Halloween was always one of my favorite holidays growing up, not for the candy but for the chance to dress up as whatever character I chose. I was a medieval lady (complete with steeple hat with veil), Maid Marian, Lady Jane Grey (the year I’d first gone to England), a colonial girl (in 1976). Admiring the imaginative costumes of the kids out trick-or-treating this past week, I thought about the fascination of pretending to be someone else. A wonderful game when you’re a child, that often becomes a more serious game in fiction.
For many of the characters in “Secrets of a Lady” masquerading is second nature. Mélanie’s whole life has been a masquerade for so many years she isn’t sure who she is anymore (”Charles had accused her of lying for so long that she couldn’t know herself anymore, and he’d been more accurate than she cared to admit”). In the course of the book, she and Charles tell different stories and play different parts with the different people they approach for information. One of the people they encounter, Hugo Trevennen, is an actor who still lives his life changing from character to character even in the confines of hte Marshalsea prison. His niece Helen Trevennen, who holds to the key to the mystery of the Carevalo Ring, has changed her identity more than once, just as Mélanie has.
The third Charles and Mélanie book, “The Mask of Night”, begins at a masquerade ball. Most of the characters in the book are wearing a mask in one way or another, whether they are masquerading as another person or keeping a part of themselves hidden from their friends or loved ones. It’s a theme I love as both a writer and a reader. Dorothy Dunnett’s Francis Crawford of Lymond, who I blogged about last week, is brilliant at masquerading. In one of books (”Queens Play”), he plays a part for the majority of the novel, and almost loses himself in it. “Niccolò Rising”, the first book in Dunnett’s House of Niccolò series begins with a hero who slowly emerges from behind the mask he has been wearing since childhood (and, as with Lymond, one spends the series trying to decipher who the hero really is). One of the delights of the Scarlet Pimpernel stories is watching Percy go from disguise to disguise, all the while living his whole life behind the mask of Sir Percy Blakeney, the agreeable fool. Marguerite is a French actress who has, in a sense, donned the mask of a fashionable English society wife. Chauvelin’s blackmail forces her into a more dangerous masquerade. (One thing we’ve discussed in the comments on my prior Scarlet Pimpernel posts is how it would have been fun to see Marguerite don more disguises in the subsequent books in the series). Sherlock Holmes is also a master of disguise both in the Conan Doyle stories and in Laurie King’s Mary Russell series, where he teaches Russell to be every bit as adept at playing a part. Holmes and Russell usually assume multiple disguises in the course of an investigation.
A character being disguised as someone quite different can reveal unexpected things about that character and those around them (as in Holmes’s reaction to Russell disguised as a flirtatious debutante). Literary disguises range from a persona assumed for an evening (as with Russell playing the debutante) to a masquerade that lasts the length of a mission (as with Holmes and Russell in other stories or Lymond in “Queens Play”) to living one’s whole life behind a mask, as Percy does in London society, as Nicholas does when we first meet him in “Niccolò Rising”, as Mélanie has been doing in “Secrets of a Lady”. Or, without being an agent or an invesitgator, a character can be masquerading simply by playing different parts in different aspects of his or her life, as to a certain extent we all do.
Do you like stories where characters masquerade, whether briefly or over the course of a novel? Any thoughts on the books I’ve mentioned? Any other favorite literary masquerades to mention?
This week’s addition to the Fraser Correspondence is Evelyn Mortimer’s reply to Gisèle’s letter of last week. As you will see, Evie’s take on Charles and Honoria is slightly different from Gisèle’s.
November 6, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Halloween isn’t celebrated to quite the same extent in the UK, which is a shame as I would love to have an excuse to dress up!
I love characters who hide behind a different persona rather than out-and-out ‘Voila!’ disguises – Percy and Marguerite in TSP are both projecting exaggerated facets of their personalities to the outside world: he, to protect his alter ego, and she her feelings. I admire quiet, introspective characters who present a mirror image of their inner self to the world, and who only trust a few with their true feelings. There’s a certain power in pretence, as with Percy allowing his society acquaintances to think what they like, but there’s also sadness that this honest, caring person must hide behind an often overbearing cover.
November 6, 2007 at 5:16 pm
I totally agree, Sarah. Longer term masquerades which play upon a real aspect of the character’s personality (while very likely suppressing other aspects) offer more depth and richness to explore than short term disguises (though the latter can be a lot of fun). I’ve always been fascinated by characters who keep their true feelings behind a mask–it gives such power to the moments whent they let down their guard (Percy has several such moments) and speaks volumes about their relationshp to the people with whom they do let down their guard, even fleetingly (Dorothy Dunnett sets it up for it’s a big deal if Lymond even signs a letter with his first name). And you’re right, it’s very sad as well that a character has to hide so much of the “real person” (and also raises the tantalizing question of just what is the real core of someone’s character).