A still from a film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s “Afterward”: Mary Boyne (Kate Harper) crossing an invisible threshold into the uncanny
Dear friends and readers,
I thought I’d tell about the list of books I’ve gotten up for two sections of English 201: Reading and Writing about Texts, a freshman and sophomore level literature course given where I teach. I’ve taught it before, and rather than try to create a whole new set of books with another theme, I’ve decided to refine what I was doing and revert back to two gothics courses I gave under the rubric 202: Texts and Contexts, some 8 (!) and more summers ago.
I have long loved the the gothic — really ever since I’ve known or recognized there was such a genre. The first one I read may have been Stoker’s Dracula, which I read with the front door to my parents’ apartment opened since both were at work until 5 o’clock. I didn’t fear people outside; it was the fantasy terrors in the closets that paralyzed me.
I’ve dedicated a section of my website to gothics, and the first time I was invited to invent not just a theme that fit into a pre-conceived course (like “Memory and Self at American University or American Literary Masterpieces), but a course from the get-go, I tried gothics. I’ve a subsection of my library dedicated to the genre and my fondness for Austen’s Northanger Abbey comes from my fondness for the genre. I’ve never tired of Bobbie Ann Mason’s The Girl Sleuth nor felt alienated from my reading of Judy Bolton, Nancy Drew and other books of this type discussed by Maureen Corrigan in her Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading.
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So not just in the meantime but out of some need in my being, I’m going to do this (probably) far from transcendent genre again.
For the first time, my list is going to depend on online texts. Last time I did a 201, I did well with an online ghost story by Edith Wharton By picking and chosing from the plethora online, I can pick and chose what ghost or gothic stories I want. I just have to hope that they are not taken down before next January 
For the students the list will look like this — they will see what they have to buy, and a pile of not too many, not too fat books.
Hill, Susan. The Woman in Black
Martin, Valerie. Mary Reilly
Charnas, Suzy McKee. The Vampire Tapestry
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw
Faber, Michel. Under the Skin
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey
McEwan, Ian. Atonement
Summerscale, Kate. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
Jodhi May as the unnamed governess in Nick Dear’s 1999 Turn of the Screw
I also remember last time how many students looked openly hostile and ill at the sight of a group of older (I had classic gothics) and newer books. So I’ve cut down my number and kept all bought books medium length to shortish. The only older book there is Austen’s Northanger Abbey — which is linguistically speaking and if not novella length, a book the size of Mary Reilly.
As I told my friend who works in the bookstore and who I’ve dealt with for about 15 years now when I order the books, if Mary Reilly is not gettable, substitute Jane Eyre and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; if no Vampire Tapestry, substitute Stoker’s Dracula; if no Under the Skin, substitute Frankenstein.
What I have here are modern re-renditions of the mostly 19th century archetypes of these classic books,whose most familiar image may be epitomized in John Atkinson Grimshaw’s A lady in a garden by moonlight (1882):
I know how the class as a group perked up when we got to the second half of the term last time and were doing all modern books.
But what we are actually going to do is much more, because we’ll have short stories and films. So it’ll go this way as a plan:
Two ghost stories (one possible vampire “Mr Jones”), with Hill’s having a particularly unnerving film adaptation Wharton’s “Afterward” a masterpiece:
Edith Wharton: “Afterward” (it’s online), perhaps “Mr Jones” (if I can find it online)
Susan Hill: Woman in black
Effective illustration to original edition of Woman in Black
Three powerful vampire tales, none misgynistic, two females and the third a genuinely inventive re-imagining of a brutal creature:
Marion Crawford: “For the Blood is the life” (extraordinary, a female vampire, online); and/or RLStevenson’s “Olalla” (ditto, more subtle)
Suzy McKee Charnas: The Vampire Tapestry
Cuny, medieval unicorn and lady tapestry (one chapter of Charnas’s novel is called “The Unicorn Tapestry”)
Historical romances novels, Mary Reilly, a rewrite of Jekyll and Hyde from the vulnerable woman servant’s point of view remains ultimately a werewolf tale; the Holmes story is about wife abuse
Martin, Valerie Mary Reilly
Sherlock Holmes: “Adventures of Abbey Grange” (online)
Kate Summerscale — The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
Uncategorizable gems which will enable me to explore why gothic fantasy gives us deep insight into our troubled lives, needs, desires, really creepy, blighted sinister stuff:
Dickens’s “Signalman” (just extraordinary, online)
James, M. R. “The Stalls of Barchester” Cathedral” (chilling, awakens atavistic beliefs, ditto, online, this James an important master for modern ghost stories)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
Illustration for edition of M. R. James’s ghost stories
Science fiction horror gothic, serious allegory in Orwellian tradition. also connects to fear of body, Frankenstein tradition of breaking deep taboos:
Faber, Michel. Under the Skin
Analysis, parody, and moves into realism: sexuality, class, war
Stevenson’s “Chapter of Dreams” (online about dream world from which gothic came for him)
Austen, Jane Northanger Abbey
McEwan, Ian. Atonement (alludes to and rewrites the former as well as Richardson’s Clarissa)
The fantasy never permitted to happen, 2008 Frears and Hampton’s Atonement (the lovers together and free)
Movies: a whole bunch; will or could include
From the Shades of Darkness series, Afterward;
A much admired unnerving Woman in Black (BBC, 1992),
From Return of Sherlock Holmes series, Jeremy Brett’s brilliance in Abbey Grange, Frear and Hampton’s Mary Reilly and Atonement;
Andrew Davies’ Signalman;
One of the two Turn of the Screws
(1999 by Nick Dear with Jodhi May, 2009 by Sandy Welch, with Dan Steevens)
Perhaps too: a piece or so from Davies’s Northanger Abbey;
One part from mini-series of the terrifying profound gothic, The Dark Angel (with Peter O’Toole)
I considered Michael Cox’s said-to-be-brilliant The Meaning of Night, but as I’ve discovered it’s maybe over 800 pages, it’s out of the question as too long. But I did order and will see if I can find time to read it because it looks brilliant and effective.
I’m not entirely satisfied with my list even as a dumbed down version of what I would prefer to do (say the 19th century originals or a course in political and realistic great books).
I wish I had a good book about gothic I could assign. I hoped to use Summerscale’s book but have discovered it’s not first rate (which I do think all my choices are, even if easy or not transcendent masterpieces) so even if I carry on with it, it cannot function in the way I partly hoped.
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As usual, the prize (Samuel Johnson no less) is a way of selling Summerscale’s book. The blurbs absurdly overpraise and mischaracterize it too. It’s not riveting and not a horror, and not a recreation of Wilkie Collins (whatever is meant by that). Rather it’s a book which self-reflexively suggests what we find so fascinating in these mystery detective stories. Summerscale is able to recreate the Victorian world expertly and fully and includes (very rare in Victorian books) all the levels of people from their own points of view (so it reads like a vivid historical Victorian novel) and she often relates Dickens and other detectives (the inimitable Chief Inspector Bucket for example) to Mr Whicher.
Alun Armstrong as Chief Inspector Bucket from Andrew Davies’s 2005 film adaptation of Dickens’s Bleak House
I’m not finding the book a disappointment because it’s not a mystery, but then I didn’t expect the blurbs on the back told me anything for real about the book. Nor do I like mysteries very much — except when they genuinely unnerving (like Susan Hill’s The Various Haunts of Men for me). When I was young, I would be startled and think the writer of the blurb misunderstood, or maybe they didn’t read the book. It may be that they often don’t, but nowadays I think they simply lie and say what they think might allure the niche audience the book is aimed at or might please the publisher or the friend who has asked them to write said blurb.
It’s not written as a mystery (however it was marketed); it’s as much literary and social criticism as it is about a real life murder. From the outset she aligns Mr Whicher with detectives in Victorian fiction, and suggests she is unearthing the Victorian milieu usually hidden from us or not sufficiently (or at all when it comes to the lower classes and their life) for us. It’s pretty clear by one-third the way through that Constance, the stepdaughter from Mr Kent’s first marriage, is the major suspect. The victim is a child, young boy in a cradle still, by his second wife.
Not that the book doesn’t have flaws and when I think of these I am dismayed to realize how I dumb down my courses to fit the average student (thus Bronte’s teacher’s monologue seems more a propos as days go back). First here and again she brings out semi-lurid statements about other murders — probably meant to entertain me. Her book can be used for reactionary behavior — building prisons, making harsh sentences to protect themselves they may think. She goes far too quickly over the seething cauldron this murder turned on.
It’s a Governess story. The second wife of Mr Kent was the governess in the first household. The first wife after a couple of pregnancies and living with this man went into an intense depression, and nonetheless he carried on impregnating her. Four infants therefore died — apparently of total neglect. He hires a governess and the children start to survive. Finally the poor wife dies, and he remarries quickly. Who? The governess. And she proceeds to be endlessly pregnant (for those who have the text, see pp. 70-73). Summerscale tells this but does not bring out morally what this is all about. The girl who confessed to the murder of the boy is a first wife’s daughter living upstairs in servants’s quarters. There is evidence the Mr Kent is having a casual affair with another servant. Shades of Peter Quint in Turn of the Screw, no? (as seen in the 2009 film). This servant Sarah Gough, did not seek the boy when missing and it was she who called the boy a snitch.
What did he snitch I wonder.
It’s a middle brow book as she is careful not to go directly and fully into the taboo areas, and will have broad appeal. I’ll lay a bet it may be a favorite with some of my students — those not given to move into levels of fantasy. I’ve students I can use this text with to show the realistic origins of the gothic. I’m thinking maybe I should have another text on depression, say Styron’s Darkness Visible, only I worry yet further students will dismiss the gothic as the product of “whiners” and certainly not directly connected to them. Were I bold I’d use Kathryn Hughes’s Victorian Governess, only the gothic has far more sources in the human abyss than what governesses knew in Victorian England.
Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) Silence (1799-1800)
I can switch my books and sometimes do, but not that often for then I confuse the bookstore and overburden my good friend there.
So if anyone reads this, can you suggest a book about the gothic (literary critical on the psychology and metaphysics of the genre) which is genuinely readable. I know of Jack Sullivan’s Elegant Nightmares which shows the genre to be a popular Kafkaesque genre for the 20th century, and Anne Williams’s Poetics of the Gothic (also Julia Briggs, Night Visitors, Coral Ann Howells, Mystery, Misery and Feeling, which is too focused on the 18th century (especially Ann Radcliffe, whom I love but do not dare to assign), on male and female gothic, brilliant. The first analyses books we won’t read and the second is too long.
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I’m a little nervous about being so dependent on the Net, but the alternative is to order a specific anthology. That would lock me into many stories I don’t want to do and force me to cut some of the books I do want to do.
And the list automatically omits stuff I regret not doing (the classic older books), downright hated or seen as religious testimony (Oliphant’s Beleaguered City!), maybe a repeat that is finally misogynistic no matter how effective or exuded what I thought bad vibes from audience — attitudes (many vampire shorter tales).
Also omitted because I’ve found they are “defined” as woman’s books automatically and impossible almost to get through to the boys and the girls misread the last two badly: Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest, and DuMaurier’s Rebecca. Jane Eyre a real loss here.
Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840) Evening (most of his work destroyed during WW2)
Ellen
P.S. I spoke about the pressures against telling the truth about books when you review them on my “Reveries under the Sign of Austen” blog.
http://misssylviadrake.livejournal.com/19339.html
This morning, Fran on WWTTA directed our attention to where Orlando Figes is being sued, partly for lying about his anonymous reviews, in one of which he was astonished a book like The Suspicions of Mr Whicher could get the respected prize it did.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/7624186/Award-winning-historian-Orlando-Figes-I-posted-anonymous-reviews-on-Amazon.html
I answered Fran as follows:
My husband, Jim, reads Orlando Figes’s books; since Jim is a fussy and well-informed reader, I take it Orlando’s books are very good. I read Eva; neither of us reads Stephanie Palmer, Figes’s wife.
My reaction may be different from Fran’s here: to me this story tells about the intense vanities of authors and how deadly the reviewing business can be. I’ve discovered (as I wrote Catherine Delors on my website) that most academic writers don’t want real evaluation; they prefer coos even if the review shows the reviewer didn’t read the book. If you praise it strongly but then show its faults, they don’t like that either, and they will do what they can to prevent you (the reviewer) from getting another book to review — or to get back in some other way.
One reason Figes could or would write anonymously is in a sense to try to tell a little truth. Summerscale’s book deserved no prize, but then most books which get prizes nowadays don’t deserve them. It’s a way of selling the book and endless back-scratching from committee to committee. The Booker Prize rewards an interlocking group of coteries.
He should not have denied it was him or been brave enough to say the truth forthrightly — I’ve discovered too that long-standing rich, tenured and established authors will lie about a book (overpraise it) or praise it extravagantly. Look at what upper middle class people this group is. How high their positions.
What are they afraid of I sometimes ask myself? They want their book to be praised and distributed. There might be something they want for their son or daughter or student. In the present atmosphere of cronyism and no jobs without an agent, things are desperate all the time. In the US the job situation is terrible and also the UK. We are back in the ancien regime.
The libel laws in the UK are stringent too. I’m not against this but the effect is sometimes not itself beneficial. One reason for the sleazy tones and long tradition of innuendo in the British press is this libel law. In a way it might be preferable to state something forthrightly, for then the individual accused can reply more easily — and sue too eventually when a further line is crossed.
I do write what I think genuinely — up to a point (not wholly, for who could?) and sign my stuff. I used the famous phrase, Freedom of the press belongs to the woman who owns one for my first paper about cyberspace. But blogs are not considered legitimate in the way of institutionalized journals. Nor Amazon reviews. That’s why I’m a little bemused to see how much all these upper class types care: they surf on Amazon to see what’s said of them. They have no direct money to lose. What egos.
Anyway I’ve written another frank blog, this one musing on my teaching this coming term.
I used to say “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” – since I’m an adjunct what have I got to lose? I suppose the same things the Figeses do, only it’s so much less likely that anyone anywhere will ever help me or mine and I come so cheap (meaning my salary) in non-entity position that I’m left alone.
Oh yes, I do wish the reviews were truthful — not because I want to see mediocre people hurt but because I would be able to buy or order a book more accurately. I may yet cancel The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
. If I keep it, it’s for the reason it’s been popular: it reads very quickly and easily. I would hope to bring home to my students what Summerscale grazes over you see, and at least critique her where she should be critiqued.
Ellen
From Linda:
“I read the article Fran posted, about Figes posting anonymously on Amazon, and immediately thought–”Who put this spin on it–that it was done out of malice?” The one doesn’t necessarily follow from the other.
If I post on Amazon–whether I use my name or not–I’m more or less anonymous. No one out there in cyberspace knows me. If one has a well-known name or reputation, one might want to post an opinion without losing the right to privacy–to avoid challenges and confrontation. One should have the right to post an opinion without endless consequences and repercussions.
There is as good a chance that Figes was just trying to tell the truth as that he acted out of a sense of rivalry and competition. He never confessed to having base motives. He only said that any harm that occurred was unintentional.
In our court system, we say the accused has a right to confront his accuser. But this is quite a different situation. The authors who felt injured could still respond to the criticism whether or not the one who criticized signed his name.
Figes may simply not have wanted to bring the weight of his name and reputation into the situation. Remaining anonymous may not have been the best thing, but it is not the hideous atrocity the media made it out to be.
Linda
Dear Linda,
I think you make very good points. Since yesterday I’ve read more than Fran posted and looked at more of Figes’s reviews so have a more general perspective to add to yesterdays.
There are many interesting angles to look at this incident from — all interesting and partly about cyberspace life and partly about reviewing. My guess is that it why the incident is attracting a lot of attention.
You could say it’s just a petty but real scandal over Orlando Figes writing scathing reviews of books of people who attacked his books on Amazon under the pseudonym “historian.”. They found him out and he denied it and now it’s come out it was him and he looks very bad. I asked Jim again what he thought of Orlando’s books. It turns out we have but one and Jim said while it started out superior, about half-way through it fell off badly. Jim suggested people tire of their books. They want you to read them and work on great opening sections. They go back and revise that when they run out of inspirtation in the middle. I said I knew a guy who said the middle of his books were the worst. He worked hard on the endings as well as openers.
But it’s wider than one man, as Linda says. For example about reviewing: in the commercial world mostly and increasingly in the academic one many reviewers don’t evaluate books accurately but rather send along blasts of praise, coos. Anything else (even criticism within a review that generally finds the book excellent) does not win any friends, and in the present atmosphere where jobs are so difficult to find and keep hold of the pressure is intense to keep and make friends (in the 18th century sense).
As I wrote yesterday, a mong the reviews Figes wrote I noticed a couple of books ludicrously overpraised and beprized. While I enjoyed it, Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is a popular middle-brow book (excuse the expression) which plays to lurid crimes in the way of Fox TV (you could read some of it this way). I rush to say it’s also an interesting self-reflexive recreaction of a Victiorian novel but Figes’ comment was accurate. This is your point Linda.
It’s about the unacknowledged importance of Amazon reviews (even for academic books) and blogs where nowadays publishers send bloggers books to review for free and urge you — I should say I — to write about said book, presumably in praise. More than more books might come. Perches to speak from and people read them.
It’s about ego-surfing. It’s startling that Figes was outed. You had to be a person who recognized who Figes’s “enemies” (those who dispraised his book) were to work out the pattern in the Amazon review and follow the zigzags. Not easy and certainly time-consuming.
Here, Linda I’d say it’s hard to be anonymous. People seek out who you are determinedly if you persist. They find your ISP, they trace you.
Again as I said, it’s startling because Figes is a “high” person; successful professor at Oxford no less, with a wife with a highly paid respected position, his mother well-respected novelist, feminist, memoirist (Eva Figes). You’d think he wouldn’t do this. Well think again. You would be wrong.
This is OT on a cyberspace listserv is is probably POL.
Ellen
From Catherine Delors:
Thanks, Ellen, most helpful for my Book 3! I am even beginning to think of a cover. If I self-publish this time around, I will have carte blanche. Editorially too, so I can go over the top 18th century…
Catherine
I’m feeling a bit guilty about my complaints and condescension towards this book. I’m nearly done tonight and would like to retract a little; all along I’ve liked it, but as I come to the end I think it has real merit. It’s a sort of documentary explicating or excavatting the undergrowth prosaic raison d’etre of the mystery story, which after all is one of the subgenres of the gothic. They very inarticulateness about why they did what they did (the crimes, the betrayals, the cruelties, the cover-ups) or lived as they did of all the real life actors is part of its point.
I’ve bought for myself the google reprint (google is just remarkable) of the contemporary account by Stapleton (surgeon) called The Great Crime of 1861, a major source for Summerscale.
I do recommend it but not as a mystery, rather a book about the real life sources of mysteries. By the end I had great sympathy for everyone, including the dead boy, and especially Mr Whicher photographs of whom conclude the book. Now if only I had some theoretical book along with this one to go with my set I’d had the makings of a fine terrain with which to explore the gothic.
Ellen
On the theme of learning, Farideh asked about a book title: _A Little Learning_, and Fran answered and we had the following dialogue on WWTTA:
”
Thank you very much .I also had this pleasure to receive a note from our dear Fran:
“By the way, you asked earlier about a book title by Caro Fraser, ‘A little Learning’. I wasn’t familiar with her work, but now I’ve seen a brief synopsis of the plot and discovered it’s set at a place of education, I’d say she’s playing on the multiple associations of the gerund ‘Learning’ itself. ‘Learning’ means academic education or scholarship; learning for a lesson; a life lesson, or, given the depressing relationship scenario, I imagine she might want to conjure up ironic associations with the little
idiom, ‘a little learning goes a long way’
And as I wrote to Fran I found in Longman Dictionary of English language and current culture , this explanation on this title: “A Little Learning “. Please read it and tell me know your idea .I mean please clarify it for me. I still need more explanations!:
“A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not thePierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.”
Origin
First used by Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) in An Essay on Criticism, 1709.
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To which I replied at first:
Dear Farideh,
It could mean “a lesson” too. It would worry me as it’s a sign the author hasn’t a firm grasp on English, not to be able to pick a title that is graspable right away. It reminds me of Jacqueline Suzanne’s ludicrously titled, “Once is
not enough.” It wasn’t what she meant.
On the other hand, we could see the crude hand of interfering editor here … ”
But then went on to say:
Farideh, Fran has gone so much further than me in answering your question. Instead of (lazily here, and not thinking) assuming the title is perhaps the publisher’s (inadequate or misleading) choice or a sign the author nodded, she connected to the way “An Education” was used in the recent excellent film (based on a young woman’s memoir):
http://misssylviadrake.livejournal.com/15023.html
The “education” and lesson in life our heroine gets means far more than her learning to study and go to school. She learns that the dull school is an open door to a wider life because she makes associations with better as well as more educated people, can become independent financially. And so on.
A little learning goes a long way (as Fran puts it) means something different from Pope’s famous line. What Fran means is more like it’s painful to learn about life and a little may be all we can endure. So in “An Education” our heroine does not need more than one affair to teach her the indifference to one another’s fates her experience shows her others have. Her boyfriend couldn’t care less how much he was costing her in her destiny as long as that night he was having a good time. When he felt threatened he could lose her, he lied just worse and pretended he could marry her – just to hold on to her.
How many knocks do you need to learn a lesson? How many times do you need to be raped to learn what sex can be?
Fran suggests a look at Fraser’s other books bears out this reading of the title.
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I think perhaps Pope’s famous line is only a starter, often quoted because it’s early in seculiarism, is catchy. So here it may mislead.
It’s a very conservative or prudential stance and can be used to support the idea people should stay in their own station and that education will make them unhappy or miserable because set their heights too high — all very unkind to individuals in the short as well as long run.
Here Samuel Johnson’s reply must be brought it:
“I am always afraid of determining on the side of envy or cruelty. The privileges of education may, sometimes, be improperly bestowed, but I shall always fear to withhold them, lest I should be yielding to the suggestions of pride, while I persuade myself that I am following the maxims of policy; and, under the appearance of salutary restraints, should be indulging the lust of dominion, and that malevolence which delights in seeing others depressed.
Ellen
From Diana Birchall:
“I read The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher a couple of years back, and here’s what I thought…
A mesmerizing true account of a famous Victorian murder case. Backed up by meticulous masses of contemporary reports, this could have fallen into the trap of being dryly forensic, but it is both elegantly framed and a breathlessly page-turning locked room murder story. The writer uses research to shed light on Victorian life and thought, and has fascinating material on the origin of detectives, fictional and real-life, and how they impacted each other. The London and country background is vividly depicted with
wonderful descriptions of Victorian forensic science, the passionate rising craze for crime stories and detective fiction, the development of crime and court language, and a clear-eyed, vital look at the legal system of the period.
The case itself is eerily reminiscent of the Jon Benet Ramsay case of our era, with suspicion falling on one family member or servant after another, and wild conjecture blowing this way and that. The enigmatic early
detective is a shadowy but intriguing feature, and the outwardly solidly respectable gentleman’s family into which a terrible crime has penetrated, captures the imagination today as it did a century and a half ago. The sense that all
may not be as it seems, is conveyed with delicious creepiness, and the full revelation of Constance’s guilt is parceled out with enormous suspense and skill. Even at the end, some mysteries remain…but it’s a masterly and
definitive portrait of a classic Victorian crime.
Diana”
Thanking Diana for her comments, I’ll add a few more of mine upon finishing the book.
I will tell the secrets implied at the end so if you don’t want to know them, don’t read on. That I feel implied to say this shows the book partly works as a mystery — but it is much more than that.
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I suggest that the book should be reread and more than once. Why? It’s who did it that matters and what this means. By the end of the book we are (I submit) supposed to be persuaded that the two children, Constance, a near teenager and her younger brother, William, murdered their stepbrother. The way it was done was brutal because 1) they were children, excitable and not old enough to empathize; 2) they got frightened and hurried; and 3) they were intensely filled with confused anger and hatred. These last emotions I suggested were brought out when half-way through the book Summerscale shows us this is a governess story: the second Mrs Kent was governess to the children of the first, mistress of the husband while the first was still alive and endlessly being impregnated. Why several neonates of the first Mrs Kent died is not clear, but the reasons are all about family internecine horrors: the father may have had syphilis, the mother was badly depressed; the liaisons going on made for lack of care.
It matters that Constance took the rap to protect William and how she spent most of her life paying for it in cruel punishments in her prison. Forget any comforts or rehabilitation and that she was not permitted any parole but released only in old age and then evidence showed she went to live near and with William with everything being done that could be to erase her presence.
William’s life was that of a bold explorer.
Their confusion matters: Constance was taught to hate her mother and we are given enough evidence to show when she realized what was the real hurts her mother endured she turned on the stepmother. You don’t have to add that William and Constance slept in the servants’ quarters and all that implies.
Then there is evidence the rest of the household knew and did what they could to cover this up. The locking in of the police by Mr Kent the first day to try to find all evidence and destroy it.
Mr Whicher suspected all this, including the murderer was not just Constance but William for when Constance confessed, he came “out” and said she could not have done it alone.
Another level: Mr Whicher paid for his suspicions. His career was badly hurt when he brought out it was an internecine family quarrel. I found the two photographs of this originally working class, hard working self-educated man so touching — he is the type you find in some of Trollope’s novels who is insufficiently appreciated.
Dickens does not come out well here, for his instincts refused to let him see and accuse the servant made of erotic entanglement and envious intrasexual murder.
The way the book is laid out is understated and you slowly see evidence you don’t understand until later — this reminds me of Emma. Indeed this is a book with shadows stories of the kind AP wants to see in Austen but are not there that way.
I will be able to make much hay with this — as it figures forth just the sort of story Henry James built in his sinister Turn of the Screw.
I don’t see the experience offered here as important for its aesthetics, but for its lessons about human nature of which I’ve only covered a few as lots of the details about daily life are instructive too.
I don’t think Orlango Figes was envious: my guess is he would despise this book as a woman’s book (without using these words), for woman’s intuitive book it certainly is. Ecriture femme as self-reflexive literary and social study of a mystery genre itself and its fascination. Along the way she makes parallels with Collins, and makes me want to try him again — though mostly I know I don’t have the patience. There’s an inwardness here that comes out in Summerscale’s postscript that reinforces my sense of this book as unusual history.
Penny a while back kept posting on a woman who wrote travel books as histories of Lincoln and I said that was woman’s history and Devoney Looser’s book was poor because she refused to give up pre-conceived notions of history. Women doing history is different from men doing it (as women doing science).
I no longer think it second rate, that was an initial prejudiced reaction.
Ellen
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P.S. I do have a dream list for next time — or some unlikely event I get a 202 (more advanced version of introduction to literature, called Texts and Contexts)
Yesterday morning as I woke I thought to myself if I wanted to start from scratch and make a serious demanding course in the new style (ignoring old ideas about canon altogether, which is what I used to do when I did serious lit courses), this would be my list: Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, Diderot’s The Nun, Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man, Levi’s If this be Man (always printed with The Truce), Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party, Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, and I’d show a Bergman film plus Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street. Other possibilities are Sand (Indiana), Paul Scott (first volume of Raj Quartet), Styron, Greene, Orwell — Trollope too. I’d get into vast trouble since the students would not like what these texts would tell them (I wouldn’t dare Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children though it’s one of the most important texts by a woman about the world as women experience it in our century). Why don’t I beyond fear of the students’ deep conservativism; I never know if my sections will fly and have in the past had sections cancelled at the last moment. With weeks of reading thus wasted. I tell myself next time maybe I’ll put in for Advanced Comp in the Social Sciences, that will force me to invent something new and I’ll invent a list of political and realistic novels and non-fiction.
[...] my Exploring the Gothic classes, we’ve read and discussed two of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, [...]