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

Woolf’s working desk at Monk House

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inge Morath (1923-2002), A Park Bench

Ellen

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On a really enjoyable reading by Colm Toibin

Colm Toibin when much younger

Dear friends and readers,

Last night we went to a local bookstore which regularly hosts talks and classes about books (as well as a weekly storybook hour for children and tours too), Politics and Prose. We’d never been there before, and to the area only once, when last July we were invited to come to a fourth of July barbecue (what a treat for us). A member of the Irish embassy asked all those who came to read James Joyce’s Ulysses on Bloom Day. We heard about this because Jim got an email from the Irish embassy which now has his name.

A large old-fashioned bookstore, two floor (!), where books are actually set up by their categories and within that the author’s name. A couple tables upfront with latest sellers, and in the back audiobooks on CD. You can wander about and come upon treasures just like this. I saw Alice Kessler-Harris’s A Difficult Woman (a biography of Lillian Hellman) on display, but had decided for Toibin’s Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature, a book of somewhat rewritten essay-review meditations published elsewhere (the LRB, the NYRB and other places). If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know how much I like his essays, and how I’ve loved those of his novels I’ve read thus far. It turns out I’ve read 4 of 7 (In praise of Colm Toibin: Un-put-downable).

Last night he was there to promote his latest novel (apparently the 7th), The Testament of Mary. Yes the central character is the Virgin Mary (does she have a last name like the rest of us?). It’s a really a novella, a short one at that, and from what he wrote a retrospective meditation by Mary some 20 years after the brutal crucifixion of her son. She is now living in safety, relative peace, left to herself by all and two visitors show up, one Lazarus. Yes he takes liberties — good historical fiction often does. The core idea is the irretrievableness of what happened and how she cannot forget and if she could change it, do it differently somehow, how she longs to. It’s memories poured out. As a subjective narrative by a women it harks back to his great The South. He seems to have a predilection for writing heroine’s texts (Brooklyn, Henry James in The Master is a kind of male heroine).

What a large crowd. It did not overwhelm the store, but it was much larger than we’d expected of such an intellectual sensitive author. There were not enough chairs for all.

He began by telling us of his trips to Venice and two paintings of the Virgin he had stood before repeated: a Tintoretto, perhaps The Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, and a Titian, The Assumption. What he seems to have liked especially about the latter was her red robe and how she soared above reality. He is himself getting older.

Recent photo — he does look like this, only he is a small man, somewhat bent, light brownish-white skin, light brown hair

Today I see that the Tintoretto has Mary in a red robe too, and the picture’s content against the reason for its festival, takes us across her life.

They were the inspiration for the book. He did not tell us why he wrote it, only that he would like it to be taken seriously and he didn’t mean it as a mock. He didn’t think the church would bother notice it — he said this in answer to one question afterwards. He does read very well, and his voice was how I’d imagined it, Irish lilt but not too heavy. I stayed awake and listening for much of it, though when his register came too low I couldn’t hear it all. We were in the back, having arrived only ten minutes before the “reading” started.

It was obvious he’d done this many times. He was smooth, and seemed such a sweet man. These sorts of things are part of what makes an author successful. The book launch. He’s learned how to do it. Among questions asked were does he have a routine, a place he always writes, what does he write with. He said he writes anywhere and with any thing (mostly a pen) and no he’s not a routine type. He does sometimes have to write a book quickly or whatever quickly lest he forget it; get it down, and then he comes back to work at it. He is not a man who has written a lot of very long books, say like Dickens, Trollope, Margaret Oliphant, Wm Dean Howells, and they all had fixed routines and places they wrote. He has made his career through socializing too and his oeuvre (in pages) most actually be preponderantly non-fiction.

I wanted to reply to something he had said before starting his readings. He said that other “classic” fiction novels, 19th century, were no help “here.” He comically alluded to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Dickens’s Miss Havisham, they could not help him. Nor Henry James. Perhaps Mrs Touchett (Ralph’s mother, isolated, alone, an “odd” woman.) While he was reading I thought of Daniel Deronda’s mother, Eliot’s older heroine who returns 25 years after giving her son up to another so she could have an operatic career, a life of her own. Now bitter, not remorseful, but regretful because after all she ended up marrying and having children anyway. The dreams she had had not been realized and how here was this son reproaching her.
But the mike was too far away.

I didn’t try to buy anything directly afterwards. The line became very long. Instead we walked three stores down to the Comet, a pizza place with ambience. A large screen played over and over the poignant short Italian film, The Red Balloon. No sound just the images before you. The walls gray. The tables ping-pong, the seats benches. Soft lights. We had two pizzas, small, a white (all cheese, garlicky nothing else) and a red (just tomato sauce topping, more spicy, reminding me in its heavy dough and yummy surface of pizza in NYC in the 1950s, so-called Napoles-like). A carafe of chianti. The place was moderately full.

We talked. We realized this was probably the first book reading we’ve ever gone to as such. Play readings by a group, lectures, maybe a book reading within a performance of other things, but not alone. Jim said we never went to the Folger poetry readings because they cost. This was for free. Also the people were less known and there was obviously time for too much talk. So too much egoism would be on display he felt. I remembered going to listen to Empson read his poem in the Graduate Center in the 1970s. How he read little and talked much of his poetry. But the talk was splendid, really insightful (as Toibin’s was not quite, though not deliberately misleading as say Andrew Davies on his films), and how John Hollander got up to ask questions, all admiring and how Empson (spiteful in this but perhaps made uncomfortable) cut him down, half-mocked him. Also a lecture by Margaret Mead at the Museum of Natural History. All I can recall is how intelligent and humane she was and ever after have reacted to all dismissals of her work, denigrations of her with a memory of this seeing her and knowing they are unfair to her.

We decided we would try some more at this place. Then to support the bookstore, we went back. That’s when I bought Love in a Dark Time. All the Testaments to Mary were gone. To tell the truth, I was not sure I wanted it, as I felt it would be wrapped up in Catholicism as some level, and I’m an atheist. I was sure it’d be feminist in intent. If Toibin had said he found out or invented a last name for her, and told us of it, I might’ve. They had only had his most recent novels: (Blackwater Lightship two copies, one still left, and mostly Brooklyn and The Master, latest and best known. I have them all plus The South and Homage to Barcelona (not there). But there was suddenly one copy as if from deep in a basement (the girl at the counter said it was “a backlist” book), this book of essays. So I snatched it. His essay on Wilde’s exposure of his homosexuality as “found out,” as a person wanting to be “found out” has influenced my thinking ever since.

We got home by 10ish, not too long to write one final blog on Jane Austen’s letters. I’m not going to give them up, but maybe go yet slower and do it by myself. The prompting from Austen-l helps, and the sense (however deluded) of reaching people, but the flak, the continual cliched readings and occasional either preposterous or theoretical agendas don’t help me at all. I waste time and make no friends refuting them.

Earlier that day I had talked on WWWTTA about Temple Grandin’s film about how animals form bonds, friendships, and people’s perception of them, and the trajectory the film belonged to. Really worth while and gotten into other debates on the growing dissemination of how it’s okay for women to subjugate themselves to sadism, even light fun … ), but I’ll add these as brief comments here later today.

We wished we could have more such nights. People are only gradually becoming aware of what a delightful city DC is slowly turning into. The neighborhood around there is small houses, apartments further off, and some shopping blocks. It’s marred by a large street which traffic streams through daily and that obscures the quiet ambience of the play otherwise. I’ve vowed to myself to read Love in a Dark Time, Homage to Barcelona, and (connected to Toibin and the project on book illustrations to Trollope which I’ve just finished — a blog this weekend), Amy Tucker’s The Illustration of the Master.

Reprinted by Tucker, it was chosen by James as a frontispiece for A Portrait of Lady, and could serve as frontispiece for Toibin’s The Master.

Ellen

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The Gothic Wanderer & Teaching the Gothic

Darkness

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went–and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light …
The meagre by the meagre were devoured,
Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answered not with a caress–he died.
— Byron, inspiration for Shelley’s The Last Man

The Gothic Wanderer by Tyler Tichelaar

Caspar David Friedrich (1174-1840), A Monk by the Sea: a sublime picture Stephen C. Behrendt uses when teaching the gothic (from Gothic Fiction: The British and American Traditions: Approaches to Teaching, edd. Diane Long Hoeveler & Tamar Heller

Dear friends and readers,

As someone who has been reading gothic books ever since I began to read books meant for adults, and has taught gothic books many times, constructed a course I gave several times in different versions, Exploring the Gothic, and dedicated part of my website to the gothic, I found myself a little startled to discover that of some 19 or so novels Tyler Tichelaar analyses with care, I’d read through only 5 of them (!), and never finished another 2 — until I turned to the MLA-sponsored Gothic Fiction: The British and American Traditions, edd. Diane Long Hoeveler & Tamar Heller, to find my ratio there was just as bad, maybe worse. The gothic as a mode is a vast terrain capable of swallowing up a variety of forms (novel, poetry, film, story, opera, video game) and conveying a themes diverse enough to be popular across several centuries. Sometimes the same book at the same time can be accurately interpreted as reactionary-conservative or radical progressive (see Richard Davenport-Hines’s The Gothic: 400 Years … ). Nevertheless, as those of us who love the mode know there are a number of images, plot-, and character types, moods, emphases that repeat like a formula. That’s why it’s easy to make fun of. Take one huge labyrinthine ancient (preferably partly ruined) dwelling, one cavern, a seashore, place inside a murderous incestuous father or mother (preferably chained), heroes and heroines (various kinds), get a tempest going at night, be sure to have plenty of blood on hand, and stir in a great deal of supernatural phenomena, have the action occur in the deep past or be connected to a deep past …

It seems most teachers begin a course in the gothic the way I did: by attempting to immerse students somehow or other: I used a short gothic novel, Susan Hill’s Woman in Black and the 1989 film adaptation, a genuinely unnerving experience whose central figure students told me they feared seeing afterward, or (for brevity as well as power), Edith Wharton’s short story, Afterward, with the BBC 1 hour film adaptation. Then I’d have the students say what they thought was characteristically gothic in either.

Tyler Tichelaar would though probably not begin with these two, nor Scott Simpkins (one of the contributors to Gothic Fiction) who seems to concentrate his course on what’s called the male gothic, and who says there are nowadays few full-scale books devoted to the male gothic, probably because the revival and recent respectability of the form is a direct result of feminism. As Eva Figes shows in her Sex and Subterfuge, the female gothic allows women writers and readers to express, experience, awake up to see, express and protest in a displaced fantasy form the real oppression and destructive nature of the upbringing and circumstances women are subjected to. At its center is usually a woman who is unjustly victimized, often imprisoned, beaten in some way. The male gothic takes the male trajectory of inflicted stress, loss, pressure, punishment, usually a male at the center, and often someone exiled — wandering far from home, unable to find or make a home, to belong anywhere. I am here simplifying of course, a book can contain both modes, women can write male gothics; men, female gothics.

This is not the only fault-line. How is it related to the picturesque on the one hand and the sublime on the other? Are horror distinguishable from terror gothics? There are sub-genres to the form: the ghost story does tend to dwell on guilt, on some irretrievable injustice having been done and is not physically violent but offers psychological terror, where the vampire story is a brutal physical exercise in breaking bodily taboos, its origins include fear of the dead hating the living, simply because (in atavistic kinds of thought) they are still living. The modern short story with its subtle sudden intrusion of the uncanny (un-home-y) stemming from M. R. James tends to present the supernatural as psychological projection. So too ways of reading differ. Tichelaar tends to analyze his stories from a Christian perspective, looking to see how the gothic enables readers to cope with the breakdown of family-centered or supportive laws and customs, and older traditional forms of state organization; Eva Sedgwick is persuaded that the gothic arises from paranoia about homosexuality (really any transgressive sexuality outside a narrow set of conventions) and discusses what gothics can make us see sexually which realistic conventions would preclude (Between Men; also her notorious “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” reprinted in Tendencies).

I take this direction because it is the great merit of Tichelaar’s book to dwell on the male gothic and use the figure of the wanderer as a way of exploring a series of related books, some written by, as for example, Fanny Burney where he analyses the distinctively feminist perspective of her work (a long chapter on her The Wanderer) and Mary Shelley where he analyses the woman’s deployment of Rosicrucian elements, the Christian myth of Paradise Lost, a profoundly pessimistic rejection of much of the romantic in an apocalyptic mythos (another long chapter, this one on Frankenstein and then The Last Man).

Robert de Niro as Frankenstein’s outcast, lonely monster, wandering in a world of snow and ice (1993 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein)

As Tichelaar says, we never learn for sure that the monster has found peace in death. Tichelaar’s point of view on The Wanderer as a gothic book about a figure seeking a community has recently been discussed in The Burney Journal too: Andrew Dicus, “Evelina, The Wanderer, and Gothic Spatiality: Francis Burney and a Problem of Imagined Community,” Burney Journal 11 (2011):23-38.

Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho as well as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk are also key texts. Tichelaar empathizes with Antonio. He understands and justifies Radcliffe’s heroines turn to reason and community at the close of harrowing losses, where especially married women and daughters are abused.

Alfonso Simonetti, Ancor Non Torna, an illustration for 19th century Italian translation of Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest

Tichelaar takes the gothic into the Edwardian era and then the 20th century with discussions of Stoker’s Dracula (another long chapter), Tarzan and the modern heroic vampire. (Although not discussed as an example by Tichelaar I’ve done Suzy McKee Charnas’s 1980s Vampire Tapestry, much indebted to geological ideas, with great success with students.)

This could be an effective book for teachers to send students to read. Tichelaar writes in a readable style; he really does tell the stories of his books effectively. I can vouch for this as in a number of cases I was not at all at a loss not having read the book. Their situations and character types are summed up clearly. He begins with Milton’s Paradise Lost which is a centrally alluded-to text — until recent times and its presentation of legitimate transgression (as the romantics saw it). I liked the plainness and personal sincerity of the approach. Tichelaar begins with his love of the gothic as a boy, how he found himself when he first became an academic forced to travel far from home (upper Michigan), displaced, identified with the gothic wanderer, and feels this is a figure who can speak home to people today similarly transplanted, or peoples today who fight to control their homeland. He traces anti-semitism and sympathy for the outcast Jew in the figure of the wanderer. He’s very concrete when he makes analogies. It is true that gambling is a central sin in Udolpho. Godwin’s St Leon does seem to be about Godwin’s own troubles as a radical philosopher trying to persuade people that reason (and a scientific outlook ultimately) drawn from experience is a far better guide to life than religious beliefs (or myths). Tichelaar is unusual for arguing that for Godwin “life’s true meaning exists in the value of human relationships, so he condemns whatever may sunder them” (p. 67). Many critics suggest Godwin’s detachment from his personal context when he argued his theses that he offended his readers intensely.

I probably learned most (new) material from Tichelaar’s chapter leading from Thomas Carlyle’s at first despairing Sartor Resartus (he ponders suicide) as a text about a gothic to Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni leading to Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens borrowed his tale of Sidney Carlton substituting himself for another man from Zanoni, was influenced by Carlyle’s French Revolution, and B-L’s use of Rosicrucian ideas about immortality and Christian Redemption. For my part I’m not sure that Dickens himself believed in these providential patterns, but he was willing to use them to (as Tichelaar says) “create a novel that is life-affirming and provides redemption for its Gothic wandering characters” (p. 193). Tichelaar emphasizes the number of wanderers in this novel, the theme of “recalled to life” (as an imperative), and how Carlton acts for the Darnay family (“I hold a sanctuary in their hearts,” p. 206) group and is a Christ-figure. The revolution is a background for a plot of sacrifice (p. 196). Maybe. I remember I was intensely moved by Dickens’s portrait of the depressive Sidney Carlton, and his poignant semi-suicide (I just cried and cried), the famous line (no matter how parodied I care not): “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known,” and Ronald Colman’s enactment:

Ronald Colman (when I was 13 my very favorite actor) — a noble-in-failure gothic wanderer

Jim’s complaint has been (while watching the movie, he read the book decades ago) that Dickens’s text lends itself to anti-French revolution propaganda of a simplistic sort. It’s easy to fear and detest the Madame Defarges of the 1935 film. I’m not sure; I’m hoping later this year (or next) to read the book with a fun and generous group of people on Inimitable-Boz (at Yahoo) and watch a number of the films adapted from it before pronouncing even tentatively.

The MLA Gothic Fiction is so rich with titles of books, ways of defining and introducing different forms of gothic, and then essays on specific gothic texts, I must perforce select out those chapters which either impressed me particularly or troubled me and draw examples from those where the kinds of gothic and those specific texts I’ve gravitated towards, preferred to read or have taught are those analysed.

Friedrich, Woman at the Window (1822)

The opening section of the book is particularly rich and useful. Six essays by respected scholars on how they start their gothic courses, how go about defining the gothic, exemplifying it: Marshall Brown uses philosophical texts:

Solitude moves us in every one of its peaceful pictures. In sweet melancholy the soul collects itself to all feelings that lead aside from world and men at the distant rustic tone of a monastery bell, at the quiet of nature in a beautiful night, on every high mountain, near each crumbling monument of old times, in every terrifying forest. But he who knows not what it is to have a friend, a society in himself, who is never at home with his thought, never with himself, to him solitude and death is one and the same.

Stephen Behrendt offers pictures, Anne Williams distinguishes female from male gothic, Carol Snef gothic’s distrust and use of science. In the last part of the book we again get general approaches, which films (Wheeler Winston Dixon), how to cope with demands one make the course interdisciplinary or include public service, reach out to relatively unprepared students. There are just a cornucopia of cited secondary studies; I looked and did see all my favorite texts were there (including the profound Elegant Nightmares, about ghost stories as popular version of Kafkaesque visions, by Jack Sullivan), though I missed the French studies that are so important (Maurice Levy). The book is limited to Anglo versions of the gothic — though these are influenced by European texts and pictures.

Henri Fuseli (1741-1825), Perceval delivering Belisane from the Enchantment of Urma (1783) — said to be wholly invented by Fuseli. What is happening here: Is the man trying to kill himself, thrust that sword down the women’s body or is he trying to break the chain of the kneeling man?

Then there are 19 essays on specific texts set out chronologically (starting with Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and ending on African-American gothics, e.g., Naylor’s Linden Hills, and really pop books (equivalent to Tichelaar’s Tarzan) like Anne Rice’s. Notable: Angela Wright on the intermingling of solid historicity with narratives of female sexual exploitation in Sophia Lee’s The Recess, Diane Long Hoeveler in effect summarizes her book Gothic Feminism for you (using among others Wollstonecraft, Dacre). Like Tichelaar, Daniel Scoggin takes you on a journey through the gothic by follwing a single figure: the vampire. I found myself learning new characteristics of sub-genres in Mark M. Hennely’s description of the Irish gothic (big-house displacement), liked the clarity of Susan Allen Ford on contemporary female gothic (Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood).

I’ll concentrate just on Judith Wilt “‘And still he insists He Sees the Ghosts’: Defining the Gothic” and Kathy Justice Gentile’s “Supernatural Transmissions Turn-of-the-Century Ghosts in American Women’s Fiction: Jewett, Freeman, Wharton and Gilman.” I was troubled by Wilt (and a couple of other contributors) who said she encourages her students to suspend their disbelief and really believe in this world of spirits or “spirituality,” and cannot quite believe her assertion that their students are sceptical. I taught gothic courses for a number of years and I found students all too frequently did believe in ghosts or could be led into saying they did. They’d imply “we don’t know, do we?” sometimes at the end of a talk. Gentile shows how to read Sarah Orne Jewet’s Country of the Pointed Firs as gothic, and then Mary Wilkins Freeman’s collected ghost stories (collected as The Wind in the Rose) re-enacting the tragedies of mothers losing their children and their loneliness and rage, culminating in Wharton’s ghost stories one which I’ve read again and again with my students and with people online in cyberspace. Wharton’s subjects marriage to a relentlessly alert scrutiny; as theme across them all is a concealed repressed vulnerable self who becomes enthralled by the past and the dead evaluation of Edith Wharton’s.

“The Lost Ghost” (from Forrest Reid, Illustrators of the Eighteen Sixties, 1928, p. 89)

As a measure of this MLA’s book’s advice, the bibliographic essayist recommends Chris Baldick’s introduction to his Gothic Tales volume as one short place which really puts the history of the genre and it central dispositions together. I read it and agree. I like how Baldick denies that the gothic is universal in reach: each of its fears work only within “the peculiar framework of its conventions” and it does belong to a peculiar set of people in a specific set of centuries where life has been lived in a fraught way (pp. xx-xxi). Margaret Anne Doody’s essay, ‘Deserts, Ruins and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction (in Genre, 1977) is one of the best essays (and so enjoyable) ever written on the female gothic. I bought myself Mary Wilkins Freeman’s collected ghost stories (I had read only one thus far), read in a couple of the anthologies of tales and ghost stories I have in the house, and vowed I’d read my collection of essays on intertextuality in Wharton bye Adeline Tintner next.

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“The Library Window” (illustration for ghost story by Margaret Oliphant)

I have myself been troubled that when I teach the gothic that I am encouraging atavistic dangerous beliefs. I’d be careful at the outset to say I didn’t believe there was a supernatural world filled with ghosts, witches, vampires or anything else. I emphasizes we were entering a fantasy realm which made heavy use of realism to draw us in. I know the gothic takes us into the realm of the numinous (to my mind the origin of the term where cathedrals are concerned) well beyond the limited doctrinal codes of establishment religions. But once we raise these terrors and the awareness death is not far from us at any time do we have the courage to confront honestly the perception of human experience raised. Elizabeth Napier famously honestly argued gothic novels fail, are silly, masochistic, disjunctive in form. Neither of these books answers responds to such objections.

I felt a residual reluctance because the material can be called sick. To myself I would say that much in human live and society is sick or very bad, and this mode enables us to explore serious issues in life, loss, grief, sexuality, madness, death, but yet I know the instigation of fear and playing around with character who are made neurotic has a downside. When students morally condemn this or that, it’s no help as most students are regarding what they are reading as “other” than them. To suggest that the stories are ethical because they bring out spirituality (religious feelings) in characters is to suggest that those who do not believe in religion are unethical. By implication this is discussed continually when the critic analyses the story to bring out its ethical content or how it criticizes society, and yet I know many students do not listen well, do not understand what they are told, and simply dismiss what a professor might say if it goes against their deep-seated lessons from their family backgrounds.

I admit I chose the gothic because it was safer. When I taught directly realistic books I would often end up being directly political or more clearly so than I meant to be. Students often did not agree with my politics, were disturbed and even angered by books like say All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Marque or John LeCarre’s The Constant Gardener. So when I did Walter von Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident after say doing Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, the depiction of the violence of US culture was somehow deflected by the use of fantasy to depict victimization.

Still I carried on teaching gothic books as part or the whole of a course because students responded intensely to some of the material. The very formulaic quality of some of it (ghost story structure) made asking them to do a talk something they could do. Perhaps Leslie Fielder was right and US culture really has gothic currents embedded in it. I like how Tyler Tichelaar reads the gothic out of his personal experience. His idea seems to me valid: we are turned into rootless souls in emotionally destructive environments when we are torn from our birthplaces and original families because that is what one must do to get a paying job (survive) in the US. I identify with the female victim heroine or the hero who is a man of sensitivity attacked for this, and this is out of my experience of growing up female in the US. Like Ann Radcliffe’s heroines I turn to reveries in beautifully ordered (picturesque) landscapes to find peace.

Friedrich, Evening

I recommend both books for readers and teachers of the gothic.

Ellen

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In praise of Colm Toibin: un-put-downable

Toibin’s Ireland

Dear friends and readers,

It’s about time I wrote in praise of Colm Toibin, of his biographical and critical essays, of his novels, his biographical fiction, his travel books. I can’t think of any writer as originally thoughtful, perceptive, humane, quietly iconoclastic, informative, absorbing, who reads authors as interesting or simply writes as well so consistently. When I see his name on a list of contributors to any periodical I subscribe to, I go to him first and he doesn’t disappoint. This morning I was lifted out of bleak loneliness (Coping) into a consoled companionableness by his review of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (for New York Review of Books LIX, 8 (May 10, 2012)9-11 where he quoted Larkin in ways that resonated with my feelings, validated them.

Toibin an Irish journalist who comes from precisely the area he has set his story in; he is himself gay or homosexual and he has written out of this perspective more directly at times. While he does write about overt politics, there is much travel writing and three of the novels at least center on this business of the compromises and concessions you must make if you want to stay in a family circle at all, or the difficulties of being in a family setting. He is interested in colonialists and hybrid-identities and literature: Anglo-Irish, Anglo-Indian, French-African, Irish-American. Catholic by faith, liberal-leftist in outlook, sympathetic to revolutionary movements, he’s a gifted writer: delicately powerful stories. He now lives in Dublin.

I can’t list all the essays by him I’ve read, over the years especially on Henry James, Oscar Wilde; his arguments stay with me and I use them in my essays and postings and they become part of my thinking. I’ve not read his short stories, but I have read The Master (a fictional biography of Henry James, see my blog on Kaplan’s biography), The South, Blackwater Lightship, Brooklyn. I wish I had read more, and now that my reading time at night is limited I shall have to turn to him during the day.

The South

I remember parts of the book vividly still. Reading The South made me choose to read his The Master and teach Blackwater Lightship and most recently (as my Christmas treat) Brooklyn.

The heroine in The South leaves cold husband and unsympathetic son to make a new life for herself in the south with a wholly unconventional painter who had fought on the left side against Franco; he had been tortured, is now under surveillance and the way he leaves is to retreat to the mountains to live very meagrely (since he has little money and no way of getting any kind of middle class income-producing job). She loves the escape, release, life with him, and herself begins painting. Much on Spanish landscape and customs of a leisured pattern of days. Eventually she gets pregnant by him and years pass and they do improve their (what some would say) squalid living arrangements. Alas, the authorities decide to come after the man again, he is again trying to do some good in the political world. He is again imprisoned, perhaps tortured (I’m not sure on this latter detail), at any rate deeply distraught once more. He has retired from society as a reaction to what he saw in the thirties. (The texts to read here is Orwell’s Reflections of the Spanish Civil War and the Homage to Catalonia). Alas, a horrible accident kills both this man and the new son — we are to see this accident is also wanted; the man wants out and he takes his son with him.

The devastation to our heroine is for a time crushing — though her behavior manifests the same pragmaticism of approach. Some wandering, and meandering and eventually she does return to Ireland, partly lured there by her son by the first husband. Not forgiven (for what should she be forgiven? is the sense of the text) nor forgiving (they are not sorry for what they are), nonetheless, her older family finds a place for her to live in Ireland.

Meanwhile (I’ve left this part out) her career as an artist has gone on quietly flourishing with paintings recording her sense of Spain and experience. She has lived an authentic life and continues to do so until the book quietly closes and at whatever price she had to pay in others’ refusal to countenance this since they did not.

The reverse is true of the heroine of Brooklyn. Indeed the slightly shocking close shows the heroine returning to Ireland and her originally intended husband because 1) she had promised to, and under the stress of circumstances been pressured into literally marrying the first lover, he having surmised she might just not come back when she sees improved living standards and freedom — he had been her only choice; no jobs anywhere that are fulfilling or money-making for such as someone from her family); and 2) the authority figures in Brooklyn discover she has married elsewhere and threatened to expose her; she knows she will become a pariah because this is the way such people as a group work, so home she goes, leaving then the man who had come to love her in his compromised way (he needs her, she fits in &c&c).

I remember the devastatingly accurate assessment of her relationship with the mother, used and she knows using her. We had been thinking the heroine was better than all these, but she is exposed as just like everyone else. And we are to feel for her, deeply feel for us all in her case.

The heroine in The South escaped all this; hers is the reverse story. But she did for much of her life live hard, in poverty, alone, her beloved man tortured, hounded and escaped through killing herself and she ends in this cottage provided for her, silent again (as the kind of talk in her Irish family is once more irrelevant to anything that matters to her for real).

But the meaning inherent in The South and Brooklyn is the same, the perspective out of which they come and the ultimate message about the obstacles to living an authentic life.

I love candour and hard-truth telling in a book; the unexpected ending exhilarated me. So many falsely easy and happy pseudo-optimistic stories are told; rather than give hope, they irritate and depress me as having the effect of throwing the blame on people who don’t do well. On the the other hand, wanting to think very well of the heroine, Eilis Lacey, when she was in the very final pages of the book obviously willing to overthrow her Brooklyn husband, Tony, and marry the new Irish man, Jim, who owned a pub and was admired by all, in a situation where she saw that instead of being ignored as the useless superfluous second sister, she would get a better job than in NYC (the competition in NYC was too keen for her to rate an office job), I liked her less. I was anxious for her because I thought it would matter to her so much to lose the beloved Tony, but when I was shown how she would give this up, I acceded it was truthful but cared less.

I loved the portrait of the mother who knew or had enough to suspect all along
her daughter had formed new ties in Brooklyn but ignored it, pretended not to
know in order to pressure the girl into lying and staying. But when the girl was
to go because her marriage in Brooklyn was found out, instead of showing affection, the mother shut the door on her. Here we see how people really value one another and what for. Now she can’t get from the girl what she wanted: not just a companion but someone who this pub owner would marry so she the mother would be admired in public.

On the immigrant patterns: I grew up in the south east Bronx mostly, in a slum which at first was heavily Irish but by the time my parents moved out was heavily black. The patterns of Irish life were to me no different than the working class Italian life I saw in Richmond Hill, a neighborhood near the one we moved to. I didn’t dislike them; they seemed to me American catholic working class by the time I was in my teens, only on the surface different from middle to upper middle class Jewish life in Kew Gardens where we did move. The Kew Gardens neighborhood I did hate and had a hard time getting used to: much snobbery, ostentation, and we lived in a 3 bedroom apartment on the ‘low end’ of life there. My name, Ellen, is partly the result of my mother imitating the names she heard around her in the Bronx. (It’s also the name of the mother in Gone with the Wind, which however she denied knowing and said it was just the people around her. I doubt she would have called me Colleen though as my mother was Jewish and that would have been gonig too far.)

Toibin sets the two other novels I’ve read by him partly or wholly in Ennisworthy. It’s where he comes from. And he has a poignant statement about missing it (boyhood memories) in Blackwater Lightship.

The Brooklyn New York parts were truth to life. My mother’s people lived in Brooklyn and for about 2 years (one year when I was small) I lived in Brooklyn and did on occasion visit these relatives growing up. The climate would seem extreme after the British Isles.

I read with an intense anxiety on behalf of Eilis, worried for her as succumbing to pressure. I had to peek ahead to assure myslf she broke away and returned. But when I experienced why and how my feelings for her changed dramatically. But this is a truthful probable portrait. It showed me patterns in my family’s reactions to me I’ve seen repeatedly.

Blackwater Lightship throws yet another permutation and light on this central experience — as does The Master, only then the partial escapee is James. This novel is about a homosexual young man who returns to his family for a weekend just before he died. They had nothing to do with him until then because they didn’t want to know or allow anyone else to know he lived a gay life. We see all their estrangements from one another too.

It’s been criticized for not centering more emphatically on the issue of homosexuality, even marginalizing it. To my mind that Toibin presents Decclan’s sexual orientation, and condition as another important element in the life of the family, not more devastating or central than say the father’s death (Mr Breen) or Lily’s long time adjusting to being alone and her giving her two children to her mother, Dora Devereux while she coped is one of its strengths.

It’s realistic: no false sentiment about family life, but that biological ties are there and for reasons that are hard to explain pragmatically except that people turn to families and families take them in as a matter of survival; there is no alternative to rely on so people come through for one another most of the time. Not all. Homeless people not uncommon. People living away from families and managing to support themselves and find company and worlds with friends happens a good deal.

Still the family pattern is the dominant one whether in a modern country and culture like the US or traditional one like Zimbabwe and India (there we have an arranged marriage and couple who come to live in the US.

Key theme of this and two other of his books, The South and The Heather Blazing (I’ve read about it), and his fictional biography of Henry James called The Master are The key themes, “are the compromises and concessions involved in belonging to a family and in calling somewhere “home”.

The DVD cover of the TV movie adaptation

Three complex female characters: Helen (now married to Hugh O’Doherty), her mother, Lily Breen, and the grandmother, Dora Devereux. All three have similar characters: proud, standoffish, determined with the ability and knowhow of domineering, running a situation, self-contained, self-possessed, but like most people wanting affection, support, and Helen shown as having sensitivities like her older son, Cathal; Manus has mean bullying personality from the get-go, huge ego. You might say it’s about the problem of mothering; by no means does this come more naturally to women than men though the task is forced on them by social arrangements and expectations.

There is no easy reconciliation. The family’s fumbling attempts at change are set against the natural process of erosion that is eating away the coastline close to the family home in Cush. The liminal space of the beach as a setting for the beginning of Helen and Lily’s reconciliation, and the novel ends with the muted triumph of Lily spending the night at Helen’s home after returning the now severely ill Declan to the hospital in Dublin.

It’s a delicately powerful story of a family’s failure to face difficult feelings and their stubborn refusal to admit need (especially the grandmother). He through them delve into memories with a visceral, unsparing depiction: main character through whom we see action is Helen: snapshots of the family’s fraught past are filtered through her memory.

When Helen was 11, she had had to deal with her father’s illness and death virtually alone – she was left with her 8-year-old brother at her grandmother’s house for six months while her mother nursed her father, or tried to. Gradually Helen withdrew from everyone except Declan into a watchful guardedness. She “trained herself to be equal to things, whatever they would be.” But her defenses against the pain of the past are a barrier against present life. She mothered Decclan, came into his room at night the way she does for Cathal and Manus. Helen’s memory of the day before her father’s funeral when she arranged on her parents’ bed a suit of his clothes complete with underwear, tie, socks, hat, and shoes, then lay down beside the father figure she had made.

There is no father figure here; Hugh kept from us; Helen and Decclan’s father died young, we see almost nothing of the grandfather. We have instead Decclan and his two friends, three male characters match three female ones: the strong Paul (a counterpart to Helen) who tells us of his marriage with Francois, and Larry, who has had bitter experiences with his family about his homosexuality and shows us the hypocrisy of the world, but is bright and cheerful in temperament and gets along very well with the grandmother, planning architectural changes to the house we know she’ll never do, and she and he know it, but he does teach her to drive a little a stick-shift car.

The theme is not coming out but coming to terms with oneself. And humour — evolving from camp Larry’s unlikely affinity with the grandmother and from her own sardonic wit–leavens a sombre load. Each has a story:

Larry tells how he came out to his family on the six o’clock news. Paul tells how he and his mate were married by a priest in a traditional Catholic ceremony.

Granny Dora tells how she got the switchblade knife that’s in her apron pocket. Helen’s mother, Lily, who fled into a fast-lane business career and a huge designer house she occupies alone, tells Helen about her father’s last days.

Then we get Declan’s graphic deterioration. The family members and friends do not avoid him

It is about homosexual man regarded as other and I understand the frustration of some gay critics because Decclan is kept at a distance from us: he seems dependent, unable to make a permanent relationship like Paul, acting out as a child to Paul. But there’s revisiting the same theme over and over: Toibin has written novels focusing on a gay man, the one I’ve read is The Master, and Henry James lived away from his family, estranged. Looking at otherness is kept away to some extent

The sense of place, here, is germane and its adjoining strand–close to a disintegrating cliff, caught in the reiterative sweep of the lighthouse–permeate the book with an elemental atmosphere.

Beautiful spare graceful prose: measured and restrained as a Victorian memoir yet poetic in precision-”extraordinary skill for rendering time and place. This quiet novel achieves its effects gradually and with subtlety

The presence of Decclan’s homosexual friends influence the behavior of his family to one another and him as he lays dying in Blackwater Lightship, and we discussed pretty fully of the six main characters, three women, daughter who is now a mother, Helen, mother, Lily, and grandmother, Dora; and we went briefly the three men: Decclan, Paul and Larry.

Decclan is dependent, not strong, looks for help from friends. He has no permanent relationship with a significant other unlike Paul and perhaps Larry. We don’t learn much about his private life for the past years. He is the person in the book dying about whom we learn least. He is kept away from us, except to give us these graphic descriptions of his suffering as perceived by the other characters. Who does he seem to depend upon? Paul.

Paul knows what to do; he finds the emergency room to bring Decclan back to at the end. He is in charge. And he and Helen, as a similarly strong character exchanges stories. Thing is they are not that strong: they need someone depending on them. We see that it’s Helen’s husband Hugh who has the friends, who is the open more giving person, really there, and she needs that. Paul’s partner. What is his story? Francoise who was an only child and needed to be married to have security. Waiting for Paul to return.

Larry, you might call him the comedian, but he’s getting through life that way. Let’s look a little more carefully at the passage where he tells his parents and family he is gay: he gets involved with public politics and finds he appears on the six o’clock news as a gay person, which his family was watching. What is the hard thing? Not the actual event or even the retelling, but the reaction in the room to when he tells of his present love relationships with a nearby family where the men lead overtly heterosexual lives.

The book is named after a lighthouse that no longer exists. Helen and Lily are talking. We don’t learn much about Decclan’s private life nor about him directly; when we learn about Larry’s life it’s indirect and the powerful stuff is about here and now and yet what is not there matters; so too Paul’s relationship with Francoise. About how important memories are and the intangible invisible lives we don’t show publicly shape the public. At the close of the edition I ordered into the bookstore, we have Toibin’s statement about his book: he gains meaning and solace through reliving his memories, and bringing them alive again.

There are eight chapters with some of the stories (memories plus present time) achieving a kind of quiet climax in the 7th, with 1st as prologue, Helen at home, and 8th as the denouement as they prepare to and bring Decclan back to the hospital and Helen brings Lily back to her house. her mother has never been there before. For those working on Blackwater Lightship for this coming journal entry: a series of inset stories or memories embedded into the narrative. People talking with Helen present, Helen and Paul confiding. Then Helen and Decclan’s story from when their father dies We see grandmother and grandfather watching TV and arguing over what they see. Then Larry’s story, Lily’s story, Paul’s story (Toibin a Catholic and has written about Catholicism in travel book on Barcelona central here); Helen’s story (Decclan the spoilt favored child as the boy). Back to Lily’s story; how Blackwater Lightship as a long gone lighthouse is central; Helen’s story again; Helen’s portrait of Lily.

Our cat (Ian) facing forward

The cats — They run away and to the Grandmother this is a bad loss. Cats are affectionate clinging creatures; Lily’s story again; told to Helen, talking of grandmother and past, signals some understanding

Book about the rhythms of the night, and how people cope with death: the Grandmother turns to these mediums who feed people’s desire to reach the dead. A dark theme of redemptive power of death runs through all his books.

The comfort in The Master is James got to live his own life to some extent. He lives as the heroine in The South, only because he has money, property and connections he manages far better than our heroine and ends up with his measure of independence, until of course he’s done in at the end by terrible sickness and death and again finds himself taken over. We see how he lives a life apart, the price of it and the achievement he managed by remaining apart.

I find I don’t have separate notes on The Master, but I do on an essay he wrote for the LRB: The Importance of Aunts. in his usual cagey or elusive way Toibin manages to say what he pretends would be “too crude” to say: especially with respect to James. The problem with Austen’s getting rid of the useless mother (which Toibin does connect to her relationship with her own) is the caricatures she creates are in danger of being taken non-seriously; you can laugh at Lady Betram, which would be to misunderstand or ignore her effect on Fanny Price.

I particularly like how Toibin deals with James’s family: he says how James loved his mother, but in the same breathe, how he kept away from her as it was all too painful to contemplate or let touch (and destroy) him. In Washington Square despite the understatement and careful avoidance of offering the readers ways of not reading what’s in front of them, her heroine has to cope with a loathsome father, a morally idiotic scheming aunt and her own pent-up sexuality. Her nobility comes from her enduring steadfastly being alone in the world. She escapes the fate of Isobel Archer because she knows how to feel and is not to be dissuaded by those around from to violate herself.

She is then a cynosure for James himself.

On Austen’s use of aunts: Austen feels free, on the other hand, to make Lady Catherine de Bourgh both imperious and comic, her wealth and power serving to make her ridiculous and unworthy rather than impressive; but she is not meant merely to amuse us, or to show us an aspect of English society that Austen thought was foolish. She is an aunt who does not prevail; her presence in the book succeeds in making Darcy more individual, less part of any system. Her function is to allow her nephew, who refuses to obey her, a sort of freedom, a way of standing alone that will make him worthy of Elizabeth ….

From the 1983 BBC Mansfield Park: Mrs Norris (Anna Massey) berating Fanny (Sylvestre le Tousel) in front of the whole family

The reader is invited, then, to dislike Mrs Norris for her cruelty and to admire Fanny for her forbearance. Austen’s biographer Claire Tomalin sees Mrs Norris as `one of the great villains of literature’; Tony Tanner thought she was `one of Jane Austen’s most impressive creations and indeed one of the most plausibly odious characters in fiction’. All this is clear, at times rather too clear. What isn’t clear is what the reader should feel about the other aunt, Lady Bertram, mistress of Mansfield Park. Tomalin dislikes her. `Fanny’s experience at Mansfield Park is bitter as no other childhood is in Austen’s work. Her aunt, Lady Bertram, is virtually an imbecile; she may be a comic character, and not ill-tempered, but the effects of her extreme placidity are not comic …

Just one from James: This sexualisation of an aunt figure is what gives the book its power. James radically destabilises the category, moves Madame Merle from being Isabel’s protector, who stands in for her mother without having a mother’s control, to being someone who seeks to damage and defeat her

More generally: The idea of the family as anathema to the novel in the 19th century, or the novel being an enactment of the destruction of the family and the rise of the stylish conscience, or the individual spirit, has more consequences than the replacement of mothers by aunts. As the century went on, novelists had to contemplate the afterlives of Elizabeth and Darcy, Fanny and Edmund, had to deal with the fact that these novels made families out of the very act of breaking them. It was clear that, since something fundamental had already been done to the idea of parents, something would also have to be done to the idea of marriage itself, since marriage was a dilution of the autonomy of the individual protagonist. There is a line that can be drawn between Trollope and George Eliot and Henry James: all three dramatise the same scene, each of them alert to its explosive implications. What they are alert to is the power of the lone, unattached male figure in the novel, someone with considerable sympathy, who moves unpredictably, who keeps his secrets and ego intact …

Photo of Henry James as the master, late in life

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Toibin’s greatness also lies in his quiet unassuming style. He gets so much in
and yet does not seem to stretch or have to overwrite at all. It’s part of what makes the novels seem so truthful.

He teaches we must find and live out our own identities at the same time as he compassionates those who do not as the cost can be so high.

From the movie adaptation of Blackwater Lightship

I need to read his Homage to Barcelona next. See the LRB archive for treasures.

Ellen

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

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snakes and Ladders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lagaan, a re-reading of British imperialism

Empire: Fiction follows Flag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fangorn Forest, just outside Fairfax county

Supernatural: Religion, Magic and Mystification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008 cover for Wrinkle in Time

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

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

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

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

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To conclude:

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

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

Ellen

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Winston Graham’s Forgotten Story: again marital rape, again Cornwall (1898); cf w/Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn

North coast of Cornwall, just above Crackington Haven, Boscastle

Dear friends and readers,

I recently read another Winston Graham novel, a novella really, The Forgotten Story, set in 1898, written 1945. I had not expected but found (once again) central to a Graham novel, a marital rape, and central to the atmosphere Cornwall.

It’s one of three the non-Poldark novels recently in print: Wintson Graham: Marnie, Greek Fire, and The Forgotten Story. Marnie is a highly unusual psychological study of a disturbed young woman which was travestied by Hitchcock into a film about a hateful mother, controlling husband and thieving woman (it made a lot of money); Greek Fire, very typical for Graham’s generation of leftist writers, a novel about the overthrow of a socialist movement in Greece, 1948, and its replacement by a capitalist religious group, heralding what was to come as it was engineered by US and other western powers’ agencies (Alexander Baron wrote a similar one about Spain in the 1950s, Franco is Dying); and Forgotten Story, historical fiction set in Cornwall, centered on Anthony Veal, an orphan boy where we meet marginalized people making a living off an inn on the coast of Cornwall at the turn of the century; how Patricia Harris (nee Veal), the daughter attempts to flee a marriage where she has married above her and finds life constraining and painful.

The Forgotten Story, has an unhappily apt title, which paradoxically point to one reason it may still be in a remember collection, as it was made into mini-series in 1983 by then respected actors which appears to have flopped if the complete lack of information in IMDB and on line stills are any indication. Nonetheless, The Forgotten Story, is also one of the few pre-1950s novels, novels before the Poldark series, Graham chose to reprint.

The cover features Sean Connery in an early leading role as the controlling husband, and Tippi Hedren as the disturbed young woman (Hitchcock originally wanted Grace Kelly)

In a brief preface to The Forgotten Story Graham writes that it was novel written just before the first Poldark (Ross Poldark) and during some dark days in WW2 and he says it reflects the dark state of mind he felt at the public revelations of what the state of the UK had been doing, the concentration camps, the reality of what the war had been. He opens by describing those who would reconstruct real events from newspaper accounts as “like paleontologists trying to reconstruct an extinct animal,” never certain because of the deceptive nature of appearances, the multiplicity of details that add up to truth but that can also suggest a number of other possibilities.” What we discover slowly in this book is that we have a dreadful murderess at its center (yes it has the commonly misogynist figure popular in crime mysteries still) who has murdered Patricia, our heroine’s father, the good Joe Veal, and now her uncle, who had been brought into the plot into order to accomplish it. Until near the end of the book it seems as if we are in a more straight historical novel about the psychological social troubles of a set of local people.

We do not know this until the very close to story’s end as it is told by a young boy, old enough to understand on a prime level what’s happening and the amorality or morality of a given event (older than the children in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird who cannot tell us but are transparent windows supposedly). The effect is part of the power: the naif perspective. He is himself endangered at the close, Aunt Madge, the murderess, Uncle Joe (as Anthony calls her)’s second wife, locks Anthony into a room below deck on a sinking ship in order to drown him. The use of a child narrator gives the word its intensity: he is not only innocent, but a good and well-meaning adolescent (aged 11), older than the children of Lee’s story and also (more recently Emma Donoghue’s The Room); nonetheless, the device works to deflect the reader from the central tabooed content in various ways and see what’s happening through normative eyes and a mind continually trying to give an upbeat presentation of events.

Its tightly structured; begins with a wreck on the coast of Cornwall, and returns to the scene at the end, resembling DuMaurier’s Cousin Rachel and Trollope’s Eye for an Eye) which both begin in terribly disturbed moments: in all three cases the novel is the explanation in the form of a story. It gives the piece a gothic framing.

Beyond the redolent use of Cornwall, I was attracted to the uncle who runs a genially transgressive bar, and to heroine, a type very like say Elinor Dashwood, the well-meaning but self-possessed and vulnerable young woman (played in the mini-series by Angarah Rees)

Angharad Rees (online promotional photo, perhaps as Patricia)

When Patricia flees her persistent husband, Tom who with a boyfriend, Ned Pawlyn (who later offers to flee to Australia so they can live as man-and-wife without being known), starts the quarrel in the bar which appears to lead to her father’s death, she has no means of supporting herself decently. This is 1898 and the only professions open to a young woman still are wife or teacher. She takes a position as a strict girls’ school — we are in a mild version of Jane Eyre too. The telling gripping incident of the story is a marital rape scene, which I’m coming to see as an obsession, a highly unusual one. Tom rescues Patricia from the bar quarrel and to assert his rights over her, rapes her. Grahame returns to this unusual motif again and again: presents a marriage scene where the husband rapes the wife and it is clear this is rape. This time it’s in apparent service of a 19th century obsession also found in Trollope's Vicar of Bullhampton: pressure on this woman to stay married to this man because he thinks he has a right to her since he’s prosperous, approved by everyone around him, is what’s respectably called decent and humane (though very rigid, a snob, controlling, cold) and what’s more in 1898 she has no decent way of earning her living. When Patricia leaves Tom publicly, and gives testimony on his behalf in a courtroom which reveals her liaison with Ned, she is ostracized and there’s a scene of public humiliaton (so she’s, to use Trollopeian types, a Mary Lowther, the good heroine who refuses the persistent hero because she’s not physically turned by him into a Carry Brattle, the “fallen” woman).
All the while she is of course in her heart an Esther Summerson/Amy Dorrit type (a pillar for others, a good person — no Arthur Clenhams in sight, alas, but someone who offers to go to Australia with her and live together there unmarried). Everything comes (quite literallly) to shipwreck.

Graham chose to return to the end of the Victorian period to be able to show this paradigm, only instead of Trollope’s way of least questioning it, and nagging the girl to take the man, showing her up, spending time on the obsessive young man and Mary’s unreasonableness (so to speak) in an effort to make the center the women’s quest for sexual satisfaction, Graham de-constructs the framing social circumstances. Tom Harris no longer has the right to demand Patricia back. In 1891 it had become no longer accepted since a famous court case for a husband to try to wrest his wife back to live with him. But he feels he ought to. The sense in the fiction is that this is wrong. This is at least one place where a woman should have real liberty. She is nagged by her (murderous we find) aunt to return to Tom using the conventional argument, she should. Period.

That this motif is returned to ceaselessly shows itd centrality for controlling women in this set of social structures, and that it’s at a great price to her.

The ending shows Tom Harris who has all along been an ambivalent figure (he appears to be exploiting the boy to pressure Patricia) into a hero of integrity. He rescues Antony and brings Patricia back from the school. We discover that Tom has been responsible for her getting her job: he had the connections and respect by his family and position as a lawyer. Unlike Ned, he can take Patricia somewhere as his wife; they can afford to provide a home for Anthony.

But the way he wins her is more interesting than this, or the way it’s presented. The presentation of Patricia’s choice to return to Tom reminded me of Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn. All is not quite forgiven — and as in Marnie, the saving grace is the rape scene is not at all dramatized (as it is twice in Four Swans), nor is the heroine driven by trauma and psychological distress (as in both Marnie and Four Swans), only an indication it took place (this is the way Ross Poldark’s rape of Elizabeth, the central heroine of the whole series is inserted — so to speak, just what led up to it, and the aftermath). Just enough is.

How do they come to this decision. From the same standpoint as Toibin’s: the woman is married to the man and so she obeys the social convention, goes with it. In the case of Toibin’s Brooklyn he uses this obedience to convention to point up the coldness of people towards one another, how they can pick up and drop one anther ruthlessly to follow what’s their interest. The force in Toibin is grimly powerful. I have read Toibin’s The South (about a woman who escapes her family to go live in Spain and finds herself embedded eventually in another family group), Blackwater Lightship (about deep alienation within a family), and The Master, Henry James as a gay man, an outsider. After a while the books all do spin around the same concerns, and for me at least are gripping. I find I can’t put them down easily each time I start one up again. I get intensely emotionally involved.

For Booklyn I found I had to peek ahead to the last pages to make sure our
heroine does what will eventually lead to some happiness for her, I was so
anxious for her. I feel the same for Graham’s heroines, all but Marnie. Toibin’s novel, Brooklyn required enormous strength to get through so much did I worry for her because she seemed to be this good person, self-sacrificing and could be bullied into giving up what could make her life joyful. But then when I came to the end of the book I saw I had been mistaken. In fact she might have liked to stay in Ireland and not return to Brooklyn, that is, stay with her birth family group instead of the new one she had become a part of it.

Toibin’s Brooklyn‘s grim insight is what we think keeps people together is not their intangible feelings, but order itself, and their value for one another comes out of how chance has put someone near someone that fits his or her needs. And either you belong to the order or you don’t.

In Graham’s Forgotten Story in effect this young woman does follow her economic and social interest in going back to the husband who s a rising lawyer. It was due to him she got the one job she did get, a teacher at a school; he vouched for her. She is indignant when she first hears of it, but forgets the indignation during the force of the shipwreck, and re-finding Anthony alive. And if she married Tom, she can also take the young boy with her and protect, mother him. It is to her social advantage and people obey conventions, every one does.

Recent cover of Forgotten Story

It’s not an emotional adherence, it’s coolly done. And we don’t see her do it, we are told it impersonally as the boy sleeps. We learn the boy after all was taken in (his father had abandoned him, sent him back to his family because the father had begun a second family where the boy was not wanted). Tom, Patricia, and Anthony head out for South Africa to make a new life for themselves taking the boy.

The forgotten story is that of this rape, of this marriage. Swept under the rug, swept away as the storm which sweeps away Uncle Perry, the uncle who colluded with the aunt, swept away as Uncle Joe, the father whose real vulnerability we are never permitted to delve. Why he married Madge? what happened to Patricia’s mother?

The fiction remains conventional (in a way Toibin’s does not): Graham treats this decision not as a violation of feeling and he presents the woman’s choice with tact and sympathy. It reminds me of the central heroine of the Poldark books who also finds security, peace, respect from the community by agreeing to marry Ross Poldark, the landowner whose servant she has been and who she has been going to bed with for a couple of weeks.

Early cover for Forgotten Story,signalling it as a woman’s romance novel

But it is the same insight: the convention the society sets up pushes people to obey it as they get rewarded for it. It does not take much in the Forgotten Story to see that those who do not have such conventions on their side suffer badly. And the curious insistence that it’s on a rape that the whole thing turns, on the rape of woman’s body — as the whole trajectory of the Poldark series finally does (I’ll write another blog on the Poldark novels after all and this is partly one). I’ve written a review of two books which argue the order and stability of socieities also depends on their willingness to murder children who do not fit in: Child Murder and British Culture.

Angharad Rees (this promotional photo is of her as a modern woman) – an enigmatic sexualized heroine who does not tell

So, to conclude not only is Graham still unusual for presenting marital rape as a central motif in his novels, he is highly unusual for doing it repeatedly. I suppose we should not be surprised that this aspect of his fiction never comes up in discussions of the Poldark novels; when I’ve talked off list or blog with people who’ve read the Poldark books, they deny Ross raped Elizabeth. Of course she was consenting — they can’t deny the rape of Morwenna, so there is the implication in the conversation that I’m morbid to dwell on this unfortunate (highly it’s implied) heroine, when her story is meant to be not that atypical, only her reaction.

When writing my paper on Richardson’s Clarissa and rape (“What right have you to detain me here?”), I took the common view how rare is the depiction of marital rape (well, except in modern African stories, mostly those by women). I was right there, but wrong to have left out this exception.

For more on Toibin’s Brooklyn, see comments.

Ellen

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Movies out of 19th century sources: real (novels, memoirs, histories) and pseudo (modern historical-costume drama): the question of Trollope’s place

Isabel Collard (Christine Kavanagh) accused of murdering her brother-in-law and lover, Roger (James Faulkner) and mother-in-law, Harriet Collard (Judy Parfitt) (Blackheath Poisonings, 1992)

Dear friends and readers,

Now I’ve re-watched all 26 episodes of the Palliser films, re-read all my blogs, and am watching for a second time Simon Raven’s 1992 adaptation of Julian Symons’s BlackHeath Poisonings (a pseudo- or imitation, pastiche 19th century mystery text).

I’m staring at the central question the volume I’m aiming my essay at is supposed to answer, Adaptation: British Literature of the Nineteenth Century and Film:

What do particular adaptations of 19th century texts reveal about the ways we understand, respond to, analyze 19th century culture?

and rereading the series of postings on what unites film adaptations of 19th century novels in my Reveries blog. I compared a number of adaptations of 19th century novels:

Hardy Films: Two Tesses and One Jude

The Golden Bowl: films from 19th versus 18th century sources

to a number of adaptations of 18th century novels, stories, texts:

Quills: Sade and Austen

One Duchess and One Cornwall Landowner: 18th versus 19th century sources

In a nutshell, my idea is 18th century films repeatedly delve into sexuality for its own sake and present the issues of each in such a way that we delve deeply into the nature of people’s psychologies interacting with the mores and issues of their particular social groups. This lends itself to abstract social issues like say slavery (as in Amazing Grace where the accent is on the individual’s inner world). The 19th century films turn to social and familial pathologies, attempt a larger picture of society in which these pathologies are formed, and we see how the social roles imposed on people conflict with and/or sustain their deepest needs and desires.

The full truth is, though, the Henry James films don’t fit this neat opposition. Since James was himself a closet gay and his books closet gay books (on a quiet level, see Roderick Hudson), they allow themselves to be used for exploration of sexual issues. For example, Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady.

One has to take into account changes in dramaturgy, technology and the way film-makers think they should and can make films. The dramaturgy of the 1970s is essentially staged plays or playlets, as as capable of holding the viewer as anything from the mesmerizing computerized and radical new modern thematizations of the 1990s and recent poetic cinematographies (1st decade 21st century) are. You must have great actors to carry it off and good scripts. The dramaturgy and cinematography is of the older stage scene kind; no montages, little voice-over, no mesmerizing computers and music. The acting is not quite all but a great deal of it. They build slowly, and slowly the characters emerge, and the story evolves and its worlds are created before us.

The 1990s after 1991 BBC Clarissa (a landmark film in retrospect) use modern computer techniques, zoom, distancing, jump cuts, on location with good cameras, huge sums on places and luxuries — important as all this is — but the outlook. They use overtly sexual scenes and include transgressive (homosexual and lesbian) sex.

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Which angle to take perplexes me too:

The authorial one? If Raven’s, then we lose Trollope. Trollope’s Pallisers however well-known and brilliant do not tell the whole story of the man, and especially as by Raven emphasize the upper class material in his vision. By contrast though the same man’s vision is found in Herbert Wise’s Malachi’s Cove out of Trollope’s short story.

how different the angle on Trollope’s vision is provided by his story (part of the source for this film done in Cornwall), this film and the filmic onlocation (Cornwall the cliffs by the sea where the poor made a living gathering seaweed for manure). It’s a startling revelation of Trollope’s ethical vision and inclusiveness.

The generic context: the Pallisers comes before the 1980s and Brideshead Revisited and the later 1970s build up toward sophistication. It is a relatively naive film technically in comparison to what came later, viz., they are not conscious of what they are doing in the way of the 1990s films and thus bare or stripped away from the kinds of intensities of meanings coming out of the images that one sees in Blackheath Poisonings for all its inferiority of story, plot and themes. They rarely use voice-over, have no flashbacks that I can remember, remember strictly within very conventional presentations of sexuality with women strongly repressed (by themselves and through preaching.

Filmic Trollope: Davies has spoken very little of his work on He Knew He Was Right and The Way We Live Now. There are no features in the DVDs of these two, no over-voice commentaries. All I have are articles by Sarah Cardwell on TWWLN. Trollope’s are apparently not “tracer texts,” texts that hit home somewhere so strongly that they become sociological events when they are filmed and generate other filmings close by. The content of such texts becomes traces found in many other works. Not even Barchester Towers can lay a claim to that — though it is remembered as the progenitor of academic politics-mysteries books in Showalter’s Faculty Towers (a study of this subgenre).

For summary and commentary on Diane Sadoff’s Victorian Vogue, see comments.

Ellen

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Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady: unusually Jamesian

Isabel Archer (Nicole Kidman)

Dear friends and readers,

I carried on with my study and comparison of films based on 18th and films based on 19th century matter, and earlier this week watched Jane Campion’s brilliant effective film adaptation of Henry James’s novel, The Portrait of a Lady, screenplay Laura Jones, produced by Steve Golin and Ann Wingate.

As with the other Jamesian films I’ve seen, two The Turn of the Screws (1999, 2009) and two Golden Bowls (1972, 2001), while the accent is still a larger portrait of social and/or economic and familial arrangements, the story and characters also present sexual derangements that don’t show up in the daylight world, seem not there at all, but below the surface and in one-on-one moments operate in a frighteningly sinister manner. One should not forget that Daisy Miller dies.

John Malkovich as Gilbert Osmond,

with his typology including Valmont (Les Liaisons Dangereuses) and Mr Hyde (Mary Reilly) while at first superficially alluring, is scintillatingly horrible, and Barbara Hersey as Madame Merle, with her typology of amoral ruthless intelligence (she played Daniel Deronda’s mother in the recent film),

also at first seemingly a friend, turns out a grim, determined outraged mother/mistress (of Pansy by Gilbert and of Gilbert). Their presences, how they act, what they say and do are central to the film’s emotional effect.

They are contrasted to the sensitive, well-meaning and intendedly generous kind Ralph Touchett:

played by Martin Donovan,

and the utterly upright Viggo Mortenson as Caspar Goodwood:

Campion’s original cinematography, direction, shots, production-design, and full dramatization of the scenes are equally chief elements making this film the memorable Jamesian experience it is.

On one level, her film is a transposition and more or less faithful to the hinge-points, characters, and themes of James’s novel; but on another, it re-reads the novel from a woman’s point of view. Campion also uses imagery quite different from most of the James’ movies I’ve seen; while I’ve not seen them all, I have seen a couple of the earlier, pre-1960s pop type, where they even change the name of the story and/or characters and are of course free with other elements (like The Heiress), and the 1997 Agnieszka Holland’s Washington Square, screenplay (Carol Doyle). James just lends himself to women’s visions (the 2009 Turn of the Screw mentioned above has Sandy Welch as director).

As a transposition, it really brings out the sinister level of James’s fiction. That’s not easy because to get the full meaning of James’s feeling that our human experience of life is sinister (dreadful, frightening, full of ugly things done to us and by us), you have also to capture the banality, the reality that day-to-day experience feels benign. We do not always have knives at the ready and sharpened. And Campion does that. It’s the acting by Malkovich as Osmond and Barbara Hersey as Madame Merle, that nothing overt or too melodramatic is allowed to happen. When Osmond beats Isabel (now I’m not sure that literal detail is in the novel) it’s through a sharp light whip to her face; he trips her to humiliate her.

Campion also transfers the truly fraught utterances by James: Madame Merle to Isabel over Lord Warburton: “let us [me and Osmond] have him [for Pansy and ourselves). That "us" is terrifying in context. Nicole Kidman has calibrated just the right fear and anxiety and deep embarrassment and helplessness because she won't admit to others what is the truth of her life this man has more control over her than ever.

The mood and tones "les choses" (as in "les choses sont contre nous") contribute: the imagery is different, not only the breaks in realism, but the dark outfits, the tight hairstyles, the framing of Isabel in doors, prison-like rooms. The music -- quiet but dreadful at the right moments. Chopin I thought was there.

One of Isabel's semi-Renaissance hieratic outfits, which have the effect of imprisoning her

The woman's point of view: superb. I have all my life read these novels where the heroine has these several men chasing her for marriage and I'm supposed to think this is just great is the myth. Well, Campion brings out how they all, Ralph too, want to control her. They are after her body and space, crowding her out. No one gives her any space:

In this film to be under an umbrella with a suitor is not joyous, but constraining

Not one man goes away but another comes. Warburton wants to marry Pansy to get at Isabel. How horrible that is, and it's made creepy. The scene of Isabel's dream interpreted by some as masochism, is to me a nightmare of their crawling all over her, smothering her. This is not James's point of view directly, but the underlying mood is.

We are to feel for Madame Merle -- who had her child Pansy out of wedlock and is herself controlled and made miserable by Osmond who controls the child. She feels for her and cannot show her who she is. Merle is made a lonely woman.

Shelley Winters as Mrs Touchett (Ralph's mother too)

The silly aunt's advice which in other films (pop ones and commercially widespread) is made the warning lesson. Here we see its total inadequacy to the case and the needs of the girl and the environment.

Two further stills:

Osmonds wins out precisely because she obeys the codes of a lady. James shows us the codes taught women (and men too -- Ralph Touchett) as a way of protecting oneself, being safe, are precisely those that enable ruthless people to take over us, especially when they are adept at pretending to be adhering to (or are actually) adhering to those norms. This insight is first developed in French 18th century novels by Riccoboni and then picked up by Fanny Burney.

Martin Donovan as Ralph Touchett - the poignant, intensely kindly way the
character is played makes me feel he is a surrogate for James in Campion's mind.

I liked the breaks in realism which pointed out the parallels in modern life to this story, and also in other films -- like the inserts of 1920s films of the Shiek kind of thing (Rudoph Valentino) and the introduction and conclusion of the actresses dressed in modern costume obsessively trying to define what is love, what a worth-while kiss. It pointed out parallels to our world today and Isabel's then.

I'd say all the luxurious objects were ambivalent. While we want to live in these places and walk amid this art, we see the price Isabel pays for it.

She really does hide behind that fan

They don't make up for the vile mercenary life, the control the guardedness of manners.

And the urge against ambition I see in all these film adaptations is here too - Ralph is used ironically. What did he think life had on offer so much? What she would do? What nonsense. I should say I've always like Ralph as a character and think in James he does carry this theme unironically. In this world nobility is see in perfectly equipped failures. Osmond is the success after all.

My only caveat is the portrait of Kate Field as Henrietta Stackpole goes beyond a totally unfair slander; it exploits the stereotype that an intelligent career woman must be ugly, flat-chested, wear glasses:

Mary Louise Parker as Henrietta made up to look home-ly and grating.

In fact, Kate Field was magnificent and dressed herself glamorously, sexily:

Kate Field by Frank Miller (1881)

I can't set this adequately in other Campion films because I've seen only The Piano. I have taught The Piano, and own the screenplay because of that, and also some critical essays on Campion's work The connection between The Piano (which I've taught but never made a blog on), its sources a later wonderfully good 19th century colonialist novel by a woman (Jane Mander, The Story of a New Zealand River, and modern Bronte costume dramas) and recently Bright Star, and this costume drama ought to be fully explored. For myself, I've not seen Campion's Janet Frame films --though I've read Fame's eloquent and moving depiction of her early adult life.

As to more James films, I do have a copy of 1997 Washington Square and remember liking it, and will try to re-see it and I'd like to see The Bostonians with Vanessa Redgrave next.

I have only a VHS Cassette so have no stills to share as the only reproduction in Laurence Raw's book is of Christian Bale as the elegant young man chasing Pansy (Valentina Cervi). I also read Laurence Raw's's article or chapter on Campion's Portrait of a Lady in his Adapting Henry James; and, as with his chapters on the 1972 BBC and 2001 Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala Golden Bowl[s], more or less concur and recommend to others.

Ellen

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Pallisers 12:25: The duchess, our heroine’s dying begins; why her daughter and Silverbridge’s fates mean so much to her

The Duke helping a very sick Duchess (Susan Hampshire) away from the Ruined Priory

Dear Friends and readers,

After a six month-hiatus, I return to the 1974 BBC Palliser series once again to conclude my study of this magnificent film cycle, 1:1-8:17 on the old blog, and 9:18-2:24 thus far on this.

Three films cover Trollope’s The Duke’s Children. 12:24 is deeply elegiac, bringing to a poignant conclusion the Prime Minister’s career as head of government, and his wife’s as a political saloniere or hostess, and after a slow adumbration of the stories of Silverbridge, the son, and Mary, the daughter (Kate Nicholls), developing in powerful earnest these characters and their involvements with other characters (Frank Tregear [Jeremy Irons], as Silverbridge’s friend and Mary’s lover) and Lady Mabel Grex ([Anna Carteret] Silverbridge’s natural mate and ex-lover of Frank).

12:25 is intensely about the relationship of the Duke and Duchess to one another as parents and to both their children (though only she interacts with Mary until the series’s final part); and it begins the duchess’s long-time slow decline (which we saw signs of in 12:24), now into death.

As 12:25 is also given over to concentration on Silverbridge’s slow maturation and his clashes with father so 12:26 concentrates on Mary as the female presence whose happy fate (she decides her own destiny) is presented as compensation for thwarting and infliction of grief and loss on her mother for many of the early parts as she is forcibly separated from a man she loved and who loved her and made to live with her role as obedient (if tenderly loved, and safe) wife to heir of the Omnium estate; Kate Nicholls is the plangent muse of all three of these last films

.
From 12:26, Lady Mary (Kate Nicholls) looking past the ruins to her mother’s grave

Simon Raven told his biographer Michael Barber (The Captain) that Lady Glencora was to him the chief protagonist of the series, and in these two parts hers is the overarching story within which Silverbridge and the Duke’s interactions take place.

I begin with a commentary on this 12:25 and then provide a summary with transcripts of two central scenes and bits from a third. The penultimate episode of the Pallisers centers squarely on the rocky relationship of the Duke of Omnium (by this point brilliantly played by Philip Latham) and his eldest son and heir, Silverbridge (played effectively partly because he so looks the part, Anthony Andrews). Two long scenes between the Duke and the son are the centerpieces of this episode. I transcribe the central long full one in my next blog. Here we shall have the full scene of Duchess’s suddenly visible weakening (the second still above), and a bit her scene with Mary where she shows the intensity of her vicarious longing for her daughter to live the fate she wants to (from which I take this still):

The Duchess turning away to look inwardly as she realizes Mary is seriously attached to Tregear, engaged, and wants to marry him

The differences between these two parts and Trollope’s Duke’s Children must be remembered here. The Raven team have mostly eliminated and reversed Trollope’s The Duke’s Children’s important secondary theme. Trollope’s novel centers on the father’s conflict with his daughter as well as his son: Trollope’s Duke is locked in strong conflict with his daughter, Lady Mary Palliser over her desire to marry Frank Tregear (we get brief but significant glimpses of him in this episode, where he gives Silverbridge good advice and tries to look out for Gerald). This second conflict links up to the second theme of the novel: the Duke’s intense nostalgia melancholy and partial regret and at the same time refusal to acknowledge the maiming of a life done to his wife, the Duchess, by marrying her to a man she (in Trollope’s novels) could never really love truly as she could not understand or sympathize with him and couldn’t resist needling him when he evidenced in little ways the nature that was at deep odds with her own.

In both films the Duchess remains a strong and dominant presence (after her death emphatically), and we are to believe has learned to love the Duke, appreciate his ethical stance and deep kindness, though she still remembers with bitterness and hurt the despair she felt at first (it’s made clear several times this was just “at first” though “at first” seems to have taken an ambiguously longish amount of time). Her real absence in Trollope’s own novel (and lack of reach after death) is part of the problem Trollope’s Duke has, for without her interference (much more ambiguously aimed and motivated in Trollope as it would be in real life), the Duke actually seems unable even to talk to his son or daughter.

In 12:25 the Duke talks to and reaches Silverbridge. On one level, the father-and-son story is yet another sub-story in the roman fleuve structure of the films — which imitates the roman fleuve structure of the novels (and those of Oliphant, Proust, Powell). We have another young gentleman’s entrance into the world, one with a cornucopia of advantages, which are basically responsible for his apparent successes (we may wonder what the future will hold for him): just one of its array of male types. On another the story is one which reinforces submission on behalf of the group (which Silverbridge does), conformity to one’s family as best for everyone including those who fall in.

And now the individual episodes with transcripts. First a brief description of each and then commentary and its source in Trollope’s novel.

12:25, Episode 36: Election Results.

Scene 1) The film opens on the Duchess dressed beautifully (oh what an outfit), walking older and looking old in her face, but setting up an exquisitely pretty tea. Duke comes in to be told that the Boncassens are coming and despite his attempt to retreat to the library he is gotten to stay and meet.

Carlton Terrace, London, Duchess and Collingwood, then Duke. Wholly invented scene of meeting and tea with Mr and Mrs Boncassen and Isabel Jerry Stovin, Eileen Erskine, Lynn Frederick); Silverbridge leaves to go to campaign and be elected; Duke’s Children, Ch 14, pp. 84-85 Silverbridge told he will be elected and to go down (narrated) is source for going off for election; some of feel of early dialogue between Silverbridge and Isabel from DC, Garden party, Ch 28, p 176; bright and sparkling for Trollope.

Scene about how privileged and unaware of their privilege, made uncomfortable, these people are; want to be respected extra and yet don’t want this to be acknowledged; Silverbridge says election not a done deal and yet no opponents, at which he is gleeful and then repeats hypocrisy about why no one is running against him (favored candidate) — Isabel about how he can’t test himself if he has no worthy opponents (and we will find he has none for Isabel’s hand — quite this kind of nuance not in Trollope).

Preparing tea with the faithful aging Collingwood (Maurice Quick)

It’s a scene where differences between American and UK outlooks on class and politics are made clear. Mr Boncassen a scholar like the Duke; although at first she seems dim, Mrs Boncassen acute in the way of the Duchess (about social things, sceptical). Mrs B: “Well, what about people who have “fancy titles and no money, how do they make out?” Duchess; “poorly, Mrs Boncassen, poorly.” The Duchess gets the best lines in the scene. It should be said not all women have this astute social perceptiveness and no information and not all men escape to libraries.

Silverbridge leaves to work at election.

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

Scenes at Matching:

Scene 2) Matching front room, duke reading and duchess sewing, to them Silverbridge with news of his election, all pride, Duke cannot congratulate because his assumption of Tory party is not based on serious thought and is a betrayal of his life; young man openly irritated and goes to be congratulated by sister; becomes clear the lineage of the family, use of good seat, family loyalty at stake Duchess tells Duke he must pretend to accept it; so much of this and previous scene taking us back to 1:1 where the two were married to set up a dynasty.

When the Duke does not congratulate Silverbridge for the first time he is openly irritated. He leaves abruptly, maybe Mary will congratulate him. Duke was angered at his winning nomination as a conservative. Then Duchess attempts to persuade Duke he must pretend not to care for Silverbridge’s choice is really his attempt to assert his independence and rightly manipulated he will return to the fold.

Scene 3) Matching the room that has served as Duchess’s boudoir, Mary congratulating Silverbridge, the boyish nature of the speech is from DC, Ch 14, pp. 91-92; mother beams and says father recovering from shock, put yourself in his way and he’ll have something kinder to say, boy heads out.

Now the important scene with Mary: Now a scene with Mary, presented as mother worry (house keeps boy out of mischief), Gerald okay at Cambridge, and what about Mary. An invented scene. Mary tells of the Priory ruins scene from 12:24, Episode 33 (Scene 11); Duchess’s deep identification, does Silverbridge know and Mary says he says father won’t hear of it (12:24, episode 34); Invented scene but Mary’s assertion he’s a gentleman brought in here too, DC, Ch 8, p 54, mother brings in her special reasons for wanting Mary to make her own choice; it seems Mary knows nothing of mother’s past and will carry on knowing nothing; she will do her best if Mary really loves this man.

It’s here the Duchess’s story comes out: she and Mary discuss Mary’s love for Tregear; we saw the Duchess’s favoring of Frank in in a gondola in Venice). Duchess points out to Mary Tregear has no money and her father will not like his lack of noble connections, to which Mary says:

Mary: “You’re not going to be difficult.”
Duchess: “No no not now that I have come to know Mr Tregear, but then I have reasons for wanting you to be allowed to make your own choice.
Mary: [All innocence, the mother has never told her daughter of her past; a false erasure of mother's past which apparently does go on among families]: “What reasons, mama?”
Duchess: “Well, I want you to be spared any unnecesssary sufferings, to be parted from the man you love makes the heart empty at least for a time. Now if you really love each other, you must be together and I shall do my very very best to bring round your father.”

Episode 37: Who to Wed?

Scene 4) Duke in some antechambre in Matching, looks grim, Silverbridge to him, they apologize to one another, from letter Duke preaches to Silverbridge after the election to guard fellow countrymen that they might be safe, free … From DC, Ch 15, letter on p. 99.

The first of several long and/or important effective scenes between Duke and son. Son comes in and apologizes and Duke replies he was ungenerous. Long talk about values, Duke too didactic but it’s moving as son’s face lights up at moments as Silverbridge so admires his father. Here we learn that the Duke still looks forward to Silverbridge marrying Lady Mabel and son is unable to tell father but clearly “off Lady Mabel”.

Now the great scene in the Priory Ruins:

The duke and duchess glimpsed as they enter — long shot

Summary: Duke and Duchess walking slowly together, she is black, important moment for series, contrast to them all aglow in sunlit landscape of Matching in previous Part, now in black, and she puts a deep red rose in his lapel. She remembers back to her walk with Alice (CYFH? and 2:3, Episode 14.

This gothic memory shows how gothic deepens; it was more than about harm; she was bucking his authority; she claims to be talking about Silverbridge, but her aim to get him to accept and help Tregear supposedly as Silverbridge’s friend; (that he’s a conservative not to count); his old ploy that he doesn’t interfere; she says Silverbridge got his seat that way, but Duke persists he must make his own passage, what’s wrong with him? not a man of means; he agrees to think carefully about Mr Tregear but will not find him a seat; what is he to me but dubious friend of Silverbridge, and she bursts; “and your daughter”, and he doesn’t hear for her illness and coughing, and asks him to take her inside. First serious scene towards death (opening of 12:24 Dolly says he couldn’t do without her, and we saw her take medicine mid-part).

A transcript:

Establishment shot: We glimpse the Duchess coming into the ruins through the masonry of the ornate columns. She is dressed in black. Then we see just the half-columns and then gradually the Duke and Duchess walking slowly and both in black come into view; they are clearly an aging pair, smiling companionably he with a cane, taking the night air

Duchess: “Ah, these ruins! [We hear birds; we see him in evening dress emerge alongside her]

They walk forward as aging couple.

Duchess: “I do so love it here [bird now very loud]. You remember how angry you were years ago when I walked here with my cousin, Alice under the moon.” [She laughs, he looks grave and serious]
Duke: “I couldn’t bear that any harm could come to you.”
Duchess: “It was only a cold, you old silly.” [So what she has is only a cold she thinks]
Duke: “It is getting chilly now. Shall we go in?
Duchess: “Oh no, I want to talk to you . . . about Silverbridge . . . now then if you’re to reclaim him for the liberal party, you must do all that you can to work yourself into his good graces.”
Duke: “My dear, I am trying to do as you suggested . . . work myself into his good graces. What do you want me to do? fawn on [they are framed by plinths now) the boy?"
Duchess: "No, no you must be more subtle than that."
Duke: "Hmmmm."
Duchess: "You could start by being kind to his friend, Francis Tregear." [From her enigmatic intense face we see she is intriguing again, this is not for Silverbridge, but ostensibly for Mary, ultimately compensation for herself in those opening parts we saw]
Duke: “Mmm. He has been a very bad influence. It was from him that Silverbridge first learned his conservative affectations.”
Duchess: [very irritated frustrated look on her face] “Planty, we have already agreed there is to be a truce about that.” [She also looks as if she's about to quaver and old, ill, cold] and that truce must extend to Mr Tregear.”

Duke looks thoughtful because puzzled. Her assertions makes no sense. Shots go back and forth between their faces as they talk [we see they do not live in the same realms of values].

Duchess [breathes a little then] “Now then, Francis Tregear wishes for a career in public service.”
Duke: “Then he’d better set about finding himself one.”
Duchess: “But he has no influence and little money.”
Duke: “My dear, I can’t mend his lack of either.”
Duchess: “But you might help him [looks and stance in her eyes and face remind me of her body language when she spoke with Lopez] by finding him a seat in the house.” [Confiding]
Duke: “He’s a conservative.”
Duchess; “Planty, we have already agreed that that is not to count just now.”
Duke: “My dear, it’s is gettin’ cold. Now shall we go in?” [now he indicates they are to walk off and the shot is medium range]
Duchess: “No, no just a moment. A seat in the house for Mr Tregear?”
Duke: “I don’t interfere with parliamentary seats. I . . . you should know that after . . . after all this time.”
Duchess: “And yet Silverbridge was for Silverbridge.”
Duke: “It fell vacant in the natural course. Silverbridge made his own appeal to the electors.”
Duchess: “And so will [now breathless, might have said "should"] Mr Tregear. Planty, I’m only asking that you should persuade some friend to find him somewhere to make [she paces about stone square, we are watching through cloistered columns again].
Duke: “No . . . Young men of Mr Tregear’s class and condition must work their own passage.”
Duchess: “What’s wrong with his class and condition?”
Duke: “Nothing. I mean that although he is a gentleman, he’s yet as you admit a man of little means. He must look to a profession before he looks to Parliament.” [This is Mr Low's argument about Phineas in Phineas Finn.]

Duke has now taken off his warm elegant black cloak and has it ready to wrap around her.
Duchess picks off a red rose from a bush.

Duchess: “Planty I should wish you to think [puts it in his lapel] very carefully about Mr Tregear [he looks lovingly at her], mmmm? [we hear the birds].

Cloak is now on her and wrapped tight and she holds it.

Duke: “But I am not going to find him a seat in parliament. After all, what is he to me, nothing but a somewhat dubious friend to my son.”
Duchess [bursts out}: "and your daughter!"

He looks up suddenly as it might begin to come to him what this is all about, but he has not heard after all, they are interrupted because she suddenly looks very ill indeed, and sick and turns and looks at him with a ghastly nauseous look.

Duke: "My dear, did you say something . . . " [after all it seems he had not quite heard . . . ]
Duchess coughs hard, short of breath and he looks at her alerted as she suddenly confronts her state.

Duke: “My dear, you’re ill.”

She breathes hard, sways, tries to deny it, looks grim.

Duchess [weak voice]. “It is chilly ["very chilly?" -- hard to make out]. Would you take me inside please?”
Duke [arm around her] “My dear, we should have gone in when I said.”
They look into one another’s eyes.
Duchess mouths: “Yes” and then turns.

No music. they walk back in the silence, she leaning against him. I think of crows. Camera follows from distance as she coughs. We hear their steps on the stone pavement.
A long shot takes in bushes with red and purple flowers to the side.

I love this scene. The Duke and Duchess late at night in elegant black walking among the Priory ruins. She remembers his anger (so we return where we began, very satisfying esthetically and thematically, binding this story) and says she only had a cold. How mad he was at Alice. He insists he was worried about her health (forgets he wanted to control her too). Neither brings up Burgo or the forced marriage but we remember it and they do too. Sometimes intelligence is asked of movie-goers.

In a later scene Duchess again tells the Duke he must work his way into the good graces of his son. Duke: “what do you want me to do, fawn on the young man?” No just be more tactful and distanced and give him room — she doesn’t say this and we get the irony about how parents often are driven to make up to adult children who they have little control over. This is not a 1870s story but a 1970s one.

Then the Duchess moves to Mr Tregear and we see another of these scenes where she is trying to get the Duke to do what she wants in cases he can’t or won’t and doesn’t know or sympathize with her goal. She wants him to get a position for Mr Treager.

He says he doesn’t do this sort of thing. She mentions Silverbridge; he denies this is that sort of thing. (This harks back to scene 1 where the Boncassens note that the election may be said to be free but Silverbridge has the same name as his district and no opponent. It also refers to the many places in the series where he denies her this way, and maybe he is no good at this kind of networking unless it’s his direct blood relative.)

The Duke clearly does not like Frank mostly because the Duke blames him for Silverbridge’s change of heart, he is someone who made the Duke’s son “a Tory!,” and what’s more his origins are “dubious.” She almost spills the truth to say Tregear is a friend of your daughter, but instinctively fearing his (let’s call it Oedipal) reaction, she halts at an outburst about “your daughter,” partly because she begins to cough violently.

She is cold, looks unwell and all the while he is attempting to put his cloak around her; she coughs, feels chilled, and they go in. It’s that last silent interaction that’s so good.

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

London and Parliament scenes.

Scene 5) Parliament seen, speaker talking, up in gallery Duke, clergyman sleeping, Silverbridge joins him, and father asks why he is up there with him; he replies he can hear just as well up here, but we are to feel he prefers to be with father already, again this is not the book but a strong domestic nexus that is 20th century nuclear middle class ideal. Also he is not happy among Tories who are not his family friends.

Orlando’s reference to armor-clad warships comes from his requests to the Duke in PM; they agree Drought is a man they neither of them like; Duke responds, “Well, you chose your own boat sir” (line in DC) gradual realization of Silverbridge that men matter (Trollope’s firm idea is men not measures), remark on Drought’s behalf that he is willing to “do his part of the grind” and “most fellows aren’t, sir” has its origin in a dialogue between Silverbridge and father, DC, Ch 25, p. 158, a chapter in the book where Silverbridge urging Gerald to keep to the liberal side and “I’ve made an ass of myself”); the invitation to dine at the Beargarten which so touches the Duke; the comment about cads there and in Parliament to from DC, dialogue with son, DC, Ch 26, pp. 163-64 (instead of Phineas Finn and Irish matter changed to armaments so as to eliminate Donal McCann’s part).

In Parliament Orlando is going on and on about armaments and ironclad ships as the camera moves up to observe the Duke high up listening and Silverbridge comes in. The jist: Silverbridge finds Orlando as distasteful as the Duke but does not acknowledge Orlando is “his”
leader and defends him on the grounds he’s a grind. Something Silverbridge remarks the Duke is and few are (including him).

A touching scene because Silverbridge invites the Duke to his club and when the Duke understands this (it takes a moment for him to get it), he is so pleased and off they go.

Silverbridge beginning to tease as they go off together: “Of course there may be one or two cads, Sir, but there are plenty here as well.”

Scenes 6 and 7) Important scene: Club (Beargarten), Source is DC, Chs 26, pp. 166-68, and DC, Ch 27, pp. 170-72 (where Tifto [JOhn Ringham] barges in); they’ve finished dining and are coming in for cofffee and drinks afterwards; talk about how club engenders selfish attitude, then the reference to Lady Mabel in the book too and in both film and book Silverbridge’s face registers he’s changed his mind, interrupted first by Tregear who leaves quickly and then Tifto who doesn’t; Tifto commits the gaff of offering a bet to Omnium:

In book Tifto doesn’t offer a bet, but Silverbridge does say “you are making an ass of yourself”; father says you must part with him with “courtesy and kindness”.

This is a memorable scene for those who know the novel. Tifto invades the son and father after dinner and makes an ass out of himself, shows himself to be vulgar, attempts to get the Duke to put on a bet, finds it amusing when the Duke says he knows nothing of horses but that they have “tails and heads.” We see Silverbridge’s agon and Tifto’s resentment at the end. Prefaced by graceful Tregear’s entranceand his exit when he sees father and son are alone — so a contrast to Tifto. Lady Mabel has come up but Silverbridge never quite tells his father he no longer wants the young woman the Duke thinks he the Duke could understand and love.

We’ve already seen Isabel Boncassen is very different from the duke and would not understand him — she really seems not to understand much. A child-like woman again. Trollope’s Isabel has some aspects of gay witty lady of Restoration comedy.

***************
Episode 38: Derby Run. Back to Matching and now Duchess is ill. Scene Eight.

Duchess can no longer walk or move with ease; in great physical discomfort

Matching, Duchess in Boudoir, Duchess dressed and sitting up but ill, with Mrs Finn next to her as friend and nurse, DC, Ch 1, p 4, Duchess fretting she cannot go see Derby, stop Silverbridge from “doing anything unwise” about Lady Mabel. Mrs Finn says Mary needs help, mother says she “poor dear” thinks she must stay here when she longs to be in London and with Tregear. This is Mary’s posture during early phase of book vis-a-vis her widower father. Later she’s sent to Lady Cantripp, eventually returns home). Duchess irritated because she cannot give Tregear encouragement or work “on Planty” while laid up (“I am finding it very hard” especially as he’s in London, lays back, sighs.)

Barbara Murray again a nurse — alas this is what superfemales dwindle to in bourgeois dramas. Duchess wretched, wants to go see the race of Prime
Minister, help Mary see Tregear in London (I repeat Mary at Matching because mother ill — we are to feel they close); she has heard something to Lady Mabel’s discredit and wants to find out about that. The point made. She is much more ill than she admits, can’t eat, not eating. Can’t get up.

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London, Carleton Terrace, the familiar breakfast room. Ninth scene. Nighttime. Lady Mabel Grex announced and we get a powerful scene where Silverbridge rejects her aggressive overtures with easy panache.

I’m not keen on Silverbridge here, but Lady Mabel does seem hypocritical here (see comment on how she is very like Kate Croy in Henry James’s Wings of the Dove). She is left stranded and excluded at its end.

He has some good lines. There is nothing nothing like this in Trollope. Instead Lady Mabel remains self-contained, dwelling in anguish (“howling” with a “storm” about her is how Frank Tregear thinks of her towards the end of the book) in her father’s ruined (gothic estate with no life to live, and the one she misses is Frank Tregear who is the rat who changed ships (again see comment on his affinity with Jamesian males). Even Raven’s Tregear is
ambiguous and we rarely see him with Mabel after 12:24′s anguished scene.

Silverbridge is reading Bell’s life in the old breakfast room. To him Lady Mabel, and here she gets her first full rebuff. Sources include DC, Ch 40, pp. 256-58 (Mabel says “I could live alone there and be happy”), 42, pp. 273-74 (self destructive behavior over rig), Ch 52, pp. 327-328 where we have Trollope’s Silverbridge’s awareness and jealousy of Frank (all this long nuanced history is excised or condensed in the film); Ch 59, p. 377 (deepest scene of book). In film as Lady Mabel has been companion of Silverbridge’s pleasures when young so when he casts her off she iss paralleled to Tifto (1) as in 11:22-23 structurally Silverbridge paralleled to Lopez.

She says he’s not been calling; father interrupts so pleased (this is sign of TV drama genius); and Mabel tries to use this. This is a bad weapon for Silverbridge repeatedly tries to show himself separate from father, so now his estrangement from Lady Mabel grows stronger at this wrenching of his father’s presence before him. This scene is all that is left of Duke’s invitation to Lady Mabel and her time at Matching, but the plot-hinge is there even if a vestige.

For more on Trollope’s Frank and Mabel see comments.

12:25, Silverbridge and his Dad next time.

Ellen

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Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago: an apolitical political novel for our times

Yuri (Hans Matheson) looking out from the army train (2002 Dr Zhivago)

What he sees: countryside

Town

Guns

Dear friends and readers,

About a week ago, I finished listening to Philip Madoc read aloud the whole of Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, probably as translated by Manya Harari and Max Hayward. I would like to share a few of the postings I wrote over the course of the four weeks it took me (in my car) to listen to this masterpiece. It may seem a perverse way to talk about the novel, but I’m going to see it in terms of the two movies, and suggest Davies’s Dr Zhivago is far truer to the text than David Lean’s, but that neither presents the real structure: it’s not dependent on a love story, but the chaos, senselessness and displacement of individual lives in our era. And neither shows the final retreat, nihilism and justified elitism of Pasternak-Zhivago’s perception of experience. (I do like the movies, both of them, but their visions are quite different as I suggest in an earlier blog.)

I also listened to it in terms of a group of novels and studies of political novels I read last year and this. I spent a couple of months last spring reading Victorian political novels (by Trollope, George Meredith, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry Kingsley, Benjamin Disraeli, among others), listened to all four novels of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, read aloud effectively (I read Vols 1-3 of 4 in the 1980s), and then rewatched Christopher Morahan and Ken Taylor’s film adaptation, Jewel in the Crown. This early winter on Trollope19thCStudies we said we’d try Hugo, and I did read more than half of Hugo’s Les Miserables as translated by Norman Denny. Well, Dr Zhivago as read aloud by Philiip Madoc has given me a further sense of what the political novel has become in our time. It’s a retreat, a disillusionment, a descendent to some extent of James’s Princess Casamassima (also read on Trollope19thCStudies, a few years ago now) where the political hero also dies, is thrown on an ash-heap — partly because he is so noble of soul.

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It opens on two scenes: the funeral of Yuri’s mother after a life of high society all the while her husband spends their fortune on his mistresses and drink; then his suicide on a train. I now see Lean chose to begin with the first incident, and Davies with the second.

Lean’s opener (1965 Dr Zhivago)

Davies then took us to the funeral and Yuri’s adoption, while Lean skipped the suicide and went on to the next chapter (3) where we meet Lara and her mother, seamtress and their desperate world. I can see that Lara indeed has a companion, Olga, who Anne-Marie Duff played (cut by Lean).

The book at this point has no political point of view that is clear — only deeply ethical in the way of 19th century novels. By contrast, Hugo’s politics are interwoven from the moment his book opens. In the smaller scenes I am reminded of fiction by Gogol and Goncharev – not Chekhov who gives us a more quiet set of people.

In these early scenes in Moscow there’s plenty of snow, up to the incident where the Czar’s dragoons break up a demonstration and proceed ruthlessly to murder people, when a politics perforce enters the narrative, but, tellingly, here not one comment from the narrator. Not one. In comparison with Hugo, this is denuded of political commentary altogether; in comparison with Paul Scott and Trollope ditto. It has vivid characters who are leading troubled confused lives.

Mother and daughter (Celia, Anna Gromyko; Lara, Keira Knightley)

At Lara’s mother’s attempted suicide and all the reactions to it, we see the influence of Zola and the European naturalists — Germinal for example. It’s quite different though (from both Hugo and Trollope too): Hugo has simple large lines and Trollope is developing multi-plot stories. Zhivago seems to emerge like some volcano slowly erupting in bits.

The beauty so far is in the language — I don’t know what is the translated text here but Madoc reads it stunningly well. I can see that imagery is in the old-fashioned way (like poetry) is one way of holding his novel together to give it meaning beyond the characters and stories. I do love the snow and the imagery and feel of it.

So in the first section of the book, Davies is closer to the book than Lean — Lean’s movie is visionary and original out of the landscape vision (as are his Dickens’ movies and Close Encounters); not that Davies lacks landscape. The politicization in 1958 terms (anti-communist) is imposed. Yuri is profoundly sympathetic to the socialist movement at first and we are told never lost his connection with its principles. There is religion of the Dostoevsky variety (talk about Christ from the abject-slave mentality) and a send-up of Tolstoi’s absurdity in Kreutzer’s Sonata, only it’s enigmatic what Pasternak finds silly.

On the absence of commentary from the implied author: I wonder if Pasternak had faith he could get this published. Like many a woman across the centuries, his text might not see the light of day and if it did, would be criticized. Surely that would affect how he shaped and how much work towards reaching his readers he put into it. Hugo knew he was a star at the time of Les Miserables, and Trollope a successful working commercial storyteller.

Thus far it reads very like a domestic realism novel. I am wondering if in 1958 simply because it came out of Russian and seemed to be the tradition of (capitalist) European western novels, it was overread — or if Pasternak, fearful of the authorities (rightly, for his Lara, the real one, was put in camps for decades because she was his mistress), curbed any tendency for commentary that could get him in trouble.

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The camera in Davies’s film of the next part (the early teenagehood of the protagonists Yuri, Lara, Tonia) keeps returning to the outside of Tonya’s parents’ house where Yuri grew up. Much attention paid to to their first Christmas party, The one they wore their first beautiful evening clothes for in Davies’s film.

Tonia and Yuri (Alexandra Maria Lara, 2002 Zhivago)

IN the book Pasternak uses the coming death of Anna, Tonya’s mother, and her memories to allow in a flooding in of her pasts, and thus previous worlds in Russia. Personating her, he provides a brilliant meditation on her refusal to involve herself in bogus litigation fights with her family members which make only lawyers rich summed up Bleak House — of course a relative protests. It reads like a nineteenth century novel thus far, a humane one by a modern consciousness.

The shooting of Komarofsky by Lara at the party. Very powerful in the book the way several points of view are kept up: we are with Yuri most of the time and only hear of Lara – this is a repeat of Lara’s mother’s suicide, again something not experienced directly but heard about and encountered by Yuri.

The trauma of Lara’s sexual life with Komarofsky is presented indirectly in the novel: we hear of her wretchedness to think of how she had been kissing his hands, how she needs to get away, and how a friend offers a position as a governess she knows of in a family. Governessing is suddenly not imprisonment but safety. Alas, it’s not enough of a life and Lara wants marriage with Pasha and needs money. So here Lean’s reticent matches the original text while Davies makes forward strides in attempting to show women’s sexuality (even if from the male, his, point of view).

Thus as far as my sense of Lara in the book, the scene where she shoots Komarofsky whose roots are so complex is slithered over in both films. So too Pasha’s own intense distress the first night of their marriage to discover she is no virgin, but a longtime mistress of Komarofsky; again the matter presented in suggestive vague words which assume you understand what is happening.

This indirection goes along with the (as I am hypothesizing) the self-censorship and really unusual silence of the narrator I know Lubbock and others have shown how so many authors of the later 19th through mid-20th century seem not to be in their fiction; at the same time, we feel them continually shaping it and know what is their stance. Not here.

Something important is going on here: this silence and indirection. The boy in front, the “front” or cover story is a curtain behind which what matters happens. The book opens with the funeral he goes to: what matters is the attempted suicide of one mother and the death of the other. This emphasis of the book is lost.

I find myself comforted by the implicit outlook strongly critical of social arrangements. Madoc has a beautiful voice. I like Lara, can feel for Pasha, and see how Yuri is a traditional hero. I did see a section where the ideas of what is art and beauty were debated.

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The two marriages are elided over in the book and what is emphasized is Zhivago and Lara’s experience of war. He dragged away from his family, she having to cope with and deciding to follow Pasha when he (foolishly and poignantly) deluded, hurt, flees her for death.

Yuri (Omar Shariff) and Lara (Julie Christie) as nurse and doctor at the front

Soon we come to where Zhivago and Lara are nurse and doctor together in a great country house which has been altered to serve as a hospital. They are falling in love but resisting it — he keeping an awareness of his affection for her the center of his conscious thought and nothing else; we don’t see in her mind at this point. Both leave or attempt to in order to return to their respective “lives” (as it’s called), he with Tonya and Shasha in Moscow, she to Yuriatrin, the village where she had manage to build a life for herself by teaching, with the plan of picking up her daughter from a friend she left her with on the way.

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The book has flaws. Pasternak does have these passages about the Bible and Christianity from Zhivago where Zhivago allegorizes the Bible or the Christian story to infer ideas not in the Bible. One is a long section on the Jews. From a train Zhivago sees a group of Russian cossacks and villagers humiliating an elderly Jewish man and preventing his family from getting needed supplies; it’s ugly. They tell Zhivago they are just having some harmless fun. Then he observes the Czar at a huge rally where everyone is ever so awed and applaud, all the while if you just looked at the man you saw a diffident stupid man who had such terrific power over the lives of others.

Then we get this meditation against the nonsense of accusing jews of not being patriotic (used against them) but then interesting, he goes on against nationalism, and says how pernicious this can be to have a group identity, how dangerous too. All this though is based on the Bible — it’s not there.

His book could be used to be anti-communist when it is rather a Voltairian vision of the political world shot through Russian art themes (references to say Pushkin, Tolstoi) and specific obsessions of Pasternak’s own as a poet and man troubled about the existence of God — Lara won’t look at this or that lest it disturb her belief in God. Nothing of Chekhov or Turgenev or Gogol.

I’m drawn by old-fashioned in depth characterization and effective scenes — and what some might call misanthropy. One group of power hungry people replace another is Boshevism is shown to feel like whatever may be the ideals pronounced (which Yuri like someone at the beginning of the French revolution supports).

The book is peculiar; it shows the kinds of jumps and starts and sudden gaps and turns I’ve seen in books where the author is not sure of him or herself, not sure it will be published, or what will be the public’s response. As I’ve said, there is an odd absence of some commentary from the narrator where you might expect it. If it is to be interpreted politically, I’d say it’s in these sudden zigzags within and between chapters and the feeling of intense constraint. Here is an implied author who doesn’t believe his book will reach an audience quite, who has no confidence in what the response of his audience will be, and who is afraid of someone powerful reading his book taking offence.

Angela Livingstone’s Pasternak argues these gaps are deliberate, artistic, a way of making the book 20th century, but this may be the special pleading of the academic determined to turn flaws into strengths of the author she has chosen to spend time on. She argues the zigzags and lack of coherence and curious repressions of the narrator are deliberate. So I’m not wrong: they are there. She says they are there because this is not a late European 19th century novel, but a 20th century one: about dislocations of lives amid anonymous non-there societies. Remember Mrs Thatcher: there is no society, only individuals and families. The vision in Zhivago is one I saw in Haneke’s White Ribbon: little groups of people turn into themselves and connections more tenuous, not there than ever; within identities in public at a great distance from realities.

Hugos Les Miserables has this terrific belief that all the people in it are united and that personality is not shattered and fragmentary, though Marius is Hugo himself. As I toted my groceries home amid the left-over and filthy snow, after having listened to another bout of Dr Zhivago, I thought to myself how modern the novel really is, and its distance from Les Miserables.

While both Lean and Davies “read” into the book, I’d say Davies is much closer. One thing does come across by the dramatic scenes. A horror and hatred of warwhich is in the book. Pasternak insists we look at what modern machinery does to male bodies, how hideously people are deformed, the terrible horrific pains they endure. This is a war using weapons no human body can withstand.

The same sense of deep pain is registered in Tonia’s childbirth — for once and maybe since then more times the excruciating experience is put down. It should be said Tonia gets no pain medication, but women didn’t until there was some effective stuff so not until the 1930s for middle class women and up in modern places. Pain physical and emotional, these realities of life we can’t escape are Pasternak’s subjects.

He insists on the irrationality of human beings carrying on such wars on. Now he can get away with this by not having politics, since for the wealthy and powerful the war will eventually or for now (they hope) protect their status, property. Davies in his movie adds statement for the soldiers to say they should go home because to fight for the Czar is to fight for people they ought to be fighting. That is not Pasternak but Davies.

The characters are believable up to a point. Like most novels, they also fall into types too. As I often like the good characters with decent morality and hearts, I like Lara and Yuri very much. She is presented as altruistic, unambitious, susceptible to bullying and temptation (as in the Komarofsky incident), Yuri as someone with high ideals in culture, art, and humanity. I am expected to think Pasha is dead, but having seen the movie I know better. I wonder if Pasternak originally intended to kill Pasha off, but changed his mind.

The descriptions are superb, the landscapes, and atmosphere of places, but there is not enough of it. See my above paragraph.
The book may have been exploited and used by the continual counter-revolutionary groups of our society, but in itself it’s really just another great novel in the European tradition, owing much to the English and German traditions, more in the quiet realistic psychology Trollope-Gaskell-Eliot-Mann vein than to the fantastical and highly mannnered type of Dickens or Thackeray. Pasternak would not be the first author to censor himself not believe in his book quite.

I like the narrator’s tone but this may be a function of Madoc’s resonant kindly voice.

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Yuri makes it back to the train

The book comes into his own when the family leaves Moscow and goes on that train ride deep into the countryside. It’s here neither film can do justice to the text. (I never did figure how when watching either movie what was the point of bringing the family to the countryside except that now Yuri can bump into Lara and the affair really begin.) The text is filled with long inward meditations by Yuri said to be what he put in his diary, sketches of remarkable characters who reveal what revolutions do to people — dislocation, the freeing of fierce animosities, the chance, rare, for some that someone can rise and fulfill his gifts, but for others total destruction of the life they had with none to take its place; poetic meditations on the countryside, private domestic life; how people make do.

Getting away is what counts

This upper class family is taken by the servants on the estate of Tonia’s grandfather; Tonia is warned to be careful or she’ll be attacked as she is a target for resentment now. The servants don’t know what to do with them and give them a hut. All the people living on the estate are breaking various laws set up by the new powerful people and they get food and other things through network coteries just as in the old way.

Tonya not knowing Yuri has begun an affair with Lara in the nearby town

Both film makers try and perhaps Lean is actually more successful here in a few silent scenes of Shariff meditating. The films could do justice to this section, but they don’t. Michael Haneke could (do see The White Ribbon); Bergman and Rohmer get as much depth as any book. Both Davies and Lean are hampered by their unwillingness to go for fully unusual filmic techniques; no voice-overs, no narrators, and keeping to naturalism in both films. It’s lacks in the film-makers not the inadequacy of the filmic medium.

In a way the book lacks the deep political understanding of Scott’s Raj Quartet, or maybe it’s not so hopeful there’s something to be explained. Scott also derives his narratives strongly out of totally thoroughly conceived characters; his book is beautifully put together and he has many women speakers, marginalized people. He also really goes into politics, quite explicitly. If Paul Scott’s masterwork is not enough valued, it’s prejudice against a white man daring to talk of India, and that he presents the British point of view equally. The complaints remind me of those against Styron’s Nat Turner.

I find myself frustrated when suddenly Zhivago switches to wholly unknown characters, gives a full sketch or feel and then moves on to another and the first never heard of again, frustrated by the lack of political analysis. As I suggestd above, Livingstone says the zigzags and gaps are deliberate, a sign of20th century disorder, disorientation, loss.

There is also hardly anything from women. Only a few long meditations from their consciousness. We go into Lara’s subjectivity only as she is understood by Yuri or presented at a distance by the narrator or other male. Hardly anything at all inward from Tonia. Is she supposed to be not that intelligent? Her last letter is so heart-wrenching but it’s all outward. This is a real loss.

The greatness and power is when we are in Yuri’s mind, feeling and thinking with him. The great sardonic ironies of warfare are brought before us, the terrible tragedies. Pasternak is clearly interested in Jews, but as it as an outsider, assimilated Jew (and not so secular either as I had thought) and he discusses “their situation” (as disempowered, mocked, rejected and yet exclusive themselves is partly how he sees it (also complains they didn’t Christianize themselves — this is not ironic). Then I am very moved and feel implicated in a way I never quite do in any of the Raj novels. They do seem historical in comparison. The way Yuri sees the world I recognize — especially it’s meaninglessness in the fleeting events and how he turns from all politicians (you see Scott does not, he studies them with earnestness).

I’m thinking partly that Zhivago is somewhat overrated because it was 1) suppressed; 2) was useful to the establishment and appealed to Lean for the same reasons. On the latter it’s being published in Italy is important only I don’t know enough: I know the Italians succumbed to US pressure to take all power from leftist groups and that the publishers of the time went for books like Il Gattopardo (very great, a masterpiece, but reactionary deeply when it comes to social and political arrangements). More also needs to be known about the first Italian translation and how it spread and turns up in English and under whose auspices. By contrast, Paul Scott’s cycle only gradually gained recognition and the film adaptation of Staying On was important in the marketing of them, and ditto the BBC mini-series.

The novel IS NOT a love story; the love stories are very much tertiary material. Both movies are centrally about sex, love and personal corruption, with Davies adding some sensible politics and Lean landscape.

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Sometimes this novel just soars. When Komarofsky comes to “rescue” Lara from Yuri (as he, Komarofsky sees it), and we hear Lara and Yuri’s reaction, we are into its typically supreme moments. All Komaroksky’s “wise” realpolitick talk is turned into irrelevant nonsense by the attitude of mind of these two: Lara who is wholly unambitious, and won’t recognize all that ambition seeks as important or even quite real; Yuri who looks upon this talk as general labels hiding the particular people who are after their interests, and it’s that we see in Komarofsky’s sudden warnings and how he got a job, that matters.

Their going off to the homestead he lived in with Tonia and his father-in-law is a kind of Tristan and Isolde tryst in reverse. The medieval icons were fleeing for love and for a hidden life; these two flee death for as long as they can hold out from it. The medieval couple went to a garden of paradise; these two go to a wasteland and broken down destroyed houses, one filled with wretched memories for Yuri. Yuri does love Tonia (her letter is heart-breaking as she bids adieu to him, not knowing it will reach him), and Lara is faithful to Pasha.

A bit of unrealism: two small children are said to be there, but hardly make their presences felt. They would be a real continual burden in life.

But it’s this angle of askance on politics I think that makes the book more contemporary than say Paul Scott’s and certainly the Victorians and Hugo.

Dr Zhivago: The conclusion in which nothing appears to be concluded

I’m into the antepenultimate (third from the last) CD of Philip Madoc reading Dr Zhivago and I’ve found something unexpected here too; This last third of the novel, not short (there are 18 disks, so 3 out of 18) is _wholly left ouf of both movies_. A stunner. We move in both movies from Yuri’s decision to let Lara go with Komarofsky to Moscow and within five minutes of being told they both suffered (and this indicated), in Davies’s move Yuri’s death, Lara’s flght from Komarosky and being arrested, and the flight of Lara’s child to a seamstress friend; in Lean’s back to Alec Guiness as Yuri’s brother interviewing Lara’s daughter and then allowing her to return to the lines of workers walking in the streets to a new job.

Yuri arriving in Moscow

Looking for Tonya; Meredith might be said to be kind to his hero by killing him off before he reaches this nadir

This part of the book is strongly significant, its the climax, the final round, and it is utterly unheroic. Yuri deteriorates some would say: he goes to pieces for a while; just sits in the cold house and writes; Long disquistions about writing, really about words; but he feels he is dying and gets himself to try for Moscow, and we hear of him joining with a friend. He meets Pasha who tells of his damned existence and kills himself (before he is killed). Arrives as a beggar. To make a long story short, Yuri can keep no job; he is let go; he is not doing what’s wanted. His talents, are you kidding? who can they help rise? They are laughed at, eventually he becomes a sort of beggar in an attic and marries (still personally liked, and a male attractive) the girl downstairs; they have children; he cleans houses for a meagre living. He grows very irritable but hurts no one, though he gives his wife a hard time (who is in danger of losing her place at the post office — what an irony there when i think of modern US life). In James’s words, a “perfectly equipped failure” to the world — and derided and mocked — which is why it all grates..

Meredith kills his hero swiftly after a sudden success (Beauchamp’s Career); Trollope gives them decent ends outwardly (Phineas Redux); Disraeli makes them huge successes. James has his Hyacinth Robinson offer himself up as a replacement body. (“What are we going to do with all those corpses, old man?” asks Gatsby at the close of Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby.) Paul Scott – well here in the last part of the fourth volume (Raj Quartet) we have Hari Kumar but he carries on as a journalist if minor, anonymous, poor, with his dignity and usefulness somewhat intact (if hopeless), Merrick murdered by a sword up his anus; Guy, well he takes notes on it all (!), Barbie died mad, Sarah fades away …

So Zhivago is closest to Scott’s Raj Quartet, only Raj Quartet only gives us a glimpse of Hari Kumar, does not stay with him for the long haul.

Zhivago is pure gem now, a masterpiece to see this New Economic Policy from below as experienced. As to romance, that wild tender love of Yuri and Lara (what did make existence worth if for a time, they held to it): he marries again, more children. His love for Tonia and family thwarted (broken up), and she unaware, thinking herself unloved. Just a passing moment in the book. No message that can be melodramatic, or uplift or high grief (Hamlet like).

Yuri never did rape anyone nor kill unless to protect himself and in the misery and heat of the battles he is pushed into.

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I finished this book last night: it ends in bleak devastation, insistent on the horrors of war, and Yuri’s death is a gift to him — rather like Hamlet except dying on that tram is so horrific (given what I’ve read about Pasternak’s experience on trams). When the two academics read into Yuri’s writing “signs of intense hope,” we are to remember how Yuri regarded them as hopelessly fatuous.

Lean comes nowhere near this; erases it for order. Davies approaches but doesn’t want to put off audiences to this extent, have them look steadily at what counterrevolution and power-mad in effect imbeciles have done.

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To conclude, most unlike Trollope, Disraeli, Paul Scott, but like George Meredith (by the end of his novel), this is an apparently apolitical novel. The hero must retreat because the forceful people and groups of the world are so corrupt, conscienceless, and/or stupid, decent action is impossible. His death made me remember Hyacinth Robinson’s in Princess Cassamassima.

Pasternak’s hero ends in the position of many today.

Journalizing 7/10/10: I’ve since this written a blog on how the two films speak to one another through parallel opening and closing and other kinds in intertextuality: how intertexuality in films works.

And I think it a good idea to link in my first blog comparing the two films: Dr Zhivago improved: the boldness of Andrew Davies.

Ellen

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