de la Mare, Walter. Memoirs of a Midget. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2004. 8.49 X 5.42. 379 pgs. Paper 1-58988-012-9.

Reviewed by Hyun-Jung Lee, Northwestern University

"What is the use of being one's self, if one is always changing?" laments the diminutive narrator of Walter de la Mare's singular novel (2004, p. 252). Presented as a first-person account of a "midget" living in (or, in a sense, out of) Victorian England, the memoirs trace her strange and fascinating life up to the turbulent events of her twentieth year. De la Mare's masterwork of lyrical grotesquerie was first published in 1921 to fervent critical acclaim, but went largely overlooked during the later decades of the twentieth century. The past few years have seen a welcome resurgence of interest in this captivating yet disquieting novel, told by one of the smallest heroines in literary history, about being extraordinary in a world that sanctions ordinariness while despising commonness, that exoticizes difference while condemning deviance.

Raised in an idyllic, protected environment under loving if slightly disappointed "full-sized" parents, the young narrator is suddenly thrust into the world after their death and left to solve the riddle of who she is and what place she occupies in a "full-grown" world. During the course of her young adulthood, she falls intensely in love with a beautiful but heartless woman named Fanny, befriends a male dwarf who falls hopelessly and futilely in love with her, becomes the toast of high London society under the patronage of the aristocratic Mrs. Monnerie, and even joins a traveling circus as "Signorina Donna Angélique, the Fairy Princess of Andalusia" in order to win her freedom and independence.

Yet, as extraordinary as these incidents may be, what dominates the foreground is the narrator's earnest attempt at "being one's self" while at the same time forging and maintaining genuine connections with others—to speak "self to self" (p. 365). Unfortunately, her unusual dimensions foil her efforts at every turn: she finds herself variously admired, petted, despised, idolized, feared, and ignored by those around her, but rarely regarded as a fellow human being.

Frustrated by the burden of seeing and being seen, the narrator eventually pronounces, "Why! Aren't we all on show?" (p. 360). Questions of specularity and spectacularity saturate her account: the memoirs suggest that, whether on a circus stage or in one's bedroom, one is constantly performing a self that may or may not be true, always seeing reflections of oneself in others and seeing oneself through others' eyes. It is this ceaselessly shifting distance between who (we think) we are and who we seem to be that divides us not only from one another but from our own selves, both because and in spite of our outward appearances.

We never learn the narrator's full name: she calls herself by the various aliases that she and others give her, as if in silent refusal to provide the reader with a small, convenient handle with which to sum up her "Self" in the way her diminutive body circumscribes her physical being. Nonetheless, the aliases provide key insights into the narrator and those who impose such labels upon her. "Midgetina"—the name by which Fanny refers to her—betrays the troubled combination of attraction and contempt that eventually poisons their relationship. "Miss M." is often reserved for those moments when the narrator feels a kind of critical distance from her own self: the memoirs, written years after the incidents recounted in them, are punctuated by passages of self-reflection when the narrator, "drawing back a pace or two" (p. 366) from the front of the stage, ruminates on her past experiences and the changes that the intervening years have wrought. "All that I write," she offers, "is an attempt only to tell, not to explain. I realize that sometimes I was pretending things, yet did not know that I was pretending" (p. 262).

Before the actual memoirs even begin, we learn from her friend and executor, Sir Walter that Miss M. has disappeared without a trace, under mysterious circumstances. In addition to casting a fairy tale-like veil over the narrative, Miss M.'s evaporation, seemingly into thin air, results in a crucial substitution: in the absence of her physical self, the memoirs become Miss M.'s only material manifestation, a "body" that resists being "seen" as a spectacle by incarnating the wavering depths and complexities of her mind. Rather than be seen and judged as Miss M. has been throughout her life, this alternate "body" demands to be "read" and, above all, communicated. In the end, the novel is a testament to the vital, unbridgeable distance that separates—indeed, individuates—all living beings, and, as such, insists that each of us, regardless of physical or mental scale, be recognized and embraced as "shar[ing] the world on equal terms" (p. 379).