An outstanding essay by Colm Toibin in this week's London Review of Books on The Importance of Aunts (in the 19th-century novel). Unfortunately it is available online to subscribers only but for this alone the £3.20 cover price is a snip.
The novel, after all, is not a moral fable or parable; it is not our job to like or dislike characters in fiction, or make judgments about their worth, or learn from them how to live. We can do that with real people and, if we like, figures from history. They are for moralists to feast on. A novel is a pattern and it is our job to notice how the textures were woven and the tones put in place. This is not to insist that a character in fiction is merely a verbal construct and bears no relation to the known world. It is rather to suggest that the role of a character in a novel is never simple. A novel isn’t a piece of ethics or sociology. It is a release of certain energies and a dramatisation of how these energies might be controlled and given shape. Characters in fiction are determined by the pattern, and they determine the pattern in turn.
....
The novel, as a form, is unsure whether it is a story, told by a single teller, or a play enacted by a number of actors. It is both static and theatrical in its systems, a sphere in which a single controlling voice operates, or many competing voices. And since the novel is made up not of characters moving across the stage wearing colourful costumes and projecting their voices, but grim black marks on the page, one of the other purposes of aunts is that they allow for dramatic entrances and departures. All through the 19th century, aunts breach the peace and lighten the load.
And at this point, as I realised I have an aunt-like figure in my own writing, entering a closed world and disturbing the peace, I had a little frisson of recognition.
And then this about Henry James's development of the aunt's role
[he] saw what was possible, that the aunt could be made not simply an enabling figure, or a cruelly comic figure, or a passive figure, but a highly sexualised woman, and thus, within the dynamic of the novel, one capable of darting at will from one guise to another, causing havoc within the narrative confines created for her: she is exciting and subversive, dangerous, potentially explosive.
Comparing the aunts in The Wings of the Dove and Edith Wharton's House of Mirth (one of my personal favourite books) he has this lovely line:
the aunt hovers over the action, darting in and out of the narrative like a large, needy reptile.
I must now go and urgently read Washington Square, Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove. All of which I sense have a theme that I am trying out in my own work.
And on the themes that writers share, Toibin has this nice comment:
By the time he began The Portrait of a Lady in 1879, James had followed the serialisation of Daniel Deronda. He read the book carefully, disapproved of it, and then took what he needed from it.