Fingersmith

“Of course, if we ever took help at Lant Street, it wasn’t character we looked for so much as lack of it.”

The term “character” here operates as a double entendre. It refers to a character reference, as when someone is seeking employment, and it slyly denotes character as in moral character—an unnecessary attribute in a house of thieves. It could also even denote “character” as a person acting in a play or a personage in a book—another oblique reference to the roles all of the main characters must play in service of the elaborate conspiracy.

“I should never have put her down as the motherly sort, myself; but servants grow sentimental over the swells they work for, like dogs grow fond of bullies.”

Sue’s observation of the behavior of the servants at Briar serves as an exploration of the master-servant relationship, a servile attitude under which she has never had to suffer. As she frequently emphasizes, her life as a thief is notable for its lack of masters and its freedom, which is quite the opposite of Maud’s seemingly privileged—but extremely sheltered—life. The simile comparing servants to dogs reveals her disdainful opinion of those who serve unworthy masters.

“She let the question fall, like it was nothing to her; and I knew confidence men who did the same, dropping one good shilling among a pile of snide, to make all the coins seem honest.”

Sue makes this observation of Maud, which foreshadows the betrayal that is to come. Of course, Maud is something of a confidence man—in league with and often compared to Gentleman—in the scheme to escape Briar. She is dishonest, like the metaphorical shillings the fraudster drops to fool the mark. Maud herself will also fall victim to Mrs. Sucksby’s conspiracy.

“He put his slice of pear to his mouth and ate it in two sharp bites. It left beads of cloudy juice on his beard. He licked his fingers, thoughtfully; and I licked mine; and Maud, for once, let her gloves grow stained, and sat with the fruit against her lip and nibbled at it, her look a dark one.”

Like an allegorical Garden of Eden, the three characters, connected through sexually charged conspiracy, indulge in the forbidden fruit. The fact that Maud’s gloves—symbolic of her innocence—become stained indicates her willing participation in the scheme. Her virtue is besmirched.

“‘My happiness is nothing to him,’ she said. ‘Only his books! He has made me like a book. I am not meant to be taken, and touched, and liked. I am meant to keep here, in a dim light, for ever!’”

Maud renders herself a symbolic book, a dusty old tome tucked away and kept, possessively, in the dark. Further, her uncle’s books are not meant for the bright light of day, such is their obscene subject matter, but rather for the dim recesses of the perverse imagination. Maud is objectified here as a collectible—though not readable—book, while elsewhere, Mr. Lilly compares her to poison, tainted by her association with his library.

“I had done it, only to show her. But I lay with my mouth on hers and felt, starting up in me, everything I had said would start in her, when Gentleman kissed her. It made my giddy. It made me blush, worse than before. It was like liquor. It made me drunk.”

Sue demonstrates what Gentleman might do to Maud on their wedding night, but she is caught unawares by the depth of her own feeling. She is both embarrassed and excited. In this simile, the rush of passion is compared to liquor that inebriates and overwhelms the senses.

“I stood and held my poor, bent twig of honesty, and watched Maud standing at Gentleman’s side, holding tight on to hers. I had kissed her. I had lain upon her. I had touched her with a sliding hand. I had called her a pearl. She had been kinder to me than anyone save Mrs. Sucksby; and she had made me love her, when I only meant to ruin her.”

Sue presides over the wedding between Maud and Gentleman, mournfully holding the symbolic bouquet of “honesty”—a travesty at a wedding filled with anything but truthfulness and integrity. It is also a telling comparison between Maud and Mrs. Sucksby, the only maternal figure in Sue’s life; the love she has for Maud can be seen, at least in part, as a search for maternal comfort.

“I imagine a table slick with blood. The blood is my mother’s. There is too much of it. There is so much of it, I think it runs, like ink.”

Maud envisions her mother’s agonizing death in childbirth (a false story she has been told about her mother’s fate). The use of ink as a metaphor for blood is significant. Maud often compares herself to a book, particularly the untoward books in her uncle’s library; thus, the blood that runs through her is tainted, as is her bloodline itself, like the ink within her uncle’s books.

“I call them lessons; but I am not taught as other girls are. I learn to recite, softly and clearly; I am never taught to sing. I never learn the names of flowers and birds, but am schooled instead in the hides with which books are bound—as say, morocco, russia, calf, chagrin; and their papers—Dutch, China, motley, silk. I learn inks; the cutting of pens; the uses of pounce; the styles and sizes of founts: sans-serif, antique, Egyptian, pica brevier, emerald, ruby, pearl...They are named for jewels. It is a cheat. For they are hard and dull as cinders in a grate.”

Maud describes her unusual education. She is not educated as most virtuous 19th-century ladies are; rather, she is taught the trade of books—specifically, socially suspect books. She points out the irony of naming fonts for precious jewels. For her, these fonts represent the extinguished light of her innocence, of her life in captivity.

“A photograph will provoke heat in an Englishman, a Frenchman, a savage. It will outlast us all, and provoke heat in our grandsons. It is a thing apart from history.”

In the debate over whether photographs are more successful vehicles of pornography than books, Mr. Hawtrey—whose psychiatric hospital Maud later seeks and who rebuffs her—champions the new visual medium over the antiquated book. Either way, the debate highlights how pornography is the purview of the male gaze, whether the spectator is “civilized” English- and Frenchmen or “savages.” Women are objectified, even in the racist language of the privileged white speaker, by all men.

“It is he, I think, who has profited from your mother’s misfortune.—You’ll forgive my speaking plainly. I am a sort of villain, and know other villains best. Your uncle is the worst kind, for he keeps to his own house, where his villainy passes as an old man’s quirk.”

When Gentleman first approaches Maud with his scheme to free her from her uncle’s grasp, while ensuring a tidy fortune for himself, he compares himself to the villainy of her uncle—but also, by extension, to the villainy he gleans within Maud herself, which will later be stated explicitly. He observes that Mr. Lilly’s wicked nature is allowed to flourish because he is private about his interests, but it also references Mr. Lilly’s privilege: A man of property and money can afford to indulge his intemperate desires.

“She hovers at the pointing finger that my uncle keeps to mark the bounds of innocence at Briar, just as I once did; and—again, like me—in her innocence she does not see it, and tries to cross it. I must keep her from that, more even than my uncle must!—and while he jerks and screams I go softly to her, and touch her. She flinches at the feel of my fingers.”

The finger demarcates the line of innocence—the line from which the spines of the books can be read—in Mr. Lilly’s library. It is both indicative of blame—how dare one cross Mr. Lilly’s boundaries—and shame, as in a wagging finger pointing at the accused. Maud has long ago been forced to shed her innocence, and she must protect Sue from said fate, though her motives are mixed. Primarily, she must not allow Sue to know that Maud is not the innocent girl that Gentleman has portrayed her to be; later, however, Maud protects Sue out of love.

“Is this desire? How queer that I, of all people, should not know! But I thought desire smaller, neater; I supposed it bound to its own organs as taste is bound to the mouth, vision to the eye. This feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. It covers me, like skin.”

When Maud begins to fall for Sue, she is overwhelmed by the power of desire—something she has only read about in books, never yet experienced herself. Desire is personified as an entity unto itself, a specter that disturbs or a creature that consumes.

“‘How ill a man may grow,’ he says, ‘from the sight of the spilling of a little of his own blood. What monsters you females must be, to endure this, month upon month. No wonder you are prone to madness.’”

Gentleman speaks to Maud as they conspire to deceive the others, primarily Sue, that they have consummated their marriage. Gentleman cuts his hand to put blood on the sheets to symbolize Maud’s loss of virginity. His comment belies his underlying disregard, even contempt, for women while expressing a common trope of 19th-century literature. Women are “prone to madness” or what was commonly called “hysteria,” a direct reference to the role of reproductive organs in unacceptable female behavior.

“I know London. London is a city of opportunities fulfilled. This place, of jostling and clamour, I do not know. It is thick with purposes I do not understand. It is marked with words, but I cannot read it.”

Maud’s innocence is on display here—she only knows London from books—and ironically renders her illiterate. London is illegible, and Maud cannot read or interpret its intentions. Comparing London to a book also reverberates with Maud’s own feelings of being one of her uncle’s books, and the reference to multiple purposes echoes with the elaborate scheme of Mrs. Sucksby’s in which Maud finds herself entwined.

“‘Meanwhile, here’s Sue. You have seen, dear girl, how close and quiet I have kept the lady’s word.’ She pats her gown. ‘Well, what was the word to me, without Sue to pin it to? Think how close and quiet I have kept her. Think how safe. Think how sharp such a girl might have grown, in a house like this one, in a street like ours; then think how hard Mr Ibbs and me have worked to keep her blunt.’”

Just as Maud’s innocence is displayed above, Sue’s relative innocence is displayed here. Mrs. Sucksby reveals that her coddling of Sue was purposeful; without it, her scheme could not come to fruition. She and Mr. Ibbs must keep Sue as innocent and open-hearted as possible. Also, Sue herself is conflated with the letter—revealing Miss Lilly’s intentions to split her fortune between Sue and Maud—which she keeps close to her chest.

“It flows, like poison. Its surface is littered with broken matter—with hay, with wood, with weed, with paper, with tearings of cloth, with cork and tilting bottles. It moves, not as a river moves, but as a sea: It heaves. And where it breaks, against the hulls of boats, and where it is thrown, upon the shore, and about the stairs and the walls and wooden piers that rise from it, it froths like sour milk.”

Maud is lost in London, trying to find freedom from Mrs. Sucksby and her house. She speaks here of the Thames, the impediment between her and possible freedom, but it is also a metaphor for Mr. Rivers—aka Gentleman—who has been the architect of her further imprisonment. It is notably spoiled and polluted, not to mention relentless as the “sea,” like Gentleman himself.

“They had taken my clothes and my shoes; but I had walked and torn and bitten that glove all night, it was all I had to keep my nerve up. I had the idea that, if they were to take it, I should be like a Samson shorn.”

In the psychiatric hospital, Sue clings to Maud’s old glove like it represents the last vestiges of her strength and sanity. The simile compares her need for the glove with the biblical Samson’s infamous haircut; when Delilah cuts his hair, he loses his remarkable strength. Initially, it motivates her growing desire for revenge. Later, it will symbolize her continuing love for Maud, motivating her determination to find her.

“It seemed too hard that I—of all people in the world!—should be kept so low, so long, from everything that was mine, by a single key—a single, simple key! not even a fancy key, but a plain one, with four straight cuts upon it that, given the right kind of blank and file, I knew I should have been able, in half a moment, to fake up.”

Sue laments her unlikely imprisonment: A fingersmith, a skilled thief, is locked away for want of a key. It also foreshadows exactly what she will do: Send Charles to get her a blank and file to cut a key that will release her. She is an active agent of her own freedom—a notable anomaly for women in 19th-century fiction.

“No-one called me by my own name. I began to answer to Maud and Mrs Rivers; sometimes it seemed to me I must be Maud, since so many people said I was. And sometimes I even seemed to dream, not my own dreams, but hers; and sometimes to remember things, from Briar, that she had said and done, as if I had said and done them.”

Throughout the novel, the author conflates the two women, maid and mistress, mistress and maid. It begins to come quite literally true once Sue is taken to the psychiatric hospital under the guise that she is Maud suffering from the delusion that she is Maud’s servant. Their fates, their very identities, are inextricably linked: while Sue is not Maud, she is, in fact, Sue Lilly, while Maud is Maud Sucksby.

“I thought, The morning has broken.—I thought of the morning like an egg, that had split with a crack and was spreading. Before us lay all the green country of England, with its rivers and its roads and its hedges, its churches, its chimneys, its rising threads of smoke.”

The simile comparing the morning to an egg symbolizes renewal—an egg contains new life, after all—and opportunity. Yet, the egg is also a delicate vessel, cracked and damaged easily. Sue (with her temporary companion, Charles) awaits on the precipice of her destiny, having escaped from her imprisonment in the psychiatric hospital and gone off to London to avenge her betrayal.

“No-one was told about me, and Maud. No-one mentioned Briar or old Mr Lilly. No-one came forward to say that Gentleman was a villain—that he had tried to rob heiresses—that he had ruined people through the selling of counterfeit stock. They made out that he was a decent young man with a promising future; they said that Mrs Sucksby had robbed him of it through simple greed.”

The trial of Mrs. Sucksby is not only sensational—it gets lots of coverage in the daily broadsheets—but also something of a sham. Mrs. Sucksby is an ideal woman to take the fall, while the machinations of the others are kept secret. The public needs a villain to vilify and a victim (in this case, Gentleman) to idolize. 

“I felt like a burglar, now. I thought of my mother—My mother was never a thief, however. My mother was a lady. My mother was the lady of this great house...I shook my head. I should never believe it.”

When Sue returns to Briar, she tries to accept that this is, in fact, her inheritance. She has not inherited murderous talents or thieving skills via her mother, as she has always been told. She must reconceive her own identity, so bound up is it in the legendary tales Mrs. Sucksby has told her. If she is not the daughter of a thief, but the daughter of a lady, then who now shall she be? Her dismissal of these facts suggests that nurture may win out over nature.