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.Meeting BashwoodTenderest Caresses 125at the railway terminus in London, he is reminded of the old grateful interest in hisfriend which had once been the foremost interest of his life (Armadale, 783; myitalics).But with Lydia s subsequent abandonment of Midwinter and her entrapment ofAllan in Dr Downward s sanatorium, the claims of male friendship are fully restored.Midwinter almost dies for his friend by changing rooms with him, so fulfilling theclaim made to Mr Brock that he would give his life for Allan.He is only saved bythe intervention of Lydia, who writes to him in similar terms that it is easy for her todie knowing that he will live.Re-enacting the scene on the Grace de Dieu in whichAllan revived Midwinter from his faint, she now restores him to consciousness beforeherself entering the room containing fatally poisoned air.In this act of atonementand self-sacrifice, she both validates her own superior love for Midwinter and atthe same time relinquishes her claim to him, allowing his loyalty to remain withhis friend rather than with his unsuitable wife.As Allan accompanies his friend toLydia s funeral, the restoration of male ties is shown to be complete.Reversing the trend in which an unsuitable or inconvenient friend dies to facilitatethe marriage plot, Armadale depicts the initial remorse of a woman who abandonsher criminal purposes for love, only to resume her plotting when she comes to feelthat her husband s attention is reserved for his friend.At this point, it is not thefriend but the wife herself who is sacrificed to the exigencies of plot.In this uneasyresolution to the novel, male friendship is shown to be ultimately more durable thanheterosexual involvement, as Lydia is redeemed by dying in place of her husbandat the right moment and Midwinter s heroism is brought out by an almost equallyintense love for his friend.In case the reader has missed the point, the novel concludeswith a conversation between the two friends on the morning of Allan s wedding day,in which Midwinter justifies his belief in the significance of the dream:I once believed that it was sent to rouse your distrust of the friendless man whom youhad taken as a brother to your heart.I now know that it came to you as a timely warningto take him closer still.Does this help to satisfy you that I, too, am standing hopefully onthe brink of a new life, and that while we live, brother, your love and mine will never bedivided again? (Armadale, 815)The ending of the novel is traditional in so far as it ends with a marriage betweenthe eponymous hero although Midwinter has an equal claim to this status andhis innocent female counterpart.However, the marriage at the end of the novel ismade subordinate, as it is in Bleak House, to the theme of romantic friendship.Theambiguous status of Lydia herself, and her timely death, further complicate the statusof friendship and marriage respectively, as Allan is restored to the foremost place inMidwinter s affection.It is telling that this relationship, and not the conventionallysatisfying marriage between Allan and Neelie, is made the focus of the final lines ofthe novel.Both Vanity Fair and Armadale work within a discernible tradition of satirising femalefriendship, but both go beyond simple mockery to suggest the ruthless exploitationthat this fashion for passionate expression may disguise.In drawing attention not126 Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literatureonly to the falsity, but to the calculated manipulation of free expression betweenwomen, each novel offers a social critique extending far beyond the sometimescomplacent remarks of the characters themselves.In each novel the presence of anenduring male friendship, and an unsatisfactory marriage, suggests a greater faithin the efficacy of male relationships.None the less the resolution of Armadale, inits very dependence on male bonds, suggests an instability caused by such intensefeeling, as friendship seemingly competes with the tradition of the marriage plot.At the end of the century, both male and female friendship would come underincreasingly close scrutiny, but relations between women would prove despite beingmore closely studied to be more resilient than the romantic register previouslyavailable for friendship between men.In both Vanity Fair and Pendennis, the ingenuousness of the heroine is favourably if laughingly contrasted with the sentimental outpourings of her calculating andhighly manipulative competitor in the marriage market.The tendentious possibilitiesof romantic friendship are fully brought out in such appropriation of its languageby skilled adventuresses; nor does the more innocent party escape unscathed, asthe narrator repeatedly undermines the depth and solidity of female passion.Thisirony that the female capacity for feeling at its best should be seen as both pureand ultimately superficial is never fully addressed; Laura is given brief momentsof satirical insight, but both Becky Sharp and Blanche Amory remain the objects, orinstruments, rather than the agents of narrative satire.But if the insincerity and transience of female friendship is available for satire,its erotic potential is clearly not.The intense friendship between Limping Lucy andRosanna Spearman in The Moonstone, for instance, raises the possibility of sexualjealousy as an element in Lucy s hostility to Franklin Blake.It is his disruptiveinfluence that leads to Rosanna s suicide, overthrowing Lucy s plan that she and herfriend should live and work together in London
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