Downton Abbey: Season 3 begins: an uneasy atmosphere

Sybil (Deborah Findley Brown) and Tom Bransom (Tom Leech) arrive

Dear friends and readers,

By way of saying I’m back from the Boston MLA I thought I’d blog briefly on the re-introduction of the serial costume drama, Downton Abbey. I watched it last night and found while there’s a change in atmosphere, basically to reflect the interjection of new presences at the Abbey and changes in people’s status, which creates agonies of embarrassment: Miss Obrien (Siobhan Finneran) has a nephew, Alfred Nugent (Matt Milne) who she maneuvers into becoming a new butler; Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) wants to live along with Lady Mary and rid himself of his valet, (Joseph) Moseley (Kevin Doyle) who would then be out of a job, if Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton), Matthew’s mother did not keep him on. There is much and intense distress when the cause of change is loss of money as we learn that Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) has lost much of his wife’s money in a risky railway investment); and high quarreling between Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) over Matthew Crawley’s (Dan Stevens) coming accession of wealth: Matthew is again by chance heir to a fortune he does want, but Lady Mary does as her understanding of her life’s worth is bound up with status, dress, ritual all of which require funds to keep up her and her family’s status. The scenes parallel and contrast to one another:

Cora comforts her husband as their bond is deep

Lady Mary bitterly accuses Matthew of not being on the “family’s side” — he’s not

Another arrival is Cora’s (Elizabeth McGovern) American mother-in-law, Martha Levinson who wants to know why her late husband’s money is now Mr Crawley’s (Shirley Maclaine looking so old, her face a mass of wrinkles and too heavily made up); she in as more of the same. It’s a remark that could be found in Pride and Prejudice as Lord Grantham’s marrying Cora is a take-off from the Trollope’s Pallisers, two works much in evidence in Season One.

The series had the same strengths: again depth of feeling, gravity of approach (respectful of each of the characters), exquisite attention to historical detail, fine acting, and above all, the serial nature — all the soap opera characteristics — of the experience itself. The above still tells it all: if we had not experienced two years of Sybil’s life and the very painful courtship and marriage to the Grantham Irish chauffeur, the vulnerable poignant feeling of Sybil and the exacerbated hurt pride of Tom would not make any sense. The gap in a year matching a gap in our life’s experience deepens the analogous effect of time passing.

When Tom comes downstairs bravely to say hello (“I wouldn’t want you to think I’d got too big for my boots”), Mrs Hughes says with genuine warmth: “That’s nice”

Phyllis Logan as Mrs Hughes, like all the older women, is made up to look considerably older than we saw her last: she plays the part of someone who eases the uneasiness (we recall how reluctantly she helped Ethel Parks, the unwed mother of the previous season)

The series also shows Fellows’s peculiar aptitude for finding just the right typical sociological behavior to make its themes manifest. For example, this part includes the exposure of a cruel trick by the upper class young man who had expected he might marry Sybil. He puts a drug of some sort into Tom Bransom’s drink, causing Tom to lose his inhibitions, over-react and literally become sick (near vomiting). This sort of thing did happen in upper class households and is regularly found in 18th century novels presented as a joke (in Smollett), and is still used to ridicule some socially unacceptable people in Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Fellows is too knowing a writer not to know this and when he has Edith’s lover, Sir Anthony Strallan (Robert Bathurst) a much older and (too) emasculated man, Fellows scores points in ethics. Many of the people at the table do not respect Strallan sufficiently because he’s not macho, and yet it is he who exposes the lout (for that’s what this guy really is). Breaks the taboo or code for allowing cruelty. This allows the family to understand this is not Tom’s behavior and allows Matthew immediately to condemn the man, and later ask Tom to be his best man, Sybil to lead Tom from the table, and prompts the man’s father to apologize. It can be seen as part of this changing world caught in the often uneasy atmosphere of the hour.

Sir Anthony and Edith managing to talk to one another, smile, with a little help from the decent Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton)

Against this (only slightly) while Fellows again presents Edith (Laura Carmichael) very sympathetically (deleted scenes in the first season showed her her father’s favorite) , he feels it necessary to have her mother apologize for her to Lady Mary because Edith is unconsciously tactless at some point. This kind of sop to the audience prejudiced against the earnest girl (the reading girl as we saw in WW1 segments) detracts from this portrait of this emerging pair of not-absolutely-conventional lovers.

And the same flaws: the political vision is ultimately profoundly reactionary. Just one of many egregious instances in this part: an absurd adherence to hierarchy as actually a good, e.g., the Abbey employs people we are told, undercut (to make it palatable) by Miss O’Brien’s retort to someone asserting he’s essential, “Yes, we’re all essential until we get sacked.”

And we have the unlikely melodrama:

John (Brendon Coyle) and Anna Smith Bates (Joanne Froggart)

Coyle’s steady congenial yet hard-threatened face helps us accept all the improbability.

In other words, the art, assumptions, characters are those I’ve analyzed before in blogs on individual parts of the first season (the luminous forest, crowded canvas) and one on its passionate dream quality and another its storytelling art. I’ve a stash of postings on the second season which if I ever get up the ambition I can put onto my website. They’re in the archives of Trollope19thCStudies and Women Writers through the Ages as Edwardian drama and a kind of art rightly associated with women (nothing to be ashamed of).

One of the finest sessions I went to at the MLA was on film TV and seriality and featured a paper on Trollope’s Barchester Towers and connected Trollope’s art in his cyclical novels to the TV mini-series, Northern Exposure. Another was on Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective, which I now mean to rent from Netflix. I shall blog separately on this session and its papers soon.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Thoughts on men and women in cyberspace: getting at the experience itself apart from physical local space (2)

‘They are surely happy,’ said the prince, ‘who have all these conveniencies, of which I envy none so much as the facility with which separated friends interchange their thoughts.’ —Samuel Johnson, Rasselas

… still, saved as we all are by some comfortable feeling of superiority from wishing for the possibility of exchange, she would not have given up her more elegant and cultivated mind for all their enjoyments — Jane Austen of Anne Elliot, Persuasion

What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently: “you say that we go round the sun. if we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”—— Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

Emma Thompson as Carrington in the 1995 film of that name, Jonathan Pryce as Lytton Strachey, scripted & directed by Christopher Hampton, adapted from Michael Holroyd’s biography — today she’d be on the Net, and a laptop might be in front of him too

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve had several thoughtful responses and have been moved to write again taking on a new aspect of the topic, or at any rate, a different perspective and emphasis.

I wrote my paper in 2006 and would like to think there has been progress in the area of understanding cyberspace experience itself as well as how cyberspace impacts on physical local (so to speak) space and vice versa. That people continue to try to understand the first, the interaction between physical/local space and what happens in cyberspace is so; this morning I saw a Call for Papers whose subtitle is “The Digital Turn” and its interest is how cyberspace is affecting book history studies; what they are after is how power relationships are changing and thus what’s written about. They are not concerned with cyberspace experience in and of itself. People who are those who would not be interacting with others the way they do if not for cyberspace and are listened to (say bloggers who are political but not hired by conventional newspapers or political organizations) are partly to blame for this, for that’s how they justify their presence on the Net. They are there for influence and social connection. To be sure, the latter is a strong part of why all people are on the Net, but it does not go anywhere near far enough in understanding what happens here.

And that’s hard. It’s one thing to say that content is only part of what’s happening and maybe not the most important, especially surface content; it’s another to try to articulate what are the equivalents to physical of what’s happening that influence content and make people behave on the Net the way they do. It’s easy to describe this through connection. Women learn early on to fear violence and humiliation; ergo, they are afraid, and rightly for them safety is the central issue. For men not so much; my experience here is men say (in off-list communications is where you learn this sort of thing) they don’t trust the other person posting; they can know too little for sure about them unless they’ve met them face-to-face or have some certain history about them and know this is their identity. This trust connects to holding onto a job and promotion and pride (saving face) — issues central to manliness, respect as a man as understood by our society.

And it’s not hard to take what is known about women’s psychology growing up — the real importance of intimate friendship as a support mechanism — and try to see how this works. The woman one commenter mentioned who pretended to be a male is escaping these continual influences or pretends she is. This woman was apparently (someone known to all) a tenured professor. I suggest therefore she is also successful because she is credentialed high. Katha Pollit has that and it makes a big difference in how people react to her postings on the Net.

Two responses were about false identities on the Net. One friend I know revels in games where he says that in fact these false identities are aspects of ourselves that we get to be, or act out (using the common life is a stage metaphor) there where we can be them nowhere else. Another inveighed against it when the identity was presented as real on a list-serv or blog. Said she was “very offended,” a phrase I note that is not much in use in physical local space but is a common way of beginning a debate or quarrel with someone on the Net. It’s put in polite terms but what it means was “you piss me off” or “how dare you,” a stance people don’t dare face-to-face unless they are willing to take the argument very far (into something physical or vengeful).

I do dislike intensely the false identities on the Net but know from the get-go, in its origin, people immediately began to take advantage of that, and a lot of people appear to love it. Those who play games don’t seem to care in the least that what they are doing will have nothing to do with what happens in real space. At least they hope so. (Sometimes they are caught up and find they are badly hurt in the real world because they have believed a false identity). I find it to be cheating, a fundamental lying but that’s because I want experience on the Net to count, though it need not in regular physical space to count.

The reality is there are a whole group of peculiar circumstances on the Net not replicated in regular physical space which are at work (how is it she speaks to me? knows something, though not much, of me? she does), elements which keep some people from posting (all these unknown make them nervous) and which encourage others to post (I’m more comfortable and freer when I am not looking at someone’s face, can speak so much more freely). The largest is it’s a writing space; you have to have a writing self, love writing and not be bothered with revealing this self which is a more private self than the social one.

In my paper the best book was Technology and Women’s Voices: Keeping in Touch (ed. Chris Kramarae) and after that Women@Internet (ed. Wendy Harcourt) because they really genuinely looked at women — for example, that we are so much less technically educated, so much more uncomfortable with technology — but both and (from the title you see this) Communities in Cyberspace essays (ed Marc C. Smith and Peter Kollock) include one on women tenants empowering themselves to fight a local landlord) (are often most on about how cyberspace and regular physical space interact. A slew of individual essays in periodicals were very good too but I no longer remember which was most helpful. For me whose identity is partly that of an academic these were Jill Arnold and Hugh Miller, “Same Old Gender Plot? Women Academics’ Identities on the Web,” paper presented at Cultural Diversities in/and Cyberspace Conference, University of Maryland, 2000; Jill Arnold and Hugh Miller, “Academic masters, mistresses and apprentices: gender and power in the real world of the web,” Mots Pluriels, 19 (October 2001).

My husband Jim taught Information Technology: he’d have 1 or 2 women to 11or 12 men every time. Conferences are 90% male and the women there are often in personnel. The kind of talk men indulge in as social grease is highly sexist and makes women uncomfortable. Men don’t want these women there so they can carry on that way.

I concluded that the internet was an equivalent of the railway in the 19th century in changing our world because I took on that aspect too. People using the railway did not get to say where it would stop or how be organized. That’s what women are today still.

But today I want to begin to dwell on another aspect, one as or more crucial. You can see it’s ignored because most photos on the Net are of people apart from their home environment, on a laptop, shown in business places, out on the street (buying hotdogs as a joke), and mostly with other people around, people in rows with laptops. That’s not accurate. Yes the cell phone has become a little computer in our hands, but that’s someone phoning someone else, acting pragmatically most of the time, killing time too, distracting themselves as with crossword puzzle. It’s not computer cyberspace experience that leads to blogs, websites, web-rings, list-servs.

Much of that time on the Net is spent at home, alone outside (it can be a common room, a library, a coffee place where you can sit for hours), ensconced in an individualized environment.

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

People’s computers and laptops are at home, an essential part of the whole environment, but just one part

It needs someone or a group like that of Freud and his early disciples to really delve this new area of life, new way of communication. A great deal of what people write is about how a newspapers and communities in regular conventionally organized physical space are impacted by someone who has the courage to break social and political codes, manners, and tell real truths or falsehoods on the Net. It’s not just a matter of finding analogies for family life. Maybe it seems impossible to do but in the 1880s it would have seemed crazy to come up with Freud’s theories and nowadays it’s all commonplace and some of it essential to understand what happens to us. My intuition tells me we have to begin with a new experience of solitude (with others there and not there), how this is recuperative. Then how people feel when they are alone in the pre-cyberspace way, and how much this empowers some when they know they are alone (and hence as women in the immediate sense safe) and how these feelings are transformed into something new. What kind of person does it empower? why? what has been their background to make them feel so? we have to get over dismissing the very real urge of people to be asocial at crucial moments of their lives.

We need to think about how much we can reach on the Net and why it is so vital to keep it un-exclusive. How much information and insight one can have in a day by reading on the Net it would not just take years of books to have, but would not be in books. What are the conventions of postings, list-servs, blogs, webrings that make them so different from what is put into still unchangeable print.

We need to think about why face-book where people do identify themselves and form small but distant groups is so enjoyable. Not scold people and despise them as delusional. They are not. We need to understand the dysfunctional nature of a lot of physical local life and how hollow it can be, impossible to find any satisfaction in. What happens at twitter? Why is this place important to the people doing it, not the important people outside the Net quoting and writing about it.

We need to be frank and examine the hurts people experience on the Net. What are the specific circumstances each time? how did the relations unravel when they would not have in physical local space apart from not being face-to-face. What was allowed and what came out? What were the results? If we cannot tell them aloud to others on the Net individually, think individually and then generalize.

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

Finally, two people, one the same as the above, brought up the issue of gender lying. Both women. I wonder if men would bring this up. It’s a separate issue. She said to watch a woman, say Sally, pretend successfully to be a man, discuss football, sex as a man, be aggressive and be respected (and perhaps help Sally’s life outside the Net) made her want to be a man intensely. It is possibly true that a woman can and experience power because on the Net she can have an imaginative experience of being a man, and in cyberspace that’s as good as physical experience. There is such a thing as internet sex. For my part, I would never want to be a man, never have. I don’t know how usual or unusual that is for someone who is a feminist. I don’t care that being a woman gives me much less power in most areas because my experience is this particular lack is not much worse than my class (which I saw robbed me from the time I could understand my environment), who I was born to, how little money or connections I had in growing up or after.

It’s not just the old Austen saying (Anne Elliot) that we like ourselves best after all and do not want to trade (see epigraphs at the top of the blog). It’s that I know myself fundamentally as a woman that’s what I want to be. I do think of myself first as much a woman as a person. Frankly (Rhett Butler stuff) I’m relieved that I never have had anyone tell me I had to support a family, had to have a certain kind of job to do so. I’m glad to have options women are given like staying home if I have another source of income beyond marketplace work remuneration. I’m glad to be free by option of having to do well in social interaction to rise to power. It’s not expected of women and they can survive without it and (if they have brains) even now when masculine values have taken over women’s worlds, can still ignore or cast it aside. I dislike and reject some of the disadvantages. I felt under no obligation whatsoever to have children. But then I basically regard life as in itself meaningless and all these things are unreal and one can if lucky pick and choose — and can try insofar as each of us can (what are our genes, where born, to whom, what gender, race, class). Like Woolf, I see that women don’t have identities in the same way at all as men; our gender cuts across all these and cuts us off from much power that comes with this or that identity.

But then gentle reader I do prefer women’s books to men’s, women’s films, women’s poetry.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

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

Read Full Post »

Capital Fringe & Castleton (the 1%): Mitzi’s Abortion, Children in a Mist, Sade’s company; Arlen/Berlin depression cheer

Promotional image for Mitzi’s Abortion

Dear friends and readers,

I was saving up a few events from Capitol Fringe to make a third omnibus blog treating of four shows (See Midsummer … In Full Swing and Midsummer … Pinky Swear … Hamlet), but find that I now insensibly have somehow gone to five, never wrote about the final gala afternoon at Castleton and have another evening coming up, this time Alice in Wonderland “as conceived by the Manhattan Project under the direction of Andre Gregory.” Jim bought us what’s called bulk tickets (you get a discount this way) and we added on another, so when the 3 weekends are over, we will have seen 14! Thus I had better hurry up and write reviews thus far.

I’ve discovered the question people ask genially, concisely, is, Which are your two best? Of the five we’ve seen since I last wrote, we’ve seen a small dramatic masterpiece, a play done with hardly any props or costumes, just the actors acting their hearts and bodies out: Elizabeth Heffron’s Mitzi’s Abortion. It’s this play that prompts me to write this blog as I hope it will eventually gain a place in the American repertoire. If I include the previous 5 Capitol Fringe events, the second finest original work I’ve seen was Andrew Simpson’s Outcasts of Poker Flat. The finest adaptation of a classic, Hannah Todd’s Hamlet. A great cabaret group (without trying to compare to others): Pinky Swear.

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

The Young couple

Mitzi’s Abortion takes the over-wrought attitude towards abortion that has taken over the public media: the young woman who finds herself pregnant, Mitzi (brilliantly acted by Natalie Cutcher) begins by quietly doubting whether she wants to go through with this pregnancy, as it is truly inconvenient in every way: the father, Chuck (also done expertly by Christian Campbell, who alternates as an expert at a podium lecturing to us on supposed phases women go through when they are pregnant) is about to be deployed to an American war abroad somewhere; they have little money, are not married, don’t live together, the list goes on. By the end of the play, when she’s had a late term abortion (which is presented as if it’s done on a 16th century birthing stool when it’s not) of a fetus which developed in a deformed manner so it is an anancephalic non-viable entity – that is, the baby if it could survive, would be without a brain; but of course it could not as it lacks a vital organ to run a human body, when she’s had a late term abortion, I say, she saves what we are told are its bones, has these cremated and is determined to hold a funeral. She sits over this box weeping hysterically.

I half-think or would like to think that we are not simply to identify with what this girl has gone through, now feels and thinks and has become. It’s obvious she’ll never get pregnant again. She breaks up with the father — on very good grounds. In contrast, when told she is pregnant, he begins with absolute joy at this proof of his masculine prowess, a sign of just how powerful his penis is and how effective his sperm, with no doubt “they” should go through this pregnancy. (I’ve seen this use of the third person plural pronoun before — my view is the pragmatic real one: he’s not pregnant, she is.) He moves to horror at the news of what these technological tests have to say, to saying how he doesn’t blame her at all and she’ll do better next time, and maybe she needed to take better care, to demanding she carry this dead entity to term. There are other contrasting voices. Towards the end Mitzi’s father (John Kevin Boggs) is overheard telling older male friends how years ago these were women’s issues, men didn’t get involved, and he just overheard his mother going off for her “fix” (abortion) and coming back and nothing was said. She went for two such fixes, didn’t die and the family was spared all this. It’s implied that she did suffer but was also freed of nature’s cruelties and injustices. Mitzi’s mother (Elizabeth Richards Bailey) is humoring her daughter at the funeral; “whatever” you want, I’ll do to help you through this — as she did the abortion, bringing magazines, sitting with or near her daughter the whole time, no matter what berating talk the daughter aimed at her.

But I half-think not since the play dwells so insistently on this idea there’s a baby inside this girl and she begins to take on an attitude that its fate is more important than hers and her grief is treated with such dignity and serious gravity. As I watched her with that little box, I remembered (as perhaps some other women in the audience did if they have had such experiences and miscarriages are very common), my miscarriage which turned into an abortion to save my life (I was bleeding to death in a small Kendal hospital), and how I asked what caused the miscarriage and what had been done with the fetus. I was told by a British nurse that often these miscarriages are “nature’s way” of “washing away” something that was not developing right and not to worry about the fetus; it had been disssolved in the blood and was gone. I remember feeling sad but also relieved. When I was under the terrific pain of the miscarriage, I had one thought: get rid of this pain, make it stop, and they did or had.

The play included a scene with an insurance agent (Louise Schlegel) who tells the doctor the insurance people will not pay for a termination as that is not allowed. No abortions. But they will pay for care of the anancephalic baby as it lies dying, which it must. She says she hates these rules, but there they are. She suggests to Mitzi that had she not been attached to a machine to test the fetus, Mitzi would not have known anything was drastically wrong (except she had stopped gaining weight as she should have been), had the nearly stillborn baby and then it would have died. So go ahead and do that as the cheapest easiest thing.

Easiest? walk around for 3 months with a dying or dead thing in you; just then it was continually kicking as a frog would.

Mitzi’s mother goes to her church (improbable place to go, but for her to defend her daughter against this group’s prejudices was part of the point) to beg for $10,000 to cover the termination. The doctor finds a way around the rule by redefining what he’s doing (this may have been improbable) and they go through with this termination.

The play has much doubling. Louise Schlegel also plays a 16th century midwife who just turns up on the stage — a dream figure. Her arms are covered with blood scars. It seems she was burned at the stake as a witch. She did in her time try to help women abort children too. Barbara Ehrenreich has written a historical pamphlet, persuasive, arguing that huge numbers of the witch trials were ordeals inflicted on women who worked as health professionals in effect, sometimes midwives. They were blamed and by the 17th century a ferocious attempt was made to stifle them and replace them with men and institutional control of women.

John Kevin Boggs also plays Aquinas who gives us the church’s positions over the ages, contradictory. His soliloquys were filled with ironies and very funny.

What we are shown is a deeply morbid self-destructive culture. Everyone who is not a professional dresses in rather poor clothes. Entertainment is Esperanto meetings, going to fast good joints; they shop in supermarkets whose array of food choices (and magazines) is depressingly meager. Their choices are limited by their range of understanding. Chuck argues that Mitzi has no right to try to spare herself since he cannot spare himself in whatever country he is deployed in. Killing or being killed is clearly not what he would have chosen as his life’s work to have a salary and place.

I fear many leaving that theater would simply have identified with Mitzi and not realized that she was driven to bring this on herself by all the cultural artefacts, economic and social pressures, deluded norms that shape her every thought. Heffron’s play is really also a portrait of contemporary US life.

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

Sean Pflueger as the father with his son

Not the worse done, but the worst show I’ve seen thus far was the horror opera Jim and I saw Saturday afternoon, Sean Ffleuger’s Children in the Mist, an adaptation of a short story by the best-selling gothic-horror writer, Stephen King . We were told it was an abridgement even though it took 2 hours and was at times tedious and repetitive. Jim said the music was “uninteresting,” and when I reminded him that to me Philip Glass’s music seems endlessly repetitive, he said it wasn’t, but subtly nuanced and continually stimulating. I know Pflueger’s music felt dull and didn’t arouse me to nervousness and distress the way Glass can. It reminded me of other contemporary American operas we’ve seen in that the centers were were not individual soliloquies, but rather everyone singing apparently meditatively, a huge folk ensemble, only it did go on making me restless (while I feel I could never tire of listening to Copeland’s music). The language was demotic, very short kinds of sentences one might hear in a supermarket or drug store. The only general statements were about God and how one must live for one’s children.

It was not the music or even lack of intelligent utterance that made the opera pernicious. Rather it was the story and characters and meaning. If (as I think she meant to), Elizabeth Heffron exposed the wretchedness and delusions fostered by our cryingly (egregiously) unjust social and economic arrangements, rules, reinforced by the way we use our machines, this one made that sickness into reality that we as people cannot escape, one engineered against us by mysterious forces we can call God. It was a sick experience. I turned to ask Jim what he thought. He came out with the word “sick” first.

We probably should have left, but I was curious to see if the play had anything intelligent or redeeming about it. I had read with my students this term 3 chapters of Bob Dixon’s Catching Them Young. One of these is an analysis of popular fantasy and supernatural stories given to children: he shows these are 20th century versions of the worst aspects of religious allegories, starting with Pilgrim’s Progress. Evil is a mysterious force; people are bad, sinful and deserve to be punished; the way they can atone for what they are is passivity and obedience to their authorities, especially the Godhead. Then when they die, they are rewarded partly by escaping a violent hell. He only included authors like C. S. Lewis, Tolkien (yes), Ursula Le Guin, Madeline L’Engel and the syndicate creations like Star Trek, so I never thought about books for adults. Now I know something of why Stephen King appeals.

I could say that poor Mitzi and her family would certainly have found copies of Stephen King at their local Safeway. As Dixon says, how can such a book teach you anything helpful in getting through life with some fulfillment? There was no sense in this opera anywhere that the explanation for the evil mist enveloping the town and killing people as if they were being painfully electrocuted could be anything but God. Half the people stuck in a supermarket cling to a woman who rants over her Bible, but the other half have no argument against this half when they refuse to succumb to hysterical praying. They just look irritated and try to flee the religious fanatics; this is the best Pflueger can come up with.

The opera’s climax includes the most violent and stubborn of the religious fanatics trying to kill those seeking to flee the situation. Many die, four escape. The four get into a station wagon that is soon out of gas, so our chief hero turns around and shots them dead with a gun. (Of course everyone has guns.) He is not left standing, oh no, a military soldier suddenly runs in and tells him, all is under control and he can return to his apartment now. We are to take this as a kind of relief. All clear go the sirens.

It put me in mind of the way Muslims pray five times a day. The stoges who work for and in the American theocracy were before me. The composer had the chief role in the cast. I noticed a few people left at intermission and the applause was not strong. However, in the audience near me were some “big” people in the festival who put on plays and act in them and they appeared very proud. The auditorium was pretty full.

Best and worst? One could say Pflueger is contemporary. Two days before we saw Children of the Mist, there had been this huge circus at an Aurora cinema where thousands gathered at midnight, taking their small children, to see another supernatural fantasy about good and evil with lots of killing, only to be interrupted by someone with real powerful weaponry (intended for wars) who massacred as many people near him as he could. Children in the Mist is the weak pablum sold to the minds of the people who go to such movies, those of them who do read.

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

What else have we gone to at the Fringe? In the Company of de Sade, written and directed by Timothy R. King. This was actually very preachy — as is Sade. The cliched story of a group of people trying to put on a play was the core of the plot-design, and the players came out individually to tell us their sad histories of unemployment, despair, or high dreams of an acting career. There was especially at the opening obligatory transgressive sex not so much enacted but suggested symbolically. The basic text was Sade’s Philosophy of the Boudoir, and what we really saw was people bickering with one another over their discomfort with the roles they were expected to play, the conditions of employment and some of their own dreams of self-esteem, who they are.

The play is interrupted by a “Christian” woman with a gun (she had only this one pathetic gun and yet it was formidable as it could kill or wound others quickly) who loathes “free sex” and our atheistic society. Bit of black humor here. She rants and raves and finally the actors jump her and she is killed by accident. But at least silenced. Everyone is discouraged and the rehearsal ends for the evening, leaving on stage only one actor who appears to have read Sade, be sympathetic with his libertarian and anarchist ideals and the actress who has befriended him. They are left alone and lonely by this body. Curtain falls.

Had the actors not been directed to try to entertain us by becoming so loudly argumentative or amuse us by self-denigrating jokes about sexuality in general or their own, it would not have been bad. I suppose in the context of the two plays I’ve gone over in this blog the characters on the stage were at least not self-destructive, tried to keep calm and through Sade’s story and words presented complicated political ideas and the quirks of human nature driven by need, vulnerability, self-delusion. I think the play could use more work.

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

Maazel owns a huge swathe of land in Rappahannock

Two musical shows and one — what shall I call it — dud. I enjoyed both musical events. Jim and I discovered that when we went this past Sunday to what looked like a long program of “bleeding hunks” (Jim’s terms for this), famous arias, scenes, moments from famous operas, we had stumbled on (or least I had for I didn’t realize this is what we were going to) the graduation recital of the whole summer school. Every single young adult aspiring singer and all the young adult musicians were there, and, under the direction of their many teachers, in the lovely festival theater Loren Mazeel’s money built, they put on a smashing show.

Number after number of some of the most moving, witty, subversive, and traditional single arias, duets, trios, several singer-scenes, and two powerful monologues took about 3 hours of performing time. They began small with lighter pieces (“Cinque … dieci” from Le Nozze di Figaro), the transition was one of Jim’s favorites, Rossini’s Duetto buffo di due gatti, two young women singing miaow and hissing and making cat yowl sounds to invigorating music, and we ended with final scenes from Don Giovanni (Jim predicted the powerful baritone young man singing Leporello would indeed have a career as his voice has unique feel and range, was memorable), Eugene Onegin, Der Rosencavalier. I realized it was a graduate recital (like Isabel had only she was the only one to sing for two hours) when I realized most of the audience were parents and relatives and the young people were going home this afternoon or tomorrow.

I have increasingly ambivalent feelings about Castleton. In-between the acts, we walked onto his terrace and looked out at his 600 acres. Nearby the most picturesque of gardens, a place to boat, a fountain, all sorts of employees everywhere. We are invited to come partake of this man who is indeed representative of the 1%. He is filthy rich. He does good things with his money but because he and others have so much, the people of Mitzi’s Abortion and Children in the Mist have so little. The tickets are not cheap to Castleton and I often have the feeling of invading a particular’s man’s house. Each year the arrangements for refreshments and snacks are different; not everything is announced to everyone (games of exclusion and inclusion played). He decrees what he wants to share and what he doesn’t. Jim mentioned that Mazeel was wrong not to have subtitles or surtitles for the gala. He has the system in place. He has more money coming out of his ears than he knows what to do with. He has rebuilt the theater in the tent three times. Was it that he or his employees just couldn’t be bothered? It would have been a lot more enjoyable to me had I known what the words for in each scene. I was not there as a “proud” family member.

I rejoice for the strong heathly excellently fed dog I saw trotting along side Mrs Maazel (well fed herself, much much younger than her husband, an ex-actress) but the rest of us are called upon to take positions just to eat and have shelter whose central purpose is to protect this place, this man’s wealthy, it’s asked that we give up our lives doing bad, corrupt or just foolish things to keep this establishment going.

Pam Ward singing Somewhere over the Rainbow

Izzy came with us to this summer’s contribution by Carla Huber’s In-series folks: an evening of song by Arlen and Berlin. Jim didn’t chose the events we went to because they were in keeping with one another and would enable me to write a coherent blog, but it does turn out this way. Whoever chose the songs stuck with depression era cheer. While at first it was indeed spirit-uplifting to listen to songs like “Let’s have another cup of coffee” (another piece of pie), to be asked to smile, smile, smile did become enervating. There was not enough plangency and when the evening ended with the singers holding up signs saying that they still believed in the American dream, to a chorus of “God Bless America” this was too much.

Tellingly, it was tamely done. We needed more “The Man that Got Away” and less “I love a parade.” Fine poignant moments were the irresistible (nostalgic) “Over the rainbow” and “Last night when we were young.

Well, what was the dud? If gentle reader, you are still reading and remember my references? the one-woman show we saw last night on a (foolish) impulse it turns out: Monique Holt called her far more than one hour performance Men don’t Listen to Naked Women. She did sign that line but it had no thematic shaping. We found ourselves in a show meant for deaf people; Holt signed everything and a man spoke the language for the sign-impaired. It seemed to me she was taking advantage of the enjoyment deaf people seemed to be having of a performance done in sheer signs. She didn’t need to have a real program (so to speak). It was slapstick, with occasionally superficially innuendoes; she made comedy out of people who smell. I noticed the couple of times she even came near something controversial (like the banks being bailed out to the tune of billions and not yielding an inch to stop foreclosures), she punted; she hesitated and seemed to sign how she wasn’t really angry at what had happened. It was a contentless hour. Did she think her audience doesn’t have any information?

My two worst (another version of this question people ask one another under the Baldachinno tent), if I take the previous 5 we went to into account, was this Men Don’t and Madame (the lame musical about Helena Rubenstein at least had a reasonable story, was trying to show something of the woman’s life and character). Men don’t show cost us more than usual as we didn’t buy it as part of our bulk.

What happened was we did miscalculate time intervals. After Mitzi’s Abortion we had a lovely yummy meal in a Chinese restaurant on Chinese restaurant row, which is near the center of the Fringe where the ticket booth and the baldacchino tent are, and the two shows we had bought for. We had egg rolls, a single eggplant claypot we shared, beer for him and white Riesling wine for me. But there were more than two hours in-between and we thought we might get bored sitting in the tent and I can’t walk that much and it was not that cool anyway. Turned out we would have done better to sit said tent which was at the time right next to a repeat performance of Pinky Swear. We could have heard it clearly and drunk more Prosecco together.

Next time we’ll know better and stick with our planned choices. Four more to go.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

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

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

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

Nightmare parody as dreamt, seen, experienced by Alfredo

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

Dessay thrust above the horde, arms thrusting champagne bottles outward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

Read Full Post »

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

Read Full Post »

Books in art and science: Sharp (3): community identities through books (Australia, South Africa, in libraries); book illustration (Phiz & Millais)

Children’s reading club, circa 1910, Children’s Museum, NY or NJ

Dear friends and readers,

A third instalment of my experience of the Sharp conference last weekend. What unites these sessions is the belief that people form social identities through reading books and magazines and create social networks and capital (Bourdieu’s term) by setting up and controlling what happens in institutions needed for the study of books. All the paraphernalia and social experience surrounding books are exploited to make favored books sell and norms spread; this includes illustrations. National identities and what language a group speaks, which languages die and which carry on partly depend on and are shaped by what texts are published and distributed.

Perhaps individual minds and hearts were not so much left out, as people were seen sheerly in their social roles interacting with one another with books. Of course individual experience with books occurs when someone is alone in a room or with his or her book and matters as intensely and maybe more than all this identity formation, marketplace behavior and accounts of social external interaction of a less intimate nature. However, it’s not something that’s studied generally nor quantifiable and not the focus of book history.

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

Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney

Saturday mid-morning I went to a 2nd session on “Transnational Transactions,” this one on forming literatures and marketplaces. In “The Two-Sided Triangle: Australian Books and American Publishers” David Carter described the attempts of Australian publishers and authors to go beyond a paradigm set up early for selling books: in publishing London was a center which dominated Australia; it’s a story of Australian books published in the US without reference to UK editions. Famous books like Henry Kingsley’s Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn and Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life appeared in both the UK and US, but there were numerous lesser books published in just American editions, e.g., Rolfe Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms, mysteries and thrillers (Fergus Hume’s The Steel Crown. Jessie Couvrer (Tasmania)’s Piper of Piper Hall. Copyright made a great difference in the profits that could be made so we see the twentieth century’s book clubs distribute Henry Handel [Ethel Florence] Richardson; the Nobel Prize made Patrick White’s books more popular in the US than UK. It’s a story of changes from decade to decade: in the 1930s Australians began to write books for an American audience; after 1945 the paperback revolution spread sexy and detective fiction; in the 1980s there was a boom in sales, which was not sustained. Australian science fiction and fantasy sold, but stories rooted in Australian landscape, history, culture did not draw much readership. Nonetheless, in the 21st century Sydney talk directly to London and New York publishers. Nowaday there is much intermixing so it’s not clear if J. M. Coetzee is an Australian or South African published in the US.

Gerald Groenewald’s “‘Through literature a nation becomes great:’ Afrikaner Nationalism and the reception of Afrikaner books in South Africa, circa 1910-40″ was the story of how Die Huisgenout or The Family and House Magazine played a central role in the formation of a separate Afkricaner white identity. Sucessive editors differently attempted to define and model a national Afrikaner life by telling (inventing?) a history of traditions and ideals. Four to five out of 28 pages were reviews of books. There were 3 distinct periods under 3 distinct editorships: 1916-23, the magazine was high brow, serious throughout; then 1923-31, it turned more popular, had fewer shorter book reviews, many photos, covered sports. 1931-45 a trade journalist headed the magazine and added strong nationalism (“the great trek” was celebrated); historical artists presented as heroic, with Africaner texts 2/3s, Dutch texts 10 to 23% and English 10 to 15%. You might say the magazine provided a school for all in the early 20th century. (Afrikans seems to be a dialect of Dutch.)

Frank de Glas told the story of the Prix Formentor (1961-65), named after the hotel its initiator and his favorite writers met at and the Prix International des Editeurs (1961-67) He was showing how small groups of individuals could create respected reputations for specific books, larger national constortiums (something worth thousands of dollars) with translations functioning as consecrations. There had been an upsurge inteh sale of books in the international market in the 1950s, and this advertising move made for author brandnames. Carlos Barral made his own and the careers of his protegees (5 writers’s careers were described) and overcame cultural repressions. Rules that were said to be followed were sometimes broken; all but communists could get their books sold. Dacia Matraini was one of the 5, the only woman and she was “annexed” by feminists.

This was the lunchtime where I bought myself bad coffee and a stale croissant for too much money; drank and ate little, and went back to the Dillon center to look at the beautiful art works by staff in the gallery, browse the books on display, talked to an editor about my book project (“A Place of Refuge,” a study of the Austen films) and then read quietly until the afternoon sessions started.

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

The Boston Athenaeum Library

In the afternoon I went to a session about how books can also be the center of individual identity and small community formation. Katherine Wisser told who were the individuals who belonged to and created social worlds through the development of the Boston Atheneaum Library: 1806 reading room was established; in 1807 named Atheneaum; 1826 established in Pearl Street House; 1829 women officially let in; 1848 established in its present location on Beacon Street. The conscious motives were those of the Enlightenment, civic pride (Boston would vye with Philadelphia and Benjamin Franklin), and to build social capital for themselves. In 1856 the Boston Public Library was opened; 1876 the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Proprietors were members, 70 in 1882, 65 men & 5 women; 3/4s of these people had gone to a Harvard college; their occupations were various, but over 1/4 were scholars, and most were involved with intellectual matters (lawyers.

Ross Harvey showed that while white New Zealanders through they were indoctrinating Maoris with industrial & capitalist (how to save, how to invest) ideas by the publication of a bilingual magazine, the Maori Messenger, Maoris had their own developed forms of industry and capitalism (tribe style), were interested in maritime, export, and agricultural activities. Their products included flax, potatoes, timber. George Grey helped Maoris hold onto their language; David Burns was used as an example of someone came to live in New Zealand and left a diary of his arduous life among the Maori, which was published.

Melanie Kimball’s “‘They wanted to read books by lady authors’”: early 20th century children’s reading clubs at the Cleveland Public library” (from archives from 1908-32) meant to demonstrate that children’s experiences were shaped by the librarians Kimball used American developmental psychology to categorize the different age groups. Children all want a club to be able to belong to a group and are vulnerable to peer pressure; between ages 10 and 20 they are trying out roles, looking at alternative solutions for lifelong goals, exploring their talents and others. It’s true the children’s statements she read showed more piety and conscious aspiration than seems probable in a child and the lists of books read were improving, some snobbish, and class and gender based: Dodge’s Hans Brinker; Alcott’s Under Lilacs; Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy. Archives show children naming their groups, electing officers. In the depression fees and car fares were waved; alas, by the 1950s there were few reading groups there to read, many more had become simply ways to meet and do something else.

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

Phiz (Hablot Browne), Meekness of Mr Pecksniff and his charming daughters, one of the illustrations for Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit

John Everett Millais, “Tom, I am come back,” one of the illustrations for Trollope’s Orley Farm

The 2nd session of the afternoon was the most exciting of the conference for me. I wrote a long chapter in my book on Trollope where I studied the original illustrations to his novels; my work was based on real study in rare book rooms, and my conclusions praised by Mark Turner in the one scholarly review I’ve had. The session was on book illustration in 19th century England and the second talk by Robert Patten, a well-known scholar of book illustration and Dickens (Charles Dickens and His Publishers [1978], George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art [1991, 1992], editor of Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices [1995]), compared an illustration by Phiz for Martin Chuzzlewit to one by Millais for Orley Farm (a set of illustrations and book I know very well). I’ll describe his paper first even though it came second.

Prof Patten argued that the two illustrations showed radically different modes of illustration, with Phiz presenting a theatrical or presentational performance, where each gesture or item is an external symbol of an attitude or idea while Millais draw an inward, subtly complex picture in which the characters turn away from us, and their physical selves are not performing for us. Phiz uses personification, his art is emblematic; we are looking at a boxed stage set. External signs tell about interiority. The message is the hypocrisy of the Pecksniff’s and sincerity of Pinch. Millais’s drawing were engraved on wood by Dalziel, and Prof Patten suggested they capture a deep moment of psychological interaction not readily allegorized at all. In my book I spent a lot of time on the psychologized idyllic style and all he said seemed to me spot on, but for his final interpretation of this specific picture. Prof Patten argued we had gender balance here, for Mr Furnival, the lawyer husband missed his wife when she had left him because she assumed he was having an affair with his client, Lady Mason, so badly, that her power was triumphing the way her skirt fills the space, with her hand at the center. He gave his talk with confidence and panache and it seemed to go over very well

The talk afterward included demurrals. One man seemed to suggest that Phiz was more inward than Prof Patten allowed and Millais more emblematic. Two women suggested that the situation was of a women suppliant before her husband. I agreed with with this and retold the story of how Mrs Furnival had left Mr Furnival after many years of emotional and social neglect, that he had the right to eject her once again, and that although Trollope let us know the husband longed for her, she did not know that. Her hand is uncertain, she is pleading with him to take her back. I then said she also would have to accept marriage on his terms, and accept that since she was literally wrong, Lady Mason would again be the center of Mr Furnival’s hours. Prof Patten then commended my comments, especially when I said both Pinch and Lady Mason are suppliants, but then said but no, this takes place after the trial. So it is gender balance.

Well after I went home, I checked and discovered that this picture occurs well before the trial. The trial is yet to come. Mrs Furnival also had been hurt by far more than Lady Mason’s presence; for years Mr Furnival had traveled alone, left her with a servant and no company, no social life. It may be she was literally wrong to think Lady Mason was her husband’s mistress, but all else she had felt was just and now she had to give up her demands and real personal needs. We may hope he’ll behave better now, but there’s no promise, and in the course of things he may well revert.

George Brettingham Sowerby, illustration to Charles Kingsley’s Glaucus, or The Wonders of the Shore

The first talk was Elizabeth Starr’s carefully thoroughly studied explanation and reading of a complicated publication of science illustrations for Charles Kingsley’s Glaucus. Kingsley presented himself as a well-read amateur who was conducting a tour of the shoreline to which we as readers are invited. There were 5 editions of this text, and what we find are a series of complex interactions between the text and illustrations, the writer and his illustrators. In particular George Brettingham Sowerby’s images function to fill the gaps in content and imagination in Kingsley’s book, and turns it into a Ruskinian experience. This book was one of the influential popular science books of the era.

Prof Starr took the audience through several comparisons of text and picture, reading aloud the scientific text with its information and then showing how the plate illustrated and went beyond the text. Competition between the men may have formed part of what happened for Sowerby’s notes to his illustrations are in an appendix. Kingsley also used Philip Henry Gosse’s nature and marine biology texts, but if we look we see that Sowerby’s illustrations are influencing Kingsley’s descriptions.

This made great sense to me. Of Millais’s illustrations to Orley Farm, especially one of Lady Mason during her agon before she hires a lawyer to fight the accusation of forgery and try to hold onto her son’s property, Trollope wrote:

In an early part of this story I have endeavoured to describe how this woman sat alone, with deep sorrow in her heart and deep thought on her mind, when she first learned what terrible things were coming on her. The idea however, which the reader will have conceived of her as she sat there will have come to him from the skill of the artist, and not from the words of the writer. If that drawing is now near him, let him go back to it. Lady Mason was again sitting in the same room — that pleasant room, looking out through the verandah on to the sloping lawn, and in the same chair; one hand again rested open on the arm of the chair, while the other supported her face as she leaned uponher elbow; and the sorrow was still in her heart and the deep thought in her mind. But the lines of her face were altered, and the spirit expressed by it was changed. There was less of beauty, less of charm, less of softness; but in spite of all that she had gone through there was more of strength, — more of the power to resist all that this world could do to her.

*************************
It was 4:30. I had had a full day. I now will try to give a paper on Trollope’s original illustrations at a coming Victorian conference (Spring 2012 in NYC, Columbia University) and Eleanor Shevlin’s Washington Area Print Group (meets one a month, on a Friday afternoon at the Library of Congress between September and May). We (Jim, I, and Izzy) had tickets to see a play about Picasso at the Capital Fringe Festival that evening. I had just enough time to get home, eat with my two beloved people, and then go out again to make the play’s first act.

So, gentle reader, I again did not attempt to go to the day’s late afternoon plenary lecture, this time at the Natural History Museum. It was hot and a walk away. I got on the train.

Well, in my clumsy and half-thwarted efforts to phone Jim to pick me up at the train station, King Street, I ended up having pleasant talk with a man on the train just my age who also has trouble using cell phones. I said I found the ubiquitous use of them analogous to chimpanzees grooming one another: phones are the most stressful way to contact someone; you have immediacy but no bodily contact to control behavior. He said he felt he lost his liberty carrying one around. Yes, Jim had said when he was working he did not want one for then he was a dog on a leash. I did manage to make the call though and when King Street arrived, I bid adieu to my companion and got off the train, walked down to the street where Jim was waiting for me in his Jaguar.

And now to bed,
Ellen

See Sharp 1, Sharp 2, and Sharp 4.

Read Full Post »

Harm spreading across the globe: privatizing medical knowledge

Wit (directed by Mike Nichols, screenplay by Emma Thompson based on Margaret Edson’s play): Jason, the resident (Jonathan Woodward) has disregarded Miss Bearing (Emma Thompson), the patient’s request to be DNR on the grounds “she’s research!” Suzie, her nurse (Audra McDonald), is protecting the space around Miss Bearing.

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine” (Marcia Angell, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A story of corruption”, NYRB, Jan 15, 2009)

The “commercialization of science” in universities, gov’t agencies and organizations has led to “research supported by for-profit entities [that] will yield results consistent with the financial interests of those entities … “the push to commercialize the university”, “a planned coordinated effort” “had been one of the biggest Ponzi schemes this side of Bernie Madoff and Allen Standford” (Sheldon Krimsky, reviewing Philp Morowski’s Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science in The American Scientist, 99 (2011):330-32).

The Doctor (directed by Randa Haines, screenplay Robert Caswell from Ed Rosenbaum’s memoir, A Taste of My Own Medicine): Jack McKee (William Hurt) is comforted by his wife, Ann (Christine Lahti) after Jack suffered an enforced barium enema, administered by mistake (indifference and carelessness led to it, and there’s hardly any apology at all).

First, do no harm. Cure seldom, relieve often, comfort always.

Dear friends and readers,

Among Helen Epstein’s many important essays published in the New York Review of Books is “Flu Warning: Beware the Drug Companies” where she carefully shows how various drug companies, the doctors and researchers they pay, and distributors and advertisers they use so skewed research in the area of flu vaccine that it is not possible to get past the conflicts of interest, unacknowledged biased behavior and results to see that the strongly probabilities of flu epidemics and need for flu vaccine was partly manufactured by the drug companies. Epstein concludes:

Six years ago, John Ioannidis, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, found that nearly half of published articles in scientific journals contained findings that were false, in the sense that independent researchers couldn’t replicate them. The problem is particularly widespread in medical research, where peer-reviewed articles in medical journals can be crucial in influencing multimillion- and sometimes multibillion-dollar spending decisions. It would be surprising if conflicts of interest did not sometimes compromise editorial neutrality, and in the case of medical research, the sources of bias are obvious.

The pervasiveness of overt and covert corruption in the medical establishment is hard for ordinary citizens to credit. They are surrounded by such expert propaganda ceaselessly poured out on TV, in movies, and in creditable print. It is nonetheless true. It not only is destroying scientific knowledge in the US; it constitutes a present danger to consumers who may be led to take drugs whic do not help them, might and do do them harm and cost them hugely.

No where is this more common than in the area of mental health where the terrain for diagnosis is partly subjective and where social problems and distresses in our competitive brutal environments in schools, universities and the job market lead to people desperately seeking solutions for success where it is so hard to achieve. One way they relieve their mental troubles and try to help their children in the newly relentless networking environment is to medicalize the problem. Insurance companies collude by offering money if the condition identified can be found described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which has become, an Angell and others have shown,

“the product of a complex of academic politics, personal ambition, ideology, and, perhaps most important, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry.”

Two recent articles by her in the NYRB dwell just on the area of mental health. The arguments in “The Epidemic of Mental Illness” (NYRB, June 23, 2011) and “The Illusions of Psychiatry” (NYRB, July 14, 2011), are fundamentally accurate, though the second article has a significant flaw in its lack of compassion for the real increase in mental illnesses across the board in patient-consumers today, its failure to acknowledge that increase in diagnosis has led to progressive empathy and understanding of mental and social stresses and help for people, as well as its repetition of ill-informed gossip which (very like Reagan on mythical Welfare queens) exaggerate the amount of help mentally disabled people get (for adults hardly anything at all). Still, she is fundamentally correct: she shows the harm that the substitution and erasure of the talk cure in favor of handing out drugs is ill-advised, a move that makes profit for the drug companies and saves doctors and the medical establishment money and having to help people for real.

So, flawed as is part of Angell’s second article, all else she writes in both articles is frighteningly sound, and, as Sheldon Krimsky shows, the direct result of commercialization of science everywhere in the US so that universities are directly dependent on private companies for funds for basic research.

About the serious issue of what causes depression and mental illness, Angell is concerned to show the fundamental flaws in the argument that a lack of certain chemical causes depression. She tried to show (or said the books under review showed) that we cannot prove these prescription drugs sold at high prices do what they are said to do. In the first case she showed the tautology of the thinking: the drug companies are in effect saying we have discovered that aspirin gets rid of headache; there is no aspirin in people’s bodies, hence it must be a lack of aspirin in the body itself that is causing the headache. So we will go out and invent new and improved versions of aspirin for you to shoot yourself up with. The side effects of these new and improved drugs are dangerous, not well-understood. She shows that in both that the research conducted by these companies is so shot through with techniques designed to prove the drugs are needed, good for people, you can’t believe what is published. The placebo tests are flawed and when they don’t produce the results wanted phony (by suppression of evidence).

She didn’t deny that the drugs calm people, children too and relieves symptoms of depression, anxiety, rage; she is aware that these results are partly why the drugs are taken by millions of people. She said we don’t know what the result of taking these drugs for decades will one for many; one result for some is addiction; for others high weight gain (bad for you). I can understand how someone who has used these drugs and feels they have helped him to survive would be taken by the pragmatic arguments that they help control one’s symptoms. I take 2 240 milligram tablets of surfak (docusate calcium) every day, and have been doing this for 30 years. I’d be desperate if they were taken away. They are needed stool softeners for me, I trust they have no bad side effects and think they do help me for my bad constipation.

Her review is just a review nothing more. She doesn’t go into what she thinks of the “talking cure” beyond suggesting such session are useful and that the dropping of them is wrong because they are another important way of helping people. I don’t think she is interested in this issue in itself nor just the medicine invented for mental troubles and illness but as these are aspects, symptoms, instances of what the article you pointed to is true: the total corruption of the drug and medical establishment in the US. It’s that she is endlessly writing about, trying to expose. The whole enterprise is filled with rottenness. She wants sweeping and fundamental changes in the FDA, the NIH (watch dogs and research institutes), the way medicine is delivered, and strong controls on the way these companies do business.

The primitive personal or honest question is, Do I agree or think that my own depression, anxiety, troubles are chemical or physiological as well as psychological. Yes. Is this because something is wrong with me or it’s in my nature to be melancholy, my physiology. Both are different ways of saying the same thing. Some people have a tendency to be cheerful, aggressive; others the opposite, and these natures we are born with are exacerbated or countered by what happened to us as we grew up and later in school and life. So I had two parents who were very ill suited and on some level hated one another. My mother should not have had any children as she is cold, indifferent, selfish, obtuse — of course the world is filled with people like this who have children. My father was made miserable about his job, his life, a frustrated thwarted man who never developed intellectually as he could have. He turned to me and should not have. Both of them were (Larkin’s phrase) fucked up and they fucked me up too.

But if I agree that it’s partly physiological, chemical, that does not mean that these drugs these companies sell are based on a reasonably logical theory which can then be used to prove their efficacy. Far from it.

Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1965)

On Angell’s article Part 2: yes, the more I have been thinking about it the more at long last (after a number of important wholly sound articles), she does show her privileged life. The article had a glaring heartlessness. She took gossip about SSI and wrote about how Aspergers people are getting sums of money equivalent to welfare (as if that had been a loadstone). She did not take into account that while the Manual might reify diseases (make diseases exist by definition) and be a political document, that does not mean that mental trouble/illness is not widespread in the society. Atul Gawande’s Complications quoted and substantiates 33% or more of Americans have major depressive episodes over the course of their lives. In his book he shows that pain, both physical and psychological, is a social problem of real seriousness, one that needs to be addressed medically, by talk cures, and by government and social reforms of our daily lives and the norms we live by. That’s the implication of his “The Pain Perplex.”

So, that while it’s true the drug companies have faulty logic (=you get depressed because you don’t have X [say aspirin]in your system when they find giving X makes you cheerful so that means aspirin is what your system lacks); and it is true that their tests for drugs are corrupt (dismissive of evidence that shows they don’t work or do harm); nevertheless, that does not mean many many US people are not in trouble and need help. They do. This is insufficiently recognized in her part 2. Especially bad is the implication that Aspergers people are living high off gov’t money. She is so absorbed in the corruption here and now she forgets there has been progress.

On this a friend wrote me as follows:

“I was thinking of the Angell articles when I was watching The Kennedys the other night (it has only just arrived here) – I had not realised that the horrific Joe had one of his daughters lobotomized – I had to leave the room when it showed the effects; as I commented before however ineffective or indeed misdirected medicalization may be when one considers that 50 years ago this barbaric practice (mainly on women as far as I can see) was still a medical commonplace there has been progress. The historical perspective – institutionalizsation, lobotomy, ECT – must be kept in mind. Certainly things are still a long way off good but at least I have never been in danger of having a chunk of my brain cut out.”

Having acknowledged this, I want to provide a short review of Angell’s other articles so that this flaw will be seen in the larger perspective. In “Body Hunters” (NYRB, 51:12, October 6, 2005), a review of Fernando Mereilles’s film adaptation of John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener, she demonstrated that although the murder of Tessa Quayle and Arnold Bluhm is improbable, much else that we find in the book is not just probable, but everyday business in testing drugs for phamaceuticals.

For example (the incident which lies behind the film), in 1996 Pfizer, the American pharmaceutical giant, opened a clinic in Kano, Nigeria, during a meningitis outbreak in order to test the drug Trovan, which had yet to be approved for use on children. There is no Tessa Quayle in this story, but there are doctors from the humanitarian group Medecins sans frontieres. There were no formal ethics-approval protocols in place for the tests, nor were the patients properly advised that they were participating in an experiment, nor was proper long-term follow-up implemented. Consequently, of 200 children treated, eleven died, while others suffered serious meningitis-related symptoms, such as deafness, lameness, blindness, seizures, and disorientation. Patients deteriorating on Trovan were not taken off it and given another antibiotic. Children given higher doses of deftriaxone to make the contrast look better yet it made for more pain. While I was at a Wagner conference, a man who used to be the Ambassador to Kenya was there, and he saw me with this novel (endlessly rereading you see), and confirmed that testing is done as a prerequisite for other care and the people don’t know what they are taking.

Further,

In 1997, Trovan was approved by the FDA to treat certain infections, but not for children and not for epidemic meningitis. The FDA found dozens of discrepancies in the documents from Nigeria. Trovan quickly became a highly profitable antibiotic widely used against a variety of infections. However, after less than two years on the market, there were over a hundred reports that the drug produced liver toxicity, causing several deaths. It is no longer sold.

The Constant Gardener (based on LeCarre’s book, directed by Fernando Mereilles, produced by Simon Channing-Williams, screenplay Jeffrey Caine): Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) tries to decipher Tessa’s computer files (see Todd Hoffman, “The Constant Writer: LeCarre Spies a New Villain”, Queen’s Quarterly, Spring 2001)

A second incident:

Thousands of HIV infected women were given a placebo while another group given a course of AZT very strong dosage for shorter time. They should have compared women being given drug as normal and at a usual rate; instead they consigned babies to HIV/AIDS and women to quicker death. The argument made was just that of LeCarre’s villain: the women in a pregnancy test would have died anyway. A Pfizer doctor contests this view, and argues that the mortality rate in his clinic was as low as, or lower than, at the MSF clinic. But this falls to respond to the ethical question of giving children an untested drug and the choices made about how to treat individuals once they are on it. The Pfizer attitude resembles that of Sandy Woodrow regarding Dypraxa, “We’re not killing people who wouldn’t otherwise die. I mean, Christ, look at the death rate in this place. Not that anybody’s counting”

Near Death (Frederick Wiseman, 1989): What Wiseman does is find the people with power in an institution and he films them for hours: here we listen to a chief of staff discussing what to do about certain patients with other medical personnel

Most of the time the trials run in these 3rd world countries are for diseases that afflict wealthy societies (arthritis, obesity, cholesterol, cancer). Research should not be done in the third world unless it concerns diseases that are virtually confined to those regions. And regulations governing research in poor countries should be every bit as stringent—and enforced just as vigilantly as in well-to-do countries. There is no justification for the present situation in which the standards are looser precisely where human subjects are most vulnerable.

Generally, there’s no question that the US and other rich countries have been conducting more and more clinical research in Africa and other parts of the third world. Although exact figures are hard to come by, it is likely that tens of thousands of studies sponsored by first-world drug companies and governments are now underway in Africa, parts of Latin America and Asia, and the former Soviet Union. Most of this research is intended to find new treatments for use in well-to-do countries. Standards are low or non existent.

These companies, called contract research organizations, or CROs, hire local doctors to find people who will take part in clinical trials, and while the payments to the doctors per patient are lower than in first-world studies, by local standards they are munificent. Doctors can multiply their income tenfold or more.

Patients, too, are readily enticed by small amounts of money and promises of free care. In fact, as in LeCarré’s story, enrolling in a trial may be the only way they can get any care at all.

Hospital (Frederick Wiseman, 1970): Wiseman also seeks out unusually candid and articulate people and films them

Finally, in “Your Dangerous Drugstore” (NYRB, 51:10, June 8, 2005), Angell makes visible the corruption found along the entire system of developing, testing and using prescription drugs. She goes over trials and shows all the problems were known and shoved under rug. Clinical trials are dropped or argued against while money spent on advertising.

The FDA has on its boards people who were or are in the pay of drug companies or affiliates. They get to decide what comes to market. At best you get a mild warning on packet.

Startlingly obviously bad is the “user fee:” the part of the FDA doing evaluating gets its funding from drug companies who they are evaluating!

Taking people’s testimonials is highly problematical. People want to believe they are different and in their case this is helping. All long for magic miracle drug.

Angell does suggest that the US public said to be growing sceptical of drug companies’ claimed disinterest: we see escalating prices; we see government bills intended to stop agencies acting for us from negotiating lower prices; we see that most research for new drugs done in university and government labs. That companies often go for “me-too” drugs.

The value of Epstein’s article is she uses a case where people are inclined to believe drug companies because flu can be a killer and vaccination can prevent illness and death. She shows how difficult it is to catch these people are their lies, pretenses, skewing of evidence.

Finally, Krimsky’s review (unfortunately, not online) shows that the very structuring of American medicine since the 1980s by neo-liberal voodoo economics has created this dire situation. How to stop it? Nothing short of universities monitoring its professors and laboratory technicians’ research for real, and firing anyone who is found to falsify results, take personal bribes, or allow his or her name to appear on research he or she did not do. In an atmosphere where all that is cared about is getting grants from companies for funding this is not about to happen tomorrow. A wholescale cleaning out of these be-shitted stables is called for.

A man in a wheelchair, left in the corridor of Metropolitan Hospital (Frederick Wiseman’s Hospital):

I can confirm the accuracy of Wiseman’s portrait. In 1989 I spent a week in Metropolitan Hospital (the place he filmed for Hospital) after I was in an automobile accident. It was like a crowded bus station everywhere. When I came in I had a fractured knee with no cast or anything on it for hours. There was that weekend one man in the whole hospital doing x-rays. Jim, my husband, promptly called him “The bottleneck.” He was not gentle doing x-rays; he was in a hurry you see.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

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

An illustration for Gaskell’s Ruth

Dear Friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Francesca Annis as Lady Ludlow (Cranford Chronicles)

My Lady Ludlow, Chapters 1-4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linda wrote:

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

To which I replied:

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

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

From Fran:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapters 10-14: The conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sylvia’s Lovers, Chapters 1-6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

G. Morland, Smugglers

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

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

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

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

It speaks for itself.

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

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

Chapter 7-15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Gluck’s Iphigenie en Tauride: the HD Met production

Placido Domingo as Oreste

Dear friends and readers,

I assume no one needs me to say the Met has produced and made an HD choice of Gluck’s Iphigenie en Tauride, so we now have an 18th century play adaptation (French, Nicolas-François Guillard) to enjoy. Basic information is here. The world shrinks apace the BBC account. Izzy’s review is succinct.

The great difficulty with Gluck operas is that very little action happens in them; as an undergrad, I was shown as a sample his Orpheus opera, which was the only one the library had video of, because there at least there was them walking out of the underworld and Orpheus turning around. Iphigenie en Tauride mostly has in its libretto the three main characters sitting around in chains and wandering around an altar, though at least there’s a brief battle and Diana’s dramatic entrance at the end.

There are various ways this difficulty can be dealt with. In the Met’s production, imported from Seattle, there’s a bit of dancing and dance-like blocking, which is appropriate enough for a French opera, and explanatory dumbshow featuring Agamemnon and Clytemnestra wandering around and wielding knives, which works less well, especially since it left me unsure if it would have been comprehendable if I hadn’t already known the story. At least the set was good, with the temple and the adjoining dungeon cell well set and creatively used.

But once again it falls to the singers to carry it, which they should be able to, since Gluck deliberately writes to demand that they do. Luckily we had Susan Graham and Placido Domingo on hand. It was announced just before the show began that they both had bad colds, but nobody at their level was going to let that stop them; they both sang and acted their hearts out, and you even stopped caring that Orestes is being portrayed by a guy who’s in his 70s! He then flirted with her during the interview, and he and Paul Groves allowed us to watch them being made up during intermission(Groves got bloodied) since there was no set change. He was in fact very aware of everyone watching, even telling one of the guys working at him to wave!

So Gluck’s strengths get shown to perfection, and so do his flaws.

I’ll add: The three principals performed marvelously. Graham (she never stopped singing), Domingo (his face, body, expressions were moving) and Groves (strong and eloquent).

Loving friends in death

I should also mention Gordon Hawkes who was there as the tyrant. He was powerful and moving as Alberic, the agonized outsider evil dwarf in Das Rheingold. This role did not give his inner self enough depth to bring forth.

Jim called production poor: he thought the set apt, but direction bad. He didn’t like the first dumb show good of Iphigenia being pulled aloft by Diana at the time of the sacrifice, many years before this opera begins. I thought it exhilarating and graceful, but agree the second, Clytemnestra and Agamemnon fighting, and she killing him as a dream-nightmare of either Oreste and Iphigenia or both of them overdone. They both did tell the audience something of the previous story).

I liked the set’s austerity and Greek frieze look, the theatrical Baroque goddess outfit for Diana at the close. The wall in the middle (the temple was divided into two spaces, one for sacrifice and the other I don’t know what for) did make the group to one side crowded in. It was like a painting by Jacques-Louis David:

The costumes were like some later 18th century version of Greeks/Romans. Mrs Siddons was in mind.

Reynolds’s portrait of tragedy (or virtue) in his painting of Garrick tempted on the one side by vice (comedy) and the other tragedy-virtue, who has been figured reminiscent of Mrs Siddons as Lady Macbeth

Susan Graham as Iphigenia

(Gluck offers marvelous moments for mezzo-sopranas. His Orpheus is written for a mezzo-soprano and an unforgettable moment of sublime grief and beauty was Janet Baker as Orpheus singing “What shall I do without my Eurydice” [mio sposp].

The camera for the audience caught the actor/singers from the side often, and scenes seem to end or be held so that we would get this kind of still picture.

(As the set was not changed, the filming in-between acts was of the (good-natured) Domingo being dressed by his dresser and Groves allowing his make-up man to create scary-looking wounds all over him.)

Alas, 18th century restrained style (repetition) of music just doesn’t reach me the way I long to be reached (I just weep continually over Strauss’s Der Rosencavalier) cry.

From a friend on facebook:

“Wasn’t it beautiful? I loved the costumes (which evoked Georges de la Tour to me) and set–except that the wall in the middle would, I thought, make it hard for people on one side of the audience to get a good view of what was going on on the other side of the wall. Al and I swapped stories about buying cheap opera seats behind pillars or in boxes next to stage when we were young. But I assume they were careful at the Met not to block anyone’s view. Al wept–I didn’t but rather felt joyful, it was so beautiful.

Good point about David, though the red-and-candlelight feel still suggests Georges de la Tour to me. But David is the right period, and you are right about the heroic tableaux. I liked the way the three Greeks’ clothing and hair differentiated them from the rest and suggested some archaic world.
Ah–I meant that the wall might interfere with the live audience’s view of the whole stage. We at the HD performance always got to see the singers.

I agree on the de La Tour.

Georges de la Tour

The goddess was in baroque outfits I’ve seen in Handel operas.

We did find that Goethe wrote a version of Iphigenia in Tauris and we have a copy of this in a good modern translation in our house. So the theme was popular in the later 18th century and play still respected today.

Drawing by Angelica Kauffman from an 1802 performance of Goethe’s play in Weimar

Why should people of this era like to see a woman surviving immolation? Perhaps because women got such a rough deal, they wanted to offer up the heroine as consolation and to flatter so-called virtue (self-sacrifice, allowing oneself to be beaten, impregnated, without resources). The manifestation of this in novels can be seen in the themes of endurance and fortitude. Well, Kleist wrote a rebuttal. And we ought to have one too.

Side issue: What I was surprised by was letting us (audience at movie-houses) into the dressing rooms. There was no set change so I guess they felt they had to provide something. It was good-natured of Domingo — who is a past master at fund raising I know.

The trailer of in-between parts was telling. It was good. So many trailers in movie-theaters are obnoxious. My theory is they are made deliberately as stupid as can be to lure fools. In a commentary over-voice of the 1995 S&S the intelligent producer, Schamus said they wanted to use the ball as the trailer and the studio got hysterical. No one will come! Instead one got idiocy.

That this trailer took some fine moments and made the thing comic in a genuinely tasteful way showed the usual trailers are deliberate stupidities.

As the movie-audience I know we miss out from the live performance, but pace all repeated telling of us to go to the theater, the people at the Met miss some things we get beyond close-ups.

Ellen

Read Full Post »