Mapping Trollope; or, Trollope as geographer

Trollope’s Barsetshire

Dear Friends and readers,

You may recall how proud I’ve been of my chapter on the original illustrations to Trollope’s novels in my Trollope on the ‘Net, my love of pictures and my huge section of illustrations to Trollope’s novels on my website. Not such happy memories: when I told you of how the North American Victorian association rejected my proposal to discuss how Trollope used cliches in his illustrations. My argument would have been how Trollope used sentimental pictures of minor stories where there is no counterpart full dramatic scene to provide heroine’s stories we don’t quite get. These provide a countervailing set of patterns for women from the ones the novels which have male readers’ tastes primarily in mind.

Well I’m trying again. I’ve sent a proposal to the Sharp Society (History of authorship, reading and publication) again to talk about my original research into nearly 500 images for Trollope’s books. This time to accord with the conference’s themes, “Geographies of the Book,”, I proposed to talk about how Trollope creates worlds for his novels which seem coterminus with real worlds we experience, but are filled in with imagined places to the point that you cannot quite map Trollope’s worlds with say southeast England, or London, or, for that matter, southwest Ireland of the other cities in the world he imagined so concretely.

I told of how when I went to an Trollope Society AGM in London in 1999, we went on 1 of 6 circuitous detailed maps drawn from the Pallisers books, but which had locations for characters across Trollope’s whole oeuvre as well as from Trollope’s own life as far as we know it. We walked round Trollope.

I thought I’d deal with how this imagined space influences us, both for good and bad, for, like Dickens, Trollope omits and stigmatizes space. Space where the abysmally poor or people who have to operate outside the norms and laws and customs his society conferred respectability on lived and worked. I’ve not only been influenced by recent book illustration histories and Franco Moretti’s famous Atlas of the European Novel, but my reading about Bath and its bogus as well as real history (see Peter Borsay, The Image of Georgian Bath).

Trollope also idealizes spaces the rich lived in, and his illustrators exploit well-known picturesque motifs. Engravings are just so important; writers like Radcliffe (believe it or not) actually relied heavily on these. For example, this is precisely the sort of illustration that picturesque writers has in mind:

Wm Westall (1781-1850), Rievaulx Abbey from Duncombe Terrace

In the illustrations themselves, emblematic objects, dress, costume, the way a particular character’s body fills (or does not fill) out space conveys evaluations of their status, position, character.

Alice Vavasour (Caroline Mortimer) in the window-seat at Matching Priory (Palliser 2:3): she’s reading in the early morning just before Mr Palliser (Philip Latham) comes to see and accuse her of what he takes to be her “abominable” conduct in taking his wife, Lady Glencora (Susan Hampshire) out to the priory ruins late at night.

People are unaware of how many city, country- and even seascapes he has in his books.

Kate O’Hara from An Eye for an Eye (illustrator Elisa Trimby)

Like other Victorian novelists, Trollope chose what passages in his book would be illustrated, and when he was at his height of success he could dictate what kind of illustrator he would have, change illustrators mid-way if he didn’t like what was drawn. Even late in his career, we find his strong influence.

Again I want to show how some of these illustrations influence the choice of actor and scene, production and costume design of the film adaptations of Trollope. Conscious departures count too.

Phiz, Burgo Fitzgerald and the Beggar Girl (Can You Forgive Her?)

Film adaptations (costume dramas, for Trollope they must be mini-series so as to give time for development) influence our dreams and longings; and the best of them picture the price we pay for our social identities, with our the hurt of those thrown away and the losses of those who sustain their roles:

Jane asking George, “What am I to do”? juxtaposed in the series with

Lady Glen in her agon having just sent Burgo away (Can You Forgive Her?, Pallisers 3:5).

I wrote it telling myself it would probably not be accepted and I must live with this as I have no particular status myself, but I’m not dismal over this, and gentle reader, you must hope with me that this time my proposal is accepted. Hope springs eternal …

A facsimile reprint: on the cover the original map

Ellen

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Found in Translations: I didn’t fall asleep over my book after all

It is plausible that no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original — Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” Illuminations

One must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is the same as potassium, but with sodium nothing would have happened), the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates and all patchwork — Primo Levi, “Potassium,” The Periodic Table

Eugene Atget (1857-1927), The Petit Trianon

Dear friends and readers,

My theme: I’ve returned to an old love to do a new project: French-to-English and back again translations in the 18th century. I begin with Walter Benjamin and my own experiences, then cover Beebee’s book, Clary on the continent, Prevost’s different Clevelands, and various different telling individual cases (different Tom Joneses, Radcliffe’s translators); I end on Renato Poggioli’s “The Added Artificer” which deserves to be much better known.

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

I have a hard time remembering when I was not fascinated by translations. I think it began back in high school when at age 16 I read a probably poor translation into English of Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame. I loved the book and wanted to know more about it, and especially I wanted to read it in French. Later on somehow reading a book in one language and then reading the same book in another gave me an experience of two weirdly interdependent books and thus worlds. When I was in college, I took French for all the years I could, extending my non-major following of it with one-credit courses: such courses met twice a week, but for one and one-half hours of sheer talk in French allowed using our books. We’d take turns using its conversations. Then in graduate school, I took a course in Italian over one summer to fulfill the language requirement (one had to pass two tests in two languages), and just loved the language, again enjoyed so much lining up a text in Italian aligned with its source or target text in English.

Anne Finch when young

During the 1980s I re-taught myself to read French and read French novels, and then for over 20 years starting the middle 1980s I taught myself to read and to translate Italian and translated Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara’s poetry and then wrote an essay on Anne Finch’s translations out of the Italian though the French. Just what I had done at first for Colonna (and what I’ve done since for a poem by Elsa Morante I found in the original Italian with French text facing it).

So when over the past week I dropped one of my projects for this fall term, the paper on Paranoia and Infamy, I naturally turned to the proposal I wanted to send to Chawton, and was happy, even eager to reread some of my books on translation (Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, The Scandals of Translation, Sherry Simon’s Gender in Translation). Did you know that over 90% of translations into the world are transations into English? how little translators are paid? How women’s writing begins in translation, how they express themselves through its covering medium?

I discovered my old folders filled with essays on translation, some read, some not read, and books and essays just on translation in the 18th century, the 19th and more recently.

Charlotte Smith by George Romney (1792)

My idea was Charlotte Smith’s translation of Prevost’s Manon Lescaut, or some study of intermediary texts between her later novels and Prevost and Rousseau, but to tell the truth I was not sure I could find something to extrapolate out of a tight narrow comparison. I do have Isabelle de Montolieu’s translation of one of Smith’s Solitary Wanderer’s Tale (Corisande de Beauvilliers, and all of M. Montagne’s (whoever he is) French translation of Smith’s Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake, which I also own in English. And of course Montolieu’s translation of Sense and Sensibility (with her preface) and soon will have her translation of Persuasion.

So I went about to look for previous work on individual books I’d done. I’ve now remembered my careful comparative reading of the opening of Radcliffe’s Udolpho with Victorine de Chastenay’s translation of the same text into French, something of Chastenay’s life (she was imprisoned during the terror and lost family members and emerged somewhat shattered and depressed, and various essays on 18th century translations of classics (Riccoboni and Davaux’s Tom Jones, a French and a Dutch translation of Prevost’s Cleveland contrasted to the French texts) and of course Prevost’s Clarisse.

Victorine de Chastenay (translator into French of Radcliffe’s Udolpho)

And I’ve read away and reminded myself of what I once knew. So, I spent Tuesday I spent yesterday reading translation studies and then how women in particular use translation: how the earliest women writers began (felt they had license) by translating, how it works to free, a way to express what is otherwise forbidden (that’s how I see Smith’s translation of Manon Lescaut), a way of declaring love and wanting to share (Chastenay’s Udolpho).

Jean-Antoine Watteau, unnamed shepherdess

I read Mirella Agorni’s poignant, The Voice of the ‘Translatress’: From Aphra Behn to Elizabeth Carter Author, The Yearbook of English Studies, 28 (1998 Eighteenth-Century Lexis and Lexicography): 181-95, and I compared a literal translation of Ovid’s Oenone to Paris with Aphra Behn’s translation/adaptation. In her case (as is not uncommon among men as well as women) she did not have any Latin, so someone gave her an intermediary crib. Behn turned the poem into erotica — on behalf of Oenone, a nobody. Since reading Germaine Greer’s persuasive debunking of all the myths growing up around Aphra Behn, including that she was an aristocrat (born on wrong side of blanket), supported herself sheerly by her playwriting (when it seems rather she combined being men’s mistresses with playwriting and verse, including translations, and pop novellas), I can see why she’d identify with Oenone.

Behn is worth remembering and this unashamed revelling in idyllic
pastoral too. Some of her most moving verses defend her as a translatress:

I by a double right thy Bounties claim,
Both from my Sex, and in Apollo’Ns ame:
Let me with Sappha and Orinda
Oh ever sacred Nymph, adorn’d by thee;
And give my Verses Immortality.

Jane Austen died declaring her immortality in defiance against everyone spending their afternoon so trivially.

‘Oh! subjects rebellious! Oh Venta depraved
When once we are buried you think we are gone
But behold me immortal!

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

The Abbe Prevost (1697-1763) translated all Richardson and Frances Sheridan’s Sidney Biddulph

Speaking very generally, as the century progressed and the novel achieved more respect, translations became more ostensibly faithful. Paradoxically at the same time (especially if you are working on the literal old model that a good translation is a sort of excellent crib — rather like those who go to movies and critique a film adaptation by how “literally” like it seemed to them to the book), translations became more creative. You can see how the author expressed her or himself through the medium.

Some of the best general essays written thus far on translation are general philosophical ones. A particularly rich one is by Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”. He opens with what may seem a strange idea: “It is plausible that no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original.” The analysis in defense of this is brilliant and rich with ideas. One train of argument suggests that any translation is about the encounter of the two languages and two cultures. I find this to be so in my experience of translation. I don’t own the words I use and must use the words of my time and culture and watch them interact with the words and cultural assumptions and whole world view of the other language — French or Italian. He says the desire to translate comes partly from a love of a certain language. Again I know this is so.

Lovelace just before the rape: Simon Brett’s late 20th century illustrations for the Folio Society edition

I reread some of Beebee’s Clarissa on the Continent, about 18th century to modern translations of Clarissa — and abridgements. I know now the Broadveiw edition provides a new edition of the 3rd edition of Clarissa, thus replacing the now out-of-print 4 volume Everyman.

Beebee’s book includes a close reading of two contemporary translations of Clarissa: Prevost and Michaelis’s. He compares these two texts to Richardson’s 1st and 3rd editions of Clarissa (which are themselves different, though both think they must Frenchify the text from the point of view of French taste and ethics). Beebee teaches us how to read translations. He has a chapter where he surveys later translations and abridgements. Particularly of interest to me was Dallas’s abridgement as Trollope wrote a critique of that; it was the book 19th century readers knew Clarissa. After Dallas when some 19th century person says she’s read Clary it’s probably Dallas’s Clary.

In last chapter of Beebee’s book he compares Sherburn’s 1970s and Burrell’s 1950s abridgements. Most of the time today Clarissa is read in an abridgement in the US. In France they read Prevost’s translation (quite different in a number of ways from Richardson); in the US when I was in college (1960s) we read Burrell’s abridgement for Modern Library; the last decade or so students read Sherburn’s abridgement for Rinehart. Margaret Doody has a long article lambasting Sherburn (by the way).

I had been really delighted to come across for the first time ever a close reading and discussion of Burrell. I was not sure of his full name. His edition had never been acknowledged or described in print as far as I knew. I had read Doody and Stuber’s exposure of Sherburn’s abridgement as a far too personal, rigid, a narrow take with interjections by Sherburn (!), but never came across any commentary on Burrell.

Lovelace attacking Clarisssa (Simon Brett again)

It was Burrell’s abridgement of Clarissa that I first read at age 18-19 and was riveted by. I had the not uncommon experience of not being able to put the book down, of being gripped to read on and on into the wee hours of the dawn. The most vivid memory I had though was of disappointment; somehow or other I had missed the rape. I still remember hunting around the text the following morning (after a little sleep) and not finding it. Later false memories began to tell me I had found it later, but now I realize that in fact I must’ve read the rape for the first time in the Everyman reprint of Richardson’s 3rd edition.

Well, guess what? Burrell omitted it! He censored out the scene. It was in the Everyman I realized that Lovelace raped Clarissa in front of the other women; there I first read the famous passage where Clary says she will be his, just give her a bit of time right here, right now.

Nonetheless, I believe that Burrell’s edition influenced me & strongly; Burrell produces a romantic (vexed word I know, but I’m trying to use it in the common sense way of overwrought individualistic emotionalism and rebellion) text. Burrell will omit much surrounding matter here and there which qualifies Clarissa’s subjective interpretations and outcries. I’ve never read Sherburn so didn’t realize he actually interjects his own interpretation and sometimes himself imitates Lovelace — falls into Lovelace’s vein. Beebee shows how both men cut the book in ways which erase some of the worst aspects of Lovelace’s character. Reading them, though, against Richardson’s books teaches us what was most deeply meant to be expressed in the original — especially after you have studied a variety of translation and adaptations.

Final duel (Brett)

I probably loved Clarissa, was more grabbed by it in Burrell’s edition than I would have been in Richardson’s whole text. Burrell omitted much of the long fourth volume, especially all the Job passages and the gruesome and to me egregiously spiteful nasty dramatizations of the deaths of wicked people. He kept Lovelace’s agon, time at the assembly ball, the lead-up to the duel. (See how vicious the Deity can get; watch out is my gut response to these Burrell thought them in bad taste.) Burrell also turned Clary into a pre-Byronic heroine and softened the presentation of Lovelace.

So I was at long last vindicated. 40 years later I learned I didn’t miss the rape after all. I had not fallen asleep over my book.

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

Samuel Palmer (1805-81), A Dream in the Appenines (1864)

Some of the best studies I read yesterday were about the clash between cultures, languages, created worlds through languages though having the same literal stories and denotative word content, and even syntax (at times). You do have to read more than one language to do translation studies and as the central hegemonic languages in the 18th century for new literary movements were French and English, these are the languages most studies are in. I went into Annie Cointre, Alain Lautel and Annie Rivera’s La Traduction
romanesque au XVIII siecle, especially a long essay on Prevost’s
Cleveland — in French and English and Dutch versions. It brings home so many issues, including the way history was more valued than fiction and historians paid more, how this book applied to a naive desire to read history made easy and salacious (as in our time). This was by Ellen Ruth Moerman.

Abbe Prevost reading Manon Lescaut aloud to group of admirer (1856 painting by Joseph Caraud)

To do a translation study you must do book history. Prevost had several translators; his book came out in more than one edition and it was censored differently in different countries. The Dutch translator was quite content to translate anti-Catholic church commentary, but the Catholic French one was not. All of them stigmatize the Quakers (everyone dislikes quakers because people resent general non-conformity with the larger group). Then Prevost wanted partly to delude his British audience into thinking his book was really a history, really written first in English and had the English copy published before the French. There are two different prefaces: one published in English opens with a solemn discourse on the uses of history; the other in French is more tongue-in-cheek and he defends himself for writing a preface (what is this hypocrisy that prefaces are to be apologized for; they are needed) and insinuates if you enjoyed the Man of Quality, you’ll find him in this book again.

The 1997 BBC Tom Jones understood how important Fielding’s presence can be in the novel for the reader who wants over self-conscious wit, self-reflexive mockery

Two essays on the translations of Tom Jones, one by Kristina Taivalkoski-Shilove and another by Annie Rivara (on Riccoboni’s Amelie)
very worth while. It was fascinating to discover that the freer early translation by La Place was the Tom Jones most French readers knew and preferred; that it was a labor of love Davaux did when he translated faithfully and carefully and included all the opening narrator chapters. In the 20th century Tom Jones is reprinted in popular editions without these opening chapters. For me the book is ruined; much of the deep pleasure comes from the presence of the narrator. But apparently not for a mass readership who are said to lose “interest.” Amelia was not popular, and Riccoboni’s choice to do it came out of her deep engagement with its story of unhappiness in years of marriage.

From Christopher Cave I was delighted to learn that Andre Morellet, humane philosophe who translated Beccario’s treatise demonstrating that torture turns up no valid information translated Radcliffe’s Italian. He found in her a congenial reformist spirit, but he continually rationalized her prose. She produces a super-abundance of description which cannot depict reality so many experiences are piled into one. He choses a line of description that’s clear and readily pictured. What makes for her original depth psychologically and pictorially vanishes. It’s true you can’t make fun of her text and it’s no longer what some find tedious. I just love myself getting lost in labyrinths with endless doors and locks.

Piranesi, I Carceri (opaque)

Piranesci, I Carceri (clarified)

And I spent time with my old love, Renato Poggioli’s “The Added Artificer” (in a marvelous anthology put together by Reuben Brower, On Translation). Like Venuti, he shows that a translation is another text, and one that is creative in a different way. The translator (like an illustrator) can transcend the first text by transposing another personality into the key of his or her own. You strive after self-expression by looking into a pool of art. Instead of a translation being pouring new wine into an old or previously extant bottle, the translator is taking older wine and making a new bottle with it. The translator is herself a living vessel saturated with a sparkling spirit and recreates the container someone with whom he or she has an affinity has given a previous embodiment to. A good translation may be read for itself, without comparing it to the original work.

Eugene Atget, Grand Trianon, Pavillion de Musique (1923-24)

Ellen

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Splendeurs et misères: George Bellows at the National Gallery

George Bellows (1882-1925), Paddy Flannigan (1909) — the insolence with which he guards himself is not going to help him much in life

Bellows, Madeline Davis, the post-master’s orphaned grand-daughter (1914) — the pathos and loneliness of her expressive face has a wounded feel

Moonlight Skating — Central park, the Terrace and the Lake, 1878 (by John O’Brien Inman) — the kind of picture Bellows sought to replace

Dear Friends and readers,

Another must-see! Splendeurs et misères (as in Balzac’s novel). This one is just chock-a-block with these magnificent brilliant stunning pictures, intelligently set up so you can journey through a career and age:

Knowing that I cannot do justice to the initial impact, social vision, painterly splendor, and wide range of the pictures (they seem to come from so many museums, private collections, and books) by George Bellows at the National Gallery, I thought I might suggest why people should be sure and go to this exhibit either in DC, or New York (it’s coming to the Met next) or London (the Royal Academy) by at least displaying unusual images reprinted in the generous catalogue book edited by Charles Brock, but I find that lots of people have beat me to it. The Net has a slew of images of Bellows work readily available, and armed with a few titles and a little effort the viewer can find many lesser known lithographs:

Bellows. A lynching (the caption says the law takes too long it’s meant ironically);

illustrations:

Bellows, Hungry Dogs;

(a favorite subject for Bellows), Hudson River landscapes:

Bellows, Rain on the River (1908);

paintings of widespread banal poverty and mutually-inflicted human misery:

Bellows, Cliff Dwellers (1914) — as a child I watched my mother string out wet clothes across a street in the Bronx (circa 1950);

hugely crowded (not a space, not a place of rest in the canvas) and exhilarating or nearly people-less and desolate nightmare city- and industrial landscape:

Bellows, Building Grand Central (a series);

and of course savagely violent boxing:

Bellows, Both Members of the Club (the way elites watched illegal boxing was to allow the instruments of their appetite to become members for a night).

The Net even has caches of Bellows’s lesser known exquisite John Singer Sergeant (or Cecilia Beaux) type portraiture:

George Bellows, Geraldine Lee (1914) — I just love the tone of that pink outfit, and don’t miss the dark pink hat

So what could I say that would suggest maybe there is something there you’ve not seen before? or remind you of what there is to see in huge and vivid size? or suggest what this particular exhibit might offer them?

Well, first, I lead with two portraits I found especially arresting, and a third picture card landscape (Inman’s populist Central Park). Then show by choices from the wide selection on the Net and my new book that while partly denying this (nervously), the exhibit nonetheless cannot help but insistently demonstrate the moving socialist and pro-people point of view that Bellows spent much of his art making electrifyingly visible.

I hope this choice suggests something of the variety and themes Bellows favored for most of his career. He worked for a magazine called The Masses, and was close with John Reed (Ten Days that Shook the World) whose name pops up repeatedly in the little explanations on the walls of the exhibit. The electrocution is one of these:

Bellows, The Electrocution.

A note of critical evaluation: Wonderfully attractive & sharply incisive, some with satirical commentary (as in his huge pictures of Billy Sunday with huge crowds labelled by his as evil for art, spiritual life and decency) as most of the paintings and drawings are, they did fall off after or around the time of World War I. The exhibit reveals how quickly Bellows was tremendously successful despite his apparent iconoclasm and radicalism. If he did make visible what the elite and powerful did not like to look at in real life, they didn’t mind when it came to his art. And as he grew successful, he seems to have stepped away from painting scenes of modern half-crazy slightly nightmare-like city life and landscape, from exposures of human cruelty.

In the exhibit World War I was a kind of turning point for Bellows’s art. While his WW1 pictures were certainly shocking and determined to show the viewer Writ Large the hideous violence and indifference to human suffering that war causes (hands cut off, a woman with her breast cut off by a man who sits next to her smoking a cigarette) and how people have no problem inflicting inhumane gov’t policies:

Bellows, Return of the Useless [from POW and slave labor camps] (1918),

they are also overt propaganda which falsifies, makes theatrical and turns war into crass displays of sentiment. As Bellows grew richer, went to live in Grammercy Park, took his holidays in Maine,and built a home in Woodstock, he began to idealize and make enigmatic landscapes, which if lovely felt child-like or cartoon-y.

One example: until this turning point, I was so aware of the hard life of horses in Bellows pictures. Big dray ones, tired, men standing nearby with whips; they were ubiquitous, used carelessly and ignored (in the picture at any rate). Then suddenly there was this vision of a horse at last without a harness, making its way towards a heavenly sky:

Bellows, The White Horse (1922)

Now the dog is happy, tail wagging, getting plenty to eat.

His later work is made up of more landscapes (now undistinguished from postcard type), pictures of himself, Emma, his wife, and daughter as, fore example, an exemplary fisherman and family, of the daughter dressed like an upper class lady of long ago, jumping rope in the privacy of Grammercy Park. These show the same splendors of paint and strong theatricality of all the paintings, maybe show it up.

Maybe one of the reasons Bellows did so well was finally his paintings do not disquiet, even the most savage of them. They celebrate being alive; nature is a dynamic glorious force and if many people have to live anonymous hard lives, they are not doing it alone and they do it vigorously.

Throughout the exhibit one read of how “masculine” was his vision and it is true that except as John Singer Sergeant type ladies or young working girls painted with unusual compassion and dignity in the same mode, the pictures are crowded with men, show male activities, present young working boys (rather than girls) bathing in the city rivers. Women appear: scolding children, as prostitutes, as fancy paid mistresses of fat cat males with top hats, but they are more in the mode of side affairs, decorations, there like the horses with male as the main dominating sufferers and power. When his style changed, and grew more stylized, flatter, I liked his pictures less. I found too that I sometimes got more out of his drawings, the lines bringing out clearly what he was showing than the colouristic treatment of the paintings.

Perhaps had Bellows lived into the depression, he would have found a new angle and returned to his original subject matter and perspective, moved into another new style. He did die young: aged 42, of peritonitis after his appendix burst. Cut off but not forgotten.

I do not mean to detract from the value of the paintings at all, but rather suggest that a viewer sees enough to begin to think for herself beyond the incessant praise of the explanations. The exhibit was accompanied by tables in the center of the rooms with hand-written notes by Bellows or his wife of prices, exhibits, their plans of what to do next. You felt them as people, two lives and a career unfolding before you.

As I particularly love meditative landscapes, I was entranced by the vivid variety and intense colors of these, the appropriate objects and things in them, like a particular kind of tree, a lone house, sparkles in just the right corner of something. Winter and (the real effects of) snow were favorite themes for Bellows — and so too for me. And I spent many years of my life walking up and down drives along the Hudson river so was drawn in repeatedly:

Bellows, Winter Afternoon (1908)

Bellows, Easter Snow (something we may not see any more) — I do like that boy and girl (I have a photo of me aged 2, in spring, standing on a mountain of snow)

It seems that Bellows’s wife, Emma (who was a fellow art student) managed to live quite well after her husband died. She had been a central person in his life; one sees that immediately after his death, a wide exhibit was set up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that she carried on selling his pictures for higher and higher prices. His loving picture of her which suggests a fulfilled domestic life is one of the lead pictures for the exhibit:

Bellows, Emma at the Piano (1914)

The National Gallery has quite a summer schedule of exhibits. There’s a fine small display of photography called “I Spy” (“the theater of the street”); pictures by the Renaissance writer, Castiglione; and coming in another couple of weeks
another blockbuster show, this one featuring alluring pictures which remind me of E. M. Forster scenes

Jim and I are lucky to live within a hop, skip and jump of Washington D. C.
We get to the National Gallery by driving at around 2 pm to a street about 5 minutes away from our house which allows three-hour parking. The three hours is over at 5 pm. So we are safe from a ticket. The Metro train is a block away, the trip about 20 to 30 minutes depending on vagaries of fixing, time, crowds. Then we walk a block in the Penn Quarter which is just the sort of place that Bellows would have painted.

Ellen

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“Decorated entirely by women, under their direction”: Women’s Building Library (Chicago, 1892-93)

Our books, dear Book Browser, are a comfort, a presence, a diary of our lives. What more can we say? (Carol Shields, Swann)

Mary Cassat, Modern Women (mural) for Women’s Building

Mary Cassatt, detail of mural as a painting

Dear friends and readers,

Some may remember that I reported on a lecture and book I learned about on the Women’s Building at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1892-93 where the stupendous aim was to gather a copy of every book published by a woman since 1492, and while they came short of that goal, they came as close as anyone could in 1892-93. I wrote a blog that got many hits about the lecture and book, Right Here I see My Own Books: “I did not think there were so many books in the world written by women … ”

In this year’s issue (it comes out once a year) of the Woman’s Art journal, there is an essay on the pathetically little art that has survived from this heroic endeavor, complete with a few photos of the building before it was torn down.

Women’s Building, Northern Pavilion

Women’s Building, Reading Room (Hall of Honor)

The crime — or tragedy – is how all was destroyed and dispersed again — by plan! The article is by an independent scholar, Charlote Garfinkle, “Progress Illuminated: Two Stained Glass Windows from the 1893 Woman’s Building, Woman’s Art Journal, Spring summer 2012. The survivors are two murals and a church-like stained glass window. I’ve put these and the photos of this exhibit to which thousands came in an album for us. You see above the Hall of Honor where you could read some of the women’s books as well as one of the murals: Mary Cassatt’s Modern Women.

As the two presenters of the lecture and writers of the book, “Right Here I see My Own Books“, Sarah Wadsworth and Wayen Wiegland, did say the art of this place was limited by the mainstream range of the types of women who ran the clubs which engineered this feat and it may seem a bit stodgy to look at Massachusetts as Mother hovering over the (as yet) coming woman of liberty, but the ideals were all we would want today (and rarely have). Mary Cassett’s mural has women working in a garden like another mural I’ve seen by her, and Mary MacMonnie’s Primitive Women remind me of Puvis de Chavannes (everyone dressed in pseudo-Greek like dresses):

The title of Elizabeth Parsons, Edith Blake Brown and Ethel Isadore Brown’s stained glass contribution, Massachusetts Mothering the Coming Woman of Liberty, Progress and Light is embarrassing, and the imagery highly traditional:

Garfinkle thinks Mary Crease Sears’s Seal of Boston has much private imagery:

Here is a final surviving photo:

The East Facade

The Woman’s Art Journal is itself a marvelous periodical: printed on art paper, it’s just filled with images. It has several long essays, and 23 pages of reviews of a couple of columns each. Expect more from me taken from this periodical from time to time.

For example (one more article): A long essay on the once popular caricatures by Minna Citrone, Jennifer Strebe’s “Minna Citron’s Feminanities: her commentary on the culture of vanity.”

Citron, Hope Springs Eternal/Bargain Basement (1930s)

Citron’s art was social realism intended to critique the present political and social order, especially the workings of unameliorated capitalism. Here’s a cornucopia of her art; and here some of her fellow women print-makers.

She also worked in traditional tropes. Her self-image of the artist makes herself out to be a powerful woman, but not quite no vanities (look at the pretty shoes and improbably fancy dress with the scarf), living in an apartment in the city, where she is not at all cut off from its realities …

Ellen

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The Making of Downton Abbey (cont’d): the luminous forest

The second shot from the first series and opening minutes of the first episode: luminous forest

Dear friends and readers,

This is a continuation of the journalizing blog I began in Under the Sign of Sylvia. The reverie on the still of Maggie Smith and Penelope Wilton will be found there.

Maggie Smith and Penelope Wilton in their life or non-costume-y clothes

Also the series begun here: A Crowded Canvas

For this morning, first, I acquired the scrumptiously produced book, The World of Downton Abbey, a work of careful filial piety, by Jessica Fellowes (doubtless she works in publishing in the UK and has been making a book this way). The quality of the paper is so expensive, fine grained, heavy that the colors of the photographs are intensely alluring in their subtlety. The book opens with a exegesis by Fellowes himself: how he came to do the program. A white-washed version but true to an extent. Features usually are. The prompt for the mini-series was Gosford Park. He is filled with the fantasy of how much has been lost when this earlier world was lost and how comfortable people were in “their places.”

Much of the opening of the book is filled with hard information about the grinding life of servants in such a world — accompanied by beautiful stills from the series and apt quotations (well-chosen) as well as little framed boxes of photos and information about real servants, telling the kind of outward facts of the lives that are publicly disseminated.

They are generous with the photographs. No doubles. With the emphasis on the women. So (to begin with our central young exemplary heroines), this is the only one of Joanne Froggart as Anna Smith in just this characteristic mode of alert intense and obedient (on the ready for work) Anna Smith:

On the left hand lower corner to the back of the glossy cover

And this the only one of Michelle Dockery as quietly deeply sensual (and of course anorexically thin, the image of frailness women must follow to be heroines in movies today) Lady Mary Grantham, here in a double fold, turning to her sisters in the drawing room:

Well, to continue from Sylvia:

The second couple on The Making of Downton Abbey (after Maggie Smith in her real life or non-costume clothes and Penelope Wilton ditto) are Phyllis Logan dressed as Mrs [Elsie we learn in the book's cast list] Hughes and using the Scots working class accent slightly moderated and modulated she uses for the series, and Brendon Coyle as Mr [John] Bates ditto. Both in costume.

I noticed that in all the pairs afterward the initial dames the actors were in costumes and those playing the working or downstairs character kept their working class accents.

The series is so clever. The pairs are presented as natural but in the presentation the upstairs people are allowed their natural non-working accents and the downstairs people offer the versions of working class they have devised for the character in the show.

Who is paired is telling too. Mr Bates is not with Anna Smith — he is in 2012 terms too old for her and might just disquiet the viewer who is not thinking — as after all three minutes thought reminds us they are actors and not lovers at all.

As I’ve learned over the years the BBC makes the director the third important person in doing a mini-series. The central presiding controller is the script writer, Fellowes, and with him or her the producer, here Gareth Neames for both seasons. These two hire the director or various directors which is what we’ve got here.

The director for the most episodes of the first season said this: he shoots upstairs differently than downstairs. Upstairs he uses classic shots, much medium shots, still, symmetrical, the old stage type; far deep shots occasionally. For downstairs it’s hand-held cameras, and the latest in close-ups, zooms, quick and non-dignified.

The class and gender messages never cease you see.

So why do I watch these things — buy such books, want to write a book on the Jane Austen subgenre of them. Well, like I said on facebook to friends there this morning:

I know it’s delusional but I feel less lonely after watching a mini-series costume drama. Two people “liked” that utterance. A third wrote “I think it is the sense of entering a different world….”, to which I replied: Hmmn. It seems to me that is our world in disguise. When I watch Downton Abbey (as that’s one we may all remember know, all share), Daisy, for example I’m reminded of someone in an office who is the last hired and the youngest. That person will become dogs-body and do all the daily tasks for everyone else. Each of the characters reminds me of a type of person or a role in life; the second season now provides that for Thomas, Sarah Obrien (I will not insult her by not using her first name), and Lady Edith Grantham as the first season did not.

Jessica Brown-Findlay as Lady Sybil Grantham, as nurse — the third young heroine, note her contemplative priestess stance

For people who value grace, gravity (a grave tone, gravitas) slowness, careful thought, it substitutes for the sense of community deliberately reinforced and fostered by the control of public media by wealthy and powerful groups who will show no communities but small groups of friends or family life and insist on people as utter individuals and thinking no way else since the 1950s. (Compare a pre-1950s Henry Fonda film.)

Mini-series done with full soap opera aesthetics relieve our enforced disconnectedness — in the US here also the way actual spaces in cities are nowadays set up and built upon, to exclude, stigmatize, separate, make it hard or expensive to get from one place to another, as there is so little public transportation outside a few major older cities.

Ellen

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Bob Dixon: “what picture of the world is presented to children through literature?”

From recent movie attempt to improve the Robinson Crusoe perspective: Crusoe (Aiden Quinn) and the Warrior (Ade Sapara) in Caleb Deschanel’s Crusoe Arthurian tales often show the process of rising slowly through violence and obedience in an aristocratic society — that’s what the boys are shown.

Dear friends and readers,

Another blog which is partly intended for my students. I was asked to provide a more sophisticated understanding of texts for my students, which would (inevitably?) lead them not only to want to publish, but to go about such projects in ways that ensure publication (what is the topic of converse this year, the actual self-interested goals of participants).

I didn’t quite do that because I know that most students don’t have a discipline, much less know what is the state of place in that discipline. Instead I assigned a couple of books which analyzed the cultural values behind our children’s language; the lack of choice; and devised projects so we could hear one another’s hard-worked upon papers, projects, hopes and dreams.

The first book was Bobbie Ann Mason’s Girl Sleuth: In search of Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton and Cherry Ames. I’ve written a blog summarizing, critiquing Mason’s book and setting it in the context of a short history of children’s literature.

Now I turn to Bob Dixon’s invaluable revelations — in the context of no talk at all about such things, his readings are revelations. Mason and Dixon function as two witnesses, two genuine cultural analyses of the values we find endorsed in classic and popularly distributed childrens’ books in schools and bookstores, and stories in magazines.

As Dixon says often what librarians and teachers present as their books and the reasons for choosing these are just lists or they simply describe a book through its blurb in praise or a rousing good tale …. As to popular series book, Mason says many of these books do not even turn up in schools and are not given prizes: they are just rewritten and distributed.

It needs also to be said first that many “classics” that young adults think they read — say Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels are a silently rewritten, dumbed-down, abridged and often sanitized or re-normed version of the original book.

And second, that everyone agrees much more common is to assign books with males as heroes; women writers will use their first initials to try to hide that the author is a woman. The book sells better. J. K. Rowling conforms precisely to both habits. Young male at school; she is J. K.

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

Bob Dixon (1931-2008), grapefruit juice in hand

Who was Bob Dixon? He is highly unusual in reaching us because he was anti-capitalism as presently practiced. I’d call him a progressive, a strong progressive. Born in country Durham in the UK, brought up by grandparents, ill from TB when young so did not go to public school, but got into university and became a writer, teacher, poet, peace activist. He did not try to take on the establishment when teaching the way J. L. Carr did.

Bob wrote much poetry but his best known books are Catching Them Young and Playing Them False in which he showed how the same elitist, sexist and racist attitudes and political ideas were being instilled through toys, games and puzzles, and he exposed the role of the commercial interests in priming the compliance of future consumers and the mass media.

His autobiography is called The Wrong Bob Dixon shows clearly how his childhood in a family broken by narrow attitudes towards his unmarried mother, his illness and the war had affected him, and how his life post war had been blighted by those same narrow attitudes and the political system that confines the ambition and natural talent and creativity of young people in the education system.

A tribute was paid to his memory in 2008 during a demonstration against war. He is not in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography nor the Literature Resource Center. The establishment erases him.

Those chapters I chose from Catching Them Young deal with issues of real concern today, sore ones: class; the imperialist-colonialist thinking and feeling which leads to devastating wars abroad; how religious allegory is used to squash an understanding of today’s world’s organizations and structures and bewilder any attempt to ameliorate the lot of most people on the earth.

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

From John Boorman’s Excalibur, an Athurian epic-romance:
Arthurian tales often show the process of rising slowly through violence and obedience in an aristocratic society — that’s what the stories from the point of view of a boy show us centrally

Snakes and Ladders

Dixon opens with Plato because with Plato begins the idea you can type people and also have ideal types everyone should aspire to. Dixon then asks the question why everyone we go we see a form of social apartheid and the visibilia of rank. Until the 19th century not only in the US but the UK the way the classes were explained were it’s God’s doings. Only by charity should or can you act to change this and that means only the “deserving poor.”

This is followed by a section on language and how language is used to differentiate and stigmatize people. Stigmatizing goes on all the time in all sorts of ways.

What we have is a literature that mirrors what is expected of a middle class child and norms. This is true of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake. We see this reflection in Bobbsey Twins, for example, on TV it’s been shown that the way people dress, the jobs we see that are given respect are middle and upper middle. Dixon suggests that working class norms are different, less demanding probably because less is expected. IQs and in the UK 11 plus exams where used to send some children to college and the rest to vocational schools and stop education early.

Dixon goes over fables and stories of people winning money and what they do with it: the moral here is to be happy with your lot. Know your place. It’s where you belong. We might say in the US this is not so (pp. 47-51).

Another important line of thought offered; this is the mantra of US public arenas. It’s asserted that anyone can have anything you want, you need only will it. Will it read hard, not for doctors’ wives just again.

Therefore if you don’t have everything you want, it’s your fault. It’s not the schools, lack of opportunities, connections, not knowing the right manners that stop you.

At every turn in most stories there are implications about social class, status and politics. It’s unavoidable because it’s implicit in our lives. What he is pointing out is the particular single perspective that is repeatedly imposed on children.

Dixon teaches us how to read: he makes points rarely made, e.g. “the germ of virtually every work of literature is conflict. The key is to look at the way the reader or view’s sympathies are aligned. I’ll give an example from a decent recent police procedural: Prime Suspect with Helen Mirren. It is very unusual for someone to sympathize with illegal immigrants in hiding. The story concerns the murder of two young woman who clean hotels for a living. The murderer is a male Bosnian who has raped one of them and wants to cover this up; they also know about a massacre that occurred that was covered up and he killed the other lest she tell once her sister was dead.

It’s not childlike for they are not presented as saints — no Uncle Toms — but real people interacting with real motives, of fear, desire for revenge, for jobs in hideous circumstances of wars brought about by ethnic rivalries is the way this show presents it.

Authors chosen not evil; they are middle class and this is their world, Nesbitt’s animal fables (p 58). I asked about the short answers the test about The History of Sandford and Merton so maybe I had better skip these two pages. But I”ll read them anyway (pp. 60-61). But little Tommy reminds me of little Trixie: how terrible to be rich they say; it’s our duty to accept and be glad our condition is no worse they say.

Forgotten is the idea that society is a contract and all of us are in it together and need one another and use one another.

Another problem is one we find in Dickens: the poor or working class are seen entirely from outside. Why do condescending, demeaning, implausible fictions continue to be shown? Downton Abbey showed two servants utterly abject before the master lord of the house; he is just generosity itself as he is not going to fire the aging woman but pay for her cataract operation. Won’t up her salary nor conditions of employment (pp. 67-69)

It’s an intensely class conscious world: He exposes a whole array of such books and only in the 1930 did they begin to circulate widely. takes these books and shows how the same paradigms are working out in classics movies for children are still made from: Francis Hodgson Burnett’s Little Princess, Secret Garden

Chapter ends on Tarzan of the Apes: Tarzan an aristocrat in leopard skins, heredity all.

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

Lagaan, a re-reading of British imperialism

Empire: Fiction follows Flag

This is an important chapter because it is so rare for people to go beyond showing racism in the US towards African-Americans and bring out the colonialist ideology that supports these terrible wars we partly fund by funding the gov’ts that pursue them.

A three page piece on Robinson Crusoe which I assigned. It’s a more peaceful book than some (p. 75) The ultimate arbiter and justification of all these is that Christianity is a better religion, the western way of life superior. At one time this was tooted unashamedly, now these ideas come in through the back door in the form of programs – in Iraq a number of laws passed to turn the essentially tribal structure of the society into a capitalist friendly one, and they passed laws against unions. They do not help women.

Killing an important part of this tradition (p. 77) as well as justification by Christianity, imperialist. Except later on as sex objects by and large women don’t turn up in these action-adventure tales and we will see very few in Ox-Bow Incidents which has some of the features of cowboy stories (p 78).

Many close imitations and (pp. 78-98) give us many variations on these foreign glamor stories, and ends on Kipling — who I think got a Nobel Prize – as to style he can write (1907). India is still a major realm in western literature; witness Jhumpa Lahiri.

The books mentioned here include authors that Mr Ellerbee’s son, Edgar in A Month in the Country, wants to win as a prize for church-going. Coral Island is the book Edgar longs for (p. 85). The aim of colonialism was to relieve unemployment at home — you could snatch land. Read the tones (p. 82). There has been change here: the Black Hole of Calcutta is now presented as part of the war of independence for India in films (p. 83) — but the presentation of the ungrateful (unnatural?) people who don’t appreciate our arms, and companies is found in the way Afghanistan is discussed today, Iraq and Iran (p 83). They don’t want us; we make things worse. The story of the Indian girl who fawns on the hero, saves him, wants to be Anglicized. That’s our Pocahontas myth (p 84). She’s really part English the way peasant girls turn out to be princesses. Part of fairy tale.

As a bye-blow these stores enforce kidnapping, child abuse and kidnapping, but I carry on. G. A. Henty, another author writing in this vein. Henty wrote hundreds of these action-adventure, sometimes science fiction, sometimes boys’ adventure-stories.

Later 19th century religion in retreat, more children are educated in schools, schools are placed where children may be indoctrinated in patriotism: the belief it’s in your interest to go to these wars and kill or be killed (p 89)

Rider Haggard (She, King Solomon’s Mines) a heady mix of sexism, imperialist wars, native Tarzan stuff. Kipling’s Jungle books: boy scouts come out of this era, Baden Powell drew heavily on the jungle books. 3. These show much cruelty to animals, don’t appear to take seriously they have feelings and an existence of their own.

These formulas remain unchanged, are only tweaked some so I didn’t assign anything on the later books except Heinlein as that allows us to see him in the context or generic background out of which his work comes and to which it belong (p. 114): Starship Troopers, a very popular glorification of war;

It ought to be a strange idea that “fighting and killing people” makes one a man only it isn’t. Ultimately all this destruction, death, maiming do come forward at the Met. I’ll come back to times where small tribes fought small tribes but the conditions have so changed that this evolved point of view functions very differently today.

I did omit Roald Dahl (pp. 111-113); his are colonialist in thrust. I find Dahl’s books so nasty where horrible things happen apart from the hero, they startle me. I have read they are liked because they fuel children’s intense resentment, give children a chance to act out revenge. Alone among popular books they are sometimes analysed and critiqued adversely. I think it’s because they do encourage hostile emotions to adults. He makes adults uncomfortable. I have read by one student a real defense of Dahl’s relatively unknown Matilda which I admit to no longer remembering but thinking the student had understood what the manipulation was.

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

Fangorn Forest, just outside Fairfax county

Supernatural: Religion, Magic and Mystification

The basic paradigms or story lines and suppositions are found in early religious didactic literature where after all a belief in the supernatural is central. Religion depends on a belief in a supernatural realm and beings.

Dixon begins with Winstanley because many religious groups have been rebels against the social order; most of them ruthlessly squashed – by the present establishment and its religious leaders. Doctrines are important in order to control ways of thought. Do not want people believing in too wild ideas; you want to control the fantasy.

I read Pilgrim’s Progress when a girl. Its sales were once close to the Bible; it’s written in very simple English with simple allegories a child can follow. Copies that are sold today are often rewritten in modern English (pp. 121-22 for Robinson’s mindset).

We are taught hard lessons in such schools. Where we learn what social quietism, obedience is how children experience patience; you must learn to suffer, nothing against social order ever.

He points out such books teach children self-contempt: the way the girl sleuth presents an impossible ideal is what the girl cannot not coming up to and so gives her a false body image (“I am fat”), and illegitimate norms she must and yet cannot follow, so “feelings of personal worthlessness” and self-abasement are part of children’s religious literature. Awe is one favorite mood.

Books made cheap and they are used to reinforce from another stand point what we see in action adventure. We are to despise the poor, the losers they are called in US society. I believe Romney said he had no interest in the poor. Some huge percentage of the US population nowadays.

We have the usual suspects, books proselytized for and no explanation of their values given — J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin (who I know from being on a listserv with her — as a poet), Madeleine L’Engle, Richard Adams and C. S. Lewis. He does cite some that are good and changing the mode: I’ll cite The Golden Compass by Philip Pulman (heroine). We get action adventure female-heroes in these. As we do in modern detective novels. and police procedural there are a few. Alas, often sexed up sex objects.

Basically Dixon objects to teaching them to die as a matter of course, and teaching them they can be prostitute, Five hours as beautiful. I’s how they mystify life and make you accept whatever is by making all a mystery; they also allow us to defy laws of nature: gravity, death; great escapist quests, sometimes with animals that we can identify with. The works slide into science fiction and allegories. Allegory where acts and people easily stand for concepts part of the terrain.

Evil is this disembodied force or someone is simply shown as maliciously evil (usually the result of envy — you are not to envy others what they have; if you are outcast, it’s your fault

Evil not located in the poor; anyway this often takes place where poverty is irrelevant; rather it’s class and place antagonisms that are manipulated. Great love of ceremony and ritual (p 149).

I agree with Dixon that the asserted idea children like a black and white world has yet to be proved; but if it’s a childish way of seeing the world, why do adults promote it? (p. 150)

2008 cover for Wrinkle in Time

Dixon’s comments on Madeleine L’Engle are eye-opening: enforced conformity seems to stand for communism so it’s really a political struggle that she disguises with mysticism. Her idea is matter is getting unbalanced. Her books makes no sense of the world to children.

Watership Down: a kind of smug complacency, highly authoritarian military warren. The rabbits set up a police state. In another book Adams makes no distinction between the kind of suffering that is endemic in human nature in a society (so religion becomes a kind of comfort, a hoped-for protection) and the kind that can be changed by changing human social circumstances (p 154.)

To me the sickest book I’ve read for children is G. H. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. Dixon says the self-absorption it encourages makes all that happens outside the self unimportant. I remember it justifying death; a kind of medieval attitude towards miracles as what we wait around for. Devils everywhere who must be smashed. Lewis makes it explicit that the Narnia books have a Christian allegory at the center. Among other things he’s a fervent monarchist, ridicules progressive schools. He married for the first time late in life and part of his outlook is naive.

Ends on a book that shows some change. TwoPence a Tub by Susan Price. It sets up an actual debate. Death is God’s way of punishing these strikers. Does God want these people to suffer. The strike doesn’t achieve much: the men go back to longer hours and cut wages.

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

To conclude:

Political correctness is a phrase hurled at people who are perfectly sincere in wanting to improve the world. They don’t talk or act the way they do to obey some strange convention or impress others; they really want to see a better life for all.

What we see on TV, in the movies, read in books has a profound influence on what we do and act effectively towards gaining a good adult life for ourselves and others.

Ellen

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In which I tell of a disappointment and how I’m overcoming it: Radcliffe replaces Trollope

“‘Is it the poorhouse, yer honor?’”, Rod Walter’s illustrations: Storytelling through Pictures for Castle Richmond

or?

Christian Wilhelm Dietrich (1712-74), Landscape with Bridge

Gentle readers, good friends,

I’m afraid I have another rejection from the Victorian &/or Trollope academic scholars to tell about. My proposal for a coming NVSA conference in spring 2001, a highly original book history type, with much new material never discussed before, was curtly dismissed. I did think of publishing it, but decided against it (however anyone interested may ask and I’ll be glad to share it). For now I’ll just put the proposal online:

“’Where did it come from?’”: extra-diegetic storytelling in the illustrations for Anthony Trollope’s novels

It grew out of my interest in book illustration and Chapter 6 of my book, Trollope on the Net, based on a study of nearly 500 original illustration to Trollope’s novels. Thoroughly snubbed is what I’ve been by some of these people (Mark Turner was the only academic scholar to review my book; it was beneath Margaret Markwick’s notice in her recent book), and I’ve found the Victorian conferences to be generally cold, heavily careerist events, with the luncheons nearly unendurable. Individuals in the MLA Victorian sessions are sometimes courteous and friendly and at the Exeter Conference I made a few friends among the less competitive, the male and non-university people, and I’ve had a few publications beyond my book on Trollope (essays, reviews), and really made numerous Net friends, but generally speaking as far as human fellowship is concerned where “le monde” is watching, where I’ve been thus far I’ve found the scholars accept no one who is not working the conventional trajectory they did and have.

So, for now, I’ll give up. My paper on film adaptations of Trollope’s novels is due to be published in a sadly butchered state (when I see what it is, I’ll rewrite my good paper and send it to Literature and Film Quarterly and tell more here on this blog about this fractured experience) and maybe eventually I’ll return to Trollope by way of Sharp book history sessions; for now, the idea of promoting Trollope as a great writer, important central voice, a person who also encouraged remarkable illustrations for his books, goes nowhere.

Instead I’ll delve more yet in my 18th century studies. I’ve really become as thorough an 18th century scholar as I have because the people in the area have welcomed me as a fellow scholar (if not equivalent institutionally successful person), starting with my Ph.D. advisor, Robert Adams Day (who encouraged me to write my dissertation on Richardson’s Clarissa and offered to be my advisor), to about 11 years ago when a couple of male 18th century scholars on C18-l invited me to come give a paper on their panel on my website at 2 18th conferences, and people were so friendly.

To offset the irritation and hurt as well as find another place to go and enjoy a conference in the spring, Jim encouraged me to contact another small 18th century society group I’ve never been to before: South Central. It’s in North Caroline, not far, and during days I won’t be teaching, and the topic something analogous, and of real interest to me: prospects and panoramas in the long 18th century, vistas. This weekend I’ll bet getting up a proposal for panoramas and/or prospects, i.e., visions in Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (a work of poetic genius I still love after all this time and stands up for another read).

It’s an old idea that Radcliffe is rich in picturesque and sublime scenery and influenced by the painters and books of engravings like Gilpin. What I’ve wanted to develop comes out of Beatrice Battaglia’s work, Paesaggi e misteri: Riscoprire Ann Radcliffe, and a volume of Rivista interdisipliare di studi romantcii) she edited, La questione Romantica — this last connects Austen to the romantics too. Battaglia’s books are too little known and really brilliant; I’ve almost only got just to summarize and tell of what’s in her central sections of this book and I’d be adding to the knowledge of and respect due Radcliffe’s art. I would examine the relationship between her visionary descriptions and individual picturesque and sublime artists — especially Gilpin in England and Vernet in France, through the medium of a intensely subjective presence interacting with what’s gazed upon, and her original fantasy re-creation of Venice (preceding and teaching Byron, James and all her successors).

Pietro Fragiacomo (1856-1922), Piazza San Marco (1899)

Of which much more anon, gentle readers,

Ellen

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Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels

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

Dear Friends and Readers,

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

Whew!

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

Ellen

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

Carrie Brattle, “castaway,” her hands appealing to someone inside a closed window (from The Vicar of Bullhampton, vignette by Henry Woods)

Dear friends and readers,

A couple of months ago I saw a Call for Papers on Patrick Leary’s Victoria listserv for a Northeast Victoria Society Association (NVSA) conference to be held at Columbia University, NYC, in April 2012. The place was convenient, the time appealed; Jim could come with me and enjoy himself during the day while I was at the conference with the two of us getting together each evening. The perspective and topics seemed to fit my desire to explore and write about Gaskell’s dramatization of disabled characters and the people (mostly women) who cared for them. The conferees were calling for papers showing Victorian writers who did not fit at all into present cliched ideas about the era, who broke our orthodoxies and conventional norms. The trouble was that to do this right would take several months of reading Gaskell carefully and books and essays about her. I haven’t got the nerve to give a superficial paper based on the reading I did with two members of Women Writers through the Ages last year — or the reading with other friends of her novels on other listservs in previous years.

Then a couple of weeks ago it came to me that I could write and deliver a paper on Trollope showing how the illustrations for his novels (which he involved himself with) provided contrapuntal readings of his novels such that alternative norms of behavior, values at variance with, and experiences undermined, subverted, provided values at variance with the explicit orthodoxies of his man plot-designs and characters. I remembered how frequently the pictorial narratives appealed sentimentally to the female reader, focused on minor women in the book, dramatized details and scenes not in (though consonant with) the novel at hand. In the above vignette for Trollope’s The Vicar of Bullhampton, the novel’s “fallen woman” or “castaway” is shown in a scene not in the novel; she is either fleeing the court where her brother has been tried to murder after he has been shamed by the community’s attitude towards her or appealing to someone on the other side of a closed window in a thicket of a garden. Neither moment is dramatized in the novel; both show her in a mode of open vulnerable distress which reveals the cruelty and unfairness of the way she’s been treated.

Well for the past three days I’ve been pulling out, breaking open and rereading my old stacks of notes on the original illustrations to Trollope’s novels, and a select group of novels that I’d like to write about – masterpieces once or still often dismissed, or put aside as having concerns no longer in fashion: Castle Richmond is a novel partly about the 1847-48 famine and has a homoerotic secondary story, as well as older heroines whose marriage is dubious or who sexually desire a handsome young man; The Last Chronicle of Barset, once Trollope’s signature book, centers on a gifted man whom his society’s treatment has driven into an angry depression to the point he’s distracted, confused, unable to function: instead of looking at him through normative lens, the pictures see the world through his eyes. The Vicar of Bullhampton I’ve mentioned. Also novels which will enable me to show the influence of these illustrations on film-adaptations which use an analagous methodologies (inventing scenes not there originally which create contrapuntal or self-reflexive corrective meanings): shots in Davies’s He Knew He Was Right and The Way We Live Now are derived from some of the the original illustrations of these.

Emily (Laura Fraser) and Louis (Oliver Dimsdale) Trevelyan: a confrontation late in the movie modelled on Stone’s conception where Davies has subtly elaborated on Trollope’s language to suggest any love’s destructiveness

I also dipped into these novels and taken down a copy of The Vicar of Bullhampton to add to my evening’s reading this coming month. And I read four essays on this and Castle Richmond and Last Chronicle and one on the collaboration nature of Millais’s and Trollope’s intertextualities in Millais’s illustrations to 6 of Trollope’s novels.

And, gentle reader, I’ve been trying to include Dickens’s Little Dorrit in my overall reading and watching budget by listening in my car to an abridgement of said novel brilliantly read by Anton Lesser and slowly going through Davies’s wondrous film adaptation once again.

The caricature style of illustration is as expressive as the idyllic one. The statue in the center of the room of a mother leaning over a child with love, re-appears in variations of grief, distress and longing in Davies’s film adaptation of Bleak House and presentations of Anna Maxwell Martin as Esther and Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock,

One result: today I wrote a 500 word proposal which I’ll be revising tomorrow, putting away until Saturday, and then sending off to the email addresses of the conference organizers. I’d like to go to the conference even if my paper is not accepted, but were it to be I could hold my head up more, experience and demonstrate more that I’m part of this scholarly Victorian world (which I am) and thus participate in and enjoy the experience more. I think I might have said on this blog that my review of The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels: New Readings for the Twenty-First Century, edd Margaret Markwick, Deborah Denenholz Morse, and Reginia Gagnier did appear in Nineteenth Century Contexts this past spring, 33:2 (2011):190-92. I will put this up on my website later this week. And my paper, Trollope and TV: Intertexuality in the Pallisers series may well be published in a coming volume on adaptations of 19th century novels.

I’m remaining a Trollopian in other ways. Izzy and I listened to Timothy West read aloud the whole of Barchester Towers recently and for a new radio system I bought for my car I’ve purchased the whole of The Last Chronicle of Barset read aloud by Simon Vance on CDs burnt with MP3s, considerably cheaper than a set of CDs made from tapes. It is a pleasure Izzy and I can share — as well as music she has burnt CDs for in our car.

Ellen

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Books in art and science (Sharp 4): Fairy books; Medical books, outsiders, & handbooks as territorial struggles; Keepsakes, Alice in Wonderland and Pitman sten

The Blue Fairy Book, compiled (and written by) Andrew Lang

Alice in Wonderland — in translation

Dear friends and readers,

I am come to the fourth and last blog on this conference. Today topics included the fantastical and imaginative (fairy books and math and Alice in Wonderland), just its seeming opposite, medical memoirs, and large handbooks whose entries and publication are fought over tirelessly because such huge amounts of money can be made by a few if the organizations can keep preventing universal non-profit medicine from going into effect. In effect the social targets for fantastical and fairy books brought before the listener how it was supposed children and their middle class parents were interacting with books, while medical books and the institutions which ignored, published or supported them showed us how an interested profession used books to fight over their territory and promote themselves, their science agenda, their careers.

A Sunday story. There was hardly any traffic on the way in, at noon the park outside the Dillon center was filled with people doing all sorts of things and the carousel nearby crowded with children.

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“The Bronze Ring” from The Blue Fairy Book

Sunday morning I might be said to have fitted in two sessions each period since in both cases, I left 2/3s the way through one session and arrived at the second session where there was still 2/3s to go. In both cases the questions were good enough to elicit re-explanations of the papers. So I heard twice as much.

At 9:00 I went to “Utopia, Fantasy and Prophecy,” and heard a paper by Jennifer Gundry on how print culture (books, thoughtful high-minded doings) were regarded with suspicion and distrust in a selection of Utopias. The critics and reviewers (rightly) assault advertising, find slipping literary standards at each new technology or innovation; they indict the low quality of the new productions. Print has failed 19th and 20th century society. It would seem the only printed object valued is money. Sara Hines described the unexpected huge success of Andrew Lang’s series of “colored” fairy books; here there is a stronger nostalgic pull. With the success of the Blue Fairy book, Lang went on to compile (and write) the nostalgic notes. Critical writing and studies of folklore and fairy tales enables us today to understand him. (Probably translation studies ought to be brought in). Green came next, then a rainbow, then violet. Lang were first intended for the Christmas market; eventually they functioned as a poet manque for family rituals, gathering and creating time together.

I hurried out to a session on scientific and medical publishing. Sounds boring? Think again: Darwin is a central tract; so too Humboldt. I spend 1/3 of my course reading serious books on how medicine is practiced today. Jim Conor’s paper on “The Editing and Publishing History of Rural and Medical Care (1948) was of direct relevance to the essays I read with my students. This was not a how to book: name a condition and then offer treatments. Rather it is a book which describe and defines disease and has essays on aspects of the profession and its author was strongly for socialized medicine. Mr Conor told a story of a man who had continually to fight to get his book published, then respected, then distributed. Eventually it became enormously influential in Canada, in US minus the politics which (if I understood him correctly) were cut out. Jennifer Conor’s paper on a specific medical memoir by Gordon Murray enabled me to see how the medical establishment viewed the kind of scientific medical memoirs I’ve been assigning students for years. With respect. The specific one she discussed had problems that were never resolved, especially balancing autobiography and telling an appealing story with explaining technical cases in difficult language.

The interest of the Health Guide is how it became a lightning rod for political issues. The AMA and other powerful physician organizations were vigilant against anything smacking of socialism, and defining illness in ways that insurance companies want to control was seen as strongly socialist behavior. The AMA fought to suppress the book. Now its definitions are used by our local day coffee bar place. As to memoirs, they can teach ethical norms, and do well when they are beautifully written, like Atul Gawande’s Complications), and can reach a large layman audience. Jennifer Conor said a president of a respected college had had to resign recently because it was discovered he plagiarised his goodbye speech from Gawande’s Complications. The students had read Gawande and recognized the passage by checking the texts on their computers.

I got myself a coffee and then went to the mid-morning sessions. Marie-Claude Felton’s paper was “‘Je ne suis pas fou’: The Self-publishing journey of poorly-estimated scholars in the 19th century was a general history of statistics; she showed far more scientists managed to spread their work by self-publishing than is realized. Johanna Lilja told of an “indefatigible botanist” who persisted in the face of neglect, ridicule and misery; institutional norms destroyed him personally though much later in life he was done justice to. The paper was very sympathetic towards the institution and its problems and showed how it learned from this experience to cope with non-conformity. Susan Pickford began her paper by telling of what she called with any specific definition or defense “insane” scientists; she was going to talk about “outsider literature,” but I felt the use of such a blanket derogatory term (“insane”) unacceptable (like the use of “idiot” in Victorian literature for mentally disabled people) in scientific, medical (or humane) senses so quickly left.

I found I had just time to listen to two papers and heard a third discussed afterward from another session, “Play and Politics.” Manuela Mouraco and Margaret Stetz argued the children’s books he described were made with parents’ ideas and desires in mind; they taught children to fit in; encouraged certain kinds of socialization and interest in subjects that are career-worthy. Mouraco and Adam Trammell agreed the Keepsake and other annuals were intended to build an identity for the people buying them; they are books with a strong middle class bias and show nostalgia for the past.

In this session and an earlier one on librarians helping children to form reading groups in libraries, the idea was endorsed in the discussion time afterward that in a classroom socialization is as or more important than the topic taught. So that if math is being taught, the children should be made to do it in group settings. This reminded me of how the whole conference seems to value how books function socially for people, what intellectual stance they enable people to feel they belong to (or do). But what about the child who learns best alone and would learn far more about the topic if left to do so alone. He or she will be straitjacketed into first enacting a set of general social skills or be made to feel bad if he or she can’t (and perhaps graded on social capability rather thabn math). This set of values makes learning very hard for the disabled (e.g., autistic children). And it’s not just the autistic that such tactics in a classroom would stmy but many non-outward people. We do have inward growth as we learn academic subjects sheerly for themselves.

For lunch I sat with Elizabeth Starr on a bench in a lovely shaded area and we shared a sandwich, memories and goals. We hope to keep contact up. She has a student working on a biography of Jane Austen for younger readers and perhaps I could help.

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The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, illustration by John Tenniel

The last session I attended was unexpected fun for me. It was on translating Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Clare and August Imholtz, a married couple of independent scholars and book collectors gave papers on different translations of Alice. Clare went over many kinds across the globe, and August concentrated on those just in Russian. Statistics of how many translations and where are impressive. Of course translation is bad at puns, and some of the word play and games that provide the experience we have of the text. They named particularly good ones (a Spanish one); August took us into the realms and suppositions of a Russian child.

Catherine Parisian then got up to tell us the history of Alice in Wonderland translated into Gregg and Pitman. How many Pitman’s, how many Gregg’s. It seems this was a way of teaching girls to read and to use phonetics. She knew I was in the audience and could read Pitman stenography and I did come up to the front to declare this text was Pitman and did not use vowels or the three line approach and the other was written precisely following the conventions. Stenography by hand is associated with women working in offices and we find it spread as soon as jobs were created: 1872 in the UK it’s said 6 women knew Pitman, in 1893 6000. Gregg grew exponentially from 1901 -1915. Alice was published in 4 systems: Callenders (1899, the 7th, Mad Tea Party chapter), Pitman (1908 and 1909), Gregg (1915) and Pitman again (1979, Chapter 7).

We discussed stenography as well as why the Alice books appeal so. We also discussed the real gender faultline in the uses of hand stenography in the first 3/4s of the 20th century. I offered my memory that in my high school class in 1963 there were not boys learning shorthand, though you could find boys learning to type. Only girls learnt sten so there was a strong taboo of shame involved. But when machine stenography spread and began to be used by court reporters, men went in for the training in great numbers in post-secondary school.

I was charmed with the notion that stenography had been taught this way. In Richmond Hill High School where I was first taught Pitman stenography I was never encouraged to respect it as a system. I did that later when I studied languages in college. I should say here that all the blogs I’ve written since I started going to conferences and blogging are the result of my use of stenography. While recently I can no longer cover pages of my sten pages in pure Pitman, and must use English spelling and abbreviated words, when I am really trying to get down specific wording there’s nothing comes near using Pitman sten.

A table of short forms within Pitman

It’s a 19th century invention.

There was again much more to the conference in the later afternoon. A Plenary panel, a general meeting, and finally an African American Literary Walking Tour, with Toast. I could not do any of it. This was the last night of the Capital Fringe Festival: we had tickets for La Belle Parricide, a play by a community of women on Beatrice Cenci so my conference ended on Alice in Pitman. Many people appeared to be leaving around the same time.

As I came out of the building, the sun seemed so bright and the air very hot. I threaded into the quiet justle of people going down the escalator. The trains to and from into Alexandria were running on just one track (not two) so there seemed to be a mass of people waiting to get on as they were thus running slowly (taking turns). I got home in plenty of time.

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This is the first conference I’ve written about in this extensive way in quite a while. I had heard a diverse number of excellent papers which took positions which did teach about how books can be or are made to function socially. Countless individuals have largely idiosyncratic or personal responses to books that these large social perspectives ignore or sweep by and these are important for the individuals and for their communities too — making for finer disinterested ideals from the sympathetic imagination which can cross all borders. Yet people do choose a book because they are part of a particular sophisticated or political world, and read as part of that (often class-based) world. About this group of people at the conference, I came away feeling the generality might have at one time really loved books for themselves (as on some level I still do a fine, beautiful or wise and good and great book), for their texts (ditto), and that’s why they cared about books materially and how they function as social instruments, commodities and social capital.

See Sharp 1, Sharp 2, and Sharp 3.

Ellen

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