The Crimson Petal and the White
| Author | Michel Faber |
|---|---|
| Publisher |
Canongate (UK) Harcourt (US) |
|
Publication date
|
2002 |
| Pages | 864 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 315627914 |
The Crimson Petal and the White is a 2002 novel by Michel Faber set in Victorian England.
The title is from an 1847 poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson entitled "Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal", the opening line of which is "Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white."
The novel was published (by Canongate) in hardback in the UK in 2002, with a paperback edition following the next year. Canongate also published The Apple, a selection of short stories based on characters from The Crimson Petal and the White, in 2006.
The novel details lives of two very opposite Victorian women, Agnes and Sugar, and the linchpin on whom they revolve: William Rackham.
William, the unwilling and somewhat bumbling heir to a perfume business, is a businessman of moderate success and little self-awareness.
He married the exquisitely doll-like Agnes, who embodies the Victorian "female ideal" of naive femininity, for her beauty though he barely knew her. Kept completely in the dark on sexual matters, Agnes' diaries express utter confusion over events like menstruation (she believes a demon returns periodically to "bleed" her), pregnancy, sex, or childbirth: she does not even acknowledge her young daughter, Sophie. Sophie, who takes after her father, is very carefully kept far from her mother's sight by the household staff, who otherwise disregard Agnes' desires and ignore her. Outside of the house, few know of Agnes' madness (though knowledge of it spreads during the length of the story), who presents herself as an inveterate hostess and socialite to the world during each season.
William soon becomes obsessed with a worldly young prostitute named Sugar, an unconventionally intelligent and strong-willed young woman who uses the affair with William to climb to a higher perch in the rigidly stratified class system of the time. William purchases Sugar from her madame (Sugar's own mother) and sets her up in a luxurious flat of her own, where he regularly visits her on his terms. Sugar has been a prostitute since the age of 13 and views sex as a living, not a pleasure, with no physical act too taboo. She is resentful of her reliance on William's (and men in general's) favour and indulges her fantasies about harming her and her fellow prostitute's clients in an explicitly gruesome novel of revenge erotica she pens in her spare time as she works to maintain William's continued interest using both her body and her mind.
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