Josiana

Josiana is a duchess and a member of the Stuart royal family, whose position gives her both inherited privilege and a place in the court’s political arrangements. Queen Anne is her sister. When Gwynplaine is recognized as the legitimate heir to the Clancharlie estates, the Queen orders Josiana to marry him and transfers the intended match away from David Dirry-Moir. Josiana’s response is not a simple acceptance of courtly duty: she is fascinated by Gwynplaine’s appearance and status as a mountebank, yet repudiates him once the royal order makes him her husband. Her story brings private desire into collision with a marriage imposed as part of a dynastic settlement.

Court Position and the Royal Arrangement

Josiana’s status makes her marriage consequential beyond her personal life. The Queen’s decision follows the discovery that Gwynplaine is Lord Fermain Clancharlie, the legitimate son of Lord Linnæus Clancharlie and heir to his father’s estates and titles. Because Josiana had been given the Clancharlie estates, Queen Anne presents the new lord as the proper husband for her sister and substitutes him for David Dirry-Moir. The command is both familial and political: the Queen invokes her authority as sister and sovereign, and directs Josiana to marry Gwynplaine.

The Queen’s motives are not purely disinterested. She knows that Gwynplaine is deformed, but has not asked what his deformity is like; she treats the question as irrelevant to his legal right and imagines that restoring a peer also vindicates the privileges of the peerage. She also expects the arrangement to please herself, combining what she regards as justice with a private satisfaction at the prospect of a striking match. Josiana is thus placed inside a royal design whose language is restitution and rank, but whose practical consequence is a marriage commanded without regard to her existing attachment.

Fascination with Gwynplaine

When Josiana encounters Gwynplaine in her rooms, her first response is astonishment rather than fear. She recognizes him and abruptly embraces him, then draws back to study him. Her attention is captivated by the very features that make him an object of public ridicule. She tells him that his deformity and low rank attract her, and describes the prospect of loving a despised mountebank as a break from the constraints of noble respectability. Her attraction is therefore bound up with social transgression: she presents disgrace, mockery, and the rejection of royal convention as forms of release from the boredom of being a grandee.

This fascination does not mean that she understands Gwynplaine’s experience. His face makes spectators laugh regardless of his feelings, while she interprets its appearance through her own appetite for the strange and forbidden. She admires the visible difference that has shaped his life, but the encounter offers no indication that she attends to the suffering or history behind it. The imbalance becomes central to their brief intimacy: for Josiana, Gwynplaine initially embodies an escape from her own social identity; for him, her attention is overwhelming, but does not give him the mutual recognition he has found with Dea.

The Command and Her Reversal

The encounter changes when Gwynplaine reads Queen Anne’s letter aloud. The document declares that he will be admitted to the House of Lords, installed in his hereditary position, and married to Josiana. After reading it, Josiana examines the report concerning his discovery and recognition, then rereads the Queen’s order. She answers calmly that the arrangement will stand, but immediately tells Gwynplaine to leave. She insists that, if he is her husband, he cannot remain in the place she reserves for her lover, and says plainly that she hates him.

The reversal is abrupt but consistent with the distinction between fascination and commitment that her earlier conduct had obscured. She had welcomed Gwynplaine as a figure of transgression while the encounter remained under her control; the royal letter converts that fascination into a binding marital identity. Josiana does not respond by accepting the Queen’s intended reconciliation between rank, property, and marriage. Instead, she refuses the intimacy the order prescribes, leaving Gwynplaine alone with the difference between being desired as an extraordinary spectacle and being accepted as a husband.

David Dirry-Moir and Public Refusal

Josiana’s attachment to David Dirry-Moir becomes explicit in a short note circulated among the lords. The note is described as a copy of a letter she supposedly sent to the Queen in answer to the marriage command; the narrative leaves open whether the copy is genuine or forged. Its reported message is that the arrangement suits her because she can keep David as her lover. The lords receive the note with enthusiasm, and Lord Mohun praises the woman it depicts. Whatever its uncertain authorship, the episode shows how Josiana’s private relationship is turned into court gossip and public entertainment.

Her words to Gwynplaine in private already establish the essential conflict: she identifies another man as occupying the place of her lover even while the Queen designates Gwynplaine as her husband. The circulating note carries that conflict into the House of Lords, where the marriage arrangement becomes material for aristocratic amusement. Josiana’s refusal is therefore not a successful escape from royal power so much as a defiant declaration within the court’s own social theatre. The evidence does not show the Queen reversing the command or Josiana marrying either man.

Narrative Significance

Josiana’s part in Gwynplaine’s rise makes his restoration materially real but emotionally destructive. Looking back on his elevation, he understands that he has been drawn away from Dea and from the life he shared with her, toward Josiana, pride, and power. He sees the peerage and palaces from the reverse side of their initial brilliance, and remembers the wandering life with Dea and Ursus as a source of intimacy and joy. His disillusionment does not make Josiana the sole cause of his choices: his inheritance, the Queen’s arrangement, and his own movement into a new social world all contribute to the separation. But Josiana’s rejection gives that transformation its sharpest personal form.

The contrast between Josiana and Dea is consequently structural as well as romantic. Josiana can see Gwynplaine’s face and find it fascinating, but her desire rests on the spectacle of his difference and on what it allows her to defy. Dea, by contrast, is remembered by Gwynplaine as the person whose inward vision recognized him. Josiana’s brief embrace followed by dismissal exposes the limits of a courtly restoration that can return a title and assign a spouse but cannot create mutual understanding. She remains both a participant in royal power and a woman resisting the marriage that power has arranged, while the consequences of the arrangement fall heavily on Gwynplaine and the life he has left behind.