Why there is no effective feminism in Trollope?

Emily flirting with Colonel Osborne (rare visualization of Ch 20, Oxford classic, ed. John Sutherland, 191-92); 2004 HKHWR (scripted Andrew Davies)

Gentle readers,

The reason is simple. It goes beyond the pragmatic ordinary reality position that Trollope frankly said women should not be allowed to compete with men for good-paying jobs as competitors, and their work outside the home for money should cease upon marriage. He is candid about his refusal to consider that women should have a right to vote too, e.g., “After all it is question of money; and a contest for that power and influence which money gives” (see “The Rights of Women”, North America).

It’s that he does not see the direct causal relationship between sexual control through violence and the raw deal women get from men and their experience of life. I saw this so clearly in my recent reading (just finished) of He Knew He Was Right and The Way We Live Now in tandem. Or maybe I read them alternatively: so many chapters of one one night and so many chapters of the other the next. I’ve written at length about HKHWR in the third chapter of my book, and the illustrators to TWWLN in the sixth chapter in Trollope on the ‘Net (and may put the chapters on line eventually.)

The lack of connection is seen most strikingly in HKHWR which treats so directly of a story about a man’s (Louis Trevelyan) sexual jealousy and anxiety and his desire to control his wife, and her (Emily vis-a-vis Colonel Osborne) sexual boredom and desire to socialize including teasing flirting with whom she pleases. When Trollope takes aboard a discussion of women’s rights he presents Wallachia Petrie whose ideas about women’s right are presented as abstractions on equality about power and money and jobs. Her apparent asexuality or sexlessness is not attached to her position beyond the idea she is jealous of her friend, Caroline who is attractive to men and prefers to marry than stay close friends with Wally. The right of a man to have custody over his children is questioned, but only for the sake of the child’s emotional health.

In the important chapter in HKHWR at Casalunga (so praised by Henry James) where Louis and Emily talk there is no sense that the sexuality that has so troubled Louis is the issue, is its core, it’s rather this particular man is weak and felt he lacked power over her.

Felix attempts to rape Ruby (2001 TWWLN, scripted Andrew Davies)

The same lack of connection is found in TWWLN. There is no sense in the book that Felix Carbury tries to rape Ruby. We are led to feel that some violence (but not specified what) is what she herself incurred on herself by breaking conventions; that’s all. John Crumb then protected her. These conventions are seen as meant to protect her and seriously believed in as sufficient protection. If anyone is presented as violent in the book it’s Mrs Hurtle whose wrath at Paul Montague’s desertion of her is the result of their having had a liaison in the US.

In North America Trollope says these women’s rights people are “undoing what chivalry has done” (NY, Knopf, 1961, 260). In this travel book and in HKHWR the narrator refers to “male chivalry” as what protects Petrie and other women as if it were a right males had to attack her somehow which with great gallantry they are giving up — as long as they what? don’t talk like Petrie? are grateful. Obey conventions.

The heart of the issue (as Ellen Willis among others in the 1970s) argued for the first time is male control not just of jobs but of women themselves sexually in the way the heart of capitalism Marx said rightly was the ownership and control of property and law to back it up. Trollope sees Melmotte’s violence but never sexually. The one sexually violent person we are shown is Mrs Hurtle who wants to whip Paul for not staying faithful and Trollope believes she is violent because she is sexually free; the two go together as animal women in his mind. This is mistaking what one has to do to protect oneself in Trollope’s society for the cause of the real pervasive violence and threat of it (contained in Trollope’s own reference to male “chivalry”).

All the elements that come together in feminist insight are found in both HKHWR and TWWLN, but they are not put together, the paradigm is not seen, including Trevelyan’s right to take possession of his child (not hers). We see possession of the child is the male’s weapon but not how this comes about (pp. 737-38 in Oxford edition by Sutherland).

It’s been a while since I read John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women. As I recall Mill’s concern is to show how the subjection of women in our society transforms womens’ character so we cannot as yet say anything about them for sure since they are forced to live dishonestly. He sees how men control women but his emphasis is not on how private sexual experience is at the heart of what’s abjected.

2002 Forsyte Saga: Soames asserting his right over Irene

Now we do see this connection in Galsworthy’s Man of Property. The insight is not centrally dramatized in scenes; it’s kept at a distance (as are the liaisons as experience by the principals), but Galsworthy makes the connection sex=property and the control of powerful men over the desirable women the heart of the perversion.

Why I think Trollope cannot see this is he is forbidden to go into sex openy. Trollope cannot rely on his imagination to teach him. HKHWR and TWWLN take hundreds of page to uncover realistically what society conspires to hide but then Trollope punts on women.

Louis fears for the power of men by which he means but is too mortified to say sexual domination, the power to control Emily’s body in every single one of its phases including flirting. All that is made explicit is his power to tell her where to live. He insists she say she was literally and fully sexually unfaithful so he will see he has full power over her even in the area of flirting is as far as Trollope brings sex and control together. And HKHWR does not concentrate on Emily’s lack of money so property is lost from the equation.

Melmotte has no money, no way to make large sums honestly either. His beating his wife and daughter are seen as urges to wrest money from them or simply release his frustrations. Paul Montague does accuse Roger of being an old man wanting to marry a younger woman, but he does not go further than that (the way Davies does in the movie which is to suggest this paradigm of older powerful man takes young rich bride is the heart of the property-system.

Clearly in Trollope, the 1st phase feminism is unacceptable. No vote, no control of one’s property, no job. The 2nd phrase would have horrified him as he does not see or refuses to think general the violence of men wreaked on women, the marriage ceremony, to control them sexually. As to the 3rd phase, if you want to baby-worship, ladies, he is willing for you to do that to your heart’s content.

Ellen

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

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

Dear Friends and readers,

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

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

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I begin with the women’s issues sessions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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PCA/ACA: film studies galore, from Coriolanus, war, docudramas to Haneke, Lean & Young Adults

Boomerang, a street scene from this film noir, docudrama(1947)

From Part 3, The Bomb, The Untold History of the US by Stone and Kuznick

Dear friends and readers,

More from the PCA/ACA conference.

Though I didn’t count the number or work out what percentage of the total number of panels film studies represented, I’ll hazard a guess it was at least one-half. Sometimes the film study was in service of some other agenda or exposing some conflict, but the session’s prime documents were films. You might say this was a conference of very intelligent people who had put away their books to concentrate on films.

There are themes running through the group. First, fidelity criticism is useless except insofar as a comparison enables us to bring out the film-makers’ contrasting purpose. That films can be a reflection of a single maker’s vision, but is so much more likely to be a group mirroring of a set of themes thought appropriate by the financial backers, in their interest. They are (most of the time) cultural barometers of what is socially acceptable that year. Gov’ts typically and without having to act directly exercise control or the film-makers bow to what they think the gov’t wouldnot want. The way to analyze films is to study the shots, the filmic techniques as well as the kind of source material and the psychological baggage associated with their stars.

If I were able to make the choice again, I would probably not spend so much of my day on film studies. If the PCA/ACA ever comes to town (DC) or close (Philly or NY) again, I’ll be sure to go to children’s literature and fashion sessions. There was a session on a comic book retelling Austen’s Sense and Sensibility which I missed.

There was a paper by Zara Wilkinson “Defending Jane Austen: Rozema’s Mansfield Park as a narrative of abolition” (Thursday, at 1:15 pm, No 2436, “Adaptation”, V: Race and Adaptation”), but as bad luck would have it, that was on against another one I really preferred to go to as my friend was giving her paper then.

I offer brief accounts of papers in a day-long immersion in film studies.

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Wednesday at 4:45 pm, “Shakespeare on Film and TV 3 (1337) offered three papers on Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus.

Vanessa Redgrave was Coriolanus’s undoing

Noel Slobada in “Riding the Lonely Dragon” began by insisting there was something odd in Fiennes choosing to film this play. It’s rarely done, unfamiliar, and abrasive; Caius Marcus might be Shakespeare’s least sympathetic hero, he’s a dynamo of violence, cannot articulate an idea, distrusts words, despises those “beneath” him. It has no subplot; it ends on an assault and utter crash. The Shakespeare text was severely trimmed by John Logan, and what we are left with is a man who cannot re-invent himself in the way Fiennes, the actor, can. Even at the close Vanessa Redgrave as the mother says to Fiennes as Coriolanus: “you are too absolute.” Slobada felt Fiennes was attracted to this figure as someone who cannot remake himself. No redemption at the close; the politician’s life a nightmare.

Rachel Hogg saw Coriolanus as an outsider, a lonely, going it alone, risk-taking. He only commands language when inciting other men to kill. He destroys his home. He’s a man without a head, a sort of cast off which leaves him vulnerable to violent brutal treatment. The dismaying (revealing) thing about the session was how unwilling the people were to discuss the women, and leaving them out of such a paper was to leave out a core part of experience. When I brought up Volumnia and Vanessa Redgrave’s role, one of the panelists insisted she was not a woman but a commanding officer. They wanted to forget the sex scenes with his wife, to cut the film off from contemporary politics too. Again and again during this conference I saw people take on a masculine point of view as universal.

Jessica Chastain chosen for her sexiness and soft femininity

Finally, Kimberly Huhn: this play “is not reassuring,” shaped by “emotional immediacy” and action. The camera was often hand-held in 2005. The hero not reflective, not super-handsome and sensitive, but someone who can do terrifying things and attracts terror. One man came who was interested in Shakespeare and had read the play (as had I) but the speakers were not interested in talking of how this production differed from other filmed Coriolanus’s, nor the usual psychoanalytical analyses.

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Carrying on the theme of war and reality in film I went to “Film and History II: the great War,” on Thursday, 9:45 am (2244), Jamie Schleser presented the new trend in films to combine commercial fiction with powerful non-fiction (then not limited by the code). As the war came on, film noir combined with crime docudrama to create films of pessimistic uncertainty. Most of these in the 1950s had themes of active persecution of supposed communists; the popular pres showed the absence of due process as a miscarriage of justice. The code in such movies is you are “guilty until you are proven innocent,” even if you don’t go to jail.

Boomerang, earnest hero and sarky heroine (Jane Wyatt)

She analysed two movies, 1947 Boomerang with Dana Andrews, Elia Kazan and Jane Wyatt and many non-professional people; Call Northside 777 (1948), with James Stewart, Lee J. Cobb, Richard Conte. (I noticed how she left women out.) A man is wrongly given a life sentence and Stewart comes to his rescue. Both films show devious politicians in a culture of pervasive corruption. They filmed an actual film Schleser argued that the use of real events helped carry the social message as you could not as easily argue to censor something that had actually happened.

Northside 777: Jimmy Stewart filmed inside a real prison

The last paper of this panel, “The best and worst of times for American cinema,” was read aloud by three people, Joe Moser in the dominant role. They had watched over 100 films and charted the presentation of war in film over the course of the early past the mid-20th century. They discovered significant trends; early on in WW1 the US presented itself as neutral, but during that time German foreign films could not get over here. Then as the US entered the war, films began to be used for propaganda and showed open sympathy for the allies. Pearl Harbor exploded into a culture of killing, with the Japanese presented as evil. Films discussed included Big Parade which was against privileges, A Very Long Engagement about mental breakdown trouble.

She seeks him no matter what … again heterosexual romance at the center — this paper made me long to read the book, and in French.

I asked if there were difference between America and European gov’t and was told the US gave people more fair warning. European gov’ts and groups treated film more respectably and it was seen as an art; European art saw the war from a social collectivist point of view, where the US consistently sees each story as individual with individual heroes winning out (or losing), epitomizing the culture. It seemed to me there was not enough on this business of cultural reflection but what the panel was interested in was the depiction of history on film. How successful does film tell history; are films history itself in the way they intervene and influence people.

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I had meant to go to at least one panel on Indian film but it turned out only one person showed up for two panels (5 could not get Visas — why did they wait until the last minute). I did hear some talk about how Indian films at their close are always redemptive. The gov’t would not let anything else through and the average person would be shocked not to have some happiness at the close, some security. This is ultimately a religious censoring, in favor of a benign providential pattern.

When that was over, I hurried off to a nearby panel on Teahouse of the August Moon. Still Wednesday , 11:30, “Film Adaptation III (3340).

Marlon Brando carefully made up to look Asian

I came only in time for the last paper on the infantilization of Okinawa and Okinawness by Risa Nakayama but heard the basic thesis of the others, about the story based on the play by John Patrick and the novel by Vern Sneider. The point was made first the play was to be done by one actor and director, but when Brando showed interest in the project, he replaced the original actor, chose a different director, changed the age of the female lead, so that a sweeping transformation was undertaken. The end result was one which differed significantly from the play and the novel. In one clip we watched a man playing an American sergeant berate Brando as Sakini for not having a goal in life, nor “get up and go.” Brando was de-sexualized. The actress, a successful singer on American TV in the 1950s was presented as a child hanging laundry. A kind of fake version of Asian music was played to which some traditional dancing was done. If an attempt was intended to cross cultures and make US viewers understand and sympathize with this culture through “charm” (and Brando had been involved in serious ventures in On the Waterfront), it failed utterly. We are invited to laugh at stereotypes.

I learned a lot in this session. As with all the sessions I went to, there were few people in the room, this time perhaps 4, all from Okinawa. I did not know that the US still controls this island as a military base. I was reminded of how we bombed and destroyed much on the island during WW2 and learned of how little was done for the people when we took over. For example, no schools were built as had been promised. One woman in the audience was old enough to have been on the island in the 1950s and told us of what she experienced. In 1962 there was a cholera epidemic, and mob scenes over vaccination. The question was asked, If there is any value in any of this material. They seemed to suggest that the novel won the Pultizer prize was worthwhile. The play won the Critics Circle award.

I was startled when I saw the film. I did see it in the 1950s and after all this time (I must’ve been about 9) I half-remembered something. Now it just appalled me.

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I stayed for Film Adaptation IV and went on to V that afternoon (3440, at 1:15 pm, and 3543 at 3:00 pm).

A scene from upper class British berth in Nazi Titanic

Sethuraman Srinivasan read a paper on a Nazi film about the sinking of the Titanic. Gramsci said socialism can get nowhere because an agenda of capitalism is enforced from the time of everyone’s earliest years of childhood. The ruling group asserts intellectual and cultural hegemony. We see this in the way Goebbels took over the cultural industry in order to influence people; his aim was to monopolize the media, to control the artists, shape the audience, appoint the financial group, enact a fascist state agenda. The film industry was nationalized, undesirable artists arrested. He knew he had to make a movie entertaining too. He especially liked to use history as for the average person what is said to be true will be taken as more convincing in argument so like other people he turned to the Titanic for its mythic power A large budget of 16 million to make anti-British propaganda: passengers attack heroic crew; wealthy are saved first, people in steerage left to die. The accident could have been avoided, but the crew was taken orders from a corrupt financier; mercantile alliance cared more for enriching themselves than the people aboard. There were heart-rending scenes of horror in this film, and much eroticizing of women. It does not seem to have been popular.

I found of great interest Kathleen Turner’s paper on making films from Young Adult fiction because she described the fiction too: it often shows a search for an identity; a need for connection to others and yet to be left alone; most often it’s narrated by a teenager, so a subjective self is at the center of the film. She conveyed the tone of these books; it’s often violent and there are intense zigzags in the stories. She wanted to see what was transferred from Lion, Witch and Wardrobe, The Hunger Games, Twilight, Harry Potter, Golden Compass to their respective film adaptations. The problem with her paper was when she looked for evidence of 1st person narrator and subjectivity in the films she became vague, had not clearly identified analogous filmic techniques except for voice over.

Pip looking up

Tien-Ai Chin gave a fine paper showing how David Lean used light and darkness (artificial candle-light and shadows), profile photography, together with gloomy splendid architecture and parallels shots and outfits to convey the moral world and themes of Dickens’s Great Expectations. Profiles (Lean felt) make us feel people are hiding from their pain She began with the opening still of Pip coming to Miss Havisham & ended on the repeat closing still of Pip and Estella escaping, going through the film at key points. Estelle is filmed to show her replicating Miss Havisham, others to show them humiliating Pip who is caught off from warmth.

Pip with Estelle in Miss Havisham’s place

By the end of the film Miss Havisham knows she has done great harm to Pip, and as she does the sunlight begins to be felt. I could see that Andrew Davies in his Little Dorrit had for the characters of Mrs and Arthur Clenham imitated Lean’s film.

A very complicated abstract paper on remediation in films was read by Darren Zufelt. If he was trying to teach what is meant by remediation, he certainly went about it using the most difficult abstract language one can find. Basically you take something found in one medium (say theater components, say a painting) and adopt it into the new one. Example: we see a book being read inside the movie and then the camera moves into the book. We have to place the film adaptation on the same level as its textual source, and interpret its web of intertextualities or re-makings (remediations). Some texts resist remediation more: for example a play whose words have become important to us. At the end he discussed new media; his example was audio books. Listening to a book read aloud dramatically by a single person changes the experience.

There was good discussion after these papers. I contributed the idea from my S&S book that when a movie is seen mostly from a single character’s point of view, when he or she is in every scene we have an equivalent of first person. I suggested the power of the 1995 S&S with Emma Thompson is she is in almost every scene and the way the camera is used suggests we are seeing everyone from her point of view.

There are normative moments in the The Piano Teacher

David Young had a hard sell. He argued that in Michael Haneke’s films, violent, cruel, out of alienated points of view, we repeatedly have instances of tender love. In Amour the elderly man loves his wife so selflessly that he kills her because she wants this. He cannot himself bear to lose her. We see humane acts in their daily routine. In the Time of the Wolf where there is such terror, savagery, nonetheless a feral Rumanian boy witnesses love and compassion between a man and wife; people attempt to survive and join other survivors. Young found love within a scene where a man axes a family fish tank and watches the fish slowly suffocate. I must say I missed the “small act of relentless love” he described. Even The Piano Teacher where love is shown as alienated sex and the ending is a brutal rape, we see that Isabelle Huppert wants to be loved; she prefers the hard relationship because she fears being hurt. Young quoted Haneke: “In general everyone has an expectation of love … most of the time I do not care about your expectation, I just care about my own.” This is what he studies, and when people do care for another.

For the last film paper I heard, Michael Rennett on Judd Apatow, a TV producer, director, screenplay writer, and Stone and Kuznick’s presentation of Part 3 of Untold History and question and answer period afterward see the comments.

Ellen

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Trollope’s widows: we are unaware of quite how many women in black he has

Very first shot of Madame Max Goesler (Barbara Murray) (Pallisers 3:6)

Dear friends and readers,

On the list-serv, Victoria an interesting query: could people cite widows in Victorian novels and what were some attitudes towards them and/or their remarrying? Someone right away mentioned Madame Max Goesler, cited a study in the recent collection Trollope and Gender, with the idea that Trollope’s widows are strong and sympathized-with figures.

That seemed to me (even for a posting) inadequate. Trollope’s fiction (and non-fiction too) abounds in widows using the type with many permutations. the fault-line, what separates the woman off from other women is her assumed sexual experience (knowingness); beyond that she is usually older than women who have never been married and may control property. Towards the type Trollope is ambivalent as he is ambivalent towards aggressive women, which in his fiction except for aging harridans (who usually dislike sex) means sexually pro-active, and women who function as individuals with power and movement outside a husband or family’s control.

The Widow Greenow (a pastoral name) alluring men at seashore picnic (Phiz illustration, Can You Forgive Her?
The Widow Greenow (an early comic example of a woman who knows how to make her “weeds” alluring

A brief suggestive survey (by no means complete). To begin with the most famous: When we first meet Madame Max in Trollope’s books (Can You Forgive Her?) it’s not clear she is a widow; it’s insinuated that she’s paying someone who she married to stay away (a remittance man). Later Trollope drops that when he wants to make her respectable and chaste so Phineas can marry her.

Mrs Hurtle (Miranda Otto) and Paul Montague (Cillian Murphy) at Lowestoffe (they probably go to bed together in the novel, they certainly do in the film, from The Way We Live Now; on the illustration this is based on, see proposal)

Trollope uses this motif for other women whose reputation he wants to cast a slur or hint they are unchaste: Mrs Hurtle’s husband is probably still living (The Way We Live Now). In Miss Mackenzie the women in boarding houses who present themselves as widows are not to be trusted, especially (it seems) in Bath (the hint is they are for sale). Mrs Smith in John Caldigate a very suspicious figure (Trollope’s presentation makes her this way) whom the hero may have married: we are never quite sure, and thus it may actually be that Caldigate’s marriage to the heroine, Hester, may actually be bigamous, whence the title Trollope wanted for his novel, Mrs John Caldigate (to call attention to the reality that we don’t know which of the two is really entitled to be Mrs C).

When John Caldigate first comes upon Mrs Smith: a ship journey remance (Folio Society illustration)

It is true that if a woman is menopausal and remains physically attractive, she is usually presented as sympathetic as well as powerful (Lady Ludlow the best-known from Framley Parsonage), but if she actually exercises that power to thwart a young man of his sexual desires, she is stigmatized (Rachael Ray’s mother) or made a sort of monster (Lady Ball in Miss Mackenzie). If she openly breaks sexual taboos (married for money even though this is allowed men), like Lady Ongar (The Claverings), she is punished harshly.

Mary Ellen Edwards drew Lady Ongar as large — here she’s trying to re-engage the hero’s sympathies (Claverings illustrations)

If she remains attractive, she has ever to be on the watch for the suspicious and distrustful: Lady Mason (Orley Farm) is under her son’s thumb and is seen as a target (and she knows it) before her son’s inheritance is questioned (partly due to his tactlessness). There’s great sympathy for Lady Mason and we are to admire her for winning a case where she was is accused of forgery — when she actually did it. Millais’s illustrations curiously make her out to be even younger than Trollope’s text suggests.

Millais’s Lady Mason shrinks from her needed lawyer Mr Furnivall’s suspicious (jealous) wife (Orley Farm illustrations)

To me though the most interesting uses of this ambivalent type of women in Trollope is where the woman has used the title to cover up a period between one relationship (marriage) and another (a second man where she has not waited until the first one was dead to “protect” herself) and Trollope sympathizes with her: Mrs Mary Askerton (The Belton Estate) now respectably married again had a period where she wasn’t a widow; she became one when her alcoholic (and presumably abusive husband) at long last died; she seems to be a parish still, shunned; it’s not clear that she couldn’t break out in to society, but at any rate only the heroine. Clara Amedroz defies the worst minds and befriends Mrs Askerton. There’s much sympathy in Dr Wortle’s School for Mr and Mrs Peacock; he married her but it’s not clear the previous husband died, and again (as in the case of Lady Mason) personal animosity leads someone to attack them to get Dr Wortle (in whose school they teach). Madame Max can be related to these until Trollope conveniently forgets about her remittance man.

Showing either that Trollope’s particular configuration of sympathy for the transgressive woman is not share today, or his more devoted readers do not think about this aspect of his fiction enough, there were no original illustrations for these widows, nor have the novels they appear in been filmed or even adapted for radio. The Widow Greenow was cut from the filmed Pallisers. And by Phineas Finn Madame Max has been turned into a chaste type widow who refuses the Duke of Omnium’s proposition that she become his mistress.

After a violent scene where Lopez needles Emily (Sheila Ruskin) over how she enjoys sex with him, and flings her to the door, she shudders (Pallisers 11:23, from The Prime Minister)

Erasures or forgetting aspects of Trollope’s presentations of widows today sometimes work to reinforce his views. When in The Prime Minister Emily Lopez believes herself “polluted” from having married an amoral and (it’s more than hinted) sexually lascivious (and Jewish) man, Ferdinand Lopez, in the novels she at length refuses to remarry the Gallahad-figure Arthur Fletcher (who she loved first and we see again loved during her marriage, causing sexual rage in Lopez). Trollope seems to assume all women should be married. That is the be-all of their existence. The TV programs cut all this. Raven does not make her collapse into the other hero’s arms quickly either. Anticipating the end of Andrew Davies’s The Way We Live Now, Raven’s Emily (like Trollope’s Lily Dale) has been seriously disillusioned, abused, and we are given to understand will marry no more.

Emily prefers her father, Mr Wharton (Pallisers 11:23)

Marie Melmotte (Shirley Henderson) closes the door on everyone (TWWLN 4:12)

While at the Exeter conference (6 years ago now) and today again the question came up why Victorians seem to have a prejudice against widows remarrying. At the conference I remember participants saying widows were a threat to the chances of unmarried women. That’s certainly in Trollope. But he also likens the black widows wear (which he disapproves of when it is too heavy or goes on for too long as hypocritical) to Indian women undergoing suttee where he makes an explicit analogy between how the family of a widow’s husband do not want her children from a second marriage interfering with the inheritance of the first husband’s children. The impulse is to erase her future, not allow her any lest it get in others’ way. And he shares the strong prejudice against women having a pro-active sexual life too (an impulse not gone from our world today).

At the Exeter conference too some of the men showed they were allured by Trollope’s widows, especially Madame Max. I’ve noticed on list-servs that male viewers often have a crush on Barbara Murray who played the part splendidly. This even though in the novels she is given masculine roles and the words used to describe her by Trollope make her into more of a gentlemen than lady, and in the films she adds to the erotic sophisticated veneer Trollope gives her much comedy (she is given funny scenes rejecting Derek Jacobi as Lord Fawn) and much poignancy and dignity at the series’ close. Early in her career the actress was a powerful Anna Karenina; and in a Wednesday night play the mistress of a broken man played by Donal Mcann.

But rather than repeat what everyone notices, I’ll end on the Widow Bold who was acted equally well (the role quite different) by Janet Maw from Alan Pater’s wonderfully scripted mini-series, Barchester Chronicles:

Another Emily faithful to her father, Mrs Bold looks out anxiously at Mr Harding and the Rev Arabin (English, clergyman, upper class, an ethical ideal for Trollope), and is never taken in by either Mr Slope (the intensely ambitious outsider, Alan Rickman just behind her) or

Bertie Stanhope, the idle ne’er-do-well who wanted her money for his family and himself:

She has just let Bertie (Peter Blythe) know he hasn’t got a chance

She is strongly sympathized with; she is pro-active on her own behalf, sexually passionate; she is liked because she breaks no taboos, loves her little boy and is loyal to her idealistic father

Women in black … The illustrations and stills tell us that for Trollope these are highly sexualized women. They don’t tell us what his narrator and book descriptions do: that Trollope’s taste was for thin women; he was allured by olive-skinned women, women had narrow wrists and small breasts (“narrow shoulders”). (The Victorian ideal is the fecund big blonde, the Juno type Trollope’s narrator calls her, does not attract him personally.)

Ellen

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Downton Abbey 3:5: childbirth as risk, trauma; or how to get rid of a character

Sir Philip Tapsell (Tim Piggot-Smith): Never fear, Duchess, I’ll get a baby out of her one way or the other

Ethel: But I think it’s going to be a lot more complicated than you allow. Mrs Crawley: Then we shall have to face those complications together, shan’t we?

Tom (Allen Leech) trying to help Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay) feel comfortable and not managing

Then taking inopportune moment to confide he’s found a job as a mechanic (she hates the idea of him returning to laboring work)

Dear friends and readers,

People keep asking me why are so many people watching and talking about Downton Abbey? Well, by this time (the third season) it’s become what Truffaut called “a sociological event.” Many don’t want to feel left out as others passionately discuss what they wouldn’t have seen; so they watch.

Of course this just avoids the question, what hooked viewers originally? I’ve been showing precisely because DA exploits the features of the soap opera form, one peculiarly fitted to TV watching. Like the clocks Mr Barrow teaches Jim are living things: “Never wind them in the early morning before a room is warmed up nor too late when the night air cools them down.” And I’ve tried to show Fellowes uncanny intuition for dramatizing paradigms of intensely sore areas — like when in the 1st episode of this season a mean bully-trick is exposed. Many suffering from bullying and underhanded tricks today know in fact such behavior is tolerated, still treated as a joke.

This power of this week’s episode derives from the way historical novels and films present usable pasts (or create them) in order to speak to us today. It is no coincidence that another female died in childbirth in a paradigm just like Lady Sybil’s in a mini-series that has sold more copies than any other (until perhaps Downton Abbey) but the 1995 A&E/WBGH/BBC Pride and Prejudice (scripted Andrew Davies, with Colin Firth as Darcy): the 1970s 2nd mini-series of Poldark ends in the death of Elizabeth Chynoweth Poldark Warleggan in childbirth. We see Elizabeth (Jill Townsend) during parturition suffering badly:

Dr Enys (Michael Cadman) helping her give birth

Like Sybil, Elizabeth gives birth and everyone rejoices, and then a few hours later we hear her screams. We’ve gone on from 1977: we hear but do not see Elizabeth die in an agony. But it is the same sudden turn about. In the earlier case (by which I mean 1977-78) the woman does not die from eclampsia but from having taken a dangerous herb-drug to induce early parturition (see court cases), and whatever Dr Enys did probably would have been as useless as the doctors in this week’s Downton Abbey (2013). (More on Elizabeth’s story.) Neo-Victorian novels are said to be feminist and it would be interesting to compare how many deaths in childbirth are directly dramatized in these novels and the specific treatment, and how these are treated in mini-series on TV but this would take research and is beyond the purview of my weekly recaps).

The point is the scenes of intense anxiety with which the episode opens, the later terrors and pains, the intense fear, the sudden relief, the turn around, and then the sudden death are about what women experience today. And also the moving half-crazed reactions of several of the characters to childbirth, here to a death. Elizabeth McGovern came into her own again (she has not had such a meaty series of scenes since she almost died of flu in Season 2) when we come upon her talking to the corpse of her daughter — with no preparations that this is what we are seeing.

Along with Tom, the husband, Cora, her mother (Elizabeth McGovern) is the person closest to Sybil during her death convulsions

Cora’s apparent calmness and smile and quiet talk fool us for the couple of seconds it takes to grasp she is talking to the dead

For once the Dowager Duchess is not funny. Maggie Smith uses her aging body in a long walk across the hall to emphasize the feeling of gross injustice at the death of the young woman.

Maggie Smith as the old woman with the distorted body, staggering slightly, leaning on her cane walking to the family now she’s heard of the death

We then see her earnestly talking about how it was nobody’s fault. For once Lord Grantham does take part of the blame, which concession may be seen as ironic from a distance as obviously he did not cause her eclampsia, though it is true at the opening of the episode he becomes irritated when Dr Clarkson tries to tell the family about the details of symptoms that are worrying him. But then is not Cora as much to blame when she tells Clarkson he is giving too much information and all they need to know is can they go back to bed?

Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) looking away as Cora tells Clarkson (David Robb) he is offering TMI

One aspect of childbirth today that seems to bother women that this week’s episode made visible is how men as physicians are often in charge. Blog after blog, comments, postings all “interpreted” the death of Sybil as the result of men in charge. In the particular instance the fatuous Tapsell was wrong, and Dr Clarkson was not able to get Lord Grantham to follow his advice and take Sybil to the hospital and try to induce labor early (a bit of anachronism there), but we could put that down to class bias. Cora, Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) blames Lord Grantham, but she is complicit, does not herself act on her impulse to ask Tom (someone calls him the “chaffeur” still), who doesn’t know what to do. And it’s by no means clear that had they gone to the hospital the outcome would have been better. It is though true that the last quarter century women have been trying to free themselves of male control, instinctively sensing the male is not sufficiently on their side as women but rather supporting the medical establishment.

For my part, while watching this week’s episode I kept remembering how during the very first time I was pregnant my husband and I had this little plan we got from the sessions on childbirth we attended together. We were going to have this book of short poems with us and he read them as we followed all our instructions on distraction. What laugh when it began to happen. Totally unreal. Or just before I went in when my grandmother suddenly turned round to me and said, oh so seriously to me, “Good Luck.” I would need was the dire feel. Looking back from another childbirth more than 6 years after the first my grandmother was the only person who produced an appropriate tone, who had not been cut off from the reality of history as well as experience. (Full disclosure: I’ve had two live births, both C-sections; before that, two miscarriages, one of which ended in an abortion to save my life.)

In Anibundel’s blog on DA this week, she links in Ta Nehisi-Coates’s great shock when he discovered childbirth is still dangerous, and a general column validating the insight that science is not magic: nature is still there and evolution has made childbirth risky for mother and baby. Atul Gawande has tried to remind women what childbirth is and was not just before the 20th century technological breakthroughs but recently.

Most after the first experience even when everything does not go badly and ends well (live healthy mother and baby) know the truth. Labor is not discomfort, it’s pain, bad pain, and the experience physically traumatic. Why is this not discussed? the same reason that the details of childbirth were not discussed in earlier times, were taboo in the Victorian novel. It seems all cultures do what they can to erase the hardship of having babies in order to pressure women into becoming mothers. I queried Victoria (a list-serv about Victorian books) two days ago for citations of scenes where we have a direct dramatization of death or agonies in childbirth. Very uncommon. We are presented with orphans, the experience of a woman is reported, but a direct scene? and when it is detailed the reviewers protested. See my list of typical childbirth deaths in Victorian to Edwardian novels.

Cora’s failure of nerve: Clarkson is speaking firmly against Tapsell and Lord Grantham (who have objected to “public” hospitals) but we see in Cora’s face a fatal hesitation (tellingly it’s Edith who stands behind her mother in such scenes)

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

Thomas Barrow (Rob James-Collier) teaching Jimmy Kent (Ed Speleers) how to wind a clock

To some watchers it may seem remarkable that this is not the only thread in this week’s multi-plot pattern. Put it down to the ability of Fellowes to convey meaning through epitomizing dialogues and gestures and the sophistication of viewers who have seen this sort of thing before. The thread with the most scenes is that of Isobel Crawley’s attempt to hire of Ethel Parks as a servant to enable her to climb out of the pariah status she is now in even though Ethel finds she need no longer be a prostitute to make ends meet. (No boy to clothe, feed, send to school.) Ethel is deeply grateful but warns Mrs Crawley that there will be complications (the use of the word links this substory with that of Lady Sybil).

Ethel (Amy Nuttall) wants this good place but is understandably fearful; Mrs Crawley (Penelope Wilton) listening

I for one was not surprised to see Mrs Bird refuse to work with Ethel. My favorite moment in this week’s episode was where the narrow Mrs Bird thinking that if she says she’ll leave, Mrs Crawley will not hire Ethel, tells Mrs Crawley she’s going and Mrs Crawley thanks her and wishes her well.

Mrs Bird (Christine Lohr) realizing her risky ploy has failed, and she is being “sacked”

Normally I loathe scenes which show the power of the employer; not this time. This being Fellowes he gives the sarky conservative who disdains good acts ammunition by making Ethel a bad cook, awkward, stumbling. But Mrs Crawley is not ridiculed for once. (Several unusual moments this week.) My hope (looking ahead) is that when Mrs Crawley loses her son (hush hush I know) she may find her reward for her beautiful act was to find she has this loving giving person with her as a substitute.

Daisy (Sophie McShera) hearing of the young mistress’s death

Daisy too is made to realize she is not as powerful as she dreamed she would be by her promotion. We see her struck by the powerful Lady Sybil’s death. Later she realizes too she is making herself disliked by Alfred by bullying the new scullery maid, Ivy, who shows competence. One might say realization is the theme of this episode. Thomas surprises himself by grieving over Lady Sybil’s death. He realizes how much she meant to him as a caring employer. We have, done with remarkable celerity, Anna and John Bates realizing how Bates’s ex-wife poisoned herself and framed him for murder, Anna’s meeting with Lord Grantham and then the lawyer (both of which are literally skipped — we are to understand what was said).

This is not the first time Mary (Michelle Dockery) had stood accusing Matthew (Dan Stevens) and he back away

There are also realizations to come. Matthew has realized that Lord Grantham is badly mismanaging Downton Abbey but when he twice in this episode tries to do something about it, he is thwarted by Lady Mary. The first time it’s in a mild talk they have as they pass a ruined barn but the second she comes near to putting him “in his place” when he attempts to tell the lawyer (who himself knows something needs to be don). How dare Matthew try to talk to her father when he is so grieved? We are getting hints that all is not well in their sex life (that’s why no pregnancy has emerged). Miss Obrien is (alas) shown as up to her usual spite as she encourages Jimmy to turn to Thomas for help, and Jimmy begins to realize that because Thomas is homosexual (however closeted) this may cause difficulties for him (who is apparently not bisexual at all).

But all these feel like very much tertiary threads in the tapestry of this week’s central drama. There is perhaps too much idealization of Sybil now she’s dead: Mrs Patmore: “She was the kindest person in the house.” But rather than cavil I’d like to close where I opened: the soap opera nature of these programs and another way of looking at Sybil Bransom’s death.

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

Sybil and Mary discuss Tom’s desire to take a job and the baby’s religion: Mary is evasive, reluctant to agree

It was reported at the end of the 1st season that Jessica Brown Findlay and Dan Stevens had said they did not want to return for a second season. That could be interpreted as wanting more money. Then between the 2nd and 3rd the same two were said to want out. This past fall it was said Maggie Smith would not do a fourth year, but now she has agreed to. Her departure would have been such a great loss to the series as almost to deal it a death-blow.

It can kill a show to lose a favored actor or actress. They are part of the mix that attracts, part of the dream life of the viewer’s on-going time the form caters to. Let’s say were Downton Abbey a day-time program, and the producers were confronted with the problem of an actor who wants out, would they kill her off? I suggest perhaps not. The structuring of soap operas is based on the idea of an ongoing community of characters only some of whom we see in an particular episodes or series of episodes. Characters drift in and out, disappear, reappear, leave legacies. It’s the large community that we see, and someone can vanish and then at a later time return. They can be brought back. This is very much the way of cyclical series of novels: Trollope has vanishing and recurring characters; so too Oliphant, Balzac, in our own time Anthony Powell. It would be easy for Fellowes to bring Sir Richard Carlisle back if the original actor or an actor who looked sufficiently like him were willing. We have a new footman, a new scullery maid. Mrs Bird is going to vanish at least for a while after this episode.

But DA is not quite ongoing in the same way as daytime TV. It’s not daily, and it doesn’t go on all year. We have only so many parts, so we really do concentrate on about 14 or so characters, with some central stars. Of course they could have written it that Sybil went off to Ireland with Tom and that’s that. Fellowes wants a family that sticks together (part of his piety). Findlay Brown’s determination to find another role and not be typecast enabled him to see his way to strong scenes by using her departure this way.

We have been similarly told that Dan Stevens is leaving after this year. He had been acting in the US on Broadway (among other roles). The character has certainly been made to feel useless for the last two episodes or so. He alone encourages Sybil in her budding career as a journalist but except for her (and she doesn’t count for much in the family prestige) if he brings forth any of his modern or progressive ideas (like his mother’s), they are not much appreciated.

Another epitomizing scene in this episode was between Mary and Sybil (as sisters they were close). Sybil asked Mary to help her stop Tom from taking a job a a lower rank and told her that she intended to make the baby Catholic to please Tom. Mary’s reply: “you don’t have to.” Now that Sybil is dead, the way is open for the family (we know of Lord Grantham’s bigotry towards Catholics) to protest this baptism (on all sorts of grounds including future career). If a struggle ensues over the baby’s religion, and Matthew sticks up for Tom’s rights as he has before), do you think that will count for much?

The closing still: Tom nursing his child

Again I have been discussing how soap opera works in order to defend the form.

P.S. For fun and semiotics: the Hats of Downton Abbey, Season 3

The hats a character wears tell a lot about her. This year the costume designer had a smaller costumer budget.

Ellen

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Downton Abbey 3:3: cruelty so raw it took my breath away

Edith (Laura Carmichael) having a hard time breathing as she realizes the humiliation in store right then

Letting go

Exhaustion defeat

Dear friends and readers,

So what was it? What had this character done wrong to have unleashed at her such a level of spite, of raw humiliation that I’ve never seen equaled in kind before — and I’ve been watching mini-series for some 40 years? Before the whole community, people she must live with, a fever pitch of rejection. The question to ask is, Why is this character scapegoated so?

Jane Eyre’s horror when Rochester’s brother-in-law interrupts her wedding to Rochester to say there is an impediment, Rochester had a wife now living, pales before this. Nothing to it.

I’ve long been puzzled at the way Lady Edith Grantham is sneered at, mocked, by Downton Abbey audience members. Fellowes, again knowing writer that he is (remember he wrote Gosford Park, one of the most intelligent of the great house movies I’ve seen, to expose the hypocrisies of professed motives), has been feeding this maw for three seasons. For three seasons I’ve seen it emerge again and again. In little things: Elizabeth McGovern as Cora Lady Grantham is directed to roll her eyes when Edith speaks; Maggie Smith as the dowager and Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary Princess grimace knowingly. In the first Edith gave away that her sister, Mary, had been in bed with one of the show’s several lout-lords who died at the abbey; in the second Edith drawn to, fooled by a man masquerading as a hideous cripple. I thought perhaps Fellows had decided he’d whip-lashed Edith enough when in 3:1 he had Robert Bathurst as Strallan courageously break the taboo which allows mean tricks and expose one played on Allen Leech as Tom Branson by another lout-lord.

I mistook. I should have realized that the intrusive domineering demand that Edith not consider this man by the Dowager was an important sign. I’ve never liked Lady Bracknell (Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest), a witty bully, upon whom (Edith Evans) Maggie Smith may intuitively have modeled herself. Amusing cynic yes, like one of the old women Anthony Trollope is ever defending. She has the crass nerve to get up and insist what is happening is right and thus disable Strallan further (he crumbled because he overheard her making fun of his prowess to the chaplain):

She’s one of many in the DA world who thinks she has intimate rights over other people subject to her authority (some behave as if many others have intimate rights over them). The dowager couldn’t stand Strallan so Edith is thrown away with him. So what is wrong with him? Aristocrat, monied, kind, perceptive, offering “quite enough happiness” for Edith to be going on with (Lord Grantham’s words).

This gives us our first hint: what is wrong? he’s said to be too old and he’s got a crippled arm, masks, masks for not saying for he’s not manly enough, not macho enough, weak.

He fails to perform masculinity adequately. There you have it. And Edith, why is she a butt? She fails to perform femininity adequately. Jim was telling me tonight that he reads a blog which argues that the real electric power of DA (for those who are addicted) is it’s camp, and tonight he read there the offhand comment that some ludicrous star, inexplicably wrong in her garments, was dressed in the Edith Grantham style. Not Lady Mary Grantham. Not Lady Sybil, now Mrs Bransom (Deborah Findley Brown). Though they all dress alike.

Tom all awkwardness, Sybil turned dowdiness itself

So this hint is not sufficiently explanatory. This is not the first time I’ve asked myself what fuels the need to ridicule this young woman?

As I have before I hunted in three very good books on women’s films I have: Tania Modleski’s mongraph Loving with a Vengeange; and edited collections of essays by Marcia Landy (Imitations of Life) and Christine Gledhill (Home is Where the Heart Is). This time I wouldn’t give up. In previous hints I’ve found Miss Sarah Obrien (Siobhan Finneran): the villainess, spiteful domineering old maid; in 3:1 and 3:2 I tried to ignore her reversion to this role but in 3:3 she is not only wearing the ugliest of thick-cloth witch-like dresses, her face made up to look like pancake, her hair terrible. She is all menace. Daisy (Sophie McShera) tells Moseley she wouldn’t want Miss Obrien to be angry at her. In this episode Miss Obrien was outwitted by Thomas (he has also returned to smirking bad gay guy, narrow envious gay man Rob James-Cellier) who foolishly thought he could make her lose her job by telling (the now trembling) Molseley (Kevin Doyle) she meant to leave and directly Molseley to offer a relative as new lady’s maid to Lady Grantham.

I found Anna — long suffering, self-sacrificing nurse type. Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan), everyone’s well-meaning mother.

Trawl, trawl, trawl and then I saw it. Tania Modleski had it: no heroine is allowed to admit openly she longs to marry.

Is not this Edith’s flaw? in the first episode she became a Lawrentian-style farm girl to allure a man (whose wife put a stop to that). She wanted to love the crippled man. And what does she say when lying in her bed afterwards: not that she has missed a dreamed-of precious life, but that both sisters are married, one is pregnant and probably the other is. We have enough to see she does like him, but that’s not the emphasis here.

She wore her heart on her sleeve. She was open. She is indiscreet. Worse: she is inept at manipulation. She breaks code & for that and her exposure of the game she cannot be forgiven. Loneliness is a laugh among Judith Butler-style performers. Did anyone in her family, anyone downstairs feel for her? Anna Smith Bates (Joanne Froggart), in some ways an alter ego; it’s no coincidence Anna is Edith’s shadow in the last we see of Edith in this episode:

She tells Anna she wishes she had another life (something Anna ought to wish for if she had any real value for herself and her time)

Score high for Fellowes. I put it to my reader this scene will be remembered and imitated. It’ll be spoken of. You thought Downton Abbey was running out of dazzle, did you?

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Mrs Hughes and Lesley Nichol as Mrs Patmore hestitate before going into doctor’s office

I had meant to show how each separate episode in a good mini-series will have its own structure and set of themes. I showed patterns in 3:2. Here, then we are looking at themes. As it’s a hidden dialogue (overheard) that defeats Strallan so this is an episode rife with hidden information and lies which have power to hurt, often enough known by people who do not realize their power. Thomas lies to Molseley and inconsistently Cora, Lady Grantham does not give Miss Obrien a chance to explain herself (“I am very hurt by your behavior”) while being all fairy-godmother goodness to Phyllis Logan as Mrs Hughes (“we will keep you” if you should become too ill to work). Daisy alone knows that Lavinia Swine (Zoe Boyle) sent a letter to her lawyer on the day she was dying and blurts it out, thus enabling Lady Mary to pressure Matthew to accept a legacy the family needs. Mrs Bartlett (Claire Higgins) may know the truth of Bates’s wife’s last hours. In the prison a friend warns Bates (Brendan Coyle) that a weapon has been planted in his bed and the police told; he is able to wrest it out of his bedding and hide it before the police rush in to search.

And so it goes. Lies, secrecy, silence — central themes in women’s books ever since Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.

Preposterous scenes of virtue — central to women’s romance since heroic 17th century romance and rife in opera. So Matthew cannot bear to accept his legacy and when persuaded to, Lord Grantham will not take the money but share the abbey with his son-in-law who admits he likes living there. Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton) teaching sleazy sarky prostitutes to use sewing machines while they jeer at her. Fellowes’s disdain and hostile depiction of the lowest vulnerable members of society is not compensated for by Ethel Parks’s shame when she comes in for help (naturally not for herself) and again flees rather than tell her secret.

What are men and women allowed to do is presented as a genuine question. Not reveal their appetite, as Anna tells Daisy that makes men flee:

The lobster is a part of the mise-en-scene — perhaps a joke version of vagina dentata?

Not take it upon yourself to criticize the arrangements of those above you Mr Carson tells Miss Obrien’s naive nephew, Alfred (Matt Milne).

Of course this is drivel as a serious investigation of how to live your life. It is really what you want that shapes your choices. Edith did want to marry Strallan and be mistress of his estate, have his children. Now she wants another life but cannot see her way to any other. Lady Mary wants to stay princess of Downton and Mr Carson her butler. Lord Grantham does not want to lose face or status. Matthew no longer seems to want the independence he once did, and Tom Bransom has begun to wear dinner jackets — they both appear to want to please their wives.

IN Downton Abbey we can measure the characters by what they want at this point. Miss Obrien wants to get back at Thomas for insulting her as someone who was never asked to be married (how does he know she ever wanted to?) and threatening her job.

As usual I warm most to Mrs Hughes who appears to want to live on, quietly, with dignity, as self-supporting as her world will let her be. I would warm to Isobel Crawley if (like Edith but for very different reasons) her work were not the subject of such ridicule.

What kind of life do you want to live is a serious debate found in Victorian novels. When Jane fled Rochester, she was forced “to build a life.” When Mrs Crawley is trying to reach Ethel, she wants also to be frank (like Edith is intuitively) and uses the word “prostitute” of how Ethel is surviving, and says “you should know this is true of every woman who has come here to rebuild their lives and I’m helping them, and is re-echoed mockingly:

(A camp picture?)

That’s right. Why not come in and help us rebuild our lives?

I understand the sarcastic laughter. People act in terms of particulars, of their own landscape, and if they don’t have access to a milieu that allows for fulfillment on middle class terms, they don’t get it. So Ethel says, “That’s not why I’m here Mrs Crawley. That is I am … what you said but I don’t want help, not for myself but … ” and unable to face whatever it is, she runs off again. It’s not so bad with Edith as say Mrs Bartlett (a laundress) or these unskilled women or Ethel. Isobel says over dinner what Edith needs is something useful to do.

But it has been a viscerally searing day for her, and my goal in this blog has been to investigate why Edith is the episode scapegoat.

Ellen

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Verdi’s Un ballo en maschera: new HD starkness, with exursis on the roving camera & interviews

Gustavo (Marcelo Alvaraz) and Amelia (Sondra Radvanovsky

So, friends and readers,

They sang their hearts out and acted the parts superbly well. To begin with what what is most memorable, second most and so on: Dimitri Hvorostovsky as the sexually betrayed husband best friend to the king, Count Anckarstrom (Renato), baritone in his role in the third act, was shaking from his controlled hysteria at his wife and decision (just) not to kill her when he’d done his magnificent long aria.

Count Anckarstrom, Renato (Dmitri Hovorostovsky)

Stephanie Blythe as the sybil Ulrica, as her name reveals a Scott like mad prophecy moment turned into the nervous cynical court fortune teller was superb; her entrance in trailing coat and sleuth-woman hat which she then took off they improved on what in the opera has become cliched stuff. She was attention-getting with her pocketbook with its large gold clasp, cigarette and flask (liquor):

Ulrica (Stephanie Blythe), Gustavo, Oscar, Gustavo’s page (Kathleen Kim)

Suddenly I wish I knew what Scott was available in Italian and what the Italian texts were like. The graveyard scene (contradictory as were they all with its Icarus ceiling and white walls):

Amelia, Gustavo, Renato

Act 3 is songfest, from extraordinary alluring thrilling melodies, to ominous choruses. The set as a whole, symbolic on top, walls, including the soprano in a slip falling against a white wall with a single large symbolic object nearby reminded me of Willy Dekker’s Traviata. David Alden was the producer and Saul Steinberg the set designer and they have clearly been influenced by Euro-trash (as it’s called operas) as well as Broadway too.

Stark was the aim, simplify and symbolize the mode.

The opera does have problems. One could say of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito there’s more there; they could do this or that. This one is what it is. It feels ungrateful to say that but it’s more dated than Traviata: the complicated plot for example. And the depiction of women’s chastity with the implication that if she had had a full sexual relationship with the king, she would have been abhorrent is deeply anti-women — especially as the opera is ultimately based on a real 18th century king and his court, Gustavus of Sweden who took the wife of his chief supporter and courtier for his mistress. Many plays of the Jacobean era show this was common; other sources show the way a married couple could rise in court was that she become the king’s mistress. They also show inevitably often the “cuckolded” man became humiliated and sometimes killed the wife and/or the king or tried to (e.g., Beaumont and Fletcher’s King and No King). The original, Una vendetta, had political matter which is feebly reflected because of the censorship. At the real court there was a fortune teller, who when she told of the king’s death and it came true, was shunned.

It is true that had Verdi been able to explore some truths about politics at court, this would have been a sizzling important opera. Had he been able at least to present as aspect of where revolutions come from, court coteries, ditto. If we knew something of his preoccupations, something never gone into or rarely during intermissions. As he was not, and they do not, the opera remains contradictory, half-baked partly senseless antics leading nowhere. It feels ungrateful to say this but it should be said. As Clement says in her Opera, or the Undoing of Women or Kerman in his Opera as Drama, the content of the opera matters.

It is what it is, and the Met did its best to make the emotions that are believable effective, resonate. They provided absorbing entertainment through the masque background, costumes, and intermission material.

So I enjoyed it and was glad we went. I really feel it was the first time I truly saw it. I understood it for the first time, the subtitles of course did that, and the staging underlined what was happening inwardly. So for the first time I was roused by the music — having understood the content of the lyrics and what the gestures of actor-singers meant. Sondra Radvanovsky: first time I ever saw her; she effective.

Amelia in her chair Hamlet-like over a skull, Ulrica behind her

During his interview Dmitri Hvorostovsky swaggered and preened, and looked out at the audience and camera instead of at Deborah Voight, but he sang so well and is attractive. The tenor Marcelo Álvarez had a feel for it as an Italian opera, and that’s what it is, complete with comic fishermen, smugglers, men laughing at a cuckold, patriotic choruses. Oscar (Katherine Kim) didn’t make any sense in his white suit with white wings, the job was to provide a coloratura soprano throughout. I’m glad we went even if in insight into the human condition this was the equivalent of a pop melodramatic movie of 1950s TVm a proto-Sopranos.

Middle career Verdi. The soaring of Traviata, Rigoletto (a new production coming up this season), La Forza del Destino, Trovatore. Who can resist these if well done?

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What the roving camera shows before the opera, during the interviews, just afterwards central to experience

It is real fun, an education, fascinating to watch the crews during most of the intermissions. (There are some where there is little for stagehands to do.) The stage is somehow not quite de-mystified. You are in on what’s happening behind the screen. We love that. This time we witnessed (if you were watching a small spat between the chief carpenter, head of the crew, and one of his people protesting apparently against being asked to clean the mirror-glass. Beneath his dignity, not important enough.

It takes hundreds of people to put up the scenes the curtains open up on. You learn a lot about staging as you watch them.

You feel part of the here, now alive aspect of things because the camera shows us the audience. They cannot see us, but we see them.

I can find no shots online of Deborah Voight (soon to be Cassandra in Les Troyens) as hostess for the interviews this time. I didn’t expect to. Nor probably Susan Graham (soon to be Dido in Les Troyens). None of the tech people and crews moving, pulling down, putting up pieces of staging.

The interviews and watching the crew set up the stage are part of what we the movie-house audiences are offered — and cannot be seen by the live people in the house. It adds a lot — pace each hostess’s mantra about how much better it is to be in the house, I’d say from the second tier up it’s not. We are taken to the costume shop, to the dressing rooms, hear taped interviews with composers and directors that can be informative, watch rehearsal sessions.

So a little on these.

Bootleg photo of intermission scene that I found on the Net — possibly by someone using a cell phone

This time, as I say, Deborah Voigt did it; she frequently has (as also Renee Fleming). They are personable and seem comfortable, feel like they are ad-libing, are comfortable and can cope with whatever their interviewees say or do. At one point the camera allowed us to see Deborah chatting with the two people she was about to interview from afar (while we watched the sets set up — and hard physical labor it was too) and I could see she had a teleprompter with the words she was to say facing her. That with its words is usually unseen by movie-house viewers.

The ability to be hostess (or host) takes a very different kind of talent to that of singer-actor within the opera play-world. Sondra Radvanovsky was the hostess I saw for the Otello, whose behavior was so cliched and absurd, so frozen. She could not get herself to react spontaneously enough — or seem to — the interviewed. So as a singer-actress I’d never have identified her as the same person. She certainly didn’t remind me of the stiff cliched inappropriately (for her body) overdressed, over-sexed hostess. Joyce Didonato was marvelous as Sycorax and in the interview done “at sea-level” in this production of her practicing Maria Stuarda promises a stunning performance. She was a very poor hostess, dull, lifeless.

As hostess (or host), you don’t have the mask of “being in your character” and you come out as partly yourself. So no or not-as-much hiding. Since inveighing against Radvanovsky’s super-tight, super-sexy outfit, I’ve since realized that the clothes the host or hostess wears (and jewels the hostess wears) are provided by the Met. There are credits saying Miss so-and-so dressed by. I didn’t know that. So Radvanosky was dressed by the Met that way.

Jim tells me that Radvanosky is said to have a gay following (fans who refer to her as Sondra); this kind of thing is known. Maybe she was dressed that way because of this perceived following. Renee Fleming by contrast has not. I’ve noticed what I’d call snobbery towards Fleming among people who go to opera; they call her vulgar! vulgar. Opera itself, the whole thing, including house is an extravaganza of vulgarity on one level — crass, unashamed revelling in luxury, in the apparatus of wealth: let’s pretend to be aristocrats going to a palace. But I grant Fleming may be is perceived as “wholesome: and her roles and outfits as hostess are all traditionally feminine.

Photo of Fleming from a story telling of how she is gone to for hostess type help

I would believe that the women singers especially have some say in what they are going to wear too. The older ones do have this problem of ideals of youth and real slimness. I’ve been told that Deborah Voigt had the operation where you have your stomach stapled to make herself thin enough to do the heroine role in the Ring. I can see that Radvanosky is still playing sexy young or youngish women. She may feel — as some women do – that dresses that are youthful and tight make her look younger and thinner. I should probably on principle sympathize (feel for “my sisters”), but I’ve a real distaste for clothes that announce people as super-rich and glamorous and my experience is looser things that swirl around your body make you look smaller at least and maybe thinner. But these sort of looser clothes are not glamorous. Those who dress the actress-singer and she collaborating study carefully each choice of clothes.

Deborah Voight is dressed slightly mannishly in suit-like outfits, shoulder-length blonde hair in a flip page-boy.

Telling: the hosts just wear tuxes, much less trouble and yet despite the women having troubles such as I’ve suggested, for the 4 year period we’ve been going I can count on one hand how many times there has been a male host. Three times is all I remember. The first time we went: Thomas Hamsen was personable, handsome, but he never did it again of those I’ve gone to. We have gone to a concert of his at the Carnegie.

Eric Owens, the brilliant black singer who was so marvelous as Alberich in Wagner’s Ring: he seemed embarrassed to do it, determined to come out all sweetness and light, utterly harmless. So he was countering myths about black men — by contrast, let’s recall he had played Alberich using from deep within himself his own felt resentments as an outsider. On the stage as singer he has a mask; not as host.

And once Placido Domingo. He was charming and unashamed in asking for money. I could imagine his pitch at fund-raisers. But he was a bit unusually stiff, watching himself. Too much is riding on the success of these HD productions? more than money perhaps?

Photo of tech crew backstage found on the Net

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To conclude, I had an exchange of email letters with a friend who has been going to these HD operas for about 6 years and (like us) goes to the European operas transmitted by HD. He buys a season ticket to the Met nowadays and this year is going to several operas from La Strada, the Royal Opera House and elsewhere in NYC movie-houses. He wrote: “I have the busiest opera schedule this season I’ve ever had.” He’s even nowadays going to the New York City opera “something I haven’t done in years. Most of this is due to the fact that HD productions are the greatest thing since macaroni.”

Us too. Jim is planning several of these Eurocinemas. We’ll get to see Lohengrin, two more operas with the very handsome Jonas Kauffman, two more with the magnificent Simon Keenleyside. We nowadays go to Opera Lafayette, in summer Castleton in Virginia and Wolf Trap. I seems we hardly have a month without an opera. It’s hard to find time to go to an ordinary movie. And I remember years where we never saw one opera, especially when PBS goes through periods of not doing them — lest they put off an audience who never watch PBS anyway.

I read some in the audience in the Met theater are resentful. They complain they suspect the staging is nowadays done for the movie-houses. (They can see the cameras this year.) Why should they (those who do) pay $300 a seat, when we poor plebs pay $20. This is not the first time technology has made available to many what was once available only to a few. And this has changed what’s available — often with some disadvantages coming in.

I’ve no doubt this new technology and all the new kinds of staging, scenic design, half-Broadway productions will bring in a much bigger traditional audience of classical music lovers, usually older people with time and money to go on weekends and weekdays or evenings. It will bring in younger people too: again and again I see Izzy so charmed by the younger singers in the present productions as well as the more modern operas. She loved The Enchanted Island. Doing so many a year will exert pressure to expand the repertoire into the baroque and modern. It already has. Everyone must really act. The production design must be good and appropriate. All this may cause new 20th and 21st century operas to be mounted, and then more written. These can speak to us the way a Un ballo en maschera can’t.

As to the disadvantages, they have not yet emerged — except the pressure on singers to look conventionally young and beautiful. That was happening already.

Ellen

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Purcell and Tate’s Dido and Aeneas & Manuel de Falla’s Love by Sorcery at the Source Theater

The death of Dido

Dear friends and readers,

Sometimes we do go to live operas. And most of the time it’s one of the productions of Carla Huber’s In-Series, now in its 30th (yes thirtieth!) year. I want you to know how wonderful, original and daring this theater has been.

We were privileged on Tuesday night to be able to to go to a performance of the now over 200-year old chamber Baroque opera by Henry Purcell (composer) and Nahum Tate (librettist-poet): Dido & Aeneas, his abandonment of her taken from Virgil’s 4th book of the Aeneas. I think this may be the third time I’ve seen it: once downstairs in Vivian Beaumont Theater in NYC (a 1970s short-lived attempt to do small operas at the Met, Piccolo Met), once at the Folger, and now on just off U-Street.

This time the theater was so crowded, there was not an empty seat. I fear not everyone knew what they were in for. I heard one woman gong on about the interesting plot, and during the intermission someone behind me exploded with irritation because she was completely grated upon by the formality, conventions, music itself of this 17th century piece. She “had not expected this!” The second piece was a ballet by Manuel Falla, El Amor Brujo (Love by Sorcery), whose puppet show version of Don Quixote Jim and I saw at Castleton a couple of summers ago, Master Pedro’s Puppet Show. It was very still: basically we watch a woman’s nightmare enacted in front of her.

I suspect many in the audience were there for Carla — or because they go to her productions. She seems to know so many people, even recognizes us (or pretends to successfully). She is a miracle woman. Thirty years ago she quit a teaching post in music in a local college and started up this theater. Most women who do it (and women do it) leave off after a couple of years at most: Catherine Flyte ran out of money; you have praise that’s high and not many people come; it’s vexing and tiring and often thankless. Exhausting. She manages partly by devoting half her time to Spanish cabaret which brings in a popular crowd. But she does not compromise quality, taste, intelligence either in her higher culture or more popular ethnic productions. Sometimes the costumes and production design is clearly done on a shoestring budget, and she moves from theater to theater. But she sustains herself. Five Mozart operas where the libretto was rewritten to be modern and relevant. Carmen redone from Jose’s point of view.

This Dido and Aeneas was stylistically performed, beautifully sung, and the costumes lovely and appropriate, but (as we have before) we wondered if there is not a problem in the opera itself. Nahum Tate’s libretto seems to veer between sceptical slightly mocking comedy (subtly seen in the light-hearted witches) and the plangent tragedy of an abandoned woman. That Aeneas is given this hopelessly inadequate explanation for himself does not help matters in the sense of understanding the opera’s stance. Jim suggested that perhaps the origin of the first production explains the see-saw quality where sometimes you find something ludicrous in language or act and cannot be sure it was meant to be funny. Purcell did the opera for a school of young women (girls really) and wrote a moralistic “warning lesson” for them. Nahum Tate, fresh from the Restoration theater, with its ribaldry and misogyny made fun. Or perhaps it was the other way round.

Remarkable how many of these masterpiece-gems in the later 17th cetnury are plays written for schoolgirls to perform: Racine’s Athalie one example. Even more: how adult and grave the content can be.

Be that as it may (as they say), the music is exquisitely poignant in Dido’s famous lament. I embed a YouTube from Hampton court; do click and listen:

I know much less about Love Through Sorcery. It too places a forlorn woman at the center, but she is not a passive or accepting victim. The first version was a gypsy scene. Originally Candelas was a gypsy from Cadiz who goes to a cave to a sybil to ask the witch to conjure up her lost lover. As directed by Alan Paul, this version gave us a working woman whose lover has died, but she cannot rid herself of ambivalent memories. She works up the courage to summon him, and remembers good as well as very bad times in order to exorcise the demon from her soul. The piece included dancing by an alter ego, pantomime, much poetry. I suppose it was a ghost opera. By contrast, Falla’s Don Quixote episode was witty and pessimistic. Both modern disillusioned pieces.

An excerpt of the ballet done traditionally in a large theater:

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I asked the next morning on C18-l was there any literature, any secondary studies of this play. No answer cameth. But one friend said she finds herself driven wild by Dido: the play is so a male point of view.

The libretto is written strictly from a man’s POV … I, too, love the music -— Purcell was a musical genius -— our choir has sung some of his works [from his and Dryden’s “King Arthur”] and they were more fun to sing every time we rehearsed them). She was a queen! She’d get over that guy in no time flat -— I can’t stand Aeneas in this version. I just want to go up and slap her, shake her, and say “Get a grip, girl!” But that’s just me, most likely.

An essential source: “Stanley Sadie & associates, New Grove Dictionary of Music (‘Grove 5′) for reliable sources, mostly musicologists, on Purcell. (Purcell, one of my favorite subjects.)”

It is true that Purcell turns Virgil’s stoic male tale into one of the many tragedy queen operas to come. No different I suppose than many of our (by some) worshipped modern numinous stars and dead queens too (Marilyn Monroe dead at 33, Princess Diana), only more obvious. Think of all the Schiller based operas. A number of women poets wrote satiric responses to these tragedy queens, among them Anne Finch on Jane Shore (the play itself was political), Elizabeth Tollett on Anne Boleyn, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu on Mary Queen of Scots, to name but three.

So, gentle reader if you require an antidote to Dido’s lament, here’s

An Epilogue to a new play of Mary Queen of Scots [never finished], design’d to be spoke by Mrs Oldfield by Mary Montagu

What could Luxurious Woman wish for more
To fix her Joys, or to extend her Power?
Their every Wish was in this Mary seen,
Gay, Witty, Youthful, Beauteous and a Queen!
Vain useless Blessing with ill Conduct joyn’d!
Light as the Air, and Fleeting as the Wind.
What ever Poets write, or Lovers vow;
Beauty, what poor Omnipotence hast thou!
Queen Bess had Wisdom, Councel, Power
How few espous’d a Wretched Beauty’s Cause!
Learn hence, ye Fair, more solid charms to prize …

If you will Love, love like Eliza then,
Love for Amusement like those Traitors, Men.
Think that the Pastimes of a Leisure Hour
She favour’d oft — but never shar’d her Power.

The Traveller by Desart Wolves persu’d,
If by his Art the savage Foe’s subdu’d,
The World will still the noble Act applaud,
Tho’ Victory was gain’d by needfull Fraud.

Such is (my tender Sex) our helpless Case
And such the barbarous Heart, hid by the begging Face.
By Passion fir’d, and not with held by Shame,
They cruel Hunters are, we trembling Game.

Trust me Dear Ladys (for I know ‘em well),
They burn to Triumph, and they sigh — to tell.
Cruel to them that Yeild, Cullys to them that sell.
Beleive me tis by far the wiser Course,
Superior Art should meet superior force.

Hear: but be faithfull to your Interest still,
Secure your Hearts, then Fool with who you will.

and Anne Finch’s The audience tonight seems so very kind. Tollett is not so satiric because her Anne writes the night before she is to be beheaded, but she is far wryer, corroded than Tate and Purcell’s Dido. It is also fair to say that Dido has not been picked as a favorite tragedy queen by other men, and in women’s poetry is often used as a Penelope type icon: strong, individual, independent, and ethical, even if done in the end. Anne Finch identifies with this Dido in an autobiographical teasing poem to her husband, asking him to come home after a quarrel: A Letter to Daphnis at London

Not that I don’t love Traviata.

I digress in order to suggest some lines of identification and full context. for both Dido and Candelas (who might be seen as a quiet prosaic daughter of Merimee’s Carmen in the short tale).

We ate out in a nearby good small French restaurant and I had my first ratatouille in years. Washed down by Merlot. Jim a steak similarly washed down.

In January Carla will do Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito on Mozart’s birthday. Since Jim and I and Izzy are going this Saturday to an HD Met performance I’ll be able to compare. I’ll bet Carla’s is as good, and perhaps more relevant. Who knows? maybe the libretto will be one of her updated ones.

In honor of the In-Series and Carla Huber, apparently not a lamenting dying nor ghost-haunted lady.

Ellen

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Cynthia Kierner’s Martha Jefferson Randolph aka Patsy Jefferson (1772-1836)

Thomas Sully, Martha Jefferson Randolph (1836, the last year of Martha’s life), it’s said she’s looks younger than she did, but the resemblance is true and like that of her father

Dear friends and readers,

As I wrote last time, with this book I felt I had come back to one of my first books that had real content, Patsy Jefferson (by whom I do not know). I’m still not satisfied; while major parts of the falsifying sentimental picture of this woman that appealed to me and stayed in my memory have been corrected, a lot not. The loving father-and-daughter, the well-educated young girl & effective Washington DC hostess for the president now has been filled out with Patsy or Martha’s education (I shall call her Martha as that was her name when she grew older), adult woman’s life, difficult last years, I was still left with a white world. At each turn, for each chapter of Martha’s life the African-American people she was surrounded by were presented as an afterthought, a couple of sketched in paragraphs, apart from everything else. Paradoxically too Jefferson himself was somehow omitted: his attitudes towards women’s education, and his white wife and daughters, his outward public politics, and shaping decisions, to some extent why he went broke in the end, but nothing inward, none of his philosophy.

And yet I did like the book and recommend it for what it does. MJR belongs with thorough studies of upper class educated white southern women of the 18th and through the middle 19th century; Kierner is really readable and adds to our knowledge of the texture of such women’s lives. She also gives a frank if too discrete depiction of a slave-based society.

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Love & Death at Monticello; Patsy Jefferson’s education

The various plantations where Jeffersons’ family found refuge during the war

Kierner’s opening chapter concentrates on creating the world of mid-18th century plantation, colonial, settler’s life. Thomas Jefferson fell in love with, but also married prudently a widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, daughter of John Whales. When she came to Monticello, she brought with her as property, the children grown into adults her father had had by an enslaved woman, Elizabeth Heminges. Among them were two brothers, James and Robert, whom Jefferson trained to be a French cook and a valet, and Elizabeth’s (unacknowledged because a slave) half-sister, Sarah known to history as Sally Hemings. The first chapter covers the Jefferson’s family during the time he was a colonial official and then a participant-rebel-architect of the American revolution. Jefferson’s first career, the dangerous revolt and his rise to national prominence. Jefferson was Governor of the colony of Virgina, and the family lived in a beautiful mansion (large and fashionable for Americans, but destroyed in 1781, a fire). Then Jefferson’s position and place enabled him to receive and convey political and military information for the revolution.

We all remember the British lost, maybe not that Jefferson’s military behavior was wanting. Virginia was a main theater for some of the Revolutionary battles, and though Lafayette had arrived with a force of 1200 men, Jefferson did not call out the local militia to defend Richmond itself. The criticism heaped on him led him to do what he periodically did throughout his life: retire from public office and imply he would not be back. Until very old, he would return.

Suffice to say while the family sustained losses (including it’s recorded 30 slaves who successfully escaped), they emerged sufficiently wealthy to return to Monticello and make it again a center of local social life. Meanwhile Jefferson’s wife, Martha had had six live births or babies, and many miscarriages; two children only survived to adulthood, Martha when young called Patsy and her younger sister, Mary or Maria when young called Polly. Her fate is one Kierner records frequently: the woman slowly grew feebler with continual pregnancies and childbed ordeals, and died of them.

Jefferson was a man dependent on women for affection; he liked having women around him, and treated the young Martha as a substitute wife, a companion from the time her mother died. She was intellectually gifted. Jefferson was hostile to women having any independent careers, public power, but eager to educate those able to able to in the finer arts and thought of their society, to provide them with manners and the wherewithal to run a large household effectively and educate their own children. They were to be companions to men (very Rousseau). The portrait of the Martha that emerges is of a gifted young woman living in a society that developed these gifts for a private domestic life, leaving her room and time to fulfill herself and do limited good within her terrain.

Hotel de Langeac, Paris, Jefferson’s large mansion

When the new US was (so to speak) in place, Jefferson managed to secure the ambassadorship to France for himself after spending a good deal of time in Philadelphia (then the culture capital of the US) and Boston. He took Patsy with him, each time leaving her with a woman to live with to guide and educate her. One worked out well, of an enlightened intelligent mind, the other a narrow religious type she had to struggle with. She did have resentments against being left behind and the education she had to undergo — “finishing” (drawing dancing). When they went to Paris, Jefferson put her in a convent. This would seem to contradict his apparent stance that he took her with him for company and to be a hostess for him. Kierney says it was because the convent offered the best education to be had; but Jefferson wanted his daughter chaste, sheltered. He brought Patsy to Paris as a front for him to appear conventional. While there, he had a liaison, with the married Maria Cosway, an Italian-English artist; it’s revealing of his character that Jefferson remained friends with Maria by letters until his death.

The convent was French Catholic and Martha did have a period of religious enthusiasm where she told her father she longed to become a nun — soon after which she was pulled out. Nonetheless, she emerged cosmopolitan in attitudes by the whole experience. In the convent and then in her father’s house, she came across all sorts of attitudes, including outright condemnation of slavery and she herself wrote a few remarks showing she understood the abysmal horrors of this condition. Then her sister, Polly (who had never known the mother and didn’t know the father by then) was brought over (against Polly’s will) to accompany Patsy and Polly joined her father as another companion (sort of).

It was around the time Martha was taken from the convent and was joined by her sister that her life with her father changed. Polly had been accompanied by Sarah Hemings (as a sort of enslaved caretaker-governess); Sarah was a year younger than Martha and 4 years older than Polly. Sarah was also these girls’ aunt (their mother’s half-sister). Robert as Jefferson’s valet and James as the French cook were already there — mingling with the French free servants. I note they were also his wife’s half-brothers, thus Martha’s uncles (and slaves). It seems that by the time Jefferson left Paris for home again Sally was pregnant by him. Suddenly when Kierner tells the reader this, she also says that it’s probable Patsy wrote many letters during this period but all have been destroyed. Well, duh. I wonder why. I imagine she was shocked.

Jefferson was in Paris a total of 7 years. Martha had fallen in love with a Wm Stone, a protege of Jefferson, very intelligent, sophisticated, Stone had gone to Wm and Mary and come with Jefferson, but he declined to return. He had had a number of affairs with the wives of French aristocrats and preferred the relatively free liberated life of France. Martha herself made friends while there, and her Paris life remained in her mind as a high point in her existence, a time when she envisioned for herself a life of liberty and social engagement.

The picture of this family going home may seem to a 21st century mind awkward: Jefferson, Patsy and Polly, the whites and Sally, Robert and James Hemingses, the blacks who slept apart in slaves’ quarters. It’s at this point that Kierner drops in passing how much Sally looked like the white wife, Martha, now dead. The question arises why they didn’t stay in Paris? Kierner says it’s supposed Jefferson promised to free them all when he died, and to free Sally’s children at age 21. I suggest that living with him in relative opulence was superior to having nowhere to turn for jobs or sustenance, no network but Jefferson’s and the one at home was the deciding factor. Jefferson treated Sally as somewhere between a mistress and slave; she had no status — it has to be remembered how a slave is someone defined as w/o any status at all.

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Wife, mother, plantation mistress

Martha’s husband Thomas Mann Randolph (1768-1828)

Told by a less discreet, less determinedly optimistic author, Martha’s marriage would turn into a story of how after a mere two months back, centrally because Jefferson had made Sally his mistress-wife, he married Martha off to a friend of his, Thomas Mann Randolph, whose properties abutted, whose family had intermarried with the Jeffersons. Within a few years Randolph the son’s ill-tempered and highly emotional personality emerged, and when the plantation business failed (very hard to achieve given his role as Jefferson’s substitute-aid again and again politically), he became “unstable and abusive,” even in his last decade someone who moved in and out of psychosis.

But this is not the way Kierner tells us. She produces Sally in Monticello as Jefferson’s slave-mistress very much as an afterthought as a reason for wanting to remove Patsy from the house. She concedes others have explained this over-hasty, over-young marriage as a result of Sally’s pregnant presence.

Kierner tells us that Tom Randolph and Patsy Jefferson were childhood sweethearts, of how intelligent Tom was, how much he admired Jefferson, how as the eldest son of the Randolphs he was set to inherit, how natural it all was. Only the lack of time was unusual. And yes maybe Patsy was bit young, just 17. Hard to say, only that what happened was after in the earliest couple of years of her marriage, initially living afar from Monticello, and then wanting to come back to live, Patsy’s desire to be near and with her father re-asserted itself and she and her husband first moved to a property nearby and then into Monticello itself. The couple at first did seem happy enough and worked hard to make themselves independent plantation master and mistress while Jefferson went off to serve in New York city where the political center of the country was. (Taking Sally with him.) Within 5 years Patsy had 4 children.

The Randolph family did not cooperate with Jefferson’s scheme of providing for Martha through their heir and placing her in a thriving atmosphere. Tom’s father remarried a much younger woman, Gabriella Harvie — she too the daughter of a friend and she just entrenched herself in the big house, and she had a son. Then Tom’s father wrote a new will giving most of his property to the new son. A close relative, another Tom Randolph impregnated Nancy, his wife’s sister, who seemed continually to be living with them; worse yet, when it was born, he helped her murder it. They thought to cover it up but the slaves saw and eventually the magistrates saw they would have to prosecute. The court exonerated the couple (so not only juries nullify) and Nancy and Tom and Judith took up life together again, only soon after Tom died, and then Nancy and Judith was left alone with little property.

An interesting set of statistics brought in at one point: in Albemarle where Tom and Patsy had their main property near Monticello 5579 slaves accounted for 44% of the population; the county’s 9226 slaves were the majority. To do Patsy’s husband justice he at first did not want to have more than a minimum of slaves, wanted a small holding and to be an attorney, but found he could not make money that way and found he didn’t have time to study. It’s clear that many of these wealthy people lived on an edge and their wealth was very much dependent on free slave labor, slaves they didn’t have to treat well.

Tom did not that quickly succumb to too much stress, emotional, and some kind of organic illness. He held public office, and what did him in more than anything else was debt. Debt was the burden of the southern plantation owner.
Martha spent much of her life making sure that illness did not conquer her children, a major feat with malaria everywhere. Educating them. She ran an efficient plantation too, and an important presence in her life was Molly Hemings, Sally’s niece. Molly was the daughter of Mary, Sally’s sister and thus another half-sister of Jefferson’s first wife. Jefferson has Martha and Maria (Polly’s name changed to that when she grew up, and she too was married off to a son of one of Jefferson’s friends and county allies) come to Washington to be his hostesses.

Chapter 4 comes to an end with Kierner’s suddenly telling of the children Sally had by Jefferson before Jefferson became president, Harriet, a girl who died at age 4 and William Beverly. Jefferson’s children by Sally were given white names.

Kierner does say there is a disconnect between the life Martha was allowed to live in Paris and the expectations for her future she could have formed there — especially watching how other upper class women lived. If so, and if the life thrust upon her quickly, ever felt at odds with what she had dreamed for herself, Martha never said so.

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The President’s Daughter

Washington DC, 1800

Martha and her sister, Maria, spent two periods in Washington DC acting as hostess for their father. This was not easy for them as both had responsibilities to their husbands and homes and children. But he needed someone to present a socially acceptable face and family to the DC world. Since sometime after Jefferson became president for the first time the first raw and mean caricatures of Sally as his mistress-bull were printed, I guess that he took the bold step of taking her with him to DC. There is something unusual here: southern men did simply take black woman as if some kind of animal they had a right to, or sometimes more humanly but Jefferson’s behavior was too consistent and continual towards Sally; he also named her children with names from his family and white culture and he was bringing them up with education. Thus he was a target for ridicule and derision as part of campaigns by those who disagreed with his policies.

The tale of Jefferson’s two daughters’ lives is otherwise yearly pregnancies, childbed traumas, and babies for Martha, with Maria finally (like her mother before her) dying of this. Martha’s husband, Tom gradually gets deeper into debt. At one point they feel forced to sell a large group of black people south.

Then we have Jefferson’s post-presidency years. The book is organized along the lines of Jefferson’s life because Patsy (or Martha) organized her life in accordance with where her father was. Yet Jefferson kept his distance. We are told his part of the house were his, and Martha’s family was leary of coming into these places (library, his bedroom, a sitting room). Sally is mentioned once and we hear of more children as well as other Hemingses trained to do skilled work (John, a master woodworker, p 169)

For Martha of course yet more children too, more deterioration of her and her husband’s finances. Again Kierner is the justifier, seeking balance and cheerful normalization. Tom craved respect as a man and joined the military and made a temporary success out of that. Martha was afraid of losing Tom (by death) and got him to resign, but he felt he had won respect. Kierner recounts how most accounts of Martha’s life tell of much unhappiness and discord because finally the husband could not accept his second place and says that’s not so, there was much compatibility and satisfaction. Perhaps. But all Kierner’s details are of clash, discord. They did sell a huge parcel of land again.

Perhaps the nadir of this phase of Martha’s life is found in what happened to her daughter, Anne, whom Martha had married off young to a nearby neighbor, Charles Bankhead. Bankhead turned out to be not just a gambler, and unfaithful but violent. He assaulted his wife and not one member of the family — not Jefferson, not Martha, tried to protect her. It was okay for this man to beat this woman in another room. They would not interfere and said they were powerless. So here you have your aristocratic home with elegant knowledge and how is a chief daughter treated? (pp. 168-169) One day this man stabbed Martha’s oldest son, Jeff and almost killed him. Again (as with the early infanticide incident) there were charges but the man was found not guilty. Since her family would not help her, it’s almost fortunate that Anne was dead by 36 — the yearly pregnancies hadn’t helped either.

Martha tried to find good husbands for her other daughters. She made efforts to step them from marrying young — as she had, her (dead) sister had and now her daughter, Anne. She sent them to DC to women she knew there (Dolly Madison among them) to find suitors. One problem was she had kept them too much at home and they were awkward and somehow naive.

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Decay and dissolution

The entrance hall to Monticello

A bright spot for Tom, the husband, was he became governor three times. There was no general election; you were elected by the members of the state senate. Along with his military record, this gave him a boost. Ellen, Martha’s daughter had married late and well and is happy with a well-to-do lawyer in Boston, has a baby. But the debts became overwhelming, Thomas Jefferson’s too, and by the end of the chapter Martha’s husband has had to sell most of his beloved property and also slaves. He does feel bad about this — as does she and she tries not to sell some house servants and succeeds to a certain extent. One wanted to be sold because she so hated her father who beat her. At Monticello and other Jefferson properties “enslaved persons’ to keep Kierner’s formulation were allowed to marry and encouraged to live in family groups.

Tom finally separates from Martha. He had himself been if not physically abusive, emotionally so in the last years together. He had suffered from the comparison of himself to Jefferson; now Tom’s eldest son, Jeff, the same Jeff who was stabbed was left all the property by Jefferson — some in trust for his mother. This Jeff was not intellectual and did poorly at university but he was a very good businessman. Tom could not accept this. It was Jeff who pushed his father, Tom, to sell his property and then Jeff himself bought it, cut it into parcels and sold each separately, making a profit — something badly needed.

Jefferson took a long time dying. While just ill, Lafayette came once more and it was a happy time — both aging men cried. Again Kierner is grating. It seems to take her a real effort to finally admit the last 2 week vigil of Martha sitting by her father included Sally in that room. It also is hard to her to call Jefferson’s sons by Sally his sons. They were freed shortly before he died and sent on their way as apprentices and with skills — well out of the area to protect them. Sally was (oddly)was not freed. I don’t know why not and it’s not explained. She goes to live with a (suddenly appealing) grandchild and other Hemings relatives in Charlottesville. Nominally she and they remain owned by Martha. It was an understood arrangement which worked. Salley died in 1835.

So the chapter closes, and Martha must leave her home. She chooses first to live with Ellen in Boston. Her other unmarried daughters plan to open a school. Jess is a businessman farmer. They all did dislike slavery, on record about this and they now own very few — house and personal servants. she staved off opening a school and teaching. She would say she wanted to, but in a revealing phrase, she concedes that since people send their children to learn whatever it is for a few short years at most, you must ever be introducing a pupil to an area, giving them elementary background and never get to where it’s interesting. So all her languages knowledge would have devolved into grammar exercises.

For Martha’s last years, see comments.

Ellen

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Accurate electoral maps: maps as an exercise in power

Dear friends and readers,

You must allow me one more centrally political blog before I return to our “regularly scheduled programming:” cultural, literary, on art, opera (music), films. This year’s presidential election in the US has been important, and when I’ve come across some enlightening pictures and information I feel I ought to disseminate what I can.

Maps are a fundamental exercise in power as is the division of space. “All maps,” one aware geographer argues, “strive to frame their message in the context of an audience. All maps state an argument about the world, and thee propositional in nature. All maps employ the common devices of rhetoric such as invocations of authority … selection, omission, simplification, classification, the creation of hierarchies, and ‘symbolization.” It’s a small step – and one which those trained in the visual arts, literary and cultural studies, would easily anticipate, along with readers of Foucault-to move to a second level of analysis, which insists that maps don’t only embody in disguised form the power of nations, empires, a ruling class, but further at the act of mapping is in itself an exercise of power.

Foucault wrote of how a critical geography would need to be attuned to the role played by maps “in shaping mental structures, and in imparting a sense of the places of the world” that blocks the circulation of alternative visions and definitions.

Now look at the map above which reflects the voting patterns of a couple of days ago now: it’s set up by county, not state, and thus enables us to see the popular vote, where it comes from, and (as it keeps the state lines just enough) thus that Obama beat Romney by a large margin popularly (51 to 48% — I’m not making these numbers up — 332 to 206). Republicans on mainstream TV (Fox, CNN, even MSNBC) are saying Obama’s was a close win. Nonsense. He has a real progressive mandate. They get away with this because the way the map is drawn leaves huge red spaces where few live as big as small blue spaces where many do. Here’s a map that is drawn proportional to votes and people — by county. The great thing about this one is if you are in a “red” state, the parts of the state that went “blue” are shown, and vice versa.

I don’t know how one gets the mainstream stations to stop using maps which favor conservatives — because they do it knowingly. When the electoral college map was first introduced in the early televised elections, it was clear the map did not reflect the popular vote, but it was the map children learned in school. Since the 1990s and the real divergence of two points of view (one which Fox tells lies to support, and CNN supports, and the others more subtly), these maps become invidious. Maps of the earth re-adjust themselves to what is disseminated popularly every once in a while. Australia used to be wholly unreal but it’s been adjusted so it doesn’t look like a tiny island.

Even this less adjusted one while going state-by-state, reveals the real popular vote state of the case:

The corollary lie one is hearing is that Obama is a man of the left. Not a bit of it. He’s centrist as this is understood today. We need not return to a stalemate of reactionary pro-super-rich, pro-evangelical religion versus everyone else, something sustained in Obama’s administration last year because he bought into the Republican’s point of view. He’s a hawk on foreign policy; he did not save Detroit, nor its people; he saved General Motors. He has not set up Employment offices (with healthy jobs programs to do much needed social services across the country), but left to us the same tired useless (how not to do it) unemployment offices — which have no jobs. He does not re-expand the Federal Gov’t the way Roosevelt did; he appoints more centrist and progressive types on the supreme court, he does not work directly to stop mass incarceration and brutal treatment of people for protesting peacefully, of minority young men for being black. At best he’s a mild ameliorator. But let us hold him to that. NO cutting our social security, medicaid, present programs at all. What has to happen is if they can his constituency and local leaders must push him to do the right thing strongly.

Huge numbers of people defied the harassment, the long hours they had to wait to vote. It took courage. The Occupy Movement has not been forgotten. All of us need one another to improve their lives. Let us think up and implement new programs (to shape and control global warming); let us re-fund older ones which worked to bring people together as friends, not competitive rivals and enemies. Talkin’ about a revolution. Keep as a goal Martin Luther King’s dreams of equal opportunity, human rights for all, time for pleasure and self-fulfillment; enacting one’s heart’s desire and finding peace.

Think of the arrogance for Romney to have run for president, accuse 47% of the population of not paying taxes at all, when it was he who paid no taxes from 1996 to 2009. See Bloomberg News and the comments below. Bill O’Reilly the last two days said (disdainfully sneeringly) how the many in the US want “stuff,” “things.” Fine for bankers to collect billions of course, and how the election was very close. Not so, and for just reasons.

Ellen

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