Recent Popular Fiction & Film: more & openly disabled characters; the effect of fandoms

Society is no comfort/To one not sociable — Shakespeare, Imogen, Cymbeline, IV:2, 12-13

The Walking Stick: Deborah (Samantha Eggar) badly lamed leaning on Leigh (David Hemmings) (1970, Eric Till, Winston Graham, George Bluestone)

Dear friends and readers,

Disabled characters have increased in numbers in popular fiction & film in the last quarter century. Has there been a genuine increase in sympathetic empathy and understanding, any real help offered such people or acceptance as a result. It would seem not. I link these two phenomena to the growth of fandoms in cyberspace and elsewhere and how they effect the development of programs and series of fictions. Why there are there. I exemplify briefly with the way disabled characters from Sondheim’s Passion to Winston Graham’s mystery and Poldark novels are treated, and more at length in Downton Abbey, from Fellowes’s himself to the indifferent to hostile commentary on him & Anna, the head housemaid who loves him.

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

A spin-off from both the APA/ACA and ASECS conferences: in both there were roundtable panels on “disability studies: I feared not enough would be said in the more casual talks these roundtables offer to take up enough time and the audience would be called upon to talk, and then feared I’d reveal myself too much or get too involved. I have seen academic people present themselves as interested in isabilities and found that they were not, except as an abstract topic; worse, if I probed I discovered the people were just as strong for enforcing “normalcy” (on behalf of “success”), just as prejudiced (not taking a whole personality into account, not being willing to critique their definitions of success), fearful and/or nervous in their reactions. I worried I’d feel angry or know intense dismay.

So I didn’t go, and now regret this because what I did do was take down names of journals, books and periodicals with disability studies for today. First off I learned that in the last quarter century there’s been a huge increase in the number of disabled characters in popular fiction. It might be the disabled characters were always there in mystery-crime fiction, though not acknowledged, as villains or victims, but not being acknowledged, presented as freaks, or evil, or reprehensible in some way. But this is a big change to presenting people with disabilities in a sympathetic or seeming sympathetic way. Nowadays disability is also popular in historical fiction and romance. So that I noticed so many disabled characters in Winston Graham does not show originality on his part, but rather a following of a zeitgeist.

I won’t cite the names of the articles or journals separately unless someone asks for these (in the comments) which is most unlikely, just describe generally. Most were studies of texts or art in the close reading humanities way today (looking sociologically, how they function in society). Basically there were two schools of thought: one argues that the new wave of appearances of disabled characters is not increasing any real understanding or sympathy for people with disabilities because 1) at the end the disabled person is forcibly or seemingly willingly co-opted into the “normal” world, made to seem “normal” and the point is to defuse the person as a threat, on the way the emphasis in portrayal is the disability itself with full utterly varied richness of people ignored; it’s voyeurism; and 2) we see very little progress in the outer world for funding, real acceptance, or even understanding in wider circles of people. The other argues that the spread of such depictions does help; little by little the stories make people no longer ignore the disabled, no longer erase them altogether, and does gradually work up sympathy and we may hope for change.

When Anne Elliot (Amanda Root) wants to visit the crippled Mrs Smith (Helen Schlesinger), her father rages at her with open disgust for her “queer” tastes (from the 1995 BBC Persuasion, Roger Michell, Nick Dear)

Then there are essays on particular works or authors or sub-genres: how disabled people are presented in romance; how presented in mystery-crime stories (where they’ve long been an unacknowledged central type, either as villain or victim); in later Victorian gothic. The way they are discussed in non-fiction case histories, which sometimes turn out to be obtuse fictions which promulgate single-minded freakish stereotyped views, e.g., Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night which invites voyeurism. Once in a while a particular writer or work is found which increases understanding and sympathy. The value of these is if you want to do such studies they show you how to do and what’s said, and give you insights.

Two good books are worth noting: Women with Disabilities, ed. Michelle Fine (and others). Fine’s the one who’s done intelligent candid studies of how women who have been raped are treated, women’s studies. The kind of character includes is Fosca in Tarchetti’s book (now called Passion from Sondheim): I’ve noticed again and again women who are presented as disabled are eroticized, made beautiful but for the disability which then adds to their alluringness (and the kick of having sex with them in the imagination apparently). Another is more historical and crosses gender, class, ethnicity: Rosemarie Garland Thomson: Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring disability in American literature. The truth is many people still believe in disabilities only if they are physical.

Fosca from Passion, made plain not crippled (yet this came from a website mocking the addictive love affair)

From what I’ve read thus far I think the those who say this increase in visibility has not led to a gain in empathy or understanding are right. Even when the novel does not enforce normalcy, readerships insist on misreading the fiction to emphasize a happy ending at the close — happy being equivalent to assimilation and erasure. From what I’ve seen in real life — the cutting off of funding, the cutting out of Aspergers from the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Physicians Manuel), and the increase in coercive techniques & drugs among psychologists again those who say more visibility has not helped are right. No one really has a mechanism for helping such people gain self-sustaining employment for or proposes helping older adults socially for real at all.

Misreading in terms of the readers’ own identity needs, to throw off a threat of anything unknown or new leads me to the other related topic I heard discussed at the conference and want to consider again. Next time (if there is one for me at either conference), and if I have a chance to go on panels about fandoms, fanzines, I will. The book here is Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins.

Fandoms are one aspect of different ways of life in the Net that are reactions the increasing anonymity and loss of community in US life, the impoverishment of individuals and high unemployment rate so that people come onto the Net to find community, meaning when there is nothing where they live. These groups replace religious communities too, can be a religious community, and they are real. It’s another instance where the idea that what happens on the Net is not real is false. In the 1950s Richard Hoggart wrote a book called The Uses of Literacy where he argued that TV was being used to create “imagined communities” which through propaganda and loyalty to shows inculcated in people Tory reactionary values; again people at a loss, people left out, communities devastated by global capitalism; the book was re-issued during the 1980s Thatcher years.

But it’s not true that these are imagined and unreal communities. These groups of people active and aggressive; authors ignore them at their peril. They meet outside the Net when they can and influence where they can. They will punish, ostracize, exclude the person who takes a different view and attack that. I have found it very painful to deal with such people; actually I can’t, don’t know how to. They can be group bloggers. They can be seen whirling to some extent around mini-series programs, Games of Thrones say or Downton Abbey.

How do you recognize a fandom. It’ll be a message board where anonymity is enforced, and thus no one held accountable. No personal relationships can develop easily. In the case of films or TV, the re-doing of bits of films in YouTube videos to change the original meanings of scenes to fit what the fans want and posting of these. They can be embarrassing. Fierce conversations which a given aggressive individual will not give up. I’d say worse than some of what happens on Austen-l only it’s moderated so the two or three people moderating immediately shut up whoever has said what they don’t agree with (they were particularly fierce over sex), “community” activities centered on the actors and stars of the films and a whole range of sociological or psychological phenomena having to do with inventing a fictional identity. They do meet outside the Net when they can. A pre-screening of the new Sherlock in a New York movie-house brought fans from around the country to meet in the movie-house, see their movie, eat and talk together afterward.

A deeply sexual shot: Robin Ellis and Angharad Rees about to go to bed together as Ross and Demelza Poldark (1975 Part 7)

Examples include Harry Potter, Batman, Dr Who, Star Wars, long-running TV programs. My experience has been with the Winston Graham Society webpage, really a message board dedicated to discussing two of the famous stars from the first mini-series: Robin Ellis and Angharad Rees (although she’s dead now). I had read in Graham’s autobiography this group succeeded in damning a 1996 film and making it impossible to go on; a paper I heard at ACA showed that the group influenced the second season of the films. I was told by one woman my discussion of disability, violence and sex in Graham’s fiction “deeply upset” her so how dare I? No one should write about this series what could upset her, no details allowed. I had notice how many disabled (often autistic) characters Graham has in his Poldark and mystery novels; how he studies alienation (Marni) and individual loss sympathetically and wanted to discuss this. The shattering of one of the heroines from continual marital rape; the reality the hero rapes one of the chief heroines and the son they have, neglected and over-indulged (anything but taken care of) after her death grows up disturbed and lonely enough to reach out for an orangutan as a companion. Forget it.

Facebook pages dedicated to famous stars or authors identified as conservative and classic, or with some ethnicity or doctrine. The audience for Austen’s books is leavened because it includes different types of people, academics and heritage industry and there’s a lot of money to be made on sequels and conferences and tourism so the fandom cannot invent this world of its own and control the material. Austen has prestige, her texts are not considered trivial and worthless in the way of say Star Trek and other texts around which fandoms whirl. These groups dislike any criticism of their author; they will justify or excuse or explain away the smallest unfavorable remark. Their identities have become involved, their egos, their self-image. They build whole worlds around their texts & shows.

Tellingly, for people interested to see if popular fiction that has a wide enthusiastic audience can function to increase the sympathetic imagination, the fiercest hostile responses come from any assertion that the fetishized material explores sexuality or gender in unconventional ways, has an ambiguous or sad ending, shows the hero to be less than admirable (violent for example, politically radical).

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

I’ll end on the treatment of disability in Downton Abbey, the first season. Since I think I do not misread, I cannot tell what the misreading would be precisely, probably in the direction of scorn or dismissal or somehow turning the disability into what’s normal if “unwanted,” as Sir Anthony Strallon was treated in the third season, or silence, as the man with the heinously disfigured face was in the second — both given over to the program-scapegoat, Edith.

In the first part of Downton Abbey, the lamed Mr Bates is almost fired because few will accept his disability: most take it as a blemish on community, insist he will not be able to do his job, a few ridicule him, a couple (that’s enough) tell false tales; Lord Grantham almost fires him but his decency and better self seeing the cruelty and injustice of the act, keeps him on at the close of the hour.

In the third part, Mr Bates still driven by fear he’ll be fired, tormented by cruel jeering or physical gestures (as when Miss Obrien trips and humiliates him) buys an instrument of torture to make himself walk more straight. As the hour wears on we see Bates in pain, leaning over in agony, having a sour expression, indeed not be able to do his job. (In the context of the hour’s juxtaposition, the parallel is the ejection of Pamuk’s corpse from Lady Mary’s room after he half-rapes her; both are trash which ruin the body and probably spirit of the character.) Finally Mrs Hughes, the housekeeper insists on seeing what is wrong with Mr Bates, and he shows her his leg, now covered with blood and sores from the contraption on it.

As ever Fellowes is on the side of the mainstream: we next see the pair by the side of a river on the property. Mr Bates has agreed to throw the thing away. The lesson Mrs Hughes instructs Mr Bates to remember is: “I promise I will never again try to cure myself, I will spend my life happily as the butt of others’ jokes and I will never mind them.” Mrs Hughes: “We all carry scars Mr Bates, inside or out, you’re no different than the rest of us, remember that.” Mr Bates: “I will try to that I do promise.” And then he hurls it off, and she cries “good riddance.’

The part about not trying to cure oneself is good — autism month should be called autism acceptance month. The group of articles I have include two arguing the higher ends of autism include people who are in many ways more gifted than the average and would not have to consider themselves disabled if others didn’t ostracize and punish them. And Mr Bates is doing his job fine. But the second part half-blaming Mr Bates and saying it was he who considered himself different is the narrow cold-shouldering mind of the establishment speaking, demanding in effect (were he autistic) that he be neurotypical and leads to people purchasing such contraptions or having painful useful dangerous operations. Stiff upper lip. Never admit to anything.

Mr Bates and Anna (Joanna Froggart) end of Part 5: he getting into cart

As far as I could tell from reading the fan’s responses to the hour, they were sympathetic to the obtuse and mean Lady Mary; in his notes to the script Fellowes exclaimed against letters to him decrying a supposed buggery — the people couldn’t endure that Lady Mary should lose her virginity (hymen) so they jumped to the conclusion buggery had occurred and this was why the man had a heart-attack (!). (How revealing of silent suppositions this is.) And on-line people quickly tired of Mr Bates — by the second season as homely and a “sob-story” (“passive-aggressive” was a favorite phrase)and felt excruciated when (they felt) asked to identify with Anna, for they would not have fallen in love with Mr Bates as she slowly does for his intelligence, integrity, good nature, refusal to kowtow or forsake his dignity, good heart (of which we see instances).

A friend wrote:

Mrs. Hughes’s comment that ‘we all carry scars’ nags me, however. Who is the “we?” On the first glance, I’d take it to be a universal statement–the series shows that everyone, upstairs or downstairs, has their problems, but I’m not convinced it is a universal “we.” (I’m sure Fellowes meant it to be.) Is the “we” the servants? However, whether or not Mrs. Hughes “we” is universal, this leads me to think that disability plays out differently between servants and masters — Matthew’s Hemingwayesque war wound, leaving him “crippled” and impotent, is a parallel to Mr. Bates’ disability — both
are physical and both call into the question each man’s ability to do his primary “job” — in Matthew’s case of course, to “make the heir,” but one has a miraculous cure and the other not …

Yes. Who is the we? In the case of the servants, they have no buffer or support to help them if they are rejected, so they must conform and if they cannot, must not complain.

I was told again and again how my blogs on Downton Abbey took “a different view,” and at times (especially around the character of Edith whose scapegoating I exposed) attacked. Twenty years from now attitudes will have frozen and it will be hard to talk freely to those still remembering (many will no longer but move on). I never did discuss disability in Downton Abbey. I should have. So have made up for that now.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Downon Abbey: First number, first season re-watched

Among the very first shots

Dear friends and readers,

I began a re-watching of Downton Abbey last night; how often I’ll do this re-watching I don’t know since I have several projects which are intended to produce papers for conferences, published reviews or published papers and there will be deadlines. But I know I’d like to do this — as well as The Forsyte Saga, 1967 and 2002 and the two Poldark mini-series and 1996 film, as it turned out abortive). The Forsyte Saga has to wait until I finished reading the novels. I’ve been bitterly disappointed at the reaction to the blogs I’ve written on the Poldark series from their prime or fan audience: aggressive absymal ignorance determined to squash intelligent interest, and in re-watching that series (I’ve only started a little) I see a certain high romance conception of picturesqueness strongly influencing the films which I had not begun to think about. The equivalent for DA is the pomp.

I have to make up my mind if I can and want to blog weekly or bi-monthly on this series to start as I have the materials easy to hand. It certainly would provide matter for this blog whose purview is become centrally film studies and film adaptations — after all that’s what I do when I’m writing about HD-opera. No matter if it’s live while filmed, it’s a film.

I was newly impressed by the exquisitely well done art this first series and first number of Downton Abbey represents — rather like a Dickens first number. Paradoxically the discipline adds to its enforcement of hierarchy.

The characters are all wonderfully seen and brilliantly played. This time I felt that the author and actors really cared about their characters and made us care. I feel in love again with Anna, found Bates just so appealing, with his slight menace a s sign of dignity and self-esteem. These first episodes emphasize his lameness is emphasized; some of the staff attempt to get him fired, so this is an hour about what happens to disabled people in a community. The seething behavior of Miss Obrien and Thomas might well be real: such a repressive environment with its skewed values would produce that. And they were matched by the low-life out of a lord, Crowborough: all the high white male types in the first series are low-life amoral sleazes and it struck me if these aren’t very like many of Trollope’s, including some of his so-called heroes (in Ayala’s Angel I can think of a horror of a Frank, Harry Clavering &c&c) only seen with a modern critical eye. The hero of the piece is Robert, Lord Grantham who has the right feelings and does the right thing, backed by Edith who however hasn’t his power to enforce her feelings so it comes out as helpless sarcasm. Lady Mary is a chip of the Dowager and her mother, but all are real and they do have some decency in them too — Mary a complex character with better impulses which win out during the attic tour. But not enough not to marry a low-life lout, not to participate in the attempted firing of Bates. I see that Sybil is presented as sweet.

Poor Daisy, the stress on how she’s the lowest of the low and made to feel it. There are astonishing revelations in Fellowes’s notes: how luxurious it was to wake in the morning and have a silent nearly invisible servant make up your fire. He takes utterly seriously this world he is presenting.

There is nothing innovative in the filmic techniques but they are all done to perfection.

Since I’m off to a conference this will be my only message today unless it should be someone else posts something that wants a reply.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Downton Abbey: beautiful script books

From the first season script: the three sisters

Dear friends and readers,

Julian Fellowes is a smart man; he knows how to keep up sustained interest in his imaginative world. What better way than produce these finely-produced generous books which enable the reader to re-imagine the series, to re-watch the DVDs with book in hand? These are forms of novels. The first script for the first season is now available for a reasonable price at Amazon; indeed the price is low considering the object and what you can pay for books say from Ashgate. The book consists of 7 plays, each of them subdivided into three acts. Whether this is a hindsight division or one Fellowes has come to see, to apprehend the parts this way elevates them into historical plays. The second season’s scripts, including the Christmas special will be out next October, just before the fourth season begins.

Fellowes shows his ability to think for himself too when he decides to bring out his scripts for Downton Abbey. It seems most script-writers obey (whether they agree or not) the private-property obsessed notion that you must not share the script lest someone use your ideas and make money off of them. As someone fascinated by film study, whenever I seriously study a film or set of films (say the Pallisers or Jane Austen films), I had usually had to go to the trouble of taking down in stenography the script as I watch a DVD, clicking pause as I go. Arduous and time-consuming. The script is the basis of the film; the shots or stills are its embodied utterances. Whenever I’ve come across a published or on-line script, I’ve rejoiced and bought it, used it. But it’s rare to find them. In the 1960s there was an attempt made to publish these in large anthologies for the newly burgeoning discipline of film studies, but apparently this went nowhere — or not enough people ordered them, so I have but two of the several then published, and more recently scripts only for those films which became part of a cult, and then not always. It maybe the real reason it’s hard to get these scripts is the average person watching movies will not buy them so there’s not enough profit to warrant producing readable ones.

Yes I know all the flaws of DA, but one is not a lack of books. Fellowes’s daughter has published two genuinely informative, helpful — and beautiful — books thus far: The World of Downton Abbey, which is a standard “The Making Of,” very interesting about the sets, costumes, ideas about the era, and genuine historical information about the lives of servants in great houses (very hard); The Chronicles of Downton Abbey, which is made up of chapter giving analyses of individual characters as Fellowes conceives or understands them, with rationales and justifications. Both are splendidly rich, the paper heavy art paper which supports color reproductions.

And others have come out with some history of the family which owned Highclere Castle in the later 19th century. Here is a small list of such books, including the original memoir for the 1970s Upstairs Downstairs.

It was taking a chance. And then arrived on my stoop today (whence this blog) not a slender script book — which is often what I’ve found, but a fat book of nearly 400 pages, good quality letterpress paper. sewn even. The scripts are beautifully set out: lots of space between lines and not just dialogue, but directions for gestures, brief descriptions of planned sets or places, and occasionally long footnotes by Fellowes telling his thinking behind a scene or some history of his impulse for writing this or that. In the center is fold of art paper with stills that go with several scenes, of which I’ve put one at the top of this blog (these show the tongue-in-cheek archetypal quality originally intended):

Fellowes is well aware of the political exposure his series has been subjected to and also how badly the decamping of Deborah Findley-Brown, Dan Stevens, and now Siobhan Finneran might hurt the coming season. It’s hard also to keep up interest and make each season filled with new suspense. Of course he could move to the 1930s and the Spanish Civil War, but how would it do for him to produce a pro-Franco series. I understand Season 4 will move ahead just 6 months.

What this has done is re-tempt me to begin to make blogs of the many postings I’ve done over the two years and not put onto the World Wide Web, but just left at Yahoo. I hesitated partly because it would take hard work as each one this season required my taking notes as well as capturing stills. The script will make it much easier, and as long as I don’t fuss too much with too many stills I could try it.

So what I’ve done in the meantime is the easier thing: simply linked my handy list into my website: I didn’t make a separate page in the manner of the Pallisers or my Austen Miscellanies as I simply haven’t done enough to warrant that, but eventually I’ll replace the links mostly from this blog, with a page in the website domaine itself. Its mascot or gravatar picture for now is Thomas (Rob James-Collier) dancing with the Dowager Duchess (Maggie Smith):

I’ve tried again and again to explain why I love costume drama enough to even take deep pleasure in this (for me) ambivalent series. Well I just do. Had I lived in the 18th century I’m sure I would have been one of those readers who bought plays bound together in books and read them slowly: in the 18th century people read plays; they were bound up in make-shift books and could be bought or found in circulating libraries. The closet dramas of Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron had an audience. The novel put paid to that by the Victorian period, especially with Mudie’s distribution services and then after Pickwick installment publication in magazines.

My goal would be to follow a schedule whereby I do one every one or two weeks. On the weekends read the scripts. The scripts would make it so much easier, indeed a pleasure; then in October when Season 2 comes out (in time for the TV airing of Season 4) I could do likewise for Season 2.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Downton Abbey: a handy list

Phyllis Logan and Hugh Bonneville dance

Gentle readers,

Pray bear with me. Here is a handy linked-in list of my blog-reviews on Downton Abbey (and a few by others). I know the “categories” function is supposed to provide a useful archive, but in this and my other 2 blogs, instead of getting just the title to click and say 4 lines to see, the archives section reprints whole blogs, so it cannot function as a place where at a glance you can see the slew of blogs on a topic easily. You must wade through.

Hence this handy list. I wrote 4 blogs the 1st season of Downton Abbey; 4, the second season; and 9, the 3rd. I also link in anibundel’s The Hats of Downton Abbey, and Emerging Quaker’s Poltical Analysis. I did write 9 postings for each week of the second season and if I can get up the ambition and discipline I will make them into blogs before the 4th season is upon us.

For now you can find all the postings I wrote on DA at this select Trollope19thCStudies archive or this select Women Writers archive.

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

Joanne Froggart

Here are the first season’s:

Pride & Prejudice as UpstairsDownstairs with plenty of Trollope mixed in

The Crowded Canvas

The luminous forest

The Making of Downton Abbey: journal blog

First Season, First Part Re-watched: the great benefits of a script and studying the shots

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

Christmas special: Lesley Nicol, Rob James-Cellier, Siobhan Finneran

From the second season

DA everywhere: from Yemen to Scotland to Yorkshire, with Portrait Shots

Serial Story-telling, the Art of the Mini-series from Poldark to Downton Abbey

Slow Journeys through Passionate Dream Material: Poldark to Downton Abbey

Class and Literature: the sense of entitlement that matters

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

Shirley Maclaine greets Michelle Dockery, Laura Carmichael, Deborah Findlay-Brown

Season 3:1 begins: an uneasy atmosphere

DA 2: the Abbey a Bourdieu Habitas?

DA 3: Cruelty so raw it took my breath away (Edith’s humiiliation)

DA 3:4: We all live in a harsh world, but at least I know I do

DA 3:5: Childbirth as risk, trauma; or how to get rid of a character

DA 3:6: the fallout; “don’t flirt with me Robert”

DA 3:7: to give way to them is to conform to the rules set down by the evil-minded

DA 3:8: The ending charity itself; or simply cricket

Cricket — Dan Steevens and Allan Leech

DA goes to Scotland: “Dreaming of a better life;” Mrs Hughes’s POV

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

Dame Maggie Smith

The Hats: from I Should have Been a Blogger

Season One: The Women’s Hats

Season Two: Men’s Hats

Season Three

******************
Political Analysis

The actors who play servants sitting on Ealing stairs talking: you can see Sophia McShea, Cara Theobald, Bernard Gallagher

A Plantation View of the World

Minus the violence

Upstairs cast rehearsal at Highclere Castle: you can see Penelope Wilton, Elizabeth McGovern

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

The scripts, together with a brief bibliography.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Downton Abbey 3:8: The ending charity itself? or simply cricket

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past — George Orwell

The past is a competitive business — Peter Borsay

The women, Tom and Matthew (final shot of watchers)

Thomas, Lord Grantham and Dr Clark (near final shot of players)

Buvan, great-souled (Aamir Khan), at bat (nowhere near final shot)

Dear friends and readers,

But wait, you are saying, whence that third still? who can they be? the hero is not white, not even in white. Buvan! How did Aamir Khan get into the grounds? Patience, gentle reader.

I’ve no doubt we were to take the ending of Season 3 as charity itself (as in “the adieu” of Darcy). Thomas (Rob James-Collier) not excluded, not handed over to the police after all; far from sacked, he’s to be under-butler. No silly soup of emotional sentimentalism either. There’s the Duchess (Maggie Smith), holding out, determined as ever. She has gotten rid of the (gratifyingly grateful) Ethel (Amy Nuttall) who was continuing to cause all that dreadful “talk:”

Ethel and Mrs Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton) standing by, outflanked

I mean what’s a friend to do? Ethel had a plan (it seems). She will tell her beloved child, Charlie, brought up by his grandparents in a great house nearby where she is to be cook (Mrs Patmore’s ex-pupil now) that she was his nanny when he was baby. What more could she want? Her life is rebuilt (we may remember the mocking laughter of the prostitutes taught to sew earlier this season). As Mrs Crawley admits, no one will know. “The slate wiped clean.” Did you not feel that you had an instance of Mrs Wood’s East Lynne before you, fully explained, nay justified?

But Thomas, now, suffering crying Thomas

has been allowed to stay.

In case you missed this part (or fell asleep by the second hour on PBS), this last part has shown us that Jimmy Kent (Ed Speleers) is the kind of homosexual who when they make public office cover up their own activity by ceaselessly persecuting other homosexuals. He’s after Thomas’s body fluids in another way. If Mr Carson (Jim Carter) gives Thomas the good reference (all heart is Mr Carson even though Thomas is “revolting,” lives in a “revolting world”), he, Jimmy, will go to the police. Who saved the day? Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan) again (she did it for Ethel) to the rescue. It seems Mrs H knows of such men (!) and believes Jimmy led Thomas on. Mr Carson bows to her authority (ironically) and she goes to Mr Bates. She is not missing from the cricket game, although naturally not to be seen under the tent nor in all white

Naturally all discretion, behind her we get to glimpse Daisy (Sophie McSheara), Ivy (Cara Theobold) and Mrs Patmore (Leslie Nicol) as befits their rank

Miss Obrien (Siobhan Finneran), that insidious spying witch, has also poured effective poison into the ears of her nephew, Alfred (Matt Milne) but is defeated by a mere two words uttered in her ears by a gallant Mr Bates (Brendan Coyle) who has returned all Thomas’s treachery and mockery of him with an act of supreme generosity: “her ladyship’s soap.” (So Mrs Hughes said were the magic words.)

This also nicely rounds out Season 3 by bringing us back to Season 1 where (we are to recall) Miss Obrien caused her ladyship’s miscarriage and near death by putting a cake of soap near her bath and leaving her ladyship to slip and fall, thus keeping Matthew the unexpected heir.

The camera on the puzzled Anna Bates (Joanne Froggart) so as to spare us the shattered woman

Miss Obrien I say nowhere to be seen at last. Nor Jimmy just now.

Alfred is not let off so easily. Peculiarly slow in the brain-pan, once an idea is put into his head, it’s hard to dislodge it, so he has gone to the police about Thomas; said police turn up to take Thomas away, but Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) now to the rescue. There has been some misunderstanding he tells the police, and by a mere word and look gets Alfred to apologize and confess he was “squiffy.” For those not in the know of 1920s upper-class slang, that means drunk, and Alfred mistook some “rough-housing” between male servants. We see in the policemen’s looks they don’t believe a word of it,

but Lord Grantham’s word overrides all and the victim they nearly had their claws on is saved — at the cost of Alfred’s humiliation.

We are supposed to find it ironically amusing that part of his Lordship’s motivation is Thomas’s supreme ability at cricket. Grantham would not want to lose such a valuable player. As long as we assume all homosexuals would be treated horrifically by everyone they meet in this era (not true), these grudging good faeries (Mr Carson, Mrs Hughes, Mr Bates, his Lordship) seem noble and we have learnt our warning lesson about how hard it is in life to be a gay man.

Of course not that his Lordship really cares who wins. At the closing moments when Molesley (Bernard Gallagher) has (no surprise there) flubbed it, he not being any more manly than Sir Anthony Strallon (Robert Bathurst) was — I mean just imagine Strallon trying to play cricket –, Lord Grantham, I say, shows he does not care who won after all. The thing is to play the game. And why? it’s an assertion of a vision, that of the sporting British empire, all-inclusive, all powerful, endlessly pastoral green, unproblematically hierarchical enacted before us.

Which brings me to Buvan — look up, gentle reader — that dark-skinned man in black playing cricket too. The scene comes from an intensely anti-imperialist, anti-British powerful Indian Hindi movie, Lagaan, which also ends in a cricket game. Only there it mattered who won, and it mattered big. The situation:

It hasn’t rained for two years in Champaner, a village in sweltering central India, but Captain Russell (Paul Blackthorne, who is a Billy Zane doppelgänger), the commander of the local British regiment, isn’t about to give the parched villagers a break. He makes a bet with Bhuvan (Aamir Khan), the most spirited of the villagers (and of course, the handsomest), but only because he believes it’s a sure thing: If the villagers can beat the British regiment in a cricket match, he’ll cancel the land tax for two years; if the British win, the villagers will have to pay three times the normal, unreasonable amount.

Jim, my husband, focused on how at Downton who won does not ultimately matter at all, what matters is the assertion of the abbey, the team spirits carrying on. And this final part lets us know it will, at least for a little while. I remember reading Tariq Ali’s sense of intense irony in recounting how this movie which shows the Indians beating cruel injust British is all about a cricket game. Simon Raven has a cricket game at the close of his adaptation of Trollope’s Pallisers, and some people who don’t remember the books very well think there is one there. Not so. Trollope was not an imperialist; anyway his sport was hunting.

Important political lessons learned too: like his mother, Isobel Crawley (above) Matthew (Dan Stevens) has compromised, held his tongue, played along; his reward is our princess bride, Mary (Michelle Dockery), and his Lordship’s acquiescence in all his schemes for turning the estate into a business, with the tenants having to pay much more and, with the help of the new steward, Tom Bransom (Allen Leech, who of course turns out to be good at cricket) make much more money for higher rents. You win by giving in to these powerful people. We see where again Mary is in charge in their bedroom trysts when she puts off love-making; he acquiesces and turns out she has been to the physician, had an operation (not a problem) and in this final scene speaks of their “little prince” on the way.

Here she’s all hat

If we were seared for Edith (Laura Carmichael) over her humiliated wedding dream, now we need not worry. Hers is indeed a Jane Eyre story, but it’s one robbed of all rebellion, all radical feeling & thought. She has kissed the whip several times by now in her piety before her father and grandmother (who responded we recall to Edith’s mild complaint with “don’t whine”) and gotten a job as a journalist. Congratulated by the editor, Charles Edwards (Michael Gregson) for not writing just about women (whew! she’s not going to be one of these militant feminists, a one note Sally), she was nonetheless put off by his seeming to flirt with her. Horrors. She checks him out and discovers he’s married. A true daughter of this house, she’s learnt her lesson not to want a man beyond all, and she does not hesitate to say she quits, only to be told he has a mad wife in an asylum and simply in such dire need of hope, a good woman’s affection, that she apparently agrees to stay.

Edith has ever been a sympathetic listener

(Come back next year, gentle reader)

In all this Edith shows her distance from a character newly introduced, the foolish great-niece, Lady Rose McClare (Lily James), with sly salacious smile (joyfully compliant anyone?, a kind of Barbie doll made real) who just lends herself out to be seduced by a man lying about his wife and is rescued by a trio of Matthew, Edith, and Lady Rosamund Painswick (the aunt, Samantha Bond). The scene reminded me of the trio at the close of Don Giovanni who rescue the silly Zerlina. Perhaps this sweeping dismissal of teenage girls in the invention of this character provided the worst because so priggish moment in the hour.

There is at least something redeeming about all but Miss Obrien forgiving Mr Barrow, even if the terms upon which it’s done bring us to “don’t ask, don’t tell” of your great shame. Ethel does not end up in the streets, with her new skill (pace the Dowager’s sneer) she may hold out until the whirligig of time is in her favor. The woman who should have been her mother-in-law, Mrs Byrant (Christine Mackie) is another of these compromiser’s with viciousness: Ethel should leave the scornful Mr Byrant, the boy’s grandfather to his wife. The depiction of Lady Rose has no such compensations. The character as conceived reminded me of Sheridan’s conservative depiction of young women as Lydia Languishes, eager to jump out windows. So much for rebellion. The dowager tells Lady Rose she will be kept on a tight leash (like a puppy?) until she’s of age. For her own good of course.

Cora, Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) back to loyal sweet do-nothing: thus she enacts a woman satisfied with a rich woman’s life

Tom Bransom is now prepared to live at Downton (as Matthew has learned to) and allow his daughter to be brought up there. His reward is no longer to be an exile. He is taken into the great home place and this not-exact parallel to the end of another rebellion (Sybil’s marriage) fits the Lady Rose story. In the end you will be assimilated.

If not visible, Miss Obrien is protected by her ladyship and Mrs Hughes’s silence: one night before the cricket game Cora must hurry off to “Obrien’s” care (it’s evening) lest she be “scolded.”

How inclusive it all is! Anyone left out that you can think of, gentle reader?

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

Despite Miss Obrien’s telling Ivy to “stay out of it,” Ivy carries on disapproving of Jimmy’s intransigence, forcing him to leave the table

So, in this mini-series and hour we see charity enacted — within the limits of stereotypes controlled by conventions which insist on a heterosexual nuclear family as the way of life that is safe.

This final part of season three ends in the big ritual scene Part 1 did. The whole self-preserving system is enacted before us: the community is self-perpetuating; who a character is, is as much a function of his or her place in this paradigmatic system as what he or she does over the course of the sequence. There is an appetite for real community that Downton Abbey feeds, and for those who can respond to what there is in it of kindness (a good deal) and mutual support, watch it as it were against the grain, aware of the ambivalence in the portraits of the hard authority figures.

Those who are fans for such series ignore the reality that the fakery and bogus nature of much that is represented in shows like Downton Abbey is not one that is widely popular; many turn away to commercial channels, to “pop” programs because upon looking at the dress, accents, house, they know they do not belong to this myth. Football instead of cricket; macho-male violent action-adeventure films would be the opposite pole. There are some fine programs on these channels (HBO) and the mini-series and police procedurals, screwball comedies can offer other kinds of ambivalent lessons. But it is rare to find alternative visions of meaningful complex real identities. Probably they are found most often in local theater art, localism.

Right now as individuals the politics of space and place as presented to us in our media seems controlled by corporations backed by military machines. Unemployment remains high, salaries low, much harshly and competitively enacted. That’s why the prospect outside the Abbey seems so bleak. It’s what’s experienced outside it in the 21st century streets & buildings that makes it so alluring.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Boston MLA 2013: Woolf & Mansfield; James & Twain, the Victorian Marriage Plot

Woolf’s working desk at Monk House

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve four more sessions to report on from this year’s MLA (see a rejuvenating time, the 18th century, public poetry, audio books, films): two on Virginia Woolf (one with Katherine Mansfield as part of a dual subject), one on Mark Twain and Henry James, and a fourth on the Victorian marriage plot.

Duncan Grant (1885-1978), The Coffee Pot (1916)

“Everyday Woolf” (No. 31, Thurs, Jan 3rd, noon to 1:15 pm) was the first I attended and (as sometimes happens) it was one of the best. All three papers were superb. Adam Barrows talked of “Mrs Dalloway and the Rhythms of Everyday Life”. Mrs Dalloway is confined to one day is a polyrhythmic sympohy felt in the body of biological rhythms, social patterns intersecting with the irreducably local and yet it all fits into a cosmic pattern. Discordant uneasy rhythms which function as disruptions. The text covers sleeping, eating, a continual melange of noise, visual perception, silence. We hear an irregular heartbeat. Septimus is made ill by what is imposed on him from war and now work. Mr Barrow read aloud great reveries from the novel. Kayla Walker discussed To the Lighthouse; each character is at work, Mrs Ramsay cooperatively, carving out space and time; she close-read the text for its rhythms and imagery.

In his paper, “Virginia Woolf and the Modern Blessings of Electricity,” Sean Mannion suggested that modernism begin when electricity began to spread. At first it was written about as a disenchantment, and Woolf shows nostalgia over fire- and gaslight. Newspapers found the world now looked like an amusement park; moonlight would not have the same function or meaning; light is now separated from fire. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of he warmth and radiance of gaslight. There were dangerous and fatal incidents early on as people had to learn how to use electricity. Woolf’s Night and Day captures a love of firelight lost in the glare of electric light; her Jacob’s Room has a mixed assessment. Of course the power of what electricity could do more than compensated for the losses, and there is an ecstatic feel too (in The Voyage Out), among other places, the library.

Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), a friend reading in a library

A second session on Virginia Woolf, this time with the Katherine Mansfield Society, was about their personal relationship and aesthetic and professional interactions (No. 338, Fri, Jan 4th, 3:30 4:45 pm). I missed the paper on their reaction to the newly formed theories of psychoanalysis, but I did hear part of Bret Keeling’s talk on their dealings with masculinity in their work and men in their lives, and Kathryn Simpson on their differing attitudes towards gifts (also in the sense of talent) and desires. She defined a gift by its function: it can consolidate social bonds, be an assertion of power and identity and authority. What was the central focus of all I heard (including the discussion afterward) was how the two women were different in background: Woolf the daughter of the Victorian intelligensia, and then a member of the Bloomsbury intellectual art-radical group, a highly defensive writer; Mansfield a colonial who needed money more desperately than Woolf and was treated badly by men, plagiarizing sometimes, radical, adventurous in during her tragically short life. Writing was central to their identity and their styles and aims were coterminous; they were rivals.

James Whistler (1834-1903), The Giudecca (chalk & pastels on grey paper, 1879)

The joint-societies’ session of Henry James and Mark Twain (No. 377, Fri, Jan 4th, 5:15-6:30 pm) was filled with unexpected perspectives. Kaye Wierzvicki’s paper focused on James’s The Bostonians, Book 3 set in Cape Cod. We encounter a post-civil war US, a central nub in a global network as well as tourist attraction. James explores its geographic identity, what places in the world it brings together through culture and characters; it figuratively projects other places like it. Kathryn Dolan taught me that Twain was anti-imperial. Twain wrote several travel books, and one (1866?) about Hiawaii exposed how the product sugar led to cruel exploitation of imported (coerced) efficient labor patterns. In his later travel writing he reported on British islands in the South Pacific, Following the Equator, then he traveled to islands in the Indian ocean. He sees forms of slavery in the transported. I just loved Harold Hellwig’s paper which he read very fast as it was long: he covered the many images, myths and stories, and visions of Venice found in Twain and James’s writing. Both show that the allure of Venice is a cover for its ruined condition. Venice provides an inner journey of the mind; Twain presents a place false, destructive marketplaces yet its people with strong self-respect. Both have famous character sketches where they capture qualities of life (James an American Mrs Bronson, Twain an escaped black enslaved man). He recited powerful passages by both writers and had a continual montage of images of Venice from the Renaissance until today when few can live there because of the continual floods.

Christopher Eccleston as the hopeful aspiring Jude at the begining of the film (1996 Jude directed by Michael Winterbottom; see my blog on Hardy films)

The last session we attended (suitcases under our chairs) was “Rethinking the Victorian Marriage Plot” (No. 745, Sun, Jan 6th, noon to 1:15 pm). Despite an apparent contemporary emphasis on women characters looking to be useful, do real work in the world (for which they are paid in some way), a professed interest in disabilities and people in need, the underlying perspective was that of women reading for love stories that teach the female reader what she wants to hear as relevant to her. Talia Schaffer suggested that Jane Eyre scorns St John Rivers because his ideal of meaningful work represses private satisfactions. Ms Schaffer looked upon Rochester as disabled and needing Jane’s help and love. Maia McAleavey discussed how the bigamy plot in Victorian novels substitutes for an argument on behalf of divorce: in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd a female bigamist makes choices she escapes from; in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure Arabella marries bigamously and finds more opportunity while Jude and Sue by behaving ethically find themselves bound and destroyed.

Sue (Kate Winslet) in a similar hopeful moment (1996 Jude)

As I sit here tonight I find myself going through the MLA book of sessions and wondering why I didn’t go to this or that (tonight seemingly) far more interesting session than those I chose. In these four blogs I have omitted a lot I did try because the time turned out dull, or jargon-ridden and phony, people posing, or the topic actually preposterous. Some were hard to write about or take notes: like a session given by companies who have put huge dictionaries on line. I went to no sessions on translation; none on intriguing odd topics (“Denis de Rougemont and appropriations of the troubadours”); there were sessions on dubbing and subtitling in movies, on animals, on psychoanalysis in literature, prison architecture, the poetics of death, global Shakespeare. It was a matter of guessing, try what I knew and where I might meet friends and acquaintances, try to go to some with Jim, leave a little time for going out and eating (it was too cold to explore Boston much). I can’t prove this but I had a sense there were fewer sessions than there used to be, and consequently a greater proportion of sessions on job hunting, careers, teaching and scholarship politics (all of which I’ve learned to avoid, especially anything for contingent faculty which often are semi-acrimonious).

I need tonight to remind myself that when we left we were exhilarated by our time away, and said we would go again the next time the MLA came to the east coast (as long as it was not too far south). We have two planned for this year already (ASECS in April and EC/ASECS next fall) and I’m going to one on Popular Culture here in DC in March where I plan to spend a full day listening to sessions on film adaptations, films and hear a paper on Winston Graham’s historical fiction from a feminist standpoint.

Inge Morath (1923-2002), A Park Bench

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Class and literature: the sense of entitlement that matters

The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real [has] to do with our social panic, with our fear of losing status. One cannot afford to lose status on this peculiar ladder, for the prevailing notion of American life seems to involve a kind of rung-by-rung ascension to some hideously desirable state — James Baldwin, from Nobody Knows My Name

How is this book packaged: for whom; how framed

Dear friends and readers,

My good friend, Kathy, (Frisbee here on WordPress) has been writing about the attack on bloggers from Sir (note the Sir) Peter Stothard, a Man Booker Prize Judge: bloggers are destroying literature, damaging the future of writing. She did not go to Oxford, she is not one of his friends. How dare they? they are not selected by winnowing editors like him with his values. To look at film adaptations (whose appeal is partly rooted in the audience’s desire to identify with a higher richer class than lower middle or working), you’d think school was central.

An iconic picture of Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in Brideshead Revisited

And I mentioned it first. But look at a panoply of stills, and you see the house (ah, the house: consider Downton Abbey and how Americans lap it up), its grounds, the bar, Venice, trips, cars, dinners, Rex (the businessman son-in-law) networking his way into power. In a way what’s needed first is an understanding of power, how it works: class confers power.

I answered Kathy in two ways and want to put my answers in a blog here to prompt thought and discussion further — as this is an important topic. The way Scott Walker and Ryan win elections is to pretend they are lower class: Scott Walker had a commercial where he showed himself driving himself to work with his lunch in a brown bag: he had to save for his kids college. Ryan pretends to be a orphan working his way up; his father died, when he was young, but the whole family are local businessmen who have contacts, networks, money, connections and he today lives in a big mansion on the place where a factory once stood.

School is mythic and it’s the mythic way school functions that enables ALEC’s corporations who want to end public education so they have put their hands into the 600 billion that go to educating young people to fool others. Parents want their children to rise from school. But school is only one part of what makes a person a member of the upper middle and upper classes.

As I wrote, looking at what school and what year a British person ended his schooling at does not tell much about class. Princess Diana never did her A levels. In the 18th about the connections of the whole family (so George Austen’s sons could go to university) but not how the immediate nuclear family would fare in the position game. In the 19th century it told about money and the success of the father at the time. Trollope always regarded himself as a gentleman. Jim my husband went to a public school as day boy; his origins were working class and lower middle. It tells something but only in a larger context.

Funny — it’s a good contrast. I’ve always been alive to class though I was told from the time I went to school that the US was classless. I knew it was a lie. My parents were very poor and my father was a socialist at one time. That’s part of it. I could see with my eyes the difference between my neighborhood (East Bronx) and those in the north west Bronx. I knew others had self-esteem I didn’t have. When I grew older and lived in Queens (Kew Gardens) I had friends with parents who lived in beautiful homes, but it was the way the other children somehow knew to be independent and interact with others that I didn’t. In the UK when I went to live there class was overt, but its underlying abilities (for those with knowing parents and higher expectations) and those without was no different. The US did sometimes substitute race for class. Black people in the US filled the role of white working class in the UK. Think of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. Do read it if you’ve not already. Sister Carrie. In An American Tragedy a young working class man is picked up and becomes part of an upper class group. He has a chance to marry a girl from this elite group (romance). His girlfriend, working class like he, is already pregnant. He is so driven by his guilt that he drowns her in an attempt to rid himself of her. Carrie is from poor working class people. She can hang into a local car-dealer and move with him to NYC and enter the acting profession, but there are limits on how far she can go at the time. She lacks a certain know-how to leverage herself any further than medium positions on the stage.

Dreiser’s and other literary naturalist books from the US and France and England too are all about the devastations of class. The old argument between Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

Class is money, manners, being told how to negotiate and present the self in a certain way, education, expectations, your habitas (all of it). In the US university people with degrees (the Ph.D) can seem to transcend class or enter a new one, but watch what happens during a depression. Some of them have children who carry on being upper class; others have children who in the next generation are in retail shops. The difference is what class the individuals really belong to: what money, connections, the sense of entitlement their grandfathers had. This firm sense of entitlement that matters is the key to why some people can use liberty and some cannot: see my “I have a right to choose my own life” on “Liberty in the Poldark novels.

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

We had a related revealing conversation about Tereska Torres’s first novel (Women’s Barracks, see image at top of blog) and her writing life on Women Writers through the Ages at Yahoo two days ago. One friend told us about Teresa Torres. An unusually effective obituary-biographical sketch told about Torres’s life in WW2 and as a writer. From the Independent: John Lichfield: Teresa Torres: War Heroine and Reluctant Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction. Do read it. At least look at the photo of her: in war uniform (which makes all seem equal) shouldering an oar: you see she’s working physically. The book meant for a Booker Prize usually sports original art or a reproduction of a high culture 19th century painting.

The discreet masochistic erotica of Edward Burne-Jones is presented as core Arthurian

Lichfield’s essay-biography is cleverly well-written, discreet too. How did Torres move from one stage of that life to another? Meet those people? Her steps are staged movingly, to the end: “The last sound that mummy heard was the sound of children laughing and singing where she had herself lived as a little girl in the 1920s. It was as if life had gone full circle.” But the daughter cannot know what her mother’s mind’s ear heard just as she died.

This is not to say the life is not admirable and fascinating. She was part of a semi-elite, or moved within one of the edges of the upper class, the art part where literary people make their lives if they are lucky. Not all can: music people like say Whitney Houston (who remained black) in her personal life never left her original class and people.

One of the important give-aways is the opener and sentence worth critiquing

The writer says she “was a well-regarded novelist” and in the next
sentence: ‘to the rest of the world she was ” the mother of lesbian-erotic pulp fiction.” Unacknowledged is the reality that only a few people really understand what they read and have a judgement worth listening to. That does not mean they are the reviewers or people who write in magazines I hasten to add. These few can include online bloggers, academic writers, or people who don’t write but read intelligently. “The rest of the world” is those who make money for writers, and why they buy what they do is also not known.

Now it might not be that the vast majority of buyers of Women’s Barracks thought it lesbian, but look at that packaging. For all we know some read it as a good war novel, but it was presented as a salacious erotic book for men to titillate themselves with about women in uniform (the way some people read salacious erotic books and pornography featuring nurses). Paradise Road I was told was partly seen that way and great efforts were made to stop this perception.

It’s salutary to ask people why they read what they read; most of
the time they won’t answer or can’t tell you quite but when they do it’s all over the place. (Sadly, like voting. why people vote for whom they do is equally hard to get at.)

Richard Sennet in his Hidden Injuries of Class suggests class is a more painful reality in the US than the UK or its commonwealth because it’s hidden, made shameful, lied about, distorted. Let us not be fooled or manipulated into despising ourselves for not belonging to what is presented as easy to belong to. It’s not.

Ellen

P.s. For another aspect of attacks on bloggers and reviewers too see: We are an injured body.

Read Full Post »

Dennis Potter’s Cream in my Coffee & Curran & Nyswaner’s Painted Veil (out of Somerset Maughn)

Peggy Ashcroft in her fifties (promotional photo)

Kitty (Naomi Watts) and Edward (Walter Fane) floating down the river (2006 Painted Veil)

Dear friends and readers,

Here am I trying to keep my word and make shorter blogs. I’ve two movies to urge you to see. Rent them at Netflix or buy or download from Pirate Bay and luxuriate in the beauty of the photography and depth and sensitivity of what’s presented: Dennis Potter’s rightly valued 1980 Cream in My Coffee and John Curran and ron Nyswaner’s wrongly ignored Painted Veil (a film adaptation of a Somerset Maugham novel).

In the first case you want see more Potter-scripted films of the 1980s, and in the second you will long to read Maugham’s novel.

Jean now old, first near close up (Peggy Ashcroft, 1980 Cream in my Coffee)

I am now able to say a Dennis Potter film can be as stunningly powerful as people say. He is a much praised (adulated) script writer of the 1980s in BBC and other British TV films and plays. I had tried two films, both with great actors: in the first I found Bob Hoskins continually breaking into song, as a working class man holding up his pride against great odds, half-broken puzzled, seemingly bewildered, yet continually breaking out into song. In the second Michael Gambon (the great Gambon Ralph Richardson calls him — and certainly nothing comes up to his Squire Hamley in Davies’ 1999 Wives and Daughters out of Gaskell), Gambon anticipated the time I saw him on stage doing a Becket play. I realized Beckett plays hate drama; they are set up so actors can do so little. In that one Gambon was imprisoned in a can; in the Potter he was swathed with bandages in the last stages of dying life in a hospital. A situation rich, but it was like watching Beethoven making some music instruments can hardly play. Yet in both I was unbearably moved.

This time the script was doable and utterly fulfilled.

Here the great presence is Peggy Ashcroft: it takes a while to realize we are watching the same couple. First Jean and Bernard, when old coming back to one of these genteel style elegant hotels that are so endemic in British novels and plays (especially plays, think Separate Tables) when he is very old, ill, dying and she a woman cowed for many years by his irascible bullying and hard nasty spiteful even tongue, picking at her:

First of series of photos panning hotel and beach (Cream in my Coffee)

Then series of photos of elderly couples

Then from one to another versions of youth

Sitting in room (Ashcroft and Lionel Jeffries)

Second, as young Jean and young Bernard over 40 years ago they had stolen away for a weekend before they married, apparently very much in love, soft focus photography

.
(Peter Chelsom as Bernard, Shelagh McLeod as young Jean)

Placed against the second older version we slowly begin to see how what was to come – an embittering life — is anticipated, but also how it could not quite have been predicted. Like life too much is enigmatic. We see during this time the young Bernard despises the young Jean partly for her lower class origins and partly for coming away with him before marriage. Young Bernard’s father is killed in an accident during the three days (bad luck) tehy are away, and he returns home to a narrow repressed somehow very English lace and there is this dreadful scene with his harridan mother who wants to control him and prevent this marriage. How she scorns Jean.

(Martin Shaw as glamorous matinee idol singing songs like “You’re the cream in my coffee/you’re the salt in my stew … “)

But while young Bernard is gone, young Jean succumbs to the kindness, and aggressive romantic words and gestures of the orchestra singer, a cad type. Lonely, feeling herself denigrated and uncomfortable, she gets “squiffy” (very drunk) and is half-coerced (but only half) into spending a long pleasurable night with him – more than any she ever had with Bernard. When Bernard returns, there’s no sign he guesses and yet …

The life to follow he has gotten back.

The bitter ironies, poignancy, plangency, occasional comedy of the two relationships and what we glimpse about the hotel, by the pool, on the beach are caught in songs whose lyrics comes out as on the spot precisely awful. You’re the salt in my stew. Right. Lots of these 30s to 40s songs. Fast forward and instead of creamy violins and big band we have hard rock and they are just as ironic, just as false.

The way each place is filmed, the dialogues just reeked to me of England and English people of a certain milieu. I need to see it again and read an essay I have on Potter’s films, but will tell a joke Jim and I had.

I said to him, we never went to such a place when we lived there. It was beyond us. We didn’t have the money. When we returned 20 years later or more (1990s), we were way beyond that and would know it’d be miserable snobbish and somehow tawdry in all its efforts. We went to Landmark recreations — a joke too time capsules and all that. He stopped and said he has never known anyone who went to such places. Did they ever exist? are they a myth that captures something in English class ridden minds?

*******************
Why do Edwardian stories and films seem to speak home to us? Forsyte Saga (which I’m watching the 1967 version of over these two months now — 26 one hour parts — about which I’ll be blogging soon), Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs. Maughn’s post-colonial Painted Veil is a brilliant epitome of this subgenre.

In part the greatness of the film is sheer photography: breath-taking beauty in China, especially of waterways, slow montage, background French music, evocative:

What it’s about is two people finding themselves as they journey “out” into a wild natural place and leaning some humility and tolerance; the triangle is contrasted to another couple, disillusioned ugly man, Waddington (Toby Jones, as great as Gambon) who lives with a native girl, in a kind of retreat from the world both came from — with records from the 1950s. This anticipates or imitates (depending on whether you are thinking of Greene’s novel or the recent film with Michael Caine), The Quiet American. Edward has left his cushy job in England to do research in China and she can get no one to marry her so she follows him.

Toby Jones as Waddington explains how he came to live there, and how the girl he loves was rescued from a short life of beating and prostitution

I’m writing about this partly because I’ve seen it so mis-described. A denigrating way of describing hero and heroine dominates all blurbs: “shunned by scientific research husband,: wife “ignites passionate affair;” or “British medical doctor trapped … in loveless marriage with faithless wife …” We do have the Maugham triangle of the selfish woman who takes over the shy young man and seems set to destroy him. But this is not what happens at all. We see his science is a form of self-gouging and how she turns to want to help him, the school (Diana Rigg is a nun running the place), the helpless women, all the diseased people. We see the way the tribal leaders are murderous towards one another and so no help can come from there:

One of her stations of the cross

One of his

It ends in tragedy — reminding me in its savagery of Before the Rains. This is like Paul Scott: while written by a white man, it is a take from a point of view that shows the European corrupt. She gets to go back and gives birth to a child; we last see her rejecting the old life, her old lover, and walking with the child away. Older now than when I read the book, Of Human Bondage (blotted out in my memory probably by the film’s take and Bette Davis as Bitter Destruction with Leslie Howard in the abject role), and aware Maugham was homosexual (he lived in south France with his partner).

I’d like to read the book and then re-see film. We’ve said we’ll do it on Trollope19thCStudies. Alas it was a flop, so no features or voice-over commentary.

An intense psychological investigation in the context of sharp disillusioned picturing of snobbish colonialism, it’s a heroine’s text, Watts turned a perhaps misogynistic story into one of a heroine coming of age (she was one of the producers).

Ellen

Read Full Post »

George Moore’s Esther Waters: a must-read, still timely book

Hugh Goldwyn Rivere (1869-1956), The Garden of Eden (1901)

Dear friends and readers,

Stirred this past spring by Rodrigo Garcia’s film adaptation of George Moore’s novella, Albert Nobbs (featuring Glenn Close and Janet McTeer), when a friend on Trollope19thCStudies proposed we revive the group readings and discussions we used to have on that list-serv, I said let’s do George Moore’s Esther Waters and then Albert Nobbs. Id long wanted to read Esther Waters, as one of those reputably great and powerful Victorian/Edwardian novels I had (somewhat unaccountably) never been assigned in any classroom, never even owned, nor tried to read. I wanted to do the full novel first as I usually like longer novels better, it had such a good reputation, and both together, might make a really satisfying new experience.

Well two of us have read Esther Waters together and when I come back from a brief time again in next week (we go to Vermont for 7 days), we mean to go on to Albert Nobbs. Esther Waters is a compelling novel, richly written, persuasive, humanely moving; its plot design is unexpected (it takes turns one does not expect as life often does), characters complex, and its social message humane. It has been somewhat misrepresented. It is usually talked of as a novel which exposes the “baby-farm” trade in later 19th century England as if this were the core, central, dominating and most shocking thing in the book. It’s there and important, but it’s not dominating, just one of several devastating experiences Esther has when she become pregnant, has a child out of wedlock, is fired, ejected from her parents’ house, and must work long hours in service even to survive so is forced to put the child out to nurse. She does not realize until a few weeks later that this recommended place means to let the child die. When she does, she snatches her darling back, and at great sacrifice to herself, holds onto him, keeps him in good health by paying someone to take good care of him while she again works in another house.

Emilio Longoni (1855-1932), Reflections of a Starving Man (1894)

It’s also said to be naturalistic, a book in the tradition of Zola’s L L’Assommoir, Frank Norris’s Octopus, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Stephen Crane’s Maggie of the Streets, Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. Thomas Hardy’s novels represent the most read British version of this school nowadays, with John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath the best known recent American masterpiece. Naturalistic novels by women include Mary Webb’s Precious Bane and Gone to Earth. These novelists all present life for real and expose the lies and hypocrisies used to support systems of privilege and power. Unlike Dickens say, they show real sex, much more graphic brutality as a system, real war (e.g., Crane’s Red Badge of Courage) is a literary Naturalist text), real criminality, and most of all the wretched real working lives of poor people ground down by their jobs and lack of opportunities. Certainly Moore shows us the last, and rejects religious fundamentalism and repression, but he really does not adhere to a belief in determinism to the extent that human life is entirely shaped by environmental and social forces. Human will does come into play. Moore also has sequences where his characters enjoy themselves, act out some of their dreams, know romance and he marginalizes the more abysmal miseries. Esther stoically survives even if she has periods of real hunger. The emphasis on Esther’s strong will and highly individual character is not typical of naturalistic novels. The thing is Esther (and William’s) choices are so limited and her strength goes only so far. So the critique of society’ structures and norms is all the stronger (I feel).

I found myself strongly identifying with the character and becoming personally involved. It reaches out to us today. And I’ve written my blog to show this.

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

Robert Walker Macbeth (1848-1910), Rainy Day (book illustration)

To cover with the first third to half of the novel or so (Chapters 1-27), each turn of the plot is not conventional altogether so you are ever worried what will happen next. I worried because I really cared for the heroine.

One early central sequence is a realistic depiction of an upper class household, Woodview, with a number of servants (a real un-blown-up Downton Abbey) The Barfields have a much more typical rich establishment. Not so very many servants, one women for cook and housekeeper for example. It’s here Esther is half-coerced into having sex with, William Latch, a stableman she is in love with and gets pregnant. There is much on betting on the races: it reminded me of how Thomas More thought dice so stupid and mindless and boring, but what if everyone does it and many bet lots of money, then (unless you are like me who does not until today know how US football is played) you have to pay attention.

There is a strong demonstration of class mobility. Mrs Barfield is religious in the way of Esther, and tries to teach her to read. They are companions. The Barfields, the people Esther works for were working class not that long ago, and they could and do fall again due to the husband’s gambling habits.

We are kept at a distance; Esther has individuality and courage. She’s not abject. On the rolling in the hay, we are not to see her as having sex with these young men, for when William does make his advance, you see she wanted marriage first. She does give in, but it was half-coerced, she was half-drunk and she refuses him the next time. She manages very well in the family group despite an abusive father (about whom she can do nothing to protect her mother). We see the importance of women’s relationships throughout the novel: Fanny Hill takes this parodically (see how the prostitute and madam collude is Cleland); here we will see a generous employee, a supportive landlady can make a big difference. William is a convincing rat — unlike Hardy’s Alec D’Urberville who practically twirls his mustache.

From London: A Pilgrimage, text by Blanchard Jerrold, pictures by Gustave Dore

We are to admire Esther for her stubbornness; it’s part of what makes her survive. She is tempted say to leave the baby with the baby-farmer, but her tenacity and self-respect gives her the courage to wrench it away and leave. She might have been more tactful with William, but I feel we are to assume she was just about raped, really coerced and is angry with him. She also is naive socially and doesn’t even think of manipulating him at this point. By the time she is with Miss Rice (the novelist-lady who hires her as a kind of paid-companion aide) she does so think. It takes time to learn.

We are indeed to feel William could not have felt much when he turns round and marries money.

The book is daring and not daring. The depiction of a near rape for example — it’s the sort of thing Hardy presents in Tess but more frankly. So when Esther later in the book is walking outside one day she meets up with Margaret Gale, another ex-servant of the Barfields. Margaret has become a streetwalker or prostitute; this is presented discreetly because Moore is not horrified and shows Margaret to live a hard life but she is surviving and in some ways better off than the servants who works from dawn to dusk for almost no money at all. Margaret has breathing time and makes a bit more money.

George John Pinwell (1842-75), At the Pawnshop (1867, The Quiver)

We see how miserably men treat their wives — how power corrupts. Much beating of women, casual and deliberate too. This is the era when the first courts decided a woman has the right to leave a man who beat her.
How deep and supportive is Esther’s relationship with her mother who husband regularly systematically beats her, keeps her pregnant, who eats the best food in the house because he controls his salary. How people of the lower classes are torn apart by the economic system, forced to move far away from one another and spend long hours of soul killing work. Body destroying too.

On hospitals, I don’t know when the pernicious practice started to stopped, but as early as the 1840s in Gaskell’s Mary Barton no worker (apparently powerless to effect this just by being sick) person apparently can get into a hospital without an employer writing a letter asking the hospital to take him or her in. By Esther Waters, this has been codified into tickets. It’s pernicious because if you displease the person who has the power to write such letters or tickets, you can’t get medical help. Obviously that can be and was used against strikers or anyone the person thought not respectable or simply didn’t like. No one talks of this much and I wish I knew more, especially when in the UK it was stopped. Perhaps WW1? sometimes wars have some unintended good effects. You’d have had so many near death, how could you stop to “vet” them by asking for letters from empowered types.

I’d like to stress the emotional honesty of the opening sequence. Nothing overdone, nothing forced. I had an experience this weekend of watching a group of relatives casually mistreat a paid home companion — nothing anyone would object to except they didn’t give her the respect of an equal human being and are planning to drop her as soon as they can with no warning. I admit I did nothing at all except (perhaps hypocritically I don’t know) salving my conscience by at least asking after her relatives, home, concerns. I know “home-aides” are still excluded from various forms of social legislation in the US intended to help domestic paid workers.

When Esther snatches back her child and after a period at the workhouse (which we don’t see — an important difference from purely naturalistic novels), Esther begins to prosper; she is hired by Miss Rice partly because Mrs Lewis gives her some slack: she is allowed to live there without paying the rent until she can. Then again a relationship forms. Fred Parsons, a evangelical type asks her to marry him, and she likes his family and they are prepared to accept her, child and all.

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

John Everett Millais (1829-96), “Robert Lyon and Hilary”

The marriage between Esther and Fred never occurs. In the middle to near the end of the book (corresponding to the second volume, Chapters 28-33/34), the book takes an unexpected turn. Esther is driven by her passions (erotic) which her mind cannot fully control. When she unexpectedly meets William, she shows herself drawn to him, unable to say no. We are to feel she finds William irresistibly sexually attractive, and she is really just not allured by Fred. The point made early about how Fred is small, meager and does not turn her on (so to speak) is part of this. We are supposed to find Fred’s particular brand of evangelical Christianity overdone. It did help him to accept Esther though as well as his mother. The portrait is complex.

I was much moved by the chapter in which Esther tells Fred she must marry William, or to put it more narrowly at the moment of the chapter, she must go live with him and hope that he will get his divorce, marry her and be a good father to his and her child as well as husband to her. The book is famous for its depiction of baby-farms, but I think this chapter is as important — the asserted thoughts and feelings behind her decision are probably still inculcated in women today. We know from the novel’s text and this scene itself that she is also intensely attracted to William physically as she is not to Fred, and that she is ambitious to be a tavern-owner and finds the prospect somehow glamorous.

To again bring in identification, again I parted company from Esther. I would not have left that baby with that baby-farmer and certainly would have gone back, taken it away and taken my chances. So I would certainly have married Fred. Esther fears the boy, Jackie, will hold her decision against her and stop loving for for giving him a different father than his bio-dad (as we would call Wm today).

I also think perhaps — now referring to Moore’s being daring and yet not daring — Moore lacked the nerve to marry Esther off to someone else when the child’s father was around. It’s an ancient idea that fathers have even primary rights over their children. We are perhaps supposed to feel that she feels tied to William emotionally and physically because she’s had his child, i.e., it is “natural” for her to prefer the father of the child. How quickly Mrs Lewis accepts William as the boy’s father notice.

William is not good husband material at all. He’s proven that thoroughly. He’s a gambler, and as presented for all she knows, he’d hit her. No I might have stayed stay away and married Fred all the quicker, hoping that if William presented himself as the father after Fred married me, that Fred would understand. He has understood about the child out of wedlock. In fact here Esther seems to me to make a serious mistake — not to be blamed as we are all creatures of unknown emotional forces within us, and one is sexual attraction. She was in love with William originally and she only began to love Fred after Fred was so good to her.

Austen would say esteem and gratitude are much better grounds for marriage than sexual attraction and shows this in her books. I agree.

One of the weaknesses of the book is we don’t see enough of Jackie and he is not characterized individually. Since so many of Esther’s decisions, indeed her life story hinges on her having gotten pregnant and having given birth to a living child and then decision to bring him up with love and care, to have him hardly there at all and then there just archetypally weakens the book considerably. We lose sight of how much part Jackie is playing in Esther’s decisions. Her anger at the child preferring the father’s goodies, her breaking the new toy might seem so selfish and again the old angry resentful Esther emerging (but then again why not? why should she not be angry? it’s from such anger revolutions emerge) without sufficient justification. But she is justified. She has given all to that child. The child becomes frightened as he knows he cannot depend on this fleeting father and is willing immediately to give up toys, suits, if he has his mother’s promise to be there always.

He would have accepted Fred. I thought Fred eloquent and clearly that he sees through that Esther does not love him and that is partly sexual and that she is ambitious.

Now what could have happened is Wm does not get his divorce, does not marry Esther, she has another child and Wm is a lousy husband. Instead we fast forward to a year later and are told it all went well. And William is presented as kind, sexually satisfying and doing well in his public house for Esther and Jackie, until he is threatened with fines and closure because he also brings customers by running a betting shop on the second floor. Fred comes to warn them about this — and also lecture them.

Maybe after all I would not have married Fred. I did myself marry someone I thought might give me an enjoyable life. I didn’t want someone who was (as I had seen all my life growing up in a working class lower middle home) who would be afraid to spend the money he made, would sock it away and not spend it — as to to accumulate something towards what? safety? paying for your old age in yet another compromised situation of half-misery and loneliness. And I have enjoyed what the money would buy that we had had and keep to the courage (with him there) of living today and telling myself when the morrow comes (if it does) then I’ll act if I must however I see it out of my own character. Yes Fred’s a banal killjoy

Still I might not have gone to live with William either. By marginalizing the great dangers — that Wm would not be able to get a divorce, that she might have gotten pregnant, that he might have left her in a far worse situation, Moore dodges this. In life one can’t or I might not have. After all Esther had a good situation living with Miss Rice and she need not have done anything. She could have offered say to go away for a couple of weekends and let someone take photos and do the trial but not had sex with Wm (as it seems they don’t use contraceptives) until marriage.

Another unreality is that Esther has not gotten pregnant again. That makes their lives so much easier. Moore ought at least to account for this by suggesting she now can’t or it’s difficult for whatever reason. And again by Chapter 41 Jackie is still kept at a distance; it’s as if she doesn’t have a child.

Apparently Moore is not interested in that kind of trajectory of tragedy, women as victims. He has shown us abused women but really it’s part of what he wants to show is working class life. Early in the novel he did say Wm and Esther were a good pair, would work, and could have made it and we begin to see them make it now as in one paragraph we are told that Wm got his divorce easily and he and Esther married and a year has passed. Really so easy? Moore is not a naturalist writer as naturalists would have gone for this story of Esther probably defeated at one of these turning points.

“Urban Smoke,” an illustration from Margaret Drabble’s A Writer’s Britain, the later 19th century

We move back to chapters about racing and betting taking over the working people’s lives (to be fair, as well as drink for solace) — as with Trollope, one has endure these chapters because Moore himself went to the races, bet, and liked to discuss horses. Also racing was common, horses were ubiquitous until the car emerged and I suppose it’s partly natural that they should have become a “toy” for pleasures as well as a “instrument” for hard work. The poor horse was an abused creature and still is or can be.

The 24 hour a day presence of a child in your life often changes it utterly, if you’re it’s mother, and especially if you have no financial or emotional support to enable you to fulfill yourself too. And that’s not what Moore admits to. Perhaps because he’s a man and hasn’t experienced it himself.

Some things to emphasize: here and there I see naturalism influencing the book. The description of the whole experience and raced of Derby day, beginning: “This was the last race,” especially where the landscape is described at length and the narrator sees this from the perspective of “William struggled with the crowd …” It’s very Hardyesque.

Also the beautiful effective description in the book of both the town and countryside: all have their beauties: “a Cockneyh pilgrimage … ” Lovely and yet so real because of the perspective.

Here and there too sex between Wm and Esther is done justice to.

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

Millais, A Chill October (1852)

The last third and conclusion of the book (Chapters 34 to the end).

Sarah’s story. As in Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho where at the close suddenly we switch to another minor heroine and have an intense even more frank replay of Emily’s ordeals, so i Sarah near the end of the book we have a harrowing replay of Esther’s. Thrown out of her house, she takes up with Bill. As he has done before, Moore only alludes to the core of the story: we see her a year later thrown out by Bill and are only told of how he forced to be a prostitute to support him. Then how she is so easily saved by Esther. In naturalistic books by Zola, Upton Sinclair, Dreiser and other top naturalists, Sarah would have perished – as she would in real life probably. But Moore does tell the story, and he emphasizes how erotically enthralled she is by Bill — conveys it. This one gripped me.

Meanwhile Esther and William are threatened by his ill health (he seems to have TB), the animus and needs of their neighbors to stop them being a betting center, and the aftermath of Fred’s visit to warn them. Then I was much moved by the persuasive, creditable — utterly believable account of William’s descent into a fatal illness of TB and gambling as a wild addiction while his house is attacked for being a betting place, he is fined and forced to close. I see now that Sarah’s story serves as a catalyst for the house’s exposure.

Because William and Esther testify on Sarah’s behalf, they call attention to themselves and their house, and the police raid them. The judge is as harsh towards them as he is towards Sarah.

I was strongly angered as I am meant to be by the judge’s hypocrisy: Moore’s point is that there are two sets of laws, one for the rich and the other for the poor. The rich can gamble and do what they want and the poor are despised and hunted down for the same behavior, half abetted by other of their own poor people because what is really wanted is that the poor work work work very hard and remain “respectable” and not bother the luxurious life of the rich whom the poor serve. Someone like Fred Parsons is actually serving the rich when he insists that (justifiably) that gambling, drinking and what other pleasures are available be strictly controlled to keep the poor minimally comfortable.

The book here fits into the naturalistic type of novel — these all strongly critiqued the capitalist system, from the above angle as well as that of the natural world people can’t fight. People do have sexual desires, they have children out of wedlock, they get sick. The way Wm gets sick, the money it costs, the way the hospital works, that he cannot get to “Egypt” is the result of his poverty. He caught his first bad cold and TB by going to race-tracks as a bookie and then switched to keeping this in the house as his health would no longer take the punishment of the courses. I did underline one example of imagery typical of the naturalistic novel: “She [Esther] grew frightened as the cattle do in the fields when the sky darkens and the storm draws near” (chapter 41, p 318)

The way William’s final death scenes first in the hospital and then moved into his own house are handled is touching. We see how far we are from the 19th century pious novel as there is no religious imagery or ideas here.

I kept thinking that Esther might turn to Fred in the end as she shares his ideas, but it is more fitting (I feel) for this work of art to end where it began. She has to support herself, has nothing, has her son. She is too old to do the job as a laundress so must “go out to service,” cannot live on her own supporting the boy at school. He will now have to go to work too.

I liked the ending and it felt fitting but I would say that at many of the turns of the story I felt Moore was inventing as he went along. There was no first outline.

So we see her by chance (and also fairy tale) return to Woodview, the house she worked in earlier with Mrs Barfield again as her congenial employer. She fulfills an older version of her position as this woman’s friend-Servant.

Elin Danielson Gambogi (1861-1919), The Sisters (1891)

It is not unrealistic to present the mistress and maid as friends. Many were, and there was not always a large distance between them. We see that in Roger Scatcherd’s wife in Trollope’s Dr Thorne who spends her time with her housekeeper

I am feeling I am ending where I begun but this book reminds me I am not. I am very different from the person I set out as and have had some measure of success with my husband so we need not live as other people’s servants with no time or place of our own or life to create of our own.

Tyler, my friend’s response:

Yes, it is a stoic ending. Quite sad. It’s as if all Esther’s life ends up being worth is that she had a son, and he could be killed in war as you say. It is not tragic like other naturalism novels – I’m most familiar with Zola’s, which tend to be depressing and disastrous in their endings, but it is still sad. It does come full circle, and in the friendship between Esther and the mistress, seems to suggest perhaps that time is the great leveler. In just a few generations, the Barfields rose up the social ladder and now they have fallen back down some and Esther has gone up some and they are almost equal, and simply time and the beat goes on and perhaps all is vanity in the end. It will be interesting to read another book by Moore now to see the similarities and contrasts.

It is a stoic ending, but it is also a kind of full circle. I was much moved by the last moment as Esther looks at her soldier son, and we are reminded how he could lose his life at any moment. He took that job as soldier partly to make money. We see the three of them standing against a fall landscape, the tone of the book sad, sombre autumnal.

I very much look forward to reading Albert Nobbs. As a piquant note: Janet McTeer starred in the film adaptation of Mary Webb’s naturalistic early 20th century Precious Bane, so she starred in the film adaptation of George Moore’s Albert Nobbs.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Have DVDs, Will take Slow Journeys through Passionate Dream material: the Poldark & Downton Abbey worlds

Ross (Robin Ellis) and Demelza, the night before his trial for inciting a scavenger riot

Thomas (Rob James-C0llier, now his Lordship’s valet, dances with Violet, Lady Crawley (Maggie Smith)

Dear friends and readers,

This is a metablog and my hopes for what’s to come for this blog.

Starting sometime this past winter, I’ve been taking slow journeys through (to me) deeply gratifying mini-series, my favorite kind those based on good books set in the past (sometimes written then) which are made up of multiple hour-long parts. The two I’ve stayed with longest provided the basis for a blog I wrote about the art of story-telling in this subgenre on TV, the 2 year Poldark (1975-76 and again 1978) and Downton Abbey (2010-11, 2011-12). I long to share some of this with my readers and friends in blogs that are readable and coherent (and not too long)

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

Thomas and Miss Sarah Obrien (Siobhan Finneran) with Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nichol) and Daisy (Sophia McShera) looking on: Mrs Hughes the sceptic: “I just don’t think the spirits play boardgames.”

In the case of Downton Abbey I want to explore the nature of the art of these mini-series as seen in this one late flowering examples. (Such lingerly graceful mini-series are under attack on all fronts, including making costume drama today using paradigms that come out of popular cinema (stunt man films, action-adventure). That’s my real interest in Downton Abbey, as a brilliant soap opera, rich from its uses of all the conventions of costume drama, historical style. I took about 12 to 13 weeks watching Downton Abbey the second season, capturing lots of stills and taking careful notes on the content of the stories and characters, and how they are juxtaposed, and relate to one another within an hour and across the hours. The state of my notes is inward, not directed towards someone who does not the film as well as I’ve begun to do nor about film as such.

And I feel I should take the time to read Jessica Fellowes’s The World of Downton Abbey, nor couple of other books I want to on the actual history of the family in this place (e.g., Life and Secrets of Almina Carnarvon by Wm Cross), and two relevant memoirs, Margaret Powell’s Below Stairs (the book which gave rise to the 5 season-long original Upstairs Downstaira in the 1970s and Amanda Mackenzie Stuart’s Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt, a biography of women of two of the upper class super-rich women of this era (in the US).

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

Demelza (Angharad Rees, “What makes you think I have nowhere to go?” — because of her rank, gender, and position as his servant, she has no where to go is the answer) — a favorite moment for me

In the case of the Poldark films, I’ve been rereading the novels again, Ross Poldark with my students, and since April Demelza, Jeremy Poldark and Warleggan. Yet I need more historical and cultural material: I want to add to the books on Cornwall and Graham’s life, books on the Peninsula War, the Napoleonic campaigns, local Cornish and English politics of 1800-1818. I also have to proceed from the assumption the books and films will not be familiar to many of my readers (though in general economically the mini-series and novel flourish as yet.) And my interest here is the 18th century and Cornish content, the author’s progressive humane feminist vision. My notes are much better here, maybe too detailed.

And I’ve been going through the films slowly, also capturing many many stills and taking new notes. I’ve not gone so far as to take down dialogue the way I have for Downton Abbey, but give me time

I will though try not to put days into making blogs the way I did for the Pallisers as they became far too long and detailed. I mean rather to immerse myself and anyone else in the 18th century worlds of historical fiction and film and then write creatively. Yes Elizabeth’s story or some historical fiction or creative non-fiction or essay once again of my own. Maybe another film-v-book study.

***************************
I’ll close this entry with the rich thoughts my students wrote after we had a genuinely thorough comparative treatment of Poldark books and films, and a few remarks on the moving (much maligned) episode in Downton which included people very sick and dying from the Spanish flu.

Several students compared the treatment of the sexual encounter and marriage of Ross to Demelza in the book and film and one nice thing was they didn’t simply say the book is necessarily (or even) superior but treated one as a realistic book and the other as a high romantic film. The way to get students to do this is set papers directly on films and specify explicitly a narrow assignment. For example, discuss the scenes in the novel which are not in the film; discuss scenes in the film not in the novel; for a start they have to compare for real.

Passionate dream material (He: “You won’t be alone. I’ll give you my name. We’ll be married. Now we’ll have no more arguing … ” Season 1, Part 4)

One student wrote as follows (more or less, I’ve corrected and condensed): In the mini-series Ross Poldark the love scene between Ross and Demelza is framed with vulnerability of emotions that overshadows the importance of class distinctions to the characters. In contrast, the novel provides more of an awareness of the social context in which the illicit affair takes place.

The film and book differ in several places. First the events leading up to the night in question. In the film it happens after Ross forces a kiss on Elizabeth and fails with the trial of Jim Carter. In the book Ross is frustrated with the trial but the confrontation with Elizabeth happened differently and much earlier. The two part on bitter terms with no passionate declaration from Ross.

There is also a difference in Demelza’s motivations and how they are presented. In the film she is shown to be completely love-struck (absolutely understandably smitten) with Ross while in the book her affections are overshadowed by her need to stay with the entire household and her job; her father wants her back because of the rumors about sex between her and Ross. In the novel her flirtation is impelled by her extreme reluctance to return to the father, her fear of him. This is about her social and physical life too, her education, into a being a lady. Her future

Two last important differences are Ross’s initial refusal of the encounter in the book and the absence of a detailed wedding proposal or scene in the book.

Ross’s vulnerable emotional state is stronger in the film. In the film it is more apparent that he is frustrated in love due to Elizabeth’s refusal to elope. In the book his frustrations are more directly the result of social norms as he has just just failed in his attempt to rescue Jim from harsh punishment in the trial; and the book’s emphasizes the rumors about his relationship with Demelza. Given Ross’s reactionary defiance when faced with social prejudice, there is less of passionate love story and more social commentary in the novel.

The initial strong refusal of Ross and the matter-of-fact handling of the marriage in the book show there is more thought from the characters as to the social implications of what they are doing at each turn — on the night of the encounter too. It’s his mother’s dress she has dared put on. She is pro-active and can be despised for offering herself sexually. Instead the film treats the ordeal as a matter of romantic passion and empathetic impulse and the second phase when he learns she is pregnant and does the right thing (chases her down), bring her back to safety is dream material.

There is emotional vulnerability present in the novel and social commentary in the film but the difference in emphasis highlights the love relationships differently so we get two unique experiences of a sexual encounter leading to marriage even if the outcome is the same.

Another kind of dream material, love and death from Downton Abbey, the flu epidemic. This was a strong episode: it’s the one where the sequences about people sickening and dying from the Spanish flu are interwoven with sequences of people in love (some marrying, some defying others, one the unwed mother who insists on holding on to her child, one OBrien whose behavior is the most moving thing we’ve had since Mrs Patmore had to have an eye operation). Even Thomas gets into the act because if he doesn’t mend his conduct he’ll end up homeless and starving. Scenes in bed and kissing and dancing alternate with scenes in graveyards and wretched helplessness in sick rooms. Woody Allen said love and death were unbeatable and this was.

Miss Obrien devotedly nursing Cora, Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern)

It’s hard to snap precisely that shot which captures the full depth with which Finneran played this role. She is unbearably moving; it was the first time the series gave her a chance. It was not just her face, but her whole body. And the still does capture how a bleached-out coloring was used for the shots in the sick rooms instead of the usual rich dark draperies colors of upstairs and the natural-seeming bright shades of the out-of-doors.

Ellen

Read Full Post »