Costume drama movies ca 1960s to 80s: Daisy Miller and The Europeans (with comments on Maurice, Jefferson in Paris, and the 2009 Emma)

Gertrude Wentworth (Lisa Eichhorn) in landscape with gazebo, 1979 Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala Europeans

Daisy (Cybill Shepherd) and Winterbourne (Barry Brown) watch a Punch and Judy show, 1974 Bogdanovich Daisy Miller

Dear Friends,

I’ve been thinking about a specific period of costume drama that is not done sufficient justice to, partly because it’s not recognized as a period or type within the history of costume drama movies. I’ve seen it mentioned as an entity only by Andrew Higson in his English Heritage, English Cinema. Higson suggests (as do other writers about early 20th century costume drama, e.g., Pam Cook, Fashioning the Nation and Gainsborough Films, and Sue Harper, Picturing the Past) that from the 1920s through 50s costume drama was a pop art: little attention was paid to historically accurate detail; it was in fact shunned lest it intimidate audiences. Higson talks as so many do (Claire Monk) of the explosion of costume drama in the 1990s, how these apparently erudite and elite high quality movies made themselves popular by addressing relevant issues today, using stars (especially sexy male controlled macho ones), and how since then there’s been partly a return to popular art so the latest costume dramas (post-2004) are mix historical accuracy, subtlety of psychology, literal faithfulness to a source with broader action-adventure, dance, sexualization, adventure (e.g., the Elizabeth movies with Cate Blanchett).

To sum up, previous to the later 1960s, or 1920-50, you have this pop costume drama/film adaptation where no attempt at historical accuracy is really made and ruthless changes in the original text: Two epitomizing examples of the 1930s through 50s pop types are the 1940 MGM P&P and 1945 Kitty. Afterwards, the 1990s, there’s a turn to opulence, faithfulness which still uses the stories and characters to address contemporary issues and an increase in naturalism/realism, plus computer techniques coming in. An epitomizing example is the 1995 Pride and Prejudice; this type is still being done only with less lavish budgets.

Well, what about this period from the 1960s through 80s? I’d say it’s characterized by boldness about art itself, not afraid to stylize strongly (which I’m especially drawn to), going for long shots (so Ang Lee was doing nothing new in the 1995 S&S by Emma Thompson), language close to or literally lifted from its textual source (really faithful transpositions or very carefully considered commentaries). I’ve written about two of these recently: the 1965 Tony Richardon’s Tom Jones and the 1974 Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.

Daisy and Mr Giovanelli admiring the art work in a cathedral in Rome

Felix (Tim Woodward) and Gertrude dancing in his studio in a flood of sunlight

Tonight I’d like to single out two I’ve watched lately — as well as read the texts: Henry James’s Daisy Miller adapted by Peter Bogdanovich-Frederick Raphael-Frank Marshall and his The Europeans adapted by Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala. What fascinates me is they are both from subtly nostalgic texts which criticize radically how we deal with sexual experience against a backdrop of a historically understood era’s social and even religious mores. Now one finds this in the other art costume dramas of the era: think Brideshead Revisited (adpated from Evelyn Waugh) and Love for Lydia (adapted from H.E. Bates).

These Henry James novellas don’t compromise with popularity, are about sexuality and central familial-class issues, and also (by chance) about an opposition of values made picturesque by a contrast between an imagined innocent US and corrupt Europe. I could as well have discussed the 1970s through 80s Austen movies, the long mini-series (Pallisers, Poldark), Brideshead Revisited. All have a delicacy and complication of approach (different moods and phases in the mini-series), which I’ve just now observed for the first time in a long time in Sandy Welch’s remarkably humanly complex 2009 BBC Emma (she substitutes simplicity for stylization — so this could really be a party at an inn, neither too small nor too opulent and brimming with people as in the 1990s through recent TV mini-series).

I will cover James’s Daisy Miller and Bogdanovich’s movie more at length; I’ll be brief on James’s Europeans and concise on Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala movie. Basically I go over the second movie to show the same sorts of things we see in the first movie.

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First up, Daisy Miller: book and film. Here is a summary of the novella’s outline and basic information about Bogdanovich’s film adaptation

In the novel, our third-person consciousnes and point of view, Winterbourne, a 27 year old expatriate bachelor American who wants young (and to him) wild Daisy Miller to follow conventions for her own sake. Daisy Miller wants to live out and go beyond the options available to women. The odyssey of experience which Daisy, “the child of nature and of freedom” ["Preface," Daisy Miller, 1909], undergoes reveals society’s desire to confine women within a narrow and rigidly defined sphere. While those women who accept their circumscribed existence pay varying prices of neurotic illness, ineffectuality, and hypocrisy, the woman who ignores social prescription is punished by ostracism and death.

Although the women characters uphold the system which restricts them, the chief arbiter of society for Daisy is a man, the aptly-named Winterbourne. As a definer and enforcer of the bourne or boundary of social propriety, whose verdict has the life-denying implications of winter, Winterbourne represents the artificial world which has ultimate control over the lives of women. Daisy is identified with natural world.

Winterbourne is strongly attached to Geneva, a city identified with Calvinism and its social reflection, a decorum which is both narrowly conventional and hypocritically relaxed. The innocent and natural association of young people is strictly controlled and even discouraged: “In Geneva, as he had been perfectly aware, a young man was not at liberty to speak to a young unmarried lady except under certain rarely occurring conditions.” Such a view is sustained in Rome by Mrs. Walker, a lady who “had spent several winters at Geneva” and is thus linked to Winterbourne’s position both seasonally and geographically

With Winterbourne as observer and mediator, Daisy Miller develops as a series of confrontations (sometimes at second hand) between Daisy and those women who live under the sign of Geneva. She is pretty and he is attracted; by end of story he realizes he has lost out. Randolph, obstreperous brother, a parallel for Daisy only it’s girls who are controlled not boys. Mrs Miller, a hopeless hapless helpless sort of woman. Like Mrs. Costello’s headaches,

Mrs. Miller’s dyspepsia is both a response to the paucity of meaningful activity in her life and a substitute for it. She becomes animated only when discussing her illness, an affliction which at least makes her important to one person–her doctor:

Chloris Leachman as Mrs Miller to the side

A poignant significant utterance by Daisy or Annie Miller: “I should not think you would let them be so unkind!” she cries to Winterbourne. She never realizes the consternation she causes in Rome. “I don’t believe it,” she says to Winterbourne. “They are only pretending to be shocked.” Her blindness to the nature of the American colony is equalled by her blindness to Winterbourne and Giovanelli as individuals. While Winterbourne fails to “read” her “riddle” rightly, she fails to “read” his. She feels his disapproval in Rome, but she is not aware of his affection for her. Neither does she reveal any adequate perception of her impact on Giovanelli. To Daisy, going about with Mr. Giovanelli is very good fun. Giovanelli’s feelings, we learn at the end, have been much more seriously involved.

Basically, she is lonely, and she has never know much “society,” except that of gentlemen. There’s a curious mischievous resonance in her words which has the function of alerting us to how much she may be misunderstood here. It’s not a game as she thinks. She offers affection and Winterbourne doesn’t understand; she refuses to abide by conventions and knows she is refusing. She’s a sweet smart Lydia Bennet

As to the other characters: Mr Giovanelli who goes about with Daisy and is content to be her constant friend, is a (to the colony of upper class English and American types) a socially unaceptable Italian — he is also a kind man. There’s Mr Winterbourne’s hypocritical aunt, Mrs Costelloa cold narrow and shallow snob, cold; Mrs Walker, a seething kind of woman, incident in Pincian gardens caught beautifully in the movie. She sees Daisy as breaking some pact all women keep together: by phonily pretending not to be sexualized, they can (she thinks) better manipulate men. Eugenio, the courrier, an escort, he knows what they should or should not be doing.

What the movie and story share: Chapter 1 Winterbourne and Daisy meet in Vevey, Switzerland; Chapter 2 they go to the Castle of Chillon together (where prisoners were thrown to die); Chapter 3, they meet again in Rome where she is being escorted around by Mr Giovanelli; Chapter 4 she is snubbed and made a pariah and has only Mr Giovanelli to be with; she insists on going to the Coliseum where she catches malaria and dies.

This outline may be said to omit everything important and particularly the characters of Mrs Costello, Mr Winterbourne’s censorious elderly aunt, censorious not of bad behavior or sin (he lives with a woman in Geneva), but of allowing anyone in public to suspect you of flouting proprieties, much less doing anything unconventional (he pretends to be taking courses), Mrs Costello’s presence important in Chapter 2 (Daisy not a hypocrite; comes out with truths: “she doesn’t want to know me”; she does in the book have interesting reflections; in the film she is made something of a philistine, a little dense); and of Mrs Walker in Chapter 3 (enraged at Daisy’s snubbing her, failure to recognize Mrs Walker’s right to control).

(From the later 18th century through to the early 20th, among the middling classes, when a couple was engaged, it was understood they were really going to get married and it was okay to indulge in a certain amount of sex. When Daisy tells Winterbourne she is engaged, she is spiteful or enticing or asking for trouble — she is saying she may be having sex with Mr Giovannelli. When she assures him by message she was not engaged, she is saying they didn’t.)

To turn to the movie, where James uses contrasts of place in story; the movie contrasts social occasions — and puts before us contrasts of beautiful and haunted places. Geneva, capital of calvinism where people are suspicious and repressed; Vevey, lovely, summer, freedom; near is Chateau de Chillon, where the imagery of dungeons, columns, death and torture from religious fanaticisms remains are felt everywhere (and yet the feel is a gentle melancholy); Rome, dangerous settled society, with coliseum in background, beautiful melancholy imagery of death and dying In the story, p 62

Now I’ll look at the story as pictorial phases. The first phase is Vevey: Winterbourne meets Randolph, then Daisy;
we see his evening meeting with Aunt in Bath’s; later Mrs Miller and then Eugenio on terrace, then they visit Chillon, and we have one more brief scene with Mrs Costello. The movie uses all these.

The second phase includes the visit to Mrs Costello by Winterbourne; Mrs Walker’s at home, the walk in the Pincian gardens, where Mrs Walker’s carriage is refused; the evening party where Mrs Walker snubs Daisy; Winterbourne and Mrs Costello visit St Peter where they see Daisy and Giovanelli wandering; Winterbourne comes upon pair in palace of Caesars; then sees or hears Daisy and Giovanelli in Colosseum (wasteland) at night; Daisy’s illness and death presented through opera, corridor, Winterbourne’s two visits to hotel, and then funeral

Some differences: the movie opens with Randolph; book opens with Winterbourne; Punch and Judy show added; Winterbourne’s friend, Charles; also Mr Giovanelli’s singing. The movie dramatizes the scene at the grave fully and poignantly.

I suggest this film doesn’t present things differently but rather different things. We lose the subjective narration. Cybill Shepherd excellent as Daisy; so too Barry Brown (Winterbourne) who was a melancholy man; Chloris Leachman as Mrs Miller, James MacMurtry, Randolph, Mildred Natwick Mrs Costello, Eileen Brennan Mrs Walker, Duilio del Prete (Giovanelli) Screenplay Frederick Raphael. Directed and produced by Bogdanovich who was having an affair with Shepherd at the time.

I loved this evocative visit: as Prisoner of Chillon, Bonnivard, the Genevan freedom fighter, confined there solitarily for 6 years. The dialogue throughout in the film refers to the haunted nature of the place. The allusion is not really a parallel (Daisy is not that much a prisons), but it is suggestive. This and colossseum as place where great cruelty once happened is in the film. We see them at play in the dungeon, but its connection to death and the destruction of people by their society is felt; as they ride away they look contemplative.

The visit foreshadows the later visits of Daisy with Mr Giovannelli to the Colosseum. Now these are seen by them — as Mr Winterbourne overhears their laughter — as fun apparently. But we see them at a distance in this place and it could be they are having sex; at any rate, she sickens and dies. And the disjunction between the playful atmosphere of the first and realities of the place and melancholy close anticipates what we are to surmize about the colosseum visits.

Dress counts in the movie and is partly what makes people come: Cybill Shepherd is given just gorgeous outfits (so much flounce and furbelow); as Daisy she is in beautiful innocent light colors (white, pale pink, light blue, she seems to radiate light); Mrs Walkman is in dark green and red seems to draw light into herself; Mrs Costello in very severe clothes. Mrs Miller is very fussy and seen from a distance a shadowy widow figure fleeing attention, very nervous. Eugenio is very sombre and formal as he smokes away; Winterbourne is impeccably correct in dress; and Giovanelli is given many informal florid touches.

As Winterbourne attracted to Daisy, we are to feel she's attracted to him far more than we do in the book. By her sheer physical presence, she's more sexual. Cybil Shepherd was a beautiful woman. She speaks the lines rapidly and ephemerally conveying a sense of a brief heedless kind of life. Chattering, she is imperious, sit over there, do this and do that. Hurry up, Mr Winterbourne. She offers easy affection and he can't understand this.

Few long shots dwelling on the landscape – though what is there is effective. The film tends to give us long shots at end of an episode. to establish where we are, as filler, to end an episode.

Daisy and Mr Giovanelli sing “Pop goes the weasel.”

Bogdanovich relies on close ups to get across strong drama. Comedy is the medium shot. As against non-story music of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart (the opera is Verdi), we have two light American songs: Pop goes the weasel an d”When you and I were young, Maggie. Funny and innocent; nostalgic and sweet. Haunting thematic significance when it’s played over grave of a girl who will now never have been anything but young. Here is Daisy in one of the last shots of her at the Colosseum, showing the grimness of her inner life towards the end.

The movie was a commercial failure. Bogdanovich is not liked it’s said and it was not promoted by the studio. But it was moer than that. First, it failed to address itself clearly enough to contemporary topics; it means to, but it doesn't manage it. You might say it's problem is it's too faithful. In its 19th century era, this story was attacked in its time as shocking — it was understood James getting at these norms. It was seen as attack on American girl — exposing them as frivolous. It's a contrast of old world European and new "innocent" world American Most people don't care in the least about this any more; only those well-versed in 19th century American literature probably know about it.

What could Bogdanovich have done — anticipating the 1990s? he could have shown Winterbourne's life in Geneva. In the film Colosseum signifies cruelty (gladiators died there) just as Castle of Chillon does. You could have shown Geneva to be a hypocritical uptight sinful place.

Second, Barry Brown as Winterbourne is central and not given enough lines or things to do. The movie wants us to see that Winterbourne's complacency has been shattered or at least disrupted and the novella wants us to feel Winterbourne has not been deeply affected. The novel damns Winterbourne much more. But it is true Barry Brown comes across as stiff. He is given many of the point of view shots. We see a lot of the movie from his eyes, just about all of it. There are objective shots, but not many.

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I began to watch The Europeans for the sake of Robin Ellis. I had been watching him as Edward Ferrars in the 1971 S&S, and then read his effective lucidly written account, Making Poldark. His career and fortune were made by that mini-series. I had noticed he played the demur supposedly repressed young hero in other films; in Bel Ami, he played a character whose sexuality was ambiguous. In The Europeans he is Robert Acton who decides not to marry the demi-monde Countess Munster, once Eugenia Young (Lee Remnick).

Note the strained faces looking forward

We have comic renditions of the same discomfort:

For Henry James’s story, here is a thorough account.

What holds your attention in the movie and at the same time makes you yawn is the persistent holding to minutiae of detail. We have exquisitely photographed landscapes (as the one above) and carefully held shots of people repressed.

Felix watching fish

This has become a convention: the shot of the character at the window with bars

There are shots with the characters poised in parallel postures:

Gertrude and Charlotte

In both Daisy Miller and The Europeans close attention has been paid to dress, corsets, how people walked, the line of the silhouette that runs from the top of the actor’s head to the tips of his or her toes.

Again the music is carefully chosen: apt is Clara Schumann’s Trio, Opus 17 — very slow, played by Eugenia when she is at home waiting for Robert Action to call. Against these we once again have the American ballads done straight, comically and nostalgically: “Shall we gather at the river” is in the background too.

The themes here include the self-deception of self-conscious virtue. Felix and Eugenia, ex-Americans who have become a Bohemian artist and woman separated from her German aristocratic husband. They come to the US seeking shelter. The relatives are Brahmin unitarians; only Gertrude shows herself restless at having to go to church to listen to Mr Brand. Mr Brand is paired off with Charlotte, the pious sister, Felix and Gertrude make an escape into one another’s arms. But the Countess seems to overplay her hand and loses Robert — much to their ambiguous relief and regret.

This was not a big box office success, but it pulled in respectable-sized audiences and has not been forgotten — partly because it’s Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala productions and since Merchant’s death, Ivory and Robert Emmet Long have been producing books about their films, and on the DVDs, there are features which promote the films as important, explaining them and providing intriguing accounts of how they were made.

To return to the movie itself, much that is pleasurable in it would be precluded today. The very nature of the looser medium precludes the intense introspective kind of art in Europeans (as well as Daisy Miller). They have either complicated psychological scenes (as in the typical BBC mini-series of the era) or these mysterious carefully poised stills.

What would have been done in the later 1980s through 90s? The ambiguous sexuality of Robert Acton would have been brought out. He’s one of James’s many closet homosexual males. The Countess’s demi-monde world would have been shown somehow. The film-makers would have made some attempt to address the question of money, class, religion more directly and for our own era. More stars would have been hired, and in the 1990s just about all of them be conventionally beautiful types. Lavish budget, naturally.

In 2000 we’d see a retreat to minimalism, much less historical accuracy and change of costume to be more like the 21st century. Much less money, and more addressing of contemporary issues and more daring interpretations of the original book. We see this in the latest Austen Persuasion, 2007: our protagonists are abject, possessed by grief and despair, revenants.

But not until the later 1960s or after the later 1980s, do we get for its own sake just this kind of pictorial extravaganza in the sun (Daisy Miller) just for itself:

Cyril Shepherd as Daisy looking up to where Mr Giovanelli is pointing

As well as this kind of extravaganza of fall leaves, golden, yellow with Lee Remnick as the isolated demi-monde who keeps herself out of the spotlight, to the side:

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This was an extraordinary moment in art costume drama, and it’s been brought back in Sandy Welch’s 2009 BBC/WBGH Emma where I hope by next week over on my Reveries under the Sign of Jane Austen to show simplicity has been made to substitute for too overt or heavy stylization, but a lot of the other techniques of this era have once more been brought into effective play.

Garai as an assertive Emma, her upper arm sexy like that — in a quiet way.

The camera swings round to show his intense grave face

Romola Garai and Jonny Lee Miller as Emma and Mr Knightly. For most of the dance at the Crown Inn, it’s matter of the rousing non-sexualized square-dance boisterous movement and gaiety; but for a few moments there is a dance in the traditional row style with the arms of the male and female intertwined, very dream like and erotic and yet grave. But today still contemporary issues are being addressed at the same time as more traditional interpretations of the original book brought back.

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After I wrote the above, I watch the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala film adaptation of E. M. Forster’s Maurice which is among the first of the opulent, relevant later 1980s to 2000 or so type; I had seen the 1991 BBC Clarissa as a landmark of this type (said to be so in several books too), but this Maurice does what the Clarissa film does. I was so moved; I love this later era too. I had thought we were in a different one now: minimal, retreat from contemporary issues, abject women (films from 2001-8), but this new Emma and Heidi Thomas’s BBC commentary adaptation of Gaskell’s Cranford of last year signal a new phase once again. I wonder if this new phase has anything to do with the reality that so many more women are writing mini-series; both these are by women writers and have women producers. Hmmm.

Ellen

EC/ASECS, Bethlehem, how far did the Enlightenment reach: women slaves, gambling, Zurich, Blake and his publisher, Joseph Johnson

Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), The Banjo Lesson (1893)

Dear Friends,

This is my last conference report of the East Central Meeting of ASECS in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I’ve treated of women writers, novelists (and marriage and family), the gothic (motherhood, Catholicism, and lesser known), not to omit Fanny Burney as an older woman. What I have left are a group of summaries of papers which swirl around the issue of how far the Enlightenment was enlightened. How far could radical people disseminate their ideas? Did such ideas influence many people’s behavior? I include the conference’s eloquent key note address on slavery; a brief account of the presidential address on gambling in religious group; a paper on the Zurich enlightenment and Samuel Gessner; and an original 20th century play focusing on William Blake’s relationship with his publisher, Joseph Johnson.

The subject of “Spiritual Middle Passages: Women and Religion in the African Atlantic Diaspora” is so terrible and horrible when I think of what was done to black people crossing the Atlantic and women slaves in the Carribean and western hemisphere, I really don’t have the heart to put a truly appropriate picture of it on my blog. The few prints I can bear to look at are all just too hideous: the prints which capture it best are those which show it to be much worse but very like what went on in extermination and slave labor camps in Germany in World War Two (not unique since this sort of thing begins to be documented during the founding of Australia on the backs of convicts and still goes on in camps around the earth). So I’ve prefaced the blog with a beautiful painting from the 1890s by the American realistic African-American painter, Henry Ossawa Turner where he depicts an aging poor black man lovingly teaching his grandson how to play a banjo. This would be many years after (30) after slavery had been ended by a ferocious war (so unwilling were slave-owners to “give up their property”) and during the era of ruthless discrimination, institutionalized injustice and ceaseless lethal poverty for most black people in the US.

Prof. Sensbaugh is an expert on the subject of African slavery; for this moving address (given Friday, Oct 9, 4:30 to 6:00), he researched in the archives of Lehigh University (apparently this is a good private college with a fine research library). He began by asking us to imagine what it was like to have been born on the sea from Guinea in a horrifying place deep down in the bowels of a slave ship; all around you are chained, beaten, raped, regularly humiliated for amusement (forced to dance on the deck of the ship, whipped), your culture stripped from you as you lost name, family, all connection with your memories, place of birth. Women were driven even worse than men because forced to breed children by their captors.

The Slave Trade

Until recently male slave experience was what was researched. Colonial planters preferred men as work horses. The documentation on the domestic private lives of slaves is fragmentary. Almost without exception the narratives written by people who were or had been slaves before the 19th century are by men: those who somehow escaped during the revolutionary war, who learned to write or read and were able to assert themselves (not as degraded as women who were turned into sex slaves). Women’s narratives date from the early 19th century (e.g., Sojourner Truth).

Mid-19th century photograph of a slave family

How to overcome this methodological challenge was part of Prof Sensbaugh’s speech: you have to trawl through archives of sales, colonial reports, tiny fragments found serendipitiously by wide reading in documentary records.
It helps to read several languages. A brief account in German in the archives of Copenhagen tell us of a woman named Rebecca Finder Prodder, a former slave in the Danish island of St Thomas, who in the 1730s married a white missionary who was jailed for sedition; she went to Germany and there widowed she married Christian Prodder, and then in her last 20 years lived on the African gold coast. He named and briefly described what we know of three to four more slave women. He said that from fragments you can build a story, e.g., one “old Elizabeth” told a child she would “look to God” and “in every lonely place I found an altar.”

He suggested that the Christian religion enabled women to join communities, extract some order from a hideously shattering experience, begin to regain some balance in their minds. They formed religious communities of women under the cover of Christianity and created lateral families. They became healers, diviners, prophets. He told of a petition a group of women were able to write (with the aid of an aristocrat on St Thomas) and send to the Queen of Denmark, of which we still have copies. They complained they were not allowed to worship; such moments formed a sanctuary for them. We can see that they did try to find some recourse beyond their cruel masters and that there were laws such masters were forced to obey. People who were masters could be deported and even executed by the authorities.

How effective was this petition? Apparently it’s very hard to say; they appear not to have been punished for sending the petition and it is still in the records in a creole language. From it we get a tiny sense of their lives and a personality dictating. Most of the talk afterwards was about this petition, the circumstances, who were the king and queen of Denmark at the time, the man who brought the petition, the languages used in Africa and the western hemisphere.

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Geoffrey Sills’s presidential address, “Odds and Evens: Sacred and Secular Gambling in the Transatlantic 18th Century” was given after lunch on Saturday around 1:00 pm. He began by telling us the 18th century constitutes one of the great leaps forward in human history despite its manifest misogyny, use of slavery, oligarchic and monarchic governments, and neoclassic ideals. His subject was the early settlement of the Moravian community in Bethlehem under the aegis of Count Zinzendorf.

Zinzendorf organized the first Moravian community by setting up lotteries as a way of organizing the community in Bethlehem: not only were offices given out this way, and important decisions of various kinds made, but people who wanted to marry were forced (if they wanted to say in the community) to get the permission of the community first. This would force them to “marry in” and control the behavior of those who wanted to be approved of. It does seem that somehow while Zinzendorf was in charge most of the time these lotteries ended up doing what he wanted despite any chance outcomes.

Prof Sills then moved to how such lotteries spread in the 18th century and today too. He spoke at length of how Benjamin Franklin proposed a lottery to pay for military means of self-protection as well as support an Academy in Philadelphia: that academy eventual become the University of Pennsylvania. The lotteries did very well: people were willing to “invest” in them. It was seen as a benign activity God favored. Today many states have sanctioned legal gambling and use lotteries themselves to raise money.

Benjamin Franklin by Michael Deas (2003, a modern image for Time Magazine)

There were no questions afterwards which was a shame. It was a speech given just after luncheon but I have seen talk after such speeches. I didn’t have the nerve to ask about the enforced conformity of having to get permission to marry from a community. Modern lotteries seem to me a form of extremely regressive taxation and I have read the “founding fathers” deliberately eschewed lotteries which had been popular in various ancien regime states in Europe.

Another area people could have brought up is how now that the steel companies have long left Bethlehem, one way this town has sought to make a little money is to allow the old steel mills to be turned into a casino.

The old rotting steel mills

Today part of it a casino

Much of the town of Bethlehem is depressed; there are large swatches of extremely poor neighborhoods. Jim and I took a walk around and the most prosperous places where were the colleges (one a Moravian one) were. One can see that vast areas of the town were once prosperous working class neighborhoods where people owned their own small homes. No more. All one can see now are a few streets of picturesque shops, and a very few restaurants which remain open in the evening and have long lines of people waiting to get in. Most of these people look middle to upper middle class and drive in from the surrounding further away small opulent suburbs. Other than these colleges and shops the place is dead. No public world anywhere to be seen.

Such is American life and the American landscape today.

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The question of how enlightened was the Enlightenment was part of the subject of John P. Heins’s talk on Solomon Gessner, a poet and painter and book illustrator in Zurich (on the panel “Research in Progress” on Saturday afternoon, 2:00-3:3:30). Gessner’s years were 1730 to 1788, he wrote Biblical and pastoral dramas, idylls, short prose works, Arcadian literature and seen as another Goethe in his interests and visions. His works were championed by Diderot. He did visionary landscape etchings where he celebrated Enlightenment figures and thought; many are mildly picturesque scenes, e.g., escapism with shepherds and shepherdesses: He was a prominent citizen with good connections; yet he was dependent on his family business to survive and his illustrations sold.

Prof Heins then went on to outline the nature of Zurich society. He said it was a repressed society, ruled by a small socially reactionary class and to protest against it you had to present your work and message quietly and indirectly. In the histories of the time this community and Gessner are usually celebrated, with Gessner living an idyllic life in a benignly-ruled Zurich. These stories feed fantasies of Alpine myths of an unspoiled landscape which gave rise to pastoral novels of the later 18th century [and much later children's books like Joanna Spyri's Heidi]. Only now are we beginning to explore the realities of 18th century Zurich. It was governed as an aristocratic repubilc, 10,000 people ruled by 2000 or 750 families, an oligarchy. There was strong enforcement of sumptuary laws, censorship, punishment by exile. Henry Fuseli was an exile from Zurich. Honest exposure of corrupt officials was punished. In 1750 Klopstock visited Zurich and composed a poem on the beauty of the natural world there; it was attacked for everything one can think of and he for being with unchaperoned women.

So when we look at Gessner’s career we see how remarkable what he did manage to publish and paint was.

The grave of Albrecht von Haller by Samuel Gessner

In the question period afterwards I cited the tragic life of Emily Kempin-Spyri who I’ve written about on this blog. A fictionalized memoir by Eveline Hasler reveals how impossible it was for Kempin-Spyri to live a fulfilled life, to work as a lawyer, and how she was eventually ground down and put into an asylum by her family. Hasler also wrote the life of Anna Goldin, burnt as a witch in 18th century Zurich (there’s been a film adaptation).

(There were two other papers and discussions of these but I was too tired to take proper notes.)

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On Sunday morning (8:30 to 9:00), one session was offering an unusual treat. Ted Braun was chairing a panel where two original playlets were to be read, both by members of ASECS. Alas, the people who wrote and were to read them got sick the night before. However, with bravery and gallant spirits Ted and Brijraj Singh read the manuscript by Joseph Bryne aloud. It was titled “Mr Blake, how can I publish this ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell?’ (Being a dialog between William Blake and his publisher, Joseph Johnson).

It was very lively and consisted of back-and-forth talk between Johnson and Blake where Johnson protested that very few would understand Blake’s poems and the few who did would be horrified. What I found fascinating about it was that the interpretation given Blake’s works harked right back to an old scholarly classic, Martin Price’s To the Palace of Wisdom: studies in order and energy from Dryden to Blake.

Price’s book is not a book about how most of the people alive in the 18th century were anything but enlightened, but rather how the writers themselves understood the limits of (and themselves undermined) possible human adherence to ethics, tolerance, reason, common sense, the sympathetic imagination: ruins and visions, the picturesque, the deeper passions of the psyche are among the topics Price treated. I have an old copy in my house where I find I underlined many passages; it’s falling apart I read it so diligently once upon a time. Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is visionary satire, here is his first plate:

I’ll end this series of reports with two of my favorite passages of Pope’s poetry.

From Moral Essays 3, “Of the uses of riches:”

Once, we confess, beneath the Patriot’s cloak,
Fro the crack’d bag the dropping Guinea spoke,
And jingling down the back-staris, told the crew,
‘Old Cato is as great a Rogue as you.’
Blest paper-credit! last and best supply!
That lends Corruption ighter wings to lfy!
Gold imp’d by thee, can compass hardest things,
Can pocket States, can fetch or carry Kings;
A single leaf shall waft an Army o’er,
Or ship off Senates to a distant shore;
A leaf, like Sibyl’s, scatter to and fro
Our fates and fortunes, as the winds shall blow
Pregnant with thousands flits the Scrap unseen,
And silent sells a King, or buys a Queen.
Oh! that such bulky Bribes as all might see,
Still, as of old, incumber’d Villany!…

[What better describes how banks, powerful bi corporations, and military contractors now run the world?]

And from Moral Essay 1, “Of the character of mankind:”

Our depths who fathoms, or our shallows finds,
Quick whirls, and shifting eddies, of our minds?
On human Actions reason though you can,
It may be Reason, but it is not Man;
His Principle of action once explore,
That instant ’tis his Principle no more.
Like following life through creatures you dissect,
Ye lose it in the moment you detect . . .
Nor will Life’s stream for Observation stay,
It hurries all too fast to mark the way:
In vain sedate reflections we would make
When half our knoweldge we must snatch, not take.
Oft in the Passions’ wild rotation tost,
Our spring of action to ourselves is lost:
Tir’d, not determin’d to the last we yeild,
And what comes then is master of the field,
As the last image of that troubled heap,
When Sense subsides, and Fancy sports in sleep
(Tho’ past the recollection of the thought)
Becomes the stuff of which our dream is wrought:
Something as dim to our internal view,
Is thus, perhaps the cause of most we do …

From Samuel Gessner’s Idylls From online: “In his idylls, Gessner, who is indebted to Theocritus and Virgil, creates an idealized, orderly, almost horticultural state of nature, from which everything rough and craggy has been eliminated; his shepherds are similarly untouched by the ruder aspects of country life . . .

Ellen

EC/ASECS, Bethlehem: papers on women poets, novelists, diarists, playwrights

Angelica Kauffman (171401807), The Muse of Composition

Dear Friends,

This is my fifth report on the smallish conference of 18th century scholars held at Bethelehem, Pennsylvania. It consists of reports on papers from three panels: on Saturday, “Bibliography, Textual Studies and Book History, Part I” (8:30-10:00 am), “Foreign Intelligences” (2:00-3:30 pm), and “Late 18th century writers” (3:45-5:15 pm). All were excellent; the women discussed are Anne Finch, Fanny Burney, Mary Brunton, Jane Cummings, Hester Thrale Piozzi, and Elizabeth Inchbald.

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The 8:30 session on Saturday concerned the public image fostered by, and actual dissemination of texts by Anne Finch, Fanny Burney, and Mary Brunton. Michael Gavin’s paper, “From manuscript to Print: Criticism and the Poetry of Anne Finch” was about how Anne Finch attempted to rise above the detraction of writers by other writers in the local politics of the era.

Miniature of Anne Finch, at the court of Mary of Modena (1680s).

Mr Gavin argued that Anne Finch’s poems are “haunted by critics.” If we look at her prefaces in her unpublished books, we find a hyper-sensitive poet who invites her readers to share her feelings. For example, her “Introduction” justifies her authorship in the face of hostile male critics, and sensitive readers who read out of their own concern and psyche. She excluded polemical poems from her 1713 Miscellany by a Lady. His argument was the dynamics of literary factionalism got in the way of her writing good poetry.

Mr Gavin began by discussing some of Finch’s poems which were never attributed to her from the 1698 religious miscellany edited (or gathered) by Nahum Tate, and the 1701 Gilden Miscellany . It’s true her poems fit into Jacobitism, can be fit into religious polemic (even Whiggism — she is hailed by Nicolas Rowe in Gilden’s volume), and she is also a poetess of exile. Nonetheless, she wanted to stand outside the literary fields of battle. She was herself a translator as were numerous women in these eras when they began careers of writing. Finch’s prefatory fable for her 1713 volume, “Mercury and the Elephant,” was meant to symbolize this stance. If we want to understand the nature of her career as a poet, Paula Backscheider has described it in her book: dedicating one’s life to writing superior verse aesthetically. I’d add, ethically, as a therapy for herself.

The painted drawing room at Norbury Park (in whose environs Fanny first met Alexandre D’Arblay)

Catherine Parisian talked about “Frances Burney in America.” Although Burney never went to the US, her books were printed in American editions and attempts were made to distribute them. The talk was on the specifics of who published what in Philadelphia and NY. She was interested to show which edition (or text) was dependent on a previous one.

Big runs were 200-300 copies, and it did emerge that despite the high hopes of the publisher/bookseller in the US, no where near enough of Burney’s books sold to justify him continuing. There was a market for this kind of high-minded intelligent book by a woman which was not sexualized overtly (Camilla fits this bill perfectly) but they didn’t reach it.

Lady Anne Barnard, 18th century Scots painter, A landscape

Emily Friedman’s paper was on “Sacred Taboos: Mary Brunton’s Posthumous Packaging.” Ms. Friedman felt the titles of Brunton’s novels (Self-Control, Discipline) are meant as self-evident jokes, and that has been scanty attention given these complex works. Her first novel, Self-Control, is about a heroine who chases after a hero to American and sails down a dangerous river in a canoe. Discipline is a strongly Emma-like novel: a heroine’s mother dies and she has no one to teach her really properly; she is given a Miss Taylor as her governess (whom she bullies) and is left to fend for herself and her father.

Brunton’s last novel, Emmeline, a work not finished, now consists of a fragment published posthumously, together with a memoir of Brunton’s short life. (She died in childbirth at age 40.) This last story is of a woman who decides she no longer loves her husband, divorces him, remarries, but discovers she and her husband are not accepted by anyone around them, and remorse and guilt drive her to misery. What happens is the new husband leaves her. It’s only 100 pages, but reads like a novella in itself.

It’s a fascinating document; contemporary reviews are painful to read now if we recognize Mary Brunton in each of the novels and this one especially has painted herself and aspects or circumstances of her life under the guise of fiction.

Reviewers did excoriate the heroine and Mrs Brunton for writing such a fiction. (Having read Brunton’s Discipline I do know how she excoriates and moralizes over her heroine, and I wondered if this 100 pages is a better novel to us precisely because Brunton couldn’t finish it, and thus ruin her text.)

In the questions and talk afterwards Ms Friedman agreed that Brunton writes very much in a vein like that of Joanne Baillie, Susan Ferrier (Scots I mentioned earlier), and Jane Austen at one remove. I asked Ms Friedman about the value of Mary McKerrow’s biography, Mary Brunton, The forgotten Scottish novelist, 2000, and she said that its emphasis is on Brunton as a Scots writer but much is well-written and revealing. Ms Friedman said this biography is mostly taken from the memoir about his life that was published shortly.

I thought Mr Gavin wanted us to see that by analyzing Finch’s poetry from another stance than that of poetry, more of its greatness came out, and asked him what he thought of its melancholy and the aesthetics of the short romantic lyrics. As I’ve dedicated years of my life to putting her poems on the Net and writing about her his paper was of especial interest to me. I was glad to see him concentrate on the unattributed poems. Someone else pointed out how Finch was in a dependent powerless position, and one reason she decided to print only de-politicized poetry (fables mostly) in her 1713 volume was she could not do otherwise.

I didn’t say so but it continues to bother me that many of the papers and essays published nowadays take positions which enable the writer to avoid the topics of feminism, and the content of the writers’ depressions and troubles. Also this final publication of Brunton’s work by the husband consisting of unfinished works, a memoir and a shaping of the author’s life which moralizes it conventionally and slides under the rug anything that does not fit that moral reminds me of how Anne Radcliffe’s husband published a similar book about her: her posthumous (but finished) Gaston de Blandville, a memoir by the husband’s friend which includes large swatches of her poetic journals, and a moral portrait which erases a troubled solitary life.

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Frances Singh told me about the paper she gave on a panel called “Foreign Intelligences” (at 2:00 pm on Saturday). The title of the paper was “Jane Cumming. missing in 1812.” I was not able to hear her deliver it, but would like to offer a summary of it here as it seems to me of real interest.

Jane Cumming was the illegimate daughter of an Indian officer who died and left a comment on her mother to the effect that she was an “evil woman.” At first Jane’s grandmother ignored her; then she had her picked up from school and sent to a training school. Someone said the teachers were lesbian and parents began to take their daughters from the school The school was ruined, and Frances brought out the terribleness of what people would say to one another is brought out.

Jane Cummings left a record of what happened, and it has not been lost to us because the story was picked up by Lillian Hellman for two film adaptations The Children’s Hour. Tellingly the first versions (on stage and in the movies) erased the possible lesbianism of the schoolteachers and the second (a 1960 movie) presented the two lesbians at the center very unsympathetically. The little girl who told is presented as a kind of spiteful fiend. Nowhere does the discourse allow for a discussion of the original blind egoism of Jane Cummings’s father (and erasure of her mother), narrow views of another human being of the grandmother, and then the realities of what would go on in a school and attempts at humane communication between people that say lesbian love might have been reaching for.

On my small list, Women Writers through the Ages at Yahoo, we spent a season reading women’s plays and discussing their films, and discovered that until very recently one group continually excoriated by the public and misrepresented with extreme hostility are lesbians. (The only group as much disliked are “bluestockings” whose stock has not gone up in the way of lesbians because they are not seen as wanting sex.)

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The three papers read on the “Later 18th century writers” were all informative and perceptive. Lisa Berglund delivered hers in a lively way as well: it was on the marginal commentary in Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi’s Observations and Reflections of a Tour of France, Italy and Germany. Lisa first gave a brief resume of Piozzi’s life, ending on her last years as a widow, and her late-life “crush” on a young actor, Augustus Conway who at the end of his life committed suicide. One must remember how rich Piozzi was, and also how she said she was miserable during her many years married to Thrale and very happy during her years with Piozzi.

The Thrales’ West Street house in Brighton, photograph from 1865

In this commentary Piozzi is looking back on her life, and she is much franker, more personal, more concrete than in her published writing. She indirectly mirrors conflicts between Protestants and Catholics. Piozzi was treated viciously in the press when she married and when she published later in life. Lisa read aloud to us some touching daily passages she wrote out in both her earlier handbooks and this last one. Part of the point was to show us that the public presentation of Piozzie’s husband was bland and almost not there, but that in this commentary his personality comes across. The commentary in general then is in a way more valuable than the self-censored narratives in public. Lisa intends to published these for Valancourt Press.

The book is also a narrative of her life’s writing process, and Lisa gave out xeroxes of different stages of the writing from Piozzi’s diaries and papers and we looked at the changes Piozzi made as she wrote. It seemed often to be a process of crossing out, generalizing, alas, erasing.

Juniper Hall, where Fanny met her husband, Alexander

Lorna Clarke is working on Burney’s court journals, and her paper comes out of her study of these. What she showed us was how much fictionalizing and imagination went into this journal. Fanny’s process of writing her journals changed at various points of her life and each time her writing alters. Instead of a diary of her daily proceedings, in the 1780s, it became a memorandum which she can write up later. Her notes show she was often very belated so what we get is emotion recollected in tranquility. We could say of her years at court, they were not wasted but that she spent a good deal of the time writing and rewriting.

The major revealing point that Lorna made was Burnye’s texts are a record of a complex interaction of then and now in Fanny’s mind as well as of Fanny writing to someone and expecting a rely. The letters to Susan are a kind of realistic novel with many layers in them. Then very later in life (after her husband’s death), she is glad to keep a diary of retrospection all the while she kept to the epistolary technique. She had developed a mastery of these dramatic and epistolary techniques of writing to the moment. The product is then (in effect) a major novel since much is fictionalized by Fanny’s imagination at different stages of time: close to the event so and so most nearly like what happened, further off so elaborated, meant for Susan’s eyes so the perspective is shaped that way, and then later in life.

Lorna developed a chronology which seems to me to cover the ground and give insight into what we are reading. When you look at the different layers of what is there and how differently different parts were written, we have a fiction of great complexity as well as a rarely well-documents significant life. Hers was an extraordinarily good paper which if heeded could bring before us finally Burney’s journals in a light that would enable us to read them with modern techniques of literary analysis instead of as simply fodder for biographical papers.

Elizabeth Inchbald, frontispiece to British Theater, 1806

Beverly Schneller argued that we should regard Elizabeth Inchbald’s Catholicism seriously — as she does. Inchbald’s first biographer, lost his head (joke alert about superstition and fairy tale ritual here). Ms Schneller suggested that in Inchbald’s novels and prayers, she stays strickly orthodox. Inchbald was puzzled at the strong hatred Protestants for Catholics. She showed how in Inchbald’s life we have much evidence she went regularly to church and followed other Catholic practices, and then went over Inchbald’s fiction carefully, showing analogies with Catholic doctrine and practice. So that although Inchbald lived an unusually independent life for her era. she was at the same time conventional about religion and family.

Ms Schneller also emphasized the importance of Inchbald’s editing work for us today, how she was the mainstay of her family. One area that has been misunderstood is her brief relationship with her husband. He was not long-lived. Often it’s presented as something she was forced to do, the result of having to find a protector against sexual harassment. Ms Schneller wanted us to see the marriage as something Inchbald chose because the man was Roman Catholic.

Alas, there was not time for much talk afterwards. So I’d like to add this thought here perhaps the point of trying to argue for Inchbald’s serious adherence to Catholicism could be to aid us in interpreting Inchbald’s fictions, plays and some of her scholarship. In particular, for example, her Simple Story has a Dorriforth, a man who is a priest and characterized as severe and critical towards the frivolous social behavior of the heroine, Miss Milner. How are we to understand this? Perhaps Inchbald’s purpose was more than secular moralizing. I know when we read it on Janeites, I saw it as very much in the French tradition of manners of comedies only the insights into human nature were harsher and the dramatic narratives incisive and unusually powerful. The second half of the book occurs after the death of Miss Milner and swirls around his lack of a relationship with his and Miss Milner’s daughter, Matilda and himself, now a secular gentleman, Lord Elmwood. It’s a striking contrast to the first half as it’s a gothic novel usually justified as showing what are the results of bad education. Clearly this kind of rationale doesn’t begin to approach what is going on in this plangent — and half-crazy I should say — story of estrangement and despair. I never did get to putting up on my website the many postings a group of us wrote about this novel in 1998 and now I don’t know if I can because my files (wri files) often won’t open at all.

I end with another professional woman artist of this era:

Marguerite Gerard (1761-1837), Le chat angora — threatened by that hair brush!

Ellen

EC/ASECS, Bethlehem: Marriage and family; another look at the rise of the novel

Louis-Leopold Boilly (1761-1845), Painter in Her Studio (1796): beautiful, luminous and witty, it’s a family portrait

Dear Friends,

Yet another conference report of the Eastern Region 18th century panels. There were four papers in the panel on Marriage and the Family (Friday, 2:45-4:15), but since I was not able to understand all four (one on Mary Davies’s Reformed Coquet was in too abstract language for me to follow the argument), I will report on three only; further as I find my notes are briefer on all of them, I will include a second panel where again I didn’t take long notes, Another Look at the Rise of the Novel (Saturday, 10:15-11:45). Both sessions were really all about what the speakers found in 18th century novels.

Lori Halvorsen Zerne went first on the panel about marriage and the family in the 18th century and she spoke on “That Amiable Family: The Redefinition of Female Duty in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall. Scott’s 1762 novel, the stories of 5 women, show that patriarchal society has been detrimental to women’s deepest interests, and yet does leave space for them to experience some personal fulfillment on the margins of the culture. Mary Raymond is the heroine’s name and she goes to live with wealthy people on and off. Lovely pictures of Isobel in apron. Earlier in the story (but still towards the end of the book), a reporter from a local newspaper expressed interest in the illustrations to Trollope’s novels as well as the novels themselves. Jim was ambivalent and didn’t get the job at the interview.

Each story shows abuses of marriage as an institution, pains and troubles you cannot avoid. A subtheme reminded me of Burney’s Evelina; Ms Halvorsen showed how Burney’s guardians in effect abandon their innocent female relative to unscrupulous people. The women in Millenium Hall use their excess income as if they were guardians and protectors of orphants, disabled children, poor spinsters. Revealingly they fullfill Fordyce’s descriptions of virtuous wives to a T. They promote diligence, cheerfulness, a sense of community and distribute money with their own hands. So the women do not overthrow or present a radical restructuring of patriarchal norms which they inherit.

Emily Shreve spoke about how Mary Robinson, Hays and Wollstonecraft (all three Marys) critiqued the institution of marriage: “Three (Mary)ges: Critiques of the Institution.” Mary Hay’s Victim of Prejudice tells a remarkably frank version of Jane Eyre; Hays embeds her story in a sociological analysis and protest against the povety and powerlessness of the disconnected.

Ms Shreve wanted us to see what a heavy price women and pressure to be sexually chaste women in the US pay for a precarious security. The Victim of Prejudice is a resisting novel: she felt one way the heroine resists ironically is her death is continually deferred.

Her title was playful: it calls attention to Hays’s marriage, and the ubiquity and dominance of rituals legitimatizing marriage. One of the ways women could try to resist was to refuse paying bridal shops all that much. But the women of Millenisum Hall end up partly supporting what they mean to attack, and not finding any purchase in the most of the chosen texts. Women who are older and not married, and younger ones who like to go clubbing are resisting but not overtly. Given such pragmatic and continual reinforcements, it becomes very hard to criticize this institutions that foster education as it is now. They express a belief in policing and marriage as meaning well by the woman, and in Hays’s novel we see she too assumes that marriage can support a woman for her lifetime securely.

Mary Robinson’s Natural Daughter. We have a virtuous heroine who refuses to allow her life be conducted in freedom, whose virtue is never in any doubt. Marriage itself is not attacked; the movie based on this text was a failure. Mary chooses to arrive safely, and shoos away most male comers. There is a Martha in this text: she is another heroine of this period; and we see how Martha has an identity secured up by the rest of the society, even with the closest and best of friends. Hays’s heroine has to get beyond seeing what whitey is doing.

Mary, by contrast, has no legitimate father; her mother has become a prostitute and her father a felon. She is the illegitimate child of mother who was sent to prison. Bourdieu offers the idea that certain transgressions are used by societies to define and show benefits to those who behave or are lucky with their parentage. And we see that Mary’s ills are fixed; she can’t get over the lack of status and outcast state of her mother.

Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Women is a yet more devastating critique of women. She shows marriage places women in a threatened vulnerable and powerless (against her husband) status. She closed with the assertion that what matters today is the self-discovery we see young woman can experience in and through such texts — even when they are abused, ridiculed, castigated.

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97), A Gotto in the Gulf of Salernum (sometimes called a Sybil), 1780-81)

Jan Stahl (from the Graduate Center, NYC, where I went) spoke on “Psychosexual Drama in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk.. MS Stahl explored how Ambrosio, Lewis’s hero, comes to commit incest and matricide, and suggested Mathilde should be seen primarily as a young woman in disguise. She found 3 phrases in Ambrosio’s relationships with women which correspond to Freud’s analysis of sexual lust. What she shows was a young male character lusting after women pathologically. What was interesting was the violence shown towards the women characters, especially the virtuous Elvira and Ambrosio’s sister, Antonia; how much and how gleeful it is. At times this male character masturbates, at times he approaches Matilde as a mother figure, but he is ever turning to frantic revulsion, as when he plunges a dagger into Antonia’s chest.

She found the pathology strikingly modern, and brought out the nightmarish feel of this fiction.

There was only a brief discussion afterwards as there had been four papers and although all had kept within the time, there was not much time left. One thing did bother me which I brought up: in the paper on Mary Hays’s Victim of Prejudice it was implied that Mary Raymond had done wrong to refuse to marry a farmer early on in the novel: her guardian had found this man of lower status willing to marry her. The passage was read aloud in a way that elided over Mary’s complete lack of knowledge of this man’s character. Together, with the argument that it’s so difficult to get outside the norms of a society, the implication became that the heroine should indeed have followed those norms. Then she would not have suffered what we see her suffer: threatened rape, seduction, abandonment by a young man she loves because his father convinces him she is not suitable by class, and then grinding poverty and debt. True, but I think Hays did not mean us to take this stance: she admires Mary Raymond for refusing to marry the rake who rapes her; she does not want us to buy into the mores of society even if they might offer compensation. In justification of this point of view, in my comment I offer a summary and analysis of this novel (see below).
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Another look at the rise of the novel had papers centering on the figures Ian Watt chose to make the important shaping canon of the 18th century. The first paper was by Joanna Myers and was on Henry Fielding. She called it “Fielding and the Strangeness of Character.” She began with Fielding’s statement, “To be placed above the reach of deceit is to be placed beyond the realm of a human being.” She wanted to show that Fielding’s writing took a pragmatic turn in later life by tracing the cynicism of his characters. In his fiction throughout he continually sees the hypocrisy and deceit of people, how a completely artful man can impose himself on so many others. She quoted Fielding a lot, to great effect, on how we misinterpret what we see in faces and elsewhere so easily. Early on he produces detailed perceptive portraits; but in a later tract, a proposal (which she quoted extensively from) Fielding has turned to giving the reader clues on his characters’ faces to help the reader tell harmful from good people. He also lacks interest in individuals and is looking for rules to control the worst impulses of people.

Stanley Kubrich’s 1975 Barry Lyndon (Thackeray’s novel is influenced by Fielding)

Leah Orr and on “Defoe as an experimenter in Fiction.” In this paper she argued that Watt’s famous descriptions of Defoe’s accurate realism describes only one facet of this many-faced politican-writer. Defoe’s career spanned 4 decades and during this time we find spiritual autobiography, travel writing, histories where he tries to rewrite the past, stories of pirates; in his moral fictions we find him wanting to influence the reader’s soul, not encourage individual freedom. She too quoted effectively from Defoe’s lesser-known works. Her idea was that Defoe was not trying to write novels in any modern sense.

Etienne Aubrey (1745-81), Paternal Love

The third paper was on Richardson’s Clarissa, and, as other papers by younger people (say in their 20s), especially women have done in the recent past, this one made me uncomfortable. The title gives something of the speaker’s attitude away: “Collecting Clarissa: The culture of curiosity in Richardson’s Clarissa. Basically she argued that Clarissa is so singular and strange in her behavior that she can be likened to curiosities people liked to collect in the 18th century. Ms Schuetze gave a history of curiosity-collecting. Then she turned to the novel and said she saw Clarissa as “a visual spectacle” (how her eyes “flash beams”) and an object, an abnormal anomaly. She talked of Clarissa’s behavior over her charities, her giving away her property, and likened Clarissa’s behavior at times to the crazy story of the 17 1/2 rabbits born to someone in the era: she’s just impossible to classify (!). At one point she said, “Don’t you just love this book; it is so strange.” She had just described Clary’s coffin.

Clarissa fleeing Anna’s teasing (1991 BBC Clarissa)

I look upon Clarissa as a common ordinary girl behaving uncommonly under terrible distress; she is a role model to the average girl dealing with the terrors of threatened sexual and marital abused, someone being abused badly by her family. I admire her for her anti-materialism (hurray!), and desire to have nothing to do with the cunning and ruthless of the world; for her virtues and knowing what goodness and kindness are. If the reader does not recognize the shared reality of human feeling here, the book might come out as camp. I asked after the panel had finished, if others in the room were bothered in the way young women today couldn’t see themselves in this figure, and the return to an anti-feminist hostility and taking on of Lovelace’s point of view. It’s Lovelace who writes Clarissa as a sweet anomaly. I was really thinking is this the perversion of socialistic feminism into a respect for power, accompanied by a distaste for associating oneself with the victim which I see today in many woman writing as feminists.

One Richardson scholar in the room thought this way of favoring Lovelace and finding Clarissa to be inhumane somehow is an old common stance and we find it today in William Warner. This is removing the argument away from modern feminisms, but it true that I take a stance like that of Terry Eagleton, Terry Castle, Margaret Anne Doody. However, this time I was really coming at the novel from a stance like Anna Barbauld: she reads the novel as about a woman like herself speaking home to her about the horrors a lack of power can inflict on a woman and offering up someone who fought hard, kept her bodily and mental integrity, and if she went down in the struggle, shows a point of view on human relationships admirable, even followable, not strange or laughable or simply unbelievable.

More generally, my ferreting out the content just about the woman at the center shows something about assumptions today that is disturbing: I’ve students who inveigh against sympathy as if this is a poor ground to take to liking someone and helping them. Victims are made into losers or people who didn’t grab the main chance. The talk afterwards also included a young male graduate student in the audience who suggested Defoe’s moralisms are all hypocrisy; he doesn’t mean them. The implication is that no one could intend morality. This is very much of our era (alas).

An older scholar countered that one and adduced numbers of Defoe’s lesser known texts which did sell, but which are undeniably meant as ethical in the pragmatic and religious sense. I cited Defoe’s Religious Courtship.

Someone in the audience then challenged Ms Orr by saying most scholars today have gone well beyond Watt’s way of reducing Defoe for Watt’s book; it didn’t invalidate her thesis, but rather insisted on a wider perspective since Watt. He said Defoe was propelled by external events and saw others as this way.

On Fielding we talked of his use of the face and how it connected to treatises on acting at the time about the actor’s face as his instrument. Also of his style and social conscience.

It was a good session. But what didn’t get discussed was Watt’s book. I argued on C18-l a few years ago that the book has been so influential and liked because it has a neat pattern and its conclusions exportable to other canonized novels, mostly by male. Tonight I’ll add that he takes novels he in the mid-20th century saw as important; at the time, these novels would not have stuck out at all. Watt need supplement: Kellogg and Steele, The Nature of Narrative, and all the many feminist critics who bring aboard our Noah’s arc so many novels by women. Really Anna Barbauld’s outlook on the rise of the novel (beginning with the Greek romances and again the 17th century with Le Princesse de Cleves) is more accurate.

Francois Boucher (1703-70), Le Petit Dejeuner (Breakfast): what novels did these women read?

My next blog on the conference will be on Jon Sensbach’s keynote speech, a moving eloquent one on women slaves and religion with one focus on what happened to women, how they were made to be cut off from women’s expectations about keeping their children and how they were deeply abjected: he concentrated on “the middle passage” of slavery; the horrors of the ships.

Ellen

Northanger — at the last

“‘I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties of both; and those men who do not choose to dance or marry themselves, have no business with the partners or wives of their neighbours.’ ‘But they are such very different things!’ ‘–That you think they cannot be compared together.’ ‘To be sure not. People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together.’” (NA, Chapter 10)

Henry Tilney (J. J. Feilds) and Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) begin their first dance (2007 NA)

Dear Friends,

As I’ve written before, (“JA: The last quarter century”)a generous editor has been good enough to put the essays I wrote on the last 25 years of editions of Jane Austen’s novels on the Jane Austen Center online magazine, one a month. She also put some of my other essays, like Jane’s Aunt Jane probably stole that lace, on Austen’s heroines, a defense of Edmund Bertram and the like; I gathered the URLs up together and put them into a posting on Reveries under the Sign of Austen.

Today I add one more, celebrating a novel I’m particularly fond of (as can be seen by the epigraph to this blog): on

Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon — all together

In its original form, A Journey Through Austen’s Career

And on the occasion of this happy conclusion to the series, I also put online the proposal for a paper to be given at the next AGM in Portland,

“People that marry can never part:” real and romantic gothicism in Northanger Abbey

As I now understand something of the politics of the way these papers are assigned (I probably didn’t help myself by having written on Austen-l and Janeites, “The significance of the repugnance of certain males towards Austen’s fiction”), I’m prepared for a possible rejection, but hope on.

Ellen

Same dance, toward its close

EC/ASECS, Bethlehem: Discovering Mom in the Convent: Representations of Maternity in Gothic Literature

Remedios Varos (1908-63), Luna

Dear all,

Here is my third report of a session at the recent East Central 18th Century conference in Bethlehem. I’ve summarized Devoney Looser’s lecture on Burney’s Memoirs of Dr Burney, and a session on four little known 18th century gothic texts, and a session on the treatment of Catholicism in literature and politics (Burke’s Ireland and France). For tonight I have two excellent papers and a lively candid discussion afterwards to report in a session where all chairs were taken (and it was not a small room with few chairs) but where all but one person were women. Apparently a topic with “mom” in the title scared away all but the most courageous of men. Three papers were listed, but only two were given.

First up was Laura Engels’s “Phantasmic Performances: Gothic Maternity in Mary Robinson’s Life of Mrs Robinson Written by Herself (1801). Ms Engels began by saying that Robinson had an early marriage, was an actress, novelist, poetess, and had a number of affairs after her liaison with the Prince of Wales, but she kept that single brief incident alive as her dominant experience for 20 years. In the era, motherhood was seen as irretrievably connected to the body, but was a legitimate role in the era; and Wollstonecraft and Siddons present themselves as private and domestic to counterbalance their socially iconoclastic experiences. Robinson, though did not present herself as a mother to counterbalance the other parts of her life, but rather simply to present herself as a mother briefly. Otherwise she foregrounded her seductive qualities and obscured her real body. [We can see this in portraits of her by Joshua Reynolds (where she is elusive and sexual) and Thomas Gainsborough, where she does seem to be spectrally sitting in a wood by a dog.]

Her depictions of mothering women show them vulnerable, powerless, hurting, in trouble. There was her mother whose husband (and Mary’s father) left her mother after 9 years of marriage to travel to America; he returned and took up a mistress and continued to dominate her mother and herself anyway. There was her teacher and mentor in boarding school, Maribel Lorrington (?) who she saw years later as a beggar in a torn dress, penniless, disfigured, the ghost of herself. She also saw destitution, aging, derangement in fiction connected to aging women and mothers, which made her not want to be a victim of her passions and desires. Still, to self-fashion herself as a mother in public felt impossible. During the time she was married and expecting her daughter, she presents herself as continually sewing clothes for her child, and kept out of public life. Her husband (to whom her Mrs Bennet-like mother married her off) was a gambler, had other women and she ended in debtor’s prison with him for a while. Yet at the same time she invokes her mother as the most important person in her life, and forced to leave her mother she at first feels powerless. She was eventually forced to survive on her own, and heavily pregnant, and breast-feeding her baby, she went on the stage to act. There is guilt over whether she can act and be a good mother at the same time. She was herself a strong woman who played many roles, had — as we can see in this depiction and her poetry — her own identity and views.

George Dance, Mary Darby Robinson (1793)

Ms Engels wondered if this presentation of herself was a bid for sympathy, and/or she was exhibiting herself, was making herself into an image offered up for voyeurism (desire on the part of a spectator) or acting “in your face.” After this short representation of her earlier adult life, her daughter finished her memoir and in effect Robinson becomes a kind of ghost. She gradually disappeared from public view in her life. We owe what we have of her works to her daughter, Mary Elizabeth Robinson, and like her own mother, she became the central influence of her daughter’s life.

Laura did mention that by contrast in the Victorian period mothers (nursing and otherwise) were shown as strong angels.

J. D. Watson (the illustrator), “The Aspen”, in Good Words, a 1863 issue

**************

Marilyn Francis then spoke from her paper, “When Will These Discoveries End:” Gothic Motherhood in Radcliffe’s The Italian. Ms Francis began by saying that The Italian ends soon after Ellena discovers her great friend and mentor, Olivia, is her mother. She quoted a critics who argued that absent motherhood in the female gothic allows the text to become a kind of bildingsroman; while the mother is waiting to be found and rescued by the child (often the mother is incarcerated and must be set free), the child’s story unfolds. The child’s story ends when the mother is revealed. Some scholars go so far as to say that mothers just have no story; the absence of a mother makes a story possible.

Ms Francis countered this with the self-evident truth that real mothers did and do have stories before, during, and after their lives with children, and in The Italian we have four active maternal figures in the novel. Bianca is Ellena’s chaperone who dies early in the novel; she protected Ellena and encouraged her relationship with Vivaldi. She tried to tell Ellena her background and that her mother was alive. The Marchesa di Vivaldi (the hero’s mother) tries to have Ellena kidnapped, put permanently in a convent, and is in collusion with the evil monk, Schedoni who is said to be Ellena’s uncle [but as I recall turns out to be her father so his desire for her and attempt at sexual coercion/rape at one point is incestuous]. The Marchesa thinks her son way above Ellena, and says of herself she “loses the mother” when she acts decisively (usually to be vicious). Only mothers who deviate from passivity and goodness get to have stories? In the novel Vivaldi never learns how complicit in evil his mother was and sorrows for her. The abbess is a third figure who Olivia defies to help her daughter.

Olivia is hiddenly a figure as major in the novel as Schedoni. She tries to teach Olivia how to have a mask, how to appear not to fight and yet fight. Olivia’s own story is kept opaque and untraceable and she relinquishes her daughter as soon as she is unmasked. We are to feel Olivia will be haunted by the memory of her daughter and loss of her daughter for the rest of her life.

Ms Francis suggested this paradigm was typical of more than gothic stories. Repeatedly in fiction mothers leave only traces of their stories behind, whch are waiting to be discovered but never are. Could it be that children don’t want to know, that the reality of women’s emotions and lives are erased because it’s too threatening to the society’s structure so the conventional narrative insists on giving us a child’s (unacknowledged) perspective?

Remedios Varos, A Paradise of Cats

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The discussion afterwards was marvellous and wide-ranging. We (many people in the room, including me) kept it up for the rest of the time. Alas, I find I didn’t (or couldn’t because of my problems with hand-eye coordination and slowness) take much down. Scattered comments I got were the remark that in modern novels the mother’s story is deferred until near the end and then embedded in an inset story (say like Byatt’s Possession where Christabel LaMotte’s story is told in flashbacks or through a packet of letters). There is great distress in a child even when grown-up when the mother is discovered to have broken taboos and/or given the child up (I instanced Daniel Deronda’s mother Vashti). We discussed how women collude in the silencing of their presences; they keep quiet to protect others (society will attack them in any case). It was suggested that reticence has been enforced over private real lives until recently and that little is gained for those who speak or those who know by telling — except release. Things don’t change for the better for women. Revealingly, pregnancy endows women with authority and strength (a kind of substitute for a phallus) so perhaps pregnancy is erased because a patriarchy will not allow women to appear stronger than men. Through pregnancy she does transcend (by creating life).

We talked of how actresses present a chaste image where it seems they are not married and have no children when no such thing; Emma Thompson is one who presents herself nowadays as a spinster or unmarried independent woman when she has two children and has long been married to Greg Wise; in the 18th century actresses similarly invented narratives which made their lives closer to the conventional heroine images they embodied. The conversation slide into discussing women politicians and the intense hostility to strong public women like Hilary Clinton. People also talked of their own experiences as mothers and daughters.

Finally, we seem to have returned to 18th century icons, and discussed Marie Antoinette who Robinson wrote a poem to and sympathized much with as did many other women of the era (see my blog “how little we can know of her”); she had a story of her own all right and tried to model a mother role too, and was savagely punished for it. But today too women are drawn to her, to the stories of her and her women (as in Adieu a la Reine by Chantal Thomas)

From Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006)

Kirsten Dunst as the young girl

The revolution approaches and she dons a more somber (darker colored) outfit

I end on a Swiftian poem by Mary Robinson, written perhaps as she looked out the window, no longer able to walk

PAVEMENT slipp’ry, people sneezing,
Lords in ermine, beggars freezing;
Titled gluttons dainties carving,
Genius in a garret starving.

Lofty mansions, warm and spacious;
Courtiers clinging and voracious;
Misers scarce the wretched heeding;
Gallant soldiers fighting, bleeding.

Wives who laugh at passive spouses;
Theatres, and meeting-houses;
Balls, where simp’ring misses languish;
Hospitals, and groans of anguish.

Arts and sciences bewailing;
Commerce drooping, credit failing;
Placemen mocking subjects loyal;
Separations, weddings royal.

Authors who can’t earn a dinner;
Many a subtle rogue a winner;
Fugitives for shelter seeking;
Misers hoarding, tradesmen breaking.

Taste and talents quite deserted;
All the laws of truth perverted;
Arrogance o’er merit soaring;
Merit silently deploring.

Ladies gambling night and morning;
Fools the works of genius scorning;
Ancient dames for girls mistaken,
Youthful damsels quite forsaken.

Some in luxury delighting;
More in talking than in fighting;
Lovers old, and beaux decrepid;
Lordlings empty and insipid.

Poets, painters, and musicians;
Lawyers, doctors, politicians:
Pamphlets, newspapers, and odes,
Seeking fame by diff’rent roads.

Gallant souls with empty purses;
Gen’rals only fit for nurses;
School-boys, smit with martial spirit,
Taking place of vet’ran merit.

Honest men who can’t get places,
Knaves who shew unblushing faces;
Ruin hasten’d, peace retarded;
Candour spurn’d, and art rewarded.

A smart woman, a poem of the “universal pursuit of the mundane and amoral aggrandizement. She lived hard and died fairly young, badly crippled from rheumatic fever. The Prince was pressured into giving her a pension, and when her last lover with whom she travelled around Europe deserted, she lived her last 8 years with her daughter, supporting them by writing in lodgings. A lonely difficult existence whose solace was her daughter.

And one last gothic image, Leonor Fini’s (1908-97) Red Vision, an archetypal image of a girl child looking up at a protective maternal vision:

There was yet one more session on Friday: “Marriage and the Family in the Eighteenth Century” and that super one I’ll tell about in my next blog on the conference.

Ellen

Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones compared

The slow motion duel from Barry Lyndon

Dear Friends,

I’ve been meaning to make a blog on Stanley Kubrick’s remarkable film adaptation of Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon (1975). I was so charmed by it when I watched it last year that I made a huge album of stills from the movie and put it in an album on Eighteenth Century Worlds. This week on Trollope19CStudies @ Yahoo we somehow began to discuss it, and I put a little of my original thoughts on the list and people liked it, so I put them here too.

The curious power of this film lies in its insistence on the importance of the slow-moving pictures:

The men gambling

It’s a highly original landmark film for its aesthetics. It’s beautiful. There are continual frames of scenes that are picturesque and evocation of the 18tn century as it’s often imagined in high art. The allure of this includes the salacious and lurid and in context the ironic narrative undercuts and works well with them.

The crowd gambling

Kubrick has the insight and daring to make a central part of his film his instinct that to see this earlier world set up as a neoclassic symmetrical dream vision and the visual pleasure of this is a very real part of the art of such films.

Marisa Berenson looks like a Gainsborough portrait and her hats
make my mouth water: this is a throw back to the Gainsborough studio costume drama films of the 40s, so Kubrick took what he could of the older modes of costume drama too.

The way to view is is to savour it in slow motion — as it is filmed. slow motion and that’s saying something since it moves so slowly.

Of course a film must have thematic meaning and this one has a hard one appropriate to Thackeray’s book. The ending said it all: a devastating bitter close whose final ethical point is close to Thackeray’s (indictment of a corrupt society, the product of human nature generally or its worst aspects for power, its coldness and egoistic appetite for where else can it come from?), though the means and methods are utterly disparate.

Thackeray’s novel (which I looked and dipped into after watching the film) has a narrator like that of Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wilde: like Fielding’s hard satire, Thackeray’s Lyndon is a crude amoral presence and would be a dangerous sociopath if we read the book realistically. We don’t. We know it’s satire. By contrast, Kubrick’s Barry is a noble young man, with a good heart and many illusions about honor and love, just about all of which are utterly out of kilter which the society which professes them (so he’s more like Fielding’s Tom Jones). The movie is not a satire on upward mobility in the Victorian era) but rather an elegy for the destruction of the low-born hero and a poignant evocation of a beautiful world, the ancien regime which paradoxically arose on the miseries and backs of the many. A comment on the 19th century here too. The continual bad things everyone is doing to everyone else amid the domesticity of the later part of the film, how so many end up crippled.

So the underlying meaning is alive; but not brought out by the acting which we could scarcely appreciate as long shots were preferred and iconic and archetypal moments. The best and most memorable moments have little to do with the original story or plot-design or even moral. It moves so slowly, and Kubrick recreates idyllic art of the 18th century — not the real one, and not even the typical, but of a subgenre of picture that after this film many of these costume dramas picked up.

This picnic was recently repeated in the BBC (later 1990s) mini-series, Aristocrats (based on Stella Tillyard’s book, film by David Caffrey and Harriet O’Carroll; it’s a domestic variant, appropriate for the age of sensibility we might say:

Tom Jones and Barry Lyndon are set in the earlier part of the century.

Sumptuous romance had been the key in the 1930s and 40s but no attempt at surface realisms (like old fashioned light), no attention to surface historical accuracies. Kubrick was apparently the first to do this consistently, even manically. Conversation pieces and genre scenes abound:

The musical Lyndon family

Kubrick’s scenes sometimes are shot for more than 90 seconds. It’s as if he asked himself how much strangeness will the audience tolerate? and dared them to complain We love to watch the gambling — that holds us. The second duel between the step-son and Lydnon is a masterpiece of nerve, especially when Barry’s nobility boomerangs back on him and he loses his lower leg and all his money.

The excess of the costume and scenes exceeds all else. Really this show that Brideshead Revisited is simply a repeat, a televisual bringing to mini-series what Kubrick did several years before in the moviehouse.

I read about Kubrick’s career too. While he is famous for a couple I couldn’t stand (the pornographic Lolita, and another frighteningly lurid one whose title I mercifully have blocked out), he also made Dr Strangelove. He is one of these directors who knows how to present himself as sole auteur — as in this film. But you have to look for in some cases another person has written the script or produced and it’s someone who does does the cinematography even if directed by Kubrick.

The next night I watched Tony Richardson’s 1963 Tom Jones to compare. While the earlier film is still charming, amusing, and yes offers a variety of filmic techniques which succeed in conveying the tone and attitudes of the book towards the characters, somehow it is also more dated than Barry Lyndon.

I think for me it was partly the movie’s content or thematizing of Fielding’s novel: Richardson told the same joke over and over: see how sweet, good, innocent, chivalrous, generous is Tom even though he is in bed with this and that and the other women. It’s that all these women want him so; they are the aggressor again and again. Then he is extricated by highjinks and we are to laugh again as he escapes — until near the end he is almost hung. I tired of it, over and over. Endless exposure of women’s breasts was part of the treat. Not much for Susannah York to do but look loving and accepting, and the sexy women to slither and slide and look CHFM.

Tom and Molly

Sophia and her Aunt Western

That’s what is the film’s repeating incident. I don’t find this all that amusing (at least on the third time and yet more of this to come) nor am I inclined to revel in this sort of “innocence” in the first place.

A pastoral

Like Kubrick, Richardson used a narrator throughout (defying what I gather still is the wisdom of film people and their scorn against non-cinematic techniques like spoken words). This provided the soft comforting ironies. Instead of a slow pace, we had speed, and the stylization kept us at a distance too.

Like Kubrick too, a genuine attempt is made to recreate something of the 18th century world: here it’s rough and ready, rural. The actor doing Mr Weston was superb, as also Partridge.

Finney as Tom setting out in the world, just before he’s diverted into the hunt

The famous long hunt is well done and its coda in a sweet chivalric scene punctuates and turns it into something conventional. Indeed as the man who gave a paper on the music of the film at the ASECS argued, it quickly repeatedly became a conventional complacent film.

Paradoxically because of its aesthetics Barry Lyndon is the graver film and Tom Jones froth in comparison. I don’t say I didn’t enjoy it in a way, but it was very mild enjoyment. A landmark film because it refuses to invite us to be snobs and uses costume drama differently for farcical comedy. It gives us something of Fielding’s quality but (as is not uncommon) leaves us the bite and what is hard about the book.

It’s my view that only is fidelity not a useful criteria, it’s impossible. What is important is to look into and at the movie as a work of art in its own right (as we do an opera many of which are adaptations from stories and novels), with many precursor texts and allusions, only one of which (if major) is its literary
source text. A movie (or opera) is not a window through which we see another text though it may interpret it. One looks at the major source to compare and understand and then appreciate the art and meaning of the new text or film (or opera)

Ellen

EC/ASECS, Bethlehem: The Seductive Menace, Popery (more gothics)

Anna (Hermione Norris) places flowers on Clarissa’s grave, Mr Hickman (Jon Sotherton) standing by (1991 BBC Clarissa)

Dear Friends,

Here is the second panel I went to at the recent conference. The second period on Friday, from 10:15 to 11:45, offered what turned out to be an excellent set of papers on “The Seductive Menace: The Dangers of Popery.”

First up was Teri Doerksen, with “Catholicism, Danger, and Womanly Virtue: Clarissa Harlowe and the Appropriation of Catholic Iconography.” She suggested that until 1745 and the Battle of Culloden, Jacobite Catholicism seemed to pose a real threat to Protestantism. After that year there is a relaxation, and we see in Clarissa, an Anglicanized hagiography sliding into Catholic ideas and practices in Clarissa. Clarissa’s desire for the single life, to join some sort of nunnery, her martyrdom of herself (like a saint), Lovelace’s dream of her going up to Heaven dressed like the Virgin Mary while he is pulled down to hell; Belford’s desire for her to be a mediatrix for him; how he prays to her; her death consummation with the word “Jesus” on her lips — are all seen as uses of Catholicism. Ms Doerksen quoted Margaret Doody’s A Natural Passion where she goes over these kinds of images and says Clarissa’s last moment was calm and tranquil.

I came up to ask a question later about Sir Charles Grandison with its Italian Catholic characters, and Ms Doerksen said she regarded Harriet and Clementina as a kind of splitting of Clarissa into a Catholic and Protestant type, and yes, she thought Richardson was conscious of what he was doing.

Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) Silence (1799-1800)

The second paper, by Rebecca Cepek, was “Remembering the Virgin Mary: Resisting the Normative in Lewis’s Castle Spectre” (found in the anthology Seven Gothic Dramas edited by Geoffrey Cox). Ms Cepek suggested Catholicism was seen as an agent of patriarchical oppression, misguided to actively cruel. Lewish reconfigures the Virgin Mary to represent the maternal; unlike Protestantism, Catholicism offered a woman to worship, and offered another choice to living ordinary women beyond that of marriage and motherhood. Lewis’s Castle Spectre is a powerful female figure resisting male domination. Unlike The Monk which is a male and horror gothic, The Castle Spectre is a work which fits the categories Anne Williams outlined for female gothic in her Poetics of Gothic. In the nightmare work run amok of The Monk, Osmond can either rape or marry Angelica; there is no role outside prostitute or wife. The male characters fail to protect the female ones; romantic love fails. By contrast, the female castle spectre creates feminist theatre. Evelina, a character in the play, longs for a wound, is in white, and has a Christ-like mother who saves her. Angelica must rely on her mother, and becomes more powerful this way. The play recalls Burney’s Cecilia who prays to her mother, anticipates Jane Eyre who does the same.

.”

The third paper was by a French literary scholar, Frederick Conrod, was called “Dialogue between a Libertine and a Pope in [Sade] Histoire de Juliette. South of the English channel, he began, Sade is seen as more than simply a site for evil; he wrote philosophical tracts in the same tradition as Voltaire and Diderot. In this paper, Mr Conrod went over a small pamphlet by Sade: “A Dialogue between a dying man and a priest.” In Sade’s collection of philosophical dialogues, Sade emphasizes how the Pope approved of those who kept their sex lives hidden. This particular dialogue is antagonistic (like Rameau’s Nephew.) The man on his deathbed says he is penitent for a life misspent (wasted, thrown away) repressing his natural impulses. The priest reinforces this idea by saying this is nothing compared to the falsehoods told knowingly by Catholic doctrine; the dying person wants a natural explanation for everything. The priest also says our free will makes a love of God worth while. But the soul equally needs vices and virtues, which are at the center of the human brain or body. In another, The Dialogue of Juliette and Pope Pius VI. The Pope stands in for an ultimate priest, and has Juliette achieve a union of sexual pleasure and perversion, which is a kind of beatitude.

I know I didn’t do justice to the subtlety of the arguments. These dialogues alternate with written-up orgies (which I guess the less said about the better). It seemed to me the paper was an argument for looking more closely at texts-in-history and the real living world Then we can see a revolution going on from the point of view of libertines of the 1790s.

The ancient abbey ruins of Clonmacnois, Ireland

Elizabeth Lambert’s biographical essay on Edmund Burke was one of the best I heard this session: “Meanwhile back at the Ranch: Edmund Burke’s outlaw Irish relations.” During the long penal time (the British control) in Ireland, most messages were sent by word of mouth. What biographers and historians have to do is extrapolate through their imagination — from scraps for what is not recorded is lost. Then slowly quietly heroic individuals living their lives out as best they can emerge. Central to her argument was how these experiences of his Catholic relatives had an effect on Burke and led to his complicated political positions, and some of famous writing. Behind his Reflections on the French Revolution is his personal love of French society as he knew it in contrast to Irish. He could not help them, or not help them very much lest he risk his position and then no one would have anything; he would have to tell them this. At the same time he felt (rightly from the evidence) that his relatives were persecuted as a way of getting at him. If he acted too aggressively (including writing candid notes), his text might very well fall into the wrong hands.

She began her talk with setting the larger scene. A series of laws were passed in 1709 as a punishment to Jacobites: Catholics were banned from public office, teaching, inheriting land in a primogeniture fashion. It’s said Catholic worship was left alone, except when local magistrates chose to bother people, which they mostly did. The atmosphere of the Irish courts was very bad. Now Burke personally experienced the effects of the penal code. Growing up he saw much unhappiness between his mother and father; on the other hand, in the house of the Nagles, more prosperous Catholic relatives who served the Stuarts in France, he held his head up.

Professor Lambert then told detailed stories about Burke’s relatives and his inability to help them when they ran afoul of the penal laws and or were seditious. I can’t do justice to them either in tone or content, but can only indicate generally a couple of the experiences Burke was involved with or saw.

Garrett Nagle had abducted a Catholic woman and was accused of involvement with the White Boys; he had set up a school for one of his female relatives to teach in (many Catholics continued to maintain schools against the law). A second Nagle was accused of fomenting rebellion and was hanged, drawn and quartered. His aunt Mary went to France to be educated in a convent, and did not return for 18 years; she came back to Ireland and saw the wretched conditions of the poor, returned to her convent in France momentarily, but came out again to go to Cork and live and teach in a fine girl’s school alongside her brother Joseph. Mary lived a life outside the law and conventions. She supposedly kept her school a profound secret, but Charles James Fox had heard and came to visit and look round.

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The questions during the discussion were about female agency in the different papers. One person commented that if a woman becomes a mother and wants to live her life as a mother, there is no nunnery alternative. To this someone replied, she was studying mother figures in convent life. Finally, how does Lewis compare to Radcliffe when it comes to their depiction and treatment of women as such in their works. I’ve never read Castle Spectre and until now that he showed a callow misogyny (remember he was 19) when he wrote The Monk . one evil shot from a man who has gotten his high
Efforcite.

Finally as I did for my second report on the gothic, I want to add something that came to mind as I listened: women’s gothic poetry, specifically that of Amelia Opie (1769-1853), who began as a radical, anti-war, visionary poet and ended a Victorian writer known as a Quaker and unitarian. I thought of how her ethical novel dramatizing the miseries a young woman experiences when she decides she is against marriage and goes to live with a man without marrying him — is really about the daughter and her mother’s relationship (with the mother the destroyer), as seen in its subtitle: Adeline Mowbray; or, the Mother and Daughter (1804). She was briefly married to John Opie, the painter of theatrical portraits, who died young.

Two short poems:

To a Maniac

There was a time, poor phrensied maid,
When I could o’er thy grief have mourned,
And still with tears the tale repaid
Of sense by sorrow’s sway o’erturned.

But now thy state my envy moves:
For thou art woe’s unconscious prize;
Thy heart no sense of suffering proves,
No fruitless tears bedew thine eyes.

Excess of sorrow, kind to thee,
At once destroyed thy reason’s power;
But reason still remains to me,
And only bids me grieve the more.

To Winter

Power of the awful wind, whose hollow blast
Hurls desolation wide, thy sway I hail!
Thou o’er the scene around can’st beauties cast,
Superior far to aught that Summer’s gale
Can, in the ripening year, to bloom awake;
To view thy majesty, the cheerful tale,
The dance, the festive song, I, pleased, forsake;
And here, thy power and thy attractions own,
Now the pale regent of thy splendid night
Decks with her yellow rays thy snowy throne;
Richly her beams on Summer’s mantle light,
Richly they gild chill Autumn’s tawny vest
But, ah! to me they shine more chastely bright,
Spangling the icy robe that wraps thy breast.
(1795)

Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840) Evening

Ellen

EC/ASECS, Bethlehem: The 18th Century Gothic

Dear Friends,

This is my second record of the EC/ASECS meeting held last week at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: I’ve written about the meeting of the Burney Society on Thursday afternoon, Devoney Looser’s lecture on Burney’s Memoirs of Dr Burney and our dramatic reading aloud of Burney’s Witlings. Now I turn to Friday’s sessions.

The first session I attended , “The Eighteenth Century Gothic,” was notable for the unusual or relatively unknown novels and texts chosen as well as the rich suggestiveness of all the papers.

First up, was Madhuchhanda Ray Choudhury’s paper on The Necromancer, or the Tale of the Black Forest (1794) by Karl Friedrich Kahlert (recently published by Valancourt books; also available in a Folio Society edition, prefaced by Devandra Varma): “The Spectre, Spectacle and the Spectacular Redefined in The Necromancer.” This is one of the Northanger novels about which Michael Sadleir was the first to write insightfully.. Ms Choudhury argued that people read this book for its spectacle and that it reveals that the enlightenment did not reach deep into people.

It’s a novel about fraud. The necromancer uses the latest technologies of the era to seem to bring the dead back to earth to those who grieve for the loss of these people; we see him fooling victims in a forest and punished for exploiting the poor and ignorant and miserable by a brutal execution. Volkert is the necromancer’s name, and he is a consummate dramatist who is in effect producing shows and exploiting acting skills comparable to what was found in theaters of the era. Volkert claimed to be working from a book written in an ancient mystic language, and his audiences are made up of naive and frightened people.

James Boaden (the memoirist) recognizes the contemporary audience’s taste for terror, and suggests the audience resented the kinds of explanations Radcliffe would offer; the audience would resent and be disappointed by the rationales. They wanted to be fooled. Reviews at the time would moralize about these kinds of plays and novels (as did the novelists), but in fact we see that exposing the frauds in this novel does not lead to the audience blaming the necromancer; quite the contrary: the audience is indifferent to the exposure and feels sympathy for the fraudulent wizard. When Volkert is beheaded, he is treated like a martyr, a hero and his spells are valued for their eeriness. There is clearly intense pleasure in the macabre and bloodcurdling (so to speak) and Volkert regards himself as a genius. Very interesting is how the necromancer justifies himself; he says he does not regret having reached the dead; he did it for a just cause; spells are a manipulative tool which he uses to serve his community (!). He becomes a heroic figure in the book. Thus claims for any desire to be enlightened are undermined by this book.

The second paper by David Fine was about Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary (1811): “Let me feel death and shame but once: Rethinking The Missionary’s Sensibility.” An alternate title is Luxima: the Prophetess (reprinted 1859). (It’s described by Nancy Paxton in her Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1837-1947. where it’s described as the love story of Hilarion, a Franciscan missionary to india, and a beautiful Indian woman, Luxima.) Mr Fine argued that the novel engages the language of mystical experience, blurs lines often drawn between the self and others, vilifies the flesh and finds the roots of this vilification in false shame. Mr Fine felt the novel addresses political changes going on at the time; and while it attempts to recover and justify the cult of sensibility, it reinforces domination of individuals by those who can manipulate passion. Sensibility is far from freeing the individual from false norms of the establishment; sensibility imprisons people. The Portuguese missionary tries to convert Hilarion by using carnal love; she sees only the sacred in their experience, and the reader sees how her experience is rooted in the flesh.

Mr Fine suggested the emotion produced by this encounter simply replicates the environments the characters find themselves in. Mysticism (he said) can produce a rupture of the boundaries set between self and society normally.

(To me this analysis showed that whatever the novelist intended, her novel finally made an argument like Austen’s S&S, and those non-gothic novels hers is like, e.g., Jane West’s A gossip’s story, 1796.)

Robert Southey writing by Edward Nash (1848)

The third paper by Elisa Beshero-Bondar was on Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801, 1838); “Southey’s Gothic Science: Galvanism, Automata, and Heretical Sorcery.” Prof Beshero-Bondar suggested this poem had much in common with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, 1831, partly by Percy Bysshe Shelley). Southey reveals the conflicts between gothicism and conventional beliefs; he merges natural philosophy (knowledge about electric bodies) with the gothic and Eastern and Western beliefs. (Southey’s apparently similarly iconoclastic poem, “The Curse of Kehama” is also dealt with at length by Nancy Paxton in her Writing Under the Raj.) She felt he was influenced by Humphry Davies’s and Thomas Beddoes’ experiments; Erasmus Darwin’s vitalist emphases in his poetry and Southey’s own travels to Portugal. At some level Southey was exposing false institutions, false religions and authorities grounded in customs and traditions. There is an assault on Islamic tenents, fatalism, submission to God. He was appropriating various models as a way of writing powerful poetry. He also anticipates his later conservatism in a questioning of the ideals of the 1790s. Cultural systems are shown to be oppressive fields, mechanisms of the powerful to control individuals.

The poem itself contains sorcerers defying God’s patterns, undermining contemporary codes of all sorts, dissecting corpses, adapting electrical energies in order to simulate the energies of the human soul. They construct a system of dynamic forces which triggers events and provides an elaborate simulacrum of the world. Some of the vocabulary and terms used are familiar to us today in some modern scientific fables (as I cannot get myself to read any of this kind of science fiction, cannot get my brain to process it as it seems to me so absurd I couldn’t really take down the parallels which seemed to be recognized by other people in the room). The events are not Godless; rather Southey modernizes Miltonic images of Satan to provide works of demon art. Electricity becomes a way of gaining power.

Prof Beshero-Bondar did not quote from the poem, but I add some lines from it from W. A. Speck’s Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters; while Francis Jeffrey attacked the poem viciously, he did allow it had some beautiful lyrical passages:

How beautiful is night!
A dewy freshness fills the silent air;
No mist obscures, no little cloud
Breaks the whole serene of heaven:
In full-orbed glory the majestic moon
Rolls thro’ the dark blue depths.
Beneath her steady ray
The desert circle spreads,
Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky.
How beautiful is night!

Anthology which includes Orra

The final paper of this panel was Melissa Wehler’s “Revising Ophelia: Joanna Baillie’s Orra and the Tradition of Madwomen.” Ms Wehler compared how Shakespeare’s Ophelia and Baillie’s Orra both progress from an aristocratic effective or socially viable woman to a mad person. It was the differences that interested her: Ophelia drowns herself, Orra brandishes her madness as a weapon. Orra rewrites her story. She summarized Foucault’s arguments in Madness and Civilization and suggested Orra’s madness was a way for her to escape imprisoning norms even if the result was a malign otherness.

Ms Wehler said Walter Scott disapproved of Orra as a character on the grounds she was no woman. Ms Wehler agreed, only she argued that this typology is conventional and she liked Baillie’s undermining of it. She compared Ophelia in her madness to Orra: Ophelia exemplifies conventional ideas about femininity; is tragically innocent, is a courtly, tender, distracted female, a spectacle for the male gaze demanding empathetic pity. In contrast, Orra is non-normative; madness provides inner sanctuary, the males around her cannot exploit her joys; they want to use her as a benevolent matriarch, but in her gothic madness she avoids all acceptable feminine types. Her posture is one of defiance and rebellion. So in a crucial moment (apparently) intense emotional distress leads to creativity.

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The discussion afterwards was intriguing and (to me) paradoxical. The intriguing part brought up fashionable ideas in scholarship nowadays: for example, that the gothic opens up a space for performance; it’s a way of framing “the other” safely for authors and audiences. Witches manipulate people it was said and so have agency; ghosts are usually not women (I don’t think that’s true). Someone suggested that men contact the supernatural and women don’t (again that’s not true). The thrust here was to say why Orra herself never has contact with the supernatural but has to find the supernatural within herself. There was also new information (for me). The Vashti character in Orra leads to Daniel Deronda’s mother. I picked up that Southey’s poem had a lot of analogies, archetypes and parallels with modern science fiction stories on TV and films and popular novels.

The paradox of the discussion seemed to me to be its disconnection with life. The people who were finding female agency in madwomen were people who knew that the way to find and keep ordinary power is to conform to expectations of other people and had done so to achieve their own successes. So there was a disjunction between their feminism for literary discussion and feminism for real.

For my part I suggested the material of The Necromancer anticipates the use of seances in the 19th century: early and frequent death was so common, the average person longed to reach lost beloved people (especially women who were continually impregnated and lost many children). It thus seemed to me not a fantastical book at all but one rooted in the kinds of longings A.S. Byatt dramatizes in her Angels and Insects. I also asked about the connections of The Missionary with other Anglo-Indian colonial novels. Hilarion tries to convert Luxima to Christianity; for her transgressive conduct, Luxima is continually threatened with abduction and rape; even though he never has sex with Luxima (since it’s sinful according to him), Hilarion is excommunicated; both nearly die in an auto-da-fe, but are saved; however, afterwards Hilarion is killed by a knife wound. The characters expose the cruelty of the power structure and perhaps the uselessness, amorality and hopelessness of an early justification for colonializing: converting people to Christianity.

I did not bring up a gothic novel we read on ECW (Eighteenth Century World at Yahoo) a couple of summers ago: Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, or, The Transformation. There was not enough time (I had asked two questions already). But I would like to bring this one up here. While not one of the novels mentioned by Austen in her Northanger Abbey, it has many of the characteristics of these “horrid” novels and like The Necromancer, and Thabbala, it is set in Europe, uses pseudo-science and science; like The Missionary, it attacks powerful groups in society which exploit the poor and powerless. It also bolsters unconventional beliefs in the supernatural which comfort people. But it also dramatizes pathological states, incest, the breaking of bodily taboos, vampirism and is pitched to a high level of hysteria. See a fascinating article at Common Place: “The Awful Truth.”

The hermits of Wissahickon Tabernacle, perhaps Brown’s inspiration for Father Wieland’s temple

So the novel is also highly individual, with quite a different set of obsessions and themes from the above relatively unread gothics today. So one thing this session showed was how little we can generalize about the gothic and or any of the “horrid” and sexy transgressive gothic texts, and how inadequately they are described most of the time.

Next up is a session which was also partly on the gothic in novels and real life: “The Seductive Menace: The Dangers of Popery; it included a play by Matthew Lewis, Sade’s Histoire de Juliette, Richardson’s Clarissa, and some real history of the oppression of Ireland.

Jane Campion’s Bright Star: yet another lovesick writer

Abbie Cornish mothering Ben Whishaw as Keats and Fanny

Dear friends

Isabel and I went to see Jane Campion’s Bright Star yesterday and while I liked a few things in it, in general I found it disappointing to dismaying. That’s unusual for me, as I usually like costume dramas, historical and film adaptation types both. Part of my reaction might be the reaction of the audience we found ourselves surrounded by. This film resembles Shakespeare in Love, Becoming Jane, Miss Austen Regrets, and other movies about geniuses (see below) in its maudlin presentation of love and insistence love is the center of the writer’s life.

To begin with, the first half was over-wrought to the point of absurdity. In keeping with the recent propensity not to have any long speeches or scenes, the characters abruptly move into the most melodramatic confrontations at the beginning of Keats’s meeting with Fanny Brawne. It was ludicrous and improbable — not to omit a little hard to follow. This first part also included continual sops to the audience in the form of remarks by various characters making fun of reading, intellectual life, poetry, and reiterating how Keats doesn’t make any or not enough money. These were apparently intended to be funny, and there was some slapstick with some of them. They keep the audience around me tittering. This grated on me and I might have left but things began to improve around the time Fanny and Keats fall in love and especially when he gets sick to death. the conflict was apparently between Mr Brown, Keats’s friend and Fanny. He wanted to expose her as a hypocrite, and flighty; they were rivals for Keats’s friendship.

The problem then was there was no build-up. Since we were already nearly falling off a cliff of melodrama, it was hard to feel for Keats and took time. Towards the end of the movie all the undercutting sotto voce snideness went and the viewer was allowed to wallow in grief in peace. Not without other preachy remarks now and again about Keats’s lack of money as well as how when you have a strong will you can have everything and anything you want. This attitude was attributed to Fanny in some self-righteous scenes with one of the male characters said to be a friend of Keats’s, Browne, who impregnates a maid and then stays with her and has to support her (perhaps marries her, it’s not clear). (This reminded me of a movie about Aspergers with Hugh Dancy, Adam, I saw a few weeks ago: its subtext was also how really all the hero had to do was brighten up and go out there and be independent and all would be well.)

There is a feminist background to the movie. I read a long time ago (when a graduate student). W.J. Bates’s Life of Keats and I remembered him reporting how badly Fanny fared in talk after Keats’s death. I have in my house a much shorter biography by Gittings where he tells of how after Fanny’s death she was treated with much condescension in the scholarship: she is called a shallow flirt, caring only for clothes, and cold to Keats to some extent. They never did have full sexual intercourse. In the movie this Fanny is endlessly sewing and we are asked to believe the spectacular outfits we see her in continually (one a scene practically) we all made by herself. She also is no reader and lies to Browne when first meeting Keats to pretend she has read a good deal. Nonetheless, or despite these egregious faults (which in the movie are not seen as faults at all), she is presented very strongly positively. Indeed the movie is about her, not Keats. Here again there is a lack. She has no interest but loving Keats and silently sewing. I began to wonder why Campion had made this movie.

I did note the strange intertitle at the end which tells the audience she wore Keats’s ring for the rest of her life and liked to walk in their favorite park wood. Not that she never married. Given the over-the-top romance, I thought to myself she must’ve married. And indeed she did, a Sephardic Jewish man after her mother and brother died, and lived abroad until the last 5 years of her life when she returned to England and when she died was buried in Brompton Cemetery.

I wondered where Keats’s sister had gotten to. None of his family was anywhere to be seen. We heard about his work in the hospital but it was nowhere in this movie. But my real complaint was the same one I have with most biopics of writers’ lives: Becoming Jane, Shakespeare in Love (the title says it all), Miss Austen Regrets, Mozart something-or-othered; in science one sees this too: in Infinity Feynman’s life is presented out of the perspective of the five year period he was married and through the lens of his first wife’s death from TB. Apparently the popular wider audience wants to believe that writers write out of love for someone and that love dominates all; if women, it’s a man’s thoughts which inspire them (Austen was inspired by LeFroy); if men, it’s a woman and sex. In a study of classical biographies (of Euripides, Sophocles), Mary Lefkowitz shows that popular biographies of writers in particular show how unhappy such people are, a kind of revenge and resentment mode. We do see Keats writing but we never heard any intelligent conversation about books or get any sense what a rhythm of a real writer’s life or the real obstacles (remember Connolly’s Enemies of Promise) are.

The best thing about it was Ben Whishaw’s reading of Keats’s letters and poems. There was much voice-over and he reads very well. And Abbie Cornish has a body, she is not anorexic. But then what was wanted was Keats should look frail and near death.

I’ve liked Campion’s movies before: the one on James’s novel, The Piano, an earlier one on Janet Frame. But I know too she tends to be overpraised (even when her movies disappear from theatres inside one weekend). She must have a lot of friends (as opposed to Bogdanovich who never seems to get any praise at all).

Ellen Moody