La Clemenza di Tito: powerful core cries out for new production

Elina Garanca as Sesto

Barbara Frittoli as Vitellia

Dear friends and readers,

So we went to yet another of these HD transmissions of Metropolitan opera productions and all three of us enjoyed it so much that Jim and I bought tickets for next week’s Un Ballo en Maschera for the 2 of us (Izzy can’t come, going to an ice-skating communal watch event), though until every single Un Ballo we’ve ever seen has seemed an incoherent mess, and encore tickets (a second set) for 2 of us of Les Troyens because Jim bought before he realized there was an conflict with this year’s MLA (we’re going) and we don’t want to miss it (Izzy will see the first live broadcast on her own).

This despite the manifest hollowness — or maybe senselessness at the heart of the way this 1984 production was (and for all I know most productions are) done. The grandiose still fake stone set is dull, and so too the inanely sexless, or asexual costumes for the 3 central male roles, two sung by female mezzo sopranos, Sesto and Annio (Kate Lindsay) in short skirts and tights and boots, and one by a stiff lifeless tenor, Giuseppe Filianoti (his idea of acting is to make his eyes bulge out at you). The core is riveting and basically the whole of the opera: Sesto (an ambiguous female-as-male) loves Vitellia (an ambitious woman ignored by Tito who drives Sesto to try to murder him) and there is no self-abasing act, no sordid or encompassing terrorist deed Sesto will not do for Vitellia, including (as Sesto does in the opera) set all Rome on fire in an effort to murder Tito, the emperor.

As presently done this makes no sense. Why should Sesto behave this way? She is presented as so innocent and moral she might still believe in Santa. What’s needed is to have it made clear Sesto wants to have sex with Vitellia (it’s not even hinted), and Vitellia refuses Sesto, rejects her and will have nothing to do with Sesto unless Sesto murders Tito. Then the disdain Vitellia continually manifests would have some content too. Sesto must in other words be presented as an active masochistic lesbian (and her costume bring this out) with Vitellia as the sadistic part of the pair or at least sexually flexible on behalf of gaining power by marrying Tito (and satisfying him in whatever way) so she may become empress.

Much of the opera are extraordinary arias sung by these two women. In the first half Sesto driven wild by need and Vitellia the (misogynistic) female who is the nasty woman scorned. Fittoli plays the first half partly comically in order to deflect the sheet disconnect to Tito and Sesto — Vitellia in the production while dressed very sexually, or got up in one of these 3 yard wide gowns stiff with jewels, seems to have no knowledge of sexuality or how to manipulate it beyond the costume put on her (which she seems unaware of).

In the second half when Sesto has been caught and condemned by Tito because she won’t tell who put her up to it, Sesto is all abject before Tito, in rags, chains, worn sandals, but not because she wants to be used by him, no she seems to need to cling to him in his purple quilted bathrobe, at his neck a frilly lace cravat and brooch.

Note the irons on her wrist, she drags chains about too — what could be more incongruous?

In this same second half Vitellia suddenly guilty turns up in the usual gothic white nightgown, extremely low cut. Tons of hair on her head throughout. Her costume is will do, just.

Tito right now is your Sir Charles Grandison without a sliver of self-awareness. Told by the young lovely Servillia (Lucy Crowe) in the first half of the opera she would rather not marry him, but prefers Annio, Tito immediately gives Servillia up as the right thing to do. Upon which we get this exquisitely poignant duet:

Annio and Servillia

Annio and Servillia can stay the same: the thus-far chaste young heterosexuals, with the source of Annio’s love for Sesto not yet aparently to Annio (though maybe Sesto could understand). But Tito must turn up as a gallant hero, good as well as debonair (failing that self-deprecating drag?). Then we would know why Sesto yearns for him too, and why Vitellia cannot attract him, hard as she has apparently tried. I’m not sure there is anything one can do about the content of his arias, they are so hopelessly jejeune but the acting could be of a man mocking himself as he is torn with his need to be ethical while he confronts these women who have (to him rightly) inexplicably tried to murder him. Jim suggested the director, Calixto Bieito is up to it; he of a Carmen which is admittedly far too fussy, what’s wanted is something more in Claus Guth’s vein or Willy Dekker’s HD Traviato.

The opera is made up of extraordinary arias of exploration and display by Sesto of her emotional life, and by Vitellia of her a semi-comic and then plangent journey spite to overwrought anguish. On the side, intertwined in, the parallel Annio for Sesto, and Servillia for Vitellia. Think of it as the soliloquys by the major characters in long 17th century heroic romances based ostensibly on classical history. The chief character comes from classical history, Tito, reigned two years when he was killed, not enough time perhaps for him to become egregiously corrupt and malign. But all else is made up, a heroine’s text (woman centered) about private sex life.

Mozart keeps us at it and the paradigm is as tightly controlled and climactic as you might like. And the singers sang beautifully – especially Garanca. Her voice was beauty itself. Frittoli was as powerful as she had been as Elvira, Lucy Crowne has lovely tones, and Kate Lindsey may someday step into Garanca’s shoes. They kept the viewer and listener intent, absorbed in them while they sang and the camera kept close on them.

All else should be shorn away into large abstract symbols or re-set. Perhaps fin-de-siecle Europe, say Vienna, a cabaret, or everyone in art deco clothing, or surreal rock, anything but the still statues and hard-to-climb up and down steps that cover the stage. In one of the interviews, the hostess, Susan Graham did asks Garancia how she got up and down without seeming to look. Garancia said her boots were very good. Not slippy at all.

While hiring famous Broadway directors, set-designers, getting the most modern of technology going, the Met is still leary of growing up sexually or presenting these often deeply reactionary operas as underlyingly transgressive. As I watched the super-good Tito I thought of today’s world leaders, the Syrian and Israeli Prime Ministers, who appear keen to murder chldren, shoot up thousands of civilians point-blank (fish-bowl style), the US drones: the numinous awe of the production around Tito would not have been true even of the 1790s. Mozart surely had heard of the incompetent but tenacious Louis XVI, his emigre armies waiting to put back the ancien regime, and Marie Antoinette, and her ladies and jewels and the guillotine meted out to them. Citoyen Capet.

This is an 18th century opera, quintessentially so. The typologies, the aspiration, the symmetrical design. Tito is a good guy. We want good men. He ought to be presented in some way that makes him attractive. It’s apparently also autobiographical in that it was Mozart’s last opera written in his last hard year and he pours himself into it. But the 18th century need not be a museum piece. Made relevant, re-thought, sharply satiric (right now the dramatic ironies Mozart sets up just seem disjunctive with the blind characters), you might get full audiences. Today at the Hoffman moviehouse, about 1/3 of the seats were empty — well maybe a quarter. At the Met I could see the place was not near full.

Next week’s Ballo is one such re-thought opera; Les Troyens a new production. One may hope the latter has done for Dido what Catherine Clement would like see done for most opera women in her Opera, or the Undoing of Women (see “It’s not over until the soprano dies”). I doubt it, but surely we have gone beyond marveling simply at Vitellia’s duet with that saddest of horns and not looking to see how it is that Mozart passed beyond hell-hath-no-fury and chained women.

After all this is an opera where at the close the women are not undone. They are all winners, whether in skirts or trousers.

Ellen

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

The death of Dido

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not that I don’t love Traviata.

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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Don Giovanni at the Barns at Wolf Trap

Sketches for the production of Don Giovanni (left to right, the Don, Elvira, Leporello and Zerlina’s outfits)

Dear Friends and readers,

Our first summer outing was a bit of a disappointment. The air had been burning hot today, brutal heat that left me breathless when I went out, so we were looking forward to a little cool in the evening at the park around the Barns. That we did have and a yummy meal of salmon, pesto fat spaghetti salad, artichokes and Riesling wine. The singing and some of the talk before the opera was fun to listen to and the crowd was big and enthusiastic. But the opera itself as done just didn’t jell, had far too many gimmicks. Her thinking seems to have been superficial, and done with an eye to “pleasing the crowd.” She did not trust the audience to have an intelligent awareness of what we were seeing, or herself wanted to avoid the opera’s central themes.

It may be that I’ve seen too many Don Giovannis lately, and it would be hard for a company to come up with yet another brilliant, relevant and thoughtful dark, or just an alive exhilarating production with terrific interactive performances. The competition is keen. Well this one, while clearly well-meant, didn’t have some central idea or mood fueling it, so it really felt like one or two characters coming on stage each time, doing their bit and getting off. There was no sense of a real individual interactive relationship between Leporello (Craig Irvin) and Don Giovanni (Ryan Kuster). Kuster’s best singing was the serenade in the second act, and his sudden vicious beatings or arrogance didn’t fit his mode of singing. Irvin as Leporello was not tired of his job, not irritated or conspiratorial, just there taking pictures (a conceit was he loved to take photos). Don Octavio’s (Jason Salyden) best arias were cut, and Donna Anna (Marcy Tonikas) and he were dull bores: no terror from her at having been raped, no comedy later when she refuses to marry him after all his devotion. So the primary rich woman (as I’ve seen before) became Elvira, played marvelously (as has become typical) as a woman still deeply in love and even wanting to go to bed with this man who seemed on the edge of beating her up:

She was one of the strongest singers with a voice that was lyrical and projected

There was no anger from Masetto (Aaron Sorenson), who was easily brutally beaten by the Don and all gentleness with the kewpie-doll comical Zerlina (Andrea Carroll) who showed more life in her reluctance to let Elvira boss her around than in her scenes with the Don. The masquerade didn’t look like fun; everyone was going through gyrations that showed a kind of Marat/Sade corruption (including buggering) which just didn’t belong. The 18th century supposed thrift-shop type outfits just looked odd. The best moments were those which were reminiscent of 18th century comedy, with, for example, the Don to the back of the stage making funny comments as Leporello pretended to be him wooing Elvira.

Kim Witman’s half-hour talk before was perhaps a warning signal. She went through the history of productions cursorily, concentrating just on those which turn the Don into a romantic figure, but then turned around and defined the opera as basically comic (dramma giocoso, or jocular) and all she said about the production as a whole was they decided to use contemporary dress to try to evoke contemporary types. In other of her talks I’ve seen her come out with ideas about the themes of the opera. How are we to take the opening rape? Is it a rape? The Don’s attitude towards his male servants? why is he a half-mad promiscuous man who never seems to have any sex during the course of the play? Is it about the irrationality of everyone which they carry on with after the curtain goes down? or a morality play? any or all of these? If she thought about it, it did not appear from the production.

I must say that I have seen nobody on stage who has been a more interesting Character than that compound of Cruelty & Lust — Jane Austen, on a pantomime-burlesque, Don Juan, or the Libertine Destroyed, adapted from Thomas Shadwell’s Libertine, 15 Sept 1813, showing even casual pantomime can evoke thought

Worst of all was Witman’s reliance on computer gimmicks. She turned the stage into several movie screens and while the first time we saw on some of them images familiar from the Internet made relevant, it seemed funny, after a while the jokes paled and were intrusive. Yes some in the audience laughed and laughed (some always do), but I noticed she did drop these jokes towards the end of the opera when things were getting serious as our two heroes went into the graveyard with the usual stone effigy.

People applauded the cast who were eager and had worked so hard. We sat next to a couple where the man was himself an opera singer and we had some talk with them about the instruments which were right in front of us. We were in the first row of four seats to the left, and just before us were the musical instruments that played for the Don’s party as well as piano and cello that didn’t fit in the pit. During intermission I suggested perhaps we were having too many gimmicks, too much of a good thing the jokes about computer usages (Leporello keeps his records of the Don’s conquests on an ipad). The man said the lights which kept traveling up and down the movie screens (to me like some Mondrian painting gone electric) made him think of Romney as an etch-a-sketch man.

You can’t win ‘em all. Mozart’s music is so alluring and some of the singing was entrancing.

The theme of this summer’s two Barns productions is the 18th century aristocratic debauched or macho male. In the era such a figure was often presented morally. Next up (in August) is Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, libretto by W. H. Auden. I hope Kim thinks about Hogarth’s powerful pictures.

Rake’s progress: the orgy at a brothel

Don Giovanni’s primary title is Il dissoluto punito; perhaps the two singing males were too wholesome-handsome:

Lunchtime special performance

Ellen

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John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore: On Doing a Sexually Radical Play in the Shenandoah Valley

John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Patrick Earl as Giovanni, the lover-brother, and Denice Mahler as his sister-lover, Annabella), from the ASC’s production 2012

Dear friends and readers,

This is a “must-see” production. So wrote the “Mid-Atlantic Travel Blogger” who while anonymous had enough clout to see a “private” performance of John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore by the group who used to call themselves “The Shenandoah Shakespeare”. He or she couldn’t or doesn’t explain why; indeed seemed puzzled how such a “twisted” play could please, and put it down to “shock.”

Within a few seconds of the start of the second act, I realized this was the production Ford’s daring play calls for: its note throughout is a gleeful exposure of the angry cynicism, amorality or sheer stupidity (imbecility) of all the authority figures of the play: some are amoral such as the cardinal (Rick Blunt), who is disinclined to prosecute the murder of one citizen because the murderer has some connections, and who gathers up all the gold left by dead strewn across the stage at the play’s close; some are justifiably cynical like Hippolita (Stephanie Holladay Earl), rejected wife of a nobleman; or Vasques (Eugene Douglas) a kind of Iago who pronounces moral lessons. There are simpletons who enforce unexamined norms: Florio (Daniel Abraham Stevens), Annabella’s father who forces her to marry the vicious treacherous Soranzo (Jake Mahler). There are the complicit for their own appetites and interest’s sake, Putana, Annabella’s “nurse” (Bridget Rue as brothel madam); Grimaldi, willing to murder at the drop of a sword (typical type of this era, played by Michael Amendola). Dark farce is the way much of these interactions are performed, with over-the-top garishly sexual costuming for the women. The story is complicated but it’s told simply at wikipedia).

Really though there’s nothing new here for us in 2012. Old hat since Marat/Sade. What is startling and commendable is from the second part of the play on, the players did Giovanni and Annabella’s love for one another as totally passionate, a beautiful thing, two souls made for one another with the most idealistic soaring of the spirit. Here’s Annabella telling Soranza what Giovanni is:

This noble creature was in every part
So angel-like, so glorious, that a woman
Who had not been but human, as was I,
Would have kneeled to him, and have begged for love.
You! why you are not worthy once to name
His name without true worship, or indeed,
Unless you kneeled, to hear another name him. (Act 3, sc 3)

The look of aspiration in Earl’s eyes is pitch perfect:

The twisting of this young man from within until he goes mad by the end of the act and himself cruelly murders Annabella (Othello-like, and Ford alludes to Othello, he cannot bear to have his woman taken by Soranzo nightly) and stalks about covered with the blood of Soranzo crazed and vehemently assailing the world from the top of his lungs on the top of a high table — these final moments are where the plot-design of the whole play had been heading.

As ever, our players “did it with the lights on,” and so they had no technology to rivet or distract us with. Earl as Giovanni was up to absorbing an audience into awed silence watching him. At the play’s close he has not the problem of what to do next since Vasques comes up to stab him from behind and then has his hired assassins (several in black who turn up whenever needed) to finish the job off:

The woman imitates a police offer, the men without the religious symbols FBI and spy-detective types, and then there’s a priest

The second half of this production was thus much braver than the Capital Fringe Festival group two summers ago who drew out of an abridged version of the play a socially acceptable feminist moral: at one point Annabella tells us (in this production from a high window) we are seeing “A wretched, woeful woman’s tragedy (Act 5, sc 1). But the dignity with which she is endowed, and the way the previous production managed to suggest this play was about men oppressing women was not followed here. This Annabella grovels on the floor:

The lines emphasized are those which present the two people as gripped by love, unable to do without one another surrounded by these “vile” types. The production used “mash-up” techniques for the intermission and during the play we were treated to 1950s rock-n-roll ballads that were very familiar to me, strains of them which I could not quite place: about love a blind passion, about loneliness. Soranzo’s bullying becomes a raping of Annabella nightly instead of justifiable rage at finding himself stuck with a pregnant woman who will not tell her lover’s name; he orders her to bed (the lines are there) where he will again do what he wants. Coerced marriage is rape.

The play put me in mind of Simon Raven’s unfortunately little known masterpiece novel, Fielding Gray: the life of the homosexual male is twisted and perverted by having to hide it, being subject to blackmail and abuse. Heterosexuals can be as nasty and horrible as they please in their sex life, it remains okay as it’s heterosexual; homosexual sex is not prima facie no good in itself; it’s what the society does to it that makes it base and wild (see my blog on Andrew Davies’s film adaptation of Hollinghurst’s Line of Beauty). So too incest here. Ford’s play differs from the many Jacobean plays enacting incest or incestuous desires and vicarious sex (Beaumont and Fletcher’s Maid’s Tragedy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, Middleton’s Women Beware Women): Ford empathizes with the lovers. As Eric Minton puts it, Giovanni and Annabella are just these “true-hearted individuals who just happen to have fallen in love with someone sprung from the same womb. Theirs may be the squirmiest sin, but many other characters prove more loathsome in their violent natures, their greed, their infatuation with revenge, and their self-serving self-righteous.” Minton then goes over the downright silly in the play but omits one young woman, Philotis (Bridget Rue), who is sent to a nunnery in a sort of daze: she had on a shiny satiny skirt with a petticoat which reminded me of outfits made for little girls who are given tap-dancing lessons by middle class US parents for the once-a-year stage performance.

Alas though, reading the Mid-Atlantic Traveler, and finding hardly any reviews of this play, and remembering how the previous production I have seen (so to speak) normalizes the action in terms of 20th century values, perhaps the players and their director were rightly cautious in the introduction and first half. They had an added on introduction which both trivialized the coming play and warned us against it, going so far as to tell us Giovanni was a bad villain. It was all a joke we were going to see, but if we couldn’t take some (whisper the word) “incest,” perhaps we shouldn’t stay. Then the first act had the actors at first turning to the audience as if to ask for boos. What they discovered was there were several fools in the first row who took this seriously and began to call out heckling comments which was then half-clapped by further idiots further back. The play-acting in this first act was oddly artificial and over-the-top strident, rather like a clown show. The way of playing the love of Giovanni and Annabella and the betrayals of the other characters seemed to suggest it was a mystery what could possibly have fuelled Ford to write such a ridiculous piece. Maybe the heckling did some good, for I could see the actors begin to stop appealing to the audience, back off, speed up, though not until the second act did the front row people begin to realize they were not supposed to boo Giovanni or call him out as a “bad guy.” Perhaps the gouging out of Putana’s eyes after Vasques manipulates and deludes her into revealing that Annabella’s lover is Giovanni did the trick to silence them. I admit they interfered with my enjoyment in the first act and was relieved when they fell silent.

During the intermission for the first time in all the many times I have seen ASC productions (a lot of them by now), I began to think well, at long last they have goofed. Or maybe it was that in such a conservative era, and in this mid-Virginia Shenandoah valley (not so far off is Evangelical Jerry Falwell country) they were scared off of doing justice to the very material they had chosen. I might have suggested to Jim we go home, only it had been a 3 hour drive to get there. But I remembered the choice of ’50s music during the intermission and hoped it was deliberate and stayed.

In the event, the actors switched gears totally and the last hour and a half was magnificent in energy, bravura, acting, poignancy.

From a Brooklyn Academy of Music production

It may be that the day we went there just happened to be a number of naive audience members in the first row. I have seen actors on stage make the mistake of inviting an audience slightly to cut up, and have to actually not just back up but even half-scold said audience to get them to be courteous in their interactions again. One must not forget that the actors on a stage are in a state of abjection to the audience: they may seem to be individually triumphing, releasing themselves, showing off, but they are performing for us, nailed down to their scripts, often showing themselves, costumed in dangerously vulnerable ways. Actors have sometimes had overtly to separate themselves from evil characters to protect themselves from the audience’s identification of them with their roles. I have read insightful accounts of theater which make this point about the reality of the actor’s rightly unacknowleged position of supplication (See Kristina Straub’s Sexual Suspects: 18th Century Players and Ideology on the long-hard slog actors of the 18th century performed to gain respect stop heckling and abuse, and protect the actresses.) I had not actually experienced what this means before this.

Jim had a different take — while just as surely recommending going to see it if you are at all within driving distance. Over dinner Jim argued that Ford is playing with ideas, at a distance from them (in the way I think of the Fletcher plays, Middleton and Massinger in his comedies). The play, Jim says, is misogynistic. Ford judges Annabella to be a whore, using the term in a general vilifying way to mean any woman who has sex outside marriage even if with just one man. (Izzy protested that Annabella cannot be a whole because she is paid nothing, has no money; she used the 20th century definition of whore means prostitute which is the way I use the term.) Jim maintains the text of the play blames Annabella. Her looseness starts the evil spreading. PUtano had it coming to her. Vasques is the Vindice (revenger on behalf of God and providence) character and that’s why he is left standing. Jim suggested that since a modern audience would dislike this very much, and want to empathize with a tragic character and feel for the victims, the people who do Ford must alter the play into black farce. Then we don’t worry who is to blame. Or they can, like the Capital Fringe people, impose a modern anti-misogynistic message by abridging.

Tragic heroine from The Broken Heart

I’m not sure. I find it hard not to read Ford’s The Broken Heart as feminist. If we are to blame Annabella, why not Giovanni who is cursed by several authority figures in the play. Surely Soranzo. Vasques recalls Shakespeare’s Iago.

So don’t miss the play. This is a play where the behavior spectacle of the audience may become part of the play and the play itself of real interest.

Ellen

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The HD Enchanted Island: Opera mash-up

Caliban (Luca Pisaroni) in the midst of a nightmare

Dear friends and readers,

From the Baroque period we have had opera seria and opera buffa. Now we have opera mash-up. The Met is attempting to dignify their daring creation with a pedigree by using the word “pasticcio.” Not only in opera, but on the legitimate and not-so-legitimate stage long 18th century stage (1660-1815), adaptations, free-wheeling and close, re-combinations of old plays abridged with non-dramatic genres like pastorals, clever mocking farces, and parodies were part of the on-going repertoire. And The Enchanted Island consists of a number of da capo exit arias: as my husband, Jim (knowledgeable in the area of opera) told me:

Opera seria is this rigid opera genre which consists mostly of da capo exit arias; that is, the aria ends as it began and then the character leaves the stage. There is some variation, not much. So in Rodelinda, we had that marvelous duet (Renee Fleming and Andreas Scholler as Rodelinda and Bertarido), but there is just the one. All else da capa. Enchanted Island had a number of da capo exit arias, but they mixed in a whole bunch of stuff that was not from opera and from musical compositions there was music from oratorios, contatae, even a coronation anthem (Neptune’s song was Zadoc a coronation anthem by Handel, written for George II and used ever since). So we do not get this sense of rigidity …

And the Met has a website which tells you where the original music from many of the parts come from so you can (if you wish) discover the original context and see how it’s been transposed.

Ariel is also Puck directing traffic among the confused lovers in the wood

However, as Jim suggests this is just one aspect of this entertainment. The Met has people in it who want to do the Baroque repertoire and they were permitted to do it if all was done that could be done to defy the basics of its strict music forms.

So, the story or plot-design was lifted from two different plays by Shakespeare, not so much as originally conceived by him, but as seen through Restoration and 18th century adaptations: this was a Tempest as seen through the salacious and titillating perspective of Dryden and Davenant and his Midsummer Night’s Dream), into which was imported the four lovers and their forest scenes from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Jeremy Sams, librettist, and Julian Crouch, director and set designer, were not content to stay with 18th century re-writes: Sycorax (sung by Joyce DiDonato) who does appear in the 18th century renditions, has become the true heroine of the story: Prospero (sung by countertenor, David Daniels) is not Shakespeare’s more or less exemplary alter ego, victim of his own goodness at the hands of an amoral cynical brother, but someone who took over Sycorax’s island and has oppressed and controlled her (somehow — don’t press this too far) ever since. She herself is a loving mother.

Sycorax listening to Caliban’s angry grief

Prospero and Sycorax are made into faintly into an Oberon v Titania pair with the right being on Sycorax’s side as the less powerful figure.

Prospero (David Daniels) and Sycorax (Joyce Didonato)

Joyce Diddonato had the last bow at the end, even though the concluding da capo aria of Act I was Prospero’s (who tells us how he has done wrong) and the epilogue was spoken by Prospero: Shakespeare’s famous good bye speech: “Now our revels are ended.”

Thus this early 21st century creation brought home how adult and frank and playful sexually was Baroque & early to mid-18thc theatre. Cross-dressing, transvestites, continual breaching gender stereotypes: Dryden and all the 18th century writers who followed him re-did Shakespeare they did “sex” him up, make things titillating and salacious that in Shakespeare’s version remain restrained (or austere, grave, serious). There was a kind of mockery of enthrallment in heterosexual stories, especially in the thankless part of Miranda (automatically falls in love with whatever young man is put in front of her, inanely idealistic), which made me wonder had I been missing this in Shakespeare’s plays (after all from his sonnets we know he was bisexual). People interested in the early modern to 18th century from any aspect would learn by seeing this.

Helena’s outfit and its part origin

There were archetypes from novels well after the later 17th century: Luca Pisaroni played Caliban was as a wrenchingly moving re-creation of Quasimodo (he has a crooked back, is disabled mentally, mocked as ugly to his considerable emotional pain), not so much from Hugo but the famous poignant Charles Laughton’s embodiment from the 1930s film. I literally cried at Sycorax’s aria over Caliban’s grief when Helena rejects him. Tears coming down my face. The Met site tells us the music sung was a plaintive song by the Virgin Mary over Christ. The lyrics and situation transpose to a modern situation where the mother would do whatever she could do spare her child, but can do nothing. The whole sequence of Caliban’s nightmare (expressed through nightmare figures dancing) was to me the high point of Enchanted Island (and people who’ve written to me said this was true for them too). I was aware he was not singing; his acting out of anguish was enough.

Costume design came from the later 17th through 18th century: Danielle de Niese at the close had a costumed modeled on Louis XIV as Apollo, somewhat modified by memories of the high plums of headdresses by aristocratic women of the later 18th century (as seen in the recent movie based on Georgiana Spenser’s life, The Duchess, and the 1999 BBC mini-series, Lennox sisters in Aristocrats).

Danielle de Niese as Ariel taking her bow (how a person can be seen as achieving her liberty in that outfit is beyond me — to me such a costume is ironic; she is encased in hierarchies)

Allusions to the US as seen in the 18th century (a Tiepolo ceiling) abounded, but also as seen today: De Niese said she thought of Tinkerbell, the Mermaids hanging from the sky each time Neptune (Placido Domingo) made an entrance, were straight from Disney.

Dialogue — the funny remarks referred to in the interviews Deborah Voigt conducted between acts — came right out of today’s pop US & UK culture. Where one of the imported young men from MND, Demetrius (Paul Appleny), didn’t want to take “no” for “no” from Miranda, Lysander (Eliot Madore), the other, said something like “he said that last time” or ‘he always says that.” Going down to the bottom of the sea, Ariel wore a scuba-diving outfit that looked like something out of Flash Gordon (or Star Wars).

Along with Sams and Julian Crouch, a central creator was Phelim McDermott, all 3 all gay Brits; they had more than little help from a man expert in Baroque, William Christie, who chose rarely done music by Handel, Vivaldi, Rameau, Purcella and lesser known composers, Campra, Rebel. The sensibility was gay, toned down. The extravagance was camp. This was “in your face” opera. The three men said they decided not to do anything moderate. They would concede no apologies. Opera is meant to be over-the-top and that’s what they were.

The Met as a group or team also simply want to sell their work and help operas reach a wider and younger audience. The hype of the interviews, the filming of staging backstage is all part of this. They must also outside the standard repertoire: you cannot keep doing the same 40 operas over and over in movie screens around the world, and new operas are not written very often. They were after a younger audience too. The singer chosen for the six young lovers were young handsome and/or beautiful and intended to please those who would not identify with aging divas and tenors close up. Helena was especially physically lovely; Hermia singer very moving (every time Shakespeare words used the production became much better and she was given mostly Shakespeare’s words), Lysander drop-dead beautiful in the Rufus Sewell mode. I could see Izzy was very taken by hijinks of the five in the forest.

I did find the girlish Ferdinand (very high counter-tenor, Anthony Roth Costanzo) downright embarrassing: his voice was very high and he was dressed like Ronald Colman as Rupert Hentzau when we first see him in Prisoner of Zenda (Ruritania, Knighthood was in Flower stuff). He was the only one of the six lovers altogether to wear an 18th century white wig; all the others had their own “natural” well, cascading and rich hair. Why he was so stigmatized, set apart I could not tell. (In film adaptations of older works, the older men and characters meant to be disliked regularly have wigs or heavy make-up; all the males meant to be entrancing wear their own hair. Ditto for the actresses.) The young woman doing Miranda was daffy. Maybe that had something to do with it, but as I say it’s foolish to try to find reasons for much that one saw literally. Often the makers were simply adding on whatever they could think of to amuse or dazzle.

One of several storms from the first act

I confess that by the end of Act 1 I was ambivalent: I felt I had not been moved; I recognized the Baroque proscenium stage, that the front of the stage was lined with shells (18th century stage used such forms to keep the candles in), but all the artifice, including the cardboard like ship going down in a computerized tempest just reminded me of how unreal what I was watching was. Ariel’s “duhs” and funny mock magic were amusing, but I didn’t like what I took to be making fun of Caliban in act 1; I am often turned off by over-luxurious, over-produced operas and prefer people sitting on chairs singing their hearts out so I can see how the music pieces relate to one another and really engage with the music and characters as somehow real enough.

But I was won over. I was turned round even to being deeply moved, admiration, enjoyment, respect by the end of Act 2. I’ve found this true of other later 20th-21stc staged productions: they start slow; Act 1 develops the situation to the point where in Act 2 we may engage deeply with what happens to this set-up situation, place, characters. That partly happened here. Mostly my engagement came from the Sycorax and Caliban matter. And the second half had far more lines from Shakespeare.

The four lovers waking from their dream spell

I cannot say I liked the long-drawn out triumphant happiness of all the characters at the ending: it’s tedious, repetitive, negates for me what went before. I’m told that is what you find in Baroque operas. But a couple of months ago, Jim and I went to the West End Cinema in DC to see Don Giovanni (Peter Mattrei the singer) from the Teatro alla Scala. Marvelously cynical and it ended almost immediately after Giovanni is pulled undergrown by the man who would have been his father-in-law had he married Donna Anna (Ann Netrebko). All we see is Leporello (Bryn Terfel) seeking a new place. Since this is patently a 21st century work, there is no need for this Busby-Berkeley let’s get everyone on stage beaming at the audience close. But then I did say this was kind of gay game.

I realize I’ve not talked much about the actual singing or music. The movie-theater I was in had the sound too high at times, but FWIW, I thought the singing of Daniels as Prospero effective, Didonato as Sycorax moving. It was ensemble and mostly no one but else but De Niese (marvelous) as Ariel emerged. It was more I was aware of the humor or sadness as I listened. The four lovers when first seen are singing a song about the pleasures they anticipate (over and over) and the innocent words become salacious; often the words seem ironically juxtaposed to the music provided or scene itself. We are not really scared ever or awed.

Claire (Helena) is someone often seen in secondary roles at the Met

I do hope there were not so many castrati as these Baroque productions suggest. Izzy says yes though especially in the Catholic Church. How cruel economic desperation and the search for prestige makes people.

See the Classical Review, the New York Times review and Clever Concoction from Yahoo.

Don’t miss it.

Ariel failing to blow on her shell

Ellen

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An historically faithful (!) Don Giovanni on HD at the movies

Don Giovanni brooding (Mariusz Kwiecien)

I must say that I have seen nobody on stage who has been a more interesting Character than that compound of Cruelty & Lust — Jane Austen, on a pantomime-burlesque, Don Juan, or the Libertine Destroyed, adapted from Thomas Shadwell’s Libertine, 15 Sept 1813

Dear friends and readers,

I am and was not alone in my enjoyment of Michael Grandage’s rousing rendition of Mozart’s masterpiece. All my neighbors around me, a full auditorium of people seemed totally absorbed and at the end (as in a few other movie operas I’ve seen) people jumped up to stand while clapping. (That’s enthusiasm and appreciation since the real live people can’t see it and it’s not recorded anywhere.) It was wonderfully well sung, where they could, well acted (within the limits of presenting comic types), rousing in tempo (they kept up a speed), and moving: I just loved the first aria by Octavio (Ramon Vargas), came close to tears. And while I’m not sure Mozart as Donna Elivra in love with Giovanni

Elvira (Barbara Frittoli),

there is a complexity to that character too that the Barbara Frittoli got across. The Claus Guth I saw two years ago now, while great and directly relevant to us today in ways this production was not, did miss Mozart’s original point (or glided over it): we are to try to understand this destructive amoral pest male who is the way he is because he was brought up without restraint. In his interview Kwiecen said he felt the character was filled with anger and hatred, and that was to the fore in the fierceness of his performance throughout. The male brought up without restraint is one of Austen’s and De Stael’s themes too.

Online institutionalized and professional critics have not agreed. Deferential and traditional (bad), tame and unimaginative (worse), timid (oi vay) or just plain lukewarm, were a few typical epithets critics resorted to within a few hours of seeing the new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Met this year.

Tastelessly, they seemed almost to lament that after a potentially crippling-for-life fall from a high balcony, and herniated disk, Mariusz Kwiecien overcame a full-scale operation and recuperation within two weeks to act and sing Don Giovanni with vigor, grace, athletics as compelling as originally conceived (except he was not asked to leap on high to the stage again). Anthony Tommasini was not alone in regretting that Peter Mattei (who just jumped into the part) had not been able to do the role on a film screened round the world. Mattei was just “superb, singing alternately with suave, seductive phrasing and menacing intensity. At 6-foot-4, he was lordly, cagey, heady with desire and glibly reckless.” Tomamsini clearly had given no thought to what Mozart wanted us to feel about the Don: a murderer, rapist (if he were not so often interrupted), brutal to his servant, a liar, reckless, ruthless, seething with fierce angers, someone whom it takes all the powers of hell by raging fires and terrifying ghosts to frighten and to drag down into the earth to a hell he has lived in all play long.

Final scene of the Don surrounded by bright fires, with Leporello (Luca Pisaroni) nearby — who has begged him not to go and responded to the commendatore’s dinner invitation, “sorry, they are too busy just now”

What they overlook (or don’t think or know enough to realize) is Michael Grandage (producer), Fabio Luisi (conductor) produced the opera the way Mozart probably intended it to be produced (including the final coda): a providential comedy where a vicious character is finally ejected from the body politic of its world, and the characters all around him learning nothing at all, but just carry on regardless as ever (rather like Ben Jonson characters). Being Mozart he saw his way into the legend’s characters to allow them to emerge as psychologically complex.

For the first time, and after seeing the opera at least 6 times before, I now realize that Mozart’s is as radically or at least full-throated a rejection of a central cultural figure as any I’ve ever have been. Cold, angry, domineering and indifferent to the feelings or lives of others, amoral, a bully without pity. To see the psychology acted out is to see the play is not misogynistic, the chief character is. Renee Fleming said the legend began with Byron. Byron’s sweet naive loving Don Juan has nothing but a name to connect him to the typology begun by Moliere Dom Juane and Shadwell (The Libertine).

Maybe they didn’t like it because they didn’t like an anti-libertine play.

Jim pointed out that many of the scenes and renditions of the songs and music were parodic of opera seria, and we (the audience) were assumed by Mozart to know what was laughed at and laugh. He loved the way the music was conducted with Leporello doing a continuo basso beneath the duets and trios of the Don, Anna, and Octavio, or Don and Elvira. He likened Mozart in the 1790s to Philip Glass, with the difference Mozart was at the start of a whole new version of middle European music traditions. I noticed how the character came onto the stage and walked off singly and in pairs like Restoration and 18th century comedy. How the characters were directed and dressed in such a way that the “buffo” characters (Zerlina, Masetto and Leporello) were dressed differently (stylized as peasants) from, and never on stage or had anything much to do with the upper class serio characters (Don Octavio, Elvira, Donna Anna, often in masquerade Venetian dominos):

Octavio (Ramon Vargas) and Donna Anna (Marina Rebeka) who seems singularly unkeen to marry her poignantly in love devoted suitor

Masetto (Joshua Bloom) and Zerlina (Mojca Erdmann) played as essentially good-natured, healthy sex is what we see they have off-stage

The Don is the linking character, belonging neither wholly to one or the other. I noticed for the first time that the Don has no family, not one, highly unusual for 18th century characters, and how many parallels there are.

The Don pulling Zerlina off — he never gets to rape anyone, ever interrupted

Elvira dragging Leporello because she thinks him the Don

I concede the opera-makers probably did not have fidelity so much in mind as pleasing a mass audience with playful stylization. They were not timid but daringly true to Mozart to stay within mainstream values today.

Giovanni (Kwiecien) duelling with the commendatore (Stefan Kocan) who rescues Anna from rape

(Donizetti’s Anna Bolena was done similarly, cautiously I’ll put it. So if you want to, you can see something homoerotic between Leporello and the Don, but then you need not.

The Met is out to make opera a mass art — that’s why they have expanded the interviews and make sure they get the stars backstage to the mikes — and they are going more traditional this year. Gelb might say damned if they do (imitates Broadway, popular high art) and damned if they don’t — and there are daring choices ahead (Philip Glass’s Satyagraha and the original concoction, The Enchanted Island, an extravaganza of fairy tale drawn from 17th century music whose title (surely knowingly) recalls Dryden and Davenant’s re-do of Shakespeare’s Tempest.

Ellen

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

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

Dear friends,

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

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

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Johannes Vermeer (1632-75), Maid and Mistress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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Foremother Poet: Anne Wharton (1659-85)

Antonio Canaletto (1697-1768), London, Whitehall and the Privy Gardens from Richmond House (1747)

Dear friends and readers,

A fifth foremother poet. In Slipshod Sibyls: Recognition and Rejection and the Woman Poet, Germaine Greer’s moving “Rochester’s Niece” on the life and poetry of Anne Wharton reveals a brilliant young woman poet whose life was brief and deeply unhappy (in all senses of the word). What she was was a great tragic satirist. She’s not the only one to write in this vein in her period: her uncle, John Wilmot does; so too Dryden in certain moods, Oldham. This was to write great poetry in her era: peers as women include Sarah Fyge Egerton, Anne Killigrew, in some moods Anne Finch, Elizabeth Thomas, Aphra Behn (who tends to the hard comic in her satire). While the oeuvre is small, it’s strong.

To begin with, I have four poems this time — a fifth follows a short life, and selections from a sixth longer one, an Heroide, will be found in the comments: a free translation/imitation where Wharton personates Penelope to Ulysses in Ovid’s way will be found in the comments. Penelope as an important icon for women is still with us (Margaret Atwood’s book).

I hope the poems will mostly speak for themselves to readers who can lend themselves to the older British prosody and plain spokenness of verse from the later 17th century

A powerful personal lyric, psychologically-conceived pictorial allegory rooted in real natural event:

On the Storm between Gravesend and Diepe; Made at that Time

When the Tempestuous Sea did foam and roar,
Tossing the Bark from the long-wish’d for Shore;
With false affected fondness it betray’d,
Striving to keep what Perish’d, if it stay’d.
Such is the Love of Impious Men, where e’re
Their cruel Kindness lights, ’tis to ensnare:
I, toss’d in tedious Storms of troubled Thought,
Was careless of the Waves the Ocean brought.
My Anchor Hope was lost, and too too near
On either hand were Rocks of sad Despair.
Mistaken Seamen prais’d my fearless Mind,
Which, sunk in Seas of Grief, could dare the Wind.
In Life, tempestuous Life is dread and harm,
Approaching Death had no unpleasing Form;
Approaching Death appeases ev’ry Storm.

A strong critique of social life(my favorite of her poems that I’ve been able to read):

Wit’s Abuse

I see not why Astrea fled away,
But wonder more, why any virtuous stay
In such a world, where they are made a scorn,
Oppress’d by numerous vice, mangled and torn
Wounded by laughter, and by wit forlorn.
I mean not here by wit, what’s truly so,
But that false coin which does for current go.
‘ Tis certain but a few can judgment make
Of such a gift, which but a few partake.
Ignorant judges may decide a cause,
Sooner against, than for concealed laws.
This is wit’s pledge, but few those precepts know,
Which many false pretenders overthrow.
And yet amongst those very few, there are
Some who betray that glorious character;
Whilst low-born falsehood goes for heavenly wit;
How many aim at what so few can hit?
The trade of hell was never had to get.
Thus these intruders double ends pursue,
Rooting out wit, they root out virtue too.
Soft pity passes now for servile fear,
A generous scorn of life for mean despair.
Truth and sincerity the fools proclaim,
Which witty falsehood always load with shame.
An active soul affected notions prove,
Out-flying common thoughts, or private love.
Thus tho’ each virtue in itself they hate,
They love to make it add to a deceit.
Undress’d ’tis scorn’d, but favour’d and allow’d.
When to the neighbouring vice it lends a cloud.
Thus the inconstant empress of the night,
Tho’ foul, and spotted, clothes herself with light,
And can with borrow’d beams be always bright.

An elegy for poetry (also above) and Rochester:

Elegy on the Earl of Rochester

Deep waters silent roll, so grief like mine
Tears never can relieve, nor words define.
Stop, then, stop your vain source, weak springs of grief,
Let tears flow from their eyes whom tears relieve.
They from their heads show the light trouble there;
Could my heart weep, its sorrows ‘twould declare:
Weep drops of blood, my heart, thou’st lost thy pride,
The cause of all thy hopes and fears, thy guide.
He would have led thee right in wisdom’s way,
And ’twas thy fault whene’er thou wentst astray;
And since thou strayedst when guided and led on,
Thou wilt be surely lost now left alone.
It is thy elegy I write, not his:
He lives immortal and in highest bliss.
But thou art dead, alas! my heart, thou’rt dead:
He lives, that lovely soul for ever fled,
But thou mongst crowds on Earth art buried.
Great was thy loss, which thou canst ne’er express,
Nor was th’ insensible dull nation’s less:
He civilized the rude and taught the young,
Made fools grow wise, such artful magic hung
Upon his useful, kind, instructing tongue.
His lively wit was of himself a part,
Not, as in other men, the work of art;
For, though his learning like his wit was great,
Yet sure all learning came below his wit;
As God’s immediate gifts are better far
Than those we borrow from our likeness here,
He was but I want words, and ne’er can tell;
Yet this I know, he did mankind excel.
He was what no man ever was before;
Nor can indulgent nature give us more,
For to make him she exhausted all her store.

A disillusioned song:

How hardly I conceal’d my Tears?
How oft did I complain?
When many tedious Days my Fears
Told me I Lov’d in vain.

But now my Joys as wild are grown,
And hard to be conceal’d:
Sorrow may make a silent Moan,
But Joy will be reveal’d

I tell it to the Bleating Flocks,
To every Stream and Tree,
And Bless the Hollow Murmuring Rocks,
For Echoing back to me.

Thus you may see with how much Joy
We Want, we Wish, Believe;
‘Tis hard such Passion to Destroy,
But easie to Deceive.

The one image of Anne that has come down to us is heavily stylized.

An unlived life: Anne’s father, Sir John Danvers, died of plague four months before she was born; Anne Danvers, her mother died after she gave birth to Anne. She and her sister were made the responsibility of Anne, Countess of Rochester, John Wilmot’s mother. Rochester’s mother is not presented as having affectionate or tender feelings ever for anyone. After her niece was “deflowered” by Henry Mordaunt, 2nd Earl of Peterborough (the two events may not have been linked), she married Anne off in 1673 at age 14 to Thomas Wharton, referred to as a sportsman and politician. Wharton was one of the debauched wit set to which her uncle, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester belonged. Apparently Peterborough paid a servant to give him access to Anne and raped her. The marriage to Wharton produced no discernible relationship between the two except that he bullied her. The one genuine companionate relationship, congenial and supportive she had was with her uncle. Some scurrilous writing at the time said they were lovers, but from their poetry it doesn’t seem so. They seem to have been uncle and niece. She manifested a very bad illness (very painful) by the time she was 11 and is said to died in wretched suffering at age 26.

I hope her life will make the final poem of this blog understandable.

Complaints are not listened to:

To Melpomene against complaint

In soft Complaints no longer ease I find,
That latest refuge of a Tortur’d Mind;
Romantick Heros may their Fancy please
In telling of their Griefs to senceless Trees.
‘Tis now to me no pleasure to rehearse
A doleful Tale in Melancholy Verse!
Men are more Deaf than Trees, more Wild than Seas:
Complaints and Tears will sooner Storms appease,
Than draw soft pity from an Humane Breast.
All Sooth the Happy, and Despise the Opprest.
Each Man who lives, of sorrow hath his share,
Or else of Pride, and cannot pity spare,
For those whose weight is more than one can bear.
All who are happy, do their Merit boast,
Think Heaven ows ‘em more, and Heav’n is Just.
Still they observe the Opprest with Partial Eyes,
And think their Crimes draw Vengeance from the Skies.
But were they gentle, pitiful, and mild,
Not (as they are) rough, unconcern’d and wild.
What Joy can pity bring on other’s Grief?
For what I feel, affords me no relief;
To see another’s Eyes with pity melt,
For wretched me, would add to what I felt.
Since in Complaints there can no ease be found,
For such an Heart as mine in sorrow drown’d.

Anne Wharton does not belong to the set of women who experienced the civil war, but was a member of the next generation which reacted to and against the religiosities and (to them) hypocritical idealisms of the mid-century. Her prosody is that of this group whose most famous woman poet was Aphra Behn. The poem to Rochester shows that like Behn (who also wrote a beautiful elegy to Rochester), Anne Wharton was one of those who saw and appreciated all his finest qualities. I really love “Wit’s Abuse.” She is said to have left 24 poems and 1 play.

In her Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry, Paula Backscheider has credited her with a poem I think written by Anne Finch: All Flie th’unhappy, and all I would flie

The tone, prosody, simple language and rhythms of the sentences are wholly unlike Wharton’s; they are close in spirit and resemble many of Finch’s. Finch’s attraction to a line like: “”Survey those glittering Particles of Light” is quintessentially typical of her. The plangent tone is her. A typical melancholy withdrawing couplet, down to the use of one syllable words:

Yes, here I’m lost, for none of all the dead
Return to tell what a Soul is when fled.

The attribution was originally contemporary and is repeated in Chadwyck-Healey too.

Backscheider also says that Wharton’s elegy to Rochester was noticed by other writers and she was “an eminent” poet in the era. I would like to think so too, but the probability is she was mostly ignored and then forgotten (see Greer); at any rate there’s no evidence for wide respect. Yes she was praised by Edmund Waller and John Dryden and exchanged verses with Behn.

I took the poems I present from Germaine Greer, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, Melinda Sansone, edd. Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse; Joy Fullard, ed. British Women Poets 1660-1800: An Anthology; Paula Backscheider and Catherine E. Ingrassia, British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century.

Ellen

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Routs coming slow: (just) past & coming conferences

Kenilworth, 1575 reconstructed

Dear friends and readers,

As you may know, for the last two weekends I have been away: for 4 days in Portland, Oregon, for JASNA AGM, preceded by the Burney conference, whose topics were the Abbey (NA) and gothic respectively.

Kenilworth, popular 1814 print

And for 1 night, 1 day and 1 morning Pittsburgh, EC/ASECS annual meeting whose topic was “recovery.”

Kenilworth, Sporting Fields photo, early 20th century: an angle & vision used in recent film adaptations of 18th/19th century novels

The topic for the 1212 JASNA AGM in NYC, is “sex, power and money.” Izzy made a good suggestion: why not focus in on the depiction of cities in Austen’s work. Her idea is look at “Sex, Power and Money” in the towns Austen depicts. I can see that; as I think about it, I realize that there is a strong animus against the town; it’s where people are hurt, are betrayed, it’s dangerous; it’s ugly (in Portsmouth), cut off from the natural world and its rhythms.

Another possibility (but not probable) is a paper on Burney’s journals for the Burney conference in 1210 (piggy-backed onto the JASNA).

Having chaired two panels successfully, I’m also thinking of proposing for the next EC/ASECS whose topic will be “liberty” (held in Penn State) a panel on 20th and 21st century novels set sometime in the long 18th and 19th century novel. Of course I want to write a paper on Winston Graham’s Poldark novels. My problem here is I have got to get up a respectable line of argument. Alas, most historical novels are not respected (this is most unlike the 19th century) and seen as romance. So I am trying to gather secondary materials (essays and books) on historical novels in the 20th and 21st century as well as Graham to give me ideas beyond the super-abstractions of post-modern thinking. Christine Clark-Evans, organizer for the coming EC was enthusiastic and open to all sorts of approaches so I’m hopeful I’ll come up with something for real.

She also suggested I send in a second panel call, saying I need not chair that one too. So I’m thinking I could propose applying Isiah Berlin’s conceptions of “positive” and “negative and positive liberty” to 18th century novels and memoirs. I define these (after Berlin) this way: Negative liberty is what you can do after you have counted in all the constraints society and your own needs put on you. Positive liberty is knowing who you are apart from all this from within and seeking to enact it; then when you agree to do what someone else wants in order to get what you want, it can be seen as a freely taken form of acting, not servitude or enslavement. Then one would see how these sub-genres and concepts act out in recent fiction. Is it different for 19th century fiction in the way filming an 18th century book or matter produces a probing of modern familial and sexual pathologies and 19th century social and economic and class issues.

Kenilworth, 1850 photo

I admit developing a new set of routs is a challenge. I am teaching; I have still this (very enjoyable) book on Austen films to write. This project now includes reading about time-travelling, an essential dream that is part of the longing to return to the Austen world and also fuels the films.

I’d like to add a project on Graham and historical novels set in the18th and 19th century novels/memoirs, and read solid (informed, thoughtful &c&C) articles & books (if there are any) about historical fiction in the 20th and 21st century. I’ve read a few on historical fiction in the 19th so this will help, but the subject is not the same at all as attitudes have undergone a sea change. This would be towards the EC/ASECS panel I mentioned above but I’d be doing it for myself. I see that it was his novel, Marnie, upon which Hitchcock’s once famous (if commercially failed) movie was made; and have gotten a superb film study by Tony Lee Moral on the film. I’d learn a lot about film from reading the novel, seeing the film, and reading this book. This would ‘feed’ into my JA movie project.

For further off projects/absorbing work, I met and talked with Gillian Dow (whose paper on Genlis’s Countess of C******** was an argument just like mine: that this gothic is a central source for NA). She told me about a coming 1213 conference at Chawton library which will celebrate the 10 years of this place devoted to women writers of the 18th century. She liked my ideas for a Charlotte Smith paper.

I will really watch out for 1213 Chawton one, and budget that year accordingly. Jim even said, why don’t we try for Cornwall that summer, one week in Hampshire and one in Cornwall following the imagined worlds of Poldark and DuMaurier too (I’m a lover of DuMaurier’s historical gothic novels too).

Not to omit plus read for fun and to join in with other on my listservs.

It feels too much and I might not be able to do it all. I’ll try for I don’t want to give anything up any more: “one cannot have too many holds on happiness” says Henry Tilney. Maybe I ought also to make my motto one of Trollope’s favorite aphorisms (from Macbeth): The labour we delight in physics pain.

Ellen

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

Elizabeth Gaskell (1865 watercolor)

Elizabeth Spencer (1921-)

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

and Return to Cranford)

The community of women from the second

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

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

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“Half a Life Time Ago”

Whistler, “Reading by Lamplight” (1858)

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

To the story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Lois the Witch”

Emigration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Lizzie Leigh”

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

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

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

For Light in the Piazza, see comment.

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

Ellen

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