It is but a glimpse of the world of fashion that we want on this same miry afternoon….
It is not a large world…. There is much good in it; there are many good and true people in it; it has its appointed place. But the evil of it is that it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air.
My Lady Dedlock has returned to her house in town for a few days previous to her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to stay some weeks, after which her movements are uncertain. The fashionable intelligence says so for the comfort of the Parisians, and it knows all fashionable things. To know things otherwise were to be unfashionable. My Lady Dedlock has been down at what she calls, in familiar conversation, her “place” in Lincolnshire. The waters are out in Lincolnshire. An arch of the bridge in the park has been sapped and sopped away. The adjacent low-lying ground for half a mile in breadth is a stagnant river with melancholy trees for islands in it and a surface punctured all over, all day long, with falling rain. My Lady Dedlock’s place has been extremely dreary. The weather for many a day and night has been so wet that the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings and prunings of the woodman’s axe can make no crash or crackle as they fall. The deer, looking soaked, leave quagmires where they pass. The shot of a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist air, and its smoke moves in a tardy little cloud towards the green rise, coppice-topped, that makes a background for the falling rain. The view from my Lady Dedlock’s own windows is alternately a lead-coloured view and a view in Indian ink. The vases on the stone terrace in the foreground catch the rain all day; and the heavy drops fall–drip, drip, drip–upon the broad flagged pavement, called from old time the Ghost’s Walk, all night. On Sundays the little church in the park is mouldy; the oaken pulpit breaks out into a cold sweat; and there is a general smell and taste as of the ancient Dedlocks in their graves. My Lady Dedlock (who is childless), looking out in the early twilight from her boudoir at a keeper’s lodge and seeing the light of a fire upon the latticed panes, and smoke rising from the chimney, and a child, chased by a woman, running out into the rain to meet the shining figure of a wrapped-up man coming through the gate, has been put quite out of temper. My Lady Dedlock says she has been “bored to death.”
I love the dismal ‘ennui’ of this description of ‘My Lady Dedlock’s’ Lincolnshire home. Its rotting stagnancy evokes a sense of a world no longer capable of sustaining life; hinting that as the Dedlock’s name suggests, (think of ‘deadlock’) My Lady’s studied self preservation cannot ward off the inevitability of her ensuing ‘end’; her tragic ruination as she is sacrificed to the ‘fashion’ of Victorian hypocrisy and morality.
If the ‘fog’ opens the novel suggesting perceptual blindness and lostness, then the mists and damp of Chesney Wold suggest decay, a progression degeneration of the name of Dedlock ., as this world is no longer fertile , no longer capable of sustaining growth.
The Dedlocks are on the brink the brink of extinction.
This end is brought about through the discovery of her carefully preserved secret, her secret child, born out of wedlock. Thus,we may recognize the dramatic irony of the obsequious repetition of ‘My Lady Dedlock’, underlining the reality that even the richest, most ‘fashionable’ of all members of this society are in truth ‘owned’ by society too.
We may also recognize the narrator’s seeming compliance with the ‘bored’ gaze of Lady Dedlock as she stares out upon the vital, life affirming relationship of parent and child, supposedly ‘bored to death’ by such a random scene and yet, we later discover, just crippled emotionally by her own psychological armour, erected to protect her from the very experience that defined her previous and most real life.
This society will crush any who are seen to transgress the rules and regulations of such a world, no matter how hypocritical. Admiration is transient, a double edged sword.
‘My Lady Dedlock’ is living on borrowed time, and the repetition of the pronoun ‘My’ shows us that she is owned by society, a prisoner, cynically tolerated and then thrown brutally away.
Wonderfully miserable. Dreariness has never been done quite so well?
