By: Paige McTernan
Majesties by Tiffany Tsao is a story chock-full of twists, turns, and shocking moments of truth. It creates not characters one would love, but instead characters one would hate or take pity on. The final chapter and closing scene definitely threw me off in a way I was not expecting! There was no way of knowing how this story was going to end. Therefore, I wanted to focus on the various genres— mystery and thriller—that follow this story as they navigate through our tight-knit cast of wealthy families in Indonesia. What signs are we witnessing as the narrative progresses? How would this story qualify as a thriller?
In the opening scene of Majesties, Estella has poisoned all 300 members of her family, with Gwendolyn miraculously surviving albeit being put into a comatose state. My first assumption afterwards was that this was going to be a mystery-type novel. Gwendolyn would wake from her coma and recover, then Nancy Drew her way through the rest of the story, carding through past memories, to figure out why Estella did what she did. I was incredibly shocked to find that this was not, in fact, the case. Instead of taking the path I was expecting, Tiffany Tsao took it to a whole new level and revealed that Gwendolyn was only a part of Estella, her “better half” as she says. Because of this, I have branded Majesties as a psychological thriller. According to a post from reedsyblog, “A thriller is a fast-paced novel full of conflict, tension, suspense, unexpected twists, and high stakes. Every single scene and element in a thriller is meant to propel the action forward, test the characters, and take the readers on a roller coaster ride that will leave them on the edge of their seats.” The constant reveal of each family’s dirty deeds leading up to the end is only the tip of the iceberg. The real psychological aspect is going back through Gwendolyn’s memories after finishing the story.
I soon began to realize: Gwendolyn is almost never mentioned by her family except Estella. None of the other major characters say her name. Not even her own birth is talked about. And the only person she was ever interacting with was none other than Estella. And the icing on the cake: Estella asking forgiveness from her reflection. There’s so much more to unpack, but once the pieces were put together, a chill was sent up my spine as I realized that “Gwendolyn”, her company, and her life was never real in the first place.
A quote from Jane Gallop’s The Ethics of Reading reads, “Close reading slows us down, stopping us at words, getting us to look around at the context of the words that stopped us, making us remember similar words and go back and look for them.” (Gallop, 12). Now normally with me being a reader who doesn’t dive very deep into narratives that often, I would have connected this quote to the few moments where Tante Sandra was compared to drops of dew because of how Gwendolyn and Estella remembered her. However, I looked back and soon realized that the Gallop quote would be better suited for the ants that were mentioned. Back in the girls’ college days, their father sent them an ant farm. Over time, the colony started to falter and die. This led Gwendolyn to say, “Then, after a week, the colony began to wither….They lay strewn all through the tunnels and on the surface. Every now and then, one would convulse before flopping down again in a crumpled heap. And then when they finally gave up, their bodies would stiffen and curl into balls.” (Tsao eBook pg. 103). This made me believe that this was foreshadowing the imminent mass murder of the families. Another moment that connected to that Gallop quote was the two brief mentions of the silkworms from Bagatelle. One moment, they were alive and healthy in the middle of the story, then at the end when they were completely lifeless. Those moments made me think of the Angsonos and the Sulinados, two clans who were once in power, now crumbled and withered away from the act of one person trying to fix something that was broken forever.
All You Read is Love 
Paige, I liked that you mentioned how nobody in Gwendolyn’s family ever addresses her existence except Estella. One thing that I noticed throughout the book was that Estella NEVER refers to Gwendolyn by name except at the very end of the book. Estella consistently refers to Gwendolyn as “doll” whenever they speak, until she begins to reveal that Gwendolyn is in fact a part of Estella. On page 246 Estella says Gwendolyn’s name for the first time when she reveals it’s time to kill the family: “My dear Gwendolyn, you hardly have a choice.” I think you’re right that in many ways this story does follow a psychological thriller’s genre conventions. The very fact that Gwendolyn struggles to confront that she is just a fragment of Estella’s psyche proves that we’re dealing with a narrator whose mental states alter the course of the story. This emphasis on the distortion’s within Gwendolyn’s sense of reality and her perceptions of the world through her memories are what makes the novel a psychological thriller.
LikeLike
Paige, I wanted to elaborate further on the fact that this novel poses itself first as a mystery novel, but then reveals itself to be a psychological thriller. I think that if someone read half of this book, and never chose to finish it, they would bring it up in conversation as a mystery novel. The other person, who we can assume finished the book and maybe went back to piece in the parts that deceptively disguise themselves as clues in the never ending mystery behind Estella’s life, would look at them and say, “How could this be a mystery with what we know by the end of the book?” I think it’s very interesting that to understand that this book is part of the psychological thriller genre, one would have to read the entire book. Furthermore, it’s equally interesting that the book can be read up until a certain point as a mystery novel.
LikeLike