, too, is special knowledge accessed by those outside of the closet who can “see” into it (perception as the sight of the closet) (225). The closet is situated as the nexus of all knowledge: following Michel Foucault's dictum that knowledge provides access to power, we may situate the closet as the repository of power, the mediator of relations between all people and, finally, the maker of all meaning, of all identity. Sedgwick divides the operations of the closet into two spheres that my “site/sight” formulation suggests: the perspective (site) and the spectacle (sight) of the closet. The former describes the experience, identity, knowledge, and power of one in the closet; the latter, those elements distributed among those-in-the-know, those who can “see” what the closet contains. Sedgwick describes these two positions as “the closet inhabited” and “the closet viewed” (222–23). The power of the spectacle of the closet proves especially crucial in terms of positionality in the social sphere: “the spectacle of the…closet [is] a presiding guarantor of rhetorical community, of authority– someone else's authority–over world-making discursive terrain” (230). The significance of the “acceptable” body as spectacle, as seen and (therefore) known, is all-important, given that inclusion in a particular social sphere is enabled (or initiated) on the basis of perceptions about one's identity or worth.
To understand the place of power in terms of (knowledge of) the closet, one must first apprehend the closet as the space of the secret: the closet is always in some way concerned with knowing and not telling, with being in the closet and being afraid of being discovered. For the closeted, silence functions as a speech act, anticipating the relationship to knowing and (not) telling, to being and (not) being discovered; as Sedgwick observes, “silence is rendered as pointed and performative as speech” (4). Sedgwick introduces the term “open secret” to describe the transparent nature of the closet, to imagine its walls of glass that precipitate the “deniability and…extravagance of flamboyant display” (164, 165). As we shall see, virtually all of the relationships in Poor Miss Finch centering around Lucilla are marked by the “open secret,” since she alone cannot see (and therefore does not know) the secret of Oscar's blueness.
The plot of Poor Miss Finch focuses on two bodies, each notably marked: the blue Oscar and the blind Lucilla. In the novel, bodies that are what Collins might call “afflicted”–damaged or spoiled–are shown to matter. Following Butler, we may consider the “matter” of bodies in the following terms: bodies may be material–that is, tangible –objects; they may signify or mean something; they may count or have effect. Ultimately, the material of a subject produces meaning and power, and Butler considers two strategies in which bodies that matter participate. The first of these is “passing,” that is, appearing as a body of a “normal” sexuality, appearing to be heterosexual: Butler argues that the function of passing ultimately has to do with what can be seen about the body itself and how this spectacular image gets “read” in terms of the “truth” of the body (170). Where passing enables some sort of continuity, some sort of illusion about the “truth” and stability of heterosexuality, the second strategy in which a body may participate, “queering,” betrays that which has been concealed to expose the problematic links between normative assumptions and “truth”: “…queering is what upsets and exposes passing; it is the act by which the…sexually repressive surface of conversation is exploded, by rage, by sexuality…” (177). Butler traces the etymology of the word “queer” to note its history of meanings, which includes “to quiz or ridicule, to puzzle” (176). In my readings of Oscar and Lucilla as bodies that matter, I appropriate Butler's terms but remove them from the realm of sexuality; that is, I consider how Oscar tries to “pass” as normal/not-blue but how his very blueness, if articulated, threatens to expose his attempts at passing. My appropriation of Butler's terms operates in the same way as my use of Sedgwick's, in that I expand the model each offers beyond the realm of sexuality to describe the negotiations of identity and knowledge. Just as the closet is the space, “queering” and “passing” are the devices through which secrets and identities are mediated.
What I am going to try and talk about today [flesh colors]
…stands at the meeting point of the properties of physical matter
and an elaboration of sexualized subjective identity that has still
to be thought through and put into practice.
(Irigaray, “Flesh Colors” 153)
My reading of Poor Miss Finch assumes that negotiations around the closet center on bodies that matter, which are marked by the binaries blind/not-blind, blue/not-blue, and concealed/revealed. In each of these, meaning gets produced in and around questions and problems of secrecy and identity. I consider three “sites” from which meaning is generated: the spectacle; otherness and sameness/misrecognition and identity; and secrets and closets.
The Spectacle
THE PLOT OF POOR MISS FINCH is driven by problems about visibility, about being seen and not being seen. These positions and their attendant anxieties find form in the two physical conditions the novel investigates, blindness and sight.
As readers, our first glimpse of Lucilla Finch is mediated through the eyes of Madame Pratolungo, the novel's narrator, who describes the heroine as, “Young–lonely–blind” and who responds to Lucilla by feeling “…a sudden inspiration. I felt I should love her” (14; ch. 1). Thus our initial impression of Lucilla is informed by a coercive voice that equates blindness with isolation: Lucilla is an alien whose physical condition distances her from her surroundings. Later, Pratolungo suggests that the blind exhibit an “incurable suspicion” and that they are “always abandoned to the same melancholy distrust of the persons about them, always doubting whether some deceit is not being practiced on them by the happy people who can see” (102; ch. 11). Time and again, the novel's narrative voice encourages us to align blindness with unhappiness, for Pratolungo suggests that the only truly happy people are those who can see, whereas the blind exist in a state of perpetual anxiety, since they fear that at any moment they might be deceived by the sighted.
Alarmed by her first look into Lucilla's eyes, Pratolungo notes that although “there was no deformity, there was nothing to recoil from… The poor, dim, sightless eyes [still] had a faded, changeless, inexpressive look….In them [there was] death” (28; ch. 3). Later in the novel, Nugent's anxiety over his growing affection for the woman he knows his brother loves reinforces the notion of Lucilla's eyes as the sight/site of death: “‘Nothing could have checked it–nothing will cure it but my death”’ (443; ch. 38). Self-conscious about the transgressive nature of his love for Lucilla, Nugent knows that he must not be found out, must not be seen by her, and he concludes that only death will save him from suffering in love and from being discovered–seen, found out– by the woman he cannot claim. Moments such as these code blindness as undesirable and debilitating, as a condition to be pitied and feared.
Lucilla's response to her blindness, however, departs radically from Pratolungo's view. She takes great pleasure in shocking those around her by way of the many tasks she accomplishes in the dark, such as rearranging rooms. Collins makes clear that Lucilla refuses to accept gestures of pity: he tells us that “she laughed scornfully at [the] surprise [of the sighted], and said she sincerely pitied the poor useless people who could only see” (143; ch. 16, emphasis added). Turning the tables on the narrator, Lucilla describes the poverty of the sighted in language strikingly similar to Pratolungo's initial description of her. For “poor Miss Finch,” as the sighted call her, blindness proves no handicap; in fact, Lucilla insists that her loss of sight guarantees her greater access to knowledge than the “poor useless people who could only see” (143; ch. 16). Indeed, after her first (and merely temporary) cure, Lucilla finally rejects sight to return, at least symbolically, to blindness as she seeks to make sense of the world: “With her eyes closed she could measure to a hairbreadth the distance which, with her eyes opened, she was perfectly incompetent to calculate!” (463; ch. 39). For Lucilla, blindness is seeing and knowing, whereas sight is the condition that prevents one from seeing clearly–and, thus, true “blindness” itself.
In addition to its function as her instrument of knowledge and ironic empowerment, Lucilla's blindness contributes to her bodily pleasures, as well. On being touched by Oscar, the “cured” Lucilla laments, “In the time when I was blind, how I should have felt [Oscar's touch]! how the delicious tingle would have run through me when he touched me! Nothing of the kind happened now” (511; ch. 43). Ironically, Lucilla's “cure” alters her self-identity completely: “The restoration of my sight has made a new creature of me….I am no longer the same woman” (511;ch. 43). Lucilla's case demonstrates that the location of privilege within the blind/sighted binary remains indeterminate, since “poor Miss Finch” rejects what would typically be regarded as desirable and even as healthy –that is, sight–in favor of the other term in the opposition. Consequently, at the novel's end, Lucilla refuses a second surgery that promises to restore her sight permanently (653; Epilogue): “‘I want to know if it [blindness] will come back…if I shall ever enjoy Oscar's society again…[as in] the happy days, Papa Grosse, when I was an object of pity, and when all the people spoke of me as Poor Miss Finch?”’ (561; ch. 45).
On the other hand, Collins's novel also extols the glories of seeing in moments that encourage us to model our responses to Lucilla's condition on Pratolungo's pity. Herr Grosse, an oculist, remarks on “how infinitely much prettier [Lucilla] will be when she can see!” (321–22; ch. 31). His observation not only acknowledge that the act of looking functions as the means by which we access beauty but, indeed, it suggests that the seeing body itself is more beautiful (and, thus, more desirable) than the blind. Grosse negotiates sight through a double trajectory: just as seeing the body is a way of confirming beauty, the seeing body is confirmed as beautiful in and of itself. In this complicated matrix, beauty becomes completely intertwined with sight, since without it–without seeing and being seen –beauty disappears. Of course, this is exactly the model Lucilla rejects, and the novel's ironic title (“Poor Miss Finch” is the name that designates the blind Lucilla) reminds us of the goal of Collins's work here, to teach readers that, as he says in the Dedication, “the conditions of human happiness are independent of bodily affliction” (6–7). Throughout the novel, Collins complicates our usual assumptions about binary constructions that privilege the “strong” or healthy side while erasing the other term, rendering that other insignificant, valueless, inauthentic, unnatural.
Otherness and Sameness/Misrecognition and Identity
NUELL PHARR DAVIS notes that Collins began composing Poor Miss Finch around the time of the birth of his daughter, Harriet, in May of 1871, when he “with stupendous originality was brooding about what it would be like to turn blue” (266). Around the same time, Collins's good friend Charles Dickens suffered the same affliction that marks Oscar Dubourg: his flesh turned blue, a side effect of the silver nitrate treatments he had taken for a skin disorder (225).
Blueness operates as the marker of otherness around which the plot of Poor Miss Finch revolves. Luce Irigaray recognizes that in its positionality as an identifying marker of babies (boys wear blue; girls wear pink), color regulates and classifies the social sphere, yet she adds that the problem with placing color in a hierarchical scheme is that “colors cannot be reduced to bipolar couples” (157). For Irigaray, the meanings of pink and blue are socially constructed and, by extension, specific only to cultures in which such designations are already recognized (156). In other words, Irigaray exposes color as a mechanism that orders the world according to completely arbitrarily constructed meanings. My reading of blueness in Poor Miss Finch follows Irigaray's: I demonstrate how that color contributes to social regulation (i.e., order and disorder) even as I explore the ways in which Collins's choice of blue as a marker of difference remains a purely arbitrary one. Ultimately, I read Poor Miss Finch as a text in which blueness may be replaced by any signifier of otherness, so that blueness emerges as the closet without content, the space of the other that cannot be reduced to one formulation, that cannot be made to “mean” any particular thing.
Every negotiation of Oscar's blueness throughout Poor Miss Finch hinges on the principle anxiety that structures the novel–Lucilla's fear of dark colors, a motif to which the narrative constantly returns (175; ch. 19). Lucilla explains her phobia to Pratolungo: “‘I have the oddest ideas in this blind head of mine. I associate life and beauty with light colors, and death and crime with dark colors. If I married a man with a dark complexion, and if I recovered my sight afterward, I should run away from him’” (120; ch. 13). Lucilla associates light “‘with all that is beautiful and heavenly, and dark with all that is vile and horrible and devilish’” (347; ch. 33). Her fear of dark colors explains her reaction upon first seeing Oscar's blue skin (which she misperceives as Nugent's, since the twins have traded places), but later in the novel, when she comes face-to-face with another blue-skinned man at the beach, Lucilla's response suggests her softening of feeling, her education in sympathy: “My eyes…saw repeated in his face, the same black-blue complexion which had startled me…when I first opened my eyes at the rectory! For the moment I felt startled again–more, as I believe, by the unexpected repetition of the blue face in the face of a stranger than by the ugliness of the complexion itself” (527; ch. 43). Lucilla's account underscores the maneuverings of the closet without content: she fears darkness, which she has constructed as other, as threatening and repulsive; but because of the growth of her capacity for understanding, because of her strong sense of compassion and fellow-feeling, she meets blueness without the horror the initial sight of it produced. Still, for all her efforts to intellectualize blueness, Lucilla remains bothered by the intrusion, the spectacle, of the other. On the beach, her fear of blueness gets replaced by her fear of a stranger (who just happens to be blue), so that the thing against which she reacts seems not so much color as the unfamiliar, the strange(r), the other. The beach scene thus positions blueness as the closet without content: merely a marker for any kind of otherness, blueness is unmasked as meaningless, its significance always–and only–determined by the context within which it is perceived. What Lucilla fears and reacts to is the thing she neither knows nor understands, first darkness and its associations with death and evil, then blueness, and finally strange(r)ness. Thus the plot of Poor Miss Finch hinges on other characters' strategies for keeping secrets from her.3
It is certainly beyond the scope of this essay to provide a detailed plot summary of the 656-page Poor Miss Finch, but a word on the plot may prove useful for readers unfamiliar with Collins's novel. From the moment of the un-bandaging of Lucilla's eyes following the surgery to restore her sight, Nugent embarks on an elaborate campaign of deception, standing in more and more frequently for Oscar in order to hide his twin's secret from Lucilla. In the midst of these manipulations, Nugent falls in love with Lucilla, and he takes advantage of her belief that he is Oscar by preparing to elope with her. All of this domestic disharmony gets resolved, of course, by the arrival of Oscar and the subsequently hasty exit of Nugent and, ultimately, by the marriage of Oscar and Lucilla and the death of Nugent during his expedition to the North Pole.
Throughout, the novel carefully explains blueness as the side effect of medical treatment. While investigating her father's illness, Pratolungo meets a number of individuals receiving treatment for their afflictions, “among others with a man who startled me…by presenting a personal deformity…The man's face, instead of exhibiting any of the usual shades of complexion, was hideously distinguished by a superhuman–I had almost said a devilish – coloring of a livid blackish-blue!” (167; ch. 19, emphasis added). Later, Oscar confides to Pratolungo that one possible course of treatment for Lucilla is “‘Nitrate of Silver,’” but he notes anxiously its side effect, a blue tint to the skin, one well-known to Collins, as I have remarked, by way of Charles Dickens. Oscar assures Pratolungo he knows someone who followed such a medicinal course–he himself–and observes that, “‘I know the price I pay for being cured’” (173–74; ch. 19, emphasis added). In the world of Collins's novel, blueness operates as a marker, a signifier, for the bodily condition of (recovery from) illness. Blueness registers (recovery from) illness at the site/sight of the body and thus codes–colors–that body as the site of the other. In the end, the color blue holds no intrinsic meaning and assumes significance only in terms of the context in which it is read (here, illness) and the condition it is imagined to symptomatize–the afflicted body, the body of the other.4
See Sedgwick's Epistemology for a discussion of the “health/illness” binary and the place of illness-as-other in such a scheme. The trope of color as a somatically legible marker of value figures in the British cultural imagination throughout the Victorian period: during a moment of crisis in “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” Sherlock Holmes announces to Watson that “I am all off colour. I can do nothing for myself” (115); in describing the symptomology of the vampire's bite in Le Fanu's “Carmilla,” Doctor Spielsberg detects just below Laura's throat “‘a small blue spot, about the size of the tip of your little finger’” (289), a wound General Spielsdorf describes as “‘a small livid mark which all concurred in describing as that induced by the demon's lips’” (310); throughout “Carmilla,” the effects of the vampire's bite include epileptic seizure, a condition whose cure, as I have indicated, often resulted in the blue tint of the skin; in his introduction to Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly, Tracy notes that “…in Irish, for obscure reasons, a Negro is fear gorm, a blue man” (xxiii); and just over a decade into the twentieth century, Warrack glossed the term “witch pricker” in his Scots Dialect Dictionary as “a witch-finder who discovered witches by pricking them for the ‘witch mark’” (682), that tell-tale blue stigmata of supernatural powers.
Because it functions as an empty signifier, an innately meaningless term, because it means nothing in and of itself but stands in as the register for a whole range of undesirable conditions, such as (recovery from) illness, blueness repeatedly gets replaced by other markers of otherness, deviance: Pratolungo relates the story of Oscar's alleged criminal activity as a counterfeiter (46; ch. 5); Reverend Finch insists that, “‘Oscar! you are deficient, my good fellow, in moral weight’” (324; ch. 32); and Pratolungo eventually informs Reverend Finch of Oscar's “insane” plans regarding his brother (423; ch. 37). In each of these instances, Oscar's blueness fades as a different sign for deviance overcodes it. Blueness stands as the registration on the body of the visible specter of otherness, but once Oscar's other deficiencies or problems or differences are identified, the need to “see” them is replaced by the power of naming them. That is, when otherness is fixed by way of linguistic classification–or, more precisely, by a taxonomy–then color, a less exact system of representation, as Irigaray points out, gets displaced at the apex of meaning. Oscar's blueness, in other words, is of less importance to Pratolungo than his (putative) criminality, immorality, and insanity.
For my reading of the novel, the most significant re-placements of blueness throughout Poor Miss Finch follow from the numerous occasions upon which Pratolungo's narrative re-genders Oscar by feminizing him.5
While much of my discussion about gender, behavior, reputation, and the sexualized implications of these arenas grows from late twentieth-century scholarship–notably, from the field of queer theory–I remain aware of the potentially problematic nature of some of my assertions, which might seem to ignore the historical distance between my time and Collins's, and thus to erase, or at least to conceal, the very different values, the resonances, of such arenas in our quite different eras. Describing Oscar or Nugent as “feminine” characters means, for me, and for my reading of Poor Miss Finch, that each man's deviation from normative masculinity, whether in Collins's time or my own, marks him as a site of potential disturbance in the discursive fields of gender, behavior, and reputation; and as a figure of disturbance embodying if not chaos then certainly chaotic potential, the “feminine” man troubles his culture, worries the world of the novel, as a queer character–as an “odd” figure, Collins's readers might have agreed; as a (proto-) “gay” figure, I argue. All of these codings return to the central problem of blueness/the feminine/the other that besets Poor Miss Finch: the threat of the other who looks like the same, the “bad” twin who stands in for the good, the respectable-looking man whose actions and appearance mask the “darkness” of his true self, the “straight” man trying desperately to fit in–not to be rejected, dismissed, pushed out, outed for his eccentricity, for what I am characterizing as his “queerness.”
As Pratolungo reflects on the mysterious stories about Oscar's allegedly criminal activities, she notes that “it was no secret that he associated with
doubtful characters, male and female; but suspicion failed to point to any one of them in particular” (73; ch. 8, emphasis added). Pratolungo reinscribes Oscar's otherness, elsewhere indicated by his blueness, in terms of ambiguous behavior that cannot be fixed on one side or another of a range of binary oppositions, lawfulness/criminality one among them. She characterizes Oscar's dubious associations as scandalous, and what makes them even more so is their relationship to queerness–to ambiguity in general, and to ambiguity with regard to sexual behavior and perceived identity in particular. Clearly queer in Butler's sense of “odd” or “problematic,” Oscar gets cast as another kind of queer character–a homosexual, neither really male- nor female-associated.
6 I am, of course, ventriloquizing typical (later) Victorian notions about the deviant nature of same-sex intercourse rather than excoriating homosexuality myself for its (putative) relationship to gender-indeterminacy. Here and throughout, I read Poor Miss Finch as demonstrating how Collins intuited what would remain largely unrecognized–not to mention unspoken–until the mid-1890s, when Oscar Wilde stood trial for acts of so-called “gross indecency.” The deliberately anachronistic use of the term “homosexual” throughout my discussion means to call the reader's attention to Collins's intuition, to the presence of the homosexual in a novel whose publication precedes the emergence of the heterosexual/homosexual binary Sedgwick traces to around the time of Wilde's trials. For me, “homosexual” must be read as a descriptor of sexuality, given the benefit of our poststructuralist hindsight; but even in Collins's day, the cultural use of the term “queer” collapsed–and reduced to a cipher–a range of behaviors, ideas, and engagements that would have been regarded as odd, as incomprehensible and therefore as ambiguous, as value-less and, finally, as a threat to the rigidly masculinist, patriarchal structure of the Victorian temper and, indeed, to the whole of the British Empire. Like our culture's fear of queerness (as a social threat, as a blurring of supposedly inflexible, rigid gender roles, and as a symptom of wide-scale degeneration), the Victorian stigmatizing of all things queer sought to secure and to maintain social control by naming and de-legitimizing the nonnormative, by singling out “the queer” for excoriation and, thus, for containment.
The secrets Oscar keeps about his criminal activities and doubtful associations enable him to pass (that is, to remain in the closet) as he continues to participate in the heterosexual (unambiguous, socially sanctioned) romantic scene.
Pratolungo's uncertainty about Oscar's secret associations–his (sexual) ambiguity– gets manifested much more clearly in her frequent characterizations of his effeminate, womanly manner. By describing Oscar crying, leaning, fainting, despairing, and retreating, Pratolungo exposes him as effeminate, as other, and she dismisses his behavior as disgusting: “…he was a little too effeminate for my taste…[his complexion] ought to have been a woman's complexion, or at least a boy's. He looked, indeed, more like a boy than a man; his smooth face was quite uncovered, either by beard, whisker, or mustache” (67; ch. 7, emphasis added). Pratolungo universalizes her anxieties about Oscar's effeminacy, noting that “in common with all women, I like a man to be a man. There was, to my mind, something weak and womanish in the manner in which this Dubourg met the advance which I had made to him. He not only failed to move my pity–he was in danger of stirring up my contempt” (68–69; ch. 7, emphasis added). Time and again, Pratolungo emerges as an aggressor away from whom the effeminate Oscar retreats, and his fear of her, which she codes as his lack of manliness, situates Oscar firmly in the position of other, so that, as far as Pratolungo is concerned, Oscar proves himself a queer character, indeed.
Oscar's secret, which remains constantly under the threat of revelation by those who can see him, practically collapses every time blueness gets mentioned in Lucilla's presence. As if succumbing to the pressure, Oscar halfway “comes out” by warning Lucilla about the blue body that hovers around their domestic scene, but he avoids a full confession by claiming that the blue body is that of his brother, Nugent (246; ch. 25). Once again, Oscar's behavior normalizes Pratolungo's assumptions about his deviance by showing him to be a liar. As if to underscore his position as other, Oscar swoons (femininely, of course), collapsing in Nugent's arms, the weight of his half-confession still on his mind: “Oscar put his arm around his brother's neck, and laid his head on his brother's shoulder…. He dropped his head back on his brother's shoulder…[and] turned, trembling, to his brother. ‘For God's sake, forgive me, Nugent!’ he said. ‘She thinks it's YOU’” (245–46; ch. 25). Fearing that Lucilla will reject him once she regains her sight, Oscar hovers like a “miserable apparition,” “hesitating,” “painfully conscious of the new complications introduced into his position toward Lucilla by the new state of things, and yet,” as Pratolungo observes, he is “not man enough, even yet, to seize the opportunity and set himself right [by revealing his secret]” (295–96; ch. 30, emphasis added). Oscar's bodily responses to Pratolungo's aggressive approaches follow the same pattern: “He winced….His head dropped on his breast. He started back from me like a beaten dog, and suddenly and silently left the room” (337; ch. 32); “His insane shyness…made him shrink…” (339; ch. 32). Feminine in his responses to Pratolungo's challenges–feminized by a woman of greater strength and integrity–Oscar proves his instability, his ambiguity, his queerness, over and over again.
In the same manner, Pratolungo constantly re-genders Nugent throughout her narrative, casting him as masculine at moments when she approves of his behavior and feminine when she does not. In her view of the world, Nugent and Oscar function as halves of a whole, as two parts of a complete system, components constantly shifting in opposition, in queer complementarity, to each other. For example, when Oscar leans in a weeping faint on his brother's shoulder, Pratolungo's portrayal of Nugent is masculinized by way of its juxtaposition to her portrayal of Oscar. But when she views Nugent as some sort of transgressor or infidel, Pratolungo re-inscribes him at the site of the woman-ish: “[Nugent] dropped his arms on the table; his head fell on them, and he burst into a fit of crying….‘Oscar all over again,’ I thought to myself, ‘on the first day when I spoke to him in this very room’” (438; ch. 38). Pratolungo's characterization of Nugent as inquisitive and gossipy embeds specifically gendered charges within her description of his behavior: “…he showed the most vivid interest–like a woman's interest rather than a man's–in learning how the love-affair between Oscar and Lucilla had begun” (235; ch. 25, emphasis added).
Pratolungo replaces blueness as the novel's marker of difference with other signifiers of ambiguity, specifically with “deviant” attributes such as criminality and deception; in so doing, she re-genders Oscar and Nugent according to what she perceives to be their “worth,” that is, their “goodness.” All of Pratolungo's mediations of gender and identity reinforce the argument I have been making: throughout the novel, blueness functions as a signifier for the closet without content, that space without any particular meaning which thus may be replaced by–may stand for– any number of other sides of binaries. As Irigaray notes, color “cannot be reduced to bipolar couples,” cannot be “fixed” in a system of binary opposition: “Colors do not obey these rules in their expression of the sexual. They explore all the possible passages and returns from one sex to another, and all the mediations between them” (157, emphasis added). Certainly, color operates throughout Poor Miss Finch in exactly the manner Irigaray describes: it occupies a queer space in which identity remains in flux as it is made and re-made over and over again, always in specifically gendered terms.
In reading Poor Miss Finch through the lens of Epistemology of the Closet, I am expanding the homo-/heterosexual scheme that informs Sedgwick's model, both theoretically and chronologically, to include a wide variety of others disempowered or disenfranchised by the dominant term in any binary opposition. Through these same sorts of moves, I suggest that we expand our readings of Poor Miss Finch to widen the novel's constructions of otherness–blueness–to include the sexualized terms Sedgwick considers. Specifically, I am thinking about the ways in which a number of signifiers–in particular, identical twins, ambiguity and criminality, anxiety and panic–operate throughout Poor Miss Finch to construct what we might consider a gay narrative, for it is through these phenomena that sameness gets reinscribed within the prefix “homo-”. At every turn, Poor Miss Finch remains dedicated to the exploration–and exposure–of the “queer.”7
For an explanation of my anachronistic use of the terms “homo-” and “queer,” see notes 5 and 6.
Prior to Nugent's entrance in the narrative, Pratolungo repeatedly casts Oscar as the other by describing him as effeminate and suspicious. Underscoring Oscar's positionality, Pratolungo's first assessment of Nugent taxonomizes both twins to demonstrate their sameness, or, in my reading, to expose them as “homo-”: both have “…the same colored hair and the same beardless faces” (212; ch. 23, emphasis added). The only difference in the brothers is that Nugent possesses “the complexion which Oscar had lost forever” albeit “just a shade darker” than Oscar's might naturally have been (212; ch. 23). Already, we are encouraged to see Nugent in terms of Oscar (each is marked by dark skin) yet as still different from his twin, since his darkness is about something else, something other than the corporeal evidence of (recovery from) an illness. For Pratolungo, Nugent represents an improved version of Oscar: “So utterly different in his manner from Oscar, except when he was in repose, and yet so like Oscar in other respects I can only describe him as his brother completed” (213; ch. 23, emphasis added). When Lucilla senses something oddly different about the brothers–“‘I can't explain it,’ she answered, after a long silence”–Pratolungo notes that “the only difference between them was in the contrast of complexion and in the contrast of manner –both of these being dissimilarities which appealed more or less directly to the eye” (225; ch. 24, emphasis added). Pratolungo (re)marks the difference between the twins as something spectacular, something visible, something to be seen or discovered. As the plot develops, this crucial spectacularity leads to a series of compacts through which secrets are negotiated around the unseeing and (therefore) unknowing figure of the blind (and, again to borrow from Sedgwick, the “dumb”) Lucilla.
The ambiguity with which Pratolungo characterizes Oscar's other life in the city, his associations with suspicious characters of both sexes, likewise marks the other life of his twin: “Away he went one morning, without bidding anybody good-by[e]. He had talked of being absent for a week–he remained away for a month” (365; ch. 34). Because Pratolungo never explains Nugent's protracted absence, the reader is left to imagine that the activities that lured him away from the domestic scene stand in an oppositional relationship to that scene, since they are kept secret, marginalized from his discourse with Pratolungo, Lucilla, and the others. Indeed, Pratolungo notes that Nugent's first incident of suspicious behavior immediately preceded “the days when my favorite [Nugent] disappointed me for the first time” (365; ch. 34). As she has elsewhere, Pratolungo codes Nugent's duplicity as symptomatic of his deviance, since throughout her narrative, duplicity functions as the particular mode of the other.
Pratolungo's construction of Oscar as “homo-” arises from her constant comparisons of the twin brothers, as well as from her tabulation of the moments that exemplify Oscar's otherness. Even Oscar's initial appearance in the novel sets the scene for his position as a figure of ambiguity: Pratolungo first encounters him as she walks with Lucilla at twilight, that time of transition between day and night, light and darkness. The chapter in which this first meeting occurs is called “Twilight View of the Man,” and I find it useful to imagine the novel itself as situated at such a perspective, that is, as invested in viewing the shady, hazy, indeterminate nature of Oscar Dubourg. In addition to her ongoing record of Oscar's eccentricities, Pratolungo periodically assesses his behavior in terms of binary oppositions marked by gender, suggesting that what she finds interesting and troubling about Oscar is the way in which he seems to occupy both sides of binary models, the ways in which his identity remains in flux:
Those curious contradictions in his character which I have already mentioned showed themselves more strangely than ever. The man who had found the courage (when his blood was up) to measure himself, alone and unarmed, against two robbers, was now unable to enter the room in which the struggle had taken place without trembling from head to foot. He who had laughed at me when I begged him not to sleep in the house by himself, now had two men (a gardener and an indoor servant) domiciled at Browndown to protect him, and felt no sense of security even in that….If any of us hinted at his occupying himself once more with his favorite art, he stopped his ears and entreated us not to renew his horrible associations with the past….The doctor…told us that his nervous system had been shaken [by the attack and robbery], and frankly acknowledged that there was nothing to be done but to wait until time set it right again. (146–47; ch. 16)
Pratolungo repeatedly links Oscar's exile from being “set…right,” his nervousness and panic about his past, to the aspects of his behavior that she reads as effeminate. Even Nugent suggests that Oscar's erotic life might be characterized as abnormal when he reminds Pratolungo that, “‘You are not talking to Oscar now–you are talking to a man who has had some experience of women’” (439; ch. 38).
8 As I suggest in note 6, I deliberately use a term like “abnormal” in describing Oscar's (possible) homosexuality to ventriloquize the attitude toward (what I am calling) homosexuality (that is, nonnormative sexual practices) that the novel's narrator clearly encourages–in opposition, it should be noted, to Collins's own call for tolerance in the novel's dedication.
The novel's most interesting coding of Oscar as queer centers around the appearance of the twins together in the ambiguous context Lucilla describes to Pratolungo:
Oscar and his twin arrived in the area a week earlier, only to part upon learning that a
single bedroom was available at the Cross-Hands, “the little public house in the village” (42; ch. 5). The twins' decision not to stay in the same bed(room) appears to provide evidence of their reluctance to be exposed in any position that might suggest their (homo-)sexual involvement, but nonetheless, even this “nonhomo-” moment gets recuperated within an explicitly queer display: the brothers' behavior upon parting, observed by the landlord and Zillah, conflates the brothers' several homo-identities (as twins, as foreigners, and as queer).
9 Even if we read this as something other than a homosexual scene, the brothers' refusal to share a room still operates as a public denial of any sort of intimate relationship between the men, since room-sharing–and even bed-sharing–was a Victorian commonplace.
Pratolungo asks, “'What became of the other brother [Nugent]?',” and Lucilla answers:
“He went away the same day–very unwillingly. The parting between them was most affecting. The brother who spoke to us to-night insisted on it, or the other would have refused to leave him. They both shed tears–”
“They did worse than that,” said old Zillah, re-entering the room at the moment….
“What did they do that was worse than crying?” I inquired.
“Kissed each other!” said Zillah, with a look of profound disgust. “Two men!”
“Perhaps they are foreigners,” I suggested. “Did they give themselves a name?”
“The landlord asked the one who stayed behind for his name,” replied Lucilla. “He said it was ‘Dubourg.’” (43; ch. 5, emphasis added)
In this exchange, Oscar and Nugent are clearly and undeniably coded as homosexual–as two men whose kiss disgusts the “normal” onlooker: their kiss raises the specter of homoeroticism, and Zillah's response to it models homophobia. Collins emphasizes the queerness of the scene by reinvoking Oscar's femininity which, by connotation, is described as undesirable (since the kiss is “worse than that”) and is conflated with his other otherness –foreignness, the signifier not only for the other, the not-like-us, but also for the geographically and culturally removed, for the other who has
come out of his own culture
to invade the
purity of Dimchurch. Just as the coming-out of the (supposed) foreigner is perceived as threatening, so too is the coming-out of the queer twins (their public acknowledgment of intimacy in the form of a kiss) recognized as subversive.
His queerness now foregrounded, Oscar's panic over his past becomes more easily understandable: were his secret life found out, he would be excoriated as the other, excluded from the little community into which he hopes to assimilate. Recall Pratolungo's observation that “he stopped his ears and entreated us not to renew his horrible associations with the past,” that “he could not even look at his box of chasing tools,” spectacular reminders of the life he led before moving into the twilight–the closet–of his present surroundings (146–47; ch. 16). Just as Oscar's illness (and cure) appear on his body as blueness, so too do his anxieties about being found out find legibility by way of somatic inscription: upon a doctor's pronouncement of his good health, “a frightful contortion fastened itself on Oscar's face. His eyes turned up hideously. From head to foot his whole body was wrenched round, as if giant hands had twisted it” (150; ch. 16). Ironically, Oscar's epileptic seizure throws the doctor's diagnosis into doubt and renders the state of his health again ambiguous: initially pronounced well, then suddenly taken ill, it is impossible to determine where along the spectrum of health Oscar really falls.10
I am grateful to Allison Pease, who, upon hearing an early conference version of this argument, reminded me that Victorian medical theory linked epilepsy to masturbation, another nonnormative sexual behavior that would have cast Oscar as “other” in Collins's world.
For Oscar, the moment of diagnosis precipitates a bodily manifestation of the panic he has harbored about being diagnosed, about being exposed–
outed. Thus, his comment that “‘I know the price I pay for being cured’” (173–174; ch. 19) indicates more than his mere acknowledgment of the permanent discoloration of his skin; it suggests too his understanding of the ways in which diagnosis (the beginning of cure) re-mediates identity and power so that the patient is “fixed” on the other side of the health/illness binary and plunged into re-covery, a figurative covering-over of the illness that has been found (out), of the problem that has been exposed. Surely, then, one can understand the origin of the physical markers that signify Oscar's constant state of panic, “the silent misery in that face, the dull, dreadful stare in those tearless eyes,” “the composure of despair” (401, 402; ch. 36).
Oscar's panic centers almost entirely around a woman, Lucilla, and his twin's anxiety revolves around the same figure: “What daunted Nugent Dubourg…was the fear of [Lucilla's] discovery” (513; ch. 43, emphasis added). Oscar's marriage to Lucilla follows a traditional model of the kind Sedgwick examines: the bride-to-be is commodified within a male-male economic exchange in which she occupies the third point in the homosocial triangle.11
In Between Men, Sedgwick describes the (homosocial) triangulation of (heterosexual) relationships, in which an erotic tension between two men is mediated through a third figure, a woman, who is posed as their object of affection, but who unknowingly merely displaces their own (suppressed) homoerotic engagement.
Collins's text makes such a model clear: “The interpretation of these high-flown sayings and doings [i.e., marriage arrangements] was, to my mind, briefly this: Oscar's money in the rector's pocket, and the rector's daughter
used as the
means” (148; ch. 16, emphasis added). Like Lucilla, Pratolungo finds herself caught between Oscar and Nugent: “My uneasiness on the subject of Oscar was matched by my angry desire to know what Nugent would do” (407; ch. 36). If we apply Sedgwick's model of homosocial triangulation to all of the relationships shared by Oscar, Pratolungo, and Lucilla, we see how Collins's situation of a third person–one who neither knows nor understands–fits Sedgwick's model quite neatly:
Oscar looked at me. Having the use of his sight he was sensible of the absurd side of the demonstration required of him–in the presence of a third person. She, poor soul, strong in her blind insensibility to all shafts of ridicule shot from the eye, cared nothing for the presence of a third person. She repeated her commands, in a tone which said sharply, “Embrace me–I am not to be trifled with!” (274; ch. 28)
Lucilla, not completely unconscious of her role in this triangulation, expresses her jealousy over the relationship between the twin brothers in a manner that allows Pratolungo to glimpse Lucilla's self-recognition as the one who is threatened or exploited, as the one under attack: “‘Compose yourself,' I whispered to Lucilla…'Your jealousy of his brother is a childish jealousy. There is enough room in his heart for his brother as well as for you’” (197; ch. 22). Throughout
Poor Miss Finch, Collins constructs a series of interconnected homosocial triangles in which two individuals are empowered or privileged by their knowledge of the secret as a third figure, the other, remains disenfranchised from knowledge and power – “blind” to their secret.
Poor Miss Finch anticipates Sedgwick's model of homosocial triangulation but casts it in terms of sight (akin to maleness) and blindness (femaleness), or empowerment and disempowerment. In any triangle, two figures “see” and thus negotiate power (that is, act as males, according to Sedgwick's model), while a third person (Sedgwick's female) remains “in the dark,” merely the (blind) commodity in the men's exchange.
Because the novel focuses on a character who must know the world through means other than sight, Poor Miss Finch mediates knowledge primarily through language. The novel offers countless instances in which characters describe and explain what they can see to Lucilla, as in the moment when Pratolungo describes what Oscar looks like upon their first meeting with him. At the same time, language is also employed to cover up what can be seen, to hide the secret–blueness–with which most of the novel's characters are obsessed. All anxieties and re-negotiations of the secret, all re-constructions of identity, are mediated through language in moments of self-articulation. As Pratolungo observes, “I saw but too plainly. Oscar had been indebted for his escape from discovery entirely to Lucilla's misinterpretation of his language” (254; ch. 26, emphasis added). Even Oscar's effeminacy derives from language; that is, what Oscar does and does not tell drives him to the instances of despair that Pratolungo characterizes as effeminate, as unsuitable for a respectable man (swooning, crying, and leaning on others for support): “There was Oscar the Weak, overwhelmed by the humiliating position in which he had placed himself toward the woman whom he was to marry [by lying to her], toward the brother whom he loved!” (248; ch. 26, emphasis is added) Oscar's negotiations of truth are always mediated through (deceptive) language, and in the end his devious language encourages us to read him as a humiliated (and thus disempowered) figure. Consequently, Oscar's “nervous confusion” emerges as the physical manifestation of his anxiety about speaking and thereby revealing himself to Lucilla (259; ch. 27). To say or not to say, to tell or not to tell, to queer or to pass: these are the dilemmas that Poor Miss Finch explores as it investigates the mediations of identity, power, and knowledge.
Secrets and Closets
PRACTICALLY EVERY CHARACTER in Poor Miss Finch proves either the keeper of a secret or the one from whom a secret must be kept. Throughout the novel, one secret in particular operates very clearly: the open secret, which others know but agree–or conspire–not to tell. Secrets function in exactly the way Irigaray describes knowledge: they “…splinter the subject” (163) and leave those around and through whom secrets are negotiated in a state of perpetual conflict and agony.12
Poor Miss Finch contains far too many passages that investigate secrecy and the mechanisms of the closet for me to include in the present discussion. I consider the most useful of these at length, but I also want to list other broad categories of moments in the narrative that anticipate Sedgwick's epistemology, since each of these deserves closer attention that I can give them here. They are: the complicity of characters in concealing the truth (Madame Pratolungo's knowledge of Oscar's secret and her intuition about Nugent's secret life, as well as Oscar's and Nugent's knowledge of each other's secrets); the function of the narrator as the-one-who-knows and who thus threatens to destroy the success of the marriage plot if she reveals the secrets (opens the closet); the viewpoint of the closet (Oscar's anxiety and dread of being seen, his lies, his moments of revelation and/as half-truths to Lucilla, his emphasis on secrecy); the response of the one-who-does-not-know to the (intuited) closet that she feels around her (Lucilla's complete frustration in terms of secrets, her hatred of the ways in which she is tricked because of her inability to see, and her ultimate decision that not-to-see is the best path for her happiness); and the ways in which the closet is opened–and perhaps closed again–at the novel's end, which I discuss later in this essay.
From the beginning of her narrative, Pratolungo makes explicit Oscar's desire that his privacy be respected, and she is told by a local merchant that, “‘I have known Mr. Dubourg from his childhood. He has reasons for wishing to live in the strictest retirement’” (44; ch. 5). Soon, we learn that Oscar's surname is an alias that conceals aspects of his past. When he tells Pratolungo–in a whisper, no less–that “Dubourg” is his mother's maiden name, she realizes the secret his name conceals: he was recently tried for murder (70; ch. 7). Of course, Oscar's
other secret in the novel is his blueness, which he keeps from Lucilla by lying, displacing his own peculiarity by claiming that his brother Nugent suffers from a discoloration of the skin (246; ch. 25). Oscar thus in some way brings his secret
out, but he needs some way to recover it, to exert mastery over it, so that it cannot be turned against him. His acknowledgment of the presence of blueness insinuates truth in the scene, but by displacing its location, Oscar keeps the secret of blueness to himself by tricking Lucilla into not-knowing that in fact it is he who is blue.
Like his twin, Nugent manipulates secrets throughout Poor Miss Finch, as well. His negotiations of secrets remain interwoven with Oscar's, particularly when he stands in for his brother in the presence of the newly sighted Lucilla to keep her from recoiling at the horror of the blue skin of the man she loves. But as the plot proceeds, Nugent's duplicity devolves from altruism to selfishness: he falls in love with Lucilla (373; ch. 34), tricks her into eloping with him (605; ch. 46), and, in effect, forcibly “takes” her, as she later recognizes, as his “prisoner” (640; ch. 49).
Two other open secrets structure the plot of Poor Miss Finch and contribute to the larger constellation of secrets and deceptions that surround Nugent and Lucilla's elopement. The first is Herr Grosse's purported decision not to let Lucilla see the blue Oscar upon first regaining her sight, since he fears that such a spectacle will cause his patient significant harm. Nugent insists that it is, after all, Herr Grosse who wants him to be present at the un-bandaging of Lucilla's eyes: “‘Oscar's face is sure to startle her, if it is the first face she sees. Grosse has accordingly requested me to be present…and to place myself so that I shall be the first person who attracts her notice’” (384; ch. 35). Finally, Lucilla reveals her secret to Pratolungo when she confesses that she has decided not to let the blue man–whom she believes to be Nugent–know how much she is horrified by the sight of him: “‘I can't and won't let Oscar's brother see that he is an object of horror to me’” (252; ch. 26). Lucilla's motives for secret-keeping may strike us at first as less manipulative than the other characters', but the effects of her secrecy tend toward the same end: they center around a decision not to hurt or exclude, not to translate “truth” directly into language but, instead, to deflect it through half-truths and lies.
Sedgwick privileges the closet as “the defining structure for gay oppression,” and she argues that “‘the closet’ and ‘coming out’ now [verge] on all-purpose phrases for the potent crossing and recrossing of almost any politically charged lines of representation” (Epistemology 71). In Poor Miss Finch, the closet, that space of the secret, remains aligned with falsehood and deceit and, ultimately, with the mechanisms of oppression: “In what a labyrinth of lies had the first fatal suppression of truth involved us all! One deception after another had been forced on us; one disaster after another had followed retributively as the result [of these deceptions]…” (456; ch. 39). Open secrets function in what we might call a “closety” manner in that they force complicity in deception and, consequently, in exclusion (from knowledge) and oppression, reminding us that the secret is knowledge is power. It is in the figure of the twins, those doubles without (much) difference, that we see the two sides of the closet(ed), a before-and-after picture of secrecy's ravages. Pratolungo compares the brothers as follows:
…And, to crown it all, there was the complexion which Oscar had lost forever (just a shade darker perhaps[)], found again on Nugent's cheeks! The one difference which made it possible to distinguish between them, at the moment when they first appeared together in the room, was also the one difference which Lucilla was physically incapable of detecting–the terrible contrast of color between the brother who bore the blue disfigurement of the drug, and the brother who was left as Nature had made him. (212–13; ch. 23, emphasis added)
Pratolungo exposes the closet in two ways, rendering it both open (visible) and closed (invisible). As the one whose secret must be kept, Oscar emerges as a disfigured body whose color narrates his misfortune, finally to (re)mark him as unnatural. On the other hand, Oscar's twin, because his body remains beautifully unmarked, is perceived to be “as Nature had made him” –as “normal” and, therefore, desirable. Pratolungo's description of the unnaturalness of the closeted twin anticipates arguments that decry male homosexuality as an anti-natural phenomenon, as well as the notion that such a condition finds legibility in the body vis-à-vis appearance, mannerisms, and carriage. Later, an exchange between Lucilla and Pratolungo underscores the novel's symptomology of the closet, the ways in which one's bodily response gets read as an index of secrecy and deception:
“You spoke just now of forcing the truth out of Oscar” [Pratolungo] said. “What made you suspect that he was concealing the truth from you?”
“He was so strangely embarrassed and confused,” [Lucilla] answered. “Any body in my place would have suspected him of concealing the truth.” (253–54; ch. 26, emphasis added)
explores the perspective of the closet by spectacularizing the tortured existence of the closeted, who prove variously afflicted, frightened, disgusted, paranoid, self-reproaching, and self-loathing–responses perhaps provoked by a closeted individual's realization that his status threatens the very end to which this novel, and, indeed, middle-class Victorian life itself, both aspire: marriage. Throughout the novel, mediations of secrets, as well as the usefulness of the closet and the anxieties that holders of secrets feel about being discovered, all have to do with the ways in which telling the truth– opening the closet to expose the secrets inside–jeopardizes the marriage-plot. Oscar's temporary relinquishing of Lucilla to Nugent, whom he asks to stand in for him, demonstrates this dilemma: “‘After inspiring her with terror and disgust at the moment when her eyes first looked at me– after seeing her innocently happy in Nugent's arms–how, in God's name, can I claim her as mine? Our marriage has become an impossibility…. There is my duty toward Lucilla–as I see it’” (420–21; ch. 37). The novel's most spectacular deception arises out of Oscar's self-consciousness about his rather queer appearance, which fuels his anxieties about exclusion, about being kept “out” of the all-important marriage-plot.
Poor Miss Finch also illuminates the dangers of truth, the consequences incumbent upon the opening of the closet as one “comes out” with the secret. Clearly, Oscar's anxieties about “coming out” (revealing his blueness) and his decision to pretend that he is who he is not (Nugent) find motivation in his fear of rejection, exclusion, and exile from happiness. For Oscar, the marriage-plot moves toward a traditional end in which he cannot participate because of his own abnormality, which his blueness renders visible. Once exposed, Oscar's secret, he fears, will jettison him “out” of the space of romance and fulfillment, and so he remains “in the closet” in order to participate in the marriage-plot. As long as his secret goes undetected, unnoticed, unseen, the semblance of truth–that conspiracy of the open secret in which all of those-who-know participate–allows the marriage-plot to proceed without (re)marking Oscar's queerness.
Herr Grosse underscores the threat incumbent upon the opening of the closet: at Pratolungo's insistence that “‘surely…all the old feelings [Lucilla had] will come back to her when she sees Oscar?’”, the doctor replies, “‘They will never come back to her–no, not if she sees fifty Oscars!’” (624; ch. 48). Once opened, the closet cannot be re-closed; once told or seen, the secret cannot be re-covered. The spectacle of the closet, the revelation of the secret, threatens the happiness of those-who-do-not-know as well as the seamlessness of the marriage-plot in which the closeted one (Oscar) wishes to participate. When Nugent claims that Herr Grosse wants Lucilla to see him before seeing (the blue) Oscar, we are reminded of this horror of the sight of (the site of) the secret/truth: “‘Oscar's face is sure to startle her, if it is the first face she sees’” (384; ch. 35). On the other hand, Lucilla's mis-recognition of truth is imagined to guarantee joy, happiness, and promise for all involved; accordingly, at the moment Lucilla (mis)recognizes Nugent as Oscar, she “[throws] her arms up in the air, with a burst of hysterical laughter” that ends in a “scream of triumph,” “[clasps Nugent] to her with all her strength as the [wrong] name [passes] her lips, and [drops] her head on his bosom as in an ecstasy of joy” (397; ch. 35). Following her sight of the man she believes to be Oscar, Lucilla is confronted with (the site of) the secret–the blue Oscar himself–and, in yet another act of misrecognition, “a cry of terror [escapes] her: she [starts] back, shuddering, and [catches] hold of Nugent's arm” (398; ch. 35). The sight/site of the queer twin proves too much for Lucilla to bear, and she demands that her bandage be reapplied as she lifts a hand to Oscar (whom she believes to be Nugent) “in disgust”: “'Put it on again. I have seen too much” (398; ch. 35, emphasis added). This scene brings together Sedgwick's epistemology of the closet quite explicitly: we see at once the negotiations of the closet around the figure of a naïve or otherwise unknowing woman (Lucilla); the emergence of anxiety, dread, and fear as the symptomology of the closet; the horror of the coming-out scene; and the decision not-to-see as a strategy for covering over the closet, for erasing the difference that makes (up) Oscar's body(-)matter, his blueness, the (now-open) secret that bars him from the marriage-plot.
In the end, Poor Miss Finch exposes Nugent as the ultimate keeper of secrets, beginning with his standing in for Oscar and ending with his elopement with Lucilla. Following the revelation of Nugent's secrets, Lucilla, who realizes that her love for Oscar must overcome her terror of his difference, rejects the “normal” twin to embrace the blue one. While it may in fact seem that such a move re-places Oscar outside of the closet (because his secret has been revealed) and Nugent inside of it (because of his newly marked presence as a villain, as the “bad” character who has been defeated and, by his death, contained), Lucilla's response to the situation remains the same as the first time she saw the brothers: she decides not to see. Her rejection of a second operation that promises to restore her sight reminds us that, as she insists earlier in the novel, Lucilla has seen too much, that only blindness guarantees her happiness. As the novel concludes, Lucilla returns to the state of bliss she enjoyed at the beginning, still the ecstatically happy “poor Miss Finch” whose joy comes from her inability to see, from her refusal to be confronted with the sight of–to “know”– the secret.
One might argue that Poor Miss Finch ends in either of what seem to be two very different ways. Perhaps Collins's novel concludes with an explosion of the closet whereby all secrets are brought out into the open as the marriage-plot is secured by the triumph of truth. Alternately, perhaps the novel's end demonstrates that the marriage-plot proceeds only by way of the re-closeting of the secret, the willingness on the part of a woman (Lucilla) not to see (and therefore not really to know) the condition that complicates the “normality” of her marriage. That condition, of course, finds form in the dark secret of Oscar's blueness, which marks him as not-normal, as the site of (recovery from) illness, as a body that matters so much that its very appearance insinuates a series of narratives of otherness (illness, foreignness, criminality), narratives individually–and, certainly, collectively– quite jarringly inimical to the Victorian marriage-plot. Such an alternate reading suggests that, in the end, the marriage of the blind Lucilla and the blue Oscar remains a very queer one, indeed.
I am truly grateful to Mary Ann O'Farrell, who provided comments on an early version of this essay; to my graduate students Susan Santha Kerns and Aneta Dygon and to my editorial intern Nathan R. Wieting, all of whom assisted in the preparation of the final manuscript of this article; and to the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Northern Iowa, under whose auspices these students were assigned to work with me. Throughout this essay, I refer to volume 15 of the 1900 Collier edition of The Works of Wilkie Collins, reprinted in 1970 by AMS Press. Many of the quotations I cite differ in language and punctuation from more recent editions of the novel.
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