Sophie Gee: The Scandal of the Season

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The Scandal of the Season fictionalizes the events that inspired Alexander Pope’s satirical poem “The Rape of the Lock”. The novel is set in London in 1711, in a fascinating period in English history and literary history. I wish I could say Gee brings the figures of the time to life, but her social commentary works better than her character development.

The period

Scandal is set at the end of Queen Anne Stuart’s reign, near the height of the Jacobite plots to put exiled James II on the throne, and a time of renewed tension between Protestants and Catholics. Alexander Pope plays a starring role in the novel, and we see his early interactions with Jonathan Swift, Richard Steele, and Mary Pierrepont (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu).

Pope visits London in the company of his country neighbors, Teresa and Martha Blount. Teresa is a local beauty, disappointed by her reception in London; Martha is plainer and predictably sweeter. The Misses Blount hope to be introduced to London society by their city cousin, Miss Arabella Fermor. Arabella is a renowned beauty, but only breaks into the upper echelons of the social hierarchy when she catches the eye of Robert Petre, the 7^th Baron Petre. Meanwhile, Petre covertly supports a rather silly Jacobite plot, endangering himself and his family’s estate.

Love quintangle, or more

Scandal has quite a tangle of central characters, but only one is well fleshed out.

Gee convincingly portrays Alexander Pope as a gifted young man with great ambition and a terrible post-adolescent awkwardness. His hunchback, sickliness, Catholicism, and desperate self-consciousness cost him in the hypercritical society he so wants to impress. Pope’s outsider status and fragile connections tie together the novel’s several threads of political, social, and literary history.

Gee’s command of historical detail is excellent, but there’s more commentary than life in the book. Pope is well developed, but he’s absent for long stretches of narrative. Martha is an acute observer, but she too hangs about the periphery of the action. The action hinges on characters who are little more than mouthpieces for Gee’s commentary.

Martha Blount quietly adores Pope, while Pope pines for her sister Teresa. Teresa treats Pope badly, setting her sights on Lord Petre, who in turn falls hard for Arabella Fermor. (Petre’s previous liaisons also figure into the story.) In addition, John Caryll is godfather to Martha and advisor to Pope, and was trustee for Petre’s estate.

The primary love story is between Arabella Fermor and Robert Petre. Gee acknowledges the affair between Arabella and Petre is the least documented aspect of the book; it “had to be filled in imaginatively, based on very light evidence in letters and diaries from the time.” Gee shows them at first simply as Beautiful People, each smug at capturing such an enviable partner. But after some mutual peacocking, they find themselves in love.

Given that the romance is a major strand of the story, it’s disappointing that Arabella and Petre remain two-dimensional. Gee takes us into the characters’ thoughts, but I rarely find these passages authentic. Rather than the characters’ private reflections, we hear Gee’s didactic moralizing. With so many articulate characters onstage, I'd have liked to see inside their heads more.

Climax? What climax?

There's little tension in Scandal, and the final blackmail is unconvincing. John Caryll appears as a convenient bogeyman at the beginning and end of the book, but each time his role—and the news he brings—isn’t well fleshed out. This bald treatment makes the threat of anti-Jacobite action appear flimsier than it should, and adds to other questionable aspects of the climax. If Petre’s funds weren’t supporting the Jacobites, a charge of treason is nonsense. If Jenkins is the threat, surely he could be paid off. If Petre saw Arabella one last time, why didn’t he warn her what was afoot? The explanation for each is frankly silly.

The ending of Arabella and Petre’s romance provides a mild kind of narrative climax, but the true resolution of the book is Pope’s decision to write "The Rape of the Lock", and Pope’s social climbing success. In keeping with her pointed commentary throughout the book, Gee wants “to leave people remembering that sexual and social pleasure are often incompatible with domestic harmony.”

Late in the book Gee has Pope explicitly reject sexual and social pleasures. The narrative is explicitly structured to reward his renunciation of society and sex with new social standing and professional success; and to punish Arabella and Robert Petre for being part of the social world, and improvidently falling in love. As an interpretation of Pope, perhaps it works; as the climax of the novel, the "Naughty naughty; I told you so" is smug and unconvincing.

The Rape of the Lock

Gee has also written an introduction to a new edition of Pope's "The Rape of the Lock". The Scandal of the Season corresponds closely to her interpretation of the poem.

Pope’s poem gives us the feeling of an outsider looking in, noticing things and overhearing conversations that he ought not to be seeing. What we get in "The Rape of the Lock" is the beginning of English comedies of manners.

Gee’s Pope has a chronic spleen and a sharp-tongued approach to people around him that are in keeping with some of his writings—such as his “Of The Characters of Women: An Epistle To A Lady”, which begins

Nothing so true as what you once let fall,
"Most Women have no Characters at all."

Why so unsatisfying?

I enjoyed The Scandal of the Season more as fictionalized history than as a novel. I appreciate the glimpses of the early-18th-century political and literary world. I’d prefer to see more of those dimensions and fewer of the rather bland social scenes and the stilted, un-historical romance.

Most importantly, the majority of the characters simply don’t breathe. Their situation itself is interesting, given the religious and political issues, the literary period, and the multiple interlocking love triangles. But the writing is too banal to capitalize on the great setup.

As Jonathan Wolff said recently,

Academic writing needs to be ordered, precise, and to make every move explicit. All the work needs to be done on the page rather than in the reader's head. By contrast, good literature often relies on the unsaid, or the implied or hinted at, rather than the expressed thought.

In Scandal I found too much said, in too didactic a mode. All the characters are articulate, but there's little nuance below the obvious level of repartee. Where there is additional meaning to be mined, Gee does the work for us, explicitly instructing us how to read the character's views and what they mean in the society of the time.

Grade: A- for interesting situations and clarity, C+ for the flat writing and characters (apart from Pope). As Pope isn't onstage enough to carry the book, and neither fiction nor nonfiction needs to be written with so many entirely symbolic characters, I'll go with a B- overall.

Tags: books, reviews, history, literary, poetry