29 June 2009

I think Sheridan read Cervantes

   Sidney Bidulph has been doing this thing recently (last 50 pages or so) where Mr. OrlandoFaulkland, Sidney's old suitor, pretends to be a knight-errant.  At one point in his letter to Sir George, O.F. writes,

You may soon expect to have the second part of this my delectable history; 'Shewing how Orlando, not being able to prevail, with all his eloquence, on the as fair and beautiful, as fierce and inexorable Princess Gerrardina, to put the finishing hand to his adventures and most wonderful exploits, did, his wrath being moved thereby, like an ungentle knight, bury his sword in her snow-white, but savage and unrelenting breast; whereat, being stung with remorse, he afterwards kills himself.'

   Would not this be a pretty conclusion of my adventures? No, no, Sir George, expect better things from thy friend. I hope my knight-errantry will not end so tragically.

He's pretending to be a knight-errant because he's run after Mrs. Gerrard, and convinced her to leave Mr. Arnold, and he's doing all this for Sidney's benefit.  It's an extended piece of selfless gallantry, which Mr. F seems to find pretty funny because he's used to thinking of himself as a rake—he and Mrs. G's niece Miss B had an illegitimate baby together, after which Mr. F declined to marry Miss B, and as a result, Lady Bidulph declined to let Sidney marry him, for being an immoral, untrustworthy young man.

   But the novel really thinks Mr. F is really this selfless, this impossibly good—because it has named him ORLANDO, as in Orlando Furioso, as in that crazy Renaissance knight who rides around after a woman he's in love with but won't ever have sex with (ever EVER), all while doing extravagant strange benevolent things for her benefit.  When Cervantes wrote about Orlando Furioso in Quixote, he was making fun of him (or making fun of people who model themselves after him)—but Sheridan's novel is taking Furioso and knighthood seriously enough to suggest that it's going to be a matter of tragedy at some point.  (Mr. F thinks his extravagant actions are funny, when he compares himself to a knight-errant—but the novel will think it's really really SAD that he and Sidney will never have a chance to have hot-hot-hot sex all over Continental Europe.)  

   Anyway, all this is interesting because I suspect that Sidney Bidulph (pub. 1761) is interested in making-fun-of-gallantry-but-also-taking-it-seriously because of Smollett's translation ofDon Quixote (pub. 1755) had made Orlando Furioso current and interesting enough that Mr. F's first name works as a subtle bit of foreshadowing about his future (or non-future) with Sidney.  


Illustration for "Orlando Furioso" by Gustave Dore (really?  even though it's signed with a different name???), from Wikimedia Commons.  


28 June 2009

Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph: An Eighteenth-Century Page-Turner?

So here's what's fascinating so far about The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph—it's the Clarissa I actually want to read. Sidney's 16, lovely, and the only daughter of a very loving but very rigid mother. She has an older brother, George (26), who's been abroad, where he made friends with a very rich young man, Mr. Faulkland. Mr. Faulkland easily falls in love with Sidney through George's descriptions of her, and a few of her letters to George (shades of Between Men, again), and soon after they finally meet, he proposes marriage. That is, he proposes to Lady Bidulph that he marry Sidney, Lady Bidulph refers him to George's authority, and finally, after the two elder Bidulphs agree, Sidney gets to say, "Well, if my mother and brother have no objections—I mean—I'm not seeing anybody—and you're really pretty—" (Something like that, anyway.)

But then Sidney gets a cold, and hallucinates for a week or so, and when she's finally up and about, a letter has come from Faulkland's dismissed footman that says he's a bad, bad man—and inside that letter is a letter from Faulkland's ex-girlfriend, who writes to tell him she's pregnant. Now the Bidulphs are in an uproar—Lady B is incensed and says she will never let S marry such a dangerous rake; F says there's a more complicated side to the story than what was in the letter, and in fact there are some other letters Lady B refuses to read, "for fear of seeing something indecent"; G says that F is a really good guy, and that if Lady B is looking for a young man for S to satisfy all her (Lady B's) scruples, S will never get married. And Lady B has had a long and scathing conversation with F where she's told him to marry his baby's mama, that he should be ashamed to be courting S, that he's an evil man for having let the babymama's aunt let him have sex with the girl and then leave her. G and B are no longer speaking, either, although the B's all share a house. And this is all before page 40. FORTY. It's amazing.

Not that Clarissa doesn't have stuff that happens—but C spends a lot more time in her letters than S does on pity and guilt and wailing that she doesn't know what she'll do. I don't know that Sidney won't get to some of that—but a much larger portion of Sidney's elaboration on these events bears directly on the plot than Clarissa's does. So much so that I'm starting to think Clarissa doesn't have a plot so much as it has a mood—a sort of feeling of overhanging, sickly, horrible gloom. All the stuff that gets written about in Clarissa—the filial piety, the guilt, the recriminations, the shame, the wishing that her father would forgive her and her brother would stop torturing her and her mother would stand up for her—is important, but important mostly to making the reader feel as hopelessly depressed as Clarissa herself must feel. Whereas Sidney—so far, at least—seems to be fascinated by the soap-operatic drama of the family feud she's missed. She wasn't a part of it while it was going on (she was moaning and sweating and hallucinating on her bed for a week), so she can watch it after it's over. She's going to feel terrible when she gets to the end of this episode, of course—but I have a feeling I'm still going to like her when it's over. For one thing, she has these lovely sentences:
You know my mother is rigid in her notions of virtue; and I was determined to shew her that I would endeavour to imitate her. I therefore suppressed the swelling passion in my breast, and, with as much composure as I could assume, told her, I thought she acted as became her; and that, with regard to Mr. Faulkland, my opinion of his conduct was such, that I never desired to see him more. This answer, dictated perhaps by female pride (for I will not answer for the feelings of my heart at that instant) was so agreeable to my mother, that she threw her arms about my neck, and kissed me several times; blessing, and calling me by the most endearing names ]at every interval. Her tenderness overcame me; or, to deal with sincerity, I believe I was willing to make it an excuse for weeping. Oh! my dear mother, cry'd I, I have need of your indulgence; but indeed your goodness quite overpowers me.
Sidney does what Clarissa never does: she reflects directly on her own conduct. "I was determined," Sidney writes, "to shew her that I would endeavour to imitate her. I therefore suppressed the swelling passion in my breast." That swelling passion is where Sidney acknowledges having feelings that she doesn't express, while Clarissa is so well behaved that she has no feelings except the ones the conduct-book expects she should. Clarissa, I think, ends up writing itself into a critique of this kind of behavior (because Clarissa does everything right but dies a horrible martyr's death), but it doesn't start off wanting to be this kind of critique—it wants to be the story of a wonderful girl whose family never appreciated her as they should have. Sidney Bidulph, though, starts off as a story about a girl who was always good but ended up unhappy, as though proving that doing everything right may actually be a bad idea.

Anyway, I'm toying with this idea of Sheridan writing a sort of vehicle for the kind of moral ambiguity that Richardson doesn't want to support. Does an epistolary novel have a viewpoint, though? Sidney Bidulph's been just letters from Sidney, so far (except for the brief introduction from the "Editor," and a briefer one from the grown-up Cecilia), so is the novel's opinion just Sidney's? Or is there a sort of über-narrator hidden inside this? (And the idea of the hidden narrator, of course, is making me think of Austen and the Secret of Style, too—could Sidney be internalizing a narrator like Miller claims Anne Elliot is doing in Persuasion?)

20 June 2009

Why the 19th C. Makes Me Sad

People keep disappearing in Copperfield.   First DC the elder dies, then DC is sent away from home, which he's young enough to experience as everyone he loves disappearing from his life.  When he comes home again, he sees his mother and baby brother briefly, but then they die, and he only sees them again lying in state in the parlor.  (By dying, they finally stop disappearing—they come to rest in the graveyard next to the church next to DC's father.  He always knows where to find them after that.)  

DC goes to school and sees Mr. Mell fired.  He leaves school, and doesn't see anyone from there for a long time.  He works, and seems to disappear from his own life; eventually, he runs away and really does disappear from it.  He finds his Aunt, and Mr. and Miss Murdstone come find him, but finally they leave again and he's glad, for the first time in the novel, to see anyone who leaves gone.  Later he sees Mr. Wickfield slowly losing his mind.  

The worst kinds of leaving for DC, though, seems to be committed by women.  When Emily Peggotty runs away from home with Steerforth, it's a HUGE problem.  Everyone is worried that Em'ly will become a whore in London, but no one will say this directly.  (Earlier, a woman--her friend Martha--ran away from home and seems to have become a whore in London, but she's also a very crazy and apparently unattractive whore, so it's hard to tell.) Pages and pages and pages are spent mourning Em'ly and worrying about her and wondering if she'll ever come back.   (Meanwhile, Mr. Spenlow and Mr. Barkis have both died, but their disappearances weren't nearly so hard.  DC seems more worried that Agnes is going to marry Uriah Heep and so disappear from his life, even though Agnes swears she'll never marry Uriah.)  Likewise, Dora is now about to die, too, which DC has to keep worrying over, hinting at it and alluding to it and anticipating it--then he takes a couple chapters to talk about other people, so that the narrative is left dreading her death.  

All the women are going away.  Men like Mr. Peggotty have to follow women around, to make sure they don't disappear, because leaving home, in any way, means becoming a whore.  (Whores are TERRIBLE, although the novel won't talk about this clearly enough for me to tell why.)   Death is probably whores too.  

14 June 2009

Copperfield: Or Only Seventy-Eight More to Go...

Still reading Copperfield, which I'm still enjoying but now have started resenting, too. (It's Long. LONG.) Listening to it streamed from Libri Vox, read by people with good voices. The chapter in which David/Trotwood goes with Steerforth to the theater is wonderful. D/T is drunk, having had Steerforth and his college friends to dinner in his new apartment. He buys too much wine, and then drinks a lot of it, hoping that Steerforth's friends will like him and stop thinking he's very young (which he is). Steerforth's friends are themselves insecure about their youth, though, because one of them keeps referring to himself as "a man." That is, he doesn't use the first-person, just speaks of himself in third. For (a non-Dickensian) example: "A man has got to speak about himself in the third person when he isn't quite comfortable with who he is, and means to display his insecurity in the most affected way possible."
But David/Trotwood is drunk, and at the theater, and doesn't know who or where he is after a while. Before getting there, he (the narrator) had been describing the dinner and the drunkenness and the state of the wine bottles in the usual first-person past-tense, but after a while these pronouns shift into a hazy "someone" (like "someone was vomiting in a corner"), and then finally says, "someone was me." But he goes on describing himself like this, from the outside, like Steerforth's vaguely unpleasant friend "a man." All of which works incredibly well when they're at the theater, and D/T is behaving very drunk in the box during the intermission (and after the intermission, although he doesn't seem to realize it and doesn't understand why everyone keeps shushing him), and the "someone" becomes frighteningly distant—especially frightening because his foster-sister Agnes is there in the box, too, and seems embarrassed to recognize him, as though he really IS someone else.
Later D/T has a melodramatic and very self-pitying hangover, and is ashamed about this transgression of personality. The "someone" has already accomplished the othering before D/T realizes it, though—we were getting it from the first "someone" (it is almost too obvious when the narrator identifies D/T as the someone), and so we're wrapped up in the little moebius-strip of D/T's/the narrator's understanding of himself, and when this understanding takes place.

12 June 2009

Eighteenth-Century Thought completed!


Finished listening to Stephen today.  The second volume ends with a very boring narrative of development in which everything—Thompson's nature poetry and the evangelical revival's interest in feeling—are measured in their relation to the rise of Romanticism.  For Stephen, prefiguring Wordsworth is good, and Pope is very bad.  I don't really understand why Stephen has it in for Pope so badly, but he finds him boring and intellectually unsound.  Furthermore, he sets up his versions of good and bad in terms of a gender politics so irritating that I could only get through the end of the book by knitting a sweater to take my mind of my annoyance.  What Stephen likes is manly and vigorous; what he doesn't like is effete, by which I think he means gay—I suppose procreation is important to his system of the-baby-of-the-eighteenth-century-is-nineteenth-century-Romanticism...  Urgh.  Anyway, reading this much of Stephen's obsession with which philosopher has the biggest penis in the eighteenth century has made me want to punch him in the mouth.  EVERYONE he writes about for 900 pages (except some disparaging references to Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and a couple paragraphs on Edward Gibbon's aunt) is a MAN—so his ranking of them by their masculinity is particularly ridiculous.  In a context where (at least for Stephen) women don't count as part of the discussion, the praising of manly arguments shows a complete lack of awareness of the limits of his inquiry.  (And they're mostly THEOLOGIANS he's talking about, too, for heaven's sake.  Really?  He thinks "masculinity" is a useful category in talking about a century's worth of silly arguments about whether certain Christian miracles existed and if they didn't exist whether God still does in the way the Bible writes about God???  But Stephen doesn't get this irony—instead, he insists on praising Locke for the machismo of his arguments.)  

(John Locke: THE Man, according to Leslie Stephen)
What irritates me more, though, is the fact that he never explains what "masculine prose" and a "vigorous argument" actually look like, so that masculinity becomes whatever you like, and what was supposed to be a book about eighteenth-century thought turns into a not-so-covert praise of this sort of amorphous masculinity that he loves.  

11 June 2009

David Copperfield

Spent today in Richmond and then at home on the sofa, reading David Copperfield. Very sleepy now, but a few notes:

1. The way vision and visual perception get tied up with memory. (Did they use the word "perspective" as a narrative word in the mid-19th century?)

2. DC's phantom imaginary sister—both Steerforth and Miss Betsy wish he had a sister, but instead he just has a dead, "girlish" mother.

3. Narrator keeps wanting to track what he knew—was aware of—at each point in the narrative. Likes to admit that he may be making things up; uses "I remember" as a kind of refrain. A kind of unreliability that, I think, may actually bring the reader in closer to the novel's world.

Also, it's fun. I like fun.

09 June 2009

Eighteenth-Century Thought

Turns out, the best way to read a 900-page summary of eighteenth-century English theology and moral philosophy is to put it on an iPod (in distressingly robotic Mac synthesizer voice) and go walking in the woods.  Finished the first volume that way this afternoon.  

So far I'm interested in reading more of Hume and Paine, but the rest of that volume bores the hell out of me.  I suspected it bored Stephen too—he starts including unnecessary extra sentences where he calls certain writers immature, insults their prose, notes they were only writing for advancement in the church or would rather have been doing chemical experiments instead or had fun evicting gypsies from around St. Paul's in such-and-such-a-year.  
I took pictures of spores, molds and fungi, too.  




"Great forces may work slowly; and it is only after many disturbances and long continued oscillations that the world is moved from one position of equilibrium to another. Progress is the rare exception: races may remain in the lowest barbarism, or their development be arrested at some more advanced stage during periods far surpassing that of recorded history; actual decay may alternate with progress, and even true progress implies some admixture of decay."  (Leslie Stephen, The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, v.1, ch.1 "Introductory," sec. 17 "summary," page 17)

07 June 2009

Aphra Behn's Oroonoko


1. Like Quixote, it's obsessed with its own fictitiousness. When Oroonoko arrives in Suriname, he hears from Trefry about this beautiful, beautiful slave girl—and of course when Oroonoko meets her, she turns out to be Imoinda. He tells Trefry (who loves stories about love) their history—and, the narrator notes, "Trefry was infinitely pleased with this novel" (Oxford UP, ed. Salzman, 43). Salzman has a very note in the back: "novel: i.e. new thing, though perhaps with a reference to the nouvelle/novel as a literary form in the Restoration concerned with such narrative turns" (n. 43, 271); this hesitancy seems to me much more cautious than is necessary—Behn is highly interested in discussing truth and fiction, and is very much in control of her novel's dalliance with metafiction.
There are several discussions of how lying—the bad fictiveness—is a uniquely European thing: the Surinamese natives don't have the concept, and Oroonoko's people, when he's at home, consider lying extremely dishonorable. The Englishmen in the novel, on the other hand, are constantly affirming their truthfulness on Jesus' dead body and then doing shitty dishonest things. The narrator is very critical.
The narrator also acknowledges that her audience may not believe her about the wonders of the new world, and so she offers all sorts of details about the snakes and fish and eels and birds and monkeys in Surinam, and corroborates them by noting that she had a cape of one kind of feathers sent back to London to be used in a production of 'The Indian Queen.' (Another acknowledgment of the fantasy of this exotic place is when the narrator talks about the eel that makes the catcher weak and sick—she says that Englishmen won't believe there is such a thing so cold as it could do that.) But of course setting up the 'reality' of the place is constructed in terms of fiction—the evidence for the birds' reality is that their feathers were sewn into a cape to be used as a costume in a play about the New World. What may be real evidence of America is immediately conscripted into the props for its fictional representation. The narrator seems to want to make it real, but before it can be real, it necessarily becomes fake again. (It also becomes part of someone else's fiction—is put onstage not in an Aphra Behn play, but one by Dryden. Which at least is a nice way of representing how semi-truth is turned into explicit fiction—stories of America that began as sort of true get spun into bigger, wilder stories that are not about any real place at all, but just the imagination of them in listener's heads.)

2. Oh yeah—at one point, she eats an armadillo. Very tender, apparently.
Baby armadillo - by Tom Uhlman/AP Photo

3. The novel loves cruelty. People and occasionally animals keep being killed with an arrow to the eye. There's a description of how the native young men bargain to be chiefs in battle by slicing off bits of their bodies —a nose, an arm—until they've proved they're braver than the other candidates. (As a result, almost all the men are too ugly to look at: the narrator initially takes them for monsters.)
But the novel is most horrified and pleased of all by its recounting of the ten pages it takes Oroonoko to die—first, he's beaten and his wounds rubbed with pepper for leading a slave rebellion, then he recovers a bit (his friends give him a bath, to wash off the pepper) and goes for a walk with Imoinda and cuts her head off, then he spends almost a week with her rotting flower-covered corpse in the woods, then finally he's captured and brought back, nursed a bit, and then killed. Before he's brought back, though, he
cut a piece of flesh from his own throat and threw it at 'em...At that he ripped up his own bely, and took his bowels and pulled 'em out with what strength he could, while some, on their knees imploring, besought him to hold his hand. But when they saw him tottering, they cried out, 'Will none venture on him?'... Tuscan...cried out, 'I love thee, O Caesar, and therefore will not let thee die if possible' and, running to him, took him in his arms, but, at the same time, warding a blow that Caesar made at his bosom, he received it quite through his arm, and Caesar, having not the strength to pluck the knife forth, though he attempted it, Tuscan neither pulled it out himself, nor suffered it to be pulled out, but came down with it sticking in his arm because the air should not get into the wound. (71)
The narrator doesn't want to see this—she's been taken away from the plantation for a few days, when Oroonoko is initially brought back, he smells so bad that she has to go away again: "(Being myself sickly," she says, "and very apt to fall into fits of dangerous illness upon any extraordinary melancholy), the servants and Trefry and the chirurgeons promised all to take what possible care they could of the life of Caesar, and I, taking boat, went with other company to Colonel Martin's, about three days' journey down the river" (71-2).

Because the narrator and Trefry are gone when Oroonoko is killed, his execution is probably narrated by her mother and sister. She's never mentioned them before this paragraph, but now they're on hand to give the last episode of the novel:
He had learned to take tobacco; and when he was assured he should die, he desired they would give him a pipe in his mouth, ready lighted; which they did. And the executioner came, and first cut off his members, and threw them into the fire; after that, with an ill-favored knife, they cut off his ears and his nose and burned them; he still smoked on, as if nothing had touched him; then they hacked off one of his arms, and still he bore up, and held his pipe; but at the cutting off the other arm, his head sunk, and his pipe dropped, and he gave up the ghost, without a groan or a reproach. My mother and sister were by him all the while, but not suffered to save him; so rude and wild were the rabble, and so inhuman were the justices who stood by to see the execution, who after paid dearly enough for their insolence. They cut Caesar in quarters, and sent them to several of the chief plantations: one quarter was sent to Colonel Martin, who refused it, and swore he had rather see the quarters of Banister, and the Governor himself, that those of Caesar, on his plantations; and that he could govern his negroes without terrifying and grieving them with frightful spectacles of a mangled king. (72-73)
There's one more paragraph—reminding us that Oroonoko was "worthy of a better fate," and that Imoinda was "brave, beautiful and constant," and that the novelist is a woman, and so can't celebrate them in the way she would like—and then it ends. WOW.

03 June 2009

History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Chapter One

Leslie Stephen claims he wanted to write about religious thought in eighteenth-century England, so he wrote this book.  (The Preface keeps going on about the "deist controversy," which Wikipedia thinks is an empirical thing about how you don't have to believe in God because you can already see God everywhere in the vibrating strings of the clavichords of your eyes that perceive the colors of the universe that is modeled after God.  Something.)  "Further," he notes, 
I have tried to indicate the application of the principles accepted in philosophy and theology to moral and political questions, and their reflection in the imaginative literature of the time.  In the chapter upon political theories, I have tried to keep as far as possible from the province of political or social history; and the last chapter is of necessity little more than a collection of hints, which could not have been worked out in detail without expanding the book beyond all permissible limits and trespassing upon the province of literary criticism.  The book, as it is, has assumed such dimensions that I have been unable to describe it satisfactorily by any other than the perhaps too ambitious title which it bears.  (1876 Putnam, volume 1, vii)

He seems interested in writing this history—at least, in what I've read so far—as a story of improvement.  Very Victorian.  Old ideas get replaced by new, better ones, because the purpose of thinking is to get to better and more complete Truths.  (He then complicates this idea, though, by talking about the intense cultural nostalgia he keeps finding in the period for older forms of thinking, and how new forms tend to be actually quite conservative: the idea "hell doesn't exist," for example, prompts the actually conservative 'new' conclusion, "so morality doesn't exist either," because that conclusion is still working in a framework in which morality is dependent on the threat of hell.)  One quaint passage: 
Old conceptions are preserved to us in the very structure of language; the mass of mankind still preserves its childish imaginations; and every one of us has repeated on a small scale the history of the race.  We start as infants with fetish worship; we consider our nursery to be the center of the universe; and learn but slowly and with difficulty to conform our imaginative constructions to scientific truths.  It is no wonder, then, if the belief, even of cultivated minds, is often a heterogeneous mixture of elements representing various stages of thought; whilst in different social strata we may find specimens of opinions derived from every age of mankind.  (Vol 1, I.6, page 5)
Then he marches though some backgrounds on eighteenth-century philosophy: there's a short bit on Descartes, then what Locke quarreled with in Descartes, then Hume and Berkeley and Reid and crazy Lord Monboddo, who "tries to show that all the higher knowledge originated in Egypt; and, most of all, he believes in the humanity of the Ouran-Outang—that interesting animal being, in his eyes, the representative of man in a state of nature when he possessed an intellect in capacity, but not in energy or actuality" (1.IV.68, p.69).  Whatever.

02 June 2009

Persuasion—the beginning and the end


Here's what Jane Austen's Persuasion is about:

Girl—smart, sensible, aristocratic, loving—marries silly, pretty aristocrat with a gambling problem. They have three daughters and then she dies. Middle daughter is the only one who inherited her character. Best friend looks out for middle daughter (because widower is completely incapable of being a good patriarch), but fails when daughter falls in love with a sea-captain. She loves him, in part, because he reminds her of her dead mother. They want to marry, but best friend thinks it's a bad idea and convinces widower-father to also disagree.

Eight years pass. Middle daughter learns to think for herself; refuses to marry eldest son of local squire, although best friend was in favor; youngest daughter marries him instead. Youngest and eldest daughters both never quite grew up, but seem not to feel the loss of their mother as middle daughter does.

Middle daughter gets older and—she thinks—uglier. She tries mothering her father and sisters, but ends up mostly being abused by them in subtle ways instead. Father becomes too poor to support the country estate, and ends up renting it out to the sister and brother-in-law of middle daughter's old suitor. Older sister and father take off for Bath; middle daughter stays with her mother's best friend and then her younger sister for a couple months.

Old suitor comes to visit his sister; seems to be courting one of youngest daughters' sisters-in-law. Middle daughter can't breathe when they're in the same room together. Her nephew falls out of a tree but isn't hurt; she mothers him because his mother won't, and the nursemaid is also irresponsible. She thinks her old suitor has forgotten her, but hears him perhaps alluding to her in his conversations with one of the women he's courting. Great anxiety and self-criticism and awkwardness ensues.

They go on a group trip to the seashore to visit his old Navy friends. She talks about Byron and Scott with his injured friend; sister-in-law jumps from a wall and hits her head; she's okay, but during her long convalescence, the in-laws and the Navy friends become close. Middle daughter observes all kinds of motherliness on the part of those families, is praised indirectly by old suitor for being a good care-giver herself. Extremely pleased.

Old suitor ends up not marrying either one of the girls, who are both otherwise affianced. He and she must admit to themselves that they're still in love; awkwardness and anxiety again ensue; they hardly speak to each other. He suspects she's going to marry her cousin who's also in Bath; she is pleased at the cousin's flirtation, but disapproves of his character. Father and older sister reveal themselves to be superficial children; mother's best friend's influence reaches an all-time low as she almost disappears into other concerns in Bath society. Middle daughter hangs out a lot with an old school friend (slightly older than herself) who is now ill and poor but had been a great comfort to her when they were young—now middle daughter comforts the friend. Suitor's sister and brother-in-law (the tenants) also come to Bath and prove acceptable parent-substitutes to middle daughter, who begins to identify with what she sees as their more sensible, compassionate bourgeois worldview. Her younger sister's mother-in-law also proves a strong source of comfort and approval.

She and old suitor are accidentally forced to speak to each other in various situations; finally he blurts out that he's afraid she's in love with her cousin, and that he loves her; she tells him she has no intentions of marrying that man, and that she's loved him since before they broke off their first engagement, but that she feels it was her duty to take her mother's best friend's advice then. (Now, though, he's quite rich—there will be no objections this time.) They marry.