Doubles, including performance, are present throughout the plot of Harding’s Florence and Giles, with our main antiheroine Florence, a young girl with a murderous streak and an intellect far beyond her years, presenting herself as unknowing in order to achieve her goals… [which makes her] unreliable but highly aware’ (Dinter, 2012, p. 68).
The narrative perspective is predominantly from Florence as first-person, although thirdperson is used at times, and her reliability as a narrator is immediately thrown into disrepute, explaining to us as the reader that ‘for a girl my age I am very well worded [but that] such concealment has become my habit (Harding, 2011, p. 5). Florence is secretive throughout the novel and uses acting/ performance in order to trick both the reader and other characters.
Her use, and indeed misuse, of language is typical of her concealment as she never reveals her ‘secret language to anyone aside from the reader and, as a mistake, to Officer Hadleigh. This in itself can be seen as a “performance” of sorts: she attempts to open up a mutual trust with the reader in order to make her version of events more believable and allow the reader to sympathise and even empathise with her.
In essence, it is suggested that through the ‘means of language, [Florence is} able to establish an independent private sphere’ (Dinter, 2012, p. 0) which the reader is essentially invited into. This means of language, and the creation of her own language, is both a way of expressing her superior intellect, while simultaneously being, according to Dinter, ‘an expression of autonomical resistance’ (p. 70). In relation to Florence and her performances, it is interesting that at several points during the text, she comments on other character’s ability, or indeed inability, to lie or pretend.
At one point in the text, such is her selfishness, she wishes for her younger brother to fake a toothache in order to gain access to the police station. She is worried that Giles will foil her strategy through poor acting skills and when she needs to act, comments on how ‘it was easier to put in a more convincing performance than my brother’s’ (Harding, 2011, p. 138). This isn’t just a sibling rivalry which transpires into something as mediocre as a competition for who is the best, she also comments on how ‘this recovery was good by Theo’s standards’ (Harding, p. 192).
Essentially, this contributes towards the reader detesting, rather than sympathising with Florence: her egotism leads to her brother being in immense pain so that she has an escape route, and constantly belittles those which are essentially her only allies. There are many comparisons to be drawn between Florence and Miss Taylor, especially considering after her murder, the former dresses as the latter. However, in terms of personality, both need control over their peers in order to feel powerful and this explains why Florence constantly depicts her brother as inferior and herself as the victim of a tyrant: despite this being untrue
Following on from the idea of performance and its effect on the reader’s perception of Florence, is the idea that in the text a doubling of reality and fiction is present, which become blurred into one. Florence is clearly a trouble child, but doubles within the novel as both an innocent child who faces hardship, as well as a tyrannical murderer who holds an obsession with being the main matriarchal figure in her brother’s life. As Dinter states, the book “deconstructs Victorian notion of child innocence [as children in contemporary times] exceed and break limits on a constant basis’ (p. 79).
Children generally are seen as the epitome of innocence and a hope for the future of humanity, but through texts such as Florence & Giles, there is an exploration of the idea that adults and children are not as dissimilar as first thought. Firstly, this is a child who not only fools, but outwits her more mature counterparts. She acts upon her feelings and seeks to remove anything which may obstruct that.
In a sense, she typifies the idea that children (some, not all) ‘will become a wild, delinquent, criminal species [and] will lose the belief that they are children’ (Baudrillard, 2002, p. 05). In fact, Florence conforms to this notion, as she does not believe that she is a child in any terms other than her biological age: she holds more power than the majority of the household, she has more intellect and cunningness, and even transgresses to carry out murder – something children would generally be seen as incapable of doing. She is seen as ‘turning violently against the adult’ (Baudrillard, p. 104) which in this case leads to Miss Taylor and, it is implied, Miss Whitaker’s deaths.
So the doubling that is present, is the child Florence and the adult Florence, both encompassed in a child’s body but with precocious, advanced, almost adult-like tendencies. Having the “Gothic child” as a highly-aware, or doubling as something much more powerful, is a typical trope of Gothic literature. It isn’t just through Florence’s personality that there is a presence of doubling, though. One of the recurring motifs in Florence & Giles, is the presence of mirrors: which, in itself, provides the user as a “double” of themselves.
However, Florence sees her and Miss Taylor both in the same mirror, saying ‘we both stood and stared at my reflection’ (Harding, p. 145). This sets off an alignment between Florence and Miss Taylor, made clear when Florence says ‘Her double is here, trapped in the glass’ (p. 148) which gives a sense of irony given that Giles sees only his sister. Miss Taylor and Florence then, are two halves of the same coin, but the idea of doubles certainly does not stop there.
Miss Taylor is not just Miss Taylor for the novel, but takes on the role of Miss Whitaker, as well as the implied role of Giles’ mother. Essentially, through the entirety of the novel, Harding plays around with the concepts of reality, fiction and what is imagined from Florence’s perspective. Given that we are only given Florence’s point of view for the whole of the novel, and as a narrator she is unreliable, the reader cannot be sure of how real these “apparitions” in the mirror truly are.
None of the other characters see Miss Taylor in the looking-glasses, with Theo even ‘let[ting] out a mighty guffaw’ (p. 184) when Florence tells him about the mirror theory. This presents Florence as having some sort of problems, that even her most trusted friend cannot take her fantastical theory seriously. However, rather than focusing on Florence’s problems, for the sake of’doubling’ it is worth looking at the mirrors and whether Miss Taylor is actually present in them, or if it is simply a mirage: a fabrication of Florence’s mind.
There are two points of the text in which the mirrors are directly significant to the plot, but they both give a different indication of whether Miss Taylor does have the house under surveillance, or whether Florence deceives us into believing it, in order to justify her actions. The first case of this, is Florence’s comment that ‘Miss Taylor brusqued into the room, evidently having seen Theo through one of her mirrors’ (Harding, p. 191). If Miss Taylor had indeed set up ‘spies’ (p. 153) in each mirror to track Florence’s movements, then this would be true: she could ensure Florence wasn’t attempting to foil her plan.
In contrast, though, Florence comments on Miss Taylor’s appearance in person (or rather lack of), and that relationship with her appearance in the mirror: ‘The strange thing was that although all this must have suspicions Miss Taylor in the mirror, she did not put in an appearance in person’ (p. 198). This throws Florence’s claim into question: potentially her fantasy about the mirrors is simply a delusion of her mind, her guilt for Miss Whitaker’s demise and her protective obsession over Giles.
This is another ‘double’ within the text, as Miss Taylor can be seen both as actually appearing in the mirror or as an entity created in Florence’s mind contained within the mirror. Both are true simultaneously within the text, although there is much more weight to the idea that the apparition in the mirror is simply a figment of Florence’s imagination, rather than it being Miss Taylor. Doubling and (subsequently) performance as a “type” of duality is seen hroughout Gothic literature, with the most prominent examples being Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – one character with two very different sides – and Dracula with Van Helsing: a protagonist and antagonist both displaying similar attributes of their character.
Both “types” of duality are seen in Harding’s novel: the former through Florence who is both an innocent child but displays chilling cold bloodedness, and the latter through the representations of Florence and Miss Taylor – both are women whose education is somewhat frowned upon they only feel comfortable when in control of a situation and both are a matriarchal figure to Giles.
Typical of Gothic literature as a discourse is that it reflects troubles of the period, of which “doubling” is one, as Dryden points to ‘issues of duality – split personalities, physical transformations, mistaken identities, doppelgangers – were found to be manifested in the social, geographical and architectural schisms of the modern city’ (2003, p. 19). The performance of Florence throughout the novel is another side of doubling which runs throughout the novel, and her cunningness and selfishness is something which makes the reader evoke feelings of betrayal and resentment.
At the beginning, we are made to feel sorry for her, but with the story’s progression, ‘such acts, gestuers, enactments… are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications’ (Butler, 1990, p. 185). In essence, Florence “acts” too much to make us empathise with her, which actually has the reverse effect and actually alienates the reader.
