End of Bidulph

Kind of a let-down, actually—horrible things keep happening, and then finally they stop. Sidney stays alive for a while, I think, I can't remember. (Orlando Faulkland completely loses his mind, which is really very entertaining, and Sidney seems to finally find him an acceptable suitor at that point, because she marries him when he says he'll kill himself if she doesn't. She finally stops agonizing about things, just says she'll do it. (Her BROTHER does agonize, and says it'll look bad if Sidney goes off with Orlando right after the wedding; she should wait a while first.) But then he kills himself anyway because he's discovered that his wife who he thought he'd shot dead with her lover wasn't actually dead, just the lover, and so he was kind of a bigamist. So it was good, all in all, that Sidney HADN'T run off with him, even though it means that Sidney and Faulkland never have sex with each other. Sad face.)

Then I read Kathleen M. Oliver's article in SEL, "Frances Sheridan's Faulkland, the Silenced, Emasculated Male" (http://www.jstor.org/stable/4625090 ). Oliver does a nice job examining how Faulkland is feminized in the novel—he's excessive, he falls in love too easily, he stays in love too long, he has a tendency to drink too much and play cards too long and lets himself get manipulated by women like Mrs. Gerrarde, Miss Burchell, and (of course) Sidney and Lady Bidulph. Oliver is responding to critics like Spacks, who have contrasted Faulkland's 'activeness' with Sidney's passivity (Faulkland, after all, gets rid of Mrs. Gerrarde as Mr. Arnold's mistress by kidnapping her and marrying her to his servant in France); Oliver says Faulkland is much more subjugated within structures of feminine power than other people have seemed to find him. Then she does something interesting where she talks about how Faulkland is Continental and Feminized, and Sidney (Sir Philip is her obvious namesake, although Spacks ties her to Lady Mary Wroth, and the Countess of Pembroke, and whatever) is English and Masculine. So HOW is Sidney MASCULINE? This would have been a really interesting way to look at the novel (Sidney not so much the victim but the victimized spokesperson of patriarchy), and I wish Oliver had gone there more. I LIKE novels in which women are men, and men are women (like how Captain Wentworth is a mother figure for Anne Elliot in Persuasion).