Disability studies — Victorian literature; women’s & present perspectives

Adam (Hugh Dancy in key role): a movie about an autistic young man

Dear friends and readers,

There’s a major area completely undiscovered – as it were — in Victorian literature. A way of making genuinely humane sense out of all sorts of works. We need to stop (first of all, a minimum first) stop using terms like “cripples” or “monstrous” as these feed into misunderstanding of what the experience of disability is to the person and those immediately around him or her, who live with and next to them.

To answer a request to cite a few such characters and comment on Victorian characters already cited:

The first shot of la Signora Neroni (Susan Hampshire): Mrs Proudie asks, “what’s so special about this lady beyond her preposterous name?” Rickman as Slope replies: “She can’t walk.”

Madame Neroni in Trollope’s Barchester Towers is not a monstrous figure, but her crippled state is described as grotesque. She refuses to try to walk is to do that would expose this aspect of her body. If we move away from the word “cripples” and an insistence on physical disability as the key to disability, Elizabeth Gaskell has quite a number of disabled characters across her oeuvre, especially the short stories (a number of which are gothic in feel). It’s mostly mental disability and she shows real empathy for the disabled character and her or his caretaker, mostly women. By contrast, there’s Eliot’s really cruel Lifted Veil where a “mentally retarded” young man (whom today would be labelled low-functioning autistic) is treated with horror, as an unendurable mischievously savage burden. I would count Tarchetti’s Fosca as an Italian Victorian gothic novella — in the modern translation by Lawrence Venuti it’s retitled Passion, the influence of Sondheim’s musical-opera.

It doesn’t take much to see many of the characters in gothic mysteries and crime stories as disabled people stigmatized as “other.” A reading of recent disability studies might open up a whole new area of humane investigation from this point of view, and this has been already begun. An issue of Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies — 6.2 (2012) — is dedicated to disability studies. The central point is made that disability is partly in the eye of the society who defines a series of traits as disability and then sees the person with these as “others”; then the purpose of the issue is to explore how disability is presented in literature. There are essays on “Late Victorian Gothic,” disability in romance, disability in crime and mystery novels.

The claim is persuasively made that crime and mystery novels have often centered on disabled people seen as villains, freaks, or the detective him or herself (mentally different you see). This kind of insight is fueling the new British Sherlock, arguably both Martin Freeman and Bernard Cumberbatch play high-functioning autistic or Aspergers characters who find deep friendship and a metier in helping other outside the cultural norm.

First shot of Dr Watson (Martin Freeman) home from war

Moving slightly away from Victorian texts, it’s argued in these essays that there are far more openly disabled characters in popular fiction than ever before, but the question is whether there has been really a development of understanding or empathy or it’s a reinforcing voyeurism in the service of enforcing normalcy. I know everyone is tired of hearing of Downton Abbey, but the presence of a character like Mr Bates is part of this new openness. What’s remarkable about Gaskell for example is by the end of her presentation the central characters have not been re-coopted into conventional patterns; they are not made “all well.”And to give Fellowes his due for once, Mr Bates is not co-opted back into “all well.” He remains outside the “norm” with his menacing dignity. The actor, Brendan Coyle, was given a central role in the film adaptation of Gaskell’s Cranford Chronicles.

I suggest a study of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights from the point of disability studies (her verse too) might open whole new points of view on Heathcliff and Emily Bronte herself, the occasional half-hysterical violence of that book, the apartness of her poetry and various stories about Emily herself. Isabella Linton Heathcliff may well be a portrait of a woman unable to cope with social demands, and reacting grotesquely.

There’s also Fictions of Affliction by Martha Stoddard Holmes: her figures in include Madame Neroni, Dickens’s Jenny Wren (Our Mutual Friend), Tiny Tim, Wilkie Collins’s Lucy Finch she also studies Henry Mayhew’s interviews with disabled street vendors; autobiographical writings of Harriet Martineau and John Kitto, both deaf; and biographies of two public figures who were blind, the postmaster general Henry Fawcett and the disabled-rights activist Elizabeth Gilbert.

Contemporary illustration of Dickens’s character by Marcus Stone

Holmes is said to be interested in the melodramatic way most of these figures are presented; it’s an emotional and moral, not a medical and social struggle. Thinking about this, for Madame Neroni I would say it is a social struggle. For example, her decision not to be seen walking, the way she re-interprets what happened during her marriage. She’s not presented melodamatically either. Not that I am arguing Trollope’s portrait is of a 20th or 21st century enlightened sort, but he does bring in that she was physically abused by her husband.

Though not on Victorian literature, the insights in Rosemarie Garland Thomson: Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring disability in American literature may be used for Victorian literature.

Deafness is also often brought up as a central “type” of disability — partly because of the strong self-advocacy by the deaf, & I suggest Leonard Davis’s Enforcing Normalcy ought to inform any work done in this area; its subtitle Disability, Deafness, and the Body brings out its central focus on deafness. One of the chapters is on the first recording and understanding of deafness as a disability (not a monstrous irreversible condition) in the 18th century; this revolutionary change began in our enlightenment and its work has never been wholly undone. Another chapter makes Quasimodo a central figure.

From Charles Laughton’s brilliant performance in The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Going back in time a century, Oliver Sacks’s Seeing Voices also has a long eye-opening chapter on individual courageous and insightful 18th century philosophes who developed and taught sign language to deaf people, miraculously it was thought at first, turning them from imbeciles into functioning members of society — by those who would let them function. Sacks goes into the first schools for the dear, unfortunately all too quickly in the early 19th century an attempt was made to enforce talking on the deaf in such schools, to take away from them their sign language, to beat them into submission even. One of the most moving accounts of seeing the change in deaf people once they are treated as human beings like ourselves with another way of communicating is found at the close of Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands writes: if he that speaks looks towards them, and modifies his organs by distinct and full utterance, they know so well what is spoken, that it is an expression scarcely figurative to say, they hear with the eye … It was pleasing to see one of the most [hitherto] desperate of human calamaties capable of so much help.

I’ve not published any conventional articles on this for Victorian studies. It would take such work for me — partly because I’d have to really dig into Gaskell. She seems to me a rare spirit in the Victorian period to show sympathy, but to be accurate, her empathy is with the care-taking women. One limitation of her gothic stories is she tends to show sympathy simply for the care-taker and we see the disabled person as violent or sullen from afar; a rare instance of one of her attempts at a disabled perspecive is Lady Ludlow’s Story where the story is told by Margaret Dawson; however, soon after the narrative begins and not until we get near to the end are we reminded our narrator is a crippled girl on a couch.

I also dream of writing a study of the Poldark novels and Daphne DuMaurier’s King’s General. Placed in the 17th century civil war, the latter’s about a heroine crippled from a fall from a horse: DuMaurier said she began it when she saw near Menabillies (her great house) a home-made wooden wheel chair from the later 17th century in a barn.

This would take me back to the eighteenth century.

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Frida Kahlo, self-portrait with doctor

Thinking about Gaskell’s approach, disabilities affect women centrally as care-takers and as disabled. I’ve now gotten myself 3 books on disability studies in the humanities, two wholly devoted to how disabilities affect women, one of which I’ve begun: Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asche’s collection: Women with Disabilities. See Fine’s Disruptive Voices: Fine is the only person I’ve read to do justice to the class bias that ostracizes women who are raped when they come into clinics for help.A little from the introduction.

Because of the way society is structured, women experience disabilities much worse than men, and are much more ignored — the two go together, experienced much more excruciatingly in the area of sexual experience, so crucial to women’s lives. . I now have statistics and essays arguing what I’ve long felt to be so: the only reason it’s said more men are autistic is people care so much more about men not getting jobs or “doing well” socially; women need only be married off and have babies; plus people are more ashamed of reading women than reading men. A reading man might become a scientist, a professor, a lawyer, what is the use of a reading woman?

Why has there been little work done among feminists for women with disabilities? shamelessly, one female academic said: such studies would “reinforce traditional stereotypes of women in need, dependent, perhaps passive.” (Can’t have that.) I’ve just begun the essay in the volume on friendship between women one of whom has disabilities and the other not.

How few the conversations with people about disabilities and how even then when confronted with an individual there’s a turning away and intense discomfort, a desire not to have the burden, fear of contagion: you’ll catch it, you too will be ostracized. Disabled characters, open and disguised, are found among classic children’s books, more often than you might suppose.

One of Yvette’s favorite books: E. B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan: a mute swan carries a trumpet and writing slate

Two further well-known texts include Elizabeth Spencer’s Light in the Piazza (made into a musical): the daughter is autistic. Lucy Greary’s Autobiography of a Face.

I’ve only begun Women with Disabilities but already the texts bring home to me aspects of a set of texts I’ve been studying for over two years now: Austen’s letters and the experience of discussing these with other people. Again and again I have to watch people continue to misread the emphases in these letters and ignore say Jane’s relationship with Martha Lloyd. Insist that she didn’t marry was a default option not a preference. Ignore the very real peculiarities in her character.

Recently I’ve added and compared Frances Burney D’Arblay’s life-writing and found some aspects of her compulsion to write come out of her disabilities as a child. But her life-writing is not as useful as Austen’s — she hides her disabilities since much is self-praising fictionalizing: she makes herself the central heroine of romances, the adulated, the envied, from George III’s madness to Hastings’ trial. It’s rather in her third novel, Camilla, where one of her two heroines, Eugenia, is lamed and her face disfigured early in the novel that we get an early rare example of empathy for a disabled woman in early literature: what happens to her: Eugenia ends up married to an abusive man.

For studying disability as such (not in literature) I’d much prefer to write about life-writings than novels

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How did I come to write the above? whom am I speaking to?

On the large academic literary listserv, Victoria, there had appeared a query where for a second time someone requested examples of “cripples” in a disquieting way. The person requested “gothic images of cripples” and used the word “monstrous” of such a character without any sense that she (or he) was treating a whole class of people as obvious freaks, taking aboard as it were what one would have hoped in such a place would be an outdated attitude.

I waited a while and when no response beyond that of listing such supposed characters emerged, which then morphed into citing “deaf” characters, I sent a posting which was at first rejected or over-looked as insufficiently Victorian. A little rewriting enabled it to go through the next day and then off-list I got a number of thank yous, remarks about how slow or small has been the progress of understanding of people with disabilities,and descriptions of experiences, that I decided to put the above posting on line to reach more people in the form of a continuation of a blog I wrote about a debate in articles in a humanities journal which covers popular literature as well as disabilities: is the increase in depiction of characters with disabilities creating real understanding or effective help for real people with disabilities? I asked how far fandoms prevent such growth in sympathy and how far authors and film-makers found themselves pressured into creating alienating depictions or enforcing normalcy.

And I discussed the dramatization of the experiences of characters with disabilities in the last 5 of the Poldark novels and Downton Abbey.

The third shot of Mr Bates (Brendan Coyle, the first two show his face in the window of a train arriving at Downton, !:1)

The first time a startlingly prejudiced posting was put on Victoria I answered it too excitedly, but if I could find that posting, I’d put here on this blog now too.

Ellen

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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Maggie Wadey’s Precious Bane out of Mary Webb’s novel, featuring Janet McTeer & John Bowe

Janet McTeer as Prue Sarn and John Bowe as Kester Woodseaves (1989 BBC Precious Bane)

Dear friends and readers,

I watched this powerful two-hour film last night, partly because I’ve had it so long and it has Janet McTeer in the star role, the disabled heroine.

We read and discussed Mary Webb’s Precious Bane and Gone to Earth on WomenWritersThroughtheAges ast Yahoo some years ago. It’s a woman’s take or version of Hardy through Lawrentian-Freudian lenses. They were shallowly made fun of by Stella Gibbons in her famous Cold Comfort Farm.

The film is pre-1991 (turning point, the BBC Clarissa) and thus the old style BBC type in that the actors have been chosen for type (not against it), because they seem to embody the author’s conception physically as well as emotionally and intellectually. It’s not over-lavish, not over-produced. John Bowe made a debut as the loving tender sane man who rescues Prue Sam from the madness of a primitive world. Several actors made their debut here beyond Bowe: Clive Owen (rather chubbier than he is today) was Gidebon Sarn, the rigid cruel brother who exploits, bullies, frightens Janice Beguildy (Emily Morgan), his fiancee, Prue, his sister (who works selflessly for him), his mother too (whose death he engineers).

Janice and Gideon against the wide seascape

He is not alone; the other older men beat their daughters and wives; Janice’s father tries to sell her more than once. The women have nowhere to turn and grieve intensely when they lose their tyrants to death or alcoholism. Jim Carter (an established character actor by this time, most recently Mr Carson the butler at Downton Abbey) makes a memorable brief appearance as Prue’s resentful damaging father who dies of heart failure at the film’s opening. Milton Johns ever the sneak, spiteful, vile (he was in the older Poldark films, as John Dashwood in the 1971 S&S) is good form here: he almost manages to have Prue drowned, and is shown up (yet again) for a coward.

Here was a strong feminist thread — far stronger than the original novel — where we are shown how used and abused the women are, beaten, murdered, vilified and abused (the last two reminded me of the Republicans running for and in office around the US today). The woman are loyal to one another and quietly try to help one another, but as they must obey and follow the men their relationships are not primarily to be with and for one another but to and for and through the men — as in Webb’s desperate desolate book.

Janet McTeer is one of the recent actresses who chooses her roles to embody this kind of agenda. The heroine comes near total destruction, nearly drowned as a witch. Her portrait reminded me of George Eliot’s heroines: Immolating herself before her family, conventions, brother, with the difference we see clearly she does it here out of desperation not because her feelings lead her that way totally. And she comes near drowning; as she is plunged in and struggles I remembered so many Eliot heroines (Romola pushing off into the sea, Maggie drowning herself trying to rescue her bully brother, Hetty in Adam Bede starring into a black pond.) Janet McTeer would make a fine Romola. Well here she was impeccable; a tall calf.

It’s also story of how people treat disability (and there we pick up Gaskell); how she becomes idiotic, becomes without power in herself, can be turned around to be so much more competent, hopeful pro-active when those around her change their attitudes towards her.

Maggie Wadey also has had a career of feminist and woman-centered critical films. She did the remarkable 1987 Northanger Abbey, a kind of Anne Radcliffe film.

The film does not glorify or revel in this primitive world romantically the way I remember Webb’s book (and Lawrence) doing. The natural world is an ambivalent one: hard work, hard to make a living, easy for people to set on fire and destroy all one man makes as revenge. The women in this film may stand quietly but they are not abject (see critique of book). Stella Gibbons would not have satirized the book had it had the slant of this movie. It’s for education as a way up: Kester Woodseaves leaves Prue (and she is almost drowned without him) to learn a trade. This reminded me much of Hardy: indeed the film was made into a strong Hardy-type fable (rather like The Return of the Native than Webb’s original, though Webb’s work is rooted in Hardy.

It’s so tightly realized; the actors move so swiftly and live in one another’s flesh, blood, seem to dwell within the forces of nature, just are so thoroughly immersed.

It was a darkened Shropshire

I can see too why the 1996 Poldark angered its audience; the way this film is done is the way the 1996 Poldark was and the original books and films were not about primitive nature, landscape and people, but an enlightenment political fable. John Bowe was the man chosen to do Ross Poldark — that I do understand.

I recommend seeing Precious Bane; it’s more relevant than ever — and perhaps its book newly relevant as we seem to lurch backwards if some very harmful people get into power that’s what will happen in the US.

Ellen

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

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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Linda Peterson’s Traditions of Women’s Autobiography

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

Mary Robinson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-feminism, indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, posing herself in velvet and satin

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

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

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

Right.

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

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

Margaret Oliphant when older

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

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

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

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

Mary Cholmondeley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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Not Quite a Year of Reading Gaskell: My Lady Ludlow & Sylvia’s Lovers

An illustration for Gaskell’s Ruth

Dear Friends and readers,

I’m sad to have to report we seem to have come to an end of our not quite a year of reading Elizabeth Gaskell on my two listserv communities.

What had enabled us to keep on came to an end: three volumes of short stories (Cousin Phillis and other tales, The Moorland Cottage and other stories, A Dark Night’s Work and other Stories), which included two novellas, plus one longer or separately-printed novella, My Lady Ludlow, all of which were online, about which I’ve written two blog: Elizabeth Gaskell festival and Still Going On. About a quarter into her brilliant historical novel, Sylvia’s Lovers, postings ceased altogether. One of the causes of my dereliction was I got caught up in writing a paper on film adaptations of Trollope’s novels with a short deadline; what made the others cease altogether I know not for sure.

I proposed that we return to our original scheme which had been read Cranford (really a fourth volume of short stories) and Mr Harrison’s Confessions (another separately reprinted novella) before going on for a longer novel. As of tonight this is not happening.

So I thought tonight I would write a third and last blog on My Lady Ludlow and Sylvia’s Lovers, since for me this three season journey has been enjoyable: I enjoyed and feel most of the stories (as well as aspects of Sylvia’s Lovers) are fine, authentic, good art, feel I have understood some core aspects of Gaskell’s writing for the first time, and gained a good deal from the postings of listserv friends.

I did love My Lady Ludlow & was exhilarated to find Sylvia’s Lovers so rich in history and downright radical. Alas its heroine & her parents were insufferable (to me) and the book was not at core a melancholy one … I should say the powerful inset story in My Lady Ludlow takes place in the 18th century and Sylvia’s Lovers is a novel set in the later 18th century — just the period of the middle Poldark novels. If you look at my other two blogs on Gaskell, you will discover that this is an era (long 18th century, from later 17th to later 18th) Gaskell returns to repeatedly.

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

Francesca Annis as Lady Ludlow (Cranford Chronicles)

My Lady Ludlow, Chapters 1-4

I started My Lady Ludlow and found myself charmed by the picturesque quality of the description, the sweetly appealing (nostalgia) tone. It’s very much a tale by a woman again, as the outlook is a compound of a widow left with so many children and desperately writing for help, getting none until a cousin agrees to take Margaret, the eldest into her household.

The introduction of Margaret is done in two voices; that of the young girl come there for the first time, and the older woman looking back. The older woman looking back softens considerably the asperity of this crisply hard experience.

I did see the first six of the Cranford Chronicles and know threading in this novel into the Cranford material gave some hard backbone to the series. Francesca Annis was Lady Ludlow and Philip Glenister, Mr Carter, her male servant who tries to persuade her to give a chance to a little boy.

What strikes me this time though comes out of my experience of reading Trollope: this is a remarkably kindly and benign way of describing a woman who while she will give a few people a chance to survive has principles and behavior which are very cruel in their effect. She is against education for anyone but the highest ranking. She would deprive most people of any opportunity to fulfill their gifts. She sends a young girl away for daring to speak eagerly. Trollope does the same thing, takes a woman (often it’s a woman) and make as almost a sweet joke of these pernicious attitudes. I wonder at this impulse and why writers do this — to get themselves to accept this? to exorcise pain this way. The effect is to justify the present order because humanly speaking to make the fiction palatable they frequently show such a woman giving in despite herself. It is despite herself.

As I moved into the novella, I remembered what I liked so about it: the narrator, Martha, becomes a crippled young woman on a couch whom Lady Ludlow takes in for life. It’s her tone and outlook that shape the book and make it (to me) appealing.

The stories of Mr Horner and Joe Gregside carry on this justification of cruelty. This is where I saw the intersection of Dinesen while the fable like presentation and love of old things, old aesthetics, fine, good taste is Cather.

It also has an embedded tragic back story — like gothics. A story that has a hard time getting told and it’s the Marquise de Crequy. That was (terrific loss) omitted from the TV presentation, instead the back story of Lady Ludlow — loss of husband, so many children, living alone now was built up. it’s a secondary novella, a powerful melodramatic tale of the French revolution recounted in My Lady Ludlow. Could this have influenced Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, as the dates tie in well. I haven’t noticed any strong similarities between the two in terms of the plot or characters – but the dark emotional atmosphere is quite similar. We see she is on the wave length of Carlyle and those who read about the revolution because it remained hotly relevant even in the UK, certainly in France (1830, 1870 – when a slaughter of people was done by the French government which equaled the Reign of Terror so talked about so much.

This inset novella adds to the weaving of the poverty and despair of some of the inhabitants into its portrait of small-town life. There was a powerful moment in the the TV episode where Lady Ludlow comes face to face with just how some of her tenants live, and is lost for words

The result is a back story put before the public that upholds the present order, and the erasure of the novel’s true back story that give it its real grit and subversive critique.

Like Dinesen, Gaskell has a narrator (Margaret Dawson on her couch) who then gives way to narrators. It’s an intricate fiction with levels of pastness and memory. Stunning that it was forgotten until this film adaptation. Also the very interest in the French revolution which one finds in women writers as disparate as Suzy McKee Charnas (Dorothea Dreams) and Isobel Colegate.

There is a servant, Martha, in Cranford: Claudie Blakeley played the role in the film adaptation

Chapters 7-9: An inset story from the past: a Paul et Virginie tales of the French revolution

The inset novella is very moving towards the end: I said last time it made me think of people in concentration camps waiting for death, people fleeing pogroms; at the close when both young people are in prison together, find comfort in their last days (even though he is badly wounded) and then guillotined reminded me closely of the atmosphere of Bernardine de Saint-Pierre very late tragic romance tale, Paul et Virginie. It was translated by Helen Maria Williams and influenced Sand (Indiana). There is an English translation online; I don’t know good it is, I can vouch for the beauty, poignancy of Williams’s.

It’s a tale which insists on the cruelty of people to one another casually and at large, on how much chance played a part in who died — as well as personal vendettas, anger, greed (just like in the 1950s in the US against socialists, communists and France in the later 1940s against those who were high up in the Vichy regime). I find myself identifying and in a way (perhaps this is intended) having a La Rochefouauld response: maybe I should not lament my troubles for how far worse is this (“there is something in the misery of others &c&c). I’m drawn to this material too because of my interest in the 18th century.

It does help justify the cruelty of Lady Ludlow for being this utter snob and considering anyone of the lower orders ontologically different from those in the upper she sees all the betrayals of the two young aristocratic lovers as facilitated by their lower class keepers knowing how to read and write. She puts the revolution down to education — which perhaps is a real cause of it.

Gaskell does immediately enough show that Lady Ludlow’s refusal to allow Mr Horner to make a clerk of the gifted little boy and her wanting to put him in the fields is keen cruelty. It made me think of communist and other revolutions where people of gifts and middle class are forced to work in the fields — spite is behind this in these regimes (like spite is behind some of what the Tories, Republicans and other new reactionary masters around the world are doing to their people when they rack up the prices of colleges out fo reach of most young adults without horrendous debts).

Then we get a return to another paradigm of hers: Miss Galinda takes in crippled people to serve and work for her, providing them with a decent place. We saw in her early short stories how often she recurred to the pattern of a mother-figure taking on a disabled child/brother. Miss Galindo takes in one such person, deformed, who had a very ill temper — Gaskell is not an idealist. Again My Lady Ludlow has to be lied to about this. It’s a very curious center for a book. I’ve seen Trollope do this but not so relentlessly and admit I much prefer a Mr Harding.

Linda wrote:

Lady Ludlow seems to believe that only chaos and bedlam can result in giving the underclasses their due. She doesn’t believe for a second that they will be better off–she thinks the world will be turned upside down and the natural order of things will be destroyed. It is not only that she wants to hold onto her position and wealth that makes her deplore the idea of education for the underprivileged. She really believes it is a bad idea all around. In a way it resembles those in the South before the Civil War who didn’t believe that blacks could take care of themselves and handle freedom. Yes, there was economics involved but also a terror of changing the social order.

To which I replied:

I might be suggested this dreadful woman is put at the center of the fiction to make us see how the mind of aristocrats worked. Well, it doesn’t quite wash or convince since Lady Ludlow is idealized. She has really no mean, sordid, envious, jealous, ordinarily spiteful (&c) characteristics a realistically conceived character would have; plus many of the aristocrat emigres, counter-revolutionaries had anything but high principles to motivate them. Read Stael’s Delphine and you come across the same kinds of ruthless horrors that once in a while take off their masks in public: say that CEO who came before Congress last year.

My Lady Ludlow like Dinesen and Cather’s books of this type is fable. Dinesen gets us to accept her reactionary point of view that way, and Cather her nostalgic dwelling in the aesthetics of the past.

From Fran:

The line that stood out for me in Lady Ludlow was her comment, ‘I always said a good despotism was best form of government’ and the story was indeed reminiscent of the cult of personality built up around some of the so-called ‘enlightened’ despots of the past.

Interesting to me, too, was the fact that while she had been so adamant about not wanting to educate the masses, Lady Ludlow’s own increasing enlightenment was furthered by the lessons she herself was taught by the example of her presumed inferiors.

I brought up Trollope’s Mr Harding because he too is an idealized exemplary center: he is given a few more unadmirable traits: he’s a coward (a big no-no), he’s (albeit comically) super-sensitive, but he is made lovable because all his principles tend to strict real justice and kindness. He’s capable of overlooking principles to do a kindness too (which Lady Ludlow is not).

I was chuffed to find that Uglow saw the inset story as in the French tradition — and her account reminded me the heroine’s name is Viriginie. I should have thought of that: yes, an allusion to Pierre de St Bernardine’s tale then. Uglow’s account dwells on the present time story and contrasts Lady Ludlow with Miss Galindo, and apparently what is to come is an awakening and change of heart in Lady Ludlow. Finally when Lady Ludlow personally encounters rural misery and poverty she is against the laws of the time that keep all this in place. Uglow admits the story is “a gentle rural wished-for revisions of history.” Then Uglow looks at some of the comedy at Lady Ludlow’s expense — ironies.

The novel reminds me of modern Booker Prize type books where we have these inset embedded novellas from the past which contrast to an ameliorated present.

We might see it as a counter to stories like “Lois the Witch,” “The Grey Woman” and many others we’ve read of strong injustice perpetrated without recourse.

Philip Glenister, Lady Ludlow’s steward, a good man (Mr Horner in the novel becomes Mr Carter in Cranford Chronicles)

Chapters 10-14: The conclusion

Back to the present time story and Lady Ludlow begins to retrieve herself: when confronted with real misery, her instincts are at least right when it comes to an individual. So Harry Gregson has had a bad accident, is miserably crippled and now it’s clear to put him in the fields would be monstrous. It took that, though.

I’ve been ignoring the narrator: Martha Dawson, it’s her love for this woman who has been kind to her that makes for the tone.

I finished the novella and by the end finally saw that the whole book should really be seen as Margaret Dawson’s story. I suppose we might say the book qualifies as a gothic because it has taken all novel long for me to realize what is the back story, what the story that was trying to get itself told and finally did.

The tone of the novel — finding Lady Ludlow lovable, the buying into Lady Ludlow’s values (or at least not critiquing them) is to be put down to this narrator who is not Gaskell. We read several stories by Gaskell where she takes on the tone of arristocracy worshippers, naive people we are to see. I have to say it still can and does function to support the present hierarchies of our world.

She is writing from memory and present life up north with a brother who while he is kind is nothing like the one in My Lady Ludlow. There are hints that her life now is one of loneliness, deprivation and hardship, particularly as a cripple. We might say this is another disability story, one told by the disabled person for once.

The last part of the novel has Mr Gray emerge who ends up marrying Bessy, the illegitimate daughter of Gibson who is rejected by the snobbery and narrow-mindedness (very like Lady Ludlows) of the Galindo family. The daughter who is led to reject him suffers in the sense that she has been deprived of a lived life. It’s all done by indirection — this last section is startlingly kept off stage: we only see the characters as Margaret sees them, but enough is told to show us what sensitive decent hero Mr Gray is and Captain James. At the end of the story after all the little boy who was crippled for life and Lady Ludlow would have deprived of education and put to work as a laborer ends up the rector and happily in a home with loving wife.

Fairy tale which exonerates Lady Ludlow by how she is individually humane – and she is and by the fact that our author (who is Goddess of the book, the presiding spirit) gives everyone happy endings. At the end all the Lady Ludlow professed to believe in has been overturned and she is accepting. Illegitimate children grow up to marry well; people marry out of their order, are educated.

She also took Margaret in and would have kept her all her life if Margaret had wanted to stray. quietly we are to wonder if biology should trump deep friendship. Lady Ludlow is a Sergeant George figure after all — I’m thinking of Dickens’s Bleak House and how the Sergeant is in a tender companionship relationship with Phil and supports him utterly. (Ours is turning back to be a world where this is all the safety net there is for lots of people).

Miss Galindo is a parallel to Lady Ludlow: another of these apparently narrow, bigoted women who turns out to be a kind fairy godmother to a few people. Now I feel she’s a parallel to Margaret: Miss Galindo is herself a cripple, ugly (we are told) and has built herself a happy life by serving others, especially Miss Bessy, child of Gibson.

The one person we do not hear of except by indirection is Bessy’s mother. An unwed mother who presumably died — or what? I cannot believe Mr Gibson would have thrown her off.

I loved the tone of the ending, the kindness of the book. I can see why it was threaded into the filmic Cranford now, for it belong in its matriarchy, attention to the vulnerable and hurt, to women especially.

The structure of the story (not the length of installments), with this weaving process whereby the effect is cyclical is typical of women’s art. I have Hughes’s book too and Dickens’s complaint was that there was not enough suspense and not enough action: one of the things that makes for the present situation where some 75-90% of what is published by men is that men are the editors, publishers, and owners, and they want structures that are what you are calling dramatic: high drama. Dickens pushed Gaskell to change her “Old Nurse’s Story” to make that lurid ghost scene at the end.
The structure Gaskell opted for is a repetitive one where things are held back, indirect; the outline Hughes gives is the “conscious” narrative but even that is this gradual inward kind of thing.

It was not my point what either of us liked or not, but that the art here is l’ecriture-femme as the French women critics have described it — the most classic case is Virginia Woolf and the book about this (alas just in French) Didier’s L’Ecriture-Femme. She has a long chapter on Woolf.

This idea is a commonplace now when Hermione Lee defended Ian McEwan’s Atonement against the ridicule of the critics she said (what the narrator in the book tells us) it’s an imitation of Woolf, and (Lee’s words) a man writing in female drag.

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Winslow Homer, Early Evening (1881), cover for edition of Sylvia’s Lovers

We see two women in the dark light, waiting on a rock, with a fisherman sitting near them, perhaps like Trollope’s Mally (“Malachi’s Cove”), they are remembering someone who did not come home alive.

Sylvia’s Lovers, Chapters 1-6

I began this today and just fell in. The last time I read a book which so gradually puts you into a landscape, step-by-step, first physically, then socially, then economically, was Hugo’s Les Miserables. I could picture Yorkshire, northeast, the seacoast, the agricultural farm land redolent of whale oil, the bridges, the different levels of houses, with outlying ones avoiding “contamination” of the smell of the source of wealth.

She enters into the outlook of sheep at moments, and then in passing what whaling is about: it reminded me of how cruel it really is: the people are killing whales for the oil. No crueller than this pressing where you snatch people (as in slavery), imprison them and then flog them into obedience.

A sense of the 18th century landscape and its typical size, amount of people and places — very like what I’m reading at the same time in Miller’s Dance, the Cornish coast, mining and its worlds (that still include smuggling through Stephen Carrington).

Trollope has a slow build-up like this for American Senator where he builds up Dillsborough, its environs, its hunting clubs, and then its people.

It seemed Scott-too, high romance is not forgotten through memory: as the new castle are looking at replaced one where a throne-less queen landed — clearly Mary Queen of Scots, and before that a monastery. A sense of the wildness of this world is on the first page, but this granddaughter of Scott does not have a man glimpsed coming down the landscape.

Gaskell ends on the chapters with an analysis & description of those classes of people who supported the press-gangs: the landed gentlemen who didn’t have so much money as the merchants and commercial and whale-fishery men below them — and liked to see them in distress. Gaskell puts it nowhere as bluntly as that, but it’s what she means. Their wives who were glad to see the upper class types who ran the snatchers as possible husbands for their daughters.

Of course those in the gangs. Everyone professed to despise the actual snatchers but Gaskell says of these, whatever else they were, they were brave and daring and led an exhilarating life of adventure — she appeals to us to remember how human nature has “this strange love of chase,” of “outwitting” others.

In the film adaptation of Graham’s novels (set in the later 18th century in Cornwall) by Episode 6-7 we have the militia — corresponding to their appearance in the last half of Graham’s second novel, Demelza, and there we get these exhilarating clashes — but also the deaths they cause, the great misery, how they do prey on the locals and rationalize it as patriotism. Donald Douglas is superb as Captain MacNeil.

Chapter 2 zeroes in on the women’s matter or romance part of the novel if I may be allowed: both working class girls out to sell butter and eggs, but Sylvia the darling, an only child, and Molly (Mary) one of many. I’ll stop here as I didn’t get far, only remark the way to read this for me is to try to hear it aloud. Then I get the dialect — otherwise I’d have trouble.

The book is very good: in Chapters 3 and 4 we learn why it’s called Sylvia’s Lovers. Yes we have one of these supposedly charming heroines in Sylvia: I’m not charmed, no more than Molly. But the context is what matters: it reminds me a bit of Les Miserables where the characters were in effect emblems and types. They did appeal to me deeply (especially Jean Valjean) but like this it’s the larger picture they are part of that’s compelling. Gaskell recreates the place of Whitby in the previous century and she is drawn to the wild shores — as a southerners she was released by these; as someone who saw the mean streets of Manchester she saw an analogy up north too.

We have a scene of sudden pressing by the gangs; we are not at the scene, rather experience it as heard of by the women not far off and then the men, what they see of ravaged and distressed and betrayed people who were waiting for men relatives, friends, lovers to come off a whaler.

There’s an argument about pressing between Sylvia’s father and Philip Hepburn, his nephew, the man who works in the shop Sylvia and Molly patronize, and takes her home. Hepburn, our normative gentleman produces an argument which defends this cruelty. Hepburn does it by this reification: the underlying idea is individual belongs to some entity called a nation, and if X is good for the nation, so the individual must obey. So if the nation feels it needs to win a war in France, it must take (kidnap) men. If we cannot pay in taxes, we must pay in person.

Sylvia’s father retorts laws are made to keep people from harming one another.

I’ve no time or perhaps inclination to work out an argument, only say that there is no such thing as a nation that is unified by one interest. There are individuals who share an interest and can act as a group. The war in France would not help the poor individuals it murders one bit, none of the wealth that would accrue to those winning would be shared with them as at this time there was no decent progressive income tax and no social services worth the name.

Groot and Fleishman (two critics) argue that the historical novel of the 19th century is a serious instrument for presenting political visions in debate. Gaskell’s certainly is — let us see if she brings in issues of political moment which affect women as individuals and people, not just as the sisters, wives, daughters of powerless men

G. Morland, Smugglers

Ch 5-6: what a quiet radical is Gaskell; a film adaptation would be terrific

Chapters 5-6 are powerful and how Gaskell to be a radical, however quietly. She has thus far shown us the political context and who and why press-gangs were supported. Rather ugly some of these. Then how press-gangs are experienced by those who are waiting for and dependent on the men coming home from a long journey. Then who are these gangs. We meet our two heroines and go home with one, Sylvia Robson and a young man who produces a philosophical argument defending them. Our heroine’s father, Mr Robson knows a thing or two of that: laws are made or should be to protect people. If his representative votes for the gangs, he won’t get my vote. A man after my heart voting for his interest.

Then we get this uneasy slightly comic intimate scene where Mr Robson is this restless person who has no intellectual life but is himself old and partly crippled and in the bad weather has no where to go. The mother and daughter contrive to make him feel he’s the boss and the daughter concocts a scheme where a tailor is induced to visit on the supposition he’ll make a sale. Gaskell is quietly showing how superior the mother and daughter are to the father in many ways but she does uphold this way of keeping this man in charge. Still she makes their subservience visible and how in order to be comfortable they are pushed into being devious.

When the tailor comes in, he is induced to talk to entertain the old man and what does he tell but of the experience of being pressed. What a violent horrific scene. We see the intimidation, the deceit and treachery, the killing and vicious shooting to maim, and the men giving in rather than be maimed or die. I’ve not time to scan it in or try to paraphrase.

It speaks for itself.

This is the era of slavery, of ubiquitous wife-beating too, high drunkenness, mass wretched poverty. Most men are not the sweet mythic manipulatable man Mr Robson is. He succumbs sweetly to his wife removing his bottle. Oh yeah …

The problem with this modern illustration is it makes the pressed man altogether too healthy and strong

Chapter 7-15

I looked up “Specksioneer.” This word was one of Gaskell’s choices for her title: The Specksioneer.” Naturally the publisher would not hear of it. It refers to the chief harpooner, who also directs in cutting up the speck, or blubber; — so called among whalers. By chapters 6 and 7 we realize the specksioneer Gaskell intended to title her book after is Charles Kinkaid, the man who attempted to fight with force the press-gang, was shot at, kicked viciously, beaten down and left for dead so they could by threats of murder kidnap the men come home from whaling.

They did kill his friend Darley a mass funeral on whose behalf we go to in Chapter 6. (Does anything ever change? a mass funeral can spark a mass protest). This funeral is overseen by the vicar who knows in his gut he ought to keen for Darley and cry out against the press-gang, if only to comfort the impoverished father and mother whose son this was. But that morning he gets a letter from the head of the press-gang telling him they were within the law, why this is needed (it seems “the English” need to go to war with the “French” and haven’t enough men, and so partly intimidated and (Gaskell would have us realize) partly persuaded, he gives a banal generalized speech.

This continual sticking up for the vicious is continued in the off-hand speech of Philip Hepburn who is Sylvia’s follower — quite literally. This kind of thing is partly put there to make us experience how these false voices nag at us.

Philip and Sylvia visit her cousins, Hester’s parents, the Coulsons and we watch the mother make out her pitiful will on Hester’s behalf. Women did make out such wills; Jane Austen has one. They try to give their little bits of property and money to someone who meant something to them, who helped them. The mother wants to help her daughter, Hester in case she marries her suitor, Will. A woman’s novel: we are made to feel how women experience time in the home: Sylvia’s mother feels how time slips by (p. 60

The scene of the funeral is powerful — the seacoast, the church on the high rocks, the crowd, and especially we are led to “dwell on the tall gaunt figure” of the specksioneer.

Unless I’m mistake Molly is in love with this specksioneer — our secondary heroine. And we see her home too. What is it bout gauntness. By Poldark Novel 9 Ross Poldark is continually described as gaunt.

Emma dancing with Mr Knightley at the Crown Inn (2009 BBC Emma)

Sylvia’s Lovers becomes a kind of Emma, Chs 11-12

Despite the sweep of the pictures, the analysis of economic, political and other angles on reality, and the action-adventure, not to omit radical sceptical politics, the book shows its roots or origins as a courtship novel in Chapters 11-12. And here it reveals Gaskell’s limitations. Sylvia is not just too good to be true, she is that way because she is ontologically superior to those about her. One cannot say she is above most others in class, but I feel in Gaskell’s core being, that’s it. And why we are supposed to be on the side of this catering to the husband no matter how distasteful his behavior apparently potentially is, how obtuse and at times ignorant or determinedly dumb his outlook, is beyond me. The fiction in this vein cloys.

Sylvia’s friend, Molly, marries a man much older than she for his status, wealth, and just triumphs over all. Perhaps we are to feel that Sylvia’s romance love of Kinkaid will not bring her a necessarily happier life, but it’s the condescension and thus falseness of the portraiture that is the problem too.

Why Gaskell “sides” against Philip Hepburn puzzles me too. It appears she too finds something lacking in him — insufficiently macho male. Oh Elizabeth I am disappointed there and begin to be on his side against the heroic harpooner.

I am enjoying this read though: I’m reading another book set in nearly this period (Graham’s Miller’s Dance is set in 1812-13) and also about people who make their living occasionally by smuggling and are threatened by pressing, and just at this turn have gone to a social occasion where there is dancing, gaiety and games, and presents a parallel to Gaskell’s A New Year’s Eve. However, Gaham’s Truro Races (Bk 2, Ch 6) do not feel at all like Emma because the focus is ont a young women “just out” (or its equivalent) going to rare chance at a ball/dance from life in a tiny community where she cares for a parent and knows only a very few friends. When Sylvia entered the ballroom, it was distinctly Emma entering the Crown Inn for her ball, and incidents of embarrassment, awkwardness ensue. I wondered if Gaskell was remembering Emma at all or if this was rather the result of two similar women not so far apart in era, type, genius and fundamental attitudes towards sex and marriage.

One striking quality of this book — now making me realize how it’s also found in North and South and Mary Barton is its radical political vision. For that it’s enormously valuable because she’s so intelligent and brings in a large picture and explains.

If I just praised the book, what I would say would be valueless because it’d be unreal.

I agree too that Philip is a hero. In the above chapters what I thought about was how real he is; he is much less a stereotype than Sylvia. He does not conform to stereotypical heroes; he’s given far more interesting and mature and believable thoughts than anyone else thus far. He’s not over-sentimentalized and genuinely somehow individualized — especially in the dance as this semi-outsider. Gaskell enters into his feelings and thoughts as someone not appreciated or understood because he feels (as a psyche) cleverer (being less a stereotype) than just about all the other characters whose minds we have been given access to.

His lack of macho maleness is in Austen’s tradition: a redefinition of manliness which is not based on appetitive rakes and glamorous sexuality (the ultimate of this might be Richardson’s Lovelace) but is first seen in the 18th century in grave heroes and then Grandison, but most appealingly in some of Austen’s heroes, especially Mr Knightley.

In fact when it comes to Philip I thought she began to side very strongly in these chapters — seeing his profound valuing of quiet domestic stable life and his kindness and tenderness and generosity. This has nothing to do with his political vision; that is critiqued. Gaskell can use a character consistently in various ways — as in life a man can be very good in private life and yet have real lacks when it comes to wider understanding. The voices she wants us to hear are also Kinkaid, Sylvia’s father especially and the narrator’s.

For a female reader a real woman at the center is more valuable – and Sylvia is a virtuous stereotype. Cynthia in Wives and Daughters is more valuable. These fictions are supposed to be exemplary. Gaskell’s heroines in this novel show the same compromises as George Eliot’s — not quite as self-sacrificing but as “innocent’ sexually and when not we are supposed to dislike or distrust or reject them. Yes it’s Victorian fiction.

But this does trouble me: again and again in her fictions she will endow the male with depths and originality of feeling (nothing coy) and not the women. We see this especially when the narrator is a male — it’s seen in Cousin Phillis for example. Men are not presented cloyingly. She respects them too much. So there is in spite of all her woman-centeredness and proto-feminism a dis-valuing her own sex in this book. It’s not in all of them (e.g., “The Grey Woman” does not).

In terms of the story it seems that Philip is in line to inherit the shop and so is in a position to ask Sylvia to marry him.

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I stopped here. I account for one aspect of my stopping in the comments. Another was no one was posting with me regularly. The fun had ceased.

Ellen

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Elizabeth Gaskell festival still going on!

Camille Pissarro, Morning Light on Snow

Dear friends and readers,

Several months ago now (!), back in September I wrote a blog about how on WWTTA we had begun a reading and discussion of a group of Gaskell’s short stories and novellas that are online as well as in print in three separate collections (Cousin Phillis and Other Tales, The Moorland Cottage and Other Stories and A Dark Night’s Work and Other Stories). The plan was when we finished these to go on to Lady Ludlow, Mr Harrison’s Confessions (also online and both used in the film adaptations Cranford Chronicles and Return to Cranford), then to read the tales of Cranford themselves and finally end on Gaskell’s historical novel, set in the later 18th/early 19th century among poor sea-faring people, Sylvia’s Lovers. These two are all online.

Well I’m here to say tonight that we did in fact read all the stories and discussed most of them — three of us reading and posting about them. I began to cross-post on Trollope19thCStudies (which is supposed to be about 19th century authors) when it’s group reads ran out and the people there fell silent insofar as reading or discussing any books, and have discovered a few more people are reading along (if not posting).

Last time I discussed “Half a Life Time Ago,” “Lois the Witch,” and “Lizzie Leigh” (together with a comparison of Elizabeth Spencer’s Light in the Piazza) as examples of the powerful and varied stories with their typical woman-centered themes that we had been enjoying. Three out of eight. Since then we’ve read 15 more (many gothics or with strong gothic elements) and it’s really hard to choose, especially since I didn’t write summaries or as coherently as I did at first.

But choose I must. So here are a five more, not necessarily in the order we read them. The reader will see that Gaskell often has male protagonists and how her sympathetic imagination takes in all sorts of people. How surprisingly varied and powerful she is if you’ve only read the 4 (great) novels set in her present era. No wonder she created the Bronte myth. For 18th century readers her bent for historical fiction is usually the 18th century and gothic; Uglow; that she is usually seen as an Austen type — neither that nor Bronte, but a voice her own.

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Claude Monet, Road to the Farm

Gaskell’s “My French Master” (from Moorland Cottage)

To me in tone and complicated outlook, this story anticipates Cranford. The depiction of Mr Chalabre is suffused with a nostalgia for the ancien regime’s surface courtesy, elegance, manners, and what Talleyrand called the sweetness of a luxurious life among the aristocracy; at the same time while the character himself in the first half believes nothing short of this is true for all aristocrats when together and they can all be depended upon to support one another (of course anyone outside the tiny charmed circle is to be dismissed and exploited, it goes without saying or notice as unpleasant), our narrator reminds us more than once that life in the ancien regime was hard, mean, cruel, outrageous: as for example, when Mr Chalabre goes to pieces over the beheading of Louis XVI, and Marie Antoinette, the narrator tells us that the people’s “rage” at the time was a pent-up natural response to centuries of continual outrage and cruel.
Beyond the occasional undercutting, in the second half when the Bourbons are brought back and M Chalabre is suddenly joyous, thinking he will have his estates again, he discovers he is very much mistaken: he is snubbed, his estates stay with the powerful bourgeois who took them over, and he is soon back in the local community teaching French again.

So much for the frame: the delight is in the human relationships idealized in the way of Cranford so stupidity (frequent), extravagance (our narrator’s father), mean gossip are somehow continually overcome by other people who make up for this, compensate and a sense of a whole community who stick together. It was this value in our anti-social time that made the two mini-series so popular: they were a paean to now despised community.

It has her usual range across years, the many deaths and losses, people going broke (and being supported somehow or other most of the time — not all), and quiet survival of a few by the end, and this “I can see her now” emotion so common in these stories.

Not to omit, Gaskell documents the struggles of the French emigres here, civil war and revolution and reaction, the destruction of an old landed order; the teller resembles one of Gaskell’s friends, Mary Mohl, English by birth, but French in manners and married to a German professor, so autobiographical too.

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John Everett Millias, Blow, blow thou winter wind, re-strike …

Gaskell’s “The Heart of John Middleton” (from Moorland Cottage)

I read this early this morning. It’s a tale of an inward conversion to religious faith. That’s the outermost plot-design. Within this though it has powerful interest in this: John Middleton is the kind of person most stories present as a bad man: poor, robber, violent, amoral, brought up by a father who worked these terrible long hours at menial dangerous tasks for tiny sums of money and he made his son do this too. What happens is father crosses even taboos among criminals and runs off and the son is ostracized by all, treated as dirt, and cannot retrieve himself.

So Gaskell is making us see the inner world of a man in most Victorian novels despised, dismissed, the kind of “other” in Sherlock Holmes’s tales. We are made aware of how unfair the lack of of opportunity for him is. No one will believe him. No one will pardon or help him in his efforts not to fall into crime again. Poaching is shown to be a way to eat: an implicit critique of the poaching laws is here.

Finally this saint like female touches his heart and he saves her from starvation when her grandmother dies. A great enemy of his, mean nasty hard man attacks said saint and she is injured for life giving Middleton a chance at her for a wife, for her relatives will give her to him as better than no one else.

What an expose of the world’s motives.

This sickly wife in bed is a common trope in Gaskell’s novels, often shown as the person who somehow saves everyone else and makes their lives better. (Not all sick people are like this at all) But the type is in Wives and Daughters, The Moorland Cottage. In W&D it’s given a twist that she’s destroyed for any fulfilling life by a dense husband.

Finally Middleton’s great enemy himself falls from favor and ends up in need and in Middleton’s house and instead of murdering him or getting back, he helps the man escape. The saintly wife dies and he becomes this person going about to convert others.

The real subject here is the heart of society: black, mean, unforgiving, laws profoundly inhuman e and unjust. It’s comparable to Trollope’s “Aaron Trowe” also about a man driven to become a criminal and then into bestial violence: no coincident AT is the initials of Trollope himself.

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Claudel, Woman Bent Over (mid-20th century)

Gaskell’s “Sexton’s Hero” as anti-bullying Gothic (from Moorland Cottage)

Last night I read the very brief story by Gaskell, “The sexton’s hero,” and it just hit the right note for me: it’s a story against bullying. What kept up the ritual of male challenge, dual, murder but that if a man refused to participate, he was ever after a target for every mean dense brute that passed by, was shunned by others lest they be involved. The first writer to bring this home to me was Germaine de Stael in her _Delphine_ where for the first time I read the mechanism behind this vicious practice.

Gaskell combines a Wordsworthian figure with this theme: the gravedigger, sexton, man who is poor, in a humble position, silent overlooked tells a story to two friends who are debating what is a true hero. Is it aggression, especially of the physical, competitive kind, or something else? Well, according to the Sexton it is indeed something else, something beyond moral courage too, for Gilbert Dawson, the man who was ostracized, mocked and destroyed (lost his lady love) because he refused to duel saves his beloved’s husband from drowning. (This one also reminded me of the old quarrel over Fanny Price who is very courageous indeed.)

The story has the usual edging towards death and dying: the story occurs in a graveyard; as the story is told we are told the heroine is now dead in the grave with many other relatives; and the sexton is now digging a grave for another child. I wondered if the Sexton was not himself Gilbert Dawson.

There is much effective description; Uglow says this story resembles another by Gaskell called “The Doom of the Griffiths” and was written while she took an annual pilgrimage to the seaside (see A Habit of Stories, pp 147-49).

I connect this to gothic since at the core of the gothic is usually a hero or heroine who is being harrowed, harassed, bullied, threatened.

Fran replied:

I’ve managed to read the latest Gaskell stories, but while sympathetic to her bravely anti-violent stance (her own pacifism can’t have been all that well received in her often jingoistic times), I can’t say I’m terribly fond of her in her overtly moralizing mode or of the sentimental religiosity of previous stories like “Lizzie Leigh.”

I rejoined:

Fran, you make me smile. I don’t think I’m morally improved when I read Gaskell and quite take your point about the (to me) not just cloying but self-destructive veins of moralizing in stories like “Lizzie Leigh.”

My guess is what I do is take away from what Gaskell approves of that I find echoed in my own psyche, and it makes me feel better, less alone. I identified with that Sexton and wish more people in the world were like Dawson. It’d be easier to live on.

Uglow doesn’t emphasize or look at Gaskell’s texts as pacifist, but they certainly are. I like this — we could also call them quietist. At the same time I’ve been reading with my students RLS’s “Ollala” (among other gothic texts) and — very much in the gothic tradition or state of mind — RLS ends that tale with this gnomic utterance:

“pleasure is not an end, but an accident; that pain is the choice of the magnanimous; that it is best to suffer all things and do well.”

It’s a kind of intense stoicism, which plays out politically (in the real social world) as conservativism, but it is comforting at least to me, and this kind of stance is one of the reasons I so enjoy the gothic.

The question (I say in my blog on this story) is what are these ethics we are to hold fast to. All RLS’s work manifests a deep bleak pessimism concerning human fallibilities and our animal nature. Gaskell has her Christianity to impose on the worlds she creates and gives us these heroic heroines. Alas, they would not have any real play in the world and that’s what we see in these short stories, many of which are gothic.

Ellen — who goes for sites of resistance like Atwood’s too

Linda:

I liked Ellen’s comment that this story has “the usual edging toward death and dying.” I, too, find this in Gaskell’s stories.

I also think Gaskell makes a point of showing how much hardship one endures in life–more so in the 19th Century because of a lack of modern medicine and technology. Life is never easy in her stories–there is no smooth sailing. Poverty is often a theme.

I think some of the morality lessons she implies are an attempt to offer comfort to those trying to make it through. Almost a false hope and cheer but welcome nevertheless in dark moments.

There is a resemblance here to Susan Hill’s Woman in Black in the pony cart and passengers trying to cross to the mainland before the tide becomes full again. The same battle against tide and time. And again tragedy. I think the story does have a gothic element.

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Joseph Wright of Derby, Earth-stopper on the Banks of the Derwent (cover illustration for Dark Night’s Work volume)

Gaskell’s A Dark Night’s Work (novella)

This one is as long as Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis, a considerable novella so I’ll take three weeks. It’s another showing her great variety. The title refers to the night our heroine’s fafter, Mr Wilkins, by accident but out of a fierce fit of temper hits his clerk, Mr Dunster over the head with something or his bare hands and the man falls, hits his head on an iron substance and dies. The father was under pressure from the prospective son-in-law, Mr Corbet, to come up with a dowry for Ellinor, and when he asked this hard-working underpaid clerk, Dunster, who was responsible for the business, not falling under altogether, the clerk told him hard truths and sneered.

What’s unexpected is the old retainer who loves Ellinor and she him (Mr Corbet had tried to separate them) proposes to buy Dunster and try to pretend they know nothing of it. The burial is done in a dark night’s work.

So now we have a murder mystery stroy complicated by Mr Wilkins’s inability to run his business, his increased drinking, Ellinor’s love for Corbet (and innocence and need for this man) and Mr Corbet’s real enough but far more limited love for her. Corbet is an ambitious man whose relatives did not approve the match.

A gothic of family, money, sexual pathology, the nexus not so different from the matter Mr Whicher investigates, — like Dostoevsky

The story at first moves the story moves slowly and realistically — in the sense of psychologically complex enough characters, and we are beginning to get at the nub or crux of a crisis. It does not seem as if very gothic to me, more in her lyrical sentimental-realism style, with much depiction of real business in a small community, real social snobberies and dissensions, intimate human relationships. I was struck by this as I close the novella last night; we were moving towards the young man, Mr Corbett, finally asking for the hand in marriage of Ellinor Wilkins who he loves as much as he is capable (not nothing) and who has learned deeply to love him, Gaskell writes:

“And thus the sad events of the future life of this father and daughter were hardly perceived in their steady advance; and over the monotony and flat uniformity of their days sorrow came marching down upon them like an armed man. Long before Mr Wilkins had recognized its shape it was approaching him in the distance — as, in fact, it is approaching all of us at this very time; you, reader, and I, writer, have each our great sorrow bearing down upon us. It may be yet beyond the dimmest pot of our horizon, but in the stillness of the night our hearts shrink at the sound of its coming footstep’ (p. 28)

In the story Mr Wilkins has neglected his business and made enemies; he has not brought Ellinor up to know how to fend for herself or do anything to support herself. The sense of the sentence though implies we do and must all go to rot, and it comes unexpectedly — not so much like an axe waiting behind the door to fall in us, but insidiously.

She feels this because she’s seen it, living in a world of the 19th century with such small social net anywhere — and harshly set up too, never mind the lack of medical science.

It seems to me the story takes a turn that reminds me of Crime and Punishment. Ellinor, Mr Wilkins and Dixon just can’t live with themselves with that body buried under the flowers; she becomes haggard, ages, intensely ill: she thinks the three should have just told the truth and produced the body, but we are to see that as the population now castigates the dead man for absconding with the money (when for years he had been a hard-worknig decent type) so they would have anathemized Mr Wilkins and perhaps hung him — as much for his uppity ways and losing his money as anything else. Mr Wilkins proceeds to try hard to keep the lies up. Dixon sorrows. All avoid one another. Meanwhile Mr Corbet is having second thoughts about this marriage. A Mr Livingston who has a heart seems to me the hero at the margins of the story who may save our Ellinor yet (she too stupid to see him clearly, blinded by her own prejudice).

I realize that the story has the same problem Fran has pointed to: the super-self-sacrificing heroine, and while for the most part, Gaskell’s tact keeps her from moving into gush, she did not resist this parenthesis (which gives something of the deleterious game for women away): “(if anyone so sweet and patient could have been worried)” (in my Oxford classics A Dark Night’s Work ed SLewis, p 127). This is not an ironic utterance.

But it satisfies or gratifies some impulse in me to work through the underlying paradigm here: as dramatized by Gaskell, we have a young woman who undergoes a terrible trauma in and of itself (burying a man illegally in the garden her father has murdered however accidentally), which is made much much worse by the effect it has on her future prospects and life. It’s true that could she have ruthlessly ignored that body, she might at least have married Robert Corbet, the rich intelligent loving-enough ethical-enough suitor, but then she would not be Ellinor: she cannot bear to desert the father, which she would have had to do as he sinks into heavy drinking and bankruptcy and social misbehaviors sufficient to stigmatize him and all around him; she really can’t get herself to desert the long-time faithful loving servant, Dixon (who she stood up for when Corbet wanted to see Dixon let go. Anyway we see that once Dixon’s watchful surveillance over th piece of ground is broken, someone does dig the ground and find the body.

This effect on her real pragmatic and emotional needs and circumstances drives her wild; she becomes ill, there’s a line somewhere about her (or maybe Dixon too) not being able to sleep for worry, anxiety, nightmares, and the burden of it. What the story does then is show her coming to terms with this “crime.” (She was an accomplice to the fact.) I’d say while we are told Corbet’s breaking off the engagment is the “great terror’ of her life, for then she knows any successful life as such things are understood is out of the quesion for her — not having a dowry, being so sensitive and intelligent; nonetheless, when he does break it off, there is something of an intense relief. Ellinor is glad to be rid of the burden. When her father dies and she finds she must rent the house to survive, she resists intensely (because she wants to watch over the corpse) but she finds she must and when she does and her old governess, Miss Munro (a loving but dense woman) finds a job and a house for them at nominal rent, I put it she’s relieved. She’s glad to put off the burden of all this and retire to this cathedrale close.

This underlying retreat is the motivation for the tale — to act it out. Gaskell wants herself to find some peace and freedom. Now Gaskell is not nice to herself (I have found Trollope writes stories where he flagellates writers for writing idealistically, not for money and then punishes them by starving them and making them give up writing — a similar kind of psychological exercise to justify to himself his own materialism at the same time as acting out his desire to be otherwise and then perverse, hittnig out at his character — the fate of George Bertam is a classic case, also Fred Pickering). When Ellinor now imagined surrounded by these friends who love and appreciate her precisely because of her inward fine nature and lack of pretension (yet you see a lady) and goes to Rome, she finds herself cheerful and uplifted and gay.

So our author has news sent that the body has been dug up and Dixon blamed. Ellinor must hurry home to try to save him from hanging, the gallows, and yet she is (faithful as ever) determined not to let people know her father did the crime.

I omitted a line: by having Ellinor told when she is away at Rome (without Miss Munro, having escaped her too now) and having this good time that Dixon is now being blamed for the crime, Gaskell punishes Ellinor for escaping (the way Trollope punishes his authors who write out of idealism rather than for money). Ellinor blames herself. It’s all her fault. It’s here that I see a parallel with Briony in McEwan’s Atonement: all her fault too! McEwan is aware that something is screwed up here, I’m not sure Gaskell is.

There is some improbability here too. It seems that Corbet is glimpsed over the years; Wouldn’t you know he marries into the family who live near Ellinor and Miss Munro and can be seen in this gorgeous wedding — to which Ellinor comes wearing all black veiled. (No flagellation too much?)
And now he is the justice in the case. We have reason to know from his character he still values Ellinor — so maybe it’s to him she will have to tell the truth.

And there’s a long-time suitor in the wings: Canon Livingstone who (much to Miss Munro’s dismay) will not pop the question as he knows very well Ellinor will say no.

For he knows (as Gaskell does) Ellinor wants none of this hard life.

I find myself mocking this story as I retell it; I can’t resist it as my mind or reason sees the absurdity of it. Yet as I read it, I fall in. Within its own terms all the characters are in character; especially the portraits of Corbet (the socially ambitious man), Mr Wilkins (Ellinor’s father who sinks into degradation), Miss Munro (who I became fond of though if I had to live with her I’d go mad with irritation at times).

And as I say I think it has a paradigm which appeals at a deep level: the trauma and the terrible things of life you see you cannot avoid and must know are lived out and then escaped from and the relief is strong.

Since I’ve been reading McEwan’s Atonement and know one way to read it is of an male author in drag writing apparently androgynously, I am struck that the real way to read this 400 page flagellation by Briony against herself is that it’s a parable not to do this to yourself. If you do a bad deed, you have two choices: live with it ruthlessly and ignore what you did, or escape somehow. Briony couldn’t pull off either; she was the prisoner of her own mind.

Ellinor too is the prisoner of her own mind and can’t escape but Gaskell lets her try and my argument is that is the unconscious reason Gaskell writes this story in the way she does.

Madness? yes. But who ever said the gothic was a sane genre.

The tale concludes with a familar paradigm to anyone who’s read much Gaskell: it was Mary Barton to the rescue; then Molly (Wives and Daughter); well here we have Ellinor to Dixon’s rescue. A fairy tale ending with the Canon Livingstone waiting in the wings. It’s carried by the depth of seeing — the landscapes — the probably felt deep psychological presence of Mr Corbet (however softened by the idealism he would remember and re-see and re-value).

Pauline Bourges, Winter (mid-19th century French)

Linda replied:

I liked your summary and analysis of this story.

All the tragedy in the story seems to stem from Ellinor’s mother’s early death. If she hadn’t passed away, the father would have stayed in line–and the fierce bond between Elinor and her father wouldn’t have come about.

The whole coverup was unnecessary. It was the father’s weakness–his alcoholism and spending habits which caused his panic. The death was accidental. Instead of burying the body, he should have reported it and faced the consequences. A matter of some unpleasantness instead of the nightmare that ensued for all three characters.

Dixon and Elinor’s tragedies arose out of their misplaced loyalty to the father. No one was thinking clearly. Corbet might have helped straighten things out if only Elinor could have brought herself to confide in him. How is it that Elinor could never even see her father’s problems with drink?

One almost thinks that Gaskell is implying this is the destiny of these characters–it was meant to be, since as you suggested, Elinor wouldn’t be Elinor if she didn’t follow these impulses.

That in the long run, there is somewhat of a happy ending is almost accidental. Elinor could easily have lived the rest of her life alone. Miss Monro did. Elinor is really lucky to have found a friend in her old governess.

Gaskell tells us again in this story of the importance of money in leading a satisfying life. She also suggests in many ways the class distinctions that dictate our standard of living. She points to the prejudice toward Mr. Dunster, because he was unlikeable–and how a group feeling rose up against him, making his disappearance a matter of no concern to anyone. There was also the prejudice of the gentry when Elinor’s father did not seem to know his place as a lowly lawyer in the early part of the story. I think Gaskell writes more of class issues in this story than she does in most of the other stories we have read.

I like Linda’s more objective take on the matter of the story too. I was (in a way) following the inner psychology of the author writing such a story: Gaskell’s inward trajectory of emotionalisms.

But yes the story itself: on the one hand, we could say it (gently) suggests to us all this loyalty to Mr Wilkins, the father is overdone, severely overdone. He was a weak man, self-centered utterly, partly because of his own class-ridden obsessions overspends and destroys himself; at the same time class protects him. I suggest Dunster was not liked also because he was a lower middle office worker. How dare he? As long as he’s not around to explain and defend, the people side with the man on the upper rung: Mr Wilkins. Note how Dixon was despised by Corbet early on and almost hung (– still goes on, in Atonement, who is suspected and sent to prison, the working class male, uppity too you see). Class is at the same time the woman’s protection: see Deborah Kaplan’s book on Austen’s conservatism; she identified with her class first as it protected her (up to a certain point as Eliot’s Mr Brooke would doubtless say).

Money too — as central as with Austen and Trollope, only no specific sums much given.

Fran:

I finally managed to finish this text and then catch up with the past mails I’d been saving, so thank you for all the very constructive thoughts on the story so far.

Like Linda, I was struck by the emphasis on class and class consciousness in the story, but also thought that Gaskell was sending out mixed signals: on the one hand she seemed critical of the snobbish, upper-class, knee-jerk rejection of upwardly mobile families like the Wilkins; on the other she seemed to confirm that prejudice by having Wilkins Jun. proceed to ruin himself and his dependents in parvenu extravagance and excess.

She also seemed to imply that part of Wilkins’ own knee-jerk aversion to Dunster was based on the fact that the latter was also successfully in the process of rising through the social ranks and perhaps intensified by the fact that on order to do so he was practising and preaching those virtues which had helped Wilkins’ own father succeed professionally and which he himself had fatally turned his back on.

There seems to be an strongly Oedipal element to the story in general: the absent/dead mother, the father fixation and the father’s instinctive rejection of Elinor’s suitors and competitors for her affections until it can’t be helped etc.

Linda also mentioned the element of destiny: still staying with the Greeks, it was interesting that Elinor’s father should bring this idea into play – even seeing himself as a (somewhat unlikely) Orestes, driven to madness by the vengeful Furies, while Elinor herself is often shown as driven to sickness and near madness by guilt and remorse. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad – mixing plays equally madly:)

Interesting, too, that the ‘gods’ use a modern instrument to bring the dark night’s work to light: the railroad, paired with capitalist greed. The mixed blessings of industrialization again.

At least Ellinor gets her peaceful happy end with her Living-stone far away from Hell-ingford….

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Gaskell’s “The Grey Woman” (From A Dark Night’s Work)
Anton Menschel, his sister (18th century, German)

We did read this story on WWTTA before and I wrote a full posting then.

What we feel about something at any given point is probably a reflection of recent experience — for me often reading. So I was struck by how much this is a Bluebeard tale. I’ve now read so much about female gothics, and “The Grey Woman” fits this paradigm to a t, with its nexus or emphasis being this continual feeling of terror, anxiety, helplessness. Another super-good passive heroine — or perhaps Gaskell splits her heroine in two so the Molly-Maggie to the rescue type is Writ Large in Amante.

I was struck by how much the Radcliffe paradigm (the labyrinth, corridors) is made particular, non-formula-ized by the setting in Germany and all its particulars.

Uglow’s take on the story is strongly about it from the point of view of women or feminism. Amante ends up dead and the murderer gets away with it; Anna ends up a grey woman afraid to go out and sees her husband — still at large (reminding me here of Nader on Bush at large) — looking his right age and strong.

Uglow sees this story as among many by Gaskell where women become — are made to become, are trained to be — natural victims of the systems their required obedience supports. Until they have the courage to defy and then they may not survive. Amante and Anna are indeed a team, and could only escape by one behaving like a man, dressing like a man, working like one. Uglow says Gaskell never loses her urge to speak for the outcast.

I’d add “woman” or often the “outcast” men in her stories are criminal types soaking the old parents and relatives back home for their plessures in the city (a Wordsworth theme). Domestic hells of marriage — sometimes brought on by passion (as we saw in Manchester Marriage are here too.)

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Again I’ve been much surprised at these stories, not the abject heroines nor the misery of women’s lives. The latter is simply probable when you think what the average life was under such customs and laws. What surprises me, what I had not expected is the intense depression of these stories. Varied they are but all so sad. I like that only some of these are so very painful, many of them.

How many sided and varied and interesting Gaskell is I thought the deeply felt descriptions and psychologies at times elevated her over just about every book I’m reading just now.

Claude Monet, Seine at Bougival (1869)

Ellen

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Elizabeth Gaskell festival: 3 short stories (comment on Elizabeth Spencer’s “Light in the Piazza”)

Elizabeth Gaskell (1865 watercolor)

Elizabeth Spencer (1921-)

Dear friends and readers,

My listserv community (mailing list) WWTTA has embarked on a four month “Elizabeth Gaskell festival.” A group of us propose to read two short stories by Gaskell each week alternating occasionally with a novella over two to three weeks, at the end of which a few of us will read her historical novel, Sylvia’s Lovers and a few others, her powerful biography, The Life of Charlotte Bronte. What enabled this was most of her works are online.

What prompted this? Her fame, we like 19th century women novelists. Some of the people on WWTTA have read Gaskell with other people on line on this and my other list before, _viz_, Cousin Phillis, Cranford (twice), Wives and Daughters (twice), North and South, two ghosts or gothics, “The Old Nurse’s Tale,” and “The Grey Woman.” Recently I had read Jenny Uglow’s wonderful biography, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, many of us had seen and loved both Cranford mini-series (Cranford Chronicles,

Lisa Dillon as Mary Smith, a stand-in for Gaskell herself from first series

and Return to Cranford)

The community of women from the second

I set up the order for reading by using my books, anthologies and individually published books. For the stories and novellas: Cousin Phillis and other tales, ed. Angus Easson, The Moorland Cottage and other stories, and A Dark Night’s Work and other Stories, both edited by Suzanne Lewis Lewis, Lady Ludlow, Mr Harrison’s Confessions, Cranford (numerous editions), to be followed by either the novel or biography (depending on what the person wanted to read).

Well, we have begun and I’ve now read three masterpieces in the short story genre, and one at least telling or candid story about illegitimacy and unwed mothers in the Victorian period. “The Old Nurse’s Tale” is one of these and I’ve written about it before (and taught twice too), but I’ve never before read or written about “Half a Life Time Ago” or “Lois the Witch.” These two, together with (more briefly) “Lizzie Leigh” and Elizabeth Spener’s “Light in the Piazza” are my subject tonight.

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“Half a Life Time Ago”

Whistler, “Reading by Lamplight” (1858)

I compare “Half a Life Time Ago” with Elizabeth Spencer’s great novella, “Light in the Piazza,” a modern masterpiece about how a mother to provide her beloved mildly disabled daughter with what’s called a normal life sacrifices much in her life and then her mildly daughter herself by giving her up to a young Italian husband embedded in a traditional family — though we have enough evidence to suspect it will go hard with this girl when her mother had to leave her to a new husband and his family. There’s a popular musical adapted from it nowadays. (For more on this one see the comments)

To the story:

“Half a Life Time Ago” is intensely moving story. It differs from Light in the Piazza” because the young boy, Will is not mildly disabled. Clara in “Light in the Piazza” seems to many people just fine; it takes time to see she is not quite like others. Will is mentally feeble gentle and sensitive and a target for ridicule, worse yet, a target for beatings by Michael Hurst, the young male apprentice betrothed to our heroine, Susan Dixon, before the story opened. The story centers on Susan Dixon’s consciousness. Her mother dies and asks her to care for this boy, specifically not to put him in an asylum.

The descriptions of the asylum are really mind-pausing. The people there know how to stop these disabled people from giving them trouble. I’ll bet.

I was at first bothered by what seemed to be Susan Dixon, the heroine’s acceptance or ignoring the cruelty of Michael Hurst, her suitor (how he enjoys triumphing over her too) and for me part of the anxiety of reading the tale was the worry lest she marry this man, Michael Hurst.

She didn’t: slowly he begins to want to marry her for her money and property and not herself. In reality he never appreciated her character at all and would probably have been much less happy with her than he was with much more ordinary, stupider woman he marries in the end. Michael stands for more than the world’s view: he is cruel. We are to believe this cruel or hard character of his attracts Susan. I wonder about this. I read a piece by Sade yesterday where he argues for masochism and sadism as central to sexual experience. I think Trollope is closer to the mark when he presents a more prosaic dominating-submissive interaction between people and I have not known anyone who likes to be hurt, bossed, or used.

Susan was lucky in that Michael brought his hard tactless mean sister to see her. They make a demand that he won’t marry Susan (they think she’s desperate) unless she puts Will in the asylum. In reaction to this ugliness, she refuses.

I can’t say she was better off herself being faithful to her disabled brother but she was doing right and until her servant-friend dies and he does become more violent she had the love and comfort of his presence. I can imagine Michael would have beaten and destroyed her brother if she had not allowed him to put the boy in an asylum.

At the same time I really admired the hardness of the tale. Will does become violent and hard to deal with later in life. In the 19th century they had no calming medicines and such a person would be so frustrated with his life as he grew older and take it out on those nearby. Susan’s servant-friend had died long ago and when Will dies young (as happens with severely disabled), Susan is left alone. One night she can’t bear not to look once more at Michael and follows him home drunken from a pub. We are told she watches him beat his horse and act as mean as usual. We are not told she is relieved not to have married him. I can’t understand this. Surely she would see how miserable in a different way she would have been.

We are told this is a community where women accept men’s drunkenness. But Susan has differed from others in refusing to put her brother away.

The story closes with Michael once more coming to Susan’s house — perhaps he too hankered after her, but so drunken in the cold, he falls hard and dies. She goes to Micheal’s wife and tells of his death, and in her own trauma over her long desolate existence, has a heart attack. The wife at first put off by her feels for her, and in the end Susan takes the broke widow and her children in so she is no longer alone.

We are to think she is now better off not being so alone.

“Half a Life-time Ago” is as good as “Old Nurse’s Story” because it is not a neurotic dream and breaks through censorship. Gaskell doesn’t quite break through to reject the sadomasochistic patterns still inculcated today but she does show the hardship and misery of isolated existence. Susan’s real lack was she never had a chance to meet anyone like her. All she ever had a chance for was Michael.

This reality lies behind not just stories like Jane Eyre but many other women’s stories until say the early 20th century when they could for the first time break away from a local community — if they were lucky find people they could have a bearable existence with.

But of course the real burning center is is the disabled child and what it takes from a mother. I know of a third: Elsa Morante’s Storia (History) where the last quarter is about her and her elliptic son and how he’s treated by the world (horrible) and his dog killed and he dies of the heart attack at 7 and she is taken to an asylum for 9 more years when her body finally dies. her soul did upon the death of the boy and dog. Funny Gaskell in comparison is much more realistic.

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“Lois the Witch”

Emigration

“Lois the Witch” anticipates our journey into Sylvia’s Lovers for its a historical fiction: set in the later 17th century in the US among American puritans. I find it just rich, embedded with knowledge of the era, especially a feel for recreating the US and the scary fanaticisms of the religious types who dominated early Massachusetts. Lois has the misfortune to be not just an orphan (no one to protect her for real) but to have been born to those who fought for the king — high church.

The story is a study of the impulse to and acting out of great cruelty religious fanaticism masks. Gothic here becomes an issue of vital life for women: witch accusations arise from the worst impulses of human nature directed towards women who are unprotected. When it comes to the enlightenment, Gaskell is on the side of secularism from her background.

I got beyond the first chapter of this story and by this time had become so anxious for the heroine I had to peek ahead. This is a terrifying tale centering on the heartlessness, cruelty and stupidity of human beings, and especially how risky fanatical religion is to anyone who is powerless, particularly a woman.

The center as the previous tales have been is women. In the first half of the tale when Lois arrives in America she listens in on a tale told in a censored way but sufficiently clearly that we realize a woman was allowed to be tortured, raped and murdered by a band of her fellow men rather than their risk their lives to save her. The hard stupid (for he probably doesn’t quite see that he’s justifying the women’s friends’ cowardice) older man who listens immediately begins to justify the men for doing nothing and among other things he comes up with the idea the whole thing was a vision sent by Satan. The obvious evidence that the woman existed and this all happened is put in front of him, and he pauses for a moment, but (like many people in juries) only long enough to dismiss this and come back to insist on his theory. What poor Lois doesn’t realize is she has awakened his ire by contradicting him.

As she arrives at her uncle’s — her mother has died and she has no relatives to live with and she is sent by the mother to the uncle for him to take her in — she sees a child whose beauty strikes her. The child see her and slips on a stump; the mother sees this. Ominous. This reader (me) knows what Gaskell is suggesting. I had a grandmother who believed in the “evil eye.” She would get it into her head that he neighbors had “poxed” her plants if they didn’t grow or sent an evil spell on her if something she wanted didn’t work out. My knowledge of this woman and what she would have been capable of if she had lived in a village with people like her has ever prevented me from sentimentalizing peasants or traditional cultures or rituals/superstitions. They are not pretty.

Her aunt is hard and mean, and immediately dislikes her for being a relation of a family which stayed loyal to Charles I. Again Lois makes the mistake of sticking up for her parents when she sees them bad-mouthed. They are after all recently dead. And we see a son is sexually hankering after her almost immediately

Of course the parallel is the woman tortured, raped and murdered and then dismissed as a vision of Satan with Lois accused of being a witch and then being murdered in some horrible way. It’s brilliant of Gaskell to align them.

Oh how I wish that sea captain who first brought Lois to the US and this biological family of hers had removed her from these people and taken her back to the US to starve. This is a hard story to read. It’s the remorseless terrifying story of a cruelty to a young woman with no one whose interest it is to help her.

As I read to the end, I found myself remembering what I’d read about people facing the cruel death penality, from Victor Hugo’s Last Day of a Condemned Man to descriptions of people waiting to be guillotined en masse. It’s the latter this story is about: a mass delusion which overtakes an ignorant fearful community. Lois dies because she gets caught up in the jealousies of the household she was placed in where no one had any feeling for her at all; she is loved and wanted by two men who her female relatives wanted for themselves. Her cousin goes mad and her aunt loathes her in order to have someone to blame. So when in a hysterical mass meeting Cotton Mather lights on her, she is lost.

Lois herself believes in witches and our narrator says when she finds herself in jail she half-believes others may be witches in other jails. When she sees them, she knows better. She finds herself chained and in quiet powerful moment is brought back to sense because she realizes how ludicrous and cruel this is. She lives on because she is so young and has a urge to survive.

A number of scenes where she refuses to confess to being a witch; she is helped to die because the old Indian woman who lived in the house with her ends up in her cell. In her impulse to control and cope for herself, she acts as if she’s doing this for the Indian woman. Only when the woman is taken from her and hung first, does she go mad, lost it and scream a horrified “Mother!” a call our narrator tells us went through people. (As other calls did).

It was the next autumn before the Captain returned with a young man who had loved Lois to bring her back to England. Too late. The young man when others present mass apologies, prayers, and the graveyard as comfort can only say, she is dead, cannot be brought back and there is no retrieval.

For myself I am bothered this far by the tale: Gaskell seems to me to ask that I understand and thus (implied) forgive. No better misanthropy than accept this with quietude.

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“Lizzie Leigh”

London Woman, Street Seller, Gustave Dore, from London: A Pilgrimage

I did find “Lizzie Leigh” a demoralizing one to start with I admit — from its outlook where it seemed to buy into the making a pariah of someone who has had a child out of wedlock to its morbidity (so many die) but can see it as revealing tellingly the same kind of tones and impulses we find in Bronte’s Shirley where there’s a story of an unwed mother now a governess whose daughter died when she was finally able to be near her, having been parted from her at birth, a kind of neurotic compensation daydream where the intense sadness allows the person to experience what she is really experiencing and validate it without breaking through censorship and telling the truth.

“Lizzie Leigh” breaks through the censorship. I’d argue it does so more than Susan Hill’s Woman in Black which allows readers and viewers to blame Jennet Humphrys. I’m aware the story turns her into a monstrous witch and only through careful reading of the text does the inner story come out. All three Wharton tales are far more feminist in structure than even the written Women in Black. Given our period’s misogyny I fear to think what a film feature might make of Hill’s work today.

For Light in the Piazza, see comment.

Photo from Lincoln Center performance of musical adaptation of Spencer’s story

Ellen

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Andrew Davies’s Middlemarch (film as history), Wives and Daughters (film as great woman’s novel transposed)

Lydgate laughing at Keepsake album as “beautifully idiotic” (Middlemarch)

Molly and Squire Hamley reading one of Roger’s letters from Africa (Wives and Daughters)

Dear Friends and readers,

As I wrote a few days ago I’ve been watching Andrew Davies’s film adaptations for a couple of weeks now as my background work towards writing about his film adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels, for now specifically his 2008 Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (with Anne Pivcevic as his producer). This is a second blog meant for me to work out my thoughts and keep a record on what I’ve watched thus far.

I began with an early adaptation of a Dickens story, and will tonight go on to two 1990s adaptations. I am also grouping them by putting together those with a similar theme, mood, or filmic techniques. Davies learned and developed his craft in more conventional as well as different sophisticated and cunning ways) as he went along, and was allowed to be more daring after each success.

To write about more than one movie at a time is not that easy to do since one of many things I’ve been so impressed by is his enormous variety, and bold willingness to experiment as well as how prolific, perceptive (of his original texts) and intertextual (with other films) his work is. Still, I’ll try. Like many writers, I write to make sense of what I’ve discovered. To coin an E.M. Forster line, I can tell what I think when I see what I’ve said.

So for this blog I’ll cover two of his 1990s film adaptations: the 1994 BBC/WBGH Middlemarch (director Anthony Page, producer Louis Marks) and the 1999 BBC/WBGH Wives and Daughters (director Nicholas Renton, producer, producer Sue Birtwistle). They are both adaptations of masterpiece 19th century novels by women, are transpositions, and the emphasis is on dramatic characters and content so they are naturalistic in feel.

Much has been written about Davies’s Middlemarch and there are a large number of intelligent pages devoted to comparing the film to George Eliot’s book in “Middlemarch on TV: A Symposium,” George Eliot — George Henry Lewes Studies, 26-27 (1994):36-81.

So what can I add here? it’s very great, moving, sombre, psychologically subtle as well as naturalistic. The colors throughout are muted: browns, greens, tans, the color of the natural world and ordinary buildings. Davies and his team stick to continuity in the manner of 1970s-80s film adaptations, much is conveyed through words in fully developed carefully nuanced dramatic scenes; the storyline and symbols feel controlled — there is some voice over and flashbacks with dreams, but this is kept to a minimum. This is a stately production, quiet sober melodious music, the paratext is the title carved in stone:

As people have remarked, the central figure is no longer Dorothea Brooke (Juliet Aubrey), but instead Tertius Lydgate (Douglas Hodge), even if she is still a core force in the film’s drama and a linking figure. Davies makes Casaubon (played so movingly by Patrick Malahide) a sympathetic figure, a weak and intense man and makes a parallel between Casaubon’s broken dreams and Lydgate’s explicit. Casaubon’s affection for Dorothea is touching before the marriage and he is a poignant figure when told he is to die. Casaubon may be waspish, and he is utterly self-centered, short-tempered, all of which makes him very real; he is also sensitive, isolated, and wants his project to reach people. The most moving still in the whole movie is of Malahide from the back looking at the flowing river after he has been told by Lydgate, he could die of a heart attack at any time.

Davies also brings out his older man’s love for this young woman (a subject which Davies repeatedly returns to and makes far more emphatic than his sources do) and the vulnerability of the well-meaning ethical man (so Lydgate brings us back to Stephen Daker of A Very Peculiar Practice).

Davies displays great sympathy for Dorothea: she is innocent because her wealth has sheltered her. Her nature is not vain, and her impulse is to plain truth-telling: as with Lydgate Davies is developing a core type of heroine: Juliet Aubrey as Dorothea resembles Justine Waddell as Molly in gestures, words, body stance.

Juliet Aubrey as Dorothea

Strong truths about life are dramatized and given utterance. For example, “marriage: it can be a noose”
Dorothea’s uncle, Mr Brooke (Robert Hardy) warns.

Turning toa slightly sarky essay on this filmic Middlemarch in The Classic novel: from page to screen, ed Giddings and Sheen, Platt and MacKillop, Ian MacKillop and Alison Platt’s “‘Beholding in a magic panorama: television and the illustration of Middlemarch,” MacKillop and Platt point out the film goes for a larger and social perspective far more than an intimate delving (which George Eliot does in her book). I’d say this is also true of Davies 1998 Vanity Fair (A&E/BBC, Marc Munden, Gillian McNeill, which I’ll write about another time).

Opening montage takes us through town, elections, countryside

The film works the way a friend and scholar, Carlo Bitossi wrote about in some lecture notes he sent me: there is a genuine historical framing. One could say the film-makers have tried to use film to tell wider history.

This as opposed to Davies’ Jane Austen adaptations where intimacy is what is aimed at and which remain narrowly focused. I’d say this is true of Davies’ Wives and Daughters too. And I think the difference may be the result of the way George Eliot is respected as making a male’s kind of novel while Elizabeth Gaskell and Jane Austen remain in a enclosed female space to male minds. Paradoxically it’s often a woman character who brings out the world’s view, as here comically incisive Elizabeth Spriggs as Mrs Cadawaller.

MacKillop and Platt commend Davies Farebrother character and Simon Chandler’s performance as a man of unfufilled potential, simply there, but whose intelligence and decency shines out.

Farebrother gambling, slightly desperate

I’ll add this character anticipates Davies’ Dobbin (out of Vanity Fair) by as acted by Philip Glenister (both harking back to Davison’s comical version in Steven Dakar). They say in this in mini-series each part is conceived of separately as a unit.

There’s this good point they bring out: this adaptation (like other fine ones) makes alive what we often forget; the 80 familiar memories most people will trot out out of a possible 500 memories are significantly added to.

Davies has taken a novel unhistoric people whose contributions count, those not famous or in the light or whose contribution askew, small: this means not just Dorothea and Lydgate, but Fred Vincy (Jonathan Firth) and Mary Garth and Farebrother too. The enemy of promise is Rosemary Vincy but as played by Trevyn McDowell, she has a life she wants to live too. How painful it was to me to see how she didn’t value this man and his gradual realization he wasn’t valued.

Finally, they suggest that the BBC surrounded the production with paraphernalia intended to show how difficult it was to adapt is significant: the film-makers took their attempt to move back in time and history seriously.

This is part of what I characterized as its attempt to be another medium in which to convey history. Prof Bitossi’s lectures show just how difficult it is, how factious or fiction-making most of the visuals one has to put together to make a picture of. It becomes a time capsule where modern technologies recreate (and to a large extent) misrepresent what we are seeing literally. The philosophical problems here are too complicated for me to go into here, but I hope I have suggested them.

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Davies offered a characteristically insightful interview on his conceptions for Wives and Daughters. I want to highlight what he said about Molly Gibson:

It’s a pretty close run between her and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice for the most appealing heroine in English literature. I’m the father of a daughter, and Molly brought out those feelings in me. You feel very protective towards her, even though she can stick up for herself. She’s not the prettiest girl in the story, and you sympathize with her when all these chaps look past her and see Cynthia and immediately stop paying her any attention.

Osborne Hamley:

He was the character who gave me the most problem with the script, because when I read the book, I thought: “My God! This is the first gay character in 19th-century literature!” Then I thought: “No, it couldn’t be.” You get the feeling when Osborne comes on that the revelation about him is going to be that he’s gay, because in the book he really is quite effeminate in his manner. He seems to be a caricature of a gay character. He’s always talking about the opera, he’s very good with older ladies, he has a very close relationship with his mother, he can’t stand his father. The secret French wife and the child seemed a bit unlikely to me, and so I tried to make him more Keatsian – not a drooping spirit, but a passionate, poetic character, who just had the bad luck to have a growing and fatal illness.

Tom Hollander as Osborne Hamley with loving mother (Penelope Wilton), literally made ill by repressed life with squire

And the modern appeal of the situation:

It’s about second families, isn’t it? In the book, of course, you’ve got second families because of people dying young. Nowadays, it’s because of divorce and remarriage. But the problems are the same, aren’t they?

Family group: Roger Hamley, Molly, Mr Gibson, Mrs Gibson, Cynthia.

My VHS Cassette version is 4 parts, 75 minutes each. I admired what I did last time: the performances and script; and I noticed again the story had been rearranged so as to make the Hamley story as and more important than the Gibson one. Also that Osborne Hamley (Tom Hollander) had been made a central figure, not somewhat to the side, with Cynthia (Keeley Hawes) similarly emerging more dominant.

As this is a later Davies and he is freer with his source and uses more bold techniques, I saw more into the film as a Davies’ film. The last part of W&D is more changed from the book than the earlier parts — it is after all unfinished and Davies takes more open liberties than with Middlemarch. Not only is Preston made sympathetic, but as Gaskell didn’t get to finish the book, Davies choses his own ending and alters matter coming up to it to fit.

The film is a richly pastoral, indeed Arcadian environment, with richly colored flowers and much dark greenery. The houses of the wealthy are ornate; there is much scientific equipment to be seen, books, botanizing in the Hamley as well as Gibson household. When we are in Africa, we move to a burnt-orange, yellow and brown palette, but there too intense beauty is caught. All this is fascinating and well-done.

To turn to particulars, Davies develops further his depiction of the father and daughter as intensely loving and interdependent, this really revelatory of Davies’ preoccupations and presentation of him self in his work. Mr Gibson believes Molly’s story, accepts her refusal to tell it all and immediately guesses the real culprit is Cynthia – - it would have been so painful had he not. Molly only nearly gets to be ill, and Mr Gibson uses that to try to keep Roger and Molly apart. It is Lady Harriet Rosamund Pike) to the rescue, Osborne dies, and Molly and Roger (Anthony Howell) marry: we are spared the wedding and instead have that appropriate ending in Africa. All along Davies has alluded to Molly’s interest in science, the growth of new enlightened attitudes in medicine and respect for science, and this is the age of women travellers. Much of the proto-feminism of Molly’s remarks are in Gaskell, not made up; they are in the book.

Davies also builds up Preston’s (Iain Glenn) relationship with Cynthia, and shows sympathy for Preston is insisting on his point of view: he loved her, thought she loved him, is intensely enamoured of her sexually, won’t let go. This is very like Davies 2002 Dr Zhivago (Granada/WBGH, Giacomo Campiotti, Anne Pivcevic, to be discussed in another blog) where the same interaction of feeling and sentiment informs Davies’ conception of Lara (who like Cynthia at first loves and then turns to hatred) and Komarovksy (Sam Neill was more subtle about showing this, but then he’s the older man). (This emphasis and perspective is not at all in Elizabeth Gaskell.)

Preston as first seen grimly riding his horse

The sexuality of a man gripped by a woman is repeated in Davies’s portrait of Mr Gibson’s (Bill Patterson) marriage to Mrs. Gibson (aka Hyacinth Kirkpatrick, Francesca Annis)

Mrs Gibson is made one of the obtuse unchangeable horrors of life: a continual liar, deceitful, obtuse to all but her ugly way of seeing the world (not just utterly materialistic but everyone and thing is measured by rank – it is a misogynistic stereotype), but now the sex complicates it as it’s brought out. This is very much a woman’s film, showing a woman’s world and it is at the intimate level of reality such things are experienced as destroying life. And they do, in the home which is hard for many women to escape still.

It is also over-wrought with emotion (something made by the film-makers partly because of this association with the matter with women’s novels), and in that falsifying. In this sense the 1994 Middlemarch is the truer to actual life film: more sombre. The feel of the film captures our dream of quiet realities, as in the Bulstrode story

Mr and Mrs Bulstrode (Peter Jeffreys and Rosemary Martin disturbed and estranged from one another by a lower class guest)

Bulstrode now under considerable stress since he does not see his way to getting rid of his old business partner who knows of his corruption and dishonesty

The over-wroughtness too reminded me of what Cardwell and others argue: women’s books are treated differently than men’s. I can see the macho-male attitude towards women’s books in Davies’s interviews for the press, not Davies so much but Davies keeping up with the honcho-type director he has to cope with and posture in front of.

It’s telling that in the interview with Nic Ransome Davies says he’s rejected from fully American projects, called “effete.” The periodical on masculinity in American typologies in popular movies especially is spot on and embodied in such people (who alas have power to make or not make movies). Every other paragraph has the word “fucking” in it; and it’s not just sprinkled in as “you knows” are (meaning “as it were”), it’s Davies keeping up with the macho-male self-presentation of Ransome. They outdo one another in talking of “babes” (beautiful actresses); nevertheless, the reader who is paying attention realizes Davies is talking of how this very macho culture precludes doing sensitive perceptive film-adaptations of better novels in the US cinemas — and tells one story of his own experience of rejection and its grounds.

Since Davies dwells more on the sister pairs of Molly and Cynthia than Gaskell and he makes Cynthia more sympatheticm, the feel of this relationship is also homoerotic and deeply sympathetic to women as his portrayal of the Misses Browning (Barbara Flynn and Deborah Findley)

Comic moment for filmic monster, Mrs Gibson

I’d say that Davies and Cardwell are wrong (if it be that Davies really sees his Wives and Daughters as two steps back to his 1995 BBC/WBGH Pride and Prejudice– one must take all he says in public as also meant for his particular listener) to underrate W&D in comparison. I found some of the dramatic scenes in the opening two parts of Moll Flanders uneven: Davies is having trouble with the allegorical and uncontrolled kind of unconscious writing that intermixes with realism in 18th century novels, especially in the earlier part of the century), have scenes which are total and/interesting failures, and the brilliance and memorabilty of the second 2 parts is not from technique but the daring amoral matter and sudden move into deep depression and open self-destructive, self-hatred of the central character; that’s content.

Much more than Middlemarch, Davies creates from intertexuality here: in an interview with Nic Ransome ( “A Very polished practice: an interview with Andrew Davies,” The European English Messenger, 10:1 [2001]:34-41), Davies complains that the director made him move 2 steps back in his technological development. He had wanted to move beyond his 1996 Moll Flanders (Granada/WBGH David Attwood, David Lascelles, also to be discussed in another blog) to use ironies, visuals, and cinematic techniques of distancing montage, and artifice; this is an adaptation which is conventional, very like the 1995 Pride and Prejudice (BBC/WBGH, Simon Langton, Sue Birtwistle) he said.

Well, yes and no. I noticed the music echoed music in Brideshead Revisited and nostalgia was worked up, use of blurring, the mise-en-scene rich and ornate greens, and this was done especially in the sequence where Mrs Gibson went to London with Cynthia and we have a few minutes of the renewal of Mr Gibson and Mollys’ relationship. Davies is daring here — he again and again in his series broaches this area of the older man loving the young girl, here really a father and daughter. It reminded me of Sebastian and Charles Ryder sequences with a use of voice-over too as the father and daughter revel together at a picnic in a meadow, and eating before the fireplace alone.

The film also exhibits intertexuality with famous books: Squire Hamley (Michael Gambon is just brilliant) coming out with Osborne in his arms, and the use of “never” shows Lear and Cordelia are meant. Osborne’s death with the fly over him is naturalistic death. Strong secularism here, a lack of religious belief (also seen in Raven’s 194 BBC Pallisers). Davies turns to Austen for some of the bitterly ironic but subdued lines of Gibson to his wife. Brideshead Revisited techniques are seen in the build up of Roger and Molly’s romance, but also the use of dance from Austen, and the final “yes” scene is clearly James Joyce’s Ulysses’ Molly. Roger and Molly are modelled partly on Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price, but it’s clear Roger is another Steven Dakar — once again Steven Dakar is seen repeatedly in versions of heroes in Davies’ films from Yuri Zhivago to Arthur Clenham.

Partricia Stoneman’s essay (“Wives and Daughters on Television,” The Gaskell Society Journal, 14 [2000]:85-100) is limited because of her fidelity criteria; she has this idea of “what is true to the spirit” of the original, an unprovable notion which leaves us with impressionism: still, she is perceptive and does give details from the production. She praises the production as true to the spirit of Gaskell and the original book. But we cannot from her grasp what is literally used filmically front of us and what we are liking concretely that cannot be in the book.

Cardwell’s Andrew Davies includes a few remarks on this film. She singles out strong female protagonists but does not suffciently see the weak males which hold center of films: emotional men, needing ties — as from A Very Peculiar Practice on. Things to remember especially: he selects his novels, he involved in selection (p 115), and tendency to ensemble drama with several voices contributing to final perspective. He displays sympathetic irony and often with villains (Preston), p 115, he has tussles with the author or quarrels, repairs, changes because he really thinks he sees more deeply or can improve and make relevant, and in his ability with direct dialogue and human insight into feelings he does very well.

Cardwell does admit she doesn’t like romance and prefers irony or epic (a male preference is shaping this) so she downplays W&D and P&P in comparison to MF, the 2001 The Way We Live Now (BBC/WBGH, David Yates, Nigel Stafford-Clark, discussed in another blog), and Dr Zhivago.

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To conclude, Middlemarch may be considered at its best a serious attempt to bring a literary masterpiece to life. The film-makers through all their techniques: mise-en-scenes, filming on doctored locations, costumes, paraphernalia, dialogue, the kinds of scenes chosen, e.g. Will Ladislaw (the beautiful Rufus Sewell) working on Brooke’s newspaper and trying to find a place in the modern world, and Lydgate’s attempt to practice modern medicine and his entanglements in local politics.

Bulstrode encounters his past in the meadow — with Caleb Garth (Clive Russell) as estate manager; Bulstrode and Garth have just been discussing how to modernize Bulstrode’s newly inherited estate

W&D is semi-original women’s film, allusive, rich in techniques and Davies character types and attitudes, intricate, psychological in a more penetrating and iconclastic way; it’s the same producer as the 1995 P&P and same script editor and the two film adaptations are alike –only this one more lyical.

Molly and Roger walking off together away from us at the close of Wives and Daughters.

My respect for Davies’ insight, complexity of vision, artistry has gone way up over these past three weeks, and it increases at each film adaptation by him I see.

Ellen

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