THE WHEEL SPINS by Ethel Lina White

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Hitchcock

Even reading the book by Ethel Lina White, it felt like it could be a Hitchcock film with the psychological tension and the way the scenes are painted. The New York Times ranked it the best picture of the year (1938).

Premonition/Foreboding (Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign)

The first paragraph introduces us to Iris. Every chapter, starting with chapter one, ends with a sense of foreboding.

• Safety vs. danger – Iris’ square on her palm
• Miss Froy is homesick, which she sees as a warning.
• The dangerous hike (being lost) was a warning.
• Rose’s dream of a railway smash.
• Iris passes out from sunstroke and barely makes the train.
• Miss Froy’s story about an Englishwoman locked in an asylum (friendless foreigner who didn’t speak the language) 
• Mr. and Mrs. Froy feel apprehensive about their daughter’s safety.

Premonition plays a role throughout the book by Ethel Lina White. Is it just a psychological variable here? Is premonition real? Is it inescapable?

Stranger in a Strange Land

In The Wheel Turns by Ethel Lina White, Iris and her friends are staying in a village of “picturesque squalor in a remote corner of Europe,” filled with barbarous scenery, magnificent ruggedness, and desolate hollows. She doesn’t speak the language or understand the culture. She’s also an outsider amongst the British “decent, well-bred” guests. And when she passes out at the station from sunstroke, she awakes to foreign people and foreign voices. 

A Legal Criticism

• As Iris waits at the train station, she overhears a disagreement between Hare and the professor. Hare says trial by jury is poor justice, people have inherent biases, people can’t control themselves from erroneous snap judgements, and even evidence isn’t reliable. He says everyone’s a “bag of his special prejudices” (50) and an unreliable witness.
• Iris rather takes Hare’s side, but then agrees with the professor’s side when she thinks about trusting the solid, dependable British woman over a foreign seductress type.
• Then Iris finds herself in this exact situation. She’s the beautiful, hysterical, rude attention seeker. She’s the least reliable person on the train — and the only one who’s right.
• Not even Hare believes her at all, though she directly calls into reality his own arguments.

Which Brings Up the Topic of Insanity/Hysteria/Delirium/Neurosis

In The Wheel Turns by Ethel Lina White, there is much talk of Iris’ supposed hysteria and weakened mental state.

Baroness: “There has been no English lady, here, in this carriage, never, at any time, except you. You are the only English lady here” (92). Iris questions her own sanity and reliability. Hare tells her a story of getting kicked in the head whilst playing football. His captain visited him in hospital, but he thought it was the Prince of Wales (Edward VIII).

Iris resolves to talk to the English visitors who saw her with Miss Froy. No one except Miss Barnes admits to seeing her. Then a stranger, Frau Kummer, appears, pretending to be Miss Froy.

The doctor offers to “take care” of Iris by placing her in a nursing home for the night. Yikes!

“The madwoman in the attic” is a literary concept derived from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s 1979 feminist critique, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. This idea examines how19th-century literature often portrayed women as either angelic figures or monstrous beings, with the “madwoman” symbolizing the suppressed rage and resistance of women confined by patriarchal norms. The term references Bertha Mason, the hidden and mentally ill wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, who represents the darker, rebellious side of female consciousness that defies societal expectations. Through this framework, Gilbert and Gubar explore how female authors of the era used such characters to express their own struggles for creative autonomy and challenge the limitations imposed on women’s roles both in literature and society.

Confidence and Misplaced Confidence

In The Wheel Turns by Ethel Lina White, Iris is arguably the least reliable person on the train. She is trying to save someone who is one of the most capable. Miss Froy speaks 10 languages and imagined this as some strength that could get her or others out of a future jam. 

And then it is Miss Froy, this confident, brilliant, friendly little gossip, who is so easily abducted.

• The ending is absolutely fascinating. It’s so wild SGH feels it must be based in reality. Iris habitually falls victim to dreams of grandeur and under this influence (and under the influence of drugs) rips off Miss Froy’s mask.
• The delusion was superior to the skill.

Iris as Unlikeable Heroine

• Iris: rich, haughty, self-centered, sheltered, and privileged — but not actually bad. 
• She has a falling out with her friends, which provides a moment of clarity – they aren’t really friends.
• The “stupid” peasant man she meets on her hike “heard only a string of gibberish. He saw a girl, dressed like a man, who was unattractively skinny—according to the local standard of beauty—with cut dirty knees. She was a foreigner …. Further, she was worked up to a pitch of excitement, and was exceptionally stupid.”
• Yet she struggles to function without her perpetual crowd reinforcing her as their queen.
• She alienates every single guest and can hardly be polite. She’s frosty when she realizes her crowd was unpopular and now she’s without their protection.
• She’s not even nice to Miss Froy.
• She doesn’t know how to do anything but pay for stuff and tip well

Yet, Iris Is Complicated — in a Good Way

On the train, she thinks, “It was discomforting to reflect that the population of the globe must include a percentage of persons without friends, money, or influence; nonentities who would never be missed, and who would sink without leaving a bubble.”

In the past 24 hours, Iris has been friendless, sick, penniless, nowhere to turn. She is poised and ready to do the thing others around her won’t do.

“Iris felt plunged in the hell of Judas Iscariot and all traitors as she made her denial. “Yes. I invented her. There’s no Miss Froy” (233). Then she “was conscious of a glow of spurious strength, followed by a rush of confidence, as she climbed out of the traitor’s hell into which she had hurled herself. ‘Lost causes are the only causes worth fighting for,’ she told herself” (241).

Iris’ Constant Mental Reframing

Iris Carr in The Wheel Turns by Ethel Lina White is quite the character.

• She thinks she’s attacked by gypsies at the train station, then realizes all these foreign faces were protecting her, and completely reframes her perspective.
• Imagine if Hare hadn’t been there to help her on the train – what then?
• Serious gaslighting by the Baroness and doctor plunge her into self doubt, which she is in and out of quite a bit, but honestly stays surprisingly true to her concept o f Miss Froy
• Sees the people around her as disdainful, or laughing at her, or mocking her. Our mental state frames our perception of others’ behavior toward us. 
• How does your mental state affect your perception of others?

She’s a self-centered, semi-society girl; put to the test with disloyal fake “friends” and hike (she climbs 5,000 feet, gets lost, hits her “zero hour” where she realizes she has been carried her entire life). Rose describes her as “utterly selfish. She wouldn’t raise a finger, or go an inch out of her way, to help anyone” (35). Yet when she tries to find Miss Froy, a stranger to her, the professor says, “You must be the most unselfish person alive. Really, it’s almost unnatural” (123).

Miss Froy Is Real — and Really Wonderful

In The Wheel Turns by Ethel Lina White, Miss Froy adores travel. She speaks 10 languages fluently and even works on idiomatic polish. She loves travel for the forward motion, adventure, and sense of discovery. “It was as though a dryad were imprisoned within the tree-trunk of a withered spinster” (79). Miss Froy’s mother thinks of her as a “modern girl,” and Carolyn is inclined to agree. She “never gave up hope” and “remained tolerably calm in the face of each fresh disappointment.”

Ethel Lina White doesn’t leave us in the dark with this psychological thriller. As Iris is plunging around mentally, Ethel Lina White actually shows us the solid truth of the elderly parents and Sock. 

This alters the story in The Wheel Turns by Ethel Lina White to be one where we watch Iris from the inside. She’s a fragile, ill, alienated, incapable, spoiled rich girl — and the only one who can save Miss Froy.

Max Hare

• A rather strange romance seemed to have developed with Hare and Iris. Where in the end she is at least traveling with him and might even be marrying him. Why?
• Hare not only didn’t believe Iris, he actually drugged her against her will, which not even the doctor would do. 
• Is acting against an adult’s will, even in what you see as their own interests, a good or bad thing?

The Professor

• Nearly unbearable, and sexist beyond comprehension. Hare points out he’s afraid of women. Is this even a type that exists any longer in the modern world? He just perceives all young women as hysterical vixens?
• The idea of the incel is close in some ways, but rarely are these people capable and trusted professionals. The professor is not an incel. He’s actually upset when his student is in love with him. 
• Iris can’t stand him, yet she realizes she needs him to lend some legitimacy to her cause.

What It Means to Be English

In The Wheel Turns, Ethel Lina White seems to have some fascinating thoughts about what it means to be English.

• “If we didn’t dress, we should feel we were letting England down” (39).
• Miss Froy: “[The Flood-Porters are] part of an England that is passing away. Well-bred privileged people, who live in big houses, and don’t spend their income. I’m rather sorry they’re dying out. … Because, although I’m a worker myself, I feel that nice leisured people stand for much that is good. Tradition, charity, national prestige. They may not think you’re their equal, but their sense of justice sees that you get equal rights” (78).
• Iris to Hare: “as I’m English and you’re English and this concerns an Englishwoman, it’s your duty to believe me” (109).
• Iris “felt she had been betrayed by her compatriots. They might boast of wearing evening dress for the honour of their country, but they had let down England. The Union Jack lay shredded in tatters and the triumphant strains of the National Anthem died down to the screech of a tin whistle” (120).
• The doctor: “it is extraordinary how the English will regard themselves as the policemen of the world” (224).

It’s an uncivilized crime in an uncivilized world on a train ostensibly transporting passengers back to civilization. What’s surprising is that the well-bred “English” passengers’ behavior is quite uncivilized.

The “Jury,” aka the No-Growth Story Arc

• The sisters, filled with “conscious virtue,” want to get home to their dog, who is “frantic” without them. One sister tells a story of testifying against a drunk man who hit a woman with his car. The sisters were later “marked people.” Quote 152.
• Mrs. Barnes wants to get home to Gabriel, who has a cold. The lie 167. 
• Mr. Todhunter doesn’t want to be waylaid in Trieste in case his wife discovers he has been cheating; Mrs. Todhunter decides not to risk everything for a man who won’t divorce his wife and for the subsequent dissolution of her marriage
• Iris realizes there’s “not one real person among the lot of us” (190).
• The professor wants his dinner and doesn’t want to be waylaid in Trieste. He can’t afford the delay, as he’s short on cash, and he has an engagement.

The “wheel spins” imagery is evoked multiple times in The Wheel Turns by Ethel Lina White, as the decisions of strangers hold Miss Froy’s fate in the balance. And yet none of these people rise whatsoever above their own self-centeredness or change their perspective by a jot.

• The old spinsters on finding they were wrong about Iris don’t alter their behavior at all. They don’t learn any kind o f lesson and stay confirmed in their idea of not getting involved, even though Miss Froy was nearly abducted and murdered and saved by Iris.
• The professor doesn’t like to think about being wrong, or change his opinions in the least.
• The newlyweds may or may not want the publicity. 
• The mother has no consideration for other mothers, and no regret for her grand lie to “save” her baby and husband.
• Even Miss Froy seems confirmed to remain unchanged in any of her behavior. 

Only Iris is going to try something different. Iris was more moved by national loyalty than by dinner. Her naive assumptions kind of saved Miss Froy, like of course English must help English…

Mystery Tropes

In The Wheel Turns by Ethel Lina White, we’re back on a train (en route to Trieste, Italy). Like Poirot, Iris joins a car on the train and disrupts the best-laid plans.

Miss Froy is hidden in plain sight, not unlike Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter.