Outlander, the watery Season 3 out of Voyager; the Prologue to Drums of Autumn

Outlander, Season 3, Episode 8: First Wife Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe as Jamie and Claire Fraser aboard a ship to seek out Ian, captured below ….

From Prologue to Voyager:

When I was small, I never wanted to step in puddles. Not because of any fear of drowned worms or wet stockings; I was by and large a grubby child, with a blissful disregard for filth of any kind.

It was because I couldn’t bring myself to believe that that perfect smooth expanse was no more than a thin film of water over solid earth. I believed it was an opening into some fathomless space. Sometimes, seeing the tiny ripples caused by my approach, I thought the puddle impossibly deep, a bottomless sea in which the lazy coil of tentacle and gleam of scale lay hidden, with the threat of huge bodies and sharp teeth adrift and silent in the far down depths.

And then, looking down into reflection, I would see my own round face and frizzled hair against a featureless blue sweep,and think instead that the puddle was the entrance to another sky. If I stepped in there, I would drop at once, and keep on falling on and on, into blue space.

The only time I would dare to walk though a puddle was at twilight, when the evening stars came out. If I looked in the water and saw one lighted pinprick there, I could splash through unafraid — for if I should fall into the puddle and on into space, I could grab hold of the star as I passed, and be safe.

Even now, when I see a puddle in my path, my mind half-halts — through my feet d not — then hurries on, with only the echo of the thought left behind ….

Friends and readers,

I decided to return to blogging about Outlander tonight, intent on writing about Season 4, and its source thus far, Drums of Autumn, and and discovered (much to my horror) that I never finished blogging about Season 3! I last posted 13 months ago (November 2017) and wrote comparing the second and third season to one another and their books and took the series up to Episode 8: First Wife. I feel I ought to finish the third season before going on to the fourth.

So, first, to catch up, I was so taken by Season 1 (the first book is called simply Outlander) that I blogged about it 2 episodes at a time and one on the book too (across 2016): A handy list; a few thoughts on the novel (February 2017).

Claire at the window: Opening soliloquy

Much as I loved Season 2 (all but the opening out of Dragonfly in Amber), I blogged but once on the whole season taken as a whole and the books it came from: “A differently framed Dragonfly in Amber” (October 2017)

Claire grieving over stillborn child (Episode 7, Faith, towards the close)

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A quick recap:

Season 3, Episode 9: The Doldrums (in front Cesar Dombuy as Fergus and Lauren Lyle as Marsali)

We left off as Ian (John Bell) has been kidnapped by pirates and Jamie and Claire see no other solution to freeing him than to follow the young man to (possibly) “the new world,” and they, their foster son, Jamie’s step-daughter, and Jamie’s new sidekick friend, Willoughby (Gary Young) take ship. Episode 9 is a series of wild and improbable adventures. It put me in mind of Greek romance in the 3rd century, long narratives of a couple endlessly parted in a vast seascape. Instead of a tempest, they are afflicted by a calm; instead of magic rituals, Willoughby’s religious art and typhus. There is a real movement to “strangeness” and uncanniness in the story of himself that Mr Willoughby tells – reminding me of an inset “history” in 18th century novels. Our Claire takes on Stephen Maturin’s role in O’Brien’s adventure romances: ship’s surgeon, hair graying, skirts tied back. Claire is tricked into getting on to another ship in order to save as many of a dying crew dying as her inadequate medicines but wise natural means can, and Jamie insists the ship he is on follow the ship she is on.

Episode 10: Heaven and Earth: Albie Marber as the appealing 14 year old Elias Pound in training to be an officer becomes Claire’s aide and then dies himself of typhus

We have two sets of adventures in two ships headed for Jamaica. On Jamie’s ship, The Porpoise, we have to worry ourselves whether Fergus and Marsali are having sexual intercourse, and Jamie is a nervous wreck and seasick, tended by the faithful Willoughby with acupuncture; on Captain Fraser’s ship we watch Claire deal with a serious epidemic where most of the sailors die. The best moments are those of Claire and Elias’s growing relationship, his sickening and dying. Claire’s ship lands and she attempts to escape but is thwarted. Claire provides suture by her voice-over. Brought back, with the help of the ship’s cook, she is induced to perform the madness of jumping ship with just a bundle and board to hold onto in order to try to reach Jamie before his ship lands in Jamaica where the plan is to have him arrested for a ransom. The ending of Heaven and Earth has her between heaven and earth in the sea itself, and this, with her back in just shift and smock (soaked) returns us to the old spirit of psychologically consistent daring of Season 1. She is her own woman, has a career; she wanted to have equal say in a marriage as to where they live, now she is like Shakespeare’s Miranda as a billow carries her to shore.

Episode 11: The Uncharted: Claire making her way, hungry, needing water, finding herself attacked by insects, heat, in danger of dying if she cannot find help

We might call this Claire meets Robinson Crusoe; her encounter with someone who seems at first to be a madman hermit-priest reminded me of Evelyn Waugh’s hero in Decline and Fall where he ends up in a jungle and for the rest of his life must read Dickens (Waugh loathed Dickens) to a similar madman hermit. after a terrible walk, she is rescued by a half-made ex-priest and the mother of his now dead beloved wife. Meanwhile Jamie has driven the Porpoise to find Claire — most conveniently the captain and most others also died in an epidemic and the storm, and landed on the same island. Claire, altered by the priest’s anger at a “chinaman” who killed his goat for soap and food, Claire realizes Willoughby and therefore Jamie must be nearby. Escaping from said priest, she flees back to the beach just as Jamie is sailing away, but, ever the clever resourceful woman, she signals with a mirror and he sails back. I admit I had tears in my eyes as they ran across the beach to one another. One sailor said this man’s wife shows up in the most unlikely places.

The Wedding

A wedding ceremony for Fergus and Marsali (where the priest is astounded she will marry a man who has lost his hand — Gabaldon and then Ronald Moore’s nagging over Fergus’s disability is in bad taste, showing their discomfort) and finally the long scene of love-making between Jamie and Claire we had been waiting all 7 episodes for (that is, since she entered 18th century Scotland in Episode 5).

It makes psychological sense they should not have had this right away. The film-makers have problem with taste and taboo: Claire is older and my guess is the film-makers and it’s taboo to present an older woman who was just widowed as intensely sexual; the same goes for the “mature man.” So how do you present a “reunion” after twenty years; they have to get to know the new person, and as for the sexual matter, the film-makers opted to be “safe” (decorous). She is dressed boyishly and then womanly. They keep the uncomfortable at bay and her acceptable with the teasing about her being this “respectable married woman” and “honorable wife.” But now they can once again reach for sexual pleasure at length ….

Closure

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The last two episodes make one arc in the way the first three (Claire seeking Jamie from modern Scotland) do.

Episodes 12 & 13: The Bakra and The Eye of the Storm

Lotte Verbeck as Geillis Duncan (Gillian Edgars who burnt her husband to cross the stones) now the Bakra

Claire and Jamie land, have to integrate themselves into this new slave society, meet (ever so conveniently) Lord John (David Berry) whose authority prevents the ruthless captain Fraser from imprisoning and sending Jamie back for money. They successfully hunt Ian out to the lair Geillis Duncan, now a fearful sorceress-like presence) amid a jungle of tribal rituals, escaped and obedient enslaved black people. We have the first incidents involving slavery and Claire’s deep disgust; we witness a homoerotic relationship between the now near equals Lord John and Jamie — the metaphor that realizes this is dramatized in their enjoyment of chess together.

Claire leading Margaret through the tribe, Willoughby seen at the back of the shot

We meet again Margaret Campbell (Alison Pargeter), driven half-mad by her greedy brother after she had been gang-raped at Culloden; she is now rescued from his brutality by Willoughby and the two make a touching pair: he so gentle, she so tender and in need. Amid scenes of colonial luxury, as Claire discovered at the opening, Geillis has been trying to obtain magic talismans to assure the succession of a Scottish Stuart on the throne; she is the devouring sexual monster of misogynistic nightmares and Claire stops her killing Ian only by beheading her with a sword. They must flee once again and in a remarkable water sequence end up in a tempest, are thrown overboard and almost drown. Claire shows a death-wish we had not expected, and now Jamie pulls her out of the sea and her desperate mood onto the shore, where at first he thinks she has died, but she revives as the child of some English colonists come up to them.

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The Prologue to Outlander, book and film: “People disappear all the time./Young girls run away from home./Children stray from their parents and are never seen again. Housewives take the grocery money, and a taxi to the train station./Most are found eventually./Disappearances, after all, have explanations./
Usually.

The outline of the Scotsman seen by Frank looking up to Claire’s 20th century window

The Prologue to Dragonfly in Amber, just the book:

I woke three times in the dark predawn. First in sorrow, then in joy, and at the last in solitude. The tears of a bone-deep loss woke me slowly, bathing my face like the comforting touch of a damp cloth in soothing hands. I turned my face to the wet pillow and sailed a salty river into the caverns of grief remembered, into the subterranean depths of sleep.

I came awake then in fierce joy, body arched bow-like in the throes of physical joining, the touch of him fresh o my skin, drying along the paths of my nerves as the ripples of consummation spread from my center. I repelled consciousness, turning again, seeking the sharp, warm smell of a man’s satisfied desire, in the reassuring arms of my lover, sleep.

The third time I woke alone, beyond the touch of love or grief. The sight of the stones was fresh in my mind. A small circle, standing stones on the crest of a steep green hill. The name of the hill is Craigh na Dun; the fairies’ hill. Some say the hill is enchanted, others say it is cursed. Both are right. But no one knows the function or the purpose of the stones.

Except me.

Talking after love-making (from Season 1)

As my stills suggest, the true thread that unites this third divagating book is still romance: a series of couples, which include Jamie and the mother of his son, Willie, her sister, Isabel who Lord John obligingly marries so as to make a family for the little boy. In my blog on the first part of this third season I accounted for the changes from the two books to this serial drama and its lack of a clear thrust and resort to “dazzling” adventure to keep the audience entered. The book is about voyaging across the sea, and voyaging through different worlds. Seen against the backdrop of the whole cycle of books (by now at least 10), it’s a stage in a vast woman’s book landscape: updated Daphne DuMaurier, many-great granddaughter of Anne Radcliffe, a motif of ghosts as if this past is hauntingly alive in the mind of the author.

Lord John (John Berry) looking at Jamie’s suddenly resurrected wife, Claire — very quizzical — he compensates for the homophobia inherent in the portraits of Black Jack Randall (Tobias Menzies) and the Duke of Sandringham (Simon Callow)

Starting in the third season of the serials, there was a more determined attempt to make Jamie the center (deviating from the book), with one episode wholly about him, but as the outline of all 13 episodes suggests, the center remains Claire’s disappearance into another time. The opening still of the ghost standing by a monument in a darkened street, looking up at someone through a window is iconic; he is her dream. In many women’s romances, the novelist’s heroine expresses a self that is masculine in many of her impulses in her relation to other characters and the culture at hand. In Gabaldon it seems to me Jamie serves this purpose; Claire is very much a classically female heroine. She can be differently female from the other women, as they are all 18th century in conception; for example, Jenny with her many children. Claire is independent, scientifically educated, progressive in politics, pro-active in behavior.

But the theme, the image is watery, that of water become magical and that is adumbrated in her prologue (above, the opening epigraph to this blog)

Now here is the great opening of Drums of Autumn, the book starts almost astounding strongly; each of them thus far with a long internal monologue: this one is about living with ghosts, and so directly relevant to the whole project of historical fiction and time-traveling. And then we turn to Claire and Jamie witnessing a very strong scene of hanging and the violence of the US colony, its cruelty.

I’ve never been afraid of ghosts. I live with them daily, after all. When I look in a mirror, my mother’s eyes look back at me; my mouth curls with the smile that lured my great-grandfather to the fate that was me. No, how should I fear the touch of those vanished hands, laid on me in love unknowing? How could I be afraid of those that molded my flesh, leaving their remnants to live long past the grave? Still less could I be afraid of those ghosts who touch my thoughts in passing. Any library is filled with them. I can take a book from dusty shelves, and be haunted by the thoughts of one long dead, still lively as ever in their winding sheet of words.

Of course it isn’t these homely and accustomed ghosts that trouble sleep and curdle wakefulness. Look back, hold a torch to light the recesses of the dark. Listen to the footsteps that echo behind, when you walk alone. All the time the ghosts flit past and through us, hiding in the future. We look in the mirror and see the shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, we make our ghosts; we haunt ourselves. Each ghost comes unbidden from the misty grounds of dream and silence. Our rational minds say, “No, it isn’t.” But another part, an older part, echoes always softly in the dark, “Yes, but it could be.”

We come and go from mystery and, in between, we try to forget. But a breeze passing in a still room stirs my hair now and then in soft affection. I think it is my mother.

In the book the narrative alters between Gabaldon as Claire and Gabaldon as Briana so this opening can equally be author, Claire once again or her daughter, who will cross the stones in the fourth season.

My next blog on Outlander will be on the first six episodes of season 4.

Ellen