Set in 19th-century England, The Dress Lodger shows the reader a face of England that is usually ignored by Jane Austen film adaptations. This novel isn’t about the trials and tribulations of the landed gentry, nor is it about the games women must play to land a husband and financial security. In Sheri Holman’s England, sanitation is nonexistent and the medical field is still in its infancy, so much so that doctors and surgeons had to resort to grave-robbing (directly or indirectly) to further their scant knowledge.
One such surgeon, Dr. Henry Chiver, has relocated to the port city of Sunderland in the hopes of reviving a reputation damaged by his involvement in body-snatching. The few students he has taken on have no faith in him due to his inability to present bodies for their study. As he grows increasingly desperate, Henry stumbles onto Gustine, a young prostitute and the eponymous dress lodger of our story, who offers to procure bodies for him for reasons that she doesn’t immediately reveal.
Of course, in a place and time where body-snatching and prostitution are commonplace, it’s only natural that Gustine’s reasons for extending help are less than altruistic. Being poor and uneducated, young Gustine has problems of her own, the most glaring of which is her fatherless son, who was born with his heart outside his chest. She works two jobs to provide for herself and her nameless baby – as a potter’s assistant during the day, and as a prostitute in a rented dress at night. Her pimp/landlord, Whilky, has charged the Eye, a silent and deformed woman, with making sure that Gustine is making him money off of the dress, and the Eye does this without fail: she is as vigilant as Gustine’s own shadow, tracking her every move and witnessing every back-alley john Gustine services. Despite all these things, however, Gustine is no simpering heroine waiting for Prince Charming to take her away from the poverty she was born into. Providing for her baby and hoping for their future is enough to sustain her.
If Gustine has a dream, it is this: that her baby will live. . . . She is elementary in her singular desire. Life for her child. Would any parent call such a modest hope avarice?
There is nothing predictable about The Dress Lodger, despite its familiar, Dickensian setting. The novel uses the collective narrator, and the grand reveal as to who the narrators are was rewarding, although it shouldn’t cause the astute reader too much difficulty to figure out who is telling the story. The characters, particularly Gustine and the Eye, were finely drawn and, in the hands of Ms. Holman, still dignified, despite their less-than-ideal circumstances. These are women who refuse to romanticize or be romanticized, and Ms. Holman grants them a version of nobility by allowing them to own their choices.
The high-born characters – Henry and his fiancee, Audrey – are illustrated as duplicitous or naive, though they are by no means unidimensional. Through their interactions with Gustine and her neighbors, Henry and Audrey are used as pointed examples of upper-class hypocrisy; their callous disregard for and naive, misguided attempts to help the lower classes are paid for dearly in the end in one of the novel’s most visceral passages.
It would not be unreasonable to assume that this story does not end well for any of our players. There is, in fact, very little that is pleasant about this tale, but the quality of the writing itself will keep the reader glued to its bleak pages. Sunderland, as imagined by Ms. Holman, is abysmal, dirty, and cutthroat; the same can be said of its citizens, both rich and poor, who are often too busy trying to hustle to care much for their neighbors. Add to this environment the silent threat of cholera morbus, and you realize it’s only a matter of time before the city – a reimagining of Sodom and Gomorrah? – implodes on itself.
Despite knowing that these characters will meet a grim fate, I found myself willingly wading in the filth of Sunderland just to see how the story would end. While it is true that The Dress Lodger skewers societal expectations and exposes its inherent hypocrisy, there is still a most human and universal aspect that is present in Gustine’s struggle – that of hope and redemption, which all of us, whether high-born like Henry or eternally toiling like Gustine, can identify with.
1 Comment
Jul 18, 2008 | Friday at 12:31 am
I recently read Holman’s ‘The Dress Lodger’, and found it lacking compared to Michel Faber’s ‘The Crimson Petal and the White’ (more or less the same cast of characters, but in Victorian England proper). The ending also felt tacked on, and Holman didn’t research her local dialects/vocabulary very well, either.