“Strange Unstable World”: Structure and Synthesis in the Final Narratives

Abstract

Norton’s readers from the 1830s and 1840s would surely have recognized her hand in the novels of the 1860s. Lost and Saved adapts numerous aspects of her first long poem, The Sorrows of Rosalie, and Old Sir Douglas returns to the familiar Scottish setting and symbolic landscape of pastoral north vs. urban south that features prominently in both The Wife and Stuart of Dunleath. Recurring themes, tropes, and modes, however, cannot disguise significant changes and evolving styles. Most notably, Norton introduces sensational plots and villains that accentuate the moral vision of melodrama—a change attributable in part to public taste. A survey of new fiction in 1863 concluded that a “book without a murder, a divorce, a seduction, or a bigamy, is not apparently considered worth either writing or reading.… [A] tale must needs be full of horror, excitement, and crime.”³ Norton’s shift in mode also reflects “an impatience of old restraints,” personal as well as artistic, and a search for a form that will enable her to combine more effectively different voices—plaintive and passionate, satirical and sentimental—within a single work.

The “sensation novel” of our time, however extravagant and unnatural, yet is a sign of the times—the evidence of a certain turn of thought and action, of an impatience of old restraints, and a craving for some fundamental change in the working of society. ¹

“Our Female Sensation Novelists”

Of all the personages who figure in history, in poetry, in art, Mary Magdalene is at once the most unreal and the most real:—the most unreal if we attempt to fix her identity, which has been a subject of dispute for ages: the most real, if we consider her as having been, for ages, recognised and accepted in every Christian heart as the empersonation of the penitent sinner absolved through faith and love.²

Anna Jameson, Sacred and Legendary Art