Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, a trilogy originally published between 1917 and 1929, seems, at first glance, deceptively Victorian. Set in Australia during the gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century, the three novels trace the rise and fall of the title character against the backdrop of colonial expansion (and, indeed, contraction). Mahony, an Irish expatriate, struggles to establish himself as, first, a shopkeeper, then, a doctor (as per his training); he marries, plays the stock market, and slowly rises up the colonial social ladder. But he suffers from incurable wanderlust, both literal and figurative. Worse still, he swings between self-destructive optimism and equally self-destructive paranoia, and the latter trait consigns him to a madhouse in the third volume, Ultima Thule. He is, in many ways, a profoundly unlikeable character throughout, whether it's his priggishness in the beginning or his overwhelming selfishness in the end. Richardson identifies Richard Mahony with the sea, both because it is eternally in motion and because it is "between" homes--Australia and Britain--rather than a home itself.
The trilogy's truly heroic figure is not Mahony but his wife, Mary. A timid teenager at the time of her marriage, at first unquestioningly devoted to her husband, Mary becomes an iron woman. In the face of her husband's inability to deal with other human beings, she learns how to conciliate his clients, manage his household, and negotiate their increasingly tricky financial straits. At the same time, she also finds herself imprisoned by a very "Victorian" domestic ideology, parts of which she accepts without question, parts of which actually destroy the family (most notably, Richard's attempts to keep business matters strictly within his own purview). While Mary is hardly perfect--she lacks imagination and doesn't seem to understand her children, especially her son--she nevertheless wrestles with life in a way that Richard conspicuously does not. The reader notes a certain irony at the expense of stereotypical gender roles: Richard's attempts to keep a firm hold on his gentlemanly public role backfire rather spectacularly, while Mary's determination to salvage her family eventually forces her into white-collar work. If Richard is the sea, Mary--who keeps trying to put down roots--is the land.
Readers of nineteenth-century fiction will recognize a number of key themes: the quest for gentility; the concept of national identity (which Richardson usually addresses figuratively, instead of directly); the figure of the "self-made man"; the collapse of religious certainties in the age of Darwin and the spiritualists; the dangers of the stock market; the possibilities of free agency versus unfeeling forces beyond one's control. And Richardson's novel is almost perfectly linear in structure. But the reader soon realizes that Richardson articulates almost the entire narrative through free indirect discourse. In other words, there's virtually no "objective" perspective on the story's events: everything is subtly shaded by Richard's perspective, or Mary's, or their son Cuffy's. (Other characters occasionally float in as well.) Richardson's approach draws our attention to the psychological territory of Australia, as well as to its often forbidding landscapes.
I got interested in this book after a mention in one of my favorite blogs and am wading through it. I love its details and imagery (it's amazing, considering I've never seen a place remotely like a scrappy Australian outback, that it appears so clearly in my mind). I'm almost through volume one and came online to find an answer to my outraged question, how could this female author have created such a miserably simpering Polly as this? Her stereotype is more cloying than Dickens! It's worse than her ikky references to the Chinese! But now you've given me hope that this has been done on purpose so I shall wade on. Thanks.
Posted by: Melinama | May 01, 2005 at 08:10 AM