PCA/ACA: abortion & feminism today; Girls & West Wing; Bronte, an 18th century actress, Grimke’s Mara & the gothic

In 1939 Wuthering Heights: Geraldine Fitzgerald played Isabella Linton, but the film-makers did not have the interest, insight, or nerve to present the range of abuse we see in the book

Dear Friends and readers,

My third and final blog report from the PCA/ACA conference held here in DC. For the first, on serial storying and soap opera, see The Way We Watch TV Now).

Here are panels and papers on women’s issues (abortion, motherhood, careers), recent feminists (Vera Brittain), Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Ann Wrighten, an 18th century memoir of an actress who moved from London to the US, Angelina Weld Gimke’s radical novel, Mara Lena Dunham’s Girls and Aaron Sorkin’s TV show, West Wing. These discussions include the best and worst papers I heard.

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I begin with the women’s issues sessions.

The best and worst were seen as the conference began, Wednesday, 1:15 pm, in session called Motherhood/Fatherhood (1127). Vicki Toscano, a working lawyer, gave a superb paper on the current legal particulars of abortion law and controversy today. Popular anti-abortion propaganda are being transformed into (or regarded) as science and accepted as parts of laws. Anti-abortion laws increasingly exploit the post-modern idea that what is scientific fact is nothing more than culturally driven beliefs. At the core is the idea that a woman upon becoming pregnant, conceiving is a mother. Women are told lies that there is a risk of infertility and must be psychological damage is they have an abortion. The claim of a risk of breast cancer is untrue (and though she didn’t say it the same pattern of turning myth into science is seen in attempts to coerce women into breast-feeding). Explicit moral language is increasingly made part of laws.

Toscano began with Roe v Wade, 1973. The court found a fundamental right to privacy was violated when all abortion was illegal, but that in the case of pregnancy that right was not absolute. the 1st trimester there need be no regulations; during the 2nd trimester to protect women’s health you can regulate the procedure. Once the fetus can survive, is a baby in potentia (there is disagreement when precisely this is) then the state’s interest in saving the child can trump the mother’s desires. Increasingly then a woman has the right to an abortion only if her life is jeopardized: it seems the fetus feels pain at 30 weeks but machines can detect a heart-beat after a few weeks and if you multiply the fetus a thousand-fold you can make a woman feel there’s a baby there.

In Planned Parenthood versus Casey (1992), the court turned away from the fundamental right to privacy, and instead said a woman’s right to an abortion is part of he right to liberty; it becomes a 14th amendment issue. The decision did away with the three trimester turning points; now the state has the right to protect the unborn from the moment of conception as long as it’s not am undue burden on the mother. The court has never found any obstacle to be that substantial that it gets in the way. States began to express a preference for childbirth over abortion. The state can insist on teaching women about abortion; the limitation is the information must be truthful, not misleading, and relevant. For no other medical procedure is there this demand for a 24 hour waiting period while the woman is told information about their abortion.

Then in 2007 in Gonzales versus Carhart legislation outlawing partial birth abortion (intact D & E) was upheld. The law now had a constitutional obligation to intervene, with a concern for the fetus or baby’s life and no exception made for the woman’s health. Congress decided that if there is any serious health risk cited by anyone, that must be taken into account. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent said the court deprives women of information and the right to make an autonomous choice. The pro-act reasonings included the idea a woman’s place is in her home.

Most importantly what’s happened lately shows a disregard for the mother’s life and well-being, a preference to save or force a baby on a woman no matter if she risks in the process. Women are increasingly being put into jail as pregnancy is in effect criminalized (especially when a woman is unmarried). We are returning to attitudes that undergirded accusations of maternal infanticide.

Ellyn Lem and Timothy Dunn discussed Anne Marie Slaughter’s “why Women can’t have it all” as if for most women in the US having it all means high professional success and fulfilling family life (husband, children). They went over the Internet controversies, saw Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In as a reply. They really defended both books as serious discussions of women’s lives and conflicts, typical enough lives with admirable values that may be held up as examples.

No one can fault their ultimate general comment that the workplace must have central institutional change to allow women who want to to be part-time at home mothers or wives. But the relevant perspective was that of the tenured college teacher who is dissatisfied because she is not making a huge sum, or on a crucially powerful committee, or is guilty because she leaves her children with a nanny for long hours at a time. Most women make small salaries and must struggle to make ends meet together with their husbands; they have no hired help. Or they are the hired help. They get part-time wages for full-time work. No benefits. The sad value of this session was to see that in these books taken at face value, feminism has become a movement for the few women who can afford to hire other women to take care of their homes and children. Feminism also takes on board neoliberalism, and in Sandberg women urged to imitate the anti-social anti-caring characteristics of men in the workplace.

I offered the idea both texts are irrelevant to most women’s lives; that supposed re-structures of work-days leads to people becoming part-time employees and a plunge in salaries with no benefits. I did not say (as I do here) the whole discussion was in unacknowledged bad taste.

Vera Brittain later in life — she did in her memoirs also chronicle women’s lives in her fiction-memoirs

Liz Podniecks’ paper on Vera Brittain showed that Brittain challenged an attitude that said women must marry and have children to be fulfilled. Brittain was an outspoken pacificist and feminist who argued that women must be employed for money outside the home to be fully adult fulfilled women. In her Testament of Youth she exposed and denounced the barbarity and uselessness of patristic wars. She herself did marry, but kept her name (unusual for the time); Winifred Holtby lived with Brittain and Brittain’s husband and helped a series of hired nannies to take care of Vera’s children. In her writing Brittain continually attacked the “useless” woman, the woman who has nothing serious to do when her children go to school; they vicariously live through their children, are dependent. Once a woman has a good job and home she can stop over-emphasizing the importance of emotional relationships which are not central to the real business of life. They are (in truth) secondary to the way society is structured.

It may be true that some middle class women live pampered lives once their children grow older; and certainly sentiment is not the driving force behind how we order our lives. But this paper, as put, was also elitist at core. It is not a matter of choice for most women. They do not want to be dependent; many cannot get near a good paying job, and thus do find their highest satisfactions in their family’s shared lives. What worried me about this paper was the next inference would be to get rid of women’s right to live on their husband’s social security if he should predecease her when she spent her life as his wife, working at home for him and his and her children and herself mostly without pay. This would force women to work outside the home, many in menial work which given men’s present reluctance to help with housework and take inward responsibility for children would give many women an endless burden. (Pass ERA and the supreme court with its identification with employers would be only too glad to do this; Republicans would be overjoyed to get rid of social security for a good chunk of the population.) For many women it’s asking too much when they are not born to the kind of people that lead to good colleges, degrees, jobs.

To be fair to Brittain, I’ve read her Testament of Youth and know it’s a deeply humane text.

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Cast of Girls: Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Lena Dunham and Zosia Mamet

Well, after the above, the only other women’s issues session I went to was an early Saturday afternoon “Gender and Media Studies” (4427, 1:15 pm) which I attended to hear a paper on “Girls” as well as “West Wing,” the first of which I’ve seen and the second never watched but was curious about.

I found Nikita Hamilton’s paper touching. An African-American young woman, she loves Girls and was determined to justify its lack of black and working class people, it upper middle class stance (the girls are supported by parents, don’t worry about losing jobs) to downplay what she admitted was its neo-liberal stances (“they do regret materialism”). she basically argued that this was a slice of life sufficiently realistic and reflective of young women’s problems today. Her valiant try reminded me of how I sometimes justify Downton Abbey as being for community, showing compassion for its characters (“intelligent dialogue”); so many of us find that we love programs in the popular media which are arch-conservative and exclude us. It’s hard to admit to enjoying racist texts which are rightly attacked as suc (e.g., Gone With the Wind is) on the grounds that this is what is on offer, where fine talents are allowed play. To say the more liberal, inclusive, socialist story is just not told. Ms Hamilton discussed the third season where Lena has a black boyfriend who is (natch) a Republican and it doesn’t last past two episodes. She said the use of a “float” magically powerful female black character (as is found in Sex and the City in recent formulations) is not much better.

Martin Sheen as the bully president, Allison Janney as his right-hand Hillary

I would have liked to believe Olivia Kerrigan’s thesis that West Wing is liberal economically and seriously alert to class privileges as well as mildly feminist but from her anaslysis of the three central women characters (all in elite positions, from a Hillary Clinton first lady, to her secretary, to a press agent), it seemed to me this program supported the point of view I heard expressed in session 1127. The program’s male hegemony (comically exposed) irritates & limits the women characters only in small symbolically grating ways. I’ve seen a video which does show the central male (president) as a bully mocking an educated women (naturally with that horrifying thing, the equivalent of a bluestocking sign, the English Ph.D.) but as explained to me we were to admire that man so I came away thinking the program reinforces our elitist hierarchical corporate society with its endorsement of competition as central to social life. Older feminist movies with actively strong career women types like Rosalind Russell (or Jean Arthur) had neither the bullying males nor the anti-intellectualism I’ve glimpsed in this series,and they evinced a genuinely social conscience towards people outside the elite world.

Two other papers briefly: Angelita Faller analyzed a group of commercials for home alarms and showed that they assume women want to be raped, black men are very dangerous, white men good protective heroes, and women living alone are not safe. Jose Feliciano brought out underlying challenges to mainstream conventional heterosexuality in MTV videos, discussing the bisexuality of stars like Lady Gaga. See my super-numinosity.

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If nothing else, the papers on imaginative works from a feminist point of view vindicated literary studies. Asked to study finer imaginative works, the presenters did bring out sustainable critiques of the way society is organized, gives women a raw hard deal, victimizes them, complete with examples of a few women who did manage fulfilled lives despite this.

I’ve three sessions, but only four papers to cover, as (shocking) in one of them only one person out of a planned three or four showed; in another the other two papers were written in an abstract jargon impossible to understand, read at top speed and appeared to be about embarrassingly poor texts; and in the third only two papers were about women issues.

Felicity Jones as Catherine Morland at the Abbey (yes one of the four includes on Northanger Abbey)

I’ll begin with the best (or maybe only) literary paper in the conference I heard: Andrea Brittany Brannon’s paper on domestic violence in Wuthering Heights (Friday, 3305, 11:30 am).

It was a relief and delight to hear Ms Brannon defend and sympathize with Isabella Linton as the novel’s centrally abused woman. Through this character we see how male power is privileged and unquestioned; how easy it is for the male to disvalue and put his wife in the wrong (how dare she disobey him?): Isabella begins as a woman who enacts her society’s version of impeccable behavior to becoming someone who cannot cope with the smallest difficulty. Bullying has reduced to marginalization; she is Heathcliff’s way of getting back. She wanted him for the same glamorous sexed-up reasons Helen wants the upper class Arthur in Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hal, but unlike Anne’s novel where we live the experience of abuse through Helen, here we see it through Nellie’s conventional eyes: Isabella is therefore become a slattern without self-respect, and if weak, deserving the cruel treatment of the easily irritated. Heathcliff tells Nellie how Isabella comes to him shamefully clinging. We may see her struggling to apply the only social behavior she knows and finding it useless to help her, inappropriate in her situation. We see her physically punished and banished with him playing the rightly scolding parent. She cannot leave for she has nowhere to go — in the case of Helen she turns to her brother. Isabella’s brother, Edgar, her one male relative with power to help, is angry at her for marrying Heathcliff and abandons her to Heathcliff. So the patriarchy fails her.

Isabella Lindon Heathcliffe (Sophie Ward) from the 1992 Wuthering Heights (glimpse of Ralph Fiennes as Heathcliff from the side)

Ms Brannon pointed out we do have Isabella’s letter, the only narrative in the book which comes to us unmediated by Nellie or Lockwood, but most readers don’t pay attention to this counter-move against the romance of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliffe. The 1992 movie with Ralph Fiennes is a rare Wuthering Heights to dramatize the next generation and second part of the book where Isabella appears. Most reviewers if they mention Isabella at all blame her (the victim). Ms Brannon made a good case for regarding Isabella as a relevant portrait of domestic abuse today. Isabella is a woman with no access to legal protection. Ms Brannon conceded the novel is problematic as clearly Emily Bronte does sympathize with Heathcliff as the underdog and violence in this novel seems more than accepted as a source of power.

This was the session which was supposed to have paper on Little Women and the Civil War, one on Daisy Miller as a feminist hero and no one came. So there was plenty of time for a good discussion. There were about 5 audience members. Some, like me, said, they had never liked Wuthering Heights as much as the other Bronte books. I thought that Emily Bronte truncated the Isabella story too much, did not realize she was onto some powerful material here. Those who had liked the book when they were young did fall in love with the wild romance.

Angelina Weld Grimke (1882-1958) (African-American playwright)

For the papers on an 18th century actress who reinvented herself, Ann Wrighten, a powerful early 20th century black woman writer, Angelina Grimke, and Northanger Abbey and A Christmas Carol as gothics, see comments.

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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Midsummer: Capital Fringe, Pinky Swear, the Brontes, Hamlet

Karen Lange reading entries aloud (Pinky Swear)

Dear friends and readers,

We’ve seen four more productions, and, as might be expected, since we are going to twice as many this year as we went to last (Izzy is going with us but 3 times and last time she went to nearly all), we did at last find ourselves at a real dud. But we’ve also had two memorable, so alive, stirring, and very contemporary experiences.

Pinky Swear is an all girls’ band, raunchy, angry, sexy; they are “in your face” in the way they apparently break all sexual taboos. They don’t quite break all, but they break several: dildos abound; they get into quarrels, they insult one another, are sarky, their songs range from a desire to fuck or be fucked, to grating irritation with the nature of life, to (sometimes) romantic longing and muted heartbreak. Masturbation is the way to go as you can do it anytime. If you can’t have the one you love, love the one you’re with was this year’s theme.

All four: Karen in the back, next to her Allyson Harkey the guitarist Christina Frank, and with the black tambourine Toni Rae Brotons

Last night (Thursday), there were three young men with them as support band, and sometimes they played music from the 60s and 70s; while I enjoyed these (they were written before the performers were born), I thought the electrifying moments came from the contemporary music, the stances the girls took.

The witty and wry Karen Lange who read aloud slips of paper on which members of the audience were asked to write the “weirdest place they had sex.” The weird experiences were not that transgressive, or odd or wild. One read loud: “We had sex under a bush in Central Park. The gravel underneath was a problem.” That prompted jokes about what positions the gravel would make most uncomfortable. Then there was a second on having sex in Central Park, and Karen remarked Central Park must be a busy place at night. The singers said they were going to put some of these on face-book, but I could not find any. An informative pdf. They were in the large (but un-air-conditioned) Baldacchino Gypsy Tent next to one of the central bars and meeting places of the Fringe.

Since the tent is across the street from the (famed) restaurant, poets-reading and performing theater space, Busboys and Poets, Jim and I went there for our dinner afterward. I had a pizza, scotch and ginger ale, and Jim had beer and burger and fries. The night was hot, but there was a breeze, and we sat outside under an awning near a working fan and were happy.

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Tonight (Friday) we saw a spectacularly well-acted Hamlet. Powerful, fast-moving sizzling performances, especially by 1) Christ Genebach who was Hamlet and his father’s ghost, and the player king: he was just magnificent; his face and gestures reminded me again and again of Ralph Fiennes; and 2) Sandy Gainum as Gertrude and the Gravedigger, she probably was directed to be this sentimental and shocked Gertrude when Hamlet comes to her in her bed to tell her not to go to bed with Claudius, but otherwise she was sharp, gesturing and face just right, ever on the move. Raven Bonniwell did another unlikely doubling of Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Osric and was particularly good in the first two. As Laertes Billy Finn was violent emotionally as well as physically. The final duel is not with swords, but fists and the two men murder one another with blunt knives.

Directed by Hannah Todd, it was said to be much shorter than the original, abridged. And it ran only 1 hour and 40 minutes, but that is not just one hour (as most of the events are) and a lot was included. Horatio was the only major character cut; they chose to sweat lines rather than cut whole soliloquies. The director’s notes said she saw the play as a violent one, an outcropping of Hamlet’s feverish imagination, trapped by his own fantasies. The play began with Hamlet half-dreaming on the floor and ended with him dead in the same posture. He and all the players were driven people. I felt we really experienced the play. There was no intermission and that helped sustain the move.

Chris Genebach as Hamlet

Everyone clapped hard, and people stood for the performers whose lines had come so swiftly and naturally (it seemed) off their tongues. The company calls themselves the Flashpoint theater and their specialty is similarly abridged classics. Lauren Katz also thought it one of the strongest productions of Hamlet she’d seen in a while.

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You can’t win ‘em all. Wednesday night we went to a musical based on the life of Helena Rubinstein in America, Madame it was called. The performers had worked very hard, the costumes were lovely, the choreography was well-worked out; the problem was the content of the lyrics and “book” and story line. Excruciatingly lame, sentimental where they should have been prosaic, including even a love duet which belonged to Carousel, and a major male role going to an actor who was wooden and couldn’t sing.

Apparently the management of the whole festival is aware of which shows are not likely to please or lure an audience, as this one was held in small basement room of a church, there were few chairs, and even these were not filled up. To be fair, here’s a reviewer who saw some good things in the show and tries to like it

Two of the actor-singers rehearsing

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Not as tedious (we stayed at Madame because we felt we’d hurt the actors-singers’ feelings), but their musical rock show nowhere as good as last year (Finn McCool) and last year not as good as the spectacular brilliance of the year before (Oreisteia), Dizzy Miss Lizzy Doing the Brontes was something of a disappointment. The idea of each rock show has been the same: interweave some story or intense anguish or misery with the upbeat of hard rock. This time it was the Brontes and I’ll give it to them, they didn’t pollyanna the story of these four finally unlucky geniuses. The frustrated outcast Branwell became an alcoholic; Anne died so young; Emily unable to integrate at all into any social life and dying fairly young; and Charlotte left alone, also unable to build a life of fulfillment with people gifted like herself, also dying, of a miscarriage; their isolated lives as children on the moors.

Narrator, Branwell and accompaniment

Izzy came with us and I can’t better her commentary.

It’s true that Jim and I probably didn’t get all the jokes because we didn’t recognize some of the pop references. It’s hard for me to believe I was the only person in that tent besides the performers who had heard of Anne Bronte — does no one watch PBS movies? there was a splendid Tenant of Wildfell Hall, with real stars in the leading roles, and on most of the listservs I’ve been on, admittedly literary ones, people have read this and/or Agnes Grey (a governess story). I was the only person to clap and call Yay! when “Anne Bronte” came forward and told us the titles of her novels. A woman sitting next to me told me she had never heard of Branwell Bronte, so I recommended Daphne DuMaurier’s powerfully passionate The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte, which reprints what is left of his poetry. Considering the lamentable state of ignorance then about the Brontes, I suppose it’s picky of me to complain Dizzy Miss Lizzy did not seem to know that Emily was a great poet, but still I wish they had known it. Some of her verses set to rock might have stirred the audience.

Untitled:

Redbreast, early in the morning
Dank and cold and cloudy grey,
Wildly tender is thy music
Chasing angry thoughts away.

My heart is not enraptured now,
My eyes are full of tears,
And constant sorrow on my brow
Has done the work of years.

It was not hope that wrecked at once
The spirit’s calm in storm
But a long life of solitude,
Hopes quenched and rising thoughts subdued,
A bleak November’s calm.

What woke it then? A little child
Strayed from its father’s cottage door,
And in the hour of moonlight wild
Laid lonely on the desert moor.

I heart it then, you heard it too,
And seraph sweet it sang to you;
But like a shriek of misery
That wild, wild music wailed to me.

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I go out to plays, to operas, see movies, look at pictures, listen to music, even walk in landscapes for the same causes I read. These experiences are meaningful to me, speak to me at some level that counts, help me endure. Funnily of these four, the one I came away with repeating an idea the artists had voiced was Pinky Swear. Karen had a song whose refrain was you end where you start out, find yourself what you were. That’s my case. Soon I shall be driven to retire (they are beginning to harass me at GMU because they want me to turn my English humanities into a business computer-based course and I cannot) and I find I end where I began.

Just being me, living alongside Jim, and the real irony is what I love after the few human beings who I am attached to and whom I hope are attached to me are books precisely those I started out with (Austen among them) and a set of 18th century historical romances, whose hero and heroine were norms for me in my conscious teenagehood: the Poldark series.

It’s not that Hamlet does not have much to say. But I’ve read and seen the play so many times it’s hard to have a fresh reaction. Maybe I did tonight. When Hamlet took Yorick’s skull, and said to his imaginary lady, to this you will come, I identified. I’ve few teeth, bad feet, my lower back hurts, my hair grey, my handwriting is terrible (when I go to make a letter it’s hard to make it come out clearly and often I will write another letter or number than the one I consciously intend), I’ve forgotten multiplication tables (and never could do percentages, fractions, long division), I can’t read late into the night or watch movies without napping, when I get on the Metro people actually immediately get up to give me a seat. Yes to that I am coming.

Do people know Sylvia Plath also drew? yes, lovely touching drawings of everyday things, houses, street scenes. Here’s a pair of shoes I can no longer wear except for a few minutes at a time unless the miracle of really soft leather is achieved.

Sylvia Plath, Large Size Shoes (maybe she thought she had “big feet”)

Ellen

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Summer’s here: my past year’s listening & new routs

Dear friends and readers,

What do you mean summer’s here? It’s the beginning of May. Well, arguably from the point of view of weather, here in Northern Virginia we have two seasons: the cold (or maybe it would be more accurate nowadays to say the mostly cool and chilly) where days are short, and the light is ruthlessly husbanded to make it last as long as possible in the later parts of the 24 hour cycle; and the hot (sometimes fiercely) with long enough light, so those of us who find demands we awaken in the darkness so hard to take, have the relief of a lit sky by 6 am. And we are in the latter season now.

But that’s not how I’m defining summer. I’m defining summer as the day when teaching ceases, and my schedule turns into a summer one for the next 3 or so months. As I teach in a college where the semester’s classes ended for me yesterday, that’s what happened today. Some people don’t feel the term is ended until the literal work is & I understand that. In a way I’ve a third of the reading of students’ papers to go. They hand in their last (3rd) paper and do a final (which has 3 short essays in class as part of it and outside class answer about 20 questions) but for me once my summer routs begin the summer begins. And while I like it, indeed find it exhilarating, sane or larger perspective-giving, what I find hard is the teaching itself. That’s the ordeal, that’s the strain.

And today I began to develop my summer’s reading and started to develop the trajectory into my summer’s writing. I sent off a final copy of my review of the Later Manuscripts of Jane Austen, a Cambridge book edited by Janet Todd and Linda Bree, and am finishing the last of the reading for my on-going project of reading and writing about a letter by Jane Austen each week: Mary Brunton’s 1810 novel, Self-Control and Brian Southam’s Jane Austen and the Navy. I began my return to Sophie Cottin to see if I can make a proposal on infamous novels for the coming EC/ASECS, using Cottin’s Amelie Mansfield and Charlotte Smith’s Manon Lescaut. I’ll write more about this as time develops — I have no deadline as I’ve also decided to go down to one section a term starting this fall so this new group of ever-revolving routs is not going to end come late August, only diminish somewhat. Over on my Sylvia blog I’ll try to work out my plan every so often. I do need order so I feel I have meaning and if only to know what to read and what to write next.

For tonight I thought I’d say here what I’ve been listening to over this past year in my car — using MP3s as CDs which I have to buy. I’ve tried the librivox recordings: Mil Nicholson reading Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend is probably among the better as she really reads dramatically, but I found I couldn’t enjoy it. She just tried too hard, went excruciatingly slowly in order to pull the voices and imagined scenes off, seemed after all to miss the larger implications or meanings and it strained my patience how at the end of each chapter I had to listen to a full announcement once again that this was librivox, in the “public domaine”, by whom, who reading and where we were. I was told this was to try to stop those who are unscrupulous from selling these readings by informing anyone who bought it they need not have. To my mind all this did was allow the private property and personal profit system to invade the world of the imagined books naggingly.

Audible.com and other venues where one can supposedly buy (or perhaps rent) many kinds of recordings are set up to cheat the customer, to trap him or her into spending huge amounts of money (see “Stay Away! it’s filled with traps!”). So my plan to use my new ipod this way didn’t work. And there’s nothing for it but buy what one can find at Amazon.

I checked out how much it would cost to turn my audiocassettes into tapes. I might do this eventually — a little at a time though. It costs $9 a cassette. That doesn’t sound overmuch, but what happened when you have 18 tapes for one of the book so Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. That’s $180 for the book. You see the problem, especially as I’m not sure the book’s tapes are not dried out and will transfer well.

For me that means mostly older books and what’s called classics and better fiction when it’s on sale. A sad decrease in what I can choose from. The old books-on-tape used to include read books that sold only to relative minority of people — good non-fiction, history, biography, science, e.g., David Case reading abridgements of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle or Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire which were not savaged but long enough to include a lot; Donada Peters reading Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Anthony Trollope. When the demand for big profit and wide sales as the criteria for what would be read aloud took over, mostly trash or this year’s fashionable book for an elite is all one can obtain — and by buying, not renting.

Still I made do. Why? I still spent a lot of hours in my car, often driving Izzy somewhere. These hours were cut down as of December when she got her good full-time job as an Information Technologist. Yes she did. I still though have many as there is no good public transportation in Virginia. And, as I’ve mourned as Sylvia, I can no longer read much or even at all at night. My brain gives out and at best I can watch movies — or write blogs. Summer being here I will be much less in the car (twice a week for 90 minutes to and from GMU was a central time), so I thought I’d record what I read this year — or listened to which comes down to the same thing sometimes better as books brilliantly read aloud are true to many authors’ purposes.

Unless I’m misremembering (which I don’t think I am) I began with Donada Peters and David Case alternating the two narrators of Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall. This was so good, especially the soft brogue Case used for Gilbert Markhan, I sometimes could hardly wait to get into my car. This was late spring just after my tape deck broke and I never finished David Case reading Fielding’s Tom Jones.

Come June I was into Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset read aloud by Simon Vance. While he is good, his interpretation was grating: he read Josiah Crawley as not tragic but veering on the comic-ridiculous (or contemptible). Hot or true high summer (August) I began and through the early fall (much of this with Izzy) listened to Donada Peters reading Daniel Deronda (we loved it, especially the Jewish half of the novel or intertwined stories), Middlemarch (I don’t think it could have been better read) and Romola (a book that fails but nonetheless has some great, riveting sequences — Izzy found it so as well as I). One might call it a George Eliot year.

I tried to post regularly in the morning on some of this in order to keep notes and remember. Only for Romola did I have anyone reading with me (on Trollope19thCStudies).

Then we turned to Dickens. I regret to say I succumbed to an abridged version of Dickens’s Little Dorrit. I thought I’d try it as the complete was so expensive — so many CDs. Anton Lesser was superb and, with a little help from Davies’s film adaptation and interpretation of Amy Dorrit (and memories of Christine Edzard’s), I felt we were in the presence of preposterous genius. The book is prophetic of today. Still we missed much I know. Then the ill-fated Mil Nicholson of Our Mutual Friend. Sometimes the book felt stillborn and if it had not been for Sandy Welch’s brilliant film, I would have gotten nothing out of it; with Welch I did feel I reached the pith and electrifying core of the book. I do think Dickens was tired or made a wrong decision to recuse himself as narrator for his characters in this novel are not sufficiently rich in imaginative thoughtful subjectivity, to carry the book.

Just now I’m into David Case reading Bleak House; if I’ve heard or read this one before, I forgot a lot of it and again the problems in it (and there are a number as in all Dickens’s books) are counteracted by Davies’ film. Next up will be Juliet Stevenson (what a treat) reading Gaskell’s Mary Barton.

So I’m not doing too badly, you see. Probably though since from here on in I’ll be relatively rarely in my car, I won’t be posting all that much on my reading since much this coming summer will be in the 18th century and surrounding Austen (I mean at long last to do a full paper on Bad Tuesday).

I do try to read at night and have managed over the past couple of months to return to Winston Graham’s Poldark novels and have read at a leisurely pace (when I could) his Ross Poldark, Demelza, and now Jeremy Poldark. I’m finding these books reward re-reading and I’m seeing new rich elements in them I had not realized before. I know there are older tapes of these read aloud, but nowadays a reading must occur on MP3s as CDs to be listenable to for me in my car and affordable.

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

So let me take time out to say here that I’m relieved and delighted to be able to say that for a second time Ross Poldark, No. 1 of this historical novel series, went over superlatively well. Last year I was so nervous going in on the first of the 3-4 days set aside for this (like other) books. But I got what were undoubted two of the best talks I had all term. This time a talk was given on the treatment of Demelza versus the treatment of Verity which got the whole class discussing these characters, their scenes, issues involved. I was startled to see a student I fully expected not to show, not only turn up for the talk, but bring a thoroughly marked up book. A fourth had gone through the mini-series and put on scenes for us to watch and then directed our attention to the book. She didn’t have a real thesis, but her choices were such, it left us a lot to talk about.

Ross (Robin Ellis) talking to Pearce (John Baskcomb) at the opening of the first episode; the young man just returned … (Part 1, 1975-76 Poldark)

It’s a tribute to the 18th century too. The last speaker (in my other class) was just chuffed to find feminist talk/discourse in the 18th century — and “by a woman” said she amazedly. She found a passage by Anna Barbauld’s niece, Lucy Aiken. I did have quotations from both Paine (Rights of Man) and Wollstonecraft (The Rights of Woman) ready. Several said how they felt there was not the resolution at the end that they wanted; that they were just beginning, hardly in medias res as they closed Ross Poldark.

When Ross first sees Demelza at the fair: she is being beaten (Part 2, 1975-76 Poldark)

Graham catches the reader with his slow drawn appealing characters we believe in and identify with. There is this intensity of concern with the characters; Graham is in them and utterly involved with their fully imagined situation. This fourth time round I see that the core of the novel which dominates it is a continual intimate delineation of the two central personalities melding and not melding together in an early phase of their marriage.

I’ve read on to Demelza and finished it last night for a fourth time. Ross Poldark incites a riot over two ships coming into and wrecked on the shore and a savage mob action ensues, a Walpurgis night to match the splendor of the night catching pilchards. The last two times round I really didn’t read slowly or carefully enough to see that indeed the hero is presented as psychologically half-crazed over the failure of all his schemes, the death of this baby daughter, the abysmal poverty around him closing in, and the enfeebled wife who to free his sister, Verity, unknowingly brought this on them — she was loyal to the individual not the group, a no no for which she is harshly punished. Nor that there are striking Jacobin sentiments given him at the same time. The book rewards re-reading in the light of the other books.

Demelza (Angharad Rees) says he has become her whole life, she loves him for all he has done (Part 3, 1975-76 Poldark)

Winston Graham will be one of my continuing projects for a long time to come.

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

So all this is to explain why I’ve not been posting on books here of late and or when I have it’s been retrospective (as in my Praise of Colm Toibin). I’ve fallen back on operas, movie-going or watching at night, what I’ve read and watched with my students (my lecture notes turned into blogs). And Downton Abbey — beloved older mini-series too. Now I’m ever hoping to do better and if I can muster up the energy to make sense of the morning notes I took on the above books or from my morning posts this summer, or find something new or genuinely interesting to say about what I have managed at night or in Jim and my coming summer activities (we are going to go to plays, operas, the Fringe festival again, the occasional lecture, dramatic reading aloud), I will. Spin offs from my later day-time routs will come in here too. In my brief discussion of Ross Poldark and Demelza I’ve given an example of what I hope to be able to do on occasion on reading-as-life.

Ellen

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Linda Peterson’s Traditions of Women’s Autobiography

          Books, books, books!
I had found the secret of a garret-room
Piled high with cases in my father’s name;
Piled high, packed large,­where, creeping in and out
Among the giant fossils of my past,
Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs
Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there
At this or that box, pulling through the gap,
In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,
The first book first. And how I felt it beat
Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark,
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books!— EBB, Aurora Leigh

Dear friends and readers,

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading Linda H. Peterson’s Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography, [subtitled] The Poetic and Politics of Life-Writing as a sort of companion-accompaniment to a group reading on WWTTA supposed to be going on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. I’m a lover of women’s memoirs and letters, travel-books, life-writing. It includes many of my favorite books, deeply cherished ones (see Julia Kavanagh: disabled woman of letters). She shows how such books first came into print in larger numbers from the 17th and 18th century in the 19th century. Arguing (dialoguing) with this book reminded me of some beautiful books I’d read, informed me about others, and showed me the state of feminist and life-writing studies at the time it was written (1999). I recommend the book for its learning, bibliography and thoughtfulness — and the books it calls attention to.

There is (in my view) a serious flaw though: Peterson is concerned to argue against the idea that women’s autobiography constitutes a different separate tradition from men’s. Well. She’s right when she says both men’s and women’s autobiographies share many of the same structures and fall into other types (spiritual or religious is one) but there is a kind of deliberate erasure going on here which doesn’t quite work and is counter to her own book which is just about women’s life-writing int he 19th century. She does show that ideas about women’s nature and what her life should and must be about (private domestic life) generated the production of these earlier texts which also supports the modern feminist structural outlook and her “other” perspective brings out other qualities of the books, but her perpetual use of scare quotes for “feminine” (as if there’s no such thing) does not work.

She is probably worried lest her book be put into a “feminist ghetto” and ignored — by whom I wonder as her audience will be the same women and men who have been working on these life-writings.

Mary Robinson

Chapter 1: “Origins” of Women’s Autobiography; Reconstructing the Traditions

The first chapter concerns the republication in the 19th century of a group of 17th century women’s autobiographies — mostly by clergyman, sometimes antiquarians related to the woman writer, once in a while a scholarly historian. It was these books I first found in the Library of Congress in the 1980s when I returned to scholarly studies here in Virginia after finishing my dissertation in 1979 in NYC. They include the memoirs of Anne Murray Halkett who two years ago I finally wrote two papers on and delivered them at 18th century conferences, and whose text I put up on the Net to make it generally available in the form it appears in the 19th century copy.

There is much of value here. You learn how these books first came into print, which ones, a little about the editing and how this bringing into print of these earlier books facilitated the publication and influenced or mirrored 19th century productions of women’s life writing from Harriet Martineau’s autobiography and travel book to Barrett Browning’s imaginative autobiogaphical (Prelude-like) narrative poem, Aurora Leigh.

The last part of the chapter is of interest to 18th century people too. Here Peterson goes with some depth into Mary Robinson’s Memoir (finished by her Victorian daughter) and Charlotte Charke’s autobiography, apparently framed by the Victorian editor to be a warning lesson and end gloomily when the ms end cheerfully and is not presented as a warning lesson at all. Peterson’s perspective leads her to emphasize of Robinson’s memoir is more than about her life as a mistress, mother, and daugher but also about her as a professional actress and writer. While I know from reading the text there is precious little about these in the book, they are obviously the real background to the publication of such a book. Similarly Peterson’s perspective enables her to make more “sense” of Charke’s non-feminine transvestite behavior, Charke’s love of male roles and her rebellion: an ambiguous experience as unsuccessful if financial and other rewards are the measure, but successful by a deeper measurement, i.e., she lived the life out that was within her, the one she wanted to, choose her identity.

For a good recent study of 17th through 18th century women’s life-writing see Caroline Breashears’s The Female Appeal Memoir: Genre and Female Literary Tradition in Eighteenth-Century England, Modern Philology, 107:4 (2010):607-631. Jane Austen’s letters would be among these kinds of life-writings first brought out in the 19th century and it follows just the same sort of trajectory: censored, re-framed from the original, coming out of genteel milieus. Another Elizabeth Grant Smith’s Highland memoir which had to wait 100 years for the full powerful text to be published, along with several others shorter memoirs she penned.

Harriet Martineau when young (often used as frontispiece to her autobiography)

Chapter 2: Polemics of Piety: Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Personal Recollections, Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, and Ideological Uses of Spiritual Autobiography

The unsentimental truthfulness of Barrett Browning must’ve stood as a refreshing shock against the common life-writing of the day if Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Personal Recollections are any measure. I read the first half of the second chapter of Peterson’s book last night and admire the temperateness with which Peterson describes Tonna’s melange of silence, outright lying — for what is it to present one’s wretchedness in life as the result of a spiritual conversation when it’s rather that the writer lives with a physically abusive husband who when she makes any money takes it ruthlessly by law from her, has to live in isolated horrible conditions whose minimal comfort depends on unscrupulous rent-racking of starving peasants. Peterson shows us how pernicious are these sorts of lies in effect — though she doesn’t say so explicitly and uses the surface content of the book to demonstrate her thesis that many women’s autobiographies do not make gender central.

Well, duh, Tonna doesn’t but if you ignore the subtext then what can you possibly read Tonna’s book for? And it’s for the subtext that Peterson does read it — though as with Austen, one can’t get behind the veil to discover what were the real particular truths of what happened to Tonna — only that she was lucky enough to escape, had a brother who took her in, became for 10 years an editor of a widely-selling Christian magazine. What she did in the magazine also goes unmentioned, unwritten up.

All that counts. No wonder Aurora Leigh was so valued, such a stunner.

Peterson does take this way — a valuable nugget? Peterson suggests that books like Hannah More’s (whom Tonna modelled herself upon) and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s prove the worth, value and integrity of chronique scandaleuse. These do tell important truths; these do give us what we need to know for real about women’s lives — the pious books give us the illegimate norms and also the rationales women used to control, berate and (I suppose) solace and flatter themselves with.

I’d add unfortunately as to behavior Tonna’s book was the “ideal” and her novels sold widely. But chronique scandaleuses also sold widely and it may be that women readers of these understood them better than we give them credit for, at least intelligent women readers did.

Peterson is slightly (not very) comical in her perverse “take” on Martineau’s autobiography. She insists on reading it as a not conforming to female autobiography because Martineau rejects the inane domesticities and pious hypocritical cruelties of Tonna’s stupid book and instead presents herself as gifted, shows how she was put down and almost destroyed by her family, escaped them to London and built a career. To be sure the latter part of the autobiography is like male ones, and Martineau’s models are implicitly male (Wordsworth, though she anticipates Trollope).

But the point is she had this terrible trouble doing it, she had the breakdown, she broke the taboo, none of which the men had to do, and the shape of her life at the end shows a female friend published the book and how she carved out a non-family group to be with.

I’m troubled by this attempt at erasure of a female version of the genre. Someone read my treatment of Kathleen Raine as “as a quintessential autobiographer who enacted a myth of a return to a past that is still with her, that has never ceased to be, and for women, this is found in childhood as metaphor and reality before the development of an adult female sexual body with all the imprisonment, repression, and destruction of the self that society inflicts” and immediately countered that this is what men experience and is not at all particularly feminine. Did she not read the last phrase? I answered: Didier’s point is when girl develops into a woman, her sexuality inflicts a terrific blow on her self-hood and psyche because her society all around her does all it can to twist and repress her. A boy may find developing into manhood hard, but he is not pressured and, if he will not succumb to pressure, then driven and ridiculed and ostracized until he gives up his appetites.

She barely acknowledged this and then I got this pious type utterance from another woman: “Thank you, too, Christine, for seeing the un-gendered humanity of Raine’s themes.” This is the early 21st century version of Tonna’s self-congratulatory tones.

My project as I see it is to call attention to women’s poetry and try to suggest what an enormous and worthy body of art it is — though much has been destroyed and what’s left from previous history and is written nowadays continues to be ignored. It is also to put together many texts which show that women’s poetry and art is different from men’s and has to understood and appreciated as by women. If most men won’t respond to that, sobeit.

Post-feminism, indeed.

Zelah Clarke as Jane Eyre (1983 BBC mini-series)

Chapter 3: “The Feelings and Claims of Little People:” Heroic Missionary Memoirs, Domesticated Spiritual Autobiography, and Jane Eyre

The problem with Peterson’s chapter on Jane Eyre is signalled in the chapter heading: she is concerned to prove that Jane Eyre like other autobiographies conforms to male norms too, the male norm here being spiritual autobiography. What others have seen as contradictions in the trajectory — for example the daughter’s obedience to the mother, her ambivalent over sex, the disconnect between a providential design and radical doubts — are ironed out. Really the feminism partly erased.

It is true that one third or the novel or maybe a quarter is given over to ST John Rivers and his desire to make Jane into a missionary wife and by paying attention to this as a career option for women, Peterson brings out what Bronte consciously meant us to see: Jane is conflicted over living for love or living for a selfless career (not so selfless as it gives some respect and prestige and activity); the very recent movie takes this last third to turn the book into a conflict between two men over a woman or her conflict which one to take. That’s not the text here.

Still I find what interests Peterson is something that comes out of a desire to accommodate society and its offer of modified compromised goals (to be a missionary’s wife was very repressive, awful really — I read about one half of Catherine Hall’s book on missionaries in Jamaica recently), that itself mirrors the problem with her whole book.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, posing herself in velvet and satin

Chapter 4: “For my better self: Autobiographies of the Poetess, the Prelude of the Poet Laureate, and EBB’s Aurora Leigh.

Peterson argues successfully that Aurora Leigh may be considered a metaphoric biography of EBB, and that it seeks to counter the image of the woman poet found in the autobiographical poetry and life-writing of Letitia Elizabeth Landon and to imitate and also correct the view of the poet we find in Wordsworth’s Prelude. Along the way Peterson quotes some of the best lines of the poem and shows how Eulalie is as important as Marion in the poem.

There is a real problem in the analysis though: again Peterson wants to show that we should not read women’s life-writing apart from men’s, and it is true that EBB has The Prelude in mind. However, the reason Peterson wants to show this in the case of Aurora Leigh is she wants to argue that EBB wanted a public role for the woman poet and she could only reach for this by making herself the equivalent of a male, seen as doing and feeling analogous things. All well and good but then Peterson has a problem: at the close of the poem Aurora marries Romney, she retreats, the lesson learned is the limits of socialism; apparently the social function of the woman poet is going to inhere in her publication of her poems which will have this influence.

Right.

This is deeply conservative stuff. Ellen Moers’s take on this poem as finally reactionary in a number of fundamental ways is the correct one. That Peterson wants to downplay the class element too is to me part of our present climate where class issues are not presented in the public media.

What is salutary about the poem is its creation and continuation of a woman’s tradition of writing and insofar as we can read against the grain when it comes to the fate of Marion Erle.

Margaret Oliphant when older

Chapter 5: Family Business: Margaret Oliphant’s Autobiography as Professional Artist’s Life

This is perhaps the best chapter in the book; it’s the one which is closest in spirit to its book, and where the refusal to put the book into a female tradition works best — with the ironical qualification that the five books Peterson uses to illuminate this one are all women’s autobiographies. She shows that Oliphant meant her book to fall into a sub-genre where the woman shows how her professional activities arise out of her home milieu, her family and that the two are inseparable. She says this sub-genre has been forgotten — or ignored. Maybe. What we are making the mistake of doing is reading this book as tragic and about a failure; no it’s about how she tried hard to bring her two sons into her profession and did succeed. I’d almost believe much of this except for the long ending where the sons fail at the profession she wanted for them and she makes this clear and they die before the end of the book’s time frame and suddenly she gives over to deeply poignant re-framing of all that has gone before. The opening about her trip to Rome where her (partly failed) artist husband died and her struggle to become professional when she returned — she succeeded largely due to one man, Blackwood – and this close are the powerful parts of the book.

The conservative and careerist biases of the Peterson’s stance became explicit here. Peterson celebrates without qualification how wonderful it is that people’s professions emerge from their families. What about people who don’t have the family talent or don’t have a family framework which suits them. She is absolutely in spirit with the family piety of Oliphant’s approach, possibly because it suits Peterson to argue that there is no difference between private and public selves. She shows how Oliphant disapproved of the life writing by a woman where she goes forth on her own to carve out her career — Martineau, Eliot’s life.

I have found the reading of this book very unpleasant. IN this chapter Peterson’s insistence on how Oliphant’s is not a story of failure (it isn’t when it comes to her personally) reminded me of 2 incidents where I was asked would I contribute my life story to online magazines. In both cases I gave an outline of what I would say and was told after all it wouldn’t do because mine was not an upbeat success story. I didn’t end up with a big job or money from publications. Therefore they didn’t want it. I said my story was that of their readerships. They said their readerships would not want such stories; they want inspiration. Since this happened twice, I was struck with this evidence of why women’s magazines are often filled with phony stories which don’t reflect the average realities of women writers or readers. I’m sure Peterson would have been on the side of these editors.

Mary Cholmondeley

Chapter 6: Mary Cholmondeley’s Bifurcated Autobiography Eliotian and Bronte Traditions in Red Pottage and Under One Roof

This was a very interesting chapter and made me want to read a novel or memoir by Cholmondeley. Peterson analyses Cholmondeley’s novel, Red Pottage and her memoir, Under One Roof Peterson again is in the paradoxical position of beginning by saying we must put women in a non-gendered autobiographical context only to find her intertextual models in women, specifically Cross’s Life of Eliot for Red Pottage, and Gaskell’s Life of Bronte for Under one Roof. Peterson argues that Red Pottage shows a young girl whose gifts are destroyed because of the repressive norms and demands of her family; she does not manage to escape (as Eliot did). It’s the bookish account of a development that is the strongest parallel. It is also based on Mary’s sister, Hester, who died young. Her brother brutally intervened to stop her career

I do love one long passage Peterson quotes from another book, Rachel West’s passionate defense of a friend’s novel, Idyll of East London (ridiculed) by talking of how a relationship with a man did not sustain her where it counted, nor any of her family, but her friend helped give “affection” and understanding to “an empty heart” and “lighten[ed] the burdens of this world” for her.

How many of us would tell our life story by an account of what books we read and what they did for us when we were young. I do think I might were I to account for how I came to get a Ph.d. in English literature, but it would be strongly in reaction to my environment (escape from the Bronx into Mary Poppins in the Park) and not an argument that as a gifted person I deserved to escape. Which in part I certainly did. I am not part of that working class family or environment (father’s, Catholic) nor the eventually bourgeois one (mother’s, Jewish, now accountants).

There is a relationship between pain and personal achievement in Red Pottage and in George Eliot’s life — and maybe for some of us too.

Under One Roof is about the importance of female friendships, of sisters, of how much they meant — as is partly Red Pottage (if by its absence). As I recall May Sinclair has a novel Three Sisters where we see these bonds mean so much. In Gaskell’s book we see that Charlotte was the one who made the public achievement of her sisters possible; it was she who took Emily’s poems and some of hers and Anne’s to a publisher and got it published. She who posthumously published Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Wuthering Heights. Whatever the flaws of Charlotte’s presentation, she did publish these. Cholmondeley is again vindicating and keeping her own sister alive through this memoir.

To conclude, this historically-rooted study is one which adds much to Victorian studies, (despite itself) studies of l’ecriture-femme, life-writing of men as well as women, and can provide many jumping off points for someone else’s study of life-writing. Peterson does make you think about genre, what is a genre, and see how many permutations there are under any given category. You could end the book thinking to yourself that genre thinking gets in the way of understanding what we write and what we read.

To all Peterson’s Victorian candidates, I add another of my favorites: Mary Smith, schoolmistress and governess, my study of her autobiography and poetry.

Ellen

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Mary Smith, schoolmistress and governess; autobiographer, poet and journalist-reporter (1822-1889)

Mary Smith (Lisa Dillon), invented character from 2008 Cranford Chronicles

Dear friends and readers,

A couple of months ago I read Kathryn Hughes’s moving sterling account The Victorian Governess,

Cover based on painting, The Governess by Richard Redgrave (1840),

and there encountered Mary Smith (1822-1889) who wrote an autobiography of herself; I was so engaged by the tone and life of this woman as quoted by Hughes that when I found her text existed as a google book, I couldn’t resist buying and then devouring The Autobiography of Mary Smith, Schoolmistress and Nonconformist, a Fragment of a Life; With Letters from Jane Welsh Carlyle and Thomas Carlyle.

I just fell in love with this woman as strongly as I did the remarkable central woman journalist, Anthony Trollope’s beloved Kate Field, early this winter, and when I discovered my Mary wrote and published poetry, and this too was available as a google posthumously published book, Miscellaneous Poems, I sent away for it from GMU’s interlibrary loan.

Since reading both I decided to write a blog in her honor this evening, and lo and behold came across a short biography in Atlantic Monthly, June 1894, pp 838-840), and then learned that her poems have recently been republished in an edited annotated collection from Nineteenth-Century English Labouring Class Poets, edd. McEathron, Goodridge and Kossick.

Here we have the magic of the Internet, which has also brought me so many friends. How does the system work? Well there’s a small angel in each machine.

So first, Mary Smith’s life, then a few of her poems, and finally a few words on Kathryn Hughes’s fine achievement.

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

Henry James’s mid-century unnamed governess played by Michelle Dockery (Sandy Welch’s Turn of the Screw, 2009)

Mary Smith writes eloquently of her life in terms hard to summarize to do justice to. She was a highly intelligent deeply moral young woman born to a dissenting shoemarker near Birmingham. It’s a story of continual hardship, derision of all her gifts, and exploitation. A typical phase of her life: she left a school she was teaching at in Scotby, Cumberland, where she was happy because of the landscape and people she worked for, to continue living with a family named Osborne whom she was attached to; she worked for another 3 years for them for no money and meagre food, not appreciated and finally driven off because someone in the family (probably the wife but hard to say) was jealous of her. She accompanies the family rather than live alone; again and again her being a woman alone is what does her in. She gets no respect that works in a effective way for her. Her life bears out bears out everything Kathryn Hughes says about lives of governesses in England in her The Victorian Governess — and more.

Her experiences as a governess finally drove her to open a school permanently — one she ran in Carlisle, UK, for 24 years. Here’s how it happened. She had been hired by a horror of a woman (cheap on food and clothes so she could show off to outsiders, cruel to servants in her niggardliness and with her commercial salesman husband such another as the grasping Mrs Mason and her hard philistine husband in Trollope’s Orley Farm) and has a hard time freeing herself. Reminds me of landlords today who hound tenants for the rent when they sign a year’s lease.

She then returned to Mr Osborne and his family. I’m beginning to suspect there was an implicit (not consummated) love affair; that would explain why repeatedly she is fired after sudden harsh treatments. The wife is never mentioned but there are apparently endless children.

So she opens a school again. Again blamed by Osborne for taking his clientele I suppose. But he goes out of business, and her school slowly flourishes while her strength holds out, and she has finally had the courage to introduce herself by letter to Jane Carlyle, who becomes a friend and in terms of feeling, just about adopts Mary as a surrogate daughter or niece.

Among the events gone over towards the last decades of her life in the book are her going to the Exhibition of 1861 with her brother. She does not like the train ride, not the Exhibition particularly (not fooled, and more interested by the spectators), but her exploration of London and the tourist world at the time.

In her forties she at last began to publish a little: she got involved in politics locally on the basis of going to lectures, becoming a reporter and writing short pieces others saw were astute: she sees the power-roots of the Crimean war, is an abolitionist, and implicit socialist. She had a small book of poetry published but this hurts more than it comforts: it costs her so much and only one notice.

I’m just compelled by her intense intelligent ethical presence and the remarks she makes about education (she’s right it’s easier to write if not corrected than read with understanding and harder yet to come up with interesting comments on reading) and character growth. How she loves the natural world. I see no sign of her reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, alas — or any other of the famous novels of the era (Julia Kavanagh also writes novels about governesses). Surely she would have mentioned it or one if she had.

Zelah Clarke as Jane Eyre (the 1983 BBC mini-series, a masterpiece)

I assume she had not money for a subscription to a library or to buy and was too hard worked for time — or maybe she feared her reader would not approve. Her style is felicitious. Her favorite author Emerson. She does read memoirs sometimes — from out of a local library. Probably she means some of her poems to be imitations of his.

I’m obviously not alone in being drawn to her. Beyond Jane Carlyle, the editors of Nineteenth Century Labouring Poets, and the people who bought us the google reprints, and Kathryn Hughes, Heidi Thomas, and Sue Conklin and Birtwistle, the creators of the BBC mini-series, Cranford Chronicles and Return to Cranford supposedly based on fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell used this real Mary Smith (played by Lisa Dillon) for a major character in the series. There is such a minor character in Elizabeth Gaskell’s fiction, but here she is made a major friend and companion-niece whno lives with Mattie (played by Judi Dench), the heroine from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford as her young cousin; when Mattie loses much of her money, the mini-series Mary goes to London rather than stay and be a burden; she she begins to write for a living and we are told she works as a teacher (not clear whether governess or schoolteacher).

Again Lisa Dillon as Mary (from Cranford, see also still prefacing this blog)

This is a very fictionalized account of this woman’s life but some aspects of character in this series is taken from this autobiography. It provides the series with the one young woman who leaves town to build herself independence through a career in the modern way.

******************
Mary Smith’s poetry

I liked some of the poems very much. I think I have chosen three typical shorter ones. She writes in ballad stanzas most of the time. Her narratives remind me of Wordsworth and Smith’s protest poems; her familiar poems about her diurnal life some of Anna Barbauld’s poetry. Mary has one long old-fashioned narrative poem (8 line stanzas) called Progress where she tries to give a humane definition of what is progress.

*”The Snow Storm”*

A tale of the fells

The cotter’s children are at the pane,
Counting the flakes as they fall;
But the mother looks up the long white lane,
Anxiously over them all.

She sees the sun set round and red,
Behind the poplars bare,
And the white mist cover the old tower’s head,
And her heart is fill’d with care.

The shepherd’s dog clings to his heels,
As they silently speed through the snow;
And the carter follows with soundless wheels,
Bowing and bending low.

She sees it all, and her heart sinks low,
For her boy, who is scarcely eight,
Is over the fells, the quarries below,
Without either guide or mate.

He went at morn, when the sun shone out,
And the birds were twittering sweet,
And the brown hens chuckled and fluttered about,
And the road was alive with feet.

And now it is getting late and dark,
And not a star appears,
Nor chip of moon, which might serve as an ark,
In a night so dark with fears.

Yet she stands at the pane where she long has stood,
But now she has lost from her sight
The tower and the trees, and her chilling blood
Grows cold as the snow flakes white.

And her boy comes not, nor is there a sound
O’er all that waste of snow
Of human-kind; and with quick rebound
Her thoughts into actions flow.

And now she is over the moor, and has crossed
The brook and the grim white wood,
And has passed the tam all white with frost,
And the dam where the old mill stood.

And oft she has stood with strained ear,
And oft she has shouted wild;
But nought has come back to her heart but fear –
­No token of her child.

But the mother’s heart knows no despair,
And over that pathless deep,
Which the bravest heart might quail to dare,
She still her way doth keep.

Yet in vain she wanders! for in the drift,
Her boy, with clasped hands,
And eyes still calm, and still uplift,
A pallid phantom stands!

His fair hair, like a sweet dead flower,
Flies fitful in the blast,
And his parted lips, all void of power,
Are sealed with a silence fast.

And nevermore will his mother kiss
Those sweet cheeks here below,
For she lies-O heaven! in woe there’s bliss­
Untroubled in the snow.

*”On Hearing the Chimes of Carlisle Cathedral at Midnight”*

Do iron tongues articulate
Those soul·entrancing tones?
Or, has mute silence given leave
To the carved lips of stones ?

Those olden saints, with uplift eyes,
And visages so calm,
Those saints in the Cathedral porch,
Sing they this sacred psalm?

Or, has mysterious midnight
In vigil thought of Him,
And paused to celebrate that thought
In holy choral hymn?

As such, or as a chaunted prayer
From some far spirit sphere,
Or, as the voice of love, those tones
I can do nought but hear.

And yet they are the self-same sounds,
Which, like some gentle word,
Fall on the distracted ear of day,
Unnoticed and unheard.

Like voices long unregarded,
Till, in some dark sad hour,
They’re heard; ah! then we wonder
At their beauty and their power.

Oh, wond’rous chimes, peal evermore,
With rich cathedral swell,
From out the God-built towers of time,
More deep than tongue or bell.

And yet unheard! Oh, is it strange
We’re poor in thought, and sad?
Who hath an ear, knows that these tones
Make rich, and wise, and glad.

*”By the Fireside”*

Sitting once more by the fireside
Of the old paternal home,
As I often sit in memory
Pleasant phantoms go and come.

Hoary winter has descended,
Laid his white hand on the pane,
Flung his mantle on the orchard,
Darkened all the earth again.
,
And I sit there in my dreaming –
In the firelight’s gleaming light
­With the dear ones who in childhood
Made the winter darkness bright.

There are all the dear old faces,
All the forms both young and eld,
In their old accustom’d places,
As I them of old beheld.

Nor are looks of kindness wanting,
For I lean upon a chair,
From which eyes to mine responding
Ease my heart of all its care.

And a smile of love, long darkened
From my life, as in the past,
With a dear uplifting sweetness
Is once more upon me cast.

Words, too, follow, kind and tender,
Words I’ve often heard before,
But familiar still they render
The same blessing evermore.

For they bring back scenes of gladness,
Scenes of quiet household life;
Which remembered, soothe in sadness,
And make strong again in strife.

And though death has come between us,
Breaking bonds that were so blest,
In those scenes of love forever,
I find hope and joy and rest.

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

Jodhi May as James’s unnamed governess (Nick Dear’s Turn of the Screw, 1999)

As for Kathryn Hughes, it’s a study which reveals the Victorian world to you through the governess figure, and (I think) shows that middling occupations today bear an uncanny resemblance to that of the governess at least when it comes to interviewing and getting the job. The best review I’ve come across is by Nancy Fix Anderson, published in Albion, 25:3 (1993):518-20. My only caveat is Anderson underestimates (why do people do this?) the harshness and abysmal poverty of the typical governess. That others were miserable, doesn’t discount hers. Also the sexual exploitation. Perhaps this is due to her not offering up the details (remember Blake).

The life of a governess very much compares with what Jane Austen’s Jane Fairfax and Emma and Elizabeth Watson dread, and Anne and Charlotte Bronte and Henry James’s governesses experience, not to omit the real life Jane Claire Clairmont, hitherto known mainly as Mary Shelley’s half-sister and one of Byron’s mistresses. Jane Fairfax is just the sort of person who ended up a governess, and the pattern of Jane Austen’s relatives’s lives shows that while she was not personally threatened (as far as we can tell), it was just such a woman of her class and education who would end up a governess or teaching at a school.

Ania Martin as the first Jane Fairfax, here an ignored and mortified Jane grateful for Mr Knightley’s courteous attention (1972 BBC Denis Constanduros’s Emma)

Diane Reynolds wrote on Austen-l:

From what I’ve read about governessing, including Agnes Grey, it was often a hard lot, filled with dawn to dusk labor and petty humiliations (obviously, it varied from home to home). I think to Jane Austen, it would have been a horror, because she would not have have time to write nor support for her writing–who would have taken her manuscripts to London, etc? Would her employers have been enraged that she was writing on “their” time? It would have been a form of death for her. I think there were huge differences between the work world then and now: now, we take “time off” as a given, we consider it “slavery,” when say a foreign-born governess, is made to work long hours without time off or overtime compensation (or social security) and we prosecute the perpetrators in highly-publicized cases that underscore a social consensus against such non-stop use of other humans. We see “stop and start” times, being “on and off” the clock as normal. But none of that was the case in Jane Austen’s time. From what I understand, at least in Victorian times (I don’t know if this holds for the Regency) there were more women seeking “positions” than there were positions ( a buyer’s market) and, as with slavery (which again, sometimes landed the enslaved in so-called (though I would not so call them) “good” positions (in fact, I think there was a book out some years ago in which a historian compared the lot of Southern slaves to Northern factory workers and determined that overall, the slaves had better conditions (!)) but slaves and governesses were essentially at the mercy of their employers. Obviously, a huge difference was that a governess could leave–at least in theory, though I imagine in practice, a single woman with no money would have little ability to leave the food, clothing and shelter of a governess position without another “situation” presenting itself. I would never liken it to “getting a job” today.

I concur strongly with Diane that for Austen it would have been a death-in-life — as would have court life and she uses strong words against life at court for any underlings (to the librarian). Everything we know (in print) by women who were governesses, and especially during the time women like Bessey Park Raines and Barbara Bodichon (mid- to later Victorian) show that the position of governess was disliked by most intensely — mostly because of the snobbery against the governess. how she was treated in a stigmatized isolating and often quietly humiliating way by her employers. The novels testify to this and a number of memoirs. Anthropologists tells us one of the worst experiences (and psychologists too) someone can have is to go down in status and have to stay among those whose status you had or shared or are above you and know it. People who are demoted at work in overwhelmingly numbers quit.

It’s this more than the drudge work, difficulty in coping which children who are also your employers (higher than you in status) and very low pay that made for the misery. Also (as I said about my mother-in-law) the long hours and lack of a private personal life — no courting (no sexuality allowed), no seeing your relatives and so on.

A member of WWTTA, Linda, put the center of the excruciation as Austen would imagine it (and Anne Bronte reveals) very well:

“Being a governess was a humbling–and intended by their employers to be a
humbling–experience. They were made to feel subservient and invisible. No acknowledgment of their intelligence or gifts was ever made. …”

In a collection of reviews of Jane Eyre by an upper class woman who identifies with the employer and we see that she is incensed to see the governess protest, sneers at the book, scorns the “whiner” (she just about uses that cruel word), and sees the book as incendiary radicalism.

Laurie Pyper as Jane Fairfax on her way to the post office (2009 BBC Sandy Welch’s Emma, the most recent incarnation)

Ellen

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This long morphing life: the four phases of feminism

Nell Blaine (1922-96), The Cookie Shop (1986) — a favorite woman artist for me

Dear friends and readers,

On C18-l, a listserv I’ve been on since 1994 Jim Chevalier asked the question, “What were our research interests?” for the ostensible reason that then we could all know what areas we shared and what was the expertise or real terrains of the community. The motive was more to get people to write and thus keep the community alive with writing presences.

At first few answered, and there was an immediate tendency not just to cite pubilshed articles or books, but refer to a recent academic site where academic-style papers are published. One growing (it was asserted) by leaps and bounds: it’s a form of self-advertisement, face-book academic version. But, rightly, Jim said that he was looking for something different from the sort of thing allowable to articulate in papers. People did begin to offer a description, short usually of research interests conventionally understood (what X is publishing or working on right now or has done). But happily finally the listowner, suggested this was a hard question to answer and told of his research areas and interests as his life’s work over years of living, teaching, being alive.

So I wrote in too, and thought I’d put my posting here as a blog since this blog is turning into an academic-style one where I write in a familiar letter manner about my serious scholarly interests (as it might be put in describing a resume).

I agree with Kevin Berland that this is — or was — a hard question to answer as posed. Areas of research interest for people who do it as central to their lives over a long period of time morph as our lives morph so it’s not just a question of new areas of interest coming out of projects but the way we go about it changing. For me too some of the areas I’ve gotten involved in have been the result of relationships and events (meeting people and joining groups) so I was commissioned to write a book on Anthony Trollope for the Trollope Society and having spent five years on it altogether found myself a Trollopian and have stayed with it — going to two conferences with papers, and recently (last month) publishing a review of a book that emerged from one of these conferences. I do love the man’s books and have grown to like him too, but it was an external event or meeting someone that diverted or expanded my interests. And now I’ve published on George Eliot too (and love her novels and letters and criticism about her, and biographies) and moved out further to Margaret Oliphant.

John Atkinson Grimshaw, one of my favorite Victorian painters, this is Leeds, autumn 1893, Golden Light – a copy hangs on one of the walls of my room

While the career trajectory often demands that one stay within a given period or interest, it’s not been that way for me. Early on I changed areas too: I began as an Early Modern specialist with an interest in poetry, dropped that to move to the 18th century and wrote my dissertation on Richardson’s Clarissa and Grandison. There I can formulate it a usual way: I was gripped by the book (Clarissa), still am (!), but also interested to answer the question, how the modern novel with its deep subjectivity developed out of the earlier romance forms. I wanted to know how this creative mood whereby when a reader reads a novel she will think she is literally “in” the book somehow, lose a sense of the world around her, and imagine herself in this world to the point you have to be proded to half-wake up to reality. I thought it was located in the reveries of epistolary narrative. I’m still fascinated by epistolary narratives, but have moved on to gothic, female gothic, French novels (as important to this process of creating the modern novel). I love French literature, and especially texts by women from the later 17th into our own time. Never tire of them

Again Nell Blaine, this time Cosmos, Night Interior, 1976

No small joy for me has been 18th century picturesque and rococo art:

Canaletto, Northumberland House, 1752 (the wallpaper for this main computer I write on and look at all the time),

landscape poetry, but it also helped that Robert Adams Day advised me a paper I wrote on Clarissa had a dissertation topic in it and said he would be my advisor. It was that offer that drew me to the 18th century as the problem of finding an advisor and a topic to write about that would be acceptable by some authority was solved.

But I didn’t give up my poetry and in the end instead of writing a scholarly researched book translated the complete oeuvres of two Italian Renaissance poets; Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara, and kept up that one too — I wrote a review of a recent translation of part of Colonna’s oeuvre. I’m interested in women’s poetry and wrote a series of essays on “foremother poets” for a poetry festival online organized by a group of women poets, an offshoot of a listserv; we (a larger group) then published an anthology of poems by us (one a person in the book) called Letters to the World. Anna Barbauld belongs here for me as a central woman poet only now beginning to be adequately read.

Giovanni Volpato and Louis Ducrois, The Temple to the Sybil at Tivoli, 1750s (the wallpaper for my laptop on my library table)

And one develops new interests — one which is partly the result of teaching is film studies, film adaptations of novels. Students and lots of people “get their stories” from movies nowadays, and movies influence how books are read or make visible how they are read at a given time, and I’m now engaged in a book project, the Austen movies — as well as an article project on Trollope, the Palliser films. And now I’ve grown fascinated with the work of Andrew Davies. My respect for him increases daily — or nightly. The other night I watched a masterwork by him (and Tristram Powell, the director, son of Anthony who wrote Dance to the Music of Time), Falling, an adaptation of a novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard (and I love and read all the time women’s memoirs and novels, an interest which began to be scholarly back with Clarissa).

I keep up with publications on the science of medicine (its history too) because I teach continually a course called Advanced Composition on the Natural Sciences and Technology. Often as much as a third of my class is made up of young and older adults who work in the worlds of medicine.

I see I forgot Austen. I first read her when I was 12 or 13 and have never stopped. She never fails me, and I keep my bookcase full of books by and about her, and essays and all sorts of things near my desk in my workroom. Close at hand, near to heart. In fact reading women’s memoirs and novels that come out of the Austen tradition or are like her books in their woman-centered point of view and interest in subjectivity and the private life impinged on by public are a need for me. I find comfort and strength in such books.

My favorite of all the heroines, Elinor Dashwood as enacted by Hattie Morahan in the 2008 S&S (by Davies and Pivcevic), in a moment where she sounds and has a facial and bodily expression like that of Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet

And also feminism. In the middle 1990s I had a conversion experience. I realized I had misunderstood the feminist movement, had (wrongly) seen it as a movement of elite women seeking to improve their career prospects and create power and prestige for themselves. This was the result of being here in cyberspace online and reading many woman’s postings and being on all sorts of lists. I realized feminism could and would help me, free me, enable me to understand what had happened to my in my life better and also read literature in a new way that made it meaningful for me, so that I could and did find myself in books in ways I could not see before — and for the first time. This has not changed what I read, but the way I read it and how I write about it. I could never have written the paper, “Rape in Clarissa” in the 1980s nor delivered it in public the way I did. Nowadays I discern four phases, here outlined, and these influence the way I see books and writing today too:

The first phase: officially visible started in 1848, in the US, by a conference in upper New York State, familiar to us in the suffragette movement where women asked for what in the western world is mostly at least in lipservice granted:

the vote, for career and education equality, for prohibition, critiquing the family structure strongly as such for hurting women physically and financially; this phase includes a demand for prohibition because when men, husbands and fathers are drunk, they don’t work and make money for the family, and they are frequently violent;

The second phase I’d sum up as the most radical and what makes feminism an object for attack, and is still hotly contested (this area includes discussions of say rape). Voices here are Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Simone de Beauvoir, Lilian Robinson, lots of famous names:

they moved to a demand for freedom for their bodies, they analyzed the role of sexuality and wanted to change the terms of sexuality and indeed the experience and said society was structured to give men power over women in each particular (the analogy would be with Marxists showing the economic basis of oppression), so a strong socialism model underlies this. It is this group of women who are called man-haters and prigs and accused of not liking sex. Well, they don’t like to be raped.

Third-phase sometimes seen as a reaction against feminism, and a qualification by women in order to deflect the backlash; here you paradoxically also find people like Linda Hirshman so insistent on getting power, be in corridors of power and angry too:

Motherhood is power once again (at least to some), if women find power in sexuality the way it’s done, that’s power (the argument against is this is no power the way it’s experienced, or only fleetingly); strong individualism (a US value), seek power for yourself and use it as you please; pro-families (best or to me most valued argued on the basis of how lower class and working women only get their self-esteem through their function in a family or as a mother); here you find women trying to reach out too beyond their class and race and ethncities.

And now post-feminism:

Refuge seeking, eclectic, sometimes seen as no feminism and a retreat, if so a sophisticated one. Examples found in Karen Joy Fowler’s Sister Noon, also Austen.

I say least about the last since the last has been least written about — as far as I know. I’d be grateful for any discussions of “post-feminism” others know of.

One more aspect of this morphing. Funny that I thought of Austen only at the end — so fundamental is she to me. I should also have brought out how we read and write differently about books and art over the years, so that not just areas of interest but how we go about them changes. Again there’s a conventional way of putting this: one takes up with say deconstruction or book history as this emerges in the scholarly world. But for me at least my engagement in such things does not come because they are there or fashionably spreading and bring up new ideas to use as perspectives. So if I nowadays bring in film studies perspectives, it’s not something external, or just that.

Emma Thompson, still my favorite actress, in a recent movie with Dustin Hoffman, Last Chance Harvey

So (I concluded on C18-l), I know lots about different things that are intertwined but also sometimes seem divagations … but are anything but. They are my life.

Ellen

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Another year in reading

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), The Cup of Tea (1879)

Again Cassatt, again her sister, Lydia, this time At the Tapestry Loom (1881) (we went to a wonderful show and lecture on her art at the National Women’s Museum of Art in DC this year)

Dear Readers and friends,

Over on Reveries under the Sign of Austen, meant to be a more personal and musing blog, I’ve written a personal account of how I and my family have experienced Christmas over the last few years, one intended to have some general application too. Here where I intend to write more impersonally and provide essay-like columns, I thought I’d list the books I’ve read this year that meant a lot to me — each set under the listserv community where I was led to read the book or posted about it. So it’s a celebration of listserv community life as well as an indication of what the different online communities do.

On Trollope19thCStudies at Yahoo, there were four:

I had read Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey before, but a long while back and it didn’t mean that much to me somehow. It just struck as more like Austen in tone and outlook than the other Bronte novels I’d read thus far.

This time Agnes Grey just stirred me deeply: AG is far more feminist than
either of her sisters’ books: it’s about a young woman’s attempt to become independent and fulfilled through the only respectable job offered to someone of her class: that of governess. That she fails is the result of her nobility of soul. I loved the acrid angry tone and the candour of the descriptions of social life as seen and experienced by the marginalized governess. She marries at the end: a gentle, aimable man as kind and egalitarian at heart as she; as much a reading person. It’s a quiet joy which she reverts to as a refuge.

Then I read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for the first time. It’s a masterpiece about so much: the alcoholism so emphasized in the early and recent criticism is but a symptom of what makes Arthur Huntingdon a horror: the point is (like Richardson’s Lovelace) he was educated to become a tyrannical amoral horror, all his worst characteristics developed and his better ones ridiculed or ignored. And so he would make his son another like himself. It’s a novel of female sexual awakening too — and renunciation. The use of journals in the form of letters makes it about the deep past and since these are read by the man Helene Graham grows to love while still married, Gilbert Markham, it becomes his novel too. He is similar to the kind of man who appears at the close of Agnes Grey, only his male ego and pragmaticism and poetry of soul developed much more. I loved the movie adaptation by Nokes and Barron, and then I listened to it read aloud alternatively by David Case (oh a new voice for him I’d not heard before, softly lifting Northern burr) and Donada Peters as Helen.

Tara Fitzgerald and Helen Graham and Toby Stephens as Gilbert Markham

I now think Anne Bronte’s two novels superior to Wuthering Heights and all Charlotte’s novels with the exception of Jane Eyre and Villette.

The third was George Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career, one of the great political novels of 19th century England — philosophically, realistically, psychologically, autobiographically.

Finally, John Sutherland’s Life of Scott. I won’t read the novels in the somewhat naive way I did before. He put together the man who wrote the journals with the man in the novels.

On Eighteenth Century Worlds at Yahoo, largely due to the enthusiasm of my good friend, Clare, I reread Richardson’s Clarissa not once but twice — I am just finishing it once again. How can this possibly have been a revelation? A transformation. Well, it was. I feel for the first time I’ve begun to read it aright. It’s meant as a portrait of a rapist: Lovelace fits all the characteristics of rapists as gathered by sociologists and others: hatred, desire for revenge, huge egoism (cannot see outside himself), strong turn to violence. The very approval of Lovelace makes visible the substructure of approval for predatory male behavior as attractive that makes the common large percentage of rapes in our society possible — with impunity for the most part. For it is still hard to get a rape case to court where there is no aggravated assault with clear injuries to the woman, she is still on trial. An added-on letter for the 3rd edition shows Lovelace imagining himself with a gang of men raping and humiliating Anna, her mother and servant: Richardson makes the point even here a court case might go in favor of Lovelace.

Clary rushing out to meet the amiable Hickman: all unreserve and generosity — I imagine Davies could do justice to this character in a rewrite of the film

Along with the book I’ve read many film studies and studied a number of films adapted from novels heavily influenced by Richardson’s (Les Liaisons Dangereuses, La Religieuse, Valmont, La Vieille Maistresse) and films adapted from 18th century history to look at how sexuality is presented today, how history presented in these films. Modern films too: Lynn Ramsey’s Morvern Callar with Samantha Morton. Also feminist and sociological studies of rape and sexuality, most recently Michelle Fine, “Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire,” Harvard Educational Review, 58:1 (1988):29-53. One book by Nancy Paxton (on colonialist books and rape and female sexuality) led me to reading and gathering colonialist novels and listening to novels (e.g., all of Raj Quartet) where female sexuality and rape are among the many significant central topics.

Paradise Road, adapted from Betty Jeffreys’ diaries of captured women in Japan

It’s been fun and deeply educational and I’m not finished yet.

And I must not forget reading Katherine Jones’s A Passionate Sisterhood: Women of the Wordsworth Circle; a complete decent edition of Elisabeth Vigee-LeBrun’s invigorating intelligent travel memoir of her life as an artist; Francoise Changernagor’s L’Allee du Roi, a deeply felt memoir-novel of the life of Francoise Maintenon (with the meditative 12th chapter); and Caroline Moorehead’s life of Lucie Dillon de la Tour du Pin, Dancing to the Precipice.. L’Allee du Roi I had read years ago, but it was like new to me; Moorehead on Mrs Delatour (a joke name) added a rich new set of memoirs and letters for me to delve eventually. I fell in love with Southey reading Jones’s book! And the poet, Sara Coleridge. Had it not been for people on the list, I would not have discovered the English translation of Vigee-Lebrun’s book on the Net is abridged, bowlderized, a shallow wholly inadequate version of this 2 volume set of meditations, character sketches, ruminations on a career and woman’s professional life.

Vigee-LeBrun’s watercolor pastel of Mont Blanc (found by Judy)

These experiences were also due largely to two new members, Penny and Catherine whose blog Versailles and more is on my blog roll.

For Women Writer through the Ages at Yahoo, the year began with Iris Origo’s The Last Attachment: The Story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli, which I found so enlightening and irresistible I went on to her immortal (I think) diary of her experience of World War 2 in Northern Italy, War in Val d’Orcia, and Caroline Moorehead’s biography of her, Images and Shadows. I learned about a whole new Byron I had not met before — and I’ve read a good deal of his poetry, letters and biography, the Byron of his last years in Italy, the revolutionary, the man who was good husband material after all. Teresa has not been done justice to until now.

This was the year we stopped having formal elections on WWTTA, and it’s hard to remember all the books therefor. This was the year I read Ingeborg Bachmann’s poetry and her novel, Marina, but much as I was moved, I think last year’s summer reading of Christina Wolf’s startlingly original and deeply humane meditation on war as well as travel, Cassandra meant more to me. (Both choices and finds, thanks to Fran, for my knowledge of German letters is woefully inadequate.) Having said that, there are few texts that come near this (a translation of) Bachmann:

Every Day

War is no longer declared,
only continued. The monstrous
has become everyday. The hero
stays away from battle. The weak
have gone to the front.
The uniform of the day is patience,
its medal the pitiful star of hope above the heart.

The medal is awarded
when nothing more happens,
when the artillery falls silent,
when the enemy has grown invisible
and the shadow of eternal armament
covers the sky.
It is awarded
for desertion of the flag,
for bravery in the face of friends,
for the betrayal of unworthy secrets
and the disregard
of every command.

For the rest over the course of the year books by women I posted on to the list comforted and strengthened me. The one that most leaps to mind was Margaret Drabble’s Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws. But also (and this personally) important to me were Suzy McKee Charnas’s My Father’s Ghost, and opening up another set of books, Nicola Beauman’s The Other Elizabeth Taylor

Our spring was spent watching women’s films (films by women and about them) and while no one stood out (and I disliked some of the plays) I learned a lot about the subgenre of women’s films: often have women in groups, emphasize women’s friendship, will usually have a lesbian (only recently presented sympathetically), and this fed into my love of Austen films. Yes I discovered Andrew Davies and was won over by him too. Indeed it’s been such a rich year watching films I can’t recall even the half of them but know how much solace and companionship and insight I’ve had — going nearly weekly with Izzy to the movies was part of this.

And I should not omit how much the weekly poetry day and putting pictures up by women frequently have told and uplifted me — for I loved the subgenres women have invented and fulfilled and what’s typical of their art, e.g., they are coloristic.

Nell Blaine (1922-96), Rooftops (1967)

An author who now means a lot to me I began to read this year on the train going to the Washington Area Print Group sessions on Fridays at the Library of Congress: Colm Toibin. I was gripped by his The South, about an Irish woman that flees Ireland for an unconventional existence in Spain, taught his Blackwater Lightship, and am now so moved by his Brooklyn (which I’m reading right now) I’m having trouble finishing it.

I finished it early this morning. It’s force is grimly powerful, and I’ve been trying to think why. I have read his The South (about a woman who escapes her family to go live in Spain and finds herself embedded eventually in another family group), Blackwater Lightship (about deep alienation within a family), and The Master, Henry James as a gay man, an outsider. After a while the books all do spin around the same concerns, and for me at least are gripping. I find I can’t put them down easily each time I start one up again. I get intensely emotionally involved.

For Booklyn I found I had to peek ahead to the last pages to make sure our heroine does what will eventually lead to some happiness for her, I was so anxious for her. I found I had to have enormous strength to get through so much did I worry for her because she seemed to be this good person, self-sacrificing and could be bullied into giving up what could make her life joyful. But then when I came to the end of the book I saw I had been mistaken. In fact she might have liked to stay in Ireland and not return to Brooklyn, that is, stay with her birth family group instead of the new one she had become a part of it. So right now I’m thinking the force of the book comes from this grim insight: what we think keeps people together is not their intangible feelings, but order itself, and their value for one another comes out of how chance has put someone near someone that fits his or her needs. And either you belong to the order or you don’t.

Now that’s the thing: sometimes you don’t and the reasons for this have little to do with your merit.

It casts a new curious light on life. Come to think of it, I really began to read him as a result of a reading and discussion of two fictional biographies of Henry James: most the 19thCentury Literature at Yahoo read David Lodges’s, which I thought poor and coarse; but Toibin is again stunning as James by virtue of his homosexuality is someone who is not wanted in the order unless he erases who he is, and so he spends his life in exile, unable to become part of any permanent order; the title, The Master, is ironic. Just about every essay I’ve come across by Toibin engages me (I read them in the NYRB and LRB). He loves to write as a woman in drag. Alas, that Sedgwick did not live to write about his books.

A. L. Coburn, Frontispiece for Henry James’s Ambassadors, vol 22 of the New York Edition of Novels and Tales (1922)

The above is a photograph touched up to suggest something of the nature of the novel’s perspective: displaced, quiet, alienated yet there and part of it, ambivalent to cultural prestige (a similar angle is seen in Andrew Davies’s He Knew He Was Right; Davies’s adaptation of Hollinghurst’s gay novel, The Line of Beauty, lays bare the truth in The Master, Brooklyn). Coburn did a number of these frontispieces which were something new and, as photographs, give us insight into period

I have tried to join in on Janeites, Austen-l, and French Literature at Yahoo, but haven’t had the energy. We had a beautiful Austen summer on Women Writers and are enjoying cross-postings on James Edward Austen-Leigh’s memoir of Jane and James Austen, her brother’s poems from Austen-l. For French Literature at Yahoo I really wanted to read with them A Very Long Engagement by Sebastian Japrisot (because I loved the film adaptation, Un long dimanche de fiancailles), but I haven’t been able to make the time.

And finally from teaching: my students led me to reread carefully and appreciate Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake for the first time; I just fell in love with Mira Nair’s film of the same name (a still from this film is now my picture across wordpress) and Mississippi Marsala.

How about you, gentle readers? any book or movie or picture or music you want to list as having meant a great deal to you this year. A new favorite? What say you?

Ellen

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Eveline Hasler’s life of Emily Kempin-Spyri

Dear Friends,

While away on a brief trip to a friend, I managed to read at night an English translation by Edna McCown of Eveline Hasler’s Flying with Wings of Wax, biographical fictional life of the first woman to achieve a law degree in Zurich, Emily Kempin-Spyri (1853-1901). Hasler’s book as translated by McCown is deeply moving and instructive: it reveals the profound and often insuperable obstacles that prevent a gifted woman from being of true service to her society and fulfilling her potential because she is a woman.

Hasler is a well-known novelist in Germany. I first came across her as the author of the book upon which a powerful film adaptation, Anna Goldin is based. Goldin was accused of infanticide and sorcery in the 18th century, the victim of a power struggle between families and virulent misogyny; Goldin’s sad ending shows the limits of the enlightenment in Switzerland. I wrote about her and the film adaptation in my report of a paper in the 18th century conference at Rchmond. Anna Goldin is only readily available in German; there is a French translation, Anna Goldin, derniere sorceresse, but it’s expensive.

In Flying with Wings of Wax (an allusion to the Icarus story), through McCown’s English prose, Hasler tells the tragic story of the life of Emily Kempin-Spyri (1853-1901), now (unfortunately and ironically) mostly only identified as the niece of Joanna Spyri, author of Heidi. It’s told in the first person, like a memoir and is described as a biographical novel. All the writing in italics (and there’s a lot) and the outline of the facts of this woman’s life are accurate; the inner life is imagined because much is unknown — and was probably destroyed. (This use of italics we came across long ago on my Women Writers through the Ages list at Yahoo when we read Nuala O’Faolin’s My Dream of You where there was an inset story of a 19th century Irish woman who was either murdered by the state or died for having killed her husband if I remember rightly; we learn of her actual life, the character of the monster she lived with, and her affairs.)

In brief, Kempin was a brilliant woman who from the time she was very young wanted to study and become someone in the world with a useful career beyond wife and mother. She had a tyrant father who ended up loathing her because he insisted all she was good for was to have babies and marry a man who would aggrandize his family. The irony here is the father was known as a liberal politician; in fact we see his liberalism was severely limited in more areas than regards women. He was one of the people who destoyed this woman: among other things, when she married a man she did love because he was a poor curate, the father refused to give any dowry. Had he given her one, she and the husband would have been far better off, but he reinforced the man’s low status and lack of connections and poverty. Kemlin enabled his wife to go to school and study law and become a lawyer with a degree. Then she discovered that she would not be permitted to practice, and no matter who she turned to, where she argued, how good or needed she was, the authorities in Zurich and Germany refused any woman the right to practice law. This after years of intense effort on her part. She was also refused the right to teach in a degree program; she could not get decent-paying pupils because her courses didn’t “count.”

The high point of her life, and her one fulfilling time occurred in NYC. She, her husband, and their three children emigrated to the US, specifically NYC, where she and he thought they might be able to build a mutually hard working and independent life together.

Why did they go to NYC? What had happened was her husband gradually lost patronage and customers in his church for his very liberal attitudes as well as his open behavior to her. They went to the US in desperation. She had had 3 children whom they took with them. Gradually she succeeded and the husband did not.

For a while things looked very good, at least for her and they hoped eventually for him: she was accepted by women philanthropists (rich men’s wives who themselves had aspiration), and by women feminists. She had a hard struggle getting permission to teach and she never practiced law openly: it was she who sat in offices and made briefs, another man and in one case her husband (they opened a business together) was the public spokesperson.

He began to become estranged from her. They were living in small apartments, and she spent most of her time writing, some of which she published, and she produced a book and delivered papers. He did nothing, and returned home to Zurich with two of their children (the older ones) who were homesick. Her life just with her daughter is shown to have been a real relief to her. She was able to get a smaller apartment whch she could afford and suited her; have a different relationship with the world and was getting somewhere.

Alas, she returned to Zurich. Her son became ill, her mother-in-law found it too much to take care of him, and she was persuaded to return on the grounds it would just be for the summer. There was a teaching job waiting for her in the fall. The boy took longer to get better and by the time she could return she had long the tenuous foothold she had gotten and her position.

So she stayed and found herself fighting the same ugly battles again. This time (it was later in the century) she did have more success. She managed to publish, to teach, and to write, and she did work in a law firm. Her husband was again her front arguing cases and doing public work while she did all the hard work and thinking, but after a while he left her and went to live elsewhere. So she worked (as she had done before) for another man who was the public front and got much of the credit and income.

Years of hard work, small pay, and endless prejudice wore her down, and she broke down mentally for a while. She came home with a man one night whom she thought liked her and she was falling in love with; an intellectual modern type, not so modern that when he saw her second daughter, he didn’t prefer the younger woman to the older one. That would have been okay but he was married and proceeded to seduce, impregnate and (of course) not marry the daughter. So there she was the ultimate bad woman: daughter disgraced and without a place; separated from her husband, and her son was not willing to work hard nor could he easily get anywhere as her son. Deep personal humiliation and unhappiness was what the world handed her.

She was institutionalized. We do not know who institutionalized her; Hasler suspects her father with the collusion of her husband and perhaps other family members, maybe her aunt, Joanna Spyri, who despite her own luck in being able to write and success with conventional stories (Heidi), was against women writing or doing anything which got in the way of serving a husband and producing and serving children. The records show that she was kept a prisoner in effect, mistreated, and made much worse by the treatment. She was mistreated as a mental incompetent; her attempts to get out and get a job (eventually any job, including that of maid) were prevented by not sending her letters out. She was put in solitary confinement and given cruel treatments. She died inside a few years.

Her ending was and is not an anomaly but characteristic of what was done to women like her and in gentler ways in some places is still done. Laws and customs were all organized against her, particularly the ability to hold property, and earn a good living. At the end of the book Hasler says how she would have loved to tell of how Emily ended in a moment like those few she knew in NYC and Zurich: surrounded by other women who were patronesses of this woman, either themselves making their way or the wives of rich husbands who gave money, having achieved her degree (which she did), publications, lectures, but the truth is more instructive.

The book is eloquently written as an interweaving of subjective memories, present-time dramas and narratives. Early on we find ourselves in the institution and realize that while one narrative begins at the opening of Emily’s life and proceeds forward, other strands move at different paces and show us different moments of her life, and always there is the present institution which she cannot get out of and her humiliation and control by others who dense, or triumph or if they want to help her cannot.

It’s revealing that long research has not enabled Hasler to find out who imprisoned Kempin in the asylum. Coincidentally I began a book by Douglas Smith, The Pearl, on the lives of a serf actress, Praskovia Kovalryova and the fabulously wealthy and powerful, Nicholas Sheremetev, who after years of exploiting her sexually and putting her on the stage (private theatricals were very popular in the era) married her; shortly thereafter she became pregnant and then died in childbirth (age 34).

Although also about a women who was victimized by a system, Smith continually buys into the surface accounts of the aristocrats, and tells the story as if the surface claims of the Sheremetev family were true. The documents left are opaque or celebrate the wealthy and powerful. What a missed opportunity. Smith is not a person with a teaching position in a university but a resident scholar and the way he gets into archives and can read documents is the last thing he would do would be to tell a story in the way Hasler does. So Smith’s book is relatively useless except reporting in modern language what the documents (very few) say and of course bringing the woman before us, reminding us she existed and what the life of serfs and this particular serf woman in Russia in the 18th century was.

In a way even this is nothing new: Praskovia is a legendary figure in Russia, and a poem by Anna Ahkmatova is dedicated to Praska: Ahkmatova lived for years in a small flat in a palace Praskovia’s fabulously rich husband’s family owned.

Not that scholars are necessarily better. I also read Maria Frawley’s Twayne book on Anne Bronte while away. I don’t find myself reading mush when it comes to the characters, but she will not permit herself to say anything offensive or outside explicit evidence. Bronte shows how how mean, ugly and vicious were her employers, but Frawley will not risk evaluating such people frankly. So the book is made up of hopeless generalizations repeated over and over again about how Bronte wanted a social identity she couldn’t have and was very unhappy. Well there needs no 200 pages to tell us this; we have Bronte’s novels which tell far more than this hollow general idea (in jargon-ridden language too).

Hasler is a rare writer. It’s such as she who throws light on our wasteland of literature (as described by Virginia Woolf). I recommend her book strongly and regret that her Anne Goldin in French is minimum $38 (it goes up from there) and that’s without postage. There is an online biography of Kempin-Spyri too.

Ellen

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