Princess Napraxine Read Along

[lunabee34]

Link to Volume 1 and Reading Schedule

Pages 46-95 (Chapters 2-3)



In these chapters, we get to know Princess Napraxine a bit better. Her defining characteristic is her coldly rational, analytical nature. It makes her into an amateur psychologist who is constantly dissecting the personalities and emotions of the people around her (and of herself); she has excellent emotional intuition and self-awareness, and her conclusions are generally correct. However, her continual scientific examination of herself and others make of her a self-absorbed egotist.

She is continually compared to flowers, she's incredibly smart, and she's bored with her wealth and with high society (jaded). She's very healthy because she eschews the typical aristocratic mode of living: no late nights, no excesses in food and drink, and taking healthy exercise. (I know these items in a series are not parallel, but screw it! LOL) I love that she has cultivated the impression that she has a delicate constitution so that she can always claim to be sick to get out of anything she doesn't want to do. As mentioned in the previous segment, Nadine is an Aesthete for whom taste supersedes morality; in fact, it functions as a moral system.

Nadine has no belief in love and has never been in love. She also has no maternal feeling and has almost nothing to do with her sons' upbringing.

Ouida makes some interesting commentary on marriage in this section. Nadine and Platon marry when she's 16 and he's 28, and Nadine agrees to marry him, not because she's in love with him (unlike poor Platon who does love her), but because she knows it's a good decision in terms of finances and social standing. She outright states at one point in this section that marriage only exists as a way of managing property. She also marries him because she knows he will never interfere with her decisions.

Ouida describes aristocratic marriages throughout her body of work as sites of constant adultery; in her novels of high society, aristocratic men and women are constantly cheating on each other, and the only rule is to do so discreetly. Nadine decides that she will be faithful to Platon (honest) even if to do so is eccentric and out-of-step with her peers. She encourages admirers but not lovers. Some of these admirers fight duels over her or commit suicide, but she accepts no responsibility for those situations. In fact, the novel directly states that Nadine enjoys being destructive.

The novel describes Nadine's experiences of sex with Platon as disgusting, melancholy, and odious. Once she is married and has sex with Platon for the first time, she becomes sex-repulsed, only having two children and then refusing to sleep with him after that. Nadine is not the only sex-repulsed character in Ouida's novels (although there are also many characters who clearly delight in sex--for example, what Natalie Schroeder calls her femme galante characters--the female villainesses).

Platon is described as a good man who is well liked by everyone but his wife who finds him stupid and irritating.

This section introduces us to the other main character, Othmar. He's 30, extremely rich, and had tried unsuccessfully to court Nadine a couple of years ago. Her refusal made him withdraw from society, and he's just returned apparently over his feelings for her. Othmar doesn't hunt, which makes him a good guy in Ouida's book; she is deeply against hunting for sport.

Finally, in miscellaneous icky, Ouida is once again antisemitic. These chapters also add Nadine's disdain for other women and Ouida's penchant for describing the Other (in this case people she calls Mongols) in terms of animals.

Very interested to see what you all think!

Comments

[landofnowhere]

Princess Napraxine is a really interesting character! On the one hand, it seems like she can get everything she wants except a sense of purpose (she is, as you say, an Aesthete, but she has no drive to create art, just to appreciate it). But on the other hand she's stifled by being a woman in a patriarchial society -- she was traumatized by her experience of sex, and if she was able to live a man's life she might get the adrenaline rush she craves more easily (though she would likely be equally cruel).

Her racism towards her husband and kids really struck me, and that she's not interested in her kids because they look like their father (or like bears, another case of describing the Other as animals). I feel like this probably played differently to a Victorian audience, who would be more shocked at her not caring about her kids and less shocked about the racism.

It seems like this is setting up a plot of "will Nadine get carried away by her emotions?"

Othmar seems like a different type of Other (Croatian!), but a sexier Other than Platon. (Where as Geraldine doesn't come across as Other at all, particularly to the English readership.)

[lunabee34]

Yes! Nadine has no sense of purpose (although she does enjoy her life despite her ennui). This idea will be explored in other novels much more explicitly; for example, in Syrlin, the aristocratic female protagonist explicitly thinks about the way her life affords her no meaningful or useful occupation.

I love what you say about Nadine not making art, only appreciating it. And being it! She is the piece of art that others appreciate.

I see you are very good at picking up on plot trajectories! LOL

[landofnowhere]

Literary and cultural references:

Napraxine's reading mentioned still seems to be mostly in English for the benefit of the audience: I hadn't previously heard of Chastelard but it seems to be by Swinburne, who I mainly know for Cynara and Proserpine, which give off a similar sort of decadent vibe as Nadine does. (ETA, oops, the Cynara poem I was thinking of is actually by Ernest Dowson! So I think I just know him for The Garden of Proserpine.)

" they only lead to morphia, chloral, dyspepsia, and Karlsbad. It is quite impossible—it must be quite impossible, even for you, Monsignore—to consider Karlsbad as an antechamber to heaven!’" -- one of these things is not like the other! I'm vaguely aware of Karlsbad as being a tourist retreat for 19th century aristocracy, but probably not fully getting the joke here.

Melville is described as "a little Rabelaisian and Montaignist at heart, and not intended by nature for a Churchman." -- interesting!

I didn't realize that "Admirable Crichton" was a phrase prior to the Barrie play!

Samuel Bernard and Sidonia are names I hadn't heard of at all: I'm assuming the former is this guy and the latter is probably the character in Disraeli's Coningsby? But I'm not getting the nuances here.

Oh, hey, Nadine references Dumas here! Maybe she's switched away from English writers because Othmar is Continental. This bit about gender roles among the Mongols, and how they are feminine in exactly the ways that Nadine is not, is also interesting.

[lunabee34]

I think the joke is first of all the witticism, the construction of the bon mot--the deliberate inclusion of these things that aren't all alike. But also a commentary on the way the ennui, depression, and satiety that Ouida is arguing characterize the aristocracy lead to drug use and indigestion after overindulgence and visiting tourist destinations in search of something exciting that never materializes.