I didn't notice this as much when I was reading the novel at first because I get all caught up in the plot but looking back the male relationships are very striking. I'm pretty sure this is what I would like to do my paper on. First, we have the obvious Strange and Norrell who appear to be exact opposites in every way, but as we now know appearances are misleading. But there are so many- Drawlight and Lascelles and my favorite male duo of the Gentleman and Steven. I think it is very interesting how Clark purposefully had all of the women play lesser, background roles so that these male relationships were ever more accessible and important. Heck, the whole first half of the novel is Norrell doing everything possible to impress Sir Walter.
And continuing on a slightly related tangent, did anyone notice how really the only interesting women were talked about in the footnotes? Like the Margaret Ford/Master's Daughter story? I already commented on Susan's post but maybe the footnotes were written by a female magician at a later date...maybe...
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Ok so I forgot to mention this: remember how upset Norrell was that Strange had a wife? Not that I am saying that these characters are all gay. Just that their relationships are very complex and Clarke spends a lot of time exploring them. Interesting.
In her comments on the Crooked Timber discussion, Clarke writes in part:
"I deliberately kept women to [the] domestic sphere in the interests of authenticity. ... It was important that real and alternate history appeared to have converged. This meant that I needed to write the women and the servants, as far as possible, as they would have been written in a nineteenth-century novel. Otherwise the deliberate contrast between 'the fields we know' and Faerie becomes much weaker. The fields we know are already somewhat distorted. Suppose the JS&MN world had become one in which the following were true:
1. the concerns of the late-twentieth/early twenty-first centuries (social justice and women’s equality) are being voiced/commented upon
2. there is magic
At this point the whole thing becomes more obviously an alternate history. It’s too different from any history we’re acquainted with. I’m not denying for a moment that JS&MN is an alternate history, but I wanted the reader to be able to put that out of her mind while she read. Too many of our contemporary concerns would have made that more difficult.
... I hoped that the women characters would take up more physical space on the page. (I don’t agree that that they’re not important -- Arabella and Emma Pole influence the action, but they are hidden elements, part of the back-to-front story that Henry Farrell points to.) But would I change it? No. It was meant to be a story about English magic and I still think this is best way to tell that story."
Thanks Andy for that post. I love her reason for it. Somebody mentioned that last class!
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