Connotations 18.1-3 (2008/2009)

70
PHILIPP ERCHINGER
with children’s games at cards, with scrap-books full of prints […] by these
and other trifling attentions like them, we composed her, and steadied her
[…]. (400-01)
Certainly, it does not require much effort to associate this pitiful creature
with the “poor helpless woman” that has earlier been introduced
under the name of Anne Catherick (92), a “half-witted,” faint and
“half-frightened” “child whose mental faculties had been in a disturbed
condition from a very early age” (495, 50, 116) and whose
“intellect is not developed as it ought to be at her age” (49). And even
though we may easily attribute these “symptoms of mental affliction”
(116) in both women to their common experience of being wrongly
confined in an asylum, this does nothing to disclaim that, by the third
epoch, they seem to have become one and the same person.
The only way to distinguish them is to rely on the authority of Walter’s
judgement, but, again, Walter, himself a mentally weak and
traumatised man, is not at all credible. 10 He does not, for example,
have any scruples in openly deceiving Laura, pretending that he was
selling her “poor, faint, valueless sketches” of painting (442), as he
calls them, just to make her feel she is doing something useful. Likewise,
Walter does deliberately not tell Mrs Clements “the whole
truth” (422) when he asks her to provide him with the information he
needs; he modifies an important statement by Pesca, declaring that he
repeats it with “the careful suppressions and alterations which the
serious nature of the subject” required (534), and even Marian’s diary
report is not reproduced in its original form but only in terms of the
notes Walter “wanted” to take when Marian read to him from her
“manuscript,” the original version of which she prefers to keep private
due to a number of delicate passages significantly relating to
Walter himself (401). The novel abounds with such apparently minor
remarks, fuelling endless speculations on whether the plot actually
did develop the way the text makes us believe. Does the unpublished
part of the diary perhaps include any disreputable details about Walter
that would further disparage the integrity of his character and his
editing? We shall never know, just as we shall never know whether