Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Footnotes Speculation
In class we wondered who could have written the footnotes. What were some of the suggestions, again? I honestly can't remember any at the moment. Going on little sleep and little sanity at the moment. But I had been wondering why we couldn't simply imagine an historian of the female persuasion, perhaps Susanna Clarke herself (from the 19th century) as the writer? At first I thought really long about the other males characters of the story, but none of them seemed to fit. And then Kalen's post and the subsequent comments pointed out that one could argue they were written to point out the footnotes can arguably lean toward women, ever so subtly. Prime example Kalen gave: the tale of Margaret Ford concluded as a cover-up. Other footnotes include little things such the controversey of correspondence, sympathizing with the Raven King's daughters, etc. And yet the language of the footnotes matches that of the book, including pseduo-traditional spellings of words (i.e. shewed). So this wasn't someone who would be looking for feminist statements or cover-ups at the time if it were a male writer, correct? Just some wondering out-loud. Anyone else wondered about that?
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3 comments:
Well, we said it very briefly in class but I think the woman at the end may actually have been a magician and she wrote the footnotes. I agree, they were definitely written by someone looking back upon the whole story after all the events had taken place. Clark is a good idea. I hadn´t thought of her.
In her Crooked Timber comments, Clarke writes:
"I came to the conclusion that the narrator was a woman writing in the late 1820s or possibly the 1830s. ... But I’ve revised that opinion. I think I knew all along who the narrator was. She isn’t anybody. She is a perfectly ordinary, nineteenth-century, all-seeing, all-knowing narrator."
We are under no obligation to agree entirely with Clarke on this point, of course, especially given the counterpointed story being told in the footnotes ...
Not trying to offend, but don't you think that an omnipotent narrator, with that much input and voice to the narration, is kind of a cop-out? I mean, "perfectly ordinary, all-seeing, all-knowing?" Oh, I've heard of those. No, wait. I believe there was way too much of the narrator's input into the story (in the form of her voice and side comments, not to mention she clearly has a gender) that the narrator herself could be considered a character! Any thoughts anyone?
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