Returning to Trollope via maps, televisuality & Australia (!)

David Suchet as Melmotte facing them all (from Davies’s 2001 TWWLN adaptation — in the last phase Suchet has in mind Charles Laughton’s moving performance as Quasimodo)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve returned to Trollope with a plunge. A writer for our time. Like Dickens, a geographer of our imagination, utterly televisual (via Andrew Davies), and aptly post-colonial.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been reading his (magnificent panoramic) The Way We Live Now and his brilliant psychological-social masterpiece, He Knew He Was Right. I had begun them once again (I’ve read both at least twice) and gotten about one-third of the way through each when I wrote a proposal for a paper to be part of a collection of essays on British Historical Costume Drama on TV (from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey), and though I’ve not had an absolute acceptance, it’s as near as firm yes as one can get. The only doubt will be if the group can get enough essay proposal to go forth for a fat volume.

Donald Pleasance played the character whose presence began for Trollope his Barsetshire novels: here he plays his cello (1982 BBC Barchester Chronicles, Alan Plater)

It would not be due until next fall, but my problem now is my proposal for Mapping Trollope was accepted by Sharp, and that will be due mid-summer. To map Trollope, to delve his re-creation of London, the mythic Barsetshire, the counties of Dillborough and surrounding areas from The American Senator (Ayala’s Angel), to say nothing of Barsetshire country (which includes both series, Barsetshire and Pallisers), I shall have to read in detail, taking down specifics from several very long novels. I know from experience the whole picture of Barsetshire first emerges in Doctor Thorne, that the chronology of the Barsetshire and Palliser books is more or less consistent and the mapping say of TWWLN fits into that of the Pallisers. And I did want to include the careful mapping of Western Ireland in Trollope’s 5 Anglo-Irish novels and two stories (consistent with the Phineas books), which are no where well enough known.

One world Trollope.

On top of this from my trip to NYC to listen to a lecture at the NY Trollope Society by Prof Nicholas Birns on Trollope’s La Vendee as historical fiction, I’ve again come into contact with this generous scholar who years ago (really) encouraged me to send him a paper on Trollope’s travel books for his Antipodes: a Global Journal of Australian/NZ literature. He told me he loved my book (I never forgot that), especially the Irish sections where I argued for the central importance of Ireland in Trollope’s life and work. I found myself unable to write the paper because at the time I didn’t understand post-colonial theories and perspectives, and the only thing I could think of was descriptive and that meant (I felt) going to Australia. Jim won’t listen to that (cost, distance), and how could I begin to spend enough time anyway.

Walhalla, Victoria 19th century print

Since then I’ve learned about post-colonial theory (see my blogs on Christopher Hodson’s Acadian Diaspora and Diasporic Jane and Indian films) and have been able to come up with a perspective which would enable me to discuss say the relationship between Trollope’s travel book, Australian and New Zealand and his novels set in Australia — without going to Australia, or if I did for a relatively short time (I do long to go). On line I’ve done that for his American Senator and North America, which we read in conjunction with one another on Trollope19thCStudies when it was still Trollope-l.

Trollope’s section on New York City and American culture as fuelled by a worship of money ever relevant (see this week’s New Yorker column, George Packer reading TWWLN).

I told him my idea for “On Living in A New Country: Inventing an Australian Identity” (a play on Patrick Wright’s On Living on an Old Country), and he seemed to like it very much, and more or less told me I could be on his pane, “The Australian Trollope,” in a coming Trollope conference. Yes a group of Trollopians are not waiting another 25 years to get together again (see Exeter conference), and in fall of 2015 plan to meet in Belgium at the University of Leuven. If I did that it would mean reading another set of long Trollope books but some new (and to me) interesting Australian literature which I have grown to love. I should say I was once part of a group looking to publish on Trollope as traveler (this was 10 years ago) when I read AngloAustralian novels (e.g., Henry Kingsley’s Geoffrey Hamlin) and Australian & New Zealand famous classics (Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life, and Jane Mander’s The Story of a New Zealand River, Ethel (Henry Handel) Richardson’s enormous trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.

Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin as Ada and Flora McGrath (1993 The Piano, Jane Campion)

The rest of my blog summarizess my proposal to discuss the film adaptations of TWWLN and HKHWR (“Andrew Davies’s Televisual Trollope”) and throws out a few ideas for “On Living in a New Country.”

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“Andrew Davies’s Televisual Trollope” will include two great artists, Andrew Davies as well as Trollope. I will show that

in Andrew Davies’s adaptations of Trollope Davies developed sophisticated televisual techniques expressively to convey Trollope’s interior monologues, epistolarity, and panoramic plot-designs and Trollope’s themes of delusional sexual paranoia and anxiety, and economic corruption. TWWLN and HKHWR rely on filmic epistolary sequences, montage, flashbacks and voice-over; Davies also breaks naturalistic conventions to allow for characters directly to address the TV audience, and for the TV screen to picture emblematic allegories. We will also see that Davies engages with Simon Raven’s famous 26 part Pallisers to replace a cynical patriarchal Tory implied author with a humane, liberal feminist one, and while so doing, critiques Trollope’s texts from a feminist and Oedipal standpoint ….

Mr Gilson overpowered by Arabella French’s chignon, and getting back when she says she will do anything he bids her including of course removing it: modelled on one of Marcus Stone’s illustrations (from Davies’s 2004 HKHWR)

The first part of the paper will examine the filmic art, themes, character types, plot-designs of TWWLN and HKHWR as a similar pair: since not enough films made from Trollope in close proximity have survived, Davies cannot (as with his Austen or Dickens films) conceive of these as part of a subgroup of author-connected films. Instead they belong to Davies’s own political satiric type films made from socially-concerned novels … In the second part how scenes and dialogues in TWWLN allude to scenes in Raven’s Pallisers to comment both on Raven’s and Trollope’s work. I will also show that Davies brightens and makes much gayer and more hopeful the perspective of HKHWR by imitating the décor and kinds of gentle caricature created in the Barchester Chronicles

For “On Living in a New Country” my idea would be to follow Trollope’s unusual (so I think) trajectory of dramatizing colonialism not from the angle of the higher echelons but from that of the desperate lower middle, working class person and family, or the angle of the younger son who is not the heir. It’s such people he tells his fiction about, and it was to them he directed his Letters from Liverpool.

In the part of Australian and New Zealand just on New Zealand where he visited the Maoris and went swimming with a group of them, we have Trollope as Bohemian (sort of), but (and now this is vague) I recall I thought he was prophetic in looking forward to how ethnic politics would work out, how these would be a core of conflict, that they would seem to replace class- and money-based politics. (It was an analogous foresight to those found in his Anglo-Irish novels about how communities react to outsiders, the use of scapegoats, and collusive officials.) Trollope saw that the person or people who live in a “new” country (so they see it) have to evolve a new identity, one connected to the old one, but different and while in his novels (John Caldigate) he warns out “gentlemen” could fall to lower ways of life, he was very enthusiastic about this new identity.

20th century illustration for Trollope’s John Caldigate (originally called Mrs John Caldigate)

I was amused to find that Robert Hughes actually ends his great book The Fatal Shore (one of the great books of the 20th century; it can stand alongside Primo Levi’s If this be man) by quoting Trollope’s graphic portraits of two men kept in prison for a very long time. I did want to produce a paper. I remember seeing a film at the time, The Proposition, which seemed to me to go into the areas I was interested in from an angle of high violence — and “Aaron Trowe” (the protagonist villain share’s Trollope’s initials, AT) is a story of high violence; so too Harry Heathcoat. Here’s a wikipedia article on the Australian film The Proposition just about this group of people, which starred Emily Watson and Ray Winstone.

The Stanleys (very much the sort of couple Trollope writes about).

TMI? If you were wondering what I’ve been reading while watching all these films and going to operas, what thinking about and why, there you have it. Next up will be a blog on Trollope’s novels HKHWR and then (separately) the TWWLN

Ellen

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“A revolutionary view of Trollope and why we read him …

The photo is by Margaret Cameron, the hat the one Trollope traveled in and the emails for him and his characters invented by me

Dear friends and readers,

It’s never too late. I’ve had a third official — published — review of my book, Trollope on the ‘Net, and I am so chuffed. Tyler Tichelaar alone took seriously and described “the other half” of my books, the part about my and other people’s experiences in cyberspace, mostly reading Trollope novels. That’s what’s revolutionary (as John Letts’s introduction says). I place as of equal interest and weight to that of scholars, the views of the other readers and myself on the list-serv the discussions occurred on between 1995-6 and 1997 (a majordomo list-serv managed by Elizabeth Thomson).

He’s placed it on his website: The Gothic Wanderer

and on the Amazon site where used copies are still for sale.

I’m so pleased by what he says in an immediate way when he refers to how Trollope is still denigrated as simply writing for money, not out of an irresistible powerful creative imagination. Just the other day on the Trollope Society face-book someone quoted Jane Smiley who had trotted out that prejudice: his routine shows he was was somehow mechanical. No one who has read Trollope’s books with their mind alive and experienced his characters, stories, dramatic scenes, narrator’s presence, just spilling over and intertwined could think this. One of the members of the face-book group quoted one of Trollope’s powerful descriptions of his experience of his imagination. I did try to counter this in my book — I’ve a chapter on An Autobiography as a book which contains a remarkable percipient description by Trollope of his own reveries: he had a pictorial dramatic imagination and would see a character in a dramatic scene identified as say “the brother” or “the sister” and from that evolve a situation, and from that a story.

I’m writing this blog partly to say I have about 3 boxes of the books left (maybe 36) from the original print-out beyond the ones sent to the members of the Trollope Society the year the book was published (2000). I’d be happy to send a copy to anyone for the literal cost of the book and postage ($15). My email: ellen.moody@gmail.com. Honestly it’s not for the money but because I’d like to make more people aware it’s about the Internet and takes an unorthodox view because of its dual context.

As Tichelaar says, this is not to say it’s not scholarly. The two official reviews — published — I had thus far paid tribute to that part of the book. In one of the yearly round-ups of Trollope studies, Mark Turner devoted two gracious paragraphs to it, like Tichelaar commending my chapter on Trollope’s illustrations of which I am (I admit) particularly proud since I did most of my original research there — including wonderful days spent at the Library of Congress examining over 460 illustrations. Many of Trollope’s novels were published in instalments and it was these that got the illustrations. They were a way of selling the numbers. Customers were attracted by putting some of the full-page pictures in shop windows. I am hoping to give a paper on these illustrations at a coming Sharp-l conference (fingers crossed). But he felt that the “other half” of my book got in the way, took up too much space. I’ve since been told by other scholars my opening chapter would traditionally place my outlook in the context of other scholars instead of placing it in the context of how I came to get on the Internet and lead reading groups. I held scholarly contexts off to every other chapter when after whatever book we read is covered, I put that book in its Trollope context (as Trollope’s Irish novels, or as Tichelaar, says his novellas, books under 300 pages of which Trollope was very proud).

A well-known illustration by Phiz for Can You Forgive Her?: see see Burgo’s casual generosity to the desperate beggar girl — this one was a favorite of John Letts and the frontispiece for my book

Margaret Drabble (astonishingly) read my book — she was a friend of Letts, and came to Trollope meetings, and she paid tribute to the readings of the novels. But she was amused at the Internet groups and thought reading on the Net might be like adult education. It’s not.

I call these official because they are not my only reviews. Since my book was published I’ve had letters and notes from all sort of people on the Net saying mostly kind things about my book. Occasionally someone has put a review of it on a list-serv. Like Jane Austen (and probably others) I’ve saved each and every one and have a folder of them (not that slender).

Nowadays the list-serv is called Trollope19thCStudies and is equally on other Victorian writers, and has been so (though the accurate name is recent) since around 1997-98 when Michael Powe opened a new list-serv on Yahoo, partly so that we could expand beyond Trollope. We moved four times: Mike handled it off of his own server; my husband ran the group using French software, but it’s very hard for individuals to keep up (as Elizabeth Thompson presumably found) and so we are back at Yahoo once again. And we carry on with Trollope too, and this past fall read Castle Richmond and starting in February we’ll be reading An Autobiography again. We are now only one of several groups reading Trollope: another on Yahoo (just called “Trollope”), several on the Trollope society site. I’ve been told of other Yahoo groups reading Trollope novels (19th century literature at Yahoo), I remember a third site I was told of (though not where it was). And there are other commemorative sites beyond mine: a teacher read the Barchester novels with her students looking for classical references. There are a mighty number of them, enough to keep high school students busy making a website: Apollo

In physical space, who knows how many library and home reading groups there are. The two Trollope societies (really one, but located on either side of the Atlantic, NYC and London) have lectures: one is coming up in February in NYC which I am now hoping to attend: Nicholas Birne on Trollope’s La Vendee (a book we’ve read twice in our Yahoo group.

Judge Staveley walking with his daughter, Madeleine: by John Everett Millais for Orley Farm, this is one of my favorite illustrations (Trollope loved Millais’s illustrations for this novel too) and is one of 24 positioned throughout my book

As Tichelaar notes, and I say as the opening statement of my website where I have much on Trollope: “Anthony Trollope is one of the greatest nineteenth-century novelists with who (oddly) the majority of readers come into contact on their own.” And in spite of the “rise” of minor and women writers, and changes in the canon which have helped Trollope’s reputation there is still a stubborn tendency to omit Trollope from syllabi except for advancd English majors and graduate students. I put it down to his original reception in part: he was not seen as the towering figure Dickens and Thackeray were, and his refusal to allow himself to write his fiction to a particular agenda. He is willing to buck his readers. In Dr Wortle’s School, he tells his readers he has a couple living together outside marriage so it they don’t want to read about such a pair, then shut the book. Trollope loves to be self-reflexive and ironically half-break the spell of reverie and tell us much of what’s going to happen at the end. We should read his novels for how a thing happens, not what.

The force bethrothal of Plantegenet (Philip Latham) and Lady Glencora (Susan Hampshire) from 1:1

I’ve grown to love the film adaptations of his novels, all of them that I’ve seen and written about them too. I find others love these films, especially the two mini-series, earlier (1974) Pallisers and (1982) Barchester Chronicles (alas only 2 of the six adapted). See He Knew He Was Right out of Moll Flanders.

But enough. As Shakespeare’s friends to whom we are so indebted for the plays, John Heminge and Henry Condell, say of Shakespeare,

read him … and againe and againe: and then if you doe not like him, surely you are in some manfiest danger, not to understand him. And so we leave you to other of his Friends, whom if you need, can bee your guides: if you need them not, you can lead your selves, and others. And such Readers we wish him.

Trollope in his mid-40s, a rare photo

I like to think my book is one place where you will gain such understanding. It’s intended for his real readers wherever they are.

Ellen

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Debt: again Trollope, other Victorian novelists — and us

Phineas (Donal McCann) famously humiliated and harassed by Mr Clarkson (Sidney Bromley) who urges him “Do Be Punctual” (Pallisers 4:7)

Dear friends and readers,

Another in the same spirit as my last. Again on Victoria someone asked for citations of debt in Victorian novels, so I wrote as follows:

As he often mirrors common reality, Trollope has so many instances and characters driven, worried and occasionally (rarely but it happens) exploiting debt in different ways it’s impossible to catalogue briefly. The most common and well-remembered plot device is of the man who counter-signs a bill for someone else and then the other person doesn’t pay it. Phineas Finn lured and pressure by Lawrence Fitzgibbon in Phineas Finn, but also Mark Robarts in Framley Parsonage who co-signs for Lord Lufton who can much better afford living on more than he has.

Larger versions of this include male characters who owe a lot of money and hide this or that their business is failing or non-existant: this leads to suicide — Melmotte and Lopez and Dobbs Brougton. Debt collectors can sometimes hound women and they seek to sell jewels or use them as insurance (Lizzie Eustace). The “blaggard” type male who we are to have contempt for is the man driven to take money from a woman (though we may be led to understand why he does): George Vavasour dragging money out of Alice Vavasour because he has to pay huge election bribes, and then breaking his sister’s arm when the grandfather dies and it’s discovered he had left just about everyone to George’s sister, but in trust so he cannot get at it.

Kate Vavasour holding her broken arm after George has fled (from the original illustrations of Trollope’s novels, this one by Miss Taylor, a scene in Can You Forgive Her?)

The most interesting instances though are those which enabled us to see the working of finance in the Victorian period: say, the short story, “Why Frau Frohman Raised her Prices” shows an Austrian woman innkeeper’s struggle not to raise her prices:

The Frau had always held her head high,– had never been ashamed of looking her neighbour in the face, but when she was advised to rush at once up to seven swansigers and a half (or five shillings a day), she felt that, should she do so, she would be overwhelmed with shame. Would not her customers then have cause of complaint? Would not they have such cause that they would in truth desert her? Did she not know that Herr Weiss, the magistrate from Brixen, with his wife, and his wife’s sister, and the children, who came yearly to the Peacock, could not afford to bring his family at this increased rate of expenses? And the Fraulein Tendel with her sister would never come from Innsbruck if such an announcement was made to her.

She learns a very hard way that to keep up with inflation (as we would put it, she must must raise her prices. Trollope analyses the workings of a business: how the Frau has to buy things before she makes money by selling them, and how when the price of these go up, she must put her prices up; if she does not, how she must buy inferior goods and then loses customers but when she does, she helps other people do better (who work for her). He does not (unfortunately) go further than that, but it is still an insightful analysis which explicates the workings of capitalism. In Doctor Thorne Roger Scatcherd now an alcoholic and ostracized from people of his own intelligence because he is not of their class grew rich by saving the large amounts he made as a construction worker who opened his own business; he then lent money to others to begin enterprises. In the Victorian period it was very difficult (well nigh impossible) for an ordinary man to borrow large sums to open a business. Charles Darwin’s father grew rich by lending money and charging interest (like Roger) of course.

Novels by Trollope about gambling or fearful of it will be about debt include s a minor gambler in Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, man who is an aristocratic drone type (familiar) and lives off his mistress; Burgo Fitzgerald does very badly at the gambling tables when last seen in Can You Forgive Her and is given an allowance by Plantagenet Palliser who also becomes wrathful when his wife, Lady Glen, congenial with Burgo and still in love with him, wants to gamble too and blamed Alice Vavasour (poor Alice). Quiet prostitution within boarding houses to pay the rent is shown in Trollope’s Miss Mackenzie. How single women really got on.

Other novelists:

Oliphant’s Hester is about the workings of a business and family and thus how well the successful yet lonely, envied and somehwat isolated heroine by the end has handled debt (It reflects Oliphant’s successful career). Gwendolen marries Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda to avoid her mother going into debt; the novel opens with her learning how gambling will not do. In Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, the secondary heroine, Cynthia is hounded by Preston, a ruthless aggressive steward who sexually wants her (and now wants to be allied to her as her mother has married up by marrying Mr Gibson), Preston, I say, tortures her emotionally over a 20 pound debt and blackmailing letters to prove it; he wants to force her to marry him.

From opening shots of Daniel Deronda (director Tom Hooper, scripted by Andrew Davies): next to Gwendoleth an aging women’s bejewelled hands at the gambling table

And so much in Dickens, just to start: Little Dorrit. The Marshalsea prison. Mr and Mrs Merdle destroyed. Arthur Clenham thrown in jail near the end.

And who can forget:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure
nineteen pounds, nineteen six, result happiness. Annual
income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds,
ought and six, result misery. —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Debt does never seem to make anyone happy in Victorian novels. It does not make individual people happy in our own day, and that’s why the Republicans can manipulate the populace by arguing the state deficit must be brought down. Corporations are not people; nor are states. Deficits when the money brought in is used by gov’t to expand social services, building roads and schools, providing for lower interest rates really does provide more jobs and a better life for all. Ask Frau Frohmann how capitalism can work well.

Ellen

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The Rake’s Progress, Wolf Trap; Emilie, Lincoln Center, 2012

Hogarth, the first of 9 engravings, “The Heir”

Stravinsky, Auden, the last scene, “Madness”

Dear friends and readers,

In the last couple of days I’ve watched two operas based on 18th century sources: Kim Witman’s production of Igor Stravinsky & W. H. Auden’s adaptation of 9 engravings by Hogarth, The Rake’s Progress, as performed at Wolf Trap, this summer, and Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf’s Émilie as performed at the Spoleto Festival and Lincoln Center via DVD. Both productions took material very difficult to make appealing thematic dramatic narrative out of, and attempted to make the audience sympathize with the central characters.

The Wolf Trap Rake’s Progress was intended to be a companion piece to the Don Giovanni they did earlier this summer. As with the earlier production, Witman’s half-hour talk gave the game away. Again there was no mention of what the opera could mean, no attention to content.

When I watched the opera, I found the way the narrative developed gave us a story which stigmatized and made the women characters ridiculous and abject (in one case, that of the Baba the Turk, stupidly evil as well as physically distasteful) and we were (somewhat absurdly) asked to regard the wastrel drone upper class male at the center as earth-shakingly important. We are supposed to care whether this guy gambles, drinks, marries an (unacceptable) middle eastern-dressed prostitute, loses all his money. This is the later 1940s after a horrific war across the world. The fable lesson as presented reminded me of Orwell’s famous punitive story, Eric or Little by Little, maybe the 1790s Road to Ruin. Jim said you find no understanding sympathetic interest in women in Auden, and in the 1950s a retreat from politics for religion. There is a certain kind of misogyny and grotesque humor about sexuality typical of male homosexual work found in Auden. But Stravinsky presumably commissioned this libretto.

I was bored in the first act with its moralizing, irritated, grated upon in the second with its focus on an ugly over-sexualized orientalism. Behind me someone said how “hysterical” Margaret Gawryslak was — I’ve learned that is a ill-understood euphemism for expressing amusement at what makes you uncomfortable. The music and acting was distancing. The last act finally had some depth of feeling that was not controlled by puerile didacticism.

Jim said the opera was padded. There is just not enough narratable (capable of turning into a coherent story) material in the 9 engravings. I thought the hollow center of the opera came from the people doing it ignoring the content. The best thing about it was the costumes. Anne Truelove’s hair-do was 1940s big rolls on her head up front with longish page-boy length hair in a net; her clothes looked like an attempt at imitating 18th century clothes using a thrift shop. The chorus at one point were redolent of Guys and Dolls.

The performers were directed to present themselves as emblems: 2 of the young women had men’s suits on and 2 of the young men were in evening dresses, heavy make-up and high heels.

And what shall I say of a company run by three women (beyond Witman at the Barns there’s Beth Krynicki who is production stage manager) who twice this summer have given us productions which have no sense of real contemporary women’s lives or social types. Don Giovanni’s rapes were treated as trivial joking. Last summer they gave us a Goldoni play turned into an opera where we had these misunderstood men and harridans of women.

If next year Witman and company give us Cosi Fan Tutte with some other misogynistic story, I will begin to suspect there’s a hidden agenda at the Barns. Let’s do all we can to hide the reality the place is run by women. Let us not allow anyone to call our work typical of women’s art or point of view. I felt what I saw at the Barns this summer represented a lost opportunity and betrayal.

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Emilie: as opera opens she is writing and thinking

Her anguish as she contemplates coming childbirth

The opera takes place a few nights before Emilie du Chatelet went into labor; she died soon after and the child did not live much longer either. One reviewer insists the opera is about how biology is not destiny; in fact it’s about how a woman’s body cut a young highly gifted woman off in her prime so she never achieved what she could have done — and not just mathematically. I was badly handicapped as I watched the DVD as it did not have subtitles, and the way it was filmed kept the singer at a distance from the viewer. There were too many candles and mirrors and gauzy curtains in the way — though I liked the triangles.

So, I’ll be brief. In a nutshell, we see an adult sensibility of someone who was aware that many people didn’t believe in a traditional life after death facing death. We see her remember her ambiguous experiences across a lifetime. The emphasis on her beauty and gifts was strong and I thought the point of piece was to say, here is this extraordinarily gifted woman just thrown away because she was pregnant, so as to make us think of all the women over the ages similarly wasted and themselves put through agons.

Repeatedly I’ve seen eighteenth-century material not lend itself to the conventional so-called realistic or naturalistic narrative which 19th century operas thrive on. But Emilie’s story could have been treated this way. I’m not sure I would not have preferred to see her coerced marriage, her complicated attempts to become educated mathematically and achieve respect and position, her love affairs, her relationship with Voltaire and then this final scene. She was turned into a passionately enthralled heroine, especially when she seemed to be remembering Saint-Lambert.

For the English reader the books to read about Emilie are Judith Zinsser’s Dame d’Esprit: A Biography of the Marquise du Chatelet and David Bodanis’s Passionate Minds: The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment. I found Elisabeth Badinter’s Émilie, Émilie, L’ambition féminine au XVIIIe siècle (the other Emilie is D’Epinay) which presents Emilie as an aspiring scientist persuasive.

Surrounded by scientific objects and instruments

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To conclude, I cannot say I liked the music of either opera; they were not lyrical, nor was there a warm feel to vocal sounds. Rake’s Progress was well sung, especially by Anne Trulove (Corinne Winters) and Nick’s Shadow (Craig Coldough as the tempter devil at Rakewell’s ears). Elizabeth Futal as Emilie was far more moving; we knew she had been a real person who had really died in Voltaire’s estate of a dread pregnancy gone wrong. Her case was treated as an adult experience not a punishment); it was a sung one-woman play, raw in tone.

Emilie is the fragile presence with fleeting knowledge seeking to understand life; like Theodore Adorno I found The Rake’s Progress coming at experience from an unreal wrong direction.

And so our summer theater going for this year has come to an end.

Ellen

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In which I respond to Kamilla Elliot’s review of Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation

Dear friends and readers,

Not only is “Intertextuality in Simon Raven’s The Pallisers and Other Trollope Films” published, but the volume in which it occurs, Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation, edd. Abigail Burnham Bloom and Mary Sanders Pollock, introd. Thomas Leitch has been reviewed by Kamilla Elliot in the online academic review journal, Review 19. While Elliot’s review justifiably critiques aspects of the volume, she signals out mine and one other, Gene M. Moore’s “Making Private Scenes Public: Conrad’s “Return” and Chereau’s Gabrielle (see my analysis in another blog), as superior, the best in the volume:

Welcoming theoretical and methodological variety, I find value in older approaches, especially when–as in the essays by Gene M. Moore and Ellen Moody–they rest on a substantial body of scholarship and research

Some of Elliot’s criticism of the volume derive from her strongly theoretical, post-modern point of view (see her Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate). I liked her suggestion that I should or could “step back from [my] meticulous microanalyses of screenplays to present a broader perspective of how screenplays mediate between literature and film?” I shall keep this kind of comment in mind when I return to my book, A Place of Refuge: A study of the Sense and Sensibility films (working title).

But I should say (and I think this an important point, fundamental even) that I disagree with her main perspective: insofar as the essays in Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation use a high amount of theoretical (packed) language and jump from general statement to general statement they lack content, and are insufficiently descriptive of their subject matter and convey less information and insight about their chosen films and books.

William Powell Firth (1891-1909), (monumental) The Railway Station (1862)

So, speaking plainly, for those interested in Victorian/Edwardian films, the volume contains 2 essays whose subject matter is Jane Austen films (arguably Victorian in the way the novels are treated); one on the generation of Jekyll and Hyde films (Leitch); one on Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (partly out of Wilde’s play); Dickens’s Christmas Carol; one on Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, an adaptation of Russell Banks’s novel, using, as does Egoyan, Browning “The Pied Piper” as an intermediary text (a superbly insightful essay by Mary Sanders Pollock); one on Kubrick’s adaptation of Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon (another genuinely enlightening informative one by Louise McDonald); one on several versions of Dracula, one on the 1939 Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films compared to recent analogous and free adaptations, and mine on Trollope whose original more accurate and grammatically sound title was “Trollope on Television: Intertextuality in the Pallisers and other Trollope films:” it focuses on Raven’s Pallisers (and two other of Raven’s mini-series as intermediary texts), but also covers Plater’s Barchester Chronicles, and uses aspects of Herbert Herbert’s Malachi’s Cove, and Andrew Davies’s The Way We Live Now and He Knew He Was Right, to suggest how centrally Raven’s perspective on Trollope has influenced those films made after his (recently in reaction against).

Elliot said she didn’t understand the three major divisions of the volume. The third follows its subtitle: “Teaching Books by Reading Movies.” The three essays tell of how the writers as teachers use film and they make concrete useful suggestions for those embarking on such teaching. Read the screenplay with the students (emphasize intermediary texts), concentrate on the beginnings and endings of films (often different from the originating book), multiple versions or films of the same story unmoors students front their tenacious adherence to the originating text as a primary standard. The second part (in which my essay appears) had essays which focus on the alteration of values in the content of book and films, but it is true that the third essay on the first part (on Dickens’s Christmas Carol) locates the persistence of the story in its content of the retrievable, rejuvenation, generosity, charitableness. The first part is supposed to be about filmic-techniques, tropes, typical procedures, the exploitation of at least generally favored paradigms and myth. Jean-Marie Lecomte’s on Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan is about technique, and Thomas Leitch’s on the many Jekyll, Hydes on the necessity to develop some understood relationship between source or eponymous text, film, and intervening film and verbal texts.

John Malkovich as Hyde (1996 Mary Reilly, an adaptation of RLStevenson’s novel & Valerie Martin’s novels of the same name)

Julia Roberts as Mary Reilly (the film includes as intertexts Victorian painting, Orson Welles’s Moby Dick, Dracula films et alia

It’s hard to differentiate theme from form. My essay covers both aspects of film adaptation of texts found to be centrally meaningful since their first reception as books. I argue that the Pallisers was an important noticed sociological event (year-long) which fixed Trollope in the TV public mind as a paternalistic Tory (like his hero, the liberal whig politician Duke of Omnium), and that in these “Raven’s scripts shape Trollope’s novels into a filmic, disillusioned political vision, which justifies patriarchy in an ameriorated inegalitarian society, itself dependent on the self-erasure of women whose emotional and social support is needed to sustain it.” I also argue that Herbert’s and Davies’s films turn Trollope’s texts into critical exposures of Victorian systems of privilege, and replace Raven’s cynical Tory Trollope with a humane, liberal Trollope, partly in reaction to Raven’s characters (who differ considerably from Trollope’s). But to show this I compare texts from Trollope’s Phineas Redux with Pallisers 8:15 and 8:16:

Lady Glencora Palliser (Susan Hampshire, 8:15, see also Mid-point)

From the Duchess’s dinner-party (8:16)

and bring in Raven’s previous film adaptations (Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson, The Blackheath Poisonings). In moving onto the recent films have to take into considerable that recent film adaptations do not conceive the material as filmed stage plays, but sequences of juxtaposed stills, and I compare the wistful feminism of Susan Hampshire as Signora Neroni in Plater’s Barsetshire with Trollope’s desperate unscrupulous Signora.

Signora Neroni (Susan Hampshire), melancholy, disillusioned (1982 BBC Barchester Chronicles)

Intertexual texts for Davies are films as much as books. Davies’ hero, Paul Montague in The Way we Live Now, refuses to treat the heroines as of right the natural property of the older males; Davies’ depiction of the Jewish themes of Trollope’s book exposes the bigotry of the hypocritical upper class English in their anti-semitism by taking one of Trollope’s inset epistolary correspondences and turning it into dramatic scenes of great power.

Davies’s 2001 The Way We Live Now: Georgiana (Anne-Marie Duff) treats the noble if Jewish Breghert (Jim Carter) in the most insulting inhumane terms

My view is a close comparative analysis which does not privilege the eponymous book or previous incarnations of it in films but includes these and the screenplay, and whatever other source and intermediate texts a film-maker necessarily must form the basis of any understanding of a film and its sources. I suggest that theoretical language is more than a blight linguistically; it can be a substitute for the hard work of close reading and a thorough grounding in the history of the era the eponymous book was written in, the era the movie is made in, its genre and all the work the film-makers (including production design and actors) did in other films. Elliot complains in her review of several “thin” and under-researched essays. The person spent all his or her time (maybe not a lot) on reading and writing these sentences of sometimes impossible to decipher packed theory.

Donald Pleasaunce as Malachi and Veronica Quilligan as his grand-daughter, Mally (Herbert has in mind previous Cornish films’ motifs, 1974 Malachi’s Cove)

Well enough. I won’t summarize my colleagues work nor go more into the details of mine. Much is on the Net in even more “meticulous microanalysis” than is permitted in a published book.

I am chuffed and proud to see my work in the same volume as that of Thomas Leitch whose Film Adaptation and Its Discontents has long been one of the books I keep on my library table near my desk and who I corresponded with by email during the time of the book’s making, shared work with and was very generous to me.

Rev Gibson (David Tennant) trying to evade Arabella French (Fenella Woolgar) (from one of Marcus Stone’s original illustrations to Trollope’s HKHWR)

Ellen

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Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels

Paul Montague (Cilian Murphy) and Mrs Hurtle (Mirando Otto) at Lowestoffe based on one of the original illustrations (2001 BBC/WGGH The Way We Live Now, script Andrew Davies)

Dear Friends and Readers,

More than five years after we had our first Trollope conference in 25 years (!); thirteen months after sending off my review of the above book which contains 15 of the 40 essays given at said conference, and making 2 blogs of my summaries and evaluations; and six months after it appeared in Nineteenth Century Contexts, I finally put the review itself on my website.

Whew!

Mr Gilson (David Tennant) edging away from Arabella French (Fenella Woolgar), also based on original illustrations (2004 BBC/WBGH He Knew He Was Right, script Andrew Davies, director Tom Vaughn)

Ellen

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Two new blogs — or old blogs moved and re-conceived

Helen McNicholl (1879-1915), In the Shade of the Tent (1914)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been meaning to tell people who come here that I’ve moved and changed my other blog and invented a third.

First, I moved my Reveries under the Sign of Austen to wordpress. This is a more appropriate space, as many blogs here have themes and are essay-like, and people can subscribe to this blog, but I moved because I became unable to cope with the constant disappearance of livejournal and the freakish working of their software as it was attacked repeatedly this summer.

So here’s an explanation why I moved it and that it is really a continuation of the old blog, with the difference I’ll try to keep on (however widely conceived) topic:

A Continuation

And two first typical blogs:

Women’s friendships and the gothic in Davies’s Northanger Abbey films

Jane Austen’s Letters: Letter 35, Tues-Wed, 5-6 May 1801, from the Paragon

The space in which my older Austen Reveries blog lived (so to speak) is now a blog meant to be personal, autobiographical, seasonal: Under the Sign of Sylvia. My gravator or icon is now Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane. I first explained my pseudonym once again: Why Sylvia. Then I wrote a new blog in the new style intended, it’s about a central breakthrough in conception about myself I had this past year:

Upon realizing I have many Aspergers traits.

I used Nell Blaine’s Cookie Shop once before on this blog in an attempt to talk about myself and my conversion experience into feminism: This long morphing life so have used a different picture to capture a summer’s day (what it is as I type this) in a mode congenial to my own, an woman impressionist unfortunately not well-known, Helen McNicholl, In the Shade of the Tent (see above): one woman is reading, the other painting; I like to think they are friends and wish the image had come out with a little less yellow.

Now this blog will be for Everything Else! and I conclude with Claire Genoux’s Saisons du corps as translated by Ellen Hinsey, New European Poets, Miller & Prufer eds.

If I had loved better
these days with their good smell of bark
these copper twilights
the mountains exposing their toothless jaws
if I had walked more upright
along trails that lead toward dawn
where faith shelters us from doubts and time

if I had known how to savor the full laugh
of the river that rocks in its fleece of leaves
my head held to the trunk’s pillow
my cheek cast amidst thyme
if I hadn’t fled like a coward to the back streets
and believed in the false lights of the city
in its burning waltz of noise

perhaps I wouldn’t–stumbling
rake my wooden head against the walls of night

The French original:

J’accepte Vie d’être votre hôte
de manger votre terre jusqu’à l’indigestion
de boire dans vos gobelets de craie
la lumière cachée des saisons le miel refroidi de vos fleurs
et mille liqueurs grossières

vous voyez j’obéis
les os bougent parfaitement dans le cuir de ma peau
et je colle mon ventre au ventre des hommes
j’obéis même si je me mouche dans votre nappe
que je crache dans vos plats

quand j’aurai bien ri bien usé la corne de mon cœur
j’accepte oui l’effroi
docilement dissoudre ma détresse de cadavre
mais durant cette sieste
enrobée dans votre drap de ravines
mon ventre bombé contre le ventre de la terre
que je jouisse de vos rêves de lait et d’astres
que tous ces repas de fortune pris jadis à votre table
aient la légèreté sur mon crâne et l’ivresse folle
d’une petite neige de printemps

Go gentle reader into the world here, of lakes, of houses and the past hidden in the woods, and what lies all about.

John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-93), Evening, Knostop, Old Hall (1870)

Ellen

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Back to Trollope: A proposal on the story-telling art of the original illustrations

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

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Sarah Walters’s Tipping the Velvet: a sombre cheering book

Keeley Hawes as Kitty Butler and Rachael Stirling as Nan Astley, the failed couple (touching portrait photo)

Rachael Stirling as Nan Astley and Jodhi May as Florence Banner the successful couple (concluding scene of Tipping the Velvet)

Dear friends and readers,

I began reading Sarah Walters’s Tipping the Velvet as part of my project studying Andrew Davies’s movies. It’s the source text for one of his delightful transgressive mini-series. I had written about this wonderful novel briefly with two others on my Reveries under the Sign of Austen blog, but have revised the blog to make it about just two of Davies’s highly unusual heroine’s text romances: Wilderness and Harnessing Peacocks. Tbis blog is a genuine summary and review of just Tipping the Velvet, film and book.

Sarah Waters shows the real harm our present sexual and social arrangements cause. We experience how repression of the full panoply of sexual instincts by ostracizing people can cause. It reveals how terrible in the cost of so many lives ruined, lost, given no chance by an utterly unequal and wasteful distribution of the wealth. The costume drama is a masquerade to speaking to the reader about today.

Central to this novel is that lesbian relationships are not acceptable. Early in the book Alice, Nan’s sister turns from Nan absolutely, with repugnance, disgust: very painful even if presented in the airy manner of relatively careless youth and innocence in the novel’s early scenes. Her family has no place for her to live out her true decent emotional life. I note that Nan does not dwell on this. She could have but this kind of ceaseless pain is omitted. Simply, she finds she cannot go home again. The extent to which she drops her family may be seen in my not being able to remember her mother’s first name. This enables the book to seem jaunty and cheerful as she does not dwell on such pain and exclusion but the book reveals the effects of this. That is in effect the story.

A moment from Kitty and Nan’s act

Further, it ends in pity. What broke our two loving heroines up, Kitty and Nan up, was Kitty’s understandable fear of the being rejected and jeered at and ending up without employment or beaten up as “Tom.” Kitty’s willingness to live an utterly compromised life (have sex with a man, be married to a man) is not what Nan can do. And Kitty is left to live alone, a fake life.

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Keeley Hawes as Kitty Butler with Nan: meeting in Nan’s room at Whitstable Oyster house

Part 1, Chapters 1-7:

Waters’s is just such a wonderful book. It’s the tone that makes it. Maybe I expected alienation, melancholy, loneliness, indirect anger through paradox, many qualities I associate with lesbian fiction. But no. It’s totally frank and direct, warm, easy, comfortable with the self. The heroine writes in the first person; it makes her unhappy that she must hide her sexuality and it would not be accepted by her family, is not by her sister, but other than that the prejudice of others does not seem to seep into the text as deep unhappiness or duplicity or self-hatred at all. In Chapters 2-3, Nan becomes Kitty’s dresser and they move to London, where she meets Kitty’s promoter and patron, the enigmatic Mr Bliss (that’s not his “real” name we are told, nor is “Butler” Kitty’s real name) and the other theatrical members of the boarding house at Brixton. It’s just a joy to read because of the tone, but what happens is not such a joy. They are poor, so is Whitstable where the family survives by fishing and selling oysters in a cafe. Nan does not dare approach Kitty for sex.

It’s refreshing and real.

It must be that there is not much happening and we are mostly in Nan our heroine’s mind as she goes out after her job as oyster girl in the evening first to the theater night after night, is noticed by Kitty Butler, invited in, becomes her unofficial dressed, and then takes her home for a visit and is finally herself invited to accompany Kitty to London. Davies gets all the action in thus far and that’s remarkable since this is a nearly 500 page book and the mini-series but 3 episodes.

Nan moves to London with Kitty; she meets the enigmatic Mr Bliss (that’s not his “real” name we are told, nor is “Butler” Kitty’s real name) and the other theatrical members of the boarding house at Brixton. After Nan joins Kitty on stage, the nature or feel of their act becomes more obvious, and one night in a moment of high success they are heckled and booed as “Toms!”

This seems to unnerve and terrify Kitty and she falls back on Walter Bliss, but he retreats and Kitty and Nan move from their boarding house to a more overtly respectable place, Stamford. They are a commercial success and are taken in by a pantomime company and there are just wonderful descriptions of Christmas pantomime with much insight into why they gratify adults as well as children. There are ominous notes about how Nan doesn’t know what is in Kitty’s mind, that despite their active love affair, Nan is lonely and she determines to visit home — Antaeus to the earth. Kitty will not go with her.

In the film adaptation, when Nan returns to Kitty, she has a harsh shock and surprise.

Usually I don’t like picaresque fictions and this is one. One sign of this is the introduction of new characters casually with little introspection. So for example, on p 149 Nan suddenly elaborates on her and Kitty’s dresser, Flora and Flora’s boyfriend, a young black man, Albert called “Billy-boy.” How discovering he has no talent for singing, he lives by hanging on, then becoming a tech person, all the while soaking up and enjoying the atmosphere and pleasures. Nothing within. My guess is that it’s because the narrative is so suffused with Nan’s subjective presence, and we are led (I am) to like her, I don’t mind the lack of introspection. This lack helps the optimistic kindly tone too — it does not seem that improbable since as we go we see pictures of much poverty, hard times, making do, and all from the outside, the stage, not at home or in the separate rooms people go to. A sweet Cabaret is what we have thus far.

And while the Tipping the Velvet mini-series is not given much praise by Cardwell, said to be crude or over-done, this not true at all. It’s delicate and has the same kinds of rhythms and scenes as other of his classic film adaptations. I found I could not get on with the film adaptation of Michel Faber’s Crimston Petal and White — not because it was not interesting — but because it’s done in this epitomizing packed-in style where you really have to have read the book to understand the movie. So I put the film aside (Jim downloaded it for me).

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The heroine has become Nan King, a meditative moment

Part 2, Chapters 8-11

So Nan goes home and does not fit in at all. Her presents are not appreciated, and her family does not rejoice in her successes at all. Indeed she does not tell them for they do not seem to want to know. Only questions are for things like, has Kitty as suitor yet? She returns to find Kitty and Walter in bed with one another.

Here I found the first real change in Davies. First Kitty goes home with Nan and so much of the discomfort is not seen. Thus Davies softens considerably the effect and it is not about how one can’t go home again. Second when Nan catches Kitty and Walter in the book, Nan becomes violent. She bites Kitty, she becomes frantic and uses frank language of sexuality and is mocked by Walter as incapable of what she claims she did. (I’m now avoiding some words lest it be picked up by Yahoo’s vigilant software eager to sell porn ads.) In Davies there is no violence in Nan, no ugly language, no accusations. In the film Walter does not (as in the book) rush in and protect Kitty; it’s merely that Kitty prefers him. In the film Kitty seems more powerful but the whole sense of the scene’s passion is muted plus Kitty’s real reason which is to be conventional and safe.

All the dislike of Nan’s sexual orientation and how it does not fit in and causes this break is basically muted in the film.

I am puzzled by the next chapter (9). In film and book why does Nan not go back and get her suitcase of clothes and her money? She does take some of her earnings she finds in the theater, but most of it was in their flat. I can understand she becomes deeply depressed, goes and lives in the cheapest ugly place she can, avoids going out for a long time until her money is near run out but it’s just too destructive to not bring with her her larger earnings and woman’s clothes. Yes Kitty and Walter would see her, but so what? They would not prevent her from taking what was hers. Yes she does dislike being a woman, but she appears to the new landlady is bedraggled women’s things and she needs them.

Still the narrative follows the mini-series more of less. Now Nan is a “renter” on the streets, but we have more broad comedy of a Victorian grotesque type for she is taken in by two “simple” women who don’t know enough of broader life to work out quite what she does for a living and are glad of her company and money. I’m sorry Davies omitted this pair, and they are a rewrite of Victorian types in fiction

Portrait photo

The tone is probably unreal. We are expected to believe that this narrator can live on the streets in this way, service men in these degrading ways and remain cheerful. She also remains singularly upbeat up. She would have been beaten badly by this time I suspect tor been in ugly brawls. She’d drink more. But I admit it is the tone that makes the book such a delight. It reminds me of say Henry Fielding in his broad expansive acceptance of realities.

This is such a wish-fulfillment narrative and so strange to be one. It’s about this woman who falls to be a male prostitute doing the most degrading things; she lives with two desperately poor simple women. I think Davies chose to film it because he loves really odd stories that break taboos. We then (as in the film) get Nan meeting Florence. Florence is home-y, chunky, a social worker and they are attracted at first sight — across the way window to terrace and then while walking. (In the film the child is a baby her brother took in; in the book she comes and cares for other families and places them in decent housing when she can.) Then she is snatched up by the cruel selfish wealthy woman in the carriage (played by Anna Chancellor who is type cast this way — from Miss Bingley on) who startles Nan because she is a woman. That was where Nan was vulnerable: the chink in the armor was the unexpected woman. She was prepared for bad and violent and lying men.

Anna Chancellor as Diana with Nan dressed up as a Ganymede

Chapter 11 is a raw frank chapter. The descriptions of sex between the wealthy hard upper class exploitative Diana Lethaby (lethal is the allegory) are startling to me. Not lasciviously done, not prurient but graphic. For once Davies somewhat mutes his source. It’s clear too that Blake (played by Sally Hawkins in the film) is exploited as is Nan. Nan just gives herself over meekly. She also bids adieu to Grace and Mrs Milne. It’s a sad scene her deserting them. She also forgets her appointment with Florence. In the film she flees a restaurant she was in with Florence; this has less excuse. She is not frightened, guilty, uncomfortable, just forgets.

The point is really the desperation of everyone in this era for any chance at money or a comfortable life style.

Nan is startled at the artificial quiet of rich people’s neighborhoods. She has never experienced this before. The outward stateliness of money and its ruthless use by those who have it of those who don’t is before us. She is herself though becoming a worse person, becoming a thing too.

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A street scene

Part 2, Chapters 12-14

When Nan as an impoverished street walker is picked up by the wealthy lesbian Diane Lethaby (the allegory stands for lethal), and brought to live with her in her mansion, Nan allows herself to be turned into a degraded toy. She is in effect owned by Diana, body and therefore soul. Lines show her like Lydia Bennet so thrilled with gifts, really toys, like her new watch, only this fiction shows us how painfully pathetic this is. We also get lines from Nan: as when she is paraded before Diana’s friends: “when I twitched and cried out there were smiles in the shadows; and when I shuddered, and wept, there was laughter” (p. 281). Nan loses all sense of time, space, as she is a kept enclosed despised thing.

Throughout the novel (as I said in my Reveries blog), Walters as Nan our narrator maintains this paradoxical cheerful or quietly sustained endurance tone, no matter how ugly or dangerous or foul her circumstances are (like when she works as a male prostitute in the streets). But now that Nancy has become Diana Lethaway’s doll gradually we see that the way Nan has gotten through life is somehow to anaesthetize herself, to cut herself off from real feelings. I asked why did Nan run away from Kitty and Walter that morning she caught them in bed without returning for her things at a minimum, and more money.

At last we are enabled to see it: for her birthday Diana dresses her up real fancy and takes her with a friend and the friend’s toy-woman-as-boy to the opera, and there Nan comes across for the first time in more than year someone from her old life. She breaks down completely. Her heart and pride can bear it no longer. And we hear of how it was intense paralyzed distress so great that kept her away from even those parts of London where she thought she might hear of Kitty.

Nan infuriates Diane by standing and talking to this friend. Then when she’s marched to her seat, she can’t stand the opera. I confess sometimes I dislike operas intensely too: people shrieking on stage, the antics often in the worst of taste (as in Mozart where the countess and her maid force the young boy page
into a frock and lock him into a closet – har har), and Nan flees (p. 291). She has been just such another object for too long. She has heard where Kitty is playing and gets herself there. And what does she see? Kitty is dressed as a boy, the child of Walter on stage who comes up to him suppliant like and plays to his wagging fingers like a dog. The audience likes this precisely because of
the humiliation implied too. Nan is sickened for her friend even if the friend doesn’t have the understanding and flees the theater.

It reminded me that this is what the world pays for. On TV reality shows. What are Kitty and Nan to do? Florence was a social worker living very meagerly and she is too plain to take Kitty and Nan’s options anyway. (Harnessing Peacocks for all its shallowness shows us a woman driven to prostitution, being
someone’s companion and cook in our era of joblessness.)

At last Waters has not been able to avoid it. She does not use anxiety as a tool to make us read on — which considering the desperate destitute straits to which Nan is reduced one would think she would. Or violence — as yet anyway. Rather desperation is the key motif.

Zena Blake (Sally Hawkins) appears to be assuaging loneliness in Nan’s kind arms

What happens is Nan becomes momentarily allied to Blake, the young maid in the house who is also sexually exploited. As in the film, Blake (played by Sally Hawkins) was rescued from an orphanage-reformatory and the way Diana bullies and terrifies her into obedience is to threaten to take her there. Comforting one another in part, Blake and Nan go to bed together, Diane catches them, and insane more with their defiance of her power than even her jealousy, she puts them back in the meager outfits she
picked them up in, and throws them out.

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Nan and Florence begin to talk

Part 3, Chapter 15

Book 3 opens with them in the streets, no friends, no money, no where to turn. Something that could easily happen to women then.

Davies’s film omits Waters’s insightful horrified apprehension of how the women (and vulnerable people generally) are driven to degrade themselves to please a crowd and sell widely, but this more mainstream kind of critique of out society is there in spades in the film. They are show utterly destitute and clinging to one another in a filthy bed in a street hovel.

I became gripped by the book and couldn’t put it down, read
into late in the night steadily on and on (this is not a short book, these are not short chapters). Over on Eighteenth Century Worlds at Yahoo, I’d been saying that historical novels allow novelists to delve very uncomfortable material directly through the disguise of costume and analogous events.

Well as I read this one I thought about being homeless, I thought about destitution in our world There’s a sequence in Jane Eyre about this, when she flees Thornton Hall and it’s no coincidence the latest Jane Eyre film begins there and keeps coming back to Jane’s experiences of rejection, freezing, danger, hunger, a desperate hunt for someone to help her.

As in the film Blake (Zena is her first name) betrays Nan by stealing what money they have and fleeing. Unlike the film Blake is intensely angry at Nan, scolds her, blames her, and we get more of a sense that the betrayal is also a (unjustified but understandable) revenge.

The film has skipped Nan’s time with Mrs Milne and Gracie (the mother with her simple daughter) so we don’t get her return there. That’s a loss as she is so desolate because these two women were disinterestedly kind.

She then seeks out Florence (Jodhi May). It’s not as improbable as it seems that she does find Florence’s flat finally; she had seen Florence before because Florence resides in the same area among the same type people but doing social work. As in the film at first Florence is very hard and rejects her in part – though takes her in. Nan wins her over gradually by cleaning, cooking, being so eager.

Ironing: how one looks the role one takes

The brother is kinder from the get-go, as intrasexual antagonism is real. It’s overcome we see by fondness in Florence which is beginning to surface.

An improbability which has continued throughout: beyond the one sharp hard hit by Diana, Nan experiences no other violence, not in the streets, no where. No rapes. I don’t believe this especially after two long bouts of being a male/female prostitute too. Plus she ought to have frozen to death or starved. She is too well by the time she reaches Florence at any rate.

But we must have some fairy tale, must we not? or we would not have a happy ending. Costume drama does avoid real life and coming this close is bad enough.

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At the Oyster Bar

Chaptera 17 – 18

The ending of Tipping the Velvet is upon me and what’s happened is Florence and Nan’s friendship and now near love liaison is flowering. They have gone to a bar filled with women couples, some dressed as men. Davies has this scene but he does not have Diana have a comeuppance which is unlikely. He also ends his series on a scene of Nan and Florence facing going home to Nan’s family. This is very good because this is hard. I can see that Waters’s does skip this and ends with a long conversation — a la Austen really — of Nan and Kitty talking where Kitty is trying to get Nan back. Austen often has a penultimate chapter with a long conversation between her heterosexual couple. Waters’s book seems to lack closure but the inconclusiveness and dialogue between Kitty and Nan brings us to a different aspect of what breaks women couples up.

While Davies does some things very right, he has to work within the limitations of his media: TV and a 3 part episode. Thus he does not do justice to the development of Nan’s relationship with Florence. We see how individual and unexpected people are. On the one hand, once Florence realizes Nan is a “Tom”, she opens up to Nan and they become fervent and she a frank bold lover; on the other, Florence is a strongly ethical woman and dismayed at Nan’s street life, her year with Diana, her apparent desertion of her family (though that is understandable she says given their reaction to you). Florence remains a strong socialist and Nan gets caught up in intense continual networking duties: the house becomes shabby again and Ralph (dear Ralph, so like men in many women’s novels, the sensitive brother type, no violent there) sweats away at his speech.

The treatment of the women by the men on the streets comes home to a modern woman reader — reminding me of the news-stories we’ve lately had and my own experiences. Historical fiction speaks to us today.

I know a meeting with Kitty is in the wings and know Nan turns her down. I’m glad I do or I’d be so anxious over it, for Waters had made Nan less than moral, capable of leaving the deep feeling Florence even now.

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In the night

Chapter 19

I finished this one last night and the conclusion got me to thinking what we differently mean by “comfort” book. I think the phrase must be so individual, for what one person derives from a book that comforts them must be from their own life.

It ends with Kitty coming over to see Nan at the desk at the labor party gala and festival which is so successful. Ralph does not quite make his speech without much help from Nan, but then he does and I believe fervently the speech on behalf of socialism is intended for us today — we can only be happy as a people across the board if we have safety and justice and decent opportunity for all. It’s a clarion call. Of course I liked this and like the book for this shaping perspective throughout (as I do Graham’s Poldark books).

Then we drop to Kitty suddenly appearing and asking an to return to their life together, said that Nan knows she loves Kitty more than she does Florence — and love here means sexual attraction, having sex too, as well as deep memories of a first experience, of leaving home and their first times on the stage together Kitty says to Nan you know you don’t really believe in these politics, you care for individuals and your mind runs on particulars and pleasure. But it would mean including Walter and also living a half-lie for that’s what Kitty would want. Not that Florence and Nan are all that open but there is something craven and shamed about Kitty’s approach that Nan can’t bear. Nan refuses Kitty and turns back to Florence.

Florence is half-bitter and asks Nan, why she did not go with Kitty. Florence too asserts that Nan loves Kitty more. It’s in Nan’s response that my comfort came. Nan says because this is my home now. You are my family now, you and Ralph. You are decent good people who took me in, and I do love you much much more. Nan says Kitty’s behavior and the time lapsed have killed her love. This tender place is where I can be me and live as me. Nan then says she knows she’s not Lily, not earnest, doesn’t care about polticis all that much. And Florence replies in kind, that she’s been missing Lily for so many years, it got in the way of seeing Nan.

The baby is there, they hear the cheers from the audience inside the tent with Ralph and the sun casts it shadow and day and novel come to an end.

Ellen

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An Andrew Davies Interlude: Satiric, Erotic and Social Vision Films

Susannah Harker as Mattie Storin (1991 House of Cards)

Dear friends and readers,

As I wrote about 10 days ago, I have returned to my project and Austen movies book, and have determined to have a two part chapter on Andrew Davies Austen films. The first will be an interlude in Part Two, itself on the Sense and Sensibility films, “A Place of Refuge,” thus far 5 chapters. The interlude will be on Davies’s Austen films in the context of Davies’s oeuvre and it’ll be followed by the 6th and final chapter of the part: contextualizing Davies, Pivcevic and John Alexander’s 2008 JA’s S&S by the other S&S films and what I can discern of Pivcevic and Alexander’s work.

To do this I’ve been re-looking at all my notes, my blogs, re-watching some of the Davies’s films I had seen and watching a few lesser known new ones, especially those in a different genre, with a larger social vision, not romance films so much as politically and socially critical (or broadly aware) ones. I’m trying to see what really unites all these films. I find Cardwell’s division of Davies’s work into 1) films based on classic famous books and 2) films based on hardly known, semi- or popular classics obscures important qualities which the films share when you re-group them in other ways. My argument will be that Davies’s films are better seen as belonging to a genre, after that against their specific eponymous book, and only after that whether it’s a classic or non-classic book. It does matter if the book has a cult following; then he dare not alter the matter too much, but many classic books are not well remembered by the few readers who have read them anyway.

I also want to disagree with Sarah Cardwell’s book on Davies, or, to put it another way, qualify what she has to say by showing that Davies’s films are far darker and more pessimistic than she concedes, that they delve into the question of human and social evil, are sceptical, show a fascination with cruel sociopaths, and persistently present homoerotic couples and sex, as part of the subversion of the repressive unreal norms he finds so pernicious of enjoyment, happiness, fulfillment.

In my first blog on Davies this summer, I summarized what I had been watching since April and my findings on these, concentrating first on the romance visions (1983 Diana out of R. F. Delderfeld, 2007 Room with a View out of E. M. Forster. Then I had a brief excursis on Davies’s Tailor Panama where he is deliberately marginalized in the credits though it’s clear he wrote the script out of John LeCarre’s novel as it has all his trademarks, including a homoerotic couple at the center:

Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush) and Andy Osnard (Pierre Brosnan) (2001 Tailor of Panama)

Finally I discerned a pattern that many of Davies’s films of social vision share with other of these Anglo- film adaptations: a young man of a lower class finds himself invited to become or forced to appear more upper class, is brought to a huge rich house where he is at first uncomfortable and then taken in, though only for a time. To Davies’s three I described there (Diana, Tailor of Panama, Line of Beauty), I want tonigh to add a few notes about on a remarkable chilling dark romance or highly erotic film, the 2009 Sleep with Me (adapted from Joanna Briscoe’s novel) and Davies’s remarkable trilogy of mini-series (4 parts each) Davies adapted from Michael Dobbs’s political thriller novels, House of Cards, To Play the King, The Final Cut.

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Lelia (Jodhi May) and Sylvie (Anamaria Marinca), the transgressive homoerotic couple in Sleep with Me

Andrew Davies and his film-making team concoct a powerful chilling movie out of Joanna Briscoe’s poor novel. Brisoe equates contemporaneity with crudity in gesture; a deliberately hard demotic style is cultivated. She is in no danger of any accusation of oversensitivity in nuances — though her conception of her characters and her fable feels compelling at first: it seems a young couple are gradually infiltrated by a quietly menacing ghost who sends the husband emails about her abject life with her mother.

Davies’s Sleep with Me is another of this type he did with Elizabeth Janeway Howard’s Falling — and also his re-do of Shakespeare’s Othello.

What all these movies do is concentrate on some character who others would call evil or “sick” and dismiss them, and show them to be very dangerous, someone the healthy and vulnerable must keep away from, but someone who is ill, really emotionally ill. In the case of Sleep with Me Davies has forayed into the area of the gothic — which the book does — to come up with Sylvie (Anamaria Marinca), a scary, creeply kind of character who we are asked to believe murdered her brother when the brother was a baby out of jealousy and now lives a socially isolated life (in part) and preys on others to wreak and destroy their relationships.

Sylvie and Richard (Adrian Lester)

It’s the ghostly and vampiric character of Sylvie that endows the film with its gothic mood and perspective.

One review rightly says that the film (and book too) delves into sexuality. Davies makes clear the most uncomfortable kinds of sexual experience people rarely admit to in front of themselves, much less talk about or enact even on stage.

For my part I found myself wondering (I’ll sound Victorian here) if this movie is not more unhealthy, far more than say The Piano Teacher. I wrote that that one was not pornographic and all that happened was justified as good insight into human character. I think I absolved that film of pornography because by the end I felt I had been given genuine ethical compass and help by the end of the film. At the end of Sleep with Me there was a justification of the cruelty and demand that we sympathize with the cruel person and respect the kind of sex she led others into (the type that can form dependency) that made me feel if this isn’t pornographic (it wasn’t, it was inhibited in the presentation), Sleep with Me did justify the basis of pornography, infliction of violence and cruelty by saying it’s just the result of someone’s emotional illness and so therefore somehow okay plus nothing we can do anything about. That may be true. If so, the world’s a dangerous place — gothic in fact.

Jodhi May had decided for this one (apparently), as Lelia, a young woman living with a black partner, Richard (Adrian Lester), she needed to appear young, and she had lost a lot of weight for this one. I almost didn’t recognize her at moments … well, only almost.

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Roger O’Neill (Miles Anderson) visits Francis Urquhart (Ian Richardson)

I was startled at House of Cards: it’s a fantasy, really over the top theatrics; the victim at the end is the reporter, Mattie, played wonderfully well by Susannah Harker. What was superb about this film was Davies’ connection with the Iago/Richard III/Macbeth Francis Urquhart played inimitably, unforgettably by Ian Richardson — and also with the victims: either the pathos of the alcoholic blackmailed weakling O’Neill, the man who can’t cope with the world (every family has one says the prime minister) and Davies’s insight that it’s because the man is a genuinely good and feelingful person he can’t make it, and Mattie Storin the girl who is led by the allurement and glamor of power to her destruction.

For me it’s particularly telling to see Davies insist that Mattie related to FU as her “Daddy”

Mattie offering herself to Urquhart (later as Daddy)

for this queasy incestuous motif is one Davies’s insists on, builds up in his 1996 BBC Emma

In the case of the first book, Dobbs had killed off the villain-hero, Richard III-Macbeth type (in Davies) Francis Urquhart and let Mattie live triumphant (so good wins out). Davies reversed that and so left room for more sequels. Upon the success of the first mini-series, Dobbs wrote two more novels, doubtless with Davies’s in mind (the way Helen Fielding went on to write another Bridget Jones Diary book after the success of the Davies’ film).

All three (To Play the King and The Final Cut too) are right in Trollope’s vein of high politics exposed. They are yet braver because Trollope eschews all particular comment and refuses to present a clear case for liberal or reformist measures; indeed his rhetorical statements by the narrator are often pro-landlord, adamently pro-capitalist. Not Davies. He exposes the hypocrisy and nonsense of berating people for not doing hard work: there are no jobs to do hard work for. The series anticipates his South Riding in this way; the social engagement of South Riding resembles that of his Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. All these movies come together in themes, perspective, character types.

To Play the King is very pessimistic and yet we have an ideal king in the center. We see how easy it is to sneer and decry people who are “lazy” instead of showing that there the way to make useful work is spend money through taxes on social services, communities, and agencies to build an make better lives for those without power.

The king (Michael Kitchen) addressing the nation on TV

A feature in the second DVD for To Play the King shows the ludicrous response at the time by some pro-Royalist people: they were indignant that Davies dared to allude to Charles and Diana, and imbecillically leaped on a single line in the three mini-series to argue indignantly Davies had implied Charles regularly had prostitutes in his quarters. It shows their bad sordid dreams for it’s a real stretch of that line.

Francis Urquhart (Ian Richardson)

The third mini-series, Final Cut, is an astonishingly brave film. Like Trollope’s political books in the Pallisers, each one of the three books brings out another level or area of critique of the savagely unjust violent war we live in. Each novel and set of films seems to open another area of misery and corruption inflicted on people — so here in the last series, Final Cut, what’s exposed is the murderous personal ambition that fires all the lies and violence in colonialized areas. The realities behind the Falklands war is exposed absolutely.

We see many things Orwellian: how the rule of law is invoked when what is happening is brutal violence repressing the poor so that the natural resources of the place (Cyprus) may be milked by the rich in the UK and lucky in Cyprus. Among many small exposes, we see that the freedom of information act offers information as long as it does not give away what individuals did the horrors. So it keeps powerful individuals in the army and powerful gov’ts protected.

Davies beats out LeCarre for the clarity with which the political perspective is worked out and made insistent upon us.

Wonderfully witty and funny is Thatcher’s funeral. Davies was attacked for staging her funeral. It seems she was not dead yet. This is a satirist’s drive: Swift would imagine people dead who had not died and it made them nervous. As with To Play the King what was attacked openly showed idiots who didn’t get the point at all, not those who understood what was being exposed. How dare Davies not be respectful in the depiction of the funeral. It’s funny the stupidity of what people seize upon. Apparently the Thatcher funeral was not in the original book by Dobbs and he insisted on having his name taken off the credits if the film-makers went through with this. They did.

The technique of all three mini-series is to startle you. So Francis throws Mattie Storin off the roof, picks her up and hurls and with a loud thud she splatters all over a car. The body guard thug, Cordor (alluding to Cawdor in Shakespeare’s Macbeth), probable lover and sidekick of Elizabeth Urquhart (Diane Fletcher), Francis’s wife, blows up those who are going to inform the public that Francis killed Mattie — sudden firebomb cars. The Final Cut opens with Francis shooting his dog dead. It’s chilling. Of course the theme is he’s going to be killed or destroyed from old age. The series ended on a Hamlet note. Elizabeth, now emerging as a cool Lady Macbeth with a hired killer-thug, sees that Urquhart is a liability; has killed too, so instead of murdering those who know he murdered peasants in Cyprus ruthlessly and without cause, are not done away with. Urquhart is. And what happens? Makepeace (Paul Freeman) who had tried to act morally is put in charge, but we feel no longer will. He has the thugs working for him now.

A parallel is an incident the mini-series opens up with: thugs hitting the prime minster’s car. They are simply gunned down. When a cabinet minister asks for clarification in the report, he’s told more details can be had but the interpretation, that criminals in road rage were responsible and understandably kill, will remain the same.

So letting formation out does not help because power structuring remains the same.

Flaws: it’s all so individualized and we are made to believe only a few of these mafia type thugs kill We see British officers not wanting to murder children, wanting to do the right thing. So one could say see it’st he bad eggs that do this, not the nature of the nest and what happens to all the eggs in it.

Also again a woman is put at the center for a semi-sexual interest. It begins to be a cliche by the third time. Sex though is depicted so naturalistically I had to avert my eyes. Especially between older people. On the other hand by continually bringing back Mattie Storner’s story and death Davies makes us fear FU. We also have Nikolas Grace as a variant on the dependent aide — he’s a quiet gay type — the vulnerable male type from Nicholas Farrell as the King’s aide to Charles Collingride, the kind man:

Matty and Collingridge, a sense of their humanity strong here.

For the woman viewer and feminist reader it’s telling that all three films must have a scapegoat at the center who is either a woman the villain seduces & murders (or has murdered) or a gay (vulnerable male as a substitute.

I did find myself getting anxious for some of the characters in each program: Mattie and John (William Chubb), Makepeace, the Greek girl who is seeking to know who killed her brothers and where they are buried, lest FU (what a joke) kill them too. After all he has gotten away with much before. The power of fiction comes from our caring about the characters and I do in Davies’s films.

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To conclude: My days are adventures in following Andrew Davies. I was startled at the trilogy House of Cards/ToPlay the King/Final Cut. Great dark satire relevant to today because inbetween these he did the utopian Middlemarch. I can’t think of more different text-films. Today I’m reading another hard satire on wide ranges of society, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (Wilson) and am about to watch the movie for a second time.

Gerald Middleton (Richard Johnson) remembering: the film makes a social vision an introspective journey of a hurt mind (Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, Part 1)

My next Davies’ film blog will be on briefly on a few films again, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, Wilson’s novel as well as Davies’s film. And then I’ll move onto Sarah Water’s Tipping the Velvet and Affinity, Victorian lesbian novels – and Davies’s films once again (perhaps with his 2006 The Chatterley Affair).

Ellen

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