The Confessions of Frannie Langton

“I’ve always wanted to tell my story, even though one person’s story is only a raindrop in an ocean.”

Frannie, despite being imprisoned, finally has a chance to tell her story the way she has seen others do in novels and memoirs. This quote shows not only her longstanding desire, but also her awareness of the subjective nature of personal histories.

“I’m trying to write this story as if it’s mine. Yet I look back over what I’ve set down so far and see how much of my own paper and ink I’ve spent on Miss-bella. The trouble is nothing ever happened to me except through her. That’s just how it was. So many in England have said that must have taught me how to hate. How you must have hated them, Frannie Langton! The pair of them! But the truth is not a cloth every man can cut to fit himself. The truth is there was love as well as hate. The truth is, the love hurt worse.”

Frannie struggles with the emotional abuse she experienced at the hands of her enslavers, knowing that what they have done is wrong but having been isolated with them as her companions. She is, however, able to use her recognition of this to combat popular narratives of slavery, exposing an abuse different from the one that usually makes it to print.

“A man writes to separate himself from the common history. A woman writes to try to join it. What are my own intentions in writing this? The simple answer is that it’s my life, and I want to assemble the pieces of it myself.”

Frannie, with the trial and the press around it, has so often been written about without input from herself, she desires to assert herself within her own story. Her love for books and stories is a key part of her character, and by writing her own story she can enter a tradition she admires and has up to this point been excluded from.

“Freedom was a sum, too, one that yields as many answers as men who’ve set their minds to it. I puzzled over it. I went sick to my stomach thinking about it. I’ll confess it.”

Frannie struggles with her feelings on her enslavement and freedom, trying to adapt to the new life she has been thrust into in London. She is nominally free, but is still being ordered around and given away by Langton, making the divide murky.

“I quailed, thinking of Paradise. The coach-house. The things that had been done there. I had been a machine. Their machine. An automaton. Wind them up and make them move. Because I’d been up on my high horse, and had a bit of learning.”

The memories of the experiments Frannie was forced to participate in at Paradise plague her throughout the novel. Her own actions in particular are troublesome to her, not only because of what she did, but because of how far she would follow orders.

“I fell asleep wishing Madame could see me as I’d been. Not the maid, not the house-girl, but Frannie the scribe. White cambric sleeves rolled up and marked with my own ink-stains, crow-feather pens, trimmed the way I liked them. Feet planted under a table, scribbling until my wrists cried out all their aches and pains. The Frannie who read Milton and Mr Defoe. Reading, thinking, writing.”

Frannie ties her ideas of image and respectability to those she has grown to admire through reading. Her interest in Meg makes her desire even more to change how she is viewed, imagining herself into a world where she is a respected intellectual, a path she has been denied.

“Her own worst enemy, she was. I always told her I knew what her trouble was. I wanted to be a lady’s maid, but she wanted to be the lady.”

Pru’s analysis of Frannie is an accurate look into Frannie’s desires and frustrations. As Langton’s daughter, she may have been accepted as a part of the society Meg keeps, had she been white. Frannie’s desires and wishes compel her to make changes to her image.

“And what do two women do in a room of their own? Isn’t this the question that troubles my accusers most? Such an easy thing to hide in plain sight—a lady and her Abigail—all eyes looking the wrong way.”

The theme of visibility is important throughout the novel, and Frannie and Meg’s relationship represents that which remains hidden. Here Frannie interrogates the duality of the situation, both the salacious way in which the idea is treated and the fear of addressing it at all.

“What no one will admit about the anti-slavers is that they’ve all got a slaver’s appetite for misery, even if they want to do different things with it.”

Frannie accurately assesses the similarities between different groups, noting here how the abolitionists she interacts with haven’t truly shed the desires of the enslavers, but instead satisfy them in a different way. They still expect her to be and act a specific way, a notion she actively rejects.

“I was angry, yes. So would you have been; so would anyone. The real madness would have been if I had not been angry.”

Here Frannie forces the hypocrisy and ridiculousness of some of the English perceptions of her into the light. Abolitionists keep asking if she was angry, if that is why she committed the murders, never thinking that it would be ridiculous if someone who had been enslaved wasn’t angry.

“The truth was that by then I was a threat to the master of the house. I wanted what he had. There were too many things I wanted. I can hardly confess them all. There isn’t paper enough, or time.”

Frannie’s desires are often seen as dangerous or inappropriate, as examples of her reaching above her station. The ridiculousness of it is that she mainly wants things that Benham is expected to have, desires that when transposed onto her end up being seen as a threat.

“I don’t want to say it, because I am terrified it might be true. I know that memories hide sometimes for the simple reason that we could not bear their weight. That sometimes it’s mercy that unwinds the clock.”

The truth of the night of the murders and what occurred are obfuscated in Frannie’s mind. She begins to wonder if she did actually hurt the woman she loved. These thoughts torture her. She accepts this, though, believing that the actual knowledge would be too much to bear, again retreating into her mind.

“In any event, she isn’t the one who had blood on her hands, and no story to account for what she’d done. Nor has anyone come to bear witness against her. No one will ever see her as the monster, if the choice is between me and her.”

The contrast between how Frannie is treated compared to the other servants in the Benham’s household is made all the more obvious in the heightened environment of the trial. Linux’s vitriolic hatred of her and the abuse she subjected her to are not even enough for the court to choose Frannie over her.

“My mind races. It’s my own self I’m trying to outrun. When I reach inside, there’s nothing. That trick, somewhere between remembering and forgetting—and the only refuge I have left.”

Frannie’s retreats into her own mind are a coping mechanism to protect her from the truth of what she has suffered. Her concern over her possible guilt in Meg’s murder makes the source of her memory problems clear—guilt, both real and imagined.

“English justice. The mirror and the sword. First, they force you to face yourself, then they force you to face death.”

Frannie’s trial seems designed to subject her to the most exposure and derision possible. Forced to hear what everyone who testifies thinks of her, she must also hear the opinions from the newspapers, read aloud at her by her wardens, all while facing the likely possibility of death.

“I do feel the power of this new dress. A kind of dignity coming back. A greater confidence. Held up by that, and your promise of good news, I hold my skirts, and lean forward so I can pay attention.”

Frannie is concerned over her image throughout, but especially during the trial when the impression she makes may make the difference between life and death. Her clothing has long aided in her confidence as a protective mask.

“With the Surgeon dead, I’d had to learn dissection, whether I liked it or not. What would Benham have written about any of this, if I had told him? Certainly not how I quailed, looking down at that child. How I felt my stomach curl. How panic thickened my breath. Ahead of me lay the same two choices as always. Do what Langton wanted, or do what I wanted.”

Frannie has reached the climax of her internal struggle against Langton, his crimes against her put into sharp relief. Frannie always wants something, but it took the massive impetus of the forthcoming torture of the baby with albinism to recognize her own wants and act upon them.

“My stomach clenches. I’m back in the dining room, telling Langton about the orangeade, telling myself I was only speaking the truth, forgetting how many sides the truth has. I can’t see how terrible it will be, because all I’m thinking about is me.”

Frannie repeatedly expresses the complex nature of the truth, and has previously stated her anger at herself for being truthful to Langton. Frannie maintains her guilt still, analyzing it to assess the root problem of selfishness and fear.

“So many things to tell her. How guilt has run through me, all this time, keeping time with my blood. How, even now, to think of it, to write of it, makes both leap in my chest. How sorry I am.”

The guilt Frannie feels for Phibbah is now compounded with the knowledge that Phibbah was her mother. She recognizes the connective tissue that guilt has formed within her, and how there are some actions from which people may not recover.

“But death can be a choice too, the dark link between dreaming and madness. Her melancholia that same black link, opium the shade she drew down on herself. All those rotten branches, growing from the same black root.”

Meg’s suicide is both a relief and a tragedy. Frannie is now assured that she did not kill the woman she loves, but she also now knows just how deeply Meg was hurting and how much the laudanum had damaged and been damaging both of them.

“Her truth now forces me to set mine down also, to face myself and what I’ve done. Forcing me to bleed, and bleed again. I feel sure I can come close to the truth of it, which is as certain as we can ever be about the truth.”

Frannie has struggled with the idea of truth throughout, as she knows how malleable it can be. She understands that confronting it is a painful exercise, and an ongoing one, coming to terms with the reality of her trauma a continuing process.

“We were there to be stared at, too. It’s instructive for the other gaol-birds to see us on our final night. The service for the condemned. Some of them reach for us, try to touch us on our smocks. Put in a word for us, they say, where you’re going.”

The visibility of Frannie’s trial and now her execution show the English legal system as a kind of circus, a put-upon show of crime and consequences. The cruelty of it is a sharp contrast to the desperation and fear of those condemned, an insult added to ultimate injury.

“Some of us are the hewers of words, while the rest are merely the hewers of wood. Perhaps someone will be interested in all of this. Though I won’t hold the few breaths left to me. As Langton said once, most publishers can’t see past their noses.”

Frannie finishes her manuscript but must leave the world without being assured of its success. Her tale must, at last, be satisfying just to her, offer fulfillment purely by being completed.