At the National Gallery: Color, Line, Light & The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorians and Pussycats

Dear friends and readers,

Theodore Rousseau (1812-67), Sunset from the Forest of Fontainbeau (the Dyke Collection).

Walter Howell Deverell (1827-54), Twelfth Night (with Elizabeth Siddal) (Pre-Raphaelites first room)

Susan Herbert, “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid after Edward Burne-Jones”

Dear friends and readers,

Though we hadn’t a good leg or knee between us, and it had rained as in a monsoon in the morning, yesterday afternoon Jim and I set forth to the National Gallery around a quarter to two because we had promised ourselves we would see the much advertised new “blockbuster” show of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. It was sunny by then and warm, and by the time we left although I was limping super-slowly, letting myself down the stairs one at a time, and Jim not much better, the experience had been well worth it, though as sometimes happened as much for the “lesser” show, Color, Light and Line, that had not been heralded, trumpeted, advertised, several rooms of quietly brilliant beautiful, unusual 19th & early 20th century French drawings and watercolors (mostly) from the Dyke Collection:

Gustave Dore (1832-83), A River Gorge in a mountain landscape,

tucked away on the first floor, just before the side entrance of the museum (well after and apart from the ever-expanding Museum shop), as for the Pre-Raphaelites, which despite the large size, unexpected Shakespeare and narrative delights, the delicacy of these, and stunning use of color of other of the paintings, where the colors still sparkled on the canvas

John Everett Millais (1829-96), Marianna

and originality of still others,

William Dyce (1806-64), Pegwell Bay

did not teach us anything new about the Pre-Raphaelites as a group.

We learned more about them or their art as a whole a couple of Christmases ago in one of these small unadvertised shows where it was contended the paintings came far more from an interaction of natural landscape, photography, science studies than literary and medieval longings. That it’s easy to make fun of this exhibit, precisely this kind of picture in a group by substituting cats for the people suggests the solemn absurdity of some of the pictures, and the lack of an adequate perspective.

There seemed nothing set before us to make sense of the pictures in the way of an exhibit a couple of years ago. The individual paintings were therefore what one could enjoy, with each of the rooms having a theme. One of the most interesting for me was the one with wallpaper, furniture, tapestries, screens, but nothing was said about Morris or the Pre-Raphaelites politics. Ford Madox Brown’s Work. I put the lack of discourse down to the way just about any decent political talk is simply erased in popular American media. But nothing on religion much either: the Middle Eastern landscapes of Hunt are not presented as landscape natural art but religious iconography (The Scapegoat). Rossetti’s Found (1854, unfinished) was presented as about modern life (!?): how so? were these 19th century Italian outfits? to me, most of all what was the attitude towards sex here.

(The colors are all blended so that it’s unfinished is part of its charm)

While the paintings often seem to worship female sexuality and reject simple macho-male images, they can equally be seen to proscribe sex altogether. But there was no feminist discourse either. There were some Julia Cameron photos scattered here and there. But no sense of women’s development of an idiom of Pre-Raphaelitism of which there was one (see Deborah Cherry’s book). No Evelyn de Morgan. Nothing to comment on how these girlfriends were used, no comment on a room filled with huge pictures of so-called “beauties” — to me these are grotesque because of the masculine nature of the faces and huge size of the women’s bodies which seem to encompass one.

This Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is less grotesque than the others, but the face is the same and the allusion to women as dangerous (the apple).

Could the room be about fear? In life certainly these men seemed to be in charge — they had the high status, the money, lived much much longer.

And what is the relationship of this Proserpine to this woman, Jane Morris said to be its model? The photo itself by Wm Morris is a perspective on her so she is endlessly constructed for us:

The exhibit says nothing

This Elizabeth Siddal, A Lady AFixing a Pennant was there, but no explanation. Gentle reader it’s very small with a modest (very inexpensive) frame:

So, how easy for Susan Herbert to poke fun:

Susan Herbert’s “The Awakening after Wm Holman Hunt”

Susan Herbert’s “Pysche after John William Waterhouse”

One consequence was Susan Herbert’s books — two of them in the shop — seemed appropriate without however as I said ruining any enjoyment of the pictures, and the exhibit downstairs feeling superior. Perhaps perversely, but also because I own reproductions of so many of the famous pictures included in the exhibit instead of buying the catalogue, I bought ($40 cheaper), Susan Herbert’s parody, Pre-Raphaelite Cats.

I recommend seeing the exhibit nevertheless. where and when else will you see these astonishing paintings brought together in one place again? Or ever see any of them? The Pre-Raphaelite paintings project, many of them, complex real psychological states, original, beautiful, make statements worth thinking about on sex, religion, social life, and in one room are made from unusual materials too (tapestries, painted chairs, stain glass windows). Although some painters were unaccountably missing (no John Waterhouse), see it also for the lesser known painters, pictures, sculptors, and the striking famous landscapes. e.g., Dyce’s Pegwell Bay. A favorite for me was Ford Madox Brown’s picture from his window: An English Autumn Afternoon — Hampstead — Scenery (1853).

There was this exquisite small marble scultpure by Alexander Munro, Paolo and Francesca (remember “that day they read no longer” from Dante?):

There are many photographs of the company and the women who served them and painted themselves (Siddal, Jane Morris, Jane Burden, Fanny Cornforth, about whom we were told nothing, suddenly she was just there and painted as as “Mouth to be Kissed”). The exhibit ends with some series paintings, one on Perseus: The Rock of Doom, The Doom Fulfilled, and the strangely compelling The Baleful Head, the latter (frozen dead images in a fountain looked down at by Perseus and the maiden) influenced George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.

What seemed to unite the whole show — one sought for something — was finally it literary content, Shakespeare, Scott, a medievalism which became a rationale or cover.

John Anderson’s review of the Pre-Raphaelites (much of it came from the Tate) is not enthusiastic, but Kayleigh Bryant does the movement justice and gives you a slideshow. The exhibition book catalogue expensive but it might come down in price soon.

The shop for the Pre-Raphaelites had the most exquisitely beautiful scarves, sewn exquisitely delicately with strips of velvet. It was all I could do to stop myself from buying one: $60 each so I didn’t. Perhaps they were intended to be there as examples of Pre-Raphaelite kind of craftsmanship or an artistic ideal? If so, no explanation. One was wrapped around a dummy knight.

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I write this blog, then, also to tell of the other exhibit. Color, light, and line.which does not lend itself to cat parodies.

This George Lemmen was not there, but it represents the quality of the sort of thing by him that was —

Lemmen was featured as a pointillist and someone who like Vuillard did paintings of the people he lived with doing ordinary domestic tasks — women sewing

Strange these museums and their curators. Not only was the show not advertised (showing a lack of faith in museum-goers), but the catalogue has been printed only as hard-cover and there were few of them in the museum and at high price (over $60). I did buy the catalogue when I came home, on the Net for less than half that price so can’t share many of the pictures and lack the names of the painters and illustrators, several of them relatively unknown.

Paul Huet, A Meadow at Sunset, pastel

There was a wall of Paul Signacs, Vuillards, Dores, Monets, George Lemmen, Pissaro, Morisot; watercolor, gouache, pen and ink, charcoal, pastel and mixed medium. The periods of art represented include romanticism, realism, impressionism, postimpressionism, pointillism (neo-impressionism), symbolism, the Dykes looked for quality, not coverage, and were delighted to find great work among unknown artists (so were not looking necessarily to make money). Some of my favorites where I can remember the artists’ names were Eugene Isabey, Alexandre Calame, Maxime Lalanne: here’s a selection of small reproductions.

I’ve found a large version of one where you can gather the quality of the paint: Henri-Joseph Harpingies, Autumn Landscape, Washerwoman.

blog size version

It’s the unexpected that delights us, the unassuming. Many of these were unashamedly romantic: cliffs at twilight, tiny people in forests, near streams. Old people who were nobody. I liked the highly romantic drawings of landscape where there were no people. So often landscapes will have one or two tiny people. Not here.

The Examiner goes over why these colors, light washes, lines should so absorb us, and the nature of the Dyke Collection. The exhibition book catalogue, looks chock-a-block with pictures and has contributions by six people.

There was an informative plaque in tribute to the Dykes who apparently intend to leave most of their collection to the musuem.

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Both shows eshewed painting the rich, famous, the military and the powerful.

Three more pictures:

Arthur Hughes’s April (click for large size which does justice to the purple coloration) is there:

(blog size version);

this Maxime Lalanne:

As to the cats, I recommend at least looking at Herbert’s irreverent fond mockery. Apparently she’s done several such books of art with pussycats, often of Victorian pictures. Herbert’s pictures are here on line if you are so unlucky as not to have a live pussycat with you in your home. Looking at them did lead me to some good books on the history of the cat and the pictures we have of them over the centuries, Caroline Bugler’s The Cat: 3500 Years of Cats in Art.

Susan Herbert, “Ecce Ancilla Domini after Dante Gabriel Rossetti” (making the expression and stance of the women’s scared eyes in the original — rightly terrified of pregnancy?)

Ellen

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Les Miserables: from Hugo parables for our time

Clear away the barricades/And we’re still there! (Thenadiers) …

But the tigers come at night/with their voices soft as thunder … (a lyric in one of the quieter songs) ….

There’s a pain goes on and on. Empty chairs at empty tables. Now my friends are dead and gone …

The 2012 film had last year’s Occupy movement in mind

Ensemble, Signature Theater, DC/Virginia 2008

Dear friends and readers,

Christmas day we (Jim, myself, Laura & Rob, and Izzy) went to see the musical movie version of Hugo’s Les Miserables, directed by Tom Hooper, an adaptation for commercial film of the original book by Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boubil, Englished and made Dickensian by James Fenton and Wm Nicolson (lyrics Herbert Kretzmer), produced by at least 9 people, some original (Cameron Mackintosh), some film types (Eric Fellner), featuring most notably and successfully Hugh Jackman as Jean ValJean, Anne Hathaway as Fantine (Izzy said later that after a while all she had to do was she Hathaway and she began to cry):

Raped, stripped, her very teeth taken from her

Daniel Huttlestone as Gavroche (this Artful Dodger provided the most unexpected totally alive moments of the production),

Eddie Remayne as Marius and Aaron Tveit as Enjolras, the young revolutionaries on the 1832 barricades (representing the 1870 uprising which was put down with more killed than in the whole of the 1792-3 so-called Terror), Samantha Barks as Eponine were as a group stronger and more effective than the first quarter or so of the film. I suspect Hooper felt more at home with them than the wildly romantic pursued Valjean. He changed Fantine to be sexual in lieu of a gamine — for me this did make Hugo’s tale relevant for women. Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen as the Thenadiers were faultless but over-directed into exaggerated grotesquerie, and Jim felt that their lines, some of the rawest most powerful in the whole piece, were placed so as to lose the central impact they were meant to have.

Thenadiers with young Cosette

I found Tom Hooper’s production of intense interest as film, as an instance of what contemporary computer, non-naturalistic and symbolic theatrical, on location, close-up and aggressive film-making can tremendously effect. I’d like to see it again to study how the camera was daringly used to turn the vision of the novel into world-as-nightmare.

The music is as stunningly piercing as ever: I was again unbearably moved by the destruction of Fantine, the heart-break of Eponine, the nobility of Jean Valjean and the soaring revolutionary defiance of Marius and Enjolras. At first I thought Marius the actor who played Bingley in Joe Wright’s P&P (2005) and Enjolras, Elliot Cowan as Darcy in Dan Zeff’s Lost in Austen (2008), both deeply appealing types.

The film’s Eponine (Samantha Barks) dying in Marius’s arms — both elegant, white, archetypal mainstream in looks

By contrast, Jim said no one could sing (!) and they all held their notes too long, Hugh Jackman was miscast (not so) and the whole production (which he said serious reviewers all agreed with) “a mess,” but apart from Russell Crowe who tried hard but just could not get up the seethingly pro-murderous law-and-order evil of Javier I thought them all stirringly effective and recognized that we had here a typical faithful BBC production. I’ve read about 3/4s of Norman Denny’s translation of Hugo’s novel, and unlike the musical, this film adaptation seemed to go through the book phase-by-phase. I don’t say the film had the original coherence, taste, brilliance of Hooper’s Daniel Deronda for the BBC (2002) or even the poignancy of The King’s Speech (2011), but it not intended to be subtle, but rather to sock its cri de coeur of the disenfranchised and powerless to wide varied audiences, and make huge returns in money.

Jackson as Jean Valjean, the tender-hearted caring for Fantine, promising to bring up Cosette, her daughter

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I know I need say no more as so many have already, since there have been so many reviews not only on this musical film (among them Miss Izzy), and the many productions, French, the original London, the Broadway one, various intermediary as well as concerts versions, but the straight dramatic films and the musical version Jim thought and still thinks the outstanding best, Eric Schaeffer’s Signature version, with Greg Stone the closest to Hugo’s conception of Jean Valjean I’ve seen:

and Felicia Curry as an inspired Eponine type:

But I think we can contribute to the ongoing conversation about Les Miserables. We have now seen or perhaps I should say heard the musical four times. Jim did once read about and attempt to sort out the original pre-production show from its first staging and I’ve also read Notre Dame de Paris (in French this time), and Hugo’s powerful anti-capital punishment novella (The Last Day of a Condemned Man (an English translation). And I watched two recent “straight” films.

Alphonse LeGros, Le Repas des Pauvres (cover illustration for Hugo’s novel)

The soul in darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who causes the darkness (Denny’s translation of Hugo)

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Before the musical was ever produced it was changed to include an overt providential patterning, religious emotionalism, and images of family types sticking together, with the Thenadiers as hypocritical aberrations we are expected to be amused by.

Jim:

Thirty years ago, Alan Boublil and Claud-Michel Schonberg decided to write a musical adaptation of Hugo’s Les Misérables. By 1980, they had a demo tape, themselves the sole performers: voice and piano. They took it to London and got sufficient backing for John Cameron to orchestrate what they had written and to record it with actual performers. This record is commercially available: call it “the French text.” Both Cameron Macintosh and James Nederlander of New York were interested in producing it, with changes. Nederlander actually optioned it, but the option lapsed.

By some later point in time Macintosh had talked Trevor Nunn into directing it. He brought in the RSC and John Caird. Herbert Kretzmer was hired to write the English lyrics, after James Fenton’s attempt was abandoned. The Macintosh/Nunn/Caird/Kretzmer collaboration was produced, first by the RSC as part of their London season at the Barbican, then by Macintosh in the West End, in 1985. Call this “the English text.”

Three major changes mark strong differences between the French text and the English text: the English text is more religious; the English text is, if anything, conservative politically where the French was more à gauche (to the left); the English text is a much bigger show. Nunn seems to have been responsible for the religious emphasis. The French text had scarcely mentioned God: a couple of “God knows how” sort of phrases and two mentions in Jean Valjean’s final lines, closing the piece.

La lumière, au matin de justice,
puisse enfin décapiter nos vices
dans un monde où Dieu pourrait se plaire
s’il décidait un jour de redescendre sur la terre.

Cosette, aime-le
Marius, aimez-la
qui aime sa femme
sans le savoir, aime Dieu.

Nunn added the scene with the Bishop of Digne; the scene where Jean Valjean wrestles with his conscience: “Who am I”; “Stars”; “Dog eats dog”; “Bring him home” and the dreadful scene where the spirits of Fantine and Eponine flank Jean Valjean as he dies (memory claims they were even dressed in white, but memory is unreliable and sometimes exaggerates for effect).

I add that Hugo is anti-clerical; the priests who harbor Valjean are pariahs and despised by all the other church people we meet. There is no afterlife. “Les Miserables” means not just the wretchedly poor but miserable in a more general sense and includes the outcasts, underdogs, rejected of society, and radical critics and rebels (who often do very badly economically and socially). Take, Book 2: Book 2, “The outcast.” The opening sequence of the movie follows this — prison for no crime at all, cruelty in a long sentence, hounding afterward with no forgiveness or any opportunity to be a productive member of legal society.

In case anyone might think this kind of thing can’t happen, he or she need only read a newspaper or journal article about who goes to prison in the US, for what, for how long, the typical use of extreme solitude (which Atul Gawande in a persuasive article in the New Yorker argued is a form of super-expensive torture): very long prison sentences, no reprieve, for small crimes having to do with drugs. Inside may be a step up for some, but it’s very bad socially. Women’s prisons are even worse than men’s, for they are subject to sexual harassment, parted from their children ruthlessly. Meanwhile bankers steal billions, flout the law and are not even brought to trial.

But the musical takes Hugo in the direction of Thatcher’s 1980s:

Jim:

Some of the depoliticizing between the French and English versions may have been unconscious, the result of removing specifically French references. In the French text, the students are carefully organizing coordinated risings:

Au Pont au Change, toutes les sections sont prêtes
Grantaire attend à la Barrière du Maine
les sculpteurs, les marbriers
tardent à se joindre à nous
mais les maçons de Montreuil
seront tous au rendez-vous

In the English text, they seem to take it on themselves to rise, because who wants to confuse the audience with the masons of Montreil. But “Empty chairs and empty tables”, added for the English text, clearly condemns the students: “Don’t ask me/What your sacrifice was for.” More, Javert, in the French text, is not really to be taken seriously. In the English text, thanks to “Stars”, he’s the second leading man.

Nunn also made Les Misérables a grandiose show. DCist in its theater preview wondered how Signature would fit it into “much smaller quarters than usually house the famous turntable-style set.” Nunn had added choruses, he added scenes, some, like “Turning”, quite unnecessary. Nunn justified “Turning” on the grounds that the women didn’t have enough to do otherwise. Of course he then used the revolving set to manage the quick scene changes. All these changes made the show worse.

I don’t mean to say that in all aspects the English text is worse than the French text. Many of Kretzmer’s lyrics are much better than those of Boublil/Schonberg. The bridge of “I dreamed a dream”, for example: “But the tigers come at night/with their voices soft as thunder.” There is nothing remotely like that in the French text. The best line in the show, from Madame Thénardier, I’m sorry, Mme. La Baronne Thenard, in “Beggars at the feast”: “Clear away the barricades and we’re still here” (perhaps the profoundest line in contemporary theater), was added. “Beggars at the feast” is the reprise of “Master of the house” which bulks up and makes rollicking — and Dickensian. Nunn had directed Nicholas Nickleby — “Devise d’un cabaretier” where Thénardier complains he is one “qu’une destinée contraîre a planté dans ce canton” and thus has become, perforce, an innkeeper)

The 2008 production had La Boheme not Dickens A Tale of Two Cities in mind

Jim had gone up to Eric Schaeffer, to say this Signature production was better than the London production we had seen years ago. “This sounded better than it was, since the London production had left me rather cold.”

Jim:

Schaeffer managed, in the Signature production, to minimize these changes. He could do nothing with the religion and politics that are baked into the English text. One cannot not sing “Stars” or “Bring him home.” And Javert did take the penultimate curtain call. But he could and did de-emphasize at least some. The business with the saintly Bishop of Digne went quick. In the final scene, Fantine and Eponine sang with Jean Valjean, but they stayed on catwalks leading to the stage (and neither dressed in white).

And he made the show intimate. The MAX theater is a black box. For this production it seated around 250. It was set up as a thrust stage, with two catwalks leading to the corners of the box, screened at the back. Sliding doors in the screen allowed mass movements onto the stage (for choral entrances or the barricade). The orchestra (two winds, five brass, three keyboards, guitar, bass, two percussion) was set on a balcony behind the screen, the conductor’s image on two screens visible from the stage. The audience, then, was on three sides. No more than six rows on any one side. Every member of the audience was closer to the cast than any member of the audience would have been in a conventional proscenium theater with the orchestra in a pit between the audience and stage.

In this setting, he brought out the quiet elements of the score. There are many. Of the 28 numbers, a majority are either soliloquys or conversations. We eavesdrop, up close, on them. The actors eavesdrop with us. In “A heart full of love”, Eponine is on the catwalk, members of the audience on either side of her, as she overhears Cosette and Marius (the same location, exactly, as she will occupy in the second act finale). She is suddenly lit as she reacts. We do not know how long she has been there. She is us. And we sympathise. Schaeffer doesn’t shrink from the noisier numbers. “Master of the house” is duly rollicking. He accepts the Dickensian parallels: Cosette in Paris reminds us of no-one more than Lucy Manette.

But the heart of this production are the quiet lyric pieces: “I dreamed a dream”, “Who am I”, Fantine and Jean Valjean’s duet around her deathbed, “Stars”, “In my life”, “A heart full of love”, “On my own”, “A little fall of rain”, “Drink to me”, “Bring him home”, Javert’s suicide, and, yes, the second act finale.

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To conclude,

There have been 19 (!) film adaptations, most recently a French mini-series with Gerard Depardieu as Valjean and John Malkovich as Javert, and in 1998 an English, with Liam Neeson as a noble Jean Valjean; Geoffrey Rush as Javert (hard and steely), Uma Thurman as Fantine (the raped Cecile in Les Liaisions Dangereuses), Hans Mathisen as Marius (deeply felt), Ann-Marie Duff (wry, realistic) the last two also in Davies’s adaptation of Dr Zhivago. Depardieu practically stands for France (remember Martin Guerre) and Malkovich (Valmont, Jekyll-Hyde) has had a long career playing evil types; the English cast shows the connection between Zhivago and Hugo. Five translations into English are available.

The story, characters, events are a parable for our time.

To turn it into a film musical with the whole repertoire of montage, location, psychological in-depth acting is to make it more available to everyone. On Christmas day almost every seat in the auditorium was taken. We were just in time and had to sit in the front row.

I remember that in London Patti LuPone sang Fantine, but she was far away — we were in the back of the orchestra. Anne Hathaway is right on top of us, close up, the story made utterly contemporary. When she sang the pain goes on and on I found myself remembering my own anguish. I was rooting for Enjolras all the way.

ENJOLRAS

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!

(I wish).

Izzy is right. You need not see this version probably. Jim is right too: perhaps another would be more thrillingly sung. This was over-produced and not controlled enough. But I would say not only don’t miss it, but also read the book, go on to Notre Dame de Paris and then The Last Day in the Life of a Condemned Man. Les Miserables‘ vision is more than of the wretched of the earth; he shows how such wretchedness is made deliberately and what it feels like to be hunted down, scorned, fearful, alone. Don’t skip the supposed digressions (Waterloo for example): the history, analysis of how society is organized into exclusionary cliques, the skewed values of church and courts passionately laid out and as relevant today as ever.

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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Class and literature: the sense of entitlement that matters

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

How is this book packaged: for whom; how framed

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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

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The picture: unfinished business

Dear friends and readers,

Jim and I are not entirely through with coping with my mother’s estate, we still have some stuff to do about the money she left, which has come to me. Sunday, though, we finished the physical things. This is the story of unfinished business going back to 1971/2.

Shortly after I left my first husband and was living with my parents in an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant (for a few weeks before I was to go to England), I found myself wandering in an department store. I no longer remember why. I came across this picture I just fell in love with. I didn’t know the artist’s name and still don’t. It was not an original — it was just a print. But it seemed to contain in it a vision of a mood, a life, a lifestyle that had deep appeal. I knew most of NYC city didn’t look like this row of picturesque brownstones through which one could view a young woman walking quietly. It has something of a feel of my favorite painter, Pissaro. I wished I could live in a part of a city that at least faintly resembled it. Its frame was plain wood and the cost $14.00.

Readers of this blog or the list-servs I post to will know how much I care about pictures.

I took it home. It was not easy since I had to bring it by subway. Then I hung it over my new cherry wood bed. It had come with string and all I needed to do was bang a couple of nails in the wall. When it came time to go to England, I knew I couldn’t take it with me. It was way too big. I had to leave it with my parents in the apartment they had just moved into in Fresh Meadows. This was 1967/68.

Fast forward a couple of years later I had returned from England, was now married to Jim and I came to my parents’ apartment. There was that picture again, but now it hung over the central sofa in the living room. Alas, my father had to some extent ruined it. He had re-framed it with an “better” wood frame that had a gold lining in it. It didn’t fit it. It was too pompous. He admitted that was so. It had become his picture in appearance as well as possession. What else would he put over that couch.

So I said nothing.

Well when we came to clear out my parents’ apartment, bag and box everything and remove what we wanted, I almost didn’t take it with me. I still couldn’t bear that new frame. Further, the picture itself had faded and embrowned over the years. (It’s not as dark as it appears in this blog; that’s the result of the darkness of the corridor.) Morning I used to think in the city was the best time of day, the time before people’s faces took on the growing anxieties and stresses of the day. But who would hire someone to clean a print that had cost $14 30 years ago? It had lost that early morning freshness of colors it had had. Also where would we put it in the truck. It was silly of me to care. It was self-indulgent in a way I couldn’t find reason for. Yet I wanted it. As Izzy wanted the china lazy Susan in the front of the house, and a small reproduction of a fin-de-siecle painting (cost $3 in a supermarket sale) that was in the front room.

In the end I took the Susan, small painting and my large one home. My big painting took up the side panel of the truck and it got scratched. Since I decided on this the last moment, the Lazy Susan didn’t get properly wrapped and one of the china pieces got smashed.

Still she was happy with them. She put the three (one chipped) on the round thing that swings about and now has her pencils, pens and other things in it on her new cherry wood hutch and desk affair that stretches from her desk to Laura’s now ex-desk with a new wide-framed TV on it.

When I got my picture inside though, it was not clear where I could put it. We have 54 bookcases. Most of our walls are covered and those which are not have favorite pictures already. There is Jim’s three Italian sloops in the front room. He found that similarly, took it to work in the Pentagon, and the day he retired brought it home.

It was more like $30.00, but then this was 30 years later he bought it.

Walls with small ones: an acqua nymph on a rock, looking dreamily up from the waters to the sky; an Alma Tadema in black-and-white of pseudo-classical figures listening to someone read aloud Virgil (these from auctions); from thrift antique shops, some commedia dell’arte figures sitting and wandering wearily in a park where some kind of masquerade is occurring; and this print of an engraving in bad shape of a salon with a gentlewoman to the side holding (cuddling) a cat:

A Chardin of musical instruments:

But I did have behind the door in the hall and over the small thin bookcase (with audio books), a stretch of wall that had a sort of reproduction of a Monet of an exhibit from a museum in France that I really didn’t care for. Had it had been a Pissaro that would have been different. Would this fit? just? and how could I put it up? My father had taken away the original string set.

Well yesterday Laura and Rob brought over their drill. I had bought a new string set from Home Depot, and voila Rob put it up so it was straight and beautifully cover the whole wall. The bookcase under it prevents the door from slamming at it. It’s a bit dark in that corridor since there is no window and just one light bulb so you can’t tell how the painting needs a cleaning and the frame somehow loses its prominence.

I had held it against my father that he had gotten my painting. I had acquiesced in giving it up because he had made it his by that frame. But over the years it had become his, it had somehow in my mind stood for where we did share a taste, for he liked it as much as I did — though could not just leave it be, had had to make it conform to some imposed norm of impressiveness. But then when he had done it, he saw he had lost part of its charm.

So, at long last I got it back. But I got it back with this new meaning, that it had been his, but time has now reverted it back into being mine through the operation of shabbiness.

Almost there.

Ellen

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

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

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

Eugene Atget (1857-1927), The Petit Trianon

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

Anne Finch when young

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

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

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

Charlotte Smith by George Romney (1792)

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

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

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

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

Jean-Antoine Watteau, unnamed shepherdess

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lovelace attacking Clarisssa (Simon Brett again)

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

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

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

Final duel (Brett)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Piranesi, I Carceri (opaque)

Piranesci, I Carceri (clarified)

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

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

Ellen

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Patrice Chereau & Anne-Louise Trividic’s Gabrielle

Gabrielle (Isabelle Huppert)

Jean (Pascal Greggory) (2005 Azor Gabrielle)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve a film to recommend for those who want to understand what it is to be in a relationship (as it’s called nowadays) with someone else: to be intimately involved daily, emotionally, physically, socially, with economic and psychological dependence with someone else in all the ways we call being in a love attachment where you have promised exclusive loyalty. How people cope with the fears, demands, dangers, boredom, intriguing puzzle and inevitable mystery, and need for support is the subject of Gabrielle, Patrice Chereau and Anne-Louise Tividic’s film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s short story, “The Return.”

It’s mesmerizing. It holds you in a kind of still fascination because of its intensity and this feeling you don’t know quite what is to happen next as both people are suddenly breaking with conventional controls or taboos (or at least we are made to feel they are) so they may break out at any moment and do something startlingly revealing, violent, scary, humiliating, touching, funny, whatever human beings can do, perhaps short of eating or killing one another. We are not scared and can watch on, do not feel we will be violated in our emotions because we don’t feel at any point they are horrifyingly violent or hate one another. They never do leave a minimum of courteous respect. And the breaking out is limited. When the two really go at one another with an intensity of traumatic feeling, what happens is they shout and physically struggle with one another to the point of messing one another’s clothes all up and crying in staccato bursts. That’s about as far as it gets. But it is enough. It is real.

Its effect depends on the norm of the film, the distanced self-control:

Stylized framed shots:

The film’s narrative: a man (he is meant to be any man in his position) has been married for 10 years. He and his wife seem to be living a comfortable contented bourgeois life. First prologue: as Jean (his name) walks home (slightly earlier than usual, finding himself in a working class crowd tightly packed in the train, on the street) we watch a mental flashback. We see his continuous successful social life with his wife, their “Thursdays,” where Gabrielle (her name) reigns as cool queen at the head of the table and the conversation with all around her and among the guests themselves is Proustian wit, soliloquys against vulgarity in the the arts (by the man who turns out to be her lover), chitchat.

He watches her

She socializes

Jean arrives and the house is quiet. He sees a note which he appears to approach with intense trepidation (shots of him coming at it from this and that angle). The note says Gabrielle is leaving him for good, has a lover. Jean loses it almost immediately and without her there begins to crack up; he then remembers himself, becomes conscious that he is making a sort of spectacle of himself (there are servants in the house) and closes the door to his room. He then he hears someone coming in. We see a veiled woman in a coat slowly climbing the stairs, and making her way into his room. His wife has returned. The text upon which Patrice Chereau (director) and Anne-Louise Trividic (writer) have based their movie is by Conrad and is called “The Return.”

The ensuing 90 minutes is mostly an intense battle of emotions, talk that goes on and on becoming more real and direct about how the two have felt about one another from the time they chose one another (and why they say they did) until their lives together now. Then the last 10 minutes or so shows them the following Thursday night at first holding up (repressing before others the truth about their relationship), but then going mad and wild in front of these supposedly civilized friends to show their profound anger and distress and accusations until one-by-one and then more hurriedly, a group leave. We discover who is the lover (the husband’s editor on the journal he works at).

Exposed

Then that night right afterwards he attempts rape, does not go through with it, then she turns and says she is willing to make love, and has her maid take off her corset, put her in a slip and robe and lays down before him on the bed. Then after a slow burn and finally getting on top of her (with all his clothes), he can’t manage it. She says something like we’ll talk again in the morning. an inter-title suggests it’s morning now and the room are lit with morning light. We see now him in the street walking quickly away. The inter-title says he leaves never to return.

Throughout voice-over and inter-titles are used.

I watched this film because of the volume my essay on Trollope was published in, Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation, ed Burnham and Pollock. The other essay which was strongly praised (besides mine) by Kamilla Elliot was by Gene Moore, “Making Private Scenes Public: Conrad’s ‘The Return’ and Chereau’s Gabrielle.” Moore says Conrad’s tale focuses on a uncomprehending husband who is mocked; in Conrad’s story the wife is nameless. Moore also says the film focuses on the wife, and has been ignored by Conrad critics (mostly male I’ll guess). In a 35 minute feature made up of interviews with Chereau, Huppert and Greggory, Chereau says his film is about the husband’s falling to pieces, shattered carapace and then what we see; his vulnerability. He is no fool in the film; he surmised she was gone (we feel) upon seeing the note; sex (we learn from their dialogue) has not been good for years, never been good. Chereau insists this is a timeless situation — within the context of nuclear middle class families so say European arrangements since medieval Europe and until today, I’d agree and I’d agree he does transcend this particularity as the two people dig deeper at another and slowly go wild from within.

But the film is also clearly about the wife. She is named. She is continually under the camera’s scrutiny. The camera is him staring at her.

The writer is a woman: Anne-Louise Trividic. Chereau kept referring to Anne. The feature had Isabelle Huppert talking about her role just as much as Pascal Greggory about his and Chereau about the film. I’d say this is one of those rare films where we get a woman’s take on a man’s work, and the woman, Gabrielle, explains what Conrad was getting at: the husband in the film keeps asking the wife why why why did she return and she has a hard time explaining this point. Over and over. She does say that the lover she got (the editor) was someone that she feared she would sink into and give all he wanted and never hold back ever, nothing. I find that beautiful and true of sexual loving: when the couple really love tenderly it can make the books or film flower (Winston Graham’s Demelza and Ross Poldark are this way); when one of the pair is cruel, this kind of loving is profoundly destructive for the other (what would happen to Richardson’s Clarissa if she married Lovelace). But Gabrielle fears it, she fears what the man would do with it — in the salon conversation she says in the prologue you don’t need to know anything about other people to enjoy their company, in fact it’s best to keep a distance. The lover is a man who complained about vulgar art but is clearly very vulgar himself, animalistic somehow: we see he loves to eat, drink, smoke cigars, is intensely sensual as the trussed-up husband is not.

But she also says they need to face what they are, what they have been. That’s the real answer: she returned in order to face with him what they have become. She left the note in order to stage the scene. She wanted to break out. She did not want this lover but to change her life with the husband.

Gene Moore says that the film makes private scenes public and is about the violation of social rules – in particular the house has a bunch of female servants who march in and out during all this trauma, serve dinners, cook, undress and dress the wife. Moore’s thesis is very odd. He really seems to think this film is about the psychological abuse of the servants. This is skewed. It is true we are in a house of servants, and watch them hearing the master and mistress fight. We see them in the kitchen as the quarrel is going on. We see them serve the pair dinner, put the food on their plates. We see the maids help Gabrielle take off her clothes and put on her slip and robe. At one point she talks to one of them who is identifying with her and this maid for a moment seems to try to interpose herself between the master and mistress.

But surely this is missing what is the point about this more marginalized material. First there are no male servants about. No valet. No butler. The servant world of this film doesn’t make sense. Why should they be all women and perpetually cooking? Why does it take three women to undress Gabrielle? Tividic is showing us a woman’s world and this male flailing himself in it.

Further, the women servants do not seem embarrassed. There was a limit to how far the couple did reveal themselves, especially in front of servants. The most intimate talk and sudden frantic gestures and actions occur when the servants are gone. Jean stayed mostly dressed and when Gabrielle offered herself up to him she still had on her lovely silk slip and was laying in the rich red robe, as a sort of blanket wrapped about her

In his most distresed moments he remains well-bred, the courteous gentleman who tries not to insult other people, not to interfere with them:

A rare shot in the light

The husband and wife are not abusing their servants. This is not a film about servant abuse, though it is private life made public for us. Jean and Gabrielle have abused themselves, alienated themselves from themselves and one another for such a long time, that they are almost not alive for real.

She leaves and then returns to break this spell. But he cannot face what she is come home to face and he flees. It’s too threatening to his delicate poise, too emasculating. He cannot face his vulnerability to her.

This is a rare subtle film about a power struggle in a marriage where both are intensely oppressed by the routine of life demanded of them. That’s why we open with him coming home from work in that crowd. Why the action is sandwiched between the stifling performative social life. He is trying to understand this within the context of speechless rage and despair, the wounded cuckold. She is mute with a sort of helpless longing, but not for the vulgar editor.

I was so stunned by the dialogue. I wished I had the screenplay so as to read it carefully — as one does a novel. Chereau and Moore say the words of the screenplay are far different from the story. Conrad’s story is short and mostly narration. This film is long and the dialogue twists and turns and keeps up.

When I snapped the shots you see here, I discovered most came out very dark; that the film was shot in shadows. It does begin in black-and-white; when the first revelation occurs (she returns), it moves into color. It goes back and forth between black-and-white and color. It ends in black-and-white as he flees. This gives us a feel of the past frozen before us. I was thrilled by many shots showing Huppert’s beauty, and how carefully Chereau caught the husband’s cracking up with taste. The shots are like pictures, framed, very stylized, artificial. Chereau talked about his cinematographer, Eric Gautier; like Francesco Mereilles, Chereau has had one person he relies on consistently and he knows how central this man is to his films.

I’d love to read an insightful study of this film. Jim tells me Chereau is famous for a Wagner ring he did in the 1970s where he took Shaw’s analysis of the opera as about capitalism seriously. Chereau (like Francesca Zambello’s direction of Das Rheingold) dressed the actor-singers in 1920s evening clothes. That works very well.

Huppert’s career has been just a brilliant one. Chereau says he chose her for the role after he watched her in the film adaptation of Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher. I am just so drawn to her performances and the types she plays in all her films. I have written about The Piano Teacher and Claire Denis’s White Material

I don’t remember seeing Pascal Greggory before. He seems to me to be able to break away from the usual demand most other actors are unable to rid themselves of: that they keep up a hard invulnerability masculinity which only cracks occasionally so that their understand of vulnerability is never explored. An actor I’ve seen recently who can break this taboo at length is Martin Freeman as Watson in the new Sherlock.

I will go on to explore a another of the films that the finer film studies in Victorian Literature and Film thoroughly examined. I know that Louise McDonald’s take on Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon is spot on, but I would like to try Atom Egoyan’s 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter.

Ellen

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Willy Dekker’s La Traviata; or, The Courtesan. A cross between Jane Campion & Samuel Beckett

courtesan. n. a prostitute, especially one with wealthy or upper class clients (Oxford Concise Dictionary). n. a woman of the town [courtisane. Fr.] Shakespeare (Johnson’s Dictionary)

Also: from traviare. v. to be lost, wandering, travail, travel, astray (Concise Cambridge Italian Dictionary)

Nightmare parody as dreamt, seen, experienced by Alfredo

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been writing altogether too frequently about prostitutes lately: from trafficking to The Rise of the English Actress, from arguments about how or whether to help prostitutes to suspect individuals and another night in the life of Roman Polanski, it seems hard to leave the topic.

And now Willy Dekker’s La Traviata at the Met directed with HD camera transmission in mind, featuring Natalie Dessay and Matthew Polenzani (to whom much of the power of the experience is owed), is undoubtedly the most memorable, striking, & contemporary production of an opera I’ve seen since Claus Guth’s Don Giovanni at Salzburg. To speak metaphorically, it seemed at first the La Traviata characters has gotten lost in some minimalist Samuel Beckett play: instead of a tree, we had a clock, instead of a dirt road, a highly uncomfortable couch, instead of a horizon, a bending wall with a overlooking roof.

Dessay in her white slip by the clock, her rich flowered robe fallen and forgotten

But then as I saw this crowd of greedy men grabbing at our heroine, assailing her, tossing her about on stone couches, making her their puppet, I was reminded of Jane Campion’s take on Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Isabel Archer was destroyed by this hard devouring and (paradoxically) scornful adulation too.

Dessay thrust above the horde, arms thrusting champagne bottles outward

What is it with Salzburg — as that’s where the Dekker & Guth premiered — what electric current from a core of contemporary brilliance is running through this place? The production has been making the rounds of opera houses since 2005, and everyone apparently “knows” the script is based on partly autobiographical novel by Dumas, La Dame aux Camelias, which has been filmed and retold many times, and this version provides the capable singer with an opportunity to deliver the most moving of performances (see, e.g., The NYTimes and Minnesota Radio).

I just loved the set. Very demanding. You are just out there singing with no distractions beyond what is meaningful.

And I was swept away by Verdi’s music. It rocks, you sway within from it. Exhilarating, mysterious (as a song in this one tells us), thrilling. The music of this part of his oeuvre makes your body move, it’s irresistible the rhythms and harmonies. Two others just the same: Rigoletto. La Forza del Destino.

So what can I add beyond what I’ve already said: If the purpose was to make an unsentimental Traviata, to wrest this cliche from false tears, Dekker and Company managed it by hitting truer emotions. Bold and simple through and through: black-on-white for everyone but Dessay against an often royal blue background:

The nerve was to bring out the underlying realities of the original Dumas by transgressive parody. The traditional ballet became a muscular man naked to the waist, putting on Dessay’s red dress, and cavorting about the stage with all the men, making gross sexual gestures (see above). Where Alfredo once left the stage, now he was there to be teased, bullied, mocked, banged about:

— or was this a nightmare? The last act was just inspired. I was near or in tears, holding them back, stunned with emotion (though often not for the specific situation in front of me but rather the emotions themselves which I’ve felt in other situations). Our heroine was no longer emoting from a bed but walking about dazed, now grief-stricken, mad with depresson, then lit with sudden crazed hope (which hope alerted even the dim Alfredo that she was not going to last), all activity, trying this, demanding that (to go to church, to go out, to be forgiven, with plans for the future), letter in hand:

Polenzani as Alfredo sang exquisitely beautifully and his acting almost as good as Robert Alagna (Don Jose in the Met HD Carmen). He was more subtle than Dessay:

And his voice was stronger and more moving: his arias were like prayers to joy. Jim said that technically Dessay wasn’t up to it: her voice rasped at the end, the middle register was lacking. Well, if so, it made her singing all the more effective at the close, her destruction more believable.

For me the only failure was Dmitri Hvorostovsky as the father; I felt he was stiff, wooden, not acting at all. Jim suggested that he was impassive because he was directed to do that by Willy: he was supposed to be the relentless male, refusing to engage in what was in front of him.

Well, I’ve read the story and the father is supposed to be intensely emotional too — he wants to go to bed with her (maybe he does). But do see the comments below where people felt otherwise and liked Dmitri’s singing and stance, and I agree that making this male a stone figure reinforces the idea of a sweeping dismissal of this woman as a human being who counts. No all that counts is the “pure” daughter for whose advantageous marriage (monetarily, for prestige) Violetta is to be cast away. (Castaway was a Victorian term for prostitute).

A fine production to end a season which included a similarly (humane, sensitive) transformed Faustus (Marina Poplavskaya has played Violetta in other stagings of this production).

Deborah Voight was again our “hostess” (replete with commercials I have to admit) and told the movie-house audience that we could go over to facebook and offer our views or go to Twitter #metfaves & register our favorites for this year. I looked at my blogs & discovered after all I’ve written separate blogs on the HD operas from the Met only 13 times over 3 years (plus 1). It seems more because I write about HD operas from Europe which we’ve seen in movie-houses in DC, and operas we’ve seen at Glimmerglass & Castleton (see operas). So I can’t remember (separate out) what I saw so very accurately even this year but this is what I tweeted (with the 129 characters enlarged a bit for coherence): Luca Pisaroni as Caliban & Leporello. Marina Poplavskaya as Marguerite and Dessayas Violetta and Renee Fleming as Rodelina. Favorite productions: Traviata, Faustus, Enchanted Island, Don Giovanni. Then I came back and added another: Joyce Didonato as Sycorax, Danielle de Niese as Ariel. As will be seen after all I’m not gone on the Wagners, nor those with Nebtrebko. I too (like many people today) find myself drawn to baritones & deeper-voiced males than the tenors and yet except for Simon Keelyside I don’t remember their names. I did like Andreas Scholl, but I had to look up his name and remember him basically as the man who sang Rodelina as the countertenor who partnered my favorite diva Renee Fleming.

I did feel I had participated in a long opera season, including a development of habits (bringing my New York Style Cream Soda, my books), recognitions as when the same people sitting in the same areas of the auditorium over the year. Very satisfying.

We’ve picked out 9 of the 12 for next year that we must see. At $20 a seat, a ten minute drive at most away, it can’t be beat.

Ellen

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An enhanced humane Gounod’s Faust: Another HD opera

Valentin (Russell Braun) is murdered in a duel he insisted on having with Faust; he curses his sister, Marguerite (Marina Poplavskaya) as he lays dying

Dear friends and readers.

Score yet another triumph for the Met this season: an enhanced humane Gounod’s Faust. I had read that the reviews of this new production were unfavorable, and while we were in the theater, we heard a few members of the Met audience fiercely boo the director, Des McAnuff, and came on the Internet tonight to write a blog fully prepared to begin by urging readers not to believe the nonsense that this production is a mess. Instead I found several strongly positive reviews, e.g., Berkshire on stage and an English review (from last year’s first production, a blog, The Eyes Have It.

So my task is easier: I need only agree and expatiate a little differently. Des McAnuff and his team have given an intelligent turn to, replaced and reversed the original punitive and mostly misogynistic Calvinist later 19th century Catholic framework of Gounod and Barbier and Carre’s Faust out of Carre’s play (based loosely on Goethe). The frame is Faust is a scientist who is in his laboratory despairing over the first use and what’s to come of his atomic bomb; he takes poison and the devil appears to stop him; the action that ensues is his nightmare, from which we return to the lab at the close to see him die. The warning lesson story of the innocent young seamstress seduced, impregnated and abandoned, left to depend on God who proceeds to make her murder her new-born infant, be cursed by her brother, and die in the arms of Christ, becomes an exposure of the cruelty of a culture which gives her little joy, and when she snatches happiness, perversely turns on her through its evil forces (not just Mephistopheles, but the village which rejects her, the brother who would have murdered her perhaps had he not exploded into a duel with Faust).I was so moved by Marguerite’s story and the performance of Marina Poplavskaya I came near tears, especially when she lays down in her jail cell and turns to its walls, and rises deluded and half-crazed now to think she has her baby back (for whom we saw her sewing baby things), and then to imagine she is still being romanced by Faust.

There are some strains with this conception. One review I read complained that McAnuff had not been daring enough and wished the atomic bomb frame had been stronger. He did eschew Catholic imagery except when the script demanded a huge cross: instead we had an Escher like setting with a enigmatic sky for background.

Far Shot.

I felt there was enough reinforcement without departing from the original text.The chorus of men were throughout men home from WW2, and in the third act pantomime stressed how many had been killed through the grieving women and families, the crippling of the men, and the senselessness of the killing. McAnuff chose not to change the script, only re-picture its context.

There was a problem with the psychology of the characters. Faust is presented as really loving Marguerite, as no rake; the duet in Act 2 was exquisitely lovingly acted and sung.

Jonas Kaufmann as Faust and Marina Poplavaskaya as Marguerite

It therefore doesn’t make sense that he should abandon her. He’s at first all love, all tenderness; then he is all longing to help her (rather like the character of Billy wanting to help the pregnant Julie Jordan in the 1956 musical Carousel). Faust looks so grief-striken for Marguerite, so remorseful we wonder why he needs Mephistopheles to give him permission to return to her, permission that’s not granted.

Rene Pape in the background as Mephistopheles, all sardonic grinning

I found Pape as Mephistopheles well sung, but the character’s comic interjections (meant as sarky relief that did get a few laughs in our movie-house) became either irrelevant or part of what didn’t matter; they were thankless. Perhaps Kauffman’s voice was too harsh; he is not a sweet tenor, but then he sang well and he is so handsome:

So the pious melodrama with a snarky devil was turned into a genuine personal tragedy that was inconsistently unmotivated, with voices chosen that further altered the feel or mood. Marguerite’s innocent early lover, Siebert (sung by a mezzo soprano, Michele Loser) becomes a friend to her, a contrast to the men of the opera:

Seibert (Michele Losier)

Marguerite emerges as the center of the piece, and Marina Poplavaskaya was brilliant as actress and singer. Tt’s not wild to see this story of a woman driven to infanticide as intervening on the abortion debate today and attitudes taken towards pregnant women across cultures, including societies which practice honor killing of women.

A facebook friend, Judy Shoaf agreed the updating worked and the production was excellent and Marguerite the touching center:

Totally agree about Poplavskaya. It was her story and she was really really touching. I loved the final bit, though, which kind of made sense of Faust’s experience. I also found strange parallels with the Powell and Pressburger film Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which follows two friends (an Englishman and a German) from about 1900 to 1945. It’s a film about soldiers who in their youth believe in honor, fight a duel, fight a war as a kind of sport, and then confront Hitler and WWII and have to change their model of the world. Deborah Kerr plays 3 women in the story, so that she appears as a governess both men love, a WWI nurse whom General Candy marries, and finally as his young driver in London as WWII gets under way (as Poplavskaya appears in the “modern” lab as well as in the WWI village). I felt there was an affinity between the old Faust in the first scene and the German character in 1945 — physically and spiritually, the tired old man. BESIDES all these thoughts, I really enjoyed the opera — wonderful music and acting, if a bit weak on spectacle.

Oops, in previous comment it should be 1941 or so where I wrote 1945 twice. Blimp begins just after the Boer War and ends early in the British involvement in WWII.

I don’t know the Blimp material. It’s often described and alluded to. I do know Deborah Kerr’s typology and Marina Poplavskaya fits that: the intensely well-meaning passionate young woman who wants to live. I felt other parallels in recent art, real life (as far as I can ascertain what that might be) & what I’ve read. Little touches like the man with the sunglasses, gloves and black outfit ushering Marguerite up the stairs to death (aka Christ). I reviewed a book about how women have been accused as a matter of course of murdering their babies (remember Scott’s Heart of Midlothian where Effie is nearly hung yet in the story line marginalized). I am so ignorant of German culture; also later 19th century French catholicism which the director McAnuff was fighting every step of the way. Marina Poplavaskaya is a religious woman (from the interview) but we see how she reached out as one can to the humanity of pity and empathy.

Izzy said the music was good: she kept mentioning Mephistopheles’ aria in the first act as superb (see her insightful review) and both she and Jim liked Pape’s performance as the amoral entrepreneur in his fancy pinstripe suit:

Jim thought Kauffman miscast: too strong as a presence too; we needed someone who could seem weaker. I thought Kauffman’s comment during his interview to the audience to see this opera as scenes from a very long play (ultimately Goethe’s enormous ten-act play) was helpful. Left out are the linking scenes; for example, what was the relationship between Faust & Mephistopheles was not really developed. Yet the acting was so strong and persuasive, it made up for these gaps.

I confess it was a new story to me. I’ve never gotten through Goethe’s Faust I (in translation), much less opened his Faust II. So I had all the suspense of an unknown story too. I now know why it’s popular. I did notice that the audience at the Met and our theater preferred to applaud Pape and Kauffman loudly and hardly “brava’d” for Marina P. I felt they were embarrassed and wondered if the popularity were ambiguous like that of Leo Janacek’s 1903 Jenufa which I saw a few years ago and was startled to discover was interpreted very hostilely to Jenufa and her stepmother (see travel blog and partial reprint in comments)

Ellen

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Emma Donoghue’s Passions Between Women: seeing what was there but I never saw before

Miss Eleanor Lavish (Sinead Cusack) from Forster’s Room with a View (Davies’s film)

Dear friends,

This is probably my third blog on Donoghue’s Passions between Women, maybe the fourth in which I’ve mentioned the book. I wrote about it to suggest that Jane Austen, her sister, Martha Lloyd, and Anne Sharp all show a pattern of life that in the era was silently identified as lesbian spintershood; then I wrote about it to discuss liberty and women and suggest that women are answerable with their bodies and it’s this ownership of women’s bodies that precludes liberty; I wrote about how Donoghue made me see Sarah Fielding’s The Governess in a wholly new light so that it made more sense, was more interesting, consistent; finally I mentioned it in my blog on Donoghue’s Slammerkin.

Can there be anything else to say? Yes. Why say it? Because I have a whole bunch of texts to tell the reader he or she should read to re-see in a new vital or poignant way. What Donoghue does do is uncover a long history of evidence that lesbian life has been with us wherever we can find some written records of sex life. We cannot treat it the way we can male homosexual history or sex because we don’t have anywhere near the direct evidence, but through the persecution and silencing a poignant human story shows through now and again. She ends on the idea that the history can teach “us” — for she comes out as a lesbian with her use of pronouns at the end — something of how to survive.

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

Johannes Vermeer (1632-75), Maid and Mistress

Let us begin with the familiar theme of maids and mistresses, and what do we find? We are made aware of the inadequacy of the typical representation of the maid and mistress where the maid gives up all, even her life to the mistress without any qualm or resentment.

I feel I had not read Defoe’s Roxanne before — though I know I did (in a graduate class where we wrote about it). I have little memory of it, but don’t remember it as a story about a maid, Amy and her mistress, as a pair of partners struggling through life where one must ever be a prostitute to support the other. We see Roxanne use Amy, when things go badly Roxanne accuse Amy of being a devil who seduces her. The class distinctions melt as they turn into an “economic double act” with Amy the manager and Roxanne the goods sold.

What destroys them is Amy’s excessive concern for Roxanne – but also her own safety. Amy had previously pushed Roxanne’s children off on relatives (shades of Moll Flanders) and one day a grown daughter, Susan, shows up; Susan threatens to expose the mother, Roxanne and Amy plots to kill Susan. At first Roxanne is horrified, and Amy retreats from this solution, but as time goes on, Amy does indeed murder Susan. Roxanne throws Amy out, but it’s the loss of Amy Roxanne cannot get over, and Donoghue says the novel peters out in confusion — I do remember it just moving into a kind of shorthand drivel and ending.

Johnson’s Rasselas? A rare telling of a close loving friendship between maid and mistress is Johnson on Pekuah and Nekayah where Nekayah saves Pekuah from a life of concubinage after rape. Nekayah sinks into an intense depression and a big ransom is paid to get Pekuah back for Nekayah. Johnson does punt by saying no rape really took place after all. I had never considered them in a lesbian light either.

Then there’s “Unaccountable Wife” by Jane Barker in Patchwork Screen for Ladies. As read by Donoghue turns out to be a story like that of The Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Elizabeth Foster and the Duke (see blog on Amanda Foreman’s biography): two women having a lesbian relationship while both of them go to bed with the Duke too (separately I suppose). What happens is the wife begins to do all the housework and after a while refuses to go to bed with the husband while her maid gets pregnant by him and does no work. It would seem to be a story of a servant beginning to dominate the mistress, only the servant is eventually thrown out and the wife stays by her side supporting her in the most menial of ways. Janet Todd in her book on women’s friendship in literature read as the exploitation of a barren neurotic wife by her servant. I agree that’s not adequate if you consider all the parts of the story.

If Donoghue is right, I have to go back and reread Betty Rizzo’s Companions without Vows where she shows how power corrupts and given unqualified power over someone else it’s the rare person who does not abuse it — whether mistress, maid or master.

Donoghue finds and praises the few stories where real conflict between maid and mistress is seen – or between upper and lower class woman. I’d say that Austen’s Emma takes advantage of this convention that the lower class women is all gratitude — and only at the end of the story has Harriet irritated and moving away and never does deal with what must have been a residual of deep resentment in Jane Fairfax. We only get her gushing. It might be Emma’s blindness but we are not encouraged to read the last encounter between Emma and Jane that way.

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Emma (Romola Garai), Anna Taylor Weston (Jodhi May), Harriet Smith (Louise Dylan) (Sandy Welch’s Emma)

Let’s backtrack from this to sentimentalized treatments of true friends. Donoghue’s treatment differs here because she considers pairs of women where things did not go smoothly, women who differed a lot. These are mostly famous and not-famous pairs of women friends who left letters.

I’ve mentioned in the previous blogs Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill’s story: the great irony is that Anne and Sarah have come down in memory as the lesbian pair, when it was Abigail Masham who won Anne finally and the story one of betrayal and pressure from impingments of other status, prestige, money circumstances. Also how Charlotte Charke’s long-time partner, Mrs Brown is just ignored even to today so the memoir is misrepresented.

Poignant is the section on Mary Astell: apparently she could not get close friends to reciprocate and would tell herself this was God’s punishment on her for not begin content with him. Finally she meets Lady Catherine Jones and she is so overjoyed to find someone who does not find her unlovable. Jones was wealthy and became a lifelong friend and patroness. In fact in her old age Mary Astell might have ended up horribly but for Jones taking the the sick woman (she got breast cancer) into her house and providing nursing.

Also The Memoir of Sophia Baddeley. Written by her long-suffering, loyal friend, Elizabeth Hughes Steele, the story is one of what happens to women whose passions the society deforms and will not honor or respect, to women who the society also encourages to be masochistic. Baddeley kept latching onto male “keepers’ who would beat her, and savagely; then she’d retreat to Mrs Steele (who also married and had a child). They have terrible rows and are finally parted. With Elizabeth what matters is a resistance to heterosexuality. The unhappy Elizabeth died young of consumption (37). I’d now like to read this one.

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Jane (Samantha Harker) and Elizabeth (Jennifer Ehle) turning to one another (1995 P&P, by Davies)

A third grouping: Sincere and Tender Passions . Anne Damer as a lesbian artist and Elizabeth Farren fit in here (since Donoghue’s Life Mask) What distinguishes Donoghue’s treatment is she also quotes letters from contemporary people who recognized the sapphism; that includes Mrs Thrale. We also see how much competition from other women Damer had with respect to Elizabeth Farren. A chasm of mistrust was easy to start up since the society was so against these alliances (pp. 139-42).

Donoghue often quotes Fielding’s The Governess in this part of the book in passing: there is a book about a girls’ school. I was startled to see Lady Pomfret, a familiar (to me in the letters I had access to) dullard, a friend of Lady Hertford. I remembered that Lady Pomfret left three thick volume of these dull missives. That I had xeroxed a bunch and was disappointed when I finally took them home. I wondered if I xeroxed the wrong ones. Maybe. But now I see they are censored and why Lady Pomfret wrote so much to Lady Hertford and so insistently.

Frances Seymour Thynne, Lady Hertford and Henrietta Louisa Jeffreys Fermor (I mention all her names so we won’t get her confused with someone else), Lady Pomfret were faithful correspondents for years and this verse epistle (a favorite with me) is from Lady Hertford to Lady Pomfret:

We sometimes ride, and sometimes walk,
We play at chess, or laugh, or talk;
Sometimes besides the crystal stream,
We meditate some serious theme;
Or in the grot, beside the spring,
We hear the feathered warblers sing.
Shakespeare perhaps an hour diverts,
Or Scott directs to mend our hearts.
With Clarke’s God’s attributes we explore;
And, taught by him, admire them more.
Gay’s Pastorals sometimes delight us,
Or Tasso’s grisly spectres fright us:
Sometimes we trace Armida’s bowers,
And view Rinaldo chained with flowers.
Often from thoughts sublime as these,
I sink at once – and make a cheese;
Or see my various poultry fed,
And treat my swans with scraps of bread.
Sometimes upon the smooth canal
We row the boat or spread the sail;
Till the bright enveing-star is seen,
And dewy spangles deck the green.
          Then tolls the bell, and all unite
In prayer that God would bless the night.
From this (though I confess the change
From prayer to cards is somewhat strange)
To cards we go, till ten has struck:
And then, however bad our luck,
Our stomachs ne’er refuse to eat
Eggs, cream, fresh butter, or calves’-feet;
And cooling fruits, or savoury greens
‘Sparagus, peas, or kidney-beans.
Our supper past, an hour we sit,
And talk of history, Spain or wit.
But Scandal far is banished hence,
Nor dares intrude with false pretence
Of pitying looks, or holy rage
Against the vices of the age:
We know we were all born to sin,
And find enough to blame within.
(written 1740)

Now these women were married so they had “cover” and a rich fulfilled life in other ways too. Lady Hertford was especially close to her son whom she did not send to public school but educated at home herself, and he grew up to be a fine sensitive well-educated man. Bi-sexual women.

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Florence (Jodhi May) and Nan (Rachel Stirling) in Tipping the Velvet (novel by Sarah Walters, movie by Andrew Davies)

The penultimate section of Donoghue’s book is titled: What Joys are these? — Donoghue proposes to pay attention to all those scenes in erotic novels where women are having sex with other women: these are usually ignored. She argues that one quality in most of them which distinguishes them is that the two women do not punish one another where later pornography usually shows the women punished severely and humiliated.

I know I was surprised by the lack of violence and punishment in Cleland’s Fanny Hill. The punishment of Suzanna in The Nun came from her refusing to become a nun, not her getting involved sexually with the mother superior, from her refusing to obey not what she did sexually. There is a scene in Les Liaisons Dangereuses where Madame de Merteuil pleasures Cecile. I too have been guilty of ignoring it.

The first pairs of active lesbian lovers that have been overlooked by readers are gotten by reading against the grain passages mocking and ridiculing women: for example, in Richardson’s Pamela, Mrs Jewkes’s attacks on Pamela — it is true that Pamela evidences a very unladylike knowledge of what Jewkes attempts. Donoghue then moves on to Anthony Hamilton’s Memoirs of Count of Grammont: a more unpleasant book shaped by a set of nasty attitudes I’ve never read — I do have a copy and have tried it more than once. I fully believe and would have noticed had I gotten that far that there are lesbians who are mocked and burlesqued, humiliated as fellow rakes to males. Madame Merteuil’s experience on the sofa with Cecile comes under here.

It seemed to me the book was returning to the ugly material Donoghue had begun with in her opening section: the earliest glimpses of lesbian in texts are the lurid imaginings of lesbians as women with somehow damaged penises.

I want to tell her, Emma, this is desperate stuff. What joys are these is a good title for this material though. But I admit What interested me in the “what joys are these section” most is how Donoghue never seemed to escape in it from the early ugly salacious kind of texts she began with. It seems until very recently (let’s say Sarah Walters) no one presented lesbian sex as fun, pleasurable, tasteful even. Tales of wooden dildoes (because in print it’s so rare for sex to be taken seriously without a phallus, same sex whippings, and unkind orgies close the chapter. Donoghue says we need to remember much of this is male fantasy: women did not get to write erotica at the time.

So one criticism of her book is it is not sufficiently (hardly at all) informed by 20th century texts. She ought to write a volume 2.

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Allan Ramsay (1686-1758), Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800, painted 1762)

And so we come to Lesbian Communities. Here again it’s a matter of countering an insistence X just doesn’t exist, in this case communities of women who are aware of themselves as lesbian in orientation. Were Jane, Cassandra, Martha and Anne Sharpe aware of themselves that way? If so, how did they read The Governess? Again the books to show as incorrect is Janet Todd’s Women’s Friendship in Literature and Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. We can’t know for sure.

So it’s a case of Margaret Cavendish’s plays (fantasies though), Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall. She does find a long passage in Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” celebrating what seems to have been a group life for women which was lesbain at least in feel, texts on nunneries, convents of pleasure, but it must be admitted again nothing historically real … as yet.

Donoghue’s catalogue and examination of texts which show that women did form lesbian communities, active in sex as well as anything else. And it continues to be the case she has to resort to these lurid texts to find this kind of material, specifically a long section in Delaviere Manley’s New Atalantis and Secret Memoirs. And the attitudes evinced of the women towards one another continue to be sort of adversarial, punitive (threats if you break away; she has a number of types of lesbian too: cross-dressing comes up. And the initials of the characters can be linked to real women at the time – at the court, in the theaters. The characters are mostly anti-heroines.

She also repeatedly shows us a scholar who has written or worked on these who denies active sex. Trumbach for example says the women cross dress in order to pass unmolested; in fact her passages quoted show they are trying to make contact by so dressing.

Sources for some of these depictions of lesbian networks are French: Grimm’s famous Correspondence litteraire and semi-pornographic French novels, Histoire d’une Jeune Fille published by Pidansat de Mairobert.

She ends on a long piece on how what the documents show of Sappho’s life (a genuine lesbian or perhaps bisexual life) and the ways she has been presented. Again it has been a matter for most writers of either erasing her active lesbian feelings altogether or presenting them as secondary and overcome (rightly) by her heterosexual romance (mostly a concoction, especially the suicide) which is seen as the right and proper and comfortable thing. Pronouns changed in the two full poems we have (as was done with Shakespeare)

But again in the forefront of respected writers now and again she finds a truthful witness: Pierre Bayle. And outside the mainstream those who write frankly, but alas often derogatory or sneering kind of texts that have this lurid tone or attack Sappho or mock her.

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Julia Kavanagh (1824-77), bluestocking spent her life studying women of letters (Davies has a Christine Kavanagh in his film, Room with a View)

Donoghue’s larger point that the reason we have no history of lesbianism is not that there was not one and probably very different in feel from these books is made over and over again. I’d say it was really more like what we find in the Bath bluestocking spinster groups and their texts which however are so severely censored (e.g., Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding …)

So, gentle reader, the next time you hear the word “spinster” or “bluestocking” or phrases “maid and mistress” and “sentimental women’s friendship,” maybe instead of drawing away from something asexual, tedious, dull, you’ll turn to the texts as richly different.

As to Donoghue’s perspective, it’s deeply somber if you think about the stories the books tell of how women suffered from silencing, controlling them severely, erasing what they wrote or misrepresenting it, and ridiculing and treating as sick a whole subset of people.

Ellen

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