Splendors and Glooms

Splendors and Glooms incorporates many of the strictures and customs of 19th-century London, relying on historically accurate depictions of Victorian London to inform the plot and characters. Victorian culture depended on separations of class and gender, elements Schlitz shows through the differences in how society treats Lizzie Rose versus Parsefall as well as through the differences between Clara’s home and Grisini’s residence. Women of Victorian England were expected to remain in the home and not mingle in society. By contrast, men belonged in the workplace and in social settings. These differences emerge in how Dr. Wintermute continues to work while Mrs. Wintermute spends her days alone in mourning. This gender divide was most evident in the upper class, which was often marked by a home’s ability to survive on a single income; in the lower classes, in contrast, women often worked, as Lizzie Rose does after Grisini’s accident. In addition to sexism, Victorian England also exercised intolerance, particularly toward foreigners. As an Italian man, Grisini is shunned by the upper class, who assume him to be a charlatan. Though such accusations were typically untrue in 19th-century London, Schlitz builds on this stereotype, making Grisini a wicked man and magician.

Schlitz’s incorporation of magic calls to the Victorian obsession with spiritualism. Mediums and seances were at the center of the spiritualist movement, reflecting a fascination with the dead and a desire to communicate with the spirit realm. Though Schlitz does not make specific use of mediums or seances, the magic that Cassandra and Grisini use borrows from such traditions. Cassandra’s phoenix-stone is a fire opal, a gem seen as dangerous or unlucky during the Victorian era. Superstition dictated that opals brought bad luck to those not born in October (the stone’s birth month), which caused the jewel to be associated with witchcraft. A lesser-known story posits that King Alfonso XII of Spain received a cursed opal that killed his wife and many of his family members for generations. This story aligns with the path of Schlitz’s phoenix-stone and how it is passed along from woman to woman through theft, each dying a terrible death by fire. Schlitz also borrows from the passion for performance in Victorian culture in the English-speaking world. The royal puppet show exemplifies the grand music halls and extravagant shows that swept public interest, and Grisini’s traveling show represents the grandeur of street performance. Together, these elements capture how important entertainment was to all classes.

Notably, Schlitz’s characters often reflect popular Dickensian archetypes; Dickens, who was among the most well-known writers of the century, created these exaggerated characters in part to speak out against the societal injustices of his divided social system. These archetypes include the noble orphan, the empathetic victim of societal roles, and the bitter old woman. Lizzie Rose and Parsefall share elements of the noble orphan archetype—Lizzie Rose’s pure goodness makes her an upstanding character, and Parsefall’s journey shows him growing past his thieving roots to become someone worthy. Clara embodies the empathetic victim, forced to live in the traditions of mourning when all she wants is to be free of the past and to live in the present. Cassandra follows the trope of the bitter old woman, evoking to an extent Miss Haversham from Great Expectations—both women feel cheated by the elusive love of men and shun the entire gender as a result. Cassandra also borrows elements of Dickens’s unknown benefactor archetype, in which a seemingly random person decides to provide for children they don’t know. In Cassandra’s case, though, she does so as a trick to benefit herself, showing how Schlitz builds upon the archetypes to give her characters motivations and follies of their own.