A Fair Trade Book
Title: The Last Waltz
Author: Nancy Zaroulis
Date: 1984
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: none
Length: 402 pages
Quote: “There is no family so secure that scandal cannot
touch it.”
And in the late nineteenth century, when a few American
women—who thought themselves well off—devoted their whole lives to the pursuit
and display of social status, scandal really hurt. The Last Waltz is
about one of those families.
Mostly it's about two women, Isabel and Marian, who meet in
their late teens and grow “old” (by pre-twentieth-century standards) together.
Both have “married well” in the sense of having married rich men who can give
them liberal allowances of money to maintain the levels of extravagance they
need to hold their social positions. (Isabel's husband is a standard-run
snob-and-bore; Marian's is a 1980s caricature of 1880s sex phobia. They also
have a friend, who answers to the name of “Pussie,” whose husband's gift to her
is a then-fatal sexually transmitted disease.) Both are profoundly unhappy with
their husbands.
At one point in the novel, Isabel says that what she really
wants for one of her children is a life of freedom from all the burdens of “a
social existence,” but when that child elopes and goes West to have that sort
of life Isabel and Marian feel devastated.
It's interesting to note, reading this 1984 novel in 2017,
how much research went into crafting these fictional steel-magnolia types as
historically plausible in everything but the way their lives echo the trendy
concerns of the 1980s. We're supposed to feel sorry for characters who aren't
having lots of sex and enjoying every minute of it; Victorian sex phobics
reinterpreted as stifled homosexuals would have appeared in a novel written
around 1994; Victorian sex phobics reinterpreted as genuine asexuals (which was
how they presented themselves) would be cutting-edge now, likely to appear in
novels like The Last Waltz by 2014. If this novel had been written
either earlier or later, Isabel and Marian might have taken more interest in
“How the Other Half Lives”--Social Darwinism was a trendy idea in the late
twentieth century, but so were charity-theme social events. Their ignorance of
global history, and ability to ignore technological progress, are plausible
given their characters but might have made them seem more narrow-minded than
the average “society matron” of the 1880s. Their lack of spirituality or
religion, ditto...and although there were a few Victorian “society ladies”
who could describe a dress in less than a full paragraph, a Victorian lady who
didn't carry around and identify herself with some form of needlework must have
been a bit of a freak.
It's a study of the period, albeit a study shaped by
twentieth century Women's History courses, but it does eventually form a plot. A
“society gentleman,” of the type who was told at the time that he was No
Gentleman but a Cad and a Bounder, is murdered. Masses of “society
ladies,” Isabel and Marian tell us, had motives for wanting him dead. Whodunit?
Isabel is accused and proved innocent, and another character's suicide might be
an admission of guilt, but Marian is never quite certain.
The intention of The Last Waltz seems to be to cause
readers to reflect, “Hmm...my great-grandmother didn't keep a diary but she
seems to have had more fun than that.” Having a life was an option even
for Victorians burdened by wealth, and did not always require a young person to
“run away” to sea or with a circus. The biographies of Victorians like Florence
Nightingale, Lottie Moon, Theodore Roosevelt, Laura Ingalls Wilder, or David Livingstone, show that even rich Victorians could always let the “society
ladies” write them off as eccentric and/or provincial, and proceed to have all
sorts of adventures.
A favorite theme among the post-Victorian “Progressive”
generation was, however, the claim that working-class Victorians had more fun
than wealthy ones. This was occasionally true, as was the claim that rich
Victorians still tended to die horribly young, but the undisputed fact was that
poor Victorians were more likely to die younger from not yet preventable causes
like tuberculosis. Silly, snobby social rules were enforced on rich Victorians
largely by fear of diseases. In real life it would have been a lucky
Victorian who reached the age of fifty with only one horrible memory of only
one friend, like poor old Pussie, literally dissolving into pus. Those families
with ten children and fourteen hired servants all went into quarantine
together, during the epidemics of infectious diseases, and surviving family
members might have watched three or four close relatives die within a month.
Wearing all black, or black and white, was recognized to mean that an early
Victorian was in mourning, but so many Victorians hardly found time to wear
colored clothes that, for Isabel's and Marian's generation, black and white
came to mean “formal” rather than “mourning.”
As I read my reactions kept vacillating between “This might
be taken from the writer's grandmother's confession” and “This is a
baby-boomer's fantasy of resurrecting her grandmother at a 1970s feminist
consciousness raising session.” I'm still unsure to what extent Isabel and Marian
are each of those types of fictional character.
Anyway, here's a relatively attractive pair of Victorian
“society matrons,” “Yankee Ladies,” bustling and flouncing around the
fashionable parts of the fashionable Northeastern cities, genteelly not mentioning
any part of the history of their world except their own well-repressed misery.
I'm not sure I believe them but I enjoyed reading about them more than I
usually enjoy reading about fictional discontented rich people. Their 400-page
story is not such a page-turner as to be hard to set aside at the end of your
commute, and should amuse you through several train rides.
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