All gothic'd out
Apr. 25th, 2009 03:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricFor the first half of Portrait of a Lady I found myself thinking 'wait, where's the gothickery? Have I got the right Henry James?'
The second half was... all the force of ghosts and spooks and vampirism and whatever else you get your gothic kicks from, concentrated into the perfectly mundane person of Gilbert Osmond. In the plotting of it, Portrait is a... social novel, I guess. Marriages and friendships and tea parties. But I don't think I've ever encountered a (fictional) character so terrifying as Osmond.
More SRS thoughts later, when I've got my head back on straight.
The second half was... all the force of ghosts and spooks and vampirism and whatever else you get your gothic kicks from, concentrated into the perfectly mundane person of Gilbert Osmond. In the plotting of it, Portrait is a... social novel, I guess. Marriages and friendships and tea parties. But I don't think I've ever encountered a (fictional) character so terrifying as Osmond.
More SRS thoughts later, when I've got my head back on straight.