House of Cards

Renate Welsh's novel is a story about a woman's unsuccessful quest to build a home, to determine an identity. It is based on family documents of the author's great-great-grandfather, a representative in the Frankfurt consitutive Assembly and one of the leaders of the failed revolution of 1848 in Germany. He and his son eventually emigrated to the United States. The writings and correspondence of these two men appear in their original form in the novel, indicated by italics. The female protagonist, Pauline, is married to the son. There are no letters preserved from her, so the author lends Pauline a voice and attempts to correct an injustic done to this woman of the nineteenth century, the injustice of misunderstanding her, of forgetting her, or of never having taken note of her in the first place. Welsh rejects an omnipotent narrative perspective and instead engages in a conversaion with her protagonist. The two very different voices are layered one upon the other in the novel, and their juxtaposition creates a formal dialogic structure. Welsh situates the documentary materials within a fictional context. Thus fiction stands side by side with fact, subjective conjecture with objective statement. Pauline's story ends in insanity in 1855.