The main blessing of Chapter XXI is that Oolanga finally exeunts, and that source of cringe troubles us no more. But, lord, Arabella is full of supernatural wonder and Adam fully prepared to partner with her against Oolanga who, while a scoundrel of the worst sort, is at least not a giant antediluvian snake!
Beyond that, we get that the worm hole is super stinky. Oolanga takes a shot at Adam, who is unprepared because, I dunno, he was thinking about having lunch or maybe some walnuts and wine. But then he draws, I guess, while simultaneously closing with Oolanga to wrestle with him—I’m not sure but this may be something of a diss at pistols made by Weiss of Paris, which we are informed by the Lady manufactured her No. 3 pistol—and with Lady Arabella joining in…
Except the mongoose gets out of his locked cage..from the description it sounds almost like the mongoose unlocked it himself…
…and while the two dudes wrestle at the bring of the pit…
…the mongoose attackes Arabella, who tears it apart with her bare hands…
…after which she grabs Oolanga and pulls him down into the pit with her…
…after which the pit disgorges a font of blood, Army of Darkness style…
…after which Adam, stunned and nauseous turns to flee…
…only to discover that the Lady Arabella is there, at the top of the stair, completely unharmed…
Oy.
Oyoyoyoyoyoy.
This is about the halfway point of the book. The rest will proceed with the absolute conviction that: a) there is a worm; b) it’s white, but only circumstantially; c) Arabella is or isn’t the literal snake.
The real upshot of this is Adam has essentially caught Arabella red-handed, in…whatever it was that just happened.
Chapter XII is a letter from Arabella to Adam—interrupted by a future encounter between Arabella and Adam—in which Arabella basically gaslights Adam into believing he saw something other than what he saw, which suffers greatly from the reader not really knowing what happened in the previous chapter.
The only real point of interest is that Arabella escapes to London—acts for all the world like the death of Oolanga (and maybe some other factor) has allowed to her to flee Diana’s Grove.
It would be interesting if we had some action that resulted in some horrible relaxation of the worm’s grip on Arabella. At this point, I believe we are entering full into “she’s a were-snake” mode, though this is one of the murkiest issues in the book. From here on out we’re going to diverge more and more, of necessity to make this make sense.
Chapter XXIII, “An Enemy In The Dark” is another astounding chapter, in that the first half is a description of Chapter XI be recapitulated—without any of the details, no less!—followed by Richard congratulating Adam on his conciseness. The last half is Richard making sure that Adam doesn’t have a crush on Arabella and Adam confessing he has a crush on Mimi, and the two agreeing that Arabella is some sort of menace.
There’s actually very little in XIII to be salvaged. Chapter XIV, “Metabolism” is a continuation of the conversation begun in XIII, but with the door locked. In this, the two agree that there’s a monster (which still hasn’t been seen!) and that it has to be destroyed. They also agree that Arabella writes the letter to Adam for the sake of fooling Edgar. No word if she CCed him on it, or what.
Now, from what I can tell, the common interpretation of LotWW has it that Arabella is literally and actually the White Worm, body and soul! This may have been Stoker’s intention, but it raises a lot more questions than it answers, I think.
Like, why can she charm the non-special mongooses? Why does Edgar’s coldness toward Oolanga frighten her? Why does Oolanga frighten her? To paraphrase Captain Kirk in Star Trek V, what does a Giant Antediluvian Worm need with a husband? Is legal ownership of Diana’s Grove so important? And what happened to the original Arabella?
If we re-interpret the whole “falling into the well with Oolanga” as “snake pulls food into lair,” which is kind of intriguing, how does she reappear at the door outside of the worm-hole? Especially if the worm-hole/well is the worm’s only entree/exit?
The next two chapters (XXV, “The Decree” and XXVI, “A Living Barbette”)…are in fact continuations of the previous conversation, merely taking place after breakfast and Uncle Dick’s bedtime, respectively.
These four chapters XXIII through XXVI can be summarized as “Selling The Giant Worm”. Adam and Nate talk themselves into believing in a giant worm, that Arabella is of snake nature—though, again, this raises tremendous questions as to how she came into existence—and they both concur that Mimi Watford is in such tremendous danger, she should be escorted to Australia.
Chapter XXVI, the unkindest blow, the antediluvian monster has “the want of principle of a sufragette”. Heh. Agreeing that Mimi is in peril and that Arabella is an ancient snake—still unseen by any character in the book!—Adam has to marry Mimi and Nathaniel has to be the one to ask.
Now, at this point, Mimi has done the battle-of-wills thing with Caswall three-ish times. She’s never encountered a snake, much less a giant white worm. She’s barely interacted with Adam whom we’ve on multiple occasions have been assured is a rival of Caswall’s for Lilla’s attention.
Even if we go with what we presume Stoker’s intentions were, we’re starved for useful progression. Keep in mind we’ve come from an unbroken stretch of Edgar material, the action scene at the worm-hole, and now an unbroken exposition dumb between Nate and Adam. This is going to be followed by an unbroken 4-5 chapter stretch where, at last, we get some worm action. So with a whole section devoted to doves and kites, the next quarter of the book will simply drop that whole issue.
But in our rewrite, we’re just gonna drop these out for some other kind of action and by checking in on some of our other characters.
One thing about this book is how much it seems to hit a kind of climax at Edgar losing his marbles well before the half-way point of the book, and the rest seems to be a talky race to the finish. Even compromised, Stoker had a sense of creating excitement. It will be a challenge to retain that.
Lair Of The White Wyrm 