Reviewed by Anastassiya Andrianova
7.11.07

Any lover of the Gothic would recognize in Constance Barton, the heroine of Arthur Phillips’ third novel, Angelica, its staple—a beautiful female orphan who rebels against patriarchal authority embodied in this thrilling ghost story by Constance’s husband Joseph, the chillingly logical vivisectionist. Constance resists her husband’s decision to move their daughter Angelica, who has spent the first four years of her life at the foot of her parents’ bed, into a separate bedroom downstairs. Each night, Constance sneaks out at the slightest expression of the child’s uneasiness and insists on staying by her side. Joseph’s later decision to send Angelica to school only exacerbates the situation. Maternal concern turns into an obsession as Constance becomes convinced that the ghost who terrifies Angelica in her sleep is none other than Joseph. Even more startlingly, these nightly visitations coincide with her husband’s attempts to satisfy his conjugal desires.

Set in London in the 1880s, Phillips’ novel captures the intriguing and disturbing aspects of Victorian England: the appropriately euphemistic references to sex, whose close connection to women’s death in childbirth has warranted Leonard Wolf’s comment (in the annotated edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) that “death sits on her side of the bed when a woman and a man make love”; the problematic nature of marriage; the conflict between feminine intuition and male rationality as well as between spiritualism and science—the former represented by the actress-turned-spiritualist Anne Montague, who helps Constance fight her ghosts, the latter by Dr. Douglas Miles, the eccentric epicure who traces Constance’s derangement to her “morbid fear of conjugal duty”; and finally, the boundary between fantasy and reality which Freud famously penetrated by stressing, in his letters to Fliess, the importance of psychic truth to neurotics, whose symptoms lay in wishful fantasies rather than facts. The presence of Freud is hardly anachronistic: set at the dawn of psychoanalysis and the peak of spiritualism, Angelica explores both phenomena which were meant to help Victorian women purge themselves of dark secrets and haunting memories—in a word, ghosts, both past and present.

It is, in fact, the uncertain distinction between fact and fiction that results in a complex, thoroughly entertaining, at times confusing, but ultimately rewarding read. Most reviewers agree that Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is the novel’s likely inspiration; Phillips even adapts the names of James’ characters (Miles, Douglas) to make the comparison more obvious. But Angelica is no simple adaptation. Phillips borrows from James the use of multiple narrators with conflicting perspectives and creates an unsettling experience for the reader. A good example of this is the “frothing story” Dr. Miles tells Joseph about a woman put on trial for murdering her husband, later found mentally unfit for prison and sent to a mental institution—the same place the doctor suggests for Constance. Baffled at first, Joseph as well as the reader is slowly able “to extract some parallel” from this inset tale: he must decide whether this is the testimony of a helpless madwoman and, consequently, sympathize with her on account of her condition, or to condemn the cold-blooded murderess should her testimony prove false. There is even a further twist, but the parallel becomes clear: in matters as knotty and nutty, no one answer is possible, and one’s sympathy as well as the blame shifts with each additional detail.

Angelica is told from four different perspectives, but it is hard to tell who gives the true account: is it Constance, the insomniac convinced that the blue apparition that haunts her child is, in fact, her husband? Mrs. Montague, who enhances séances with stagecraft while teaching her female patients how to manage their husband’s appetites? Joseph, who quietly accepts his wife’s descent into madness? Or, the four-year-old Angelica?

Phillips, the bestselling author of Prague and The Egyptologist, distinguishes between novels that “will provide every single answer” and Angelica, which “sets itself up” in such a way that “it’s just not possible to have a complete answer,” inviting us to question “what we do and do not know about the world” (Publishers Weekly). In the end, the grown-up Angelica turns out to be the anonymous narrator of all four accounts. She is now a hysteric whose health depends upon the successful unraveling of the truth. Yet, she cannot match up all the conflicting accounts of the events she “know[s] actually occurred”: “If each of the players performed his own unconnected drama,” she reasons, “then it is only in the intersection of those dramas that my life can be seen, through the latticed spaces where light can pass between three stories laid over each other. And yet when I lay these stories atop each other, no light does pass and no space remains.” Like Angelica, the reader can, in due course, tie up the loose ends of the plot; however, also like her, she will never know the whole truth—or “complete answer.” To do so would require looking at the stories reductively, from a single rationalist perspective whose efficacy the novel itself undermines.

Angelica is not just a period piece; it is a psychologically rich novel at once feminist and sensitive to the male experience. We undoubtedly feel for Constance and Angelica who challenge manly, hyper-rational views on reality—the former in her fight against her unsympathetic husband, the latter against her analyst, who consults his watch eager to summon “the next pretty hysteric.” But we may also be compelled by Joseph’s melancholy account of nearly losing his wife in childbirth “only to see her vanish into motherhood,” shunning their marriage bed to be with her child. It is, moreover, a post-modern novel in that it questions the stability of meaning—what Angelica calls the “manly promises of certainty”—to which science aspires, espousing a more intuitive and, by the novel’s standards, feminine, approach. For this, Angelica serves as the mouthpiece, interested less in the elusive final product than in the process of searching for meaning—somewhere in the “intersection of those dramas” that make up life.