Princess Napraxine Read Along

[lunabee34]

Link to Volume One and Reading Schedule
P.S. I am running a week behind on the reading schedule. :/

Chapters 8-9

Now we start to learn more about Yseulte. She's very young and childlike, innocent and naive. She is very proud of her aristocratic lineage and reveres the past (that reverence for the past is an important theme that shows up in many of Ouida's works). She eschews attention and was perfectly happy living an ascetic life with her grandma before war drove her out of Paris.

The dismay she expresses at the death of flowers is an opinion Ouida shares; in one of her non-fiction essays, she goes on at length about the evils of picking flowers just so they can die.

We are also introduced to Baron Fritz who is one of my favorite characters in the novel. He's an irascible old man who is genuinely fond of Othmar but also exasperated with him because he doesn't understand Othmar's POV re: their wealth. He is not a villain, but he holds the opposite of all the characteristics Ouida considers virtuous: he's a proponent of capitalism, he prefers the city to the country, etc.

We learn that a great deal of Othmar's antipathy to his wealth comes from learning that it was originally acquired during a famine in a legal but deeply unethical way.

These chapters contain Ouida's usual critiques of marriage--that it is a financial transaction only rather than about love and about the joining of people who suit each other.

And to go along with the smattering of racism, we have some ableism in these chapters when Baron Fritz announces that he believes two diseased people marrying is immoral.

Comments

[landofnowhere]

Need to go back and reread these chapters! But the main thing that stuck me was how fairy-tale-ish the scene of Othmar encountering Yseulte gathering flowers is -- shades of Beauty and the Beast and Tam Lin. And the whole thing just feels very romance trope-y. I can imagine a version of their story that's a genre romance, something Eva Ibbotson might write, with Princess Napraxine relegated to the role of the Other Woman, but since Nadine is the title character and protagonist of the book, the book is clearly interested in doing more with her than that.

I also was struck by Othmar's sense of betrayal that his gardener had been selling his flowers when away -- he wants to have feudal liegemen, not employees.

Also struck by the detail "the red leaves of the Canadian vine framed in crimson". Hard to look up "Canadian vine" but I'm seeing suggestions that it's another name for Virginia Creeper -- anyway, the name suggests an intrusion of the New World onto the Old World.

[lunabee34]

Yes! Ouida hates Americans LOL; she finds them crass and opportunistic and vulgar. I don't find it hard to believe that she would extend those feelings to the New World plants that were in some cases supplanting native British plants.

I don't want to spoil anything for the ultimate plot, but this meeting is like a fairy tale, and I think Ouida subverts that genre in some ways as the novel progresses.