As usual, I finished Thou Art the Man surprisingly fast (it took me at least a week to get through the same number of pages in Emma), but that's not unusual for me and sensation fiction. I don't know how people waited for the next number to be written - I think I might go crazy. Most of the book was pretty standard fare (spoilers start here): youthful passion is blighted by a dread disease (epilepsy) and a horrible murder. The young epileptic man, Brandon, is convinced to run away rather than stay and face judgment by (surprise, surprise) the real murder, Hubert Urquhart, while his virtuous lover, Sibyl - believing he's died in a storm - is convinced to marry an Earl to preserve her good name. Ten years pass before the murderer's plot is uncovered, but by the end of the novel the good are (mostly) rewarded and the evil die of cancer.
It's the ending that I'm torn over. I always feel this way about Victorian novels - no matter how insane the ride, they always seem to conclude with everyone in their "proper" place - the place 'for which they were born,' even those who have spent the bulk of the preceding pages trying to escape that place. Brandon and Sibyl can never actually be together because Brandon is tainted by his hereditary epilepsy and the insanity that everyone believes goes with it. In the end, he has to die so that she can safely marry the virtuous (but still noble) preacher (Urquhart having also killed Sibyl's first husband - and his older brother - for his title and property). Sibyl's niece, Coralie (Urquhart's daughter), also has to be married off by the end, and Urquhart's villainy is punished by the cancer that symbolically disfigures him.
On the other hand, there are no damsels in distress. Sibyl is blonde, beautiful and virtuous, but she hardly ever faints. Yes, she marries a man she cannot love, but unlike Collins' Laura, she does so by choice, not because her dead father said so. Even after her marriage, Sibyl retains control over the massive fortune that her father - a commoner - built up for her, just as she retains her ability to act for herself. She relies on a man to follow through on the more active parts of her sleuthing, but it is clear that she would take those steps herself were it not for her keen awareness of social strictures, or if there were no man she could trust.
Even Coralie - the plain daughter of the wicked man (of noble birth) - manages to escape the hereditary stain and degeneration that the men around her are subject to (her father's family is cold and unfeeling, Brandon inherits his epilepsy from his mother, but it is always referred to as his father's curse for making an unwise marriage). When we first meet Coralie, she is well on her way to becoming as hard and selfish as her father, but by the end she redeems herself and her family name by cutting off her father, though she still cannot bring herself to expose his crimes.
In addition to her ability to change, Coralie is intriguing for her frank discussion of marriage. As she tells her aunt, Coralie accepted her difficulty early on:
"When I was twelve years old I found out the difference between beauty and ugliness. I heard all the pretty little girls admired...while I observed that people called me good, or clever, or sensible! So I looked steadily at my image in the glass, and I faced the unpleasant fact. 'You are plain, Coralie,' I said to myself; 'unmistakably plain...Never forget that you are plain...and then perhaps other people won't remember the fact quite so often...' So if I have come to nineteen years of age without being admired, I have at least escaped being laughed at!" (7-8)
Instead of relying on her looks to land a wealthy husband, Coralie relies on her wits. She finds hope in the stories of plain women who have managed to land the most eligible bachelors, based on the power of their personalities. In her diary, she is unmercifully direct - especially regarding her efforts to attract a husband. She quickly learns that men prefer to be listened to than to listen, and sacrifices the sports and revelries she prefers in order to attract a suitable partner. Naturally, she eventually does find a wealthy landowner who finds her vivacious wit and enthusiastic approach to fox hunting irresistible, but Coralie's marriage is still a far cry from the 'virtuous damsel is rewarded with a rich husband' model that seems to dominate Dickens' work. Together with Sibyl's first marriage, Coralie's musings emphasize the planned - even mercenary - nature of Victorian marriage.
Braddon saves the most politically interesting bits for the epilogue. Formulaic as Sibyl's second marriage may be, it does force her out of her comfortable country home - where her coal-tycoon father was able to forestall union organizers through strong applications of noblesse oblige - and into a busy metropolis:
"In this busy centre Sibyl learns to understand new phases of life. She finds herself no longer in a small community, where one man's wealth can achieve wonders of order and prosperity, and one man's influence can shape all things to his liking, but in the thick of the bitter battle, among the revolts and conspiracies of labour against capital, and the exactions and injustices of capital against labour; the contest of strength with strength the appeals to public opinion; the power, sometimes reckless and fatal, sometimes wise and beneficent, of a free Press; the heat and strife of politics...here she has to discover how little her wealth can do where needs are so constant and so manifold." (328)I have to admit that this part surprised me. Braddon was one of the more radical sensation fiction authors, but she seemed to establish herself as fairly anti-union in the first half of the novel and this addition caught me off guard. Not to say that she's pro-union in the end - she seems to describe the wars between labor and capital as a more or less evenly matched battle between the two sides, but it's heartening to see a popular author discuss capitalism's inherent ambiguity. It's also interesting that she chose to incorporate that ambiguity into the 'happily ever after' part of her novel. The labor-capital battles do have a more prominent place in novels like Elizabeth Gaskill's North and South, but Braddon does less to resolve the conflict - instead she fairly directly says that there is no neat solution, but that doesn't mean people shouldn't try. I guess I can forgive 'forced' marriages for that.
