*The Secret of the Sea* (1913)
Nov. 17th, 2012 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
emma_in_dreamIf I had been more organised, I would have reviewed *The Secret of the Sea* in April this year, to coincide with the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic.
The story was inspired by the Titanic, featuring two sets of twins orphaned in the sinking of a ship. They get muddled up and no one knows which are the heirs of duke and which are the children of ‘commoners’.
It’s one of my least favourite books by Turner. This is partly because it is incredibly episodic. It starts with a chapter which is effectively an unattached prologue in a different genre. This could stand as a quite gripping short story on its own.
In summary, at nine o’clock at night a junior officer is flirting with a girl passenger and asking her for a ribbon from her shoe. By ten o’clock she is dead, frozen in the water, and he has shot several men trying to storm one of the remaining life boats.
It is gripping stuff, but I do find the racism seriously grating. I know this is how the Titanic was interpreted at the time. Fine, white officers gallantly defending the right for women and children to evacuate first while steerage Italians and Chinese panic and storm the boats. But the racism, intertwined with classism, does, I guess fit with the larger nature/nurture preoccupation of the novel.
The next chapter is another false start. This time we are in the woods as a grandmotherly duchess picks bluebells and thinks about her son who always picked the flowers with her until he ran off with an actress. She is worried that her daughter-in-law is not up to scratch. Then she hears that her son is dead.
Then the third start when the actress daughter-in-law and twin grandchildren are about to be shipped back to England. The boat sinks and you (finally) get to the confused heir motif.
This is such a hackneyed, Victorian plot. Eventually it is determined which is which. In between there is a lot of angst about being 'ill bred'.
And a minor character is introduced, a village boy unlike the other village boys because he is the descendent of Huguenots. He does not look like them and he devours literature on electricity before running off to make his fortune. Which he manages within three months by saving a daring cross-Channel pilot and helping him set a world record. Turner herself says that this is like a nineteenth-century penny dreadful.
(As a side note, I didn’t check the publication date til after I had finished it, but I was sure it had to be between 1912 and 1914. It definitely post-dates the Titanic sinking but the reference to French, British and German authorities working together on the design of airplanes is out of place once you hit World War One.)
So, all the elements hang together to examine nature/nurture. Even the two false starts fit in with this theme. And Turner was consciously addressing the issue as she wrote that it 'was a chance to try to demonstrate that it is the environment and education of the child that mean so much more than birth'.
However, to my eyes, a century later, it's a bit of a flop. I just don't care which one inherits the title and it would seem more sensible to me that, in the absence of DNA tests, they just flip a coin or choose the child who seems best at estate management.
Also, to heighten the difference, Turner has the poor-but-honest family continue to live in poverty which just makes the Duke and Duchess look like asses.
However, it apparently sold consistently well and when re-released in the 1940s in the midst of paper rationing sold 500 copies in the first week.
The story was inspired by the Titanic, featuring two sets of twins orphaned in the sinking of a ship. They get muddled up and no one knows which are the heirs of duke and which are the children of ‘commoners’.
It’s one of my least favourite books by Turner. This is partly because it is incredibly episodic. It starts with a chapter which is effectively an unattached prologue in a different genre. This could stand as a quite gripping short story on its own.
In summary, at nine o’clock at night a junior officer is flirting with a girl passenger and asking her for a ribbon from her shoe. By ten o’clock she is dead, frozen in the water, and he has shot several men trying to storm one of the remaining life boats.
It is gripping stuff, but I do find the racism seriously grating. I know this is how the Titanic was interpreted at the time. Fine, white officers gallantly defending the right for women and children to evacuate first while steerage Italians and Chinese panic and storm the boats. But the racism, intertwined with classism, does, I guess fit with the larger nature/nurture preoccupation of the novel.
The next chapter is another false start. This time we are in the woods as a grandmotherly duchess picks bluebells and thinks about her son who always picked the flowers with her until he ran off with an actress. She is worried that her daughter-in-law is not up to scratch. Then she hears that her son is dead.
Then the third start when the actress daughter-in-law and twin grandchildren are about to be shipped back to England. The boat sinks and you (finally) get to the confused heir motif.
This is such a hackneyed, Victorian plot. Eventually it is determined which is which. In between there is a lot of angst about being 'ill bred'.
And a minor character is introduced, a village boy unlike the other village boys because he is the descendent of Huguenots. He does not look like them and he devours literature on electricity before running off to make his fortune. Which he manages within three months by saving a daring cross-Channel pilot and helping him set a world record. Turner herself says that this is like a nineteenth-century penny dreadful.
(As a side note, I didn’t check the publication date til after I had finished it, but I was sure it had to be between 1912 and 1914. It definitely post-dates the Titanic sinking but the reference to French, British and German authorities working together on the design of airplanes is out of place once you hit World War One.)
So, all the elements hang together to examine nature/nurture. Even the two false starts fit in with this theme. And Turner was consciously addressing the issue as she wrote that it 'was a chance to try to demonstrate that it is the environment and education of the child that mean so much more than birth'.
However, to my eyes, a century later, it's a bit of a flop. I just don't care which one inherits the title and it would seem more sensible to me that, in the absence of DNA tests, they just flip a coin or choose the child who seems best at estate management.
Also, to heighten the difference, Turner has the poor-but-honest family continue to live in poverty which just makes the Duke and Duchess look like asses.
However, it apparently sold consistently well and when re-released in the 1940s in the midst of paper rationing sold 500 copies in the first week.
