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of the upper-bourgeoisie has not exactly been purified, it has at least been put
together again.
Opening with dire premonitions of imminent collapse and chaos and a fear
of “impending evil,” The Seven Secrets comes full circle in a conclusion which
restores the Edwardian bourgeois world to something like its former innocence and
stability and which seems to reaffirm some of the ideological assumptions that the
narrative itself had appeared to question. Sir Bemard may have been a scoundrel and
a bounder, but the moral rectitude and social responsibility he was supposed to have
stood for are still embodied in Ralph and Jevons, at a less exalted social level.
Similarly, the masculine authority that Sir Bemard had criminally exploited will still
be upheld by the pair, in their own fashion. Indeed, in any case, it seems quite likely
that for Le Queux’s reading community (who were well-used to the predictable way
in which his novels invariably flirted with disaster before restoring order) the
uncertainties and confusions of the narrative could even have been interpreted as
manageable and necessary elements in a kind of ritual of ethical cleansing required
for society to progress. Be that as it may, the closure to The Seven Secrets leaves the
surface of the Edwardian social order more or less unruffled, with Jevons retuming
to his tea business in the City and Ralph in the quiet rural practice that was always
his ideal. “What is more,” Ralph says, “I have obtained in Ethelwynn a wife who is
devoted to me and beloved by all the countryside—a wife who is the very perfection
of all that is noble and good in woman” (148). And as if all this was not enough, not
only does he get the girl, he gets her money, too. “The Courtenay estate is ours,” he
declares at the close, making no secret of his satisfaction.
Kuwait University
Kenneth Payne
Works Cited
Greene, Graham. The Ministry of Fear. 1943. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Print.
Le Queux, William. The Seven Secrets. London, 1903. Project Gutenberg. Web. 15
Sept. 2012.
Pittard, Christophen 2007. “Cheap, Healthful Literature”: The Strand Magazine,
Fictions of Crime, and Purified Reading Communities.” Victorian
Periodicals Review 40 (1): 1-23.
Snyder, Robert Lance. 2010. “’Shadow of Abandonment’: Graham Greene’s The
Confidential Agent.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 52 (2):
203-226.
This Work was Supported by Kuwait University, Research Grant No. [AE01-09]