Carrie Brattle, “castaway,” her hands appealing to someone inside a closed window (from The Vicar of Bullhampton, vignette by Henry Woods)
Dear friends and readers,
A couple of months ago I saw a Call for Papers on Patrick Leary’s Victoria listserv for a Northeast Victoria Society Association (NVSA) conference to be held at Columbia University, NYC, in April 2012. The place was convenient, the time appealed; Jim could come with me and enjoy himself during the day while I was at the conference with the two of us getting together each evening. The perspective and topics seemed to fit my desire to explore and write about Gaskell’s dramatization of disabled characters and the people (mostly women) who cared for them. The conferees were calling for papers showing Victorian writers who did not fit at all into present cliched ideas about the era, who broke our orthodoxies and conventional norms. The trouble was that to do this right would take several months of reading Gaskell carefully and books and essays about her. I haven’t got the nerve to give a superficial paper based on the reading I did with two members of Women Writers through the Ages last year — or the reading with other friends of her novels on other listservs in previous years.
Then a couple of weeks ago it came to me that I could write and deliver a paper on Trollope showing how the illustrations for his novels (which he involved himself with) provided contrapuntal readings of his novels such that alternative norms of behavior, values at variance with, and experiences undermined, subverted, provided values at variance with the explicit orthodoxies of his man plot-designs and characters. I remembered how frequently the pictorial narratives appealed sentimentally to the female reader, focused on minor women in the book, dramatized details and scenes not in (though consonant with) the novel at hand. In the above vignette for Trollope’s The Vicar of Bullhampton, the novel’s “fallen woman” or “castaway” is shown in a scene not in the novel; she is either fleeing the court where her brother has been tried to murder after he has been shamed by the community’s attitude towards her or appealing to someone on the other side of a closed window in a thicket of a garden. Neither moment is dramatized in the novel; both show her in a mode of open vulnerable distress which reveals the cruelty and unfairness of the way she’s been treated.
Well for the past three days I’ve been pulling out, breaking open and rereading my old stacks of notes on the original illustrations to Trollope’s novels, and a select group of novels that I’d like to write about – masterpieces once or still often dismissed, or put aside as having concerns no longer in fashion: Castle Richmond is a novel partly about the 1847-48 famine and has a homoerotic secondary story, as well as older heroines whose marriage is dubious or who sexually desire a handsome young man; The Last Chronicle of Barset, once Trollope’s signature book, centers on a gifted man whom his society’s treatment has driven into an angry depression to the point he’s distracted, confused, unable to function: instead of looking at him through normative lens, the pictures see the world through his eyes. The Vicar of Bullhampton I’ve mentioned. Also novels which will enable me to show the influence of these illustrations on film-adaptations which use an analagous methodologies (inventing scenes not there originally which create contrapuntal or self-reflexive corrective meanings): shots in Davies’s He Knew He Was Right and The Way We Live Now are derived from some of the the original illustrations of these.
Emily (Laura Fraser) and Louis (Oliver Dimsdale) Trevelyan: a confrontation late in the movie modelled on Stone’s conception where Davies has subtly elaborated on Trollope’s language to suggest any love’s destructiveness
I also dipped into these novels and taken down a copy of The Vicar of Bullhampton to add to my evening’s reading this coming month. And I read four essays on this and Castle Richmond and Last Chronicle and one on the collaboration nature of Millais’s and Trollope’s intertextualities in Millais’s illustrations to 6 of Trollope’s novels.
And, gentle reader, I’ve been trying to include Dickens’s Little Dorrit in my overall reading and watching budget by listening in my car to an abridgement of said novel brilliantly read by Anton Lesser and slowly going through Davies’s wondrous film adaptation once again.
The caricature style of illustration is as expressive as the idyllic one. The statue in the center of the room of a mother leaning over a child with love, re-appears in variations of grief, distress and longing in Davies’s film adaptation of Bleak House and presentations of Anna Maxwell Martin as Esther and Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock,
One result: today I wrote a 500 word proposal which I’ll be revising tomorrow, putting away until Saturday, and then sending off to the email addresses of the conference organizers. I’d like to go to the conference even if my paper is not accepted, but were it to be I could hold my head up more, experience and demonstrate more that I’m part of this scholarly Victorian world (which I am) and thus participate in and enjoy the experience more. I think I might have said on this blog that my review of The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels: New Readings for the Twenty-First Century, edd Margaret Markwick, Deborah Denenholz Morse, and Reginia Gagnier did appear in Nineteenth Century Contexts this past spring, 33:2 (2011):190-92. I will put this up on my website later this week. And my paper, Trollope and TV: Intertexuality in the Pallisers series may well be published in a coming volume on adaptations of 19th century novels.
I’m remaining a Trollopian in other ways. Izzy and I listened to Timothy West read aloud the whole of Barchester Towers recently and for a new radio system I bought for my car I’ve purchased the whole of The Last Chronicle of Barset read aloud by Simon Vance on CDs burnt with MP3s, considerably cheaper than a set of CDs made from tapes. It is a pleasure Izzy and I can share — as well as music she has burnt CDs for in our car.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 