Part I
Fingersmith is a novel that piles irony on top of irony and top of irony. Part I is narrated by Susan, part of an Oliver Twist-like gang of young thieves and petty criminals looked after by the Fagin-like Mrs. Sucksby. Mrs. Sucksby has engaged the particular charms of Susan in a complicated scheme involving the seduction of an heiress name Maud by another of Sucksby’s criminal partners. Everything goes according to plan except for the fact that Susan finds herself falling in love with Maud. Which is why she is left shrieking and in disbelief at the ironic climax of Part I in which the reader is forced to realize that much of this plot has not been exactly what it seemed. The ironic laugh turns out to be on the reader and not on the character the reader assumed it might be.
Part II
In Part II, the narrative duties are taken over by Maud. While certainly not all, much of Part II covers some of the same territory already delineated in Susan’s narrative. Maud’s version proceeds to make the irony arriving with the revelations at the end of Part I much more complicated than assumed. More importantly for the sake of narrative construction, however, is that in making the truth available to the reader, but not Susan, Part II succeeds in infusing adding another layer of irony as Part III commences.
Part III
Part III adds a brand new dimension to the dramatic irony established in Part I as Susan reclaims the role of storyteller and proceeds upon a course of action based on assumptions that the reader knows are misguided, but Susan does not. This ironic distance between what a character thinks and what the reader knows is tragically intensified for the reader as it becomes clear that Susan has set forth on a path that the reader knowns has the potential to be a self-destruction mission potentially resulting in emotional devastation.
"Is there money in it?"
Up to this point, the reader has been encouraged to look upon Maud more sympathetically for being an unwilling participant coerced by a deviant uncle into taking an inappropriately active role in the process of his compiling a dictionary of pornographic terms. Only at the end is the irony revealed: Maud now making a living writing erotic stories relying upon the knowledge of how to write them gained through the enforced participation at the hands of her uncle. The answer turns out to be yes. There is money in it. The irony in the question even being asked is, of course, more than apparent today.
The Fingersmith's Victims
In the section narrated by Maud, an observation is made that is kind of a microcosm of the entire ironic foundation of the novel. Speaking of Sue, Maud writes:
“…though she knows much, what she has is a counterfeit knowledge, and worthless.”
The irony here is quite cutting. On its most superficial level, it is ironic because Maud herself has been operating the whole time under a counterfeit knowledge; what she thinks she knows is ultimately—in her own word—worthless because it isn’t based on truth. More profoundly ironic is the layer which lies beneath the surface. The reader has also been operating under the veil of counterfeit knowledge—and remains so for some time even after reading Maud’s narrative account. Does this then make everything in the novel to this point and even beyond worthless? According to Maud, the answer is clear. The reader who has enjoyed having their metaphorical pockets of expectation picked by a master literary fingersmith might well disagree.
