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

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

Dear Friends and readers,

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

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

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I begin with the women’s issues sessions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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

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

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

Dear friends and readers,

More from the PCA/ACA conference.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vanessa Redgrave was Coriolanus’s undoing

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

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

Jessica Chastain chosen for her sexiness and soft femininity

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

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

Boomerang, earnest hero and sarky heroine (Jane Wyatt)

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

Northside 777: Jimmy Stewart filmed inside a real prison

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

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

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

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

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

Marlon Brando carefully made up to look Asian

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

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

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

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

A scene from upper class British berth in Nazi Titanic

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

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

Pip looking up

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

Pip with Estelle in Miss Havisham’s place

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

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

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

There are normative moments in the The Piano Teacher

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

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

Ellen

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PCA/ACA conference: TV soap opera and serial story-telling; or, The Way We Watch TV Now

Shoverdose: @lizzieskurnick’s word for binge-watching a TV series.

Humpty Dumpty: ‘You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word … [Lewis Carroll] For instance, take the two words “fuming” and “furious”. Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first … if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “‘frumious’.

‘Nowadays people curate their experience of TV and cinema films’

Mr Bates (Brendon Coyle) quietly crying — fired because a disabled man (Downton Abbey, Season 1:1)

Anna Smith (Joanne Froggart) come to comfort the just fired Mr Bates — saying “Tell us how you are getting on …. ” Downton Abbey 1:1) — it is true that we remember this subliminally in the 3rd season whey she & Bates are happy in Scotland

Dear friends and readers,

Among the many unusual subjects treated seriously at the recent American Popular Culture and American Culture Association country-wide conference in DC, was that of soap opera and serial story-telling. This phenomena on TV and in film was treated in sessions on it; in British Popular Culture (which includes mini-series); in Gender Studies on TV ( made up of programs with a serial arch, e.g., Girls, West Wing); and some of the many sessions on film adaptations.

This is a blog about who and how people watch soap operas and serial dramas nowadays; how people participate as fans on the Internet: very differently since we have all these new technologies which put us in control. We curate our experience of TV. Passionate fans influence and shape what they watch if it becomes popular. I offer a new word: shoverdose (show-overdose). I summarize a few papers on specific serials, including those on the CW channel, Days of Our Lives, an older Police Procedural, Downton Abbey, and Poldark and in these you will find summarized characteristics found in soap operas and serial story-telling.

I admit I don’t have any summaries on Jane Austen mini-series — that’s because I didn’t hear any papers on Austen mini-series. I admit to shoverdosing: on the 1995 Ang Lee & Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility; Andrew Davies‘s Little Dorrit and Sense and Sensibility; the 1981 Brideshead Revisited; lots of people have shoverdosed on Davies’s 1995 P&P and Fay Weldon’s 1979 P&P, Simon Raven’s The Pallisers.

So on soap opera and serial story-telling, how we watch these nowadays and a few of them: Two sessions on specific soap operas, one on the Poldark novels versus the two mini-series and Downton Abbey and a paper from a Film session on war films. First I’ll cover how people experience soap opera or serial story-telling on TV today and then specific serial dramas.

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On Saturday, 9:45, Soap Opera II (4201) featured two papers, Marion Wren’s “Short Attention Span Theater: The Cultural Status of TV serial narratives in a Post-network era” and MJ Robinson’s “Curatorial Culture and the Future of Serialized TV.”

Wren asked, How do we watch TV? Jessica Helfand has argued that the Internet media has turned people into skimmers, people who multi-task, and skim an article while doing many other things on-line. The result is “narrative deprivation:” people have ceased to deep read.

Pessimism and anxiety lies behind such formulations. For example, Helfand does not take into account the phenomenon of binge watching (sometimes referred to as shoverdose — show overdose) which the availability of DVDs and all sorts of ways of controlling and time-shifting our watching has enabled us to do. Someone sits down and watches a whole season of whatever program he or she wants over several extended hours. This is diametrically diferent frmo the way audiences once watched serials and TV.

She suggested that advertisers have only the crudest methods and points of view on the audiences for such soap operas and serial TV and films. They regard viewers as so many eyeballs and when they can try to count them. So Downton Abbey drew 7.9 million for the 1st instalment of the 3rd season. One element in its success is its framing as “legacy,” as “heritage,” as elite and upper class. Therefore that it becomes the object of obsessive viewing is legimitized. Its upper class content and status as quality drama makes it a form of aspiration. This is what the branding did in this case. In previous sociological events of this type it was Jane Austen (the 1995 P&P), elite books and quality drama (Brideshead), historical heritage and regional cults (Upstairs, Downstairs, Cornwall for Poldark whom Graham said was first likened to GWTW).

Ms Wren then turned to examine what we know of the behavior of fandoms that surround such experiences. Henry Jenkins has written about them in Textual Poachers. Jenkins wrote that these fans are not assive; they are a participating culture; they are creative and extend the universe of the show to fit their preconceptions. They work at this, once upon a time by forming clubs, traveling to sites, writing fan letters, now by blogging, tweeting, again traveling to meet one another, by illegal downloading, by using web 2.0 media (I saw that in Poldark where fake videos misrepresenting the mini-series were made). They influenced the author and later seasons by their aggressive demands and insistent views. Both the makers and the viewers may be said to conspire together to often emphasize surprise to mystify the experience, to guard outsiders and one another from showing their what is the real motivation and need served. Viewers invent legitimizing narratives. The audience are communities to be exploited.

I was reminded of Richard Hoggart’s older book on The Uses of Literacy. He argued way back in the 1950s that TV was used politically; to persuade people they were part of imagined (= unreal) communities who espoused a group of values, values which were in this way proselytized for.

The real problem is to turn this into a business model to make as much money from it as possible. Ms Wren mentioned that AMC did not like when fans came onto twitter as faux characters; they felt this was plagiarism and maybe the fans would make money themselves. Twitter was told to pull such tweets and it did. The fans got very mad and AMC let them go back online as a form of on-line advertising because they did see the unlikelihood most fans would make any money.

Ms Wren seemed to want to suggest that binge watching, tweeting creatively about such a serial is depth viewing. But is it? What do the fans write? They write narratives and stay on the surface and miss much of the nuance of what itself is not subtle. OTOH, shoverdose is such a denigrating word and I know that immersion in a script, close study of parts of a mini-series (the juxtaposed shots) and its course texts and intertextuality yields as much depth of knowledge and understanding as any George Eliot novel.

By “Curatorial Culture” Ms MJ Robinson meant how viewers today can organize, select, arrange their own programming: “nowadays people curate their own experience of TV and cinema film.” In the past 5 years what has happened to TV watching resembles what happened in the 15 years to music listening and the last decade to journalism. TV watching used to be top down: the executives chose when you would watch, and you had to stay within the patterns of airing set forth by the channel. TV now can be consumed at any time, any where on a variety of machines. TVs come with “apps”. On YouTube viewers make their own movies. There is such a behavior as “churning:” people join briefly to watch whatever is the promotional offering and then unsubscribe.

Thus the Nielson family viewer ratings which the TV larger channels still cling to (partly they don’t want to know how few people might watch a program or who they are or even what is preferred for real) are hopelessly outdated. The “televisual has become an undifferentiated landscape.” What happens is programmers are fighting for audience shares that they do not know how to translate into direct revenue. Or they are trying to monetize the serial watching in new ways. For example, Netflix did a deal with a Norwegian company to release 8 episodes of a very popular serial, but it was set up in a way that forced the viewer to watch them sequentially.

The aim is to find out when content is used and attach an advertisement to the use. There was always a problem predicting popularity which often increases slowly. So Seinfeld had ratings in the basement in the first season and in the second, soared. The Poldark mini-series was at first ridiculed. Now the difficulty is much greater. On the Internet you find an increasing number of “apps” where to watch a program you have to click on “facebook” first (or twitter or some other social media place) and that way you are counted.

Companies keep their data to themselves. Netflix does not release its the ratings it has from its rentals publicly. There are laws against cable companies mining their data; your privacy is protected unless you are thought to be part of Al Quaeda. They’ve never been able to predict with any ease what the public will make a cult about next.

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Helen Mirren as Concerned Cop (Prime Suspect, Season 6)

Soap Opera II at 9:45 also had a paper on a channel dedicated to soap operas for teenage girls, and Soap Opera III at 11:30 (4301) papers on what made a commercial success, a specific mainstream program breaking taboos and types of programs not seen as soaps but have the same characteristics.

A brief survey of the serials discussed. Kayti Lausch discussed the CW channel and its teen serials, i.e., Gossip Girls, Vampire Diaries (any title with the word “diary” in it is aimed at girls), Secret Circle, Melrose Place, The Beautiful Life. Voice-over also identifies a show as for women. In type they are very like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The characters are often mean to one another and there is a lot of conventionalized sex. The characters are rarely at work or school, and when they are there, their interest is not in their work; there is little for the young women to do, and every week there’s some sort of party.

Melissa Ames suggested that when the content really reflects the mood and of a given era the serial is a success. The problem with this is you end up offering a tautology as an explanation, e.g., since this show demonized the rich was a success its era was one where the rich were propagandized against. She described repeating typical stories: revenge is popular, melodramatic deaths, mistaken identities, the fragility of loyal love, tawdry trials, and of course the family is central. She suggested the programs she studied shows any sense of shared sacrifice has faded, people blame victims, escapist content preferred. She had in mind programs like Dallas, the Sopranos, Games of Thrones, Mad Men and Downton Abbey.

Kimberly Smith discussed the introduction of gay characters into The Days of Our Lives. Gay characters had been seen in soap operas from 1991 on, but Days of Our Lives made Sonny Kiriakis, a character central to the series, a member of one of the primary families, and Will Horton, a son of another family fall in love. Ms Smith screened a powerful scene where Horton’s father comes in to object and is clearly intensely hostile, and another where the two lovers behave sentimentally and emotionally the way heterosexual couples are often filmed. Some of the fans protested hysterically but enough accepted to make this pair of characters a staple of the show.

Roberta Brody described a specific serial called Law and Order, which has since had a number of imitations: it did not tell the personal lives of the police; the story was tightly organized, a new case or set of characters brought in for each episode; little back story even for the central case; it’s an ensemble cast (so costs less as there is no star salary); heavily event-driven, with abrupt closings. These share elements with soap operas: melodrama (provocation, pangs, and penalties); themes include heinous rimes, victims who are victims but if they have committed a crime are punished; a conflict of duty and personal feeling; hidden babies, rejected children, rebellious teenagers at risk; poor choice of partners (husbands, wives); substance abuse, mental illness, and loneliness for central characters. She went over a typical story. Her thesis was that the soap opera elements are rarely acknowledged and part of the reason for the series’ success.

I asked if these had evolved in Police Procedural like Prime Suspect and Five Full Days where we do learn about the detectives’ lives, and have feminist themes. She insisted that these “new” kinds of Police Procedurals did not belong to “proper” Law and Order programs; had been influenced by PBS or BBD mystery series. I asked if the Law and Order programs had been aimed at men, and instead of answering this, she said that when it was discovered men watched more than women, women were added to the permanent cast.

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Dan Stevens as Matthew Crawley, officer, saving one of his men, another man waiting to help (Downton Abbey 2:1)

I heard three papers on Downton Abbey. The first, by Joanna Abtahi, was one of three on depictions of WW1 in Film and History (Thursday 9:45 am, 2244). She said DA was the first season presented as frivolous escapist fare which climaxed suddenly in the Earl of Grantham declaring the nation is at war. The second season saw a dramatic transformation. This character-driven drama now presented itself as accurate. She presented the view of the great war as a useless waste of millions of life, futile, with the ordinary man seen as indispensable as simply the “conventional usual view;” and argued that DA was countering this with the idea that the war created meaningful experiences, showed that the patriarchy was concerned for the social order, with the community pulling together in the face of “great peril.” Matthew’s behavior shows he deserves his authority; The snobbish selfish Mary becomes care-worn, Sybil a nurse who runs off with Branson, Thomas hitherto a villain, an understandable man, who destroys his hand to escape death on the battlefield, and cries over a suicidal patient. She suggested that the program suggested today the UK is more trustful of its government (! — ignoring the huge strikes against the destructive Tory elite gov’t).

John Greenfield and Janice Blandford gave papers on Downton Abbey in “British Popular Culture 4 (Thurs, 1:15 pm, 2420) which startled me: they took the program at its surface value and did not critique its values; Ms Blandford seemed to think the portrait of Robert Grantham (she called him Robert) was realistic. Ms Blandford bought into Edith as vicious, Daisy as dutiful and therefore gaining an obliged new father who helps her “assert herself.” Robert feels the “way elite people then felt about their estates” (high idealism); upholding the social order right and good. Mr Greenfield claimed in the 3rd season Robert (he also did not call the character Lord Grantham) is humiliated and defeated in the 3rd season (victim of new technology and world); Mrs Hughes is strong in the way she befriends Ethel and defies Mr Carson; Edith has become a feminist; a gay plot came to the forefront (! — it has been there all along); Tom transcends his old role; it all ends on “the exhilarating [?] birth of the child.” The death of Matthew he thought must’ve prompted shouts of “swerve” “swerve” across “the nation.” He conceded the woman servants were oppressed.

The reality is Lord Grantham remains in charge throughout and only he has the power to make the police go away and not arrest Matthew. He says he values Matthew for his cricket-playing.

Mr Greenfield discussed serial story-telling in a Freudian way. He suggested its serial production allowed for twists and turns and multiple plots and death, and that Fellowes has mastered the form and uses it captivatingly. He quoted Linda Hughes and Michael Lund on the serial novel in Victorian magazines: pleasure may be discharged again and again as female sexuality is supposed enjoyed (as opposed to male which does not practice sustained arousal).

I raised my hand and said, “lets imagine Anthony Trollope seeing this series. He’d laugh raucously. Great houses are political linch-pins where wheeling and dealing and patronage goes on. As to all these abstractions, he’d see through it as unreal.” I described Trollope’s fiction which Fellowes has been influenced by but where Fellowes’ mind is fuzzy and narrowly aimed; Trollope is precise with wide and thorough knowledge of his era.

Robin Ellis as Ross Poldark returning from the rape of Elizabeth (Poldark, 1975-76, Part 15)

Julie Taddeo’s paper (in the same Thursday session on British Popular Culture) was on the treatment of women in the Poldark worlds’ she compared the way Ross’s rape of Elizabeth was treated in TV mini-series as opposed to the Poldark novels. For a summary, see continuation in comments section.

Ellen

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

Woolf’s working desk at Monk House

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inge Morath (1923-2002), A Park Bench

Ellen

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

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

Letting go

Exhaustion defeat

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom all awkwardness, Sybil turned dowdiness itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(A camp picture?)

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

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

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

Ellen

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Downton Abbey 3:2: Is the Abbey a Bourdieu habitus?

Siobhan Finneran as Sarah Obrien looking at her nephew & realizing what she’s up against if she wants her nephew to succeed

Dear friends and readers,

I had meant to write but one blog a week on Downton Abbey, but discovered that the American PBS stations are not following the divisions of the British series and this past week presented two parts back-to-back. As when PBS cuts out parts of these films, so when they run them together, they obscure their patterns, themes and emphases. Part One was re-introduction where the viewer was remarkably quickly re-informed about who the characters were, and watched the season’s new premise

1) fuel the crisis scenes where characters have failed to cope (Lord Grantham [Hugh Bonneville] loses his wife’s money) or refuse to be co-opted (Matthew Crawley [Dan Stevens] is still struggling against his role as kept man, this time yet more distastefully because the source of the money is a dead deluded girl); and

2) fuel conflicts as some of the characters’ whole being is bound up with keeping what they can of the left-over ancien regime order of the pre WW! world (e.g., Lady Mary [Michelle Dockery], Carson [Jim Carter], Lord Grantham, Violet, the dowager [Maggie Smith]), while others want out (Matthew, Lady Sybil now Mrs Bransom [Deborah Findlay-Brown]), see it as punishing, excluding, cheating, pressuring them (Daisy Robinson [Sophia McShera], Tom Bransom [Allen Leech], Sarah Obrien), see what’s happening and don’t care as long as they can get what they want out of what’s to be (Lady Edith [Laura Carmichael], Mrs Hughes [Phyllis Logan], Anna Bates [Joanne Froggart]) or just knuckle under (Cora, Lady Grantham [Elizabeth McGovern]; Anthony Strallan [Robert Bathurst]).

This quite apart from how we are to view them ethically.

The richness of the series — what makes it compelling is the way these complexities are made to play out in the dramatic scenes and manifest in witty dialogue.

The first part ended not only in the wedding, but the immediate prologue to it: Daisy seeing that going on strike is useless, counterproductive and just plain silly (Thomas’s bad advice) and yielding to seeing Lesley Nicholl as Mrs Patmore was doing her best and all she could — she got her a raise of 12 shillings. We see them working together on the food and at the last moment rushing out to see the wedding too from afar (the reactionary lessons of the series never ceases):

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Part Two shows the need of a third season to be fresh while keeping the community going. The world of Downton lost characters in the previous years to war (which itself provided much of the narrative thrust and events of the second year) or life’s attrition (Gwen Dawson got an office job, Sir Richard Carlisle [Iain Glenn] couldn’t integrate). So you need new characters or you bring a strong character back. In the aesthetics of soap opera characters may drift out of range and then drift back again.

Penelope Wilton as Isobel Crawley is still half-thwarted in her function as the program’s proofs that liberal solutions will not work. (Again Fellows’ politics is ceaselessly in evidence.) Mrs Crawley has now opened a clinic and employment agency for young women who have become outcasts. This allows Fellows to bring back Ethel whose rebellious spirits and burning desires will no doubt overcome her shame and unwillingness to kow-tow (compromise) to authority and conventional norms. Those of us who did watch last season know she had a small son and he needs to be accounted for.

Amy Nuttal as Ethel Parks lets Penelope Wilton as Isobel Crawley pass her by taking on a blank look (so as not to be recognized)

And thus we are hooked into next week.

This need to make the material compelling again may also be seen in Part Two where the idea seems to be to throw wrenches into our assessments and expectations. There is a real attempt to make us suspect that after all maybe Bates did murder his wife. Brendan Coyle is presented as a seethingly dangerous, menacing John Bates when Anna Bates is not around. The partnership of Thomas and Miss Obrien breaks down. Uncertainty replaces or is added to unease as part of the dominating mood. The Bransoms have gone home to a difficult life in Ireland. Will Lady Mary and Matthew really make it as a couple? Until near the end of the part, will Shirley Maclaine as Mrs Leveson again supply an enormous amount of money to keep this luxurious hierarchical life going for this privileged group of people?

A central thread with more episodes than any other: Mrs Hughes appears to have cancer; she and Mrs Patmore see the lump, feel it, consult the doctor repeatedly. Will she survive? In the touching close of the second part we see her and Lesley Nicoll who as Mrs Patmore has been her support and companionship walking off into the darkness:

Mrs Hughes: You just missed an admirer. Mr Carson said you did very well.
Mrs Patmore: Did you tell him?
Mrs Hughes. No. And what is there to tell? One day I will die and so will he and you and everyone of us under this roof. You must put these things in proportion Mrs Patmore, and I think I can do that now.
Mrs Patmore puts out her hand and touches Mrs Hughes’s arms and walks off the stage.
Mrs Hughes turns round, faces the camera steadily and then turns out the light

Ironically what is certain in this series so far has been death. For my part in Part One for me the most moving character was Mrs Patmore: it was when Anna left her alone to have her eye operation and she looked so anxious that I burst into tears. In Part Two I bonded with Mrs Hughes’s moral strength and loyalty when she helped Ethel and her Scots sceptical stoicism. When the character who I originally hated as a misogynistic fantasy and has now emerged as one of my favorites (I’ve grown to love her), Miss Obrien, tries to pressure Mrs Hughes into conforming with the rest of the kitchen and at least pretending to believe in an afterlife, ghosts, spirits,” Mrs Hughes replies: “Yes but I do not believe they play boardgames.” I now see Miss Obrien as a stand-in for the old deprived-governess character (always in sober clothes, not made up), single, perhaps unaware of her lesbian impulses (especially towards her lady as we saw when Cora became mortally ill).

As there is a resort to switching or casting doubt on our expectations, so the primal generic feature of soap opera is allowed to emerge: female desire. It’s powerful. What are these two episodes about, but women getting married? We have the iconic scene of the bride, the outfit, the walk down the aisle. The high point (or low depending on who you concentrate on) of the previous part when Anthony Stallan exposed the lout-lord (it’s curious how young high lords in this series have often been louts) Larry Grey [Charlie Anson], but now in this episode we think we are having a repeat of the thwarted romance that happened to Edith (with a crippled man who was an imposter) in the second season. Lord Grantham tries to break up Edith’s romance; he refuses to reward Stallon, and implicitly it’s his not being a macho male (the bad arm is the sign of this). AT the center we have this poignant moment when Edith begs her father to let her have what she really wants and is backed strongly by Mrs Leveson (one of her best moments).

The sentiment is undercut because we realize Lord Grantham is also motivated by a desire to please his mother-in-law in the hope of getting her money

Women are the operative force in this second part. From Mrs Leveson’s American maid, Reed (Lucille Sharp) who has an alerter eye than Obrien’s nephew Alfred (Matt Milne) and courts him:

to Miss Obrien goinng about trying to help Alfred when she gives Thomas a strong comeuppance by having the nerve to steal all his Lordship’s fancy shirts and putting them in a trash burner: Thomas’s fooling Alfred into burning a small spot on Matthew’s dinner jacket is petty stuff to this. Her intense desire to help her nephew shows her mother instinct. And she has all along existed on the other end of a spectrum to where the Dowager looks at the world, her sceptical wit is as good as Maggie Smith’s and she delivers her lines equally deadpan.

The palette of this part is dark, dark colors, a lack of light, downstairs and the prison are more frequently seen than upstairs which is itself often night-time.

The mini-series costume drama is easy and even natural to respond to as it imitates life’s rhythms through its exploitation of time and character bonding, but it is not easy to explain its complicated art: the weaving patterns and juxtapositions of the multiplot-structure with their climaxes in ritual group scenes (it need be no more or less than a dinner or shooting party or picnic)
become tedious when outlined. Its aesthetics and tropes are that of women’s art, which is often mocked. The gnomic advice of Mrs Leveson to Lord Grantham in the part’s penultimate scene is meant as much for women as it is for (a small class of people after all, Lords losing their money):

Mrs Leveson: You know the way to deal with the world today is not to ignore it. If you do, you’ll just get hurt.
Lord Grantham: Sometimes I feel like a creature in the wild whose natural habitat is gradually being destroyed.
Mrs Leveson: Some animals adapt to new surroundings. It seems a better choice than extinction.
Lord Grantham: I don’t think it is a choice. I think it’s what’s in you.
Mrs Leveson: Well, let’s hope what’s in you will carry you through these times to a safer shore.

And they drink to it.

Is it too much to see Downton Abbey as a habitus in Bourdieu’s sense: where we see dramatized from a woman’s perspective and art (the soap opera) “the lifestyle, the values, the dispositions and expectation of particular social groups that are acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life.” As long as we read against the grain Fellows’s persistent reactionary lessons, which the dramatic form and characters provide much undermining of, I think it is.

Ellen

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Reading ghost stories, at the Winter Solstice: Oliphant, Wharton, M.R. James

John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-93) A lady in a garden by moonlight (1882)

From BBC film adaptation of M. R. James’s The Ash Tree, 1975

Dear friends and readers,

This Christmas I revived on all three of my list-servs reading and discussion of Christmas ghost stories — or, failing ghosts (the case of Anthony Trollope, too strong a sceptic for this kind of thing), just stories meant for Christmas (we read “Christmas at Thompson Hall”). It is a long custom-sanction’d habit to tell ghost stories at the Winter Solstice, and I’d read some with others a few years ago for a couple of years in a row, and made a gothic section on my website for some of our conversations (see. e.g., Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “Lost Ghost”). On two lists people read with me, and on a third a couple of people watched the YouTube presentations I had found.

So, on the evening of this (fulfilling as it happened) Christmas Day I thought I’d re-tell one, offer a brief synopsis and YouTube of another, some links to powerful ones and an explanation from whence this urge to tell ghost stories Winter Solstice derives.

I found myself reading a-new, finding new qualities in Margaret Oliphant’s “Old Lady Mary.” Oliphant’s most powerful fiction is a ghost novella, The Beleaguered City, where, as in “Old Lady Mary,” part of the power of the story comes from the desire of the dead beloved and loving person to reach one another, in response to a shared loss and loneliness.

19th century illustration of Beleaguered City

The story as I first understood it (here’s the online text):

In brief: a very old lady, ‘Old Lady Mary’, who is very rich and alone, takes the daughter of a distant cousin, nearly a child, without anyone else to turn to, into her house. She is all that can be loving and tender and good to the child as she brings her up. She is told that she must make a will out which will leave her money to young Mary, but cannot get herself to do it. She cannot face the reality she will die, has always herself been because of her wealth sheltered. Lady Mary resents advice, and avoids the lawyers by playfulness. She does however write a codicil, leaving everything to the girl, but she hides it away.

She dies, and the young girl is left desolate.

This begins the story which then takes us through the young girl’s fear, loss, humiliations at the hands of the family who takes over Lady Mary, her guardian’s house — they don’t mean to hurt her, but they put her in her place. She is now their servant. At the very end of the story we are told it was finally found, but that is in a coda and is not important.

The story is told from the point of view of Old Lady Mary after she has died — when she is a ghost, trying to make contact and reparation, retrieval is too late. Her presence is felt but the living act towards her frivolously, foolishly. Ghosts make them uncomfortable. The story is aimed at Dickens’s Christmas Carol, by then an iconic story where all can be undone, retrieved, redeemed. Not so, says Oliphant. Less seriously, she has some fun gently mocking the way ghosts are treated in stories.

The curious effect is to make us believe in Lady Mary as a ghost; to take her seriously. This is no silly story for people who want titillation or reassurance.

These are certainly besides the point to Lady Mary who is desperate to make contact with the young Mary. But, she supposes that she wants more than emotional catharsis, forgiveness, and release. She wants to help her. (Think Tiny Tim.) She wants more than to compensate; she wants to retrieve, to make up for past mistakes, and finds she cannot make genuine contact. She
has convinced herself her attempts her unselfish because there’s the codicil to be found and then the young Mary will own the house where she is now a servant. But ghosts are laughed at or make people nervous. Their paraphernalia is absurd.

The climax of the story is in a obscure but precisely described vision of the young girl. From all her troubles and the disquiet and upset brought on by Lady Mary’s efforts, the young Mary grows ill, and, as in a dream, for a split second sees Lady Mary who feels she is seen. In that moment the girl holds out her hand and Lady Mary feels she has been forgiven. After all she discovers she needs no nothing more. That’s it. We get a sense the young Mary and the old Lady Mary were face to face. But we are not sure. It might just be in the ghost’s mind. Young Mary never fully explains what she feels because people would laugh, and she’s not sure what she saw though she did from the beginning forgive & never hated her ex-guardian. She was taught by the old lady not to expect much.

The last enigmatic line of the story: ‘Everything is included in pardon and love’.

Re-reading: I was more than ever persuaded Oliphant had Dickens’s one benign and perhaps other Christmas season texts in mind where all is made up for in a gush of end-of-story forgive and forgetfulness (modern term “Healing”). But I felt this time that Old Lady Mary however stumblingly and ambiguously did retrieve the situation and felt she reached the young girl she now realized she had loved so.

She does not get to reach out to young Mary directly, cannot have the satisfaction for sure which she is reaching out for soon after the tale opens. In life she could have made sure young Mary understood she was sorry for how she had behaved in life, what she had done in death, but still we are told the old woman managed to reach someone and point to where the will was and the will is found. The understanding and forgiveness are left ambiguous. We do not know for sure that the girl got the money she so desperately needed, but enough is put before us to assume so. How life-like.

I realized how much it’s a heroine’s text. Much of the story is spent in Lady Mary as a ghost’s mind and that is very unusual. I want to stress that. I dare say almost all ghost stories, we are not permitted to get close to the ghost. They are kept at a distance. Again, they are mostly scary, malevolent, Kafka-esque figures. The intensely benign aim of ghost Lady Mary’s efforts is as rare as Dickens, but with Dickens we do not enter the ghost’s consciousness. And show the ghost failing to reach.

Her story in this way shows belief in an afterlife and ghosts around us. The ambiguous wispy signals of seances you see are ghosts trying to reach us and unable to as God has made it too late. I think we may take it that this is how Oliphant understood the absurdity of what happens at seances. My outstanding favorite line from Downton Abbey is the Scots housekeeper’s retort to the lady’s maid’s conventional appeal,

“Don’t you believe in spirits?”
“I do not believe they play boardgames.”

By contrast, Oliphant has it, it’s that God will not let the dead reach us. She was a firm believer in the afterlife. I should stress that. These are not the kinds of ghost stories where the story is strictly speaking a metaphor. In Oliphant’s case her husband, both sons, nephew and a niece all pre-deceased her. To believe they carried on elsewhere was apparently one way she could endure her raw grief and continual sense of desperate loss.

I found it a much more moving story than I did the first time round.

Michelle Dockery could play the part of young Mary very well. Now known for her part as Lady Mary Grantham in Downton Abbey, she was much better as the unnamed governess in Sandy Welch’s 2009 Turn of the Screw)

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BBC film adaptation of “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedrale” by M.R. James

It should be said most ghost stories are instances of female gothic, many have been written by women, and they are often ways of presenting the real vampirage over women by men and societies in general. This was a speciality of Edith Wharton whose “Kerfol” I reread last week. The writer need not be a woman, and the vulnerable figure can be a man (as they just about all are in M.R. James’s stories (“The Stalls”). But the one I read from 3 I chose by M.R. James all set in the 18th century was such a story, and gentle reader here it is online and as a YouTube

The film features a very young Edward Petherbridge, and with his and other actors’ help, the BBC group has brought out the terror and power and high violence of an MRJames story usually there, but in muted subjective form. The film version brings out the terror and horror. It’s the story of an 18th century squire-aristocrat who has returned to his estate and country house is haunted by the ghosts of women beaten, tortured and then hung as witches and that this is who the ghosts are that destroy him by their hideous tales only emerges slowly.

What I like particularly about the whole of this early series from the BBC is instead of the usual prettied up 18thcentury (say of faithful Austen films) we see the raw realities of rural life. It’s not a story for the weak stomached if you can get it up to full screen.

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From the cover of an anthology of ghost stories by women written at the turn of the 19th into 20th century: Restless Spirits

Gentle reader, it’s not hard to find potted explanations of the origin of ghost stories as matter for Christmas. But it’s often-half-hearted. How did this habit emerge?

I’ve a different explanation than most I’ve seen. This festival comes at the end of each year. Says John Donne: “‘Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s …” It’s natural to look back, to remember, indeed that’s one of the functions of this ritual time. And in many years of our lives, we lose people. Before the 20th century death was ubiquitous for young and old. This year my mother died. I was first drawn to ghost stories after my fathere died, irretrievably gone, and I could not make up wrongs that had happened. Psychologically I would feel his presence in my mind lurking.

This year I found myself remembering more cheerfully a good friend I met here on the Internet, who joined in various reads, who discussed, and who I was lucky enough on one fine night to spend an evening in Brooklyn with at a party with two of her close friends, Linda Ribas. She died in summer, too young to have left us. She read some of these stories with us on WWTTA, Henry James on Trollope19thCStudies, an 18th century novel by a woman on EighteenthCenturyWorlds. She especially loved pictures, John Atkinson Grimshaw a favorite, and landscapes, and I’ve included one by Grimshaw, and another favorite of hers by Nell Blaine. We miss her on WWTTA

Nell Blaine (1926-96), Winter Trees from Studio

So ghost stories come from this kind of remembering, not that in my case at any rate I think we are going to reach anyone after death. Death is annihilation. But we can remember them. And then the ghost is picked up and becomes a vehicle for entertainment, instruction, artful absorption, a suspension of disbelief.

I often assigned ghost stories when I taught the gothic and found students were fascinated by this sub-genre (mode) of a subgenre (short fiction for magazines) — for ghost stories are very artful configurations.

Ellen

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The Gothic Wanderer & Teaching the Gothic

Darkness

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

The Gothic Wanderer by Tyler Tichelaar

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friedrich, Woman at the Window (1822)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friedrich, Evening

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

Ellen

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Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing

From The Grass Is Singing, a Studio 4 film (1962)

Dear friends and readers,

Returning to my promise to try to write shorter more frequent blogs, over the past week and one half I’ve been mesmerized by one of Doris Lessing’s early novels: The Grass is Singing.

Lessing is the kind of writer who can produce such very different books (and thus takes on pseudonyms so as not to disappoint her readership under her first name): she has the intensely realistic social critique novel and/or memoir, often with a heroine at the center (but it can be a cat), where we are invite to experience the nature and sources of commonplace destruction of people, places, environment, relationships, communities on this earth. The Golden Notebook belongs to this type, and alas has overshadowed the others, e.g., The Summer Before the Dark, The Memoirs of a Survivor, and A Small Personal Voice. I remember being mesmermized by The Summer Before the Dark.

She also writes allegories where the action is fantastic, and susceptible to moralistic exhortation, feminist, anti capitalist, to my mind not persuasive because so unreal (you can prove anything when you get to make up the evidence), often dwelling on exterior delineation, e.g., the Martha Quest books, the Canopus in Argos series (some under a pseudonym). There are writers where even the stance or message is utterly different between two or more sets of books (e.g, Margaret Drabble with her traditional heroine’s texts versus successful careerist books; Margaret Atwood again with heroine’s texts, this time made contemporary versus environmental fantasies & allegories). In Lessing it’s the realization.

The epigraph to the novel tells us the title comes from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland which is then immediately parsed for us:

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the rumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico, co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Hirnavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder

It is by the failures and misfits of a civilization that one can best judge its weaknesses.

The story: We begin with a brutal murder. Mary Turner, a white woman has been killed by Moses, her male black house-servant. The novel seems to hark back to Olive Schreiner in its immediate reaching out to use the incident for a depiction of the class and racial divides of South Africa, countryside and town, and a sense of landscape dreadfully hard to endure, farm, survive in.

Then we move back to focus on Mary whom we first meet as a exhausted corpse. While not overtly feminist, we experience how she was driven to marry Dick Turner, a man she barely knows after years of living a detached successful enough (not unhappy) life in an office as a clerk. Lessing says Mary’s way of life offering liberty to women would not be possible in the era she is writing the book, 1950; that’s interesting. It means women have recently lost ground.

Mary is driven because she begins to overhear people mocking her, feels she is somewhat ostracized. Delicately it’s suggested people assume she’s a closet lesbian. She is not. She didn’t want to marry because she saw the misery of her impoverished parents, and especially mother’s life and now she finds she’s
repeating it. There is much compassion for the man too.

A colorized still from the 1962 movie

As with Schreiner, a contrast is set up between the veld and the city. The city is hollow, hypocritical, anonymous, mindless impersonal relationships which based themselves on daily repetition of numbing activities (like drinking), but the veld
is hot, dry, impossible to make a living on unless you pour huge amounts of money in and pay no wages for work; death dwells there; catastrophe and egoistic patterns of behavior where people lose perspective emerge. In both places a race and debt system controls everyone’s behavior. Mary’s husband, Dick, refuses to be co-opted into the debt system; he wants to live in harmony with his land and eek a subsidence life from it. This means living in continual bare poverty with small groups of crops providing small amounts of money from month to month. A tin roof which makes the heat worse. No holidays.

In Claire Denis’s White Material (partly based on this book), she emphasized Mary’s hatred of the store Dick tries to run as a version of what partly killed her mother as it died.

Feeling herself to be going mad with heat, poverty, loneliness, nothing to do, Mary at least determines to flee. She takes what has has left of decent clothes, what she can put together to get to a train (but she has to enlist a disapproving neighbor to drive her there), and leaves a note. Once back in town she goes to her old boss whose ad for a person to fill her old job she saw. He tells her sorry he’s just gotten someone else. A lie. She doesn’t look right and anyway she’s married. He’s shocked and alienated – at her looks too. The forces that drove her to this marriage are driving her back. Dick is at the hotel when she returns. He is abject and desperate and she returns.

Mary demands a child. Let’s have a baby and it will give us a meaning. He refuses. A child will only make life harder and how can they bring another human being up with any hope or good life in this place. Mary tries to get him to plant tobacco in huge amounts (he does borrow money) to make cash crops, but the year is a bad one and the crop fails. He hates what it has done to his land.

For a short while his behavior has (from Mary’s standpoint) been better, but he sickens badly. Then she has to run the team in the field; she is ugly in her behavior, inhumane, taking out her despair on them. A physician tells her they must build a decent roof, renovate the house to get rid of the bugs, and take a 3 month holiday. He offers no funds, but does not charge.

Mary has been taking out her rage on her house servants, and her one pride is that she is above them. She treats them like instruments, scolds, slaps, insults. Gradually no one will work for her, and there is left only Moses, and Dick now menaces her: he warns her not to lose Moses. To keep Moses she must bend, and we see him take over as she weakens, sickens, comes to depend on him to dress her, to make her eat. It’s suggested she begins to go to bed with him while Dick is out in the field all day with a small group of black men.

So, it’s a thoroughly implicitly feminist story. An anti colonialist expose of the capitalist system and the lives of poor to middling people who try to escape their grinding lives by emigrating. This is the set of people Trollope wrote his colonialist stories about too (see Returning Home). They mostly die or go to pieces or somehow, just, survive.

But the novel’s greatness is not in this message as in the way the prose begins to soar as Lessing enters Mary’s mind and we exist inside what Mary sees and feels as she desperately holds on against disintegration. It’s here her genius shows itself.

The outer pattern is that of The Golden Notebook. No we do not have four parallel differently colored notebooks where the action in each shows us versions of the heroine — in contemporary London as a bourgeois divorcee living off the proceeds of her one successful novel; in South Africa as a communist; as a fictional heroine invented by herself as magazine writer; as a diarist writing down what is said as she visits a psychiatrist. Then all dissolves into one golden notebook, a sort of final plunge in the final notebook which became identified with the almost Lawrentian idea that what the heroine needed was a long series of good orgasms.

At the conclusion of The Grass Is Singing we also have a dissolution. The heroine has lost her struggle and we return to the impersonal third person perspective we began with. An outsider, a neighbor who was the man who found the dead body now comes to the farm in hopes himself of taking it over and also out of pity for Dick. He sees a woman who has gone utterly to pieces, and become a sort of subject presence to her black servant and her husband gone equally crazed with his inability to cope with what’s needed in capitalist farming. The long stretch of meditation is extraordinary (some typical utterances from the book), but the insight is not sheerly erotically based as the circumstantials details of the disintegration have been exterior to Mary as well as what was in her and Dick.

Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people’s company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

Dick often stood at the edge of the field, watching the wind flow whitely over the tops of the shining young trees, that bent and swung and shook themselves all day. He had planted them apparently on an impulse; but it was really the fruition of a dream of his. Years before he bought the farm, some mining company had cut out every tree on the place … it wasn’t much, planting a hundred acres of good trees that would grow into straight, white stemmed giants; but it was a small retribution; and this was his favorite place on the farm. When he was particularly worried, or had quarreled with Mary, or wanted to think clearly, he stood and looked at his trees …

Mary, with the memory of her own mother recurring more and more frequently, like an older, sardonic double of herself walking beside her, followed the course her upbringing made inevitable. To rage at Dick seemed to her a failure in pride; her formerly pleasant but formless face was setting into lines of endurance ….

Though what thoughts of regret, or pity, or perhaps even wounded human affection were compounded with the satisfaction of [Moses'] completed revenge, it is impossible to say. For, when he had gone perhaps a couple of hundred yards through the soaking bush he stopped, turned aside, and leaned against a tree on an ant-heap And there he would remain, until his pursuers, in their turn, came to find him.

We are told briefly (by the narrator) the evil was not this woman, nor was there anything wrong with her, nor her husband, and by implication, not even this “wicked” angry (enraged) black man, but the evil was all around them. The words refer to her past, the farm, how they have been taught to cope. Alas, many readers will not get what these vague or general pronouncements mean: she means the way Mary was driven to marry, the way Dick was not permitted to love his land and cultivate it without exploitation (as economically it’s not viable), the whole race system which when the black man is taken away is referred to when he is made to stand for “hurt human affection.”

In the book this is not spelled out clearly in the way I have just done, only implied and the book could be read as simply a story about a weak or neurotic woman. In her movie, Claire Denis makes sure that we see the larger picture and she writes a part for Isabelle Huppert which turns her into a strong presence who does not turn mad or become a slave, but is externally destroyed by the black revolution. There is a wikipedia article which sums the book up this way:

The Grass Is Singing is a bleak analysis of a failed marriage, the neurosis of white sexuality, and the fear of black power that Lessing saw as underlying the white colonial experience of Africa.[citation needed] The novel’s treatment of the tragic decline of Mary and Dick Turner’s fortunes becomes a metaphor for the whole white presence in Africa.[citation needed] The novel is honest about the fault-lines in the white psyche.

I think from the lacunae in The Grass Is Singing we see why Lessing turns to fantastical books with super-strong (supposedly exemplary admirable) characters and why her rhetoric remains unsatisfying. Lessing has said that people must force themselves, through effort of imagination, to become what they are capable of being, so there is a judgmental view in the book, a way of presentation that can be read as a punishment.

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907), Girl with Cat

To return to her reading of Eliot’s poem, it’s almost silly to epitomize its meaning as about how failures and misfits reveal to us the weaknesses of society. Eliot’s poem is about a peace that can come when you give up the illusions of hope through civilized progress. Some might call it equally despair, but when the grass is felt to sing with life we are not being exhorted to find ways to build and share better tractors.

The Grass Is Singing is a great book because it shows us human nature and the worlds we create unsparringly.

Ellen

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Found in Translation: To translate seemed to me a beautiful thing to do

In the long winter of 1784, which I passed in Normandy, this little Novel fell into my hands … for their amusement, I translated [into English] as I read [the French], the most striking passages of the story; which appeared to me so interesting that I was induced to translate the whole; or rather to write it anew in English — Charlotte Smith, from her preface to her Manon

The idea of making a name for myself in the Republic of Letters animated all my faculties — Victorine de Chastenay, on first beginning to translate Radcliffe’s Udolpho

Pierre Arnaud’s recent translation of The Romance of the Forest

Dear friends and readers,

You will instantly recall that last month under a similar heading, I wrote about how I was working on a proposal to give a paper at this coming summer’s Chawton conference on women and translation: I didn’t fall asleep over my book after all (!). Well I did a good deal of reading and sent along two different options.

I discovered that Charlotte Smith really changed Prévost’s Histoire de Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731) and Gayot de Pitaval’s Causes Célèbres et Interessants (1734-44) to bring into the English imaginary explosively transgressive reality-based material from sexual and familial life. In Smith’s Manon L’Escaut, or the Fatal Attachment, Prévost’s enigmatic text intended to justify amoral decisions for aristocratic male readers becomes a story genuinely focused from the point of view of a pro-active heroine with a realistic pragmatic consciousness. I also found that her Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake (1790) her first fully poetic landscape novel was translated into French by M. De Montagne, who made of it a romantic “paysage.” Montagne’s romantic translation is really melodious, I loved the sounds of the French, it was like verse in prose. Smith turned gothic and sentimental romance into vehicles for critiquing the ancien regime as it was experienced in the UK at the time. Montagne helped make these sort of landscapes an accepted mode in France.

Lidia Conetti’s recent Italian translation of Radcliffe’s Udolpho: sometimes it’s better than Radcliffe or Chastenay

When I went back to Chastenay’s 1798 translation of Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) I discovered Chastenay resembles Radcliffe in her reformist radical agenda, in her case much modified by her family’s devastating experience of the revolution (including imprisonment, lose of property, and her father having nearly been guillotined). She also identifies with Emily St. Aubert, Radcliffe’s heroine. What Chastenay loses in subtlety, she replaces in much more social understanding of real life experiences of unjust imprisonment, familial abuse, murders, and harrowing hostage experiences. She carries over Radcliffe’s sheer sensibility of into a focused forceful romantic paysage which adds to Radcliffe’s nightmare scenarios of dreams of nervous distraught pursuit and chase, and perhaps remembered experiences of near rapes (incest?).

A later 19th century cover to Chastenay’s translation shows an awareness of the depth of inward strangeness in Radcliffe-Chastenay

Nonetheless, I wanted to suggest that reading these texts (as people still do) as sheer female gothic obscures their critiques of the social, economic and political order which are valuable in themselves, which influenced other important books (e.g., George Sand’s Consuelo/La Comtesse de Ruddolstadt, influenced by Radcliffe through Chasteney).

Alas, I think I wrote about this more clearly here than I did in the official mandarin-type proposal. I am just so much better at writing casually in letter style. I thought by having two sets of texts I could make my argument about the value of these translated texts more strong. I would not present an analysis of each text as that would take far too long but just my findings. It interested me too that Smith’s Manon was suppressed — perhaps people thought her strong amoral heroine dangerous — and people are still today unaware of how she alters that text to make Manon the center and an active heroine (at least in Manon’s mind). Montagne’s Ethelinde is also a nearly anonymous and thus disrespected text. So they make a neat comparison with Chastenay’s whose text is still read in France and countries where French is read. There are on the Net still the frontispieces for the volumes of her 1798 text. I saw a popular copy in a good bookstore when I was in Paris for 2 weeks once. Hers also has prestige and is well-known and yet I think there is but the one article by Dorothy Medlin on 4 (!) different translations of Udolpho into French and only one small part is on Chastenay text.

A frontispiece to a French text of one of the memoirs, life-writing, travel books to emerge from the French revolution & Napoleonic wars

On the other hand, it would be fun to to expand more on Udolpho and on Mémoires de madame de Chastenay, 1771-1815 (written between 1810 and 1817, published 1896). Chastenay lived to the mid-19th century; she knew and spoke with Napoleon (who treated her with respect); she translated Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village as Le village abandonne as a genuinely protest text. I’d really like to tell more people, expand on what I’ve already written about Radcliffe’s A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 (published 1795) (see my Nightmare of History in Radcliffe’s non-fiction Landscape). Radcliffe is so beautifully well-read in art books, architecture, cultures, and she is a sort of Girondist (rather like Madame de Roland), a serious reformer who means her novels to be taken in the way other novels of her era were which critiqued society. In her case the ancien regime.

Using Smith’s Prevost, Montagne’s Smith and Chastenay’s Radcliffe, a configuration of the three texts, I’d write and talk about translation. If I study Radcliffe & Chastenay’s lives, life-writing, travel, I’d write and about the two women writers, though the centerpiece would be a comparative translation study.

My larger goal is to call attention to a large body of work still ignored, to which these translations belong. When these books are studied the arguments often resemble those film adaptations once had to contend with: evaluation and judgement based solely on a one-to-one literal comparison with the assumption the first text is necessarily the most important and better. I want to show micro-analysis is still at the core of translation study but when we change our assumptions how much we have to learn and how many new and fascinating texts to read.

Hubert Robert’s Hermit in a Garden

I really enjoy reading and doing translation. It’s a real urge as such. One sits with books and books, dictionaries, thesauruses, different previous translations. Sheer language endeavour. Poetry as such. Books I’m interested in from this terrain include Isabelle de Montolieu’s influential translations of Austen into French (both of which I just bought from Amazon, complete with prefaces): Raison et Sensibilite (someone retyped the whole text, four columns a page), and La Famille Elliot, ou L’Ancienne Inclination (a facsimile, the volume labelled I contains the whole text). When Montolieu writes her prefaces to her translations of Austen, she assumes in the first no one will ever hear of Austen a decade from now nor S&S, and in the second her respect has grown enormously (she’s read Emma and MP) and feels she must translate more strictly but her sense of Austen’s place does not come near how she regards Smith (she translated one of Smith’s Solitary Wanderer‘s tales and provides a preface again).

I have written on and just delighted in Felix Fénéon’s gem, Catherine Morland (1898/99, reprinted by Gallimard 1946), and recently bought Pierre Goubert’s serious literary biography of Austen, a rare treatment in French (biographies of Austen do not abound outside English, not in French either); he translated her earlier novels and wrote about them in the Pleiade. I’ve read one of two 1807 translations Stael’s Corinne, ou L’Italie into English (one read and much admired by Austen), and it’s a cross between Radcliffe and Austen! have wanted to try Isabel Hill’s 1884 Victorian and did read thoroughly the brilliant Corinne or Italy by Sylvia Raphael (often unmentioned, she died young, her book printed as an Oxford Classic, 1998).

And I do want to read more translation studies. On my TBR pile is Belllos’s Is that a Fish in Your Ear? and Suzanne Levine’s The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American fiction. I need some outside goal, deadline, to help me do all this for if it’s so pleasurable, it’s hard work.

My proposal was turned down. I think probably most unfairly. To do myself justice and also keep my thoughts where I can find them again and share them with others, I’ve put my proposal on my website. “To translate seemed to me a beautiful thing to do: Translation as Matching Creative Act”. I’ve at least done myself that much justice. (Freedom the press and speech belongs to the woman who has a website.) As you know if you ever read my Sylvia blog I’m just an honorary Duchess aka ex-adjunct lecturer.

Ellen

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