The Crimson Petal and the White
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber is a 2002 epic postmodern novel set in Victorian-era England. The main characters include William Rackham, the unwilling heir to a perfume business; Agnes, William's brittle, long-suffering "mad wife in the attic"; and Sugar, a decidedly unconventional and strong-willed young prostitute whose intense affair with William gives her the opportunity to climb to a higher perch in the rigidly stratified class system of the time. Other characters include Henry Rackham, William's pious brother who wants to be a clergyman and his friend Emmeline Fox, a widow who works in the Rescue Society that tries to reform prostitutes. The novel is told from the perspective of all of the main characters, and the omniscient narrator occasionally addresses the reader directly. There is also a metaliterary aspect, as Sugar is working on her own novel, Henry writes sermons, and Agnes keeps a diary. The novel was generally well-received by critics.
Canongate published The Apple, a selection of short stories based on characters from The Crimson Petal and the White, in 2006.
As of January 2007, a movie production with the same title was slated for release in 2009, directed by Curtis Hanson.
The title is from a 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".
In Popular Culture
The novel was referenced in an episode of the television show Gilmore Girls in Episode 16 of Season 4 called "The Reigning Lorelai". Emily Gilmore briefly and drunkenly recommended the book to her daughter Lorelai while Richard was mourning his mother's (the "first" Lorelai) recent death. It is very out of character for the uppercrust character, Emily, to be drunk, smoking, in a houserobe and so excited about a novel where the protagonist happened to be a "prostitute named Sugar".
Background
Set in 1870s London and principally concerning a 19-year-old prostitute called Sugar, it was described by some critics as postmodern while others echoed the assertion (made in an early review) that it was "the novel that Dickens might have written had he been allowed to speak freely". Twenty years in the writing, the book showed Faber's admiration for Dickens's prose and George Eliot's narrative architecture, but its themes were informed by feminism, post-Freudian awareness of sexual pathology, and post-Marxian class analysis, as well as by unrestricted access to Victorian pornographic texts that had been suppressed until the late 20th century. The Crimson Petal and the White was a bestseller in the USA, Italy, France, Holland and Belgium, and a steady seller in most other countries.
