Blog #4: Suffering in The Seamstress

I'll preface my post by saying that I'm only 22 pages into the narrative (my digital version is 145 pages), up until the point that Virginia walks the street with Mr. Lavenham. Therefore, I'll have to limit my response to the beginning of the narrative.

Reynolds' text constructs the vitality of human life as diametrically opposed when it is seen through the lens of class distinction. Virginia, we learn, miraculously maintains a spritely interiority, despite immense suffering. The narrator describes the conditions of penury that afflict Virginia:

"For she thought that it was hard--oh! it was hard to have toiled so much and have rested so little, [sic]--to be compelled to sit up so many hours, and to be enabled to sleep for so short a time,--to plunge herself by sheer labour into such utter exhaustion, and to rise again with the stiffness still in every joint and the aching in every limb!" (3, chp. 2).

Clearly, Virgina struggles against enervation and exhaustion. In this sense, the reader is clearly meant to  understand Virginia's felt sense of life as unjust and unequal. The fact that she is compelled to wake up everyday with "aching in every limb" suggests that Virginia's vitality is determined by her class position. As someone living in conditions bordering complete abjection, she is never afforded the luxury of feeling her own body as secure or comforted. Rather, the trace of her labor pervades every inch of her.

The narrator's description of Virginia's physical beauty, though, suggests that she resists her destitution to an extent: Virginia's "sylphide beauty"(1, chp. 1) is conveyed partly by the vibrancy of her red lips (1, chp. 1), and her skin and ankles are healthy enough to "instantaneously" effect sexual desire within the Marquis (7, chp. 2). While Virginia's vitality is clearly complicated (we should definitely discuss the opening scene in which she pushes her body to its physical limits, which paradoxically invigorates her work and destroys her health), I think that Reynolds suggests that Virginia is "living" in a way that foreshadows continued life.

This sense of life continuing is contrasted by a scene of life ending. Mrs. Jackson, the elderly woman who exploits Virginia's labor, is described as an "invalid" (4, chp. 2) and presumably sick. I think that this image serves a very specific purpose in Reynolds' text. By associating aging and illness with someone from a class that can live relatively comfortably, he underscores the resiliency and initiative of the working class as diametrically opposed to the corruption of the "upper" classes (which are variously defined in the opening scenes). Specifically, Reynolds suggests that it is the working classes who embody "life." The "upper" classes--symbolized by Mrs. Jackson as anyone who can live in relative comfort, free from daily aching limbs--exemplify a type of life that is less than full, and moving downward, rather than upward. Virginia, on the other hand, embodies a vitality that is moving upward, despite her suffering. Therefore, Reynolds suggests that all classes live a life that is "less-than" full; the lower classes are forced to struggle, yet persevere; the upper classes languish, and slowly recede into enervation.