Not since she arrived, an adopted cousin, small and forlorn, in the great house, has any child but Fanny herself penetrated the white-- painted attic where she sleeps. All we are told of the attic is that it is painted white. For years we are not told, either, anything about the lower room where eventually Fanny sits, the old schoolroom, which she will make a place of her own. Fanny takes refuge in her attic room on certain occasions, or so we may assume. As a small child from a fallen branch of the family, at first she is timid; everything in the house is big, anything might hurt her; so she creeps up to the attic, to cry. The maids have sneered at her clothes. Then as Fanny grows up we notice that her part as an outsider becomes even more painful: like all the other children, all the people in the house, she has to exist up-front, uniquely and conspicuously as member of a family. For fifteen chapters her actual refuge cannot be revealed-like everyone else she is exposed. Her exposure, to talk, to commands, to the activities and exigencies of a chattering collective. allows her no refuge, except in her silences. A white silence, a moral attic, Fanny's moon. While she is growing up a bit more, she is usually seen to be at her in the drawing room, under the eye of her other aunt, frumpish Mrs. Norris. Her work must be knitting, or embroidering, or crochet-work; perhaps she darns socks. But on some occasions she is seen in the open air, on horseback, or admiring the shrubbery. At Sotherton she is dutifully waiting, alone, at an iron gate, which is locked. Open air and exercise flush her cheeks, as does dancing. Fanny loves to see vegetation flourish. Something in her is building up, a strength, a range of sympathies. Yet if she were told of a force deep in earth so blind, so stupefying that, when it became manifest, it would have to be a creature so huge and gnarled that its eyelids dragged along the ground, that it would need help to raise them and then, when it saw, it would see what people do not see, still she would answer: Do you say so, Sir? Now that all five children have grown out of the schoolroom, Fanny has adopted it. She makes it her own establishment (says Edmund). Soon after her arrival in the house, the other children had bestowed on her some of their least valued toys. Perhaps those toys still console her, along with more recent acquisitions. She has one or two cast-off chairs (they have suffered the ill-usage of children); also she has been eagerly collecting books. Fanny tends various potted plants and cherishes a faded footstool. And here on the wall are some unwanted family profiles. Here too is a sketch, by her brother William, now a sailor, of HMS Antwerp, in the Mediterranean. The letters of the name are as tall as the mainmast. In three lower windowpanes, three transparencies: they are there to come to life whenever light might shine through the glass. Even when dark days gather round the house, Tintern Abbey is to be seen, a moonlight lake in Cumberland, and between those images a cave in Italy. So there must be poems by Wordsworth among Fanny's books. Does nobody else in the house care to read? Edmund has just come into the room. He notices that Fanny was leaning over a huge volume about China, and he notices a book by the homely Suffolk poet Crabbe, also a copy of The Idler. (But all this, like the cave in Italy, is recessed in the narrative; the spotlight moves elsewhere.) Now, for the first time, Edmund attends to Fanny's good sense in her own space. Hitherto he has attended to it, yes, but elsewhere. Out of her baffled silences Fanny has stepped. The openings on the larger world are here, in her room, while up the stairs her attic remains closed and white. Yet in neither room is there a fire. Another volume has to pass before, early in the day, Sir Thomas comes to plead with Fanny, already eighteen. She is seated on a sofa, a shawl round her shoulders. …
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Mar 14, 2024
María Fernanda López-Armenta + 1
Open Access