Affinity

Sarah Waters

4 ideas

1. The Millbank medium's escape through her visitor

   In 1870s London, Margaret Prior, a grieving, depressed spinster, becomes a lady visitor at Millbank prison and falls in love with Selina Dawes, a medium jailed after a séance in which her patroness died. Selina convinces Margaret they are spiritual 'affinities', shown by gifts that seem to arrive from the spirits and private knowledge no prisoner could have. Margaret secretly gathers money, clothes and passports for them to flee together, but Selina escapes alone with Margaret's maid, Ruth Vigers: her lover and accomplice, who had been reading Margaret's diary and feeding its contents to Selina.

2. The invisible servant as perfect instrument

   A class system trains its masters not to see the people who serve them, so a servant can read letters, move objects and pass on secrets without ever becoming a suspect. The more complete the employer's sense of privacy, the more total the servant's access. Here the maid carries out the 'supernatural' effects: the watcher's blindness to her is the mechanism of the con, not an accident within it.

3. The observer is the one being observed

   Margaret enters the prison as an inspector, peering at women through cell grilles, and assumes her position of looking makes her the one who knows. In fact her own inner life, set down in a private diary and lived out in a mother-controlled household, is the most exposed thing in the story. Seeing surveillance as two-way reveals that people who believe they are doing the watching often expose the most, because they never guard against being watched.

4. Longing to be chosen makes ideal marks

   A con works best not on the gullible but on the lonely, because it offers what they already want to believe: that they are uniquely seen, destined and loved. Once the mark accepts the frame of predestined 'affinity', every coincidence becomes proof and every doubt becomes a betrayal of the bond. The victim then does the persuading herself, and pays for and plans her own deception.

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