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Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) and Henry Tilney (J.J. Feilds) entering the realm of the ancient Abbey, crossing the bridge (2007 Granada/WBGH Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies)

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at American University
Day: 4 Tuesday mornings, 9-45-11:15 am online,
Study Group 1620: The Heroine’s Journey
Office located at 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington DC 20016
Dr Ellen Moody

Description of Course:

We will explore the archetypal heroine’s journey across genres and centuries in the western Eurocentric tradition, from classical times to our 21st century female detectives. Our foundational books will be Maria Tatar’s The Heroine with 1001 Faces (written as a counterpart to Joseph Campbell’s famous and influential The Hero with a Thousand Faces), and Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey (click to reach the whole text online for free). Our four books will be Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales; Elena Ferrante’s Lost Daughter; and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. We will discuss what are journeys, the central experiences, typical plot-designs, characterizations, and events of the lives of our heroines of classical myth, fairy & folk tales (and connected to this historical romance and time-traveling tales), realistic fiction, and the gothic (and connected to this mystery/thrillers, detective stories). There are two recommended films as part of our terrain to be discussed: Outlander, S1E1 (Caitriona Balfe as Claire Beauchamp transported), and Prime Suspect S1E1 (Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison). I will supply some poetry (Atwood, Carol Ann Duffy, Marge Piercy), two scripts (for the serial episode of Outlander and the 2022 film adaptation of The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal), and one parodic modern short story (“Rape Fantasies” by Atwood), all as attachments.


Leda (Olivia Colman) stopping off to look at the sea sometime during her journey there and back (Lost Daughter, 2021)

Required Books (these are the editions I will be using but the class members may choose any edition they want):

Margaret Atwood. The Penelopiad. NY: Grove Press (originally O. W. Toad), 2005, ISBN 978-1-84195-798-2
Angela Carter. The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales. NY: Harper and Row, 1981. ISBN 0-06-090836X (reprinted with new codes many times)
Elena Ferrante. The Lost Daughter, trans. Ann Goldstein. NY: Europa, 2008.
Jane Austen. Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman. NY: Norton Critical Edition, 2004. ISBN 978-0-393-097850-6. Another excellent (good introduction, good materials at the back of the book) modern edition is the Longman Cultural text, ed. Marilyn Gaull. NY: Longman (Pearson Educational), 2005. ISBN 0-321-20208-2

Strongly suggested films:

Outlander, Season 1, Episode 1, called “Sassenach” Written Roger Moore, directed John Dahl. Featuring: Caitronia Balfe, Sam Heughan, and Tobias Menzies. Available on Netflix (and Starz), also as a DVD. I can supply a script for this one.
Prime Suspect, Season 1, Episode 1, called “Price to Pay 1 & 2.” Written Lynda La Plante, Directed Christoper Menaul. Featuring Helen Mirren, John Benfield, Tom Bell. Available on BritBox, YouTube and also as a DVD


Kauffmann, Angelica, Penelope Taking Down the Bow of Ulysses (18th century)

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion

June 6th: Introduction, Atwood’s Penelopiad, with a few of her Circe poems, and Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Big O” (from The World’s Wife)

June 13th: From Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales read “The Bloody Chamber” (Bluebeard), “The Courtship of Mr Lyon,” (Beauty and the Beast)”Puss-in-Boots,” “The Lady of the House of Love” (Sleeping Beauty plus), “The Company of Wolves” (Little Red Riding Hood). Please have seen Outlander S1, E1. Another movie you could see is the 1984 Company of Wolves, an extravagant fantasy bringing together a number of Carter’s fairy tales and fables; she is one of the scriptwriters. It’s available on Amazon Prime.

June 20th: Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, with Marge Piercy’s “Morning Athletes” If you are interested, see the film adaptation, The Lost Daughter, scripted & directed Maggie Gryllenhaal; while much is changed, it is absorbing and explains the book (Netflix film, also available as a DVD to buy); it features Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, and Jack Farthing (as Leda’s husband). I can supply a script for this one too.

June 27th: Austen’s Northanger Abbey, with discussion that links the gothic to modern mystery-thriller and detective stories. I will send by attachment Margaret Atwood’s “Rape Fantasies” (a very short story). Please have seen Prime Suspect S1, E1-2. If you are interested, see the film adaptation, Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies, directed by Jon Jones; while much is changed, this one is also absorbing and adds to the book (available as a YouTube and DVD); it features beyond the two principals, Carey Mulligan, Liam Cunningham (General Tilney) and Sylvestre Le Touzel (Mrs Allen)

First still of Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison, late arrival at crime scene, driving herself (Prime Suspect, aired 6 & 9 April 1991, “Price to Pay”)

Select bibliography (beyond Tatar’s Heroine with a 1001 Faces and Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey):

Beard, Mary. Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations. Liveright, 2013. Early refreshingly jargon-free feminist readings of documents left to us.
Bojar, Karen. In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018.
Carter, Angela. Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings [non-fiction, essays, sketches, journalism], ed Jenny Uglow, introd. Joan Smith. NY: Penguin, 1998
Cavender, Gray and Nancy C. Jurik, Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect. Urbana: Univ of Illinois Press, 2012.
Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 2004.
Frankel, Valier Estelle. 3 books: Symbolism & Sources of Outlander: Adoring Outlander: On Fandom, Genre, and Female Audience; Outlander’s Sassenachs: Gender, Race, Orientation, and the Other in the TV series. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015-17 (also on later books, Duane Meyer, The Highland Scots of North Carolina, 1732-1776. Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina, 1961.)
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. 1983; rep, rev Harvard UP, 1993.
Gordon, Edmund. The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography. London: Chatto & Windus, 2016.
Hirsh, Marianne. The Mother-Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Indiana: Bloomington UP, 1980
Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. 2nd Edition. Chicago: Univ of Illinois, 1995.
Moody, Ellen, “People that marry can never part: A Reading of Northanger Abbey, Persuasions Online, 3:1 (Winter 2010): https://jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol31no1/moody.html ; The Gothic Northanger: A Psyche Paradigm, Paper delivered at a EC/ASECS conference, November 8, 2008 online: http://www.jimandellen.org/austen/gothicna.html ; The Three Northanger Films [includes Ruby in Paradise], Jane Austen’s World (Vic Sandborn, April 6, 2008: online: https://janeaustensworld.com/2008/04/06/the-three-northanger-abbey-films/
Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981.
Southam, B.C., ed. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion: A Casebook. London: Routledge, 1968.
Stevenson, Anne. “Diana Gabaldon: her novels flout convention.” Publishers Weekly 6 Jan. 1997: 50+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 15 Apr. 2016. Online.
Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood, Starting Out. Canada: Harper Flamingo, 1998.
Tomalin, Clair. Jane Austen: A Life. NY: Vintage, 1997.
Williams, Anne. The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: Univ Chicago P, 1995.


Claire (Caitronia Balfe) among the stones, just arrived in 1743 (Outlander S1, E1, 2015)


Burt Lancaster as Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina (from Il Gattopardo, Lucino Visconti, 1963)

Dear friends and readers,

This book represents a complete turnabout for me, and twice: I started the term regretting that I had chosen this book as not having enough story to it, as too reactionary, maybe static, and, before it was time to discuss it with the class, I fell in love with it as quietly subtly intensely active (though the most overt actions, the battles are off-stage), profound in its understanding of how politics works, encompassing in an epitomizing way of the history and culture of history from well before to well after the Risorgimento, but centering on one of its central phases, Garibaldi’s invasion of Sicily. I had partly been influenced by my first watching of the film in the American version (cut down, and dubbed by others, except for Lancaster’s voice, which was his own), which on first blush (I now think I was so tired), I found so flat and stilted; but again, before it was time to discuss the film with the class, I had watched the whole of the Italian version (with all speaking Italian except Lancaster, and here he was dubbed), 3 hours and 40 minutes and was mesmerized, deeply affected. In fact I watched it twice, and then four different features about it, Visconti, Lancaster, the book.

Lampedusa was a great poet whose work emerges from a kind of exile imposed on himself; his novel as great historical novel which while presenting a version of the Risorgimento which many would say is wholly inadequate and reactionary, nonetheless stands up to scrutiny because of the scepticism and irony with which just about everything is viewed, the main character’s real intelligence and insight into everyone he meets, and his essential kindly humanity. It is often not mentioned that he fought in World War Two; he did live a life apart immersed in literary and art study, but he also experienced much of life — like Italo Calvino’s nun who goes nowhere. He presided over the decay and loss of his family estate, watched the world lurch through changes from the opening of the century to a decade after World War Two.

It is partly an autobiographical book because the prince is based on Lampedusa’s real great-grandfather, a learned, solitary (despite being surrounded by people), non-professional scientist when there was no such thing as a scientific profession and a rentier; he devoted himself to astronomy. Fabrizio is the book as he is the movie: his quiet, melancholic, ironic self fills its spaces; fundamentally he’s alienated from his society while belonging utterly to it – he belongs nowhere and is at its core. He lives just outside the rough and tumble of the world while being intensely aware of how it works. The prince’s nephew, Tancredi, is partly based on Lampedusa’s own nephew (minus the cold callowness) — his nephew has today turned one of the castles in the book into a tourist house, set in a beautiful landscape.

What we see in our book is a specific phase of the risorgimento: how it was experienced in the early 1860s and at and around Palermo. The book opens with our characters being told of the military come, Garibaldi at the head winning again and again, everywhere, sometimes fighting fiercely, others being welcomed in a celebratory spirit (Naples). Garibaldi is the great absent-presence of this book. He is never on stage but we hear about him all the time – Scott is a lot kinder and brings his world historical characters on stage, but Scott is not such a conservative as Lampedusa who didn’t want to dramatize Garibaldi as his presence would have contradicted the prince’s idea that all revolutions do is replace an old corrupt order with a new one.

I find the wikipedia article provides an excellent synopsis and phase-by-phase plot-summary. This is well put:

The novel is the story of Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina,[3] a 19th-century Sicilian nobleman caught in the midst of civil war and revolution. As a result of political upheaval, the prince’s position in the island’s class system is eroded by newly-moneyed peasants and “shabby minor gentry.” As the novel progresses, the Prince is forced to choose between upholding the continuity of upper class values, and breaking tradition to secure the continuity of his family’s influence. A central theme of the story is the struggle between mortality and decay (death, fading of beauty, fading of memories, change of political system, false relics, etc.), and abstraction and eternity (the prince’s love for the stars, continuity and the resilience of the Sicilian people). In a letter to a friend, the author notes: “Be careful: the dog Bendicò is a very important character and is almost the key to the novel”. This heraldic emblem is the key to destruction, in the sense that ruin comes even to the dog.”

Jeffrey Meyers’s literary close reading in the Italian Quarterly is also suggestive: The Leopard is a richly symbolic novel from the first scene during the Rosary to the final moment when the carcass of Bendicò is flung out the window. The symbols form two categories: there are those which emerge and disappear only to be found later in a somewhat varied form, like a pattern of dolphins leaping through the sea. These may be called recurrent symbols, which only grow to their fullest meaning toward the end of the book, and through their very expansion advance the theme of the novel. Through repetition and variation they function also as leitmotifs and thereby effect a structural unity. The eviscerated soldier, the stars, Sicily itself, and Bendicò are recurrent symbols, woven like threads into the fabric and texture of Lampedusa’s art.

The second mode of symbols are used more conventionally; they occur and evoke a higher meaning only once. But these static
symbols often appear in an expanded moment which allows their meanings to reverberate through the novel and foreshadow the future. Prophecy is used structurally to link the present with the future and to give an air of predestined inevitability to important actions. The most successful symbols in this group are the series of objets d’art which illustrate and prophesy the love of Tancredi and Angelica….”

I love the houses, the wandering through the rooms of Tancredi and Angelica, how they get lost in the palace at Donnafugato, the highly ironic and despairing political scenes  — even if the mayor wins he lies about the count so that it should be unanimous; the cry of anguish of the progressive man that the prince will do nothing for the immiserated poor; then the luxury and delicacy of the ball itself, finally how gently the prince died — how he wanted to go. The gentle comedy.

I leave my reader to peruse the rest of these wikipedia articles (above, below, one on Lampedusa), and find and read the articles I cited in the comments

Lampedusa was motivated finally to write the book towards the very end of his life when he went to a literary fair and conference for the first time in many years and thought to himself I can do as well as these people – and of course felt he was coming to the end of his life – he was no longer well. He drove himself to finish it, and when he died, it had been rejected by a couple of the major Italian publishers. It’s sad to know he never knew of its publication nor the several short stories he wrote around the same time and readied for publication.

The initial reception was very mixed – to say the least. It was rejected and not until Eugenio Montale, a major poet, and Giorgio Bassani championed it, did it see the light of day as a book. Bassanio was not socialist and at one time was a fascist – so it was a political time-bomb. What happened was it sold phenomenally well. You can think of it as the Downton Abbey of its day.

Very slowly since it has gained much respect as a poetic masterpiece, psychological study of a particular kind of man at place in time, as a historical novel set in 1860 in Palermo where all around the main action slaughters are going on, and fierce politics – overheard by our prince and brought as news by his nephew, Tancredi, and experienced as a plebiscite where there seem to be (astonishing) no contrary votes.

In a kind of touristy essay – by a man who visited the cemetery in Palermo where the Lampedusa family is buried after he had read the novel many years before and once again – Richard O’Mara remarks that the Mayor we meet, Calogero, as the prince half-predicts, did found a Mafioso organization which still exists because when the Americans came in with their ambiguous Marshall Plan, they handed out a number of central positions to Mafioso agents.


The famous highpoint of the ball: the prince dances with his coming daughter-in-law

The film too did not initially get the respect it should have — because it’s a costume drama, and had star types at the center. But the sheer popularity of it won out. As with Hollywood movies when it comes time to give out prizes, they shower second-rate movies that were phenomenal successes at the box office, but later as the movie shows sustaining power, gains an audience, the film critics who count look again — or look louder. Over the years, this long unusual film for its time, Il Gattopardo, been studied and found to be immensely rich in dialogues, events, details, cinematography, and depth of emotion. It is also gently funny: the specifics of many of the characters make us laugh while we feel for them. It was filmed entirely on location, and use was made of real buildings, real churches, the Sicilian landscape, monuments, sky.

Again wikipedia did real justice to it. Here are some of my notes:

I was fully involved and discovered the movie to be (for 2 hours and 40 minutes) mostly a light comedy with melancholy undertones, with a simple story, focusing on the central male, the Prince played by Lancaster. He dominates the film and carries it — not an easy thing to do

Lancaster delivers a remarkable performance. The second star cast was Alan Delon and he speaks French so in neither version can you hear him. The one street battle scene (Garibaldi invades Sicily) is very well done, but at a distance and not long enough for the burden of meaning it’s asked to bear. The outlook is very anti-risorgimento with the political idea that the peasant world does not want to change; since we hardly see any we are not in a position to judge. The other idea that you have to permit change in order to keep things the same is acted out in an election presented in the film as useless. The class snobbery as in the book is not contradicted; there is no downstairs.

The scenes between the prince and a sort of hunting comrade and the middle mayor whose daughter, Angelica (Claudia Cardinale) the Prince’s nephew marries are among the best for understanding the characters and Visconti’s outlook (an aristocrat himself albeit a man of the left).

Beyond that the filming of the places is remarkable and the last quarter the film devoted to a ball whose different phases have different symbolic resonances — it reminded me very much of the balls in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind — we do glimpse that the nephew’s marriage is one of convenience, but as the inner life of his coming wife is downplayed and one of calculation — we don’t feel grief.

I like this comment about the ending of both book and film by Randy Boyagoda:

The novel’s appeal could be attributed to its beautiful prose (obvious even in translation), to its languid pacing, and to how it unfolds the many layers of intrigue and fidelity within a family and between a family and the people around them. But it’s this moment–the beginning of the Prince’s decline, and its rationales and causes–that makes The Leopard more than just another underappreciated classic. It’s this moment that makes it speak to the kinds of concerns we each have to deal with these days in our personal, professional, and faith lives … There is far more at play in the Prince’s Donnafugata dilemma than obvious irony and poetic social justice. Taken in the context of the whole novel, it is a superb evocation of what it means to be a serious person out of step with one’s time … What matters in each of these situations is accepting that you need to act for the greater good while also accepting the permanent possibility of a Pyrrhic victory


The last glimpse of Fabrizio as he walks home in the dark

Ellen


Cliff top — Aliano, Italy, in Lucania region

Dear friends and readers,

There is no doubt in my mind that the favorite text — the one most liked, respected over this past year that I’ve taught has been Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (published 1945). It’s common to call this wonderful meditative account of Levi’s time of forced exile at Grassano and then Gagliano a poetic masterpiece; it also provides a profound and empathetic explanation of how millions of people can become fascists, once again (alas) an important topic in our world today.

I offered this more concise and simple description of it the last time I wrote of it here:

It’s an ethnographic and anthropological study. It covers the year he spent in internal exile — a peculiarly Italian form of imprisonment descending from the Roman period, where a person is cut off, exiled from his or her community, isolated in a remote spot and watched to keep him or her from any kind of political activity, news of the world he or she understands. (A number of the Jewish and socialist/communist literati in Italy were treated this way: Ginzburg’s memoir includes a couple of years in Abruzzi.) Carlo Levi may be said to have thoroughly internalized his exterior culture — he acts as physician (he was trained to be a doctor), paints (his vocation), writes, joins in tangentially — which culture during his sojourn expands to sympathize with these strange and victimized (for centuries) people he finds himself among, whom since the Northerners know little of them, he is determined to bring before the world of his readers (the book was written in 1946 after Mussolini fell from power).

His conclusion that these people live in a timeless realm they cannot be plucked from is shown to be inadequate by his own account: He repeats many times that things there do not have to be the way they are; a wide government program well funded, providing irrigation, changing the financial laws, redistributing land, education, would transform the habitus and its people who have been given no opportunity, no good choices (like the working class whites of the US), exploited by every group that has taken power over them, and the result has been seething just repressed destructive violence. (The lesson for our era is more direct in Carlo Levi’s book’s conclusions than the above books.) He compels our attention by the riveted and insightful nature of the chronological settling in and living alongside story he tells. His sister visits him at one point, and we see this world from her experienced sophisticated compassionate eyes she registers shock and horror at a majority of children suffering from malaria, insects, uneducated, dressed in rags, with no hope for a better future than unending hard farm work which barely supports them — and is not enough to pay the overlords demanded taxes.


A detail from one of his embracingly beautiful depiction of the people of Lucania

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So let me go a little more into detail as it’s so relevant to our world today

The title of Levi’s book is a proverbial phrase often repeated by the local peasants and which `in their mouths may be no more than the expression of a hopeless feeling of inferiority. We are not Christians, we’re not human beings’. Levi explains its much deeper meaning: Eboli is `where the road and the railway leave the coast of Salerno and turn into the desolate reaches of Lucania. Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope, nor the relation of cause and effect, nor reason nor history’. Levi says in the second half, to begin reform you must begin to eradicate this idea they are inferior and their lives worth nothing. An intense empathy at the same time as he does not sentimentalize these people – he sees them out of clear sceptical disillusioned eyes – Levi mediates a gap between them and us. A new world cannot come from the plans or documents of a few enlightened men (and/or women).

The book sort of divides into two parts. Until about Chapters 12-13, we see him enter this hovel, what life with the widow is like, and get a series of portraits of fascist officials, then specific types (rather like Chaucer) of people doing specific jobs (postmaster, inspector, tax collector), all humanized, given psychological and social depth. The first half of the book might be described as his search for a place he can live with some hope of enacting his professions as a painter and now doctor. It takes two attempts: first he goes to live in a crumbling hospital-prison; then one of the upper class people in the village has a vacant three room building which can be turned into kitchen, bedroom, and studio, with a balcony. Levi then acquires a housekeeper and cook Giulia Venere, and settles in. But each step enables him to develop ideas about the place and people. We see the murderous (because so desperate) internecine family and frenemy politics, men who went to the America (mostly NYC) and having made a little money (almost inexplicably) come back to live in poverty once again – who they are and how they now live. Through the women whose children he cares for and a failed attempt to hire housekeeper and then successful one, he tells of the average lives of these women, almost perpetually pregnant, and most of the pregnancies not from husbands – gone away for years, many of their children dying, they too in their houses long hours of primitive tasks, the most important of which is food production.

The second half after he sets this up we get longer sections on history and politics, and some festivals he experiences, his own trip to the previous place he lived, home, his failed attempt to do something about the malaria. Levi here expatiates in compelling tales his political and philosophical point of view: we learn of the later 19th century wars of brigandage in southern rural Italy – a precursor in fascism. Though they had no political or philosophical POV Levi does adumbrate his political and philosophical point of view in his review of the wars of brigandage – a precursor in some ways to fascism, though they had no political or philosophical POV.

I find the whole long section about bringandate extraordinary. I know few texts like it. Among the utterances in this section are the crazed ideas that he quotes people spouting; they remind me of the crazed ideas Trump manages to evoke from his “base” as it’s called. People saying things you just don’t know where to begin to try to convince them otherwise

Basically he argues to have a real revolution one must break with the past. Italy never developed a full middle class bourgeoisie across the country; those who were middle class had developed through compromises with the upper classes – protectionism, rifling of state and taxpayers coffers; they absolutely excluded from any power working and lower middle class people. He was against notions of resistance; fundamental problems are too deep. This apparent passivity and unchangingness (which is what we find asserted in many reactionary and conservative books) is born of hopelessness and an inculcated sense of inferiority; what you have beneath that is a ferocity born of despair. His description of these people could describe Trump’s armed people on Jan 6th.

He also argues elsewhere (a book called Fear of Freedom) people are afraid of freedom; they fear liberty -this is very like Rousseau. Man is born free but everywhere in chains. To which a 19th century philosopher said this is to say sheep are born carnivorous and everywhere eat grass. A critique of western civilization – not to speak of tribal life. Religions seek certainty and stability in rituals and myths. Each life is an individual journey. Inherited codes and practices are only a kind of outer skin or protective layer – law, which must be reinterpreted over and over as circumstances and needs change.

The Risorgimento was basically the take over of all Italy by the form of government that had evolved in the north, in Turin and Piedmont and it wouldn’t do. It emerges from the Napoleonic take-over (invasion) of Italy which provoked the individual states and regions to go to war against the colonialist powers who had taken over Italy before Napoleon: Austria and France in the North, Venice itself over others, Spain in the south, the Ottoman empire, the south west: gradually after a series of wars, defeats and successes, until a culmination in the battles fought by Garibaldi, backed by the philosophy of Mazzini, and ideas of reform from Cavour, this Rising Again, took shape. One obstacle I’ve not yet mentioned was the Catholic Church and its grip on Rome; that was not broken until late in the 19th century.

What he does in his one fiction and his memoirs and travel books is reveal the inner workings of a society as a sort of anthropological study with the aim ultimately of emancipating people – of course now you come for gov’t helps in health, infrastructure, education. But that’s not the heart of what needs to be transformed. He much admired Antonio Gramsci another complicated brilliant man who was not directly murdered in prisons but whose health and selfhood so destroyed (like Oscar Wilde) 3 years later he died at home. But more important is a politics of position. That is achieved by getting purchase on what people remember, what they think is their history, what they read … That is by education. It’s crucial to educate people to know and think (if you are determined to control them) what favors you – that is what all this banning of books and unashamed attempt to repress modern education in schools and colleges is about. Books which reveal the true history of enslavement in this country, the Jim Crow era (a regime of terrorism) are crucial to teach so as to enable people to know who they are – and also in forming identities. People are sheep. Films and books matter.

The old order is dead. The new order cannot yet be born. In this interregnum a variety of pathological symptoms arise — Gramsci — that is what Levi is showing us in southern Italy

Levi’s book combines a people outside of History with Hope. He shows them being crashed into by History – in the form of the State – demanding taxes, conscription, its officers controlling people – but he sees hope of change

Families have been dispersed, houses devastated, property destroyed, states overturned. If these ruins were only material the world would quickly go back to what it was. But the old sense of the family has been lost, the old sense of home has changed, the old sense of property no longer has the validity it once had, the old sense of the State has lost all power. And something deeper has changed in men’s souls, something which is difficult to define, but which is expressed unconsciously in every act, every word, every gesture: the very vision of the world, the sense of the relationship of people with each other, with things and with destiny [from another text by Levi written in 1944].

He is convinced history is of essential importance even if the average person cannot see this, pp 137-38 Shakespeare’s earliest plays are histories – Wars of the Roses, government’s being overturned, tyrants emerging – he does not defend brigandage – of course not9 – but we need to understand it. One problem with the Jan 6th hearings is the kinds of questions people are allowed to ask in modern courts of law do not elicit from the answerers what we would like truly to know about them. Levi can find food for thought in the classics because he reads them – as it were aright. On p 141 we see him considering Virgil’s Aeneid not as it’s usually discussed but to bring out what Virgil is silent about.. Very violent societies – state (Trollope says) is that level of organization which has the monopoly on violence in any given area – that’s neutral but you can have different ways of electing and choosing that state. Blind urges to destruction gets us nowhere (that is what we are seeing the present GOP under Trump attempting today).


In a museum in Matera — a woman and children

There is much to entertain too. Funny stories: two men forbidden to carry on their relationship as resisters leave bowls of spaghetti out in a specific place for one another so they can eat the same meal at the same time. A story of resilience. There are poignant retellings of womens’ lives vis-à-vis their children. When he makes a serious attempt to get the local authorities to do something about the malaria, his license to practice is taken away. He submits a plan that worked in Grassano, and the Gagliano mayor forbids him to practice. This prohibition does enrage and rouse the people. At least one man dies directly as a result of his not being able to help him; another man has a ruptured appendix and every effort is made by his brother and Levi to get Levi to his side. They do not have the arms or wherewithal to riot as a mob, so they put on a play where they enact the roles of the people who truly are oppressing them as comic and horrible monsters. (There is also a Christmas play). He feels for animals and makes us feel for them: the women are forced to neuter their pigs and the ritual terrifies the women and the pigs: Levi describes their ordeal graphically.

There is cheerfulness too. For unexplained reasons Levi is given “time off” or “away” from Gagliano, to return to the more middle class Grassano, a sort of vacation from the monotony. He goes to cafes, participates in games, talk; among other things, the towns people also put on a play. He is treated like some kind of star. I felt he was treated as an extraordinary person and this worked on his sensibility a bit too strongly. But at the core of this book is his love for these people (although he cannot live here, does not belong) and atttempts to help them. The last couple of pages of the book repeat his political and moral ideas and are a vow to enact them politically if he survives. And he did.

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I conclude with a little life:

His years were 1902 – 1975. He grew up in Turin, both parents wealthy, his father a doctor. Levi trained as a doctor at first – we see that ability come into prominence in his time in Lucania. His sister with whom he was close and whose visit to Gagliano (as I said), provides an important section of the book – she brings some tools of his medical trade, some tools for his painting trade; a stethoscope is unheard of in this place. Luisa’s astonishment and shock when she visits this rural southern part of Italy for the first time enables us to see the place through the eyes of someone never come near such a place – horror especially at the children covered with insects so diseased so young – none of it necessary (she says and knows as this does not exist in the north). The theme of the book, through her eyes is, someone or people elsewhere have made the choices which lead to this environment and the peasants knowing no hope or nothing better have acquiesced – but are in their deepest selves very angry – whence among others fascism – we are seeing something of the same thing here in the US. Sister is a child psychologist, pediatrician at a time few women in Italy were highly educated and she begins immediately to make plans for people to enact on these people’s behalf.

By 1923 Levi had been living in Paris as a painter; by 1928 he had given up the profession of medicine and become a painter – and went back to Turin. He was also in Rome where he lived a good deal in the later part of his life. 1934 the year he was arrested for anti-fascist activity was the same year Mario Levi swims to safety in Switzerland; Levi had founded a party calling itself Justice and Liberty – 1929. Ginzburg belonged – so that’s how Natalia met him. There were spies or moles everywhere and one who presented himself as a pornographer (he had to pretend to some talent) was a member of the secret police. In 1936 Levi was released and moved quickly to Paris until the fall of Mussolini. He joined the Political Action Party (see just below), influenced by a politically active man named Gobetti (also turns up in Family Lexicon) edited papers and returning to hiding wrote. He took refuse in Southern France and also the Pitti Palace in Florence where he is said to have written Christ Stopped at Eboli. Throughout the 1930s, 40s fascist police a constant threat. Christ Stopped at Eboli was published by Einaudi for whom Natalia worked – so too Pavese and others – a very in group.


One of Levi’s own paintings: a vista, a view of Aliano

After the war, he met the woman who became his partner, Lenuccia Salva. 1950 he edited Italia Libera, identified as the voice of Partito d’Azione (Action Party). He wrote one novel, The Watch (Orologio) using some of this journalism I Rome. He was imitating non-fiction works – in the experimental mode popular among the more artistic – -elite – since Joyce’s Ulysses, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. They play games with time. The watch occurs over three days during which time the protagonist has lost his watch. He is doing for Italy and Rome after the war what he had done for Lucania during: recording life culture politics impingement of history. He wrote another marvelous meditative book about Italy just after the war: Fleeting Rome.

He lived a life of energy and fervor – he painted away, had lots of exhibits. His experiences in Sicily ae another semi-autobiographical book, Words are Stones (Le parole sono pietre) won a prestigious prize. Traveled to Germany & Italy and recorded what he saw – one book called The Future has an Ancient Heart. I like that. 1963 elected Senator on the communist ticket, died of pneumonia in January 1975.

Levi left much of his writing out of print or scattered and in 2002 was published Fleeting Rome, wonderful book – in seach of La Dolce Vita. Posthumous. There is no biography in English, and no inexpensive one in Italian or any other language. He was a communist; communists are erased; in the 1930s they didn’t get prizes, stories about them didn’t get prizes …

Christ Stopped at Eboli had a hard time penetrating the US market; early reviews by US people condemned it (this was the 1950s remember – with McCarthyism and John Birch Society on the war path) as propaganda. It made its way slowly and a film made hardly seen in the US Francesco Rosi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, a sort of neo-realistic documentary (1979) I have the first half of a faulty DVD set; the second disk is missing. There are Wonderful features about the making of the film, the director and Levi himself.


Filmed on location, here is the stairway leading up to the house Levi lived in.

He was buried in Aliano and today people come to tour Aliano to see his house; various signs tell you what he did here and there.
I must not leave out his dog, Barone. The film shows him taking Barone on by chance; in fact, he told people he wanted a dog for a companion, and this dog was a beautiful good-natured stray (in effect) and he was given him. Barone today is buried next to Levi’s father (presumably in Turin). The photo at the beginning of this section is of Levi and Barone.

Ellen


Donald Pleasance as Mr Harding playing his cello (1983 Barchester Chronicles, scripted Alan Plater

Dear friends and readers,

Yesterday’s session on Trollope’s The Warden via the online Trollope London Society reading group, was particularly good. The talk was that pleasurable and informative I think I’ll re-watch — Eric Williams, the man’s name, a retired teacher, projected the warm feeling and picturesqueness of The Warden one comes away with. New people were there, 112 altogether for the session. This testifies to the popularity of this novella among Trollopeans. We’re having an extra session this coming Monday — Trollope’s birthday “party” Dominic called it.

Eric Williams’s talk brought out the central elements Nicholas Shrimpton’s introduction in the new World Classics Oxford paperback covers thoroughly in The Warden — the way the text is made up of layers of different kinds of discourses, and that some of these are realistic enough characters in a domestic story (indepth meditations within characters), but others are satiric (using caricature), allusive (literary references as well as political ones to the real world of England at the time, especially church and presspolitics, and the Crimean war), burlesque (mock-heroic language and the kind of roman a clef feel of the supposed three boys of the Archdeacon who are not boys at all but over-the-top depictions of specific church and politicians at the time). The card game at Eleanor’s party had a few paragraphs very like Pope’s Rape of the Lock where what’s happening in the cards becomes a felt event as if the cards were active beings. So Trollope is going through different layers of reality. This is apparently what Shrimpton was referring to when he called it an experimental novel.


Nigel Hawthorne as Archdeacon Grantly in debate with Mr Harding

The question is, Does it work altogether? or do sometimes the different elements jar?


Catherine Morland’s journey to the abbey, driven and teased by Henry Tilney (2007 Granada NA, scripted Andrew Davies)

This calls to my mind the problem for some people reading Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey: on one level a young girl enters the world aka “le monde” (a 18th century trope); on another we have a gothic parody with the central female character, Catherine, a naif (a character as a satiric device). So does Catherine quite make sense? perhaps in NA too much is caught up in the central figure while in The Warden these different and contradictory kinds of things are diffused across the work? Yet in the later part of The Warden, there is an argument that Trollope’s satiric parody of Dickens’s sentimental radical protest novels go too far: for example, is does the hilarity of the absurdly exaggerated The Almshouse mirror too strongly and remain uncomfortably close to the novel we are reading called The Warden. Does suspension of disbelief break down?

I now say no.  That we must dismiss realism from our minds and Trollope’s style enables us to do this.

Since I’ve been reading and watching Agatha Christie’s stories (as books, as films) one of the central textural elements that makes The Warden a great work and Agatha Christie’s stories not is that the idyll in Christie is set apart; there is no world outside her villages (at least those I’ve read and seen thus far),and the village itself is presented in ways stripped of power structures.  In Trollope’s novella the story and idyllic surroundings are precisely embedded in the real outside world whose power structures are made transparent.  Consider the role of the train and London on the map in The Warden … So this layering and movement between types of characters is part of what made it a bud from which the whole series of the Barchester books could grow


Mr Harding wandering in the cathedral in the famous chapter, “A Long Day in London”, as he waits to see Sir Abraham Haphazard.

I feel I should add that insightful and informative comments were made after the talk. Only the talks are recorded; to encourage more participation and freedom of expressions conversations afterwards are not recorded, but sometimes add greatly to the experience. So one participant pointed out that although Trollope himself — or his narrator — seems to lean on the idea that John Bold’s intervention accomplished nothing much, and put at risk what the old men had (this is Archdeacon Grantly’s view); nevertheless a number of these egregious unfair distributions of inherited wealth in the church were re-arranged, or put a stop to, and there were genuine reforms. So a book like The Warden beyond being an unacknowledged Condition of England novel, also perhaps provided a spur to do some good. “You have to start somewhere.” I add that reform often comes top down, that is change is made in who holds onto the power by those in power and this too can bring improvement in people’s lives.

The wonderfulness of Alan Plater’s Barchester Chronicles, the 1983 7 part serial was brought up too — how beautifully it’s acted and how faithful it seems. How funny at times. The music and setting. For myself beyond Donald Pleasance, I just love Barbara Flynn as the plain spoken sensible Mary Bold.

Ellen


The ensemble for King Lear: Patrick Paige as Lear, Michael Milligan as fool, Shirine Babb as Kent, Matthew J Harris as Edgar

The director and a few of the actors know the deep pessimism and agony of what humanity is, is the core of the play, that it is utterly serious, but the actors have been encouraged to demean and undermine it with coarse humor, and project its impact through the techniques of action-adventure noise & (for the women) sexy costumes


Amanda Assucena as Anna, José Pablo Castro Cuevas as Vronsky

So to sum up, this is a ballet which fails to tell in the most primitive terms the story of the book, caricatures the depths of the characters, leaves out much that counts that could have been used for dance, and emphatically ends on the worst of morals.

Dear friends and readers,

Nonetheless, far be it from me to suggest you should not rush out and see the King Lear (Peter Marks who never does stint praise) being performed at the Klein Theater in DC this spring: after 3 hours of it you will be moved, shaken, at times unbearably rivetted (when the Cornwall and Regan pluck out the eyes of Gloucester there is no flinching). Page has such a resonant voice and thoughtful dignified as well as raging compassionate presence, he probably matches any other performer I’ve seen (that includes Ian McKellen, 2018, and Anthony Hopkins, 2016, the fool played by the inimitable Karl Johnson).

As to the Joffrey’s Anna Karenina, the long central dance sequences of Anna and Vronsky finally making love, of upon marriage and exile from society, him becoming irritated and disdainful, and a later time of ecstasy after a vilifying social experience, a threesome of the two with Edson Barbosa as a raging Karenin probably go as far as dance without moving into pornography and violence can, to figuring the emotions of such encounters. But denuded as it is of everything else in the novel, I do advise rather taking in one of the excellent film adaptations, listening to the book read aloud, or, if all else fails, read the magnificently plausible book.

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I’ve put off writing about the first experience (I saw the Lear two weeks ago now) because I was unwilling to counter the ecstatic screams of praise I’ve seen nearly everywhere on King Lear as it seemed uncharitable. I was aware while watching this (often very young) company how hard they were working. They seemed driven to somehow affect the audience to some overt reaction, and when the three actresses playing Goneril, Regan and even Cordelia, became vulgarly raunchy, with coarse gesturing towards sex, I put it down to eagerness to believe that Shakespeare was not some “solemn dude” Other reductive gleefulness jarred but I do know that there are places where Shakespeare’s King Lear creaks — the opening triadic ritual, Edmund’s awkward self-congratulations, the chronicle-like war scenes near the close are felt and maybe it is salutary for glamorous mystification of audiences to come to an end. But now I know a number of the actors came from a training school or program run by the Shakespeare theater: the company was saving money by not hiring seasoned professionals.

So it is a simply highly uneven production. Patrick Paige is just superb in every way; he has all the nuanced feeling and depth of thought and anger and pathos one looks for and he carried the show. What a resonant voice he has. The actors playing Gloucester (Craig Wallace) , Edgar and Kent were best after him. Edmund (Julian Elijah Martinez) has some quiet sarcastic turns. Most of the others were either adequate or not at all. All three actresses (four by the end) playing the three daughters were either overdone or wooden (let me spare their names). Oftentimes the ensemble was just too noisy, or loud when they mean to be rousing.

Visual motifs that will stay with me: Lear and the fool behind him with a woolen hat and two battered suitcases — this recalled the Lear with Anthony Hopkins with him and the actor playing the fool walking about with a shopping cart and their things in it. The sets were at times inspired and the hard action, and wildness was done well. I’d say see it and get what you can; they work hard and mean well — the deepest feeling came out of the sequences on the heath, the abysmal poverty of the shack they find themselves in. It was terrifying the scene where Gloucester’s eyes are plucked out – done with driving flair; the whole audience was shuddering — a sense of how frequent in our world is torture. A couple of satiric lines over politicians seemed apt for today. A new inspiration was the quiet death of the fool. Hitherto the fool just vanishes in the text and all productions I’ve seen; in this one he dies of cold, and exhaustion and is covered by a tent blanket.


Near the denouement

The very ending scene of most Lears is what we are all waiting for. Page chose to speak the final famous lines over Cordelia’s body so quietly.

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Opening screen and set; intermission showed screen of snowing…

The Joffrey Anna Karenina is another matter. The reviews tell us to go because it’s such a prestigious company; it’s beyond me how the quality of the dancing is something apart from what is represented (we are told to refresh ourselves so as to understand what is faintly represented); and then there’s how these things are done. The point here is to explain what these reviews are avoiding saying.

I have now read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina three times (in two different recent and good translations) and listened to it read aloud superbly well by Davina Porter. I’ve watched at least seven different adaptations. I am aware of just how punitively Tolstoy regards Anna’s behavior, how much the book presents a patriarchal perspective, how it glorifies the holding to conventions (the Levin and Kitty story) and finally slides over the misery of Anna’s sister-in-law, Dolly, at the hands of Anna’s brother, Stiva (played most effectively by Matthew McFayden, 2012) and in Tom Stoppard’s script (2012) But it also shows how ambiguous and distancing is Anna’s relationship with her husband, how needlessly cruel Karenin is over the child, how impossible it is to live apart from a community who will not accept but deride you.

To even begin to get the meaning of this novel, one must have all three couples, and present them in equally understanding ways, which is what Tolstoy did. This Anna Karenina just about omitted the Stiva-Dolly story, and presents the Levin-Kitty story as if there were no downside (and there is in the novel). The Anna dancing scenes presented her too consistently and especially towards the end as simply a victim. Deprived of her son, she is available for kicking. We see her become a drug addict — so the pity that she is ostracized from company is lost. The company chose to have Anna’s death a horror gothic scene, and then turn to a complete joyous ensemble surrounding Kitty and Levin that was like something taken out of Oklahoma, with no sense of humor or boisterousness.


This comes early on; there is no period of doubt where Kitty is attracted to other men

I suppose the worst lack was the omission of the early scenes of Kitty and Levin’s romance take place on an ice-skating pond. I really (perhaps naively) expected some thrilling ballet over ice — or pretend ice. Just about every movie I’ve seen includes these scenes.

They did need to use pantomime for without it there was no understanding why Dolly looked so glum and Stiva useless, helpless. But I read the company is above that sort of thing. The first we saw her son was the scene where Karenin takes the child from her.

There was an effective moment with Anna seen on one side of the stage (in her slip) and Vronsky painting her on the other. They opened on the train station and Anna’s arrival, but her meeting with Vronsky over-rode anything we might learn of Stiva or Anna’s husband. In the closing her image was presented large with the doctor injecting her with some drug over the railway set. She looked ghastly all right. Then we saw her body naked made large on the screen. Maybe spare yourself.


Almost all the reviews show this scene of Karenin presenting Vronsky with Anna

I don’t say this company didn’t work hard and probably the dancing was superbly well done. But long live patriarchy silently screams this ballet. Watch out if you trespass. I went with a friend and we were moved to discuss how in the last couple of years women have lost such ground in the US, not to omit Islamic nations around the world. No woman in the US today should get pregnant: it is too dangerous for her. She said shows how the #MeToo movement is struggling to survive.

Nicola Paggett in the 1977 movie as she walks into the snowy world towards the end of the film; Stuart Wilson was Vronsky; Eric Porter as Karenin. This BBC production remains the best adaptation of Anna Karenina in English; it shows real understanding of the center people.

The Kennedy Center appears to be returning to what it all too often did before the pandemic: get in shows from elsewhere and rely on the glamor of names to pull audiences in.

Ellen


A photo of Anna Madeley as Mrs Hall and Ella Bernstein as Eva Feldman, an evacuated Jewish child — done so as to evoke 1940s photos

“Snuggling down in the Yorkshire Dales to save a few cows turned out to be just what the doctor ordered last winter…” (Anibundel of the first season playing providentially almost just as the pandemic hit)

Dear friends and readers,

This is my third season watching this latest and 3rd iteration of James Herriot’s series of books, All Creatures Great and Small, and, as was to be expected, the matter has taken further turns away from the book. I find not totally to my surprise that I never posted on the first season, only its Christmas special albeit in the context of the series, the original movie and Herriot’s books. I also never posted on the second season as a whole, only giving it honorable mention as among a series of fine women’s films for 2022. This third season I’ve gotten to the point that I watch it as appointment TV, Sunday nights at 9 EST, and then re-watch it on the computer (WETA passport) so as to understand anything I misunderstood and savor it! Indeed, I keep up with Samuel West on twitter about the series, and was glad/relieved to be re-assured it will be back for a fourth season, one which incorporates the realities of World War Two as sifted through its comfort-show lens.


Opening paratexts — not as witty and varied as those of the Durrells but the same sort of entrance gate …

I feel I should say something in praise of it, yet am held back (as I was in previous years) by my sense of its shamelessly softened realities that intellectually I do not fall for, but emotionally cannot resist. The promotional photo put out by the series after the airing of the Christmas special embodies the formula: they offer suggestions of in-depth trauma controlled and distanced by the story and characters’ good natures so as to push the watcher into near tears as we actually watch everything turning out well after all. Anibundel calls it pastoral perfection. Sometimes they can overdo it and in the third season there was more evidence of this, as for example, when they were paradoxically insensitive as they tried to appeal to too many contradictory cultural impulses as in the use of a Jewish evacuated child also to stand in for a Christian child opening her magical presents on Christmas day surrounded by patiently pretending adults. Most of the time they have tact and quick pace enough not to insist on an over-motivated improbable anxiety by Nicholas Ralph as Herriot (still ostensibly the central hero) when confronted by a bullying authority figure; Callum Woodhouse as the boyish Tristan pulls this off much better since at the same time Woodhouse has a presence which remains wryly humorous.

An adequate detailed summary with useful links


Caring care

For me what stabilizes the mix are the many tales of suffering animals, some of whom die despite what is depicted realistically as veterinary care. I can believe in these skeins and cry over people upset because their pets (in effect) need rescue. I must not be the only watcher for whom Mrs Hall is turning out to be as central a character as Siegfried Farnon (seen more fully as a hurt sensitive man by Samuel West previously played somewhat similarly by Anthony Hopkins). They are our caring parent presences. The women remain in their traditional subordinate roles, supportive of their men, while strong in their own right; class status remains respected, ethnicity (British Indians are now added to the black farmers, assistants and one wife we’ve seen).


Siegfried and Mrs Hall dealing with a problem cooperatively

Her finest moment, Episode 4: the reunion with Frederick

I admit up-front last night’s ACGS was over-the-top in two ways and in the third parallel story overdid it (egged the compound so we would understand the theme), yet it touched me intensely, I was in a state of anxiety waiting with Mrs Hall, worried Edward would not come (and when Mrs H returns home and sits down with Siegfried the first question he asks is, “Did he come?”), then I did feel bad for her at his awkwardness, but glad he brought out his accusations. To tell the truth, I’m with him; at the last moment as they walk along towards the train she blurts out “I panicked” — that’s about it. When she discovered he was stealing, she became frightened she’d be blamed, and she needed a place to live, a job. She thinks she loves him above all, but unlike  a parallel Dickens’s text where we are to accept at surface value what Mrs Rouncewell (Bleak House, who also gave up a beloved son to fit into the hierarchical society) says (Mrs R does not say she loves George above everything), there is enough there to show us the son is partly correct in his assessment of Mrs H’s loyalties. She put him in jail. The second story of the weeping older man with his dog who is all the man has in the world did make me cry — alleviated by the comedy (if you can call it that, it was strained) of Siegfried “training” another boy. It was really too much to have Rachel’s younger sister (I think of her as Rachel not Helen) leave school so we could see Rachel show how loyal she is to the child herself — again undercut somewhat by an awareness this is not the best decision — or only if the girl genuinely wants to stay in this small world, which has been made idyllic and which Herriot has chosen when an adult and after a superior education.

His most moving, Episode Episode 3: the backstory killing of all the horses in WW1 still in Siegfried’s mind, told very well by Judith Cheney, a member of Trollope & his Contemporaries @ groups.io

“Siegfried in a flashback memory of the end of WW1, Siegfried was ordered to put down all of the war horses which would not be transported back to Britain. The white or dapple grey horse he killed was the horse in the scene, he & other soldiers found a horse which had been whinnying in pain wounded on the battlefield. They rescued & rehabilitated it. These horse killings had broken S.’s heart & deeply affected him for the rest of his life. (Remember the racehorse episode back a season or two?)

The superior officer who ordered Siegfried to kill all the horses may have been the man whose horse he was now again being told to put down on the Seabright estate – from the dialogue: Siegfried to this racehorse’s owner, ” Oh no you don’t, you’re going to stay & watch it this time.” Siegfried is able to save this horse however, by his gentleness & mounting him bareback, he is able to gallop him off over the hill & thus prove him rideable, with time & proper handling & kindness.”

A couple of recaps told me that this kind of episode where the accent is on sorrow and lost can be complained about — and also that there is more of this in this series than is explicitly appreciated. One trick is to keep the depths in the backstory: we never experience what happened to Mrs Hall and Frederick years ago, and our account of it remains incomplete.

I should say now (about the fakery) — I’ve probably said it before — Yorkshire is NOT eternally green, the skies do not ETERNALLY shine. Beige, brown, grey, yellow — yes some sunny days but certainly not in most of the winter. This is Wuthering Heights country. Rain, cold damp, raw — one of podcasts from WETA about the program has a British person who knows better but never a peep out of her. Wintertime days are very short. Very grey. But nevertheless I love their brightly colored animated paratexts, for Christmas covered with white snow. Flaws include that Woodhouse is getting too old to play the awkward semi-innocent (!) male; and Rachel Shenton as Helen is not given enough to do. The gaiety of the show is supplied by this innocent or overtly young non-predatory male. He is so easily controlled by his new love, the British Indian young woman, Florence Pandhi (Sophie Khan Levy)


The dog is hers

The film story does not yet go overtly into politics, but with World War Two coming up, they cannot slide over the threat of Nazism and fascism; instead they render these things hintingly and as beyond everyone’s conception. I doubt they will ever come near the true explanations of the evil’s facets (as Foyle’s War did and does almost every time): the existence of hopelessness and the need to escape into worlds of destruction would astonish these characters as crazed nightmares are precisely the sort of thing this series is an antidote for. The characters all stand firm in their belief the world is fundamentally a good place. Good medicine is what they mean to offer for those who can enter into the wholesome comfort of bargaining that works out well for almost all.

This is more sheer fun than the show and captures something archetypal about each of the characters:

Ellen


Edmund and Fanny reading Cowper together (1983 Mansfield Park), discussing it …

[Edmund] made reading useful by talking to [Fanny] of what she had read (Mansfield Park, close of Chapter 2)

Dear fellow readers and friends,

I wonder if you have noticed that alarm bells have been ringing these past few weeks, shall I say once again? Literary criticism has lost its way (Stephan Collini, “Exaggerated Ambitions,” from the LRB), with academic politics as the main culprit (Merve Emre, “Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism,” The New Yorker). The larger and (for teachers of English literature and other humanities subjects) pragmatically worrying developments of sudden and catastrophic-feeling declines in enrollment, have lead over the past few years to what Bryan Alexander, a professional futurist, has been cataloguing as “the Queen Sacrifice:” many colleges simply get rid of their humanities departments. They are not generating enough income from outside places (grant authorities, corporations), or respect, and the fundamental cause cited is lack of interest, lack of enrollment (This time Virginia).

When a department is thrown out so are all the tenured faculty.

It’s this overhaul of college curricula and not just in the US (I’m referring to the UK universities, also English speaking and reading) so as to eliminate whole areas of study that has motivated seriously meant essays, e.g., Evan Kindley, “Departments on the Defensive,” NYRB; and again from The New Yorker, Nathan Heller’s accurately titled analysis, “The End of the English Major: Why humanities are in free fall. The immediate explanation is the astronomical fees for a degree, and the purpose of college as providing training and certificate for a good job, something you can do someone will pay you for, so future with healthy financial prospects, especially if you spent a lot. The Atlantic tells us the students are wrong to think these other majors will produce better job prospects: Benjamin Schmidt, “The Humanities are in Crisis,” with huge numbers of persuasive statistics going back to 2008. But no one believes this.

And of course then come (also from The Atlantic) sneers, scepticism and mockery

One important mechanism causing this not mentioned in any of the above, is the withdrawal of state funding from many colleges and the necessity of the college turning to corporations for funding. When I first when to work for George Mason University more than half its income came from the state; I believe when I left it was under 20%. Corporations get to put influential people on boards and they want studied in colleges what will make them money: docile students. I saw with my own eyes politically conservative people preferred for jobs over liberal ones.

Thus no one should be surprised another aspect of this is the slow elimination of anti-colonialism and anti-patriarchal militarism as embodied in “Women Studies” — in some places long ago become “Gender Studies,” having got rid of the objectionably narrow (!) or “red flag” word (“Women”).

There is no need to be apocalyptic. Another angle of this seems to me eternal: when I was in graduate school, many of the other students hated the requirements for reading older literature.  Spenser’s Fairie Queene is still a favorite work to decry when imposed on everyone. Among the first “reforms” in the Vietnam era when college students demanded change, was the removal of required courses, and within majors like English, the removal of hard courses that to me made it into a discipline with a recognizable area of knowledge all were to know: a course in linguistics for real; requirements that you read other languages; requirements that you take survey courses and then pass exams outside the classes on the history of what you were learning. In the 1970s the demand that English majors study Anglo-Saxon literature in the original was dropped from British colleges’ curricula.

I have had the (to me at the time) shocking experience of being told by fellow graduate students that they hated to read long or hard or old books, or read at all. One guy told me he was there to read and learn to imitate Hemingway. Around the 1980s mark it was common to find departments made up of students there to become modern writers themselves, or, worse yet (as Collini would doubtless say), use and read theory to “interrogate” what the canon had been, and begin our job of saving the world by deconstructive close readings (now I’m mocking this post-Leavisite point of view) of older canon-based books by mostly white males and adding to these books by women, by people of color, by non-privileged and marginalized peoples.

And apart from the pressure of relentless unconditional (unmitigated) capitalism as a way of life all have to endure in the US (and elsewhere) what we study as part of the English canon is to many outdated — for example, Cowper’s beautiful later 18th century autobiographical meditative poem, The Task (what Edmund and Fanny are reading just above). Latin and Greek went at the turn of the 19th century, to be eventually replaced by scientific medicine. I remember how when I told Jim in the 1990s of the suggestions made in one of the Chair’s meetings on how to make the English major more attractive, he laughed and said they were trying to argue their buggy whips were better than anyone else’s buggy whips when cars had now replaced the horse and carriage. He himself was a computer software scientist who had switched from the higher mathematics for his Ph.D. to software inventor, teacher and finally Program Management (he worked at the famous DARPA) for his quarter of a century career.

What we seeing a cumulative effect: the slow erosion is become landslides.

I have something simple to say. Paradoxically around the time of the spread of theory (and its horrible jargon) and the resultant switch from aesthetic and moral points of view to seeing texts as mirrors of cultures and history so that the literature class becomes a kind of cultural study I felt “we” were having a failure of nerve. People just didn’t believe that literature, that reading books and understanding them for just for themselves mattered. The book was a way of learning cultural history. In several of the above articles, college students today are quoted as loving to read and wanting to, but not seeing literature as anything but personal entertainment, in function a hobby.

What did I learn when I studies literature as a graduate student: I learned how to read a book, so that when I finished it, it had some meaning for me outside the particulars of the stories’ action, evaluative gossip of characters’ personalities, and a kind of literal appreciation for beautiful or riveting description (setting), clever witty allusions to other works. I learned also how to write and to talk about (recognize first as in Forster’s Aspects of Fiction) the imagined elements that make up books and many years later films so as to make sense of them so that they were relevant to my world, my inner life. Learning to write that way lead me to learn how to teach others to talk and to write that way.

Now I’m not the only person in this world that thinks learning how to understand a book (or movie) and disseminate it to others is an important matter. In my Sylvia I blog last week I wrote about the lawless (no longer will any degree or knowledge of education be required in people who manage and rule colleges) and Nazi-like censorship and erasure of whole areas of knowledge going on in Florida and elsewhere: scary ruthless policies of repression across Florida Colleges. How this is spreading to other states. Where does Nazism come from, fascist movements, the inability to grasp who or what it is in your interest to vote for? Ignorance, a lack of real education or miseducation.

Anyone who has read my blogs regularly has to have come across my analysis of books and movies, of authors’ works, of kinds of books and movies (genres) — that’s what this blog and my Austen reveries are predominantly made up of. Or I hope they are. Last week over on my Austen blog I was on about Women’s Holocaust Memoirs; if you haven’t picked up from this blog I’m a feminist who nonetheless loves romance, you must’ve been skimming (see my Outlander series).

So, my friends and fellow readers, that’s what it is. People have not been making clear what is being learned at the core of the humanities or literature or history or other subjects for study and for ourselves adding to about and by the human arts. We don’t want to admit this simple set of formulae are at the heart of what is taught and what is learnt and what is disseminated.

I will close with the latest example of my education. The London Trollope Society is having a conference in Oxford, Somerville, this coming September and they called for papers on Women and Trollope. After having read The Belton Estate recently (I’ve been meaning to write a blog but have been remiss), I came up with this:

Intriguing Women in Trollope’s Fiction

Using a gendered perspective, I will discuss women characters who act, think, and feel in unexpected ways, whom recent readers find hard to explain, and cause controversy. I’ll focus on lesser known as well as more familiar presences.

My first & central pair will be Clara Amedroz and Mrs. Askerton from The Belton Estate. Most essays have been about how Clara at first prefers the glamorous, guarded, demanding and upper-class Captain Aylmer to the open-hearted, farmer-like, affectionate Will Belton. I will dwell on Clara’s refusal to give up her friendship with Mrs. Askerton, a woman who fled an abusive husband and lived with him before her husband died, thus enabling Mr. Askerton and her to marry.. Mrs. Askerton is stunningly unexpected in her generosity of spirit and mix of conventional and unconventional views. The first half of my talk will move from Clara to other young about to, just married or not marriageable women whose lives take them in insightful directions, e.g., Lily Dale, Miss Viner (“Journey to Panama”), Lady Glencora, Emily Lopez.

The second half of my talk will move from Mrs. Askerston to sexually and socially experienced disillusioned women, e.g., Madame Max, Mrs. Hurtle, Lady Mabel Grex, Mrs. Peacocke (Dr Wortle’s School), as well as older mature women who are mothers, and whom Trollope takes seriously, e.g., Lady Lufton, Mrs. Crawley, Lady Mason.

Trollope dramatizes what might seem perversities of behavior these women resort to as contrivances to get round a lack of concrete power (used against them, sometimes by other women, e.g., Lady Aylmer) to try to achieve results they can be happy or live in peace with. The point of the talk is to show how Trollope probes and makes visible psychological and iconoclastic realities in his women characters’ lives..

I believe that if I wrote this paper, I would have something to bring to other women — and men too — about Trollope’s depiction of women that could be important to them to realize. Now it might be rejected. Probably will be. I’ll be in competition with people with titles of all sorts, fame, and it’s not presented conventionally, and not aimed at what fans of Trollope might find reassuring. Or not what’s wanted for other reasons. But I believe in it, I believe it’s good. I believe in good readings as useful. I don’t want to compliment myself further. The point here is to defend the humanities and English majors as serious people learning something as important as Program Management.

Ellen

A spring syllabus for reading a group of 20th century Italian novels and memoirs, an essay and poetry in English translation

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at American University
Day: Tuesday afternoons, 1:45 to 3:15 pm, Feb 28 to May 2, 2023
SG 690: 20th century Italian Memoirs and Novels
10 sessions online (location of building: 4801 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D.C. 20016)
Dr Ellen Moody

To begin the process of registration go to:  https://www.olli-dc.org/

Description of Course:

In this course, participants will read a group of Italian works with a view to understanding the culture, history, and politics of Italy. These works will include: Natalia Ginzburg’s memoir, The Family Lexicon (1963) which takes place in Turin and Rome before, during, and after WWII; Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, a memoir of his time in exile in WWII (1947); Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1957), a historical novel set in Palmero during the risorgimento; Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table (1975), a memoir of his using the periodic tables wittily; and a non-fiction essay by Iris Origo, “Biography: True and False” found in her A Need to Testify, poetry by Elsa Morante and [Noble-prize winner] Salvatore Quasimodo (texts taken from various books) and an excerpt from Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After, all sent via attachment. The course will have as subthemes Italian-Jewish writers, women’s and life-writing and WW2.

Required Books:

Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, translated by Jenny McPhee, afterword by Peg Boyers. New York Review of Books Classics paperback. ISBN 978-59017-838-6
Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, translated by Frances Fenaye, introduction Mark Rotella. NY: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-53009-2
Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, introd. Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, trans. Guido Walman. NY: Pantheon. ISBN 978-0-375-71479-5 (the Everyman edition with introduction by David Gilmour is an alternative)
Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, translated by Raymond Rosenthal. NY: Schocken Books. ISBN0-8052-1041-5


Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion. The schedule is not cast in cement; if we find we need more or less sessions for any particular text or topic, we can be flexible.

Feb 28: 1st week: Introduction: Italian Literature and history. Ginzburg & women’s writing. Begin The Family Lexicon

Mar 7: 2nd week: The Family Lexicon
Mar 14: 3rd week: Carlo Levi & WW2 & fascism. Christ Stopped at Eboli

Mar 21: 4th week: Christ Stopped at Eboli
Mar 28: 5th week: Iris Origo’s essay on biography (life-writing), poetry by Elsa Morante, the historical novel
Apr 4: 6th week: The Risorgimento, Lampedusa. Begin The Leopard
Apr 11: 7th week: The Leopard and Lucino Visconti’s film
Apr 18: 8th week: Holocaust Memoirs. An excerpt from Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After. Primo Levi, Post-WW 2 Italy. Begin The Periodic Table

Apr 25: 9th week: The Periodic Table  . For next week neo-realistic films: The Bicycle Thieves and Bitter Rice.

May 2: 10th week: Finish the Periodic Table, discuss two films; final thoughts about what we read, saw, discussed.

Suggested supplementary reading and a remarkable French TV serial:

Aleramo, Sibilla. A Woman, trans Rosalind Delamar. Univ of California at Berkeley. 1980
Banti, Anna (pseudonym for Lucia Lopresi). Artemisia, trans Shirley D’arcia Caracciolo. Bison (University of Nebraska), 1998.
Bondanella, Peter and Andrea Ciccarelli, edd. The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel. Cambridge UP, 2003.
Boyers, Peg. Hard Bread [A memoir of the life and writing of Natalia Ginzburg through poetry]. University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Baranski, Zygmunt and Rebecca West, edd. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture. Cambridge UP, 2001
A French Village. Developed by Frederic Krivine, Phillipe Triboit. Various writers and directors. 7 year French serial set in occupied Vichy France, 1941-1946, with fast forward to 1975; 2002. Amazon prime, also to buy as DVD sets
Gilmour, David. The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe di Lampedusa. NY: Pantheon, 1988.
Ginzburg, Natalia. The Little Virtues, trans. Dick Davis. NY: Arcade Press, 1985. A Place to Live and Other Selected Essays, ed, trans. Lynne Sharon Schwartz. NY: Seven Stories Press, 2002.
Gordon, Robert S, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi. Cambridge, 2007.
Houlding, Elizabeth, “Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo and Rose Lamont,” Women’s Review of Books, 13:2 (1995):1-3.
Jeannet, A.M., and G. Sanguinetti Katz, ed. Natalia Ginzburg: A Voice of the Twentieth Century. University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Levi, Carlo. Fleeting Rome: In Search of La Dolce Vita, trans. Antony Shugaar. Padstowe, Cornwall: John Wiley & Sons, 2005
Moorehead, Caroline . Iris Origo: Marchesa of Val d’Orcia: A Biography. Boston: Godine, 2002. Also: A Bold and Dangerous Family (a history of a family who fought against fascism in Italy), A House in the Mountains: The Women Who Liberated Italy from Fascism – she has a number of books on fascism and the resistance in Europe, all very good. A Train in Winter is her most famous – it exists as an audiobook.
Origo, Iris. A Chill in the Air, An Italian War Diary, 1939-40, introd. Lucy Hughes Hallett; War in Val D’Orcia, An Italian War Diary, 1943-44, introd. Virginia Nicolson. NYRB Classics, 2017, 2018.
Ortese, Anna Maria. Evenings Descends Upon The Hills: Stories from Naples, trans Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee. Pushkin & New Vessel, 2018
Nievo, Ippolito, intro Lucy Riall. Confessions of an Italian, trans. Frederika Randall. Penguin, 2014
Parks, Tim. Italian Ways,A Literary Tour of Italy. Richmond, Surrey: Alma Books, 2016.
Quasimodo, Salvatore. The selected Writings, ed., introd., trans. Allen Mandelbaum. NY: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1960.
Sullam, Simon Elvis. The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy. trans. Oona Smyth and Claudia Patane. Princeton UP, 2018
Testaferri, Ada, ed. Donna: Women in Italian Culture. University of Toronto Italian Studies. Toronto UP, 1989.
Theweileit, Klaus. Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conway. 2 Vols. Women, floods, bodies, history; Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing White Terror. Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota Press, 1987
Tuck, Lily. A Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante. Harper Collins, 2008.
Weaver, William, ed. Introd. Open City. Begins with a long fine essay on literary and political life in Italy, especially in the north, and then is a book of excerpts from books by the Italian writers in Post-War Rome, includes excerpts from Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi’s novels.


Map of Italy


The author’s real name is Carolyn Heilbrun, the detective Kate Fansler


Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) of Prime Suspect fame

Friends and readers,

An interim blog: this is me thinking out a few semi-conclusions I’ve come to after a couple of months of reading books about women detectives (history, literary criticism, culture, feminist) and reading and rereading a few such books by men and women. As I’ve written on my Sylvia I blog, I seem to be going through something of a transition after living in this world without Jim for some 9 plus years. Part of this is I am liking books I used to not be able to read, and able to accept optimism and at least sympathize with (understand in a new way from an outward transactional POV) some conventional transactional pro-social-ambition perspectives.

To get to the point here, I find that I can’t resist reading and watching new kinds of material in the detective, mystery-thriller, spy genre kind, which I’ve come back to seeing as closely allied to the gothic. Not that I altogether rejected books with women detectives at the center: my first Internet pseudonym was Sylvia Drake, a minor character in Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy night, and my gravatar for my political blog is a small picture of Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane looking thoughtful.


From Strong Poison: she is supposed the murderer and this is in prison, she is talking to Lord Peter Wimsey (Edward Petherbridge)

The reading came out of my preparing for my coming The Heroine’s Journey course this winter. As you can see, if you go over the look, there is no example among my four slender book choices of a female detective novel. That’s because I couldn’t think of one slender enough for such a short course until I came upon Amanda Cross’s (aka Carolyn Heilbrun’s) Death in a Tenured Position. Most recent and older female detective novels are average size, say 350 pages (Gaudy Night is about this size) because often many combine a “novel of manners” (or domestic romance) with the detective formula. But I found it to be a central category because since surfacing in novels in the 1860s, the type has multiplied in appearances until say today there may be several TV shows featuring a female detective available all at once.

Although I’ve found dictionary-type books with lists and essays on women writers and their detective novels (Great Women Mystery Writers, ed Kathleen Gregory Klein, truly excellent; By a Woman’s Hand by Jean Swanson and Dean James, 200 short entries which have the merit of naming the author as well as the detective and offering enough information to give the reader a gist of what type of mystery fiction this is), it has been very hard to find any essay-like books treating just the category of female detective fiction by women writers. The nature of the material (influences, who’s writing what, movies as a group-creation) has led to many male writers putting female detectives at the center of their series, and many female writers putting male detectives, and these mixed gender creations (so to speak) are often superb in all sorts of ways.

One of my felicitous reading and watching experiences this past year was Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders (both book and film), which features a private detective, Atticus Pund (spelt without accents) in a 1950s novel as part of an investigation into a parallel murder today by the old trope amateur sleuth, Sue Ryland in (presumably) 2021 — for its witticism, self-reflexive uses of the core fantasies, styles and yes multi-gender empathies.


Sue Rylands (Leslie Manville) is also intended to appeal to older unmarried career women (the spinster trope transformed & modernized at last)

But as there is a real, findable, and demonstable fault-line and difference between male and female writing, and films made by mostly men or mostly women, and visual art, and music too, and one of my aims as a teacher and writer is to keep women’s literature alive and make it more respected; I’ve been after just the books by women albeit in a multi-gender context. I’ve also tried to stick to films where the central author originally (or continuously) is a woman, and evidence shows women directing, producing, doing set design. The qualification here is all of these are shaped by the kind of detection mystery genre the book/film is written in. I’ve followed Andrew Marr centrally here; Julian Symons’s Bloody Murders is also indispensable.

I’ve come to a few tentative conclusions.

I agree in part with Kathleen Klein’s brilliant analysis (The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre) of the depiction of female detectives mostly in books, but equally by men and women that often these may easily be read and are in fact intended (when conscious) as anti-feminist (meaning the movement for independence and equality) portrayals from a male (in some eras on TV lascivious) POV.

This POV is on display in right now in the incessant arguments and brutal put-downs of Miss Eliza Scarlet (the ever patient Kate Phillips has played many an wholly abject woman, from Jane Seymour in the recent Wolf Hall, to Tolstoy’s hero Andrei’s long-suffering wife, the 2016 serial by Andrew Davies) by “The Duke” Inspector Wellington (the pugnacious, overtly insulting professional police detective played by Stuart Martin, doubtless chosen for his resemblance to the matinee idol type, Richard Armitage) who reiterates constantly a woman cannot be both a real or natural or happy woman and a detective; who needs strong men around her to protect her. Injury was added to insult in the most recent episode (Season 3, Episode 2) where a story was concocted whereby a mean and bullying ex-friend, Amanda Acaster, who repeatedly humiliated and nowadays derides her, is also used to criticize adversely Eliza’s character: Eliza is supposed now to have felt for Amanda trying to have a career using the same manipulative amoral tactics she did when the two were young. She is not charged though her measures were what encouraged a gang of thieves to use her restaurant as a front.  But look she surpasses Eliza in the Victoria sponge cake line. The costuming of the program shows some knowledge of the illustrations for such stories in the 1870s/90s, the music is very good, and lines are witty (though usually at Eliza’s expense) and I’d call the presentation stylish. I have spent this much time on it as it’s contemporary and its perniciousness extends to endorsing bullying and mocking non-macho males (Andrew Gower as a homosexual man controlled by his mother).

In many of these detective stories especially the hard-boiled type, and since the 1990s, the woman simply takes on male characteristics, and when she doesn’t and displays genuine female psychology, set of values, life experiences, and is as competent as the males and not just by intuition, by the end of a given book or series, we are to see she has not lived a fulfilled life, which must include marriage and motherhood. This is how Prime Suspect finally ends. In medias res, the female detective of whatever type is often allowed genuine common women’s lives characteristics and we see themes and archetypes familiar in women’s literature, e.g., recent film instance of the mother-daughter rivalry paradigm in Annika where the older heroine is divorced and lives with her teenage older daughter. There is now a line of disguised lesbian socially-conscious fiction, e.g., Val McDermid, seen in film recently featuring Karen Pirie played by Lauren Lyle, of Outlander provenance, dressed in unemphatically non-binary ways

But I don’t agree wholly with Klein (or others who write from her vantage). At the same time, the way out is not to trivialize and pretend to treat as playful amusement “the lady investigator” and her now many daughters, grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters, all the while lightly coming to the same conclusion as Klein, with some face-saving and genuinely rescuing qualifications. This is the vein taken by Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan in their The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction: a very informative as well as insightful book; it covers amateur and private detectives as well as the spy genre, which Klein does not. Nor is it to ignore this aspect of the genre altogether: Lucy Worsley in her Art of Murder manages this, at the same time as she (curiously) denies that the mass audience for this kind of thing understands it as fantasy (that most murders are not solved, and when solved not by brilliant ratiocinative nor super-scientific techniques, but rather information from people involved) but out of a thirst for violence and fascination with death (this does ally it to the gothic).

What we need to remember is the history of the genre: it first emerges in the later 19th century when women could get jobs and income on their own, go to college as woman (usually women’s colleges). The whole larger genre of detective fiction develops its characteristics when you first have men hired in visible numbers and a real police force. So there were male models for male detectives but no female models for female detectives. This changes (Miss Scarlet and the Duke is quite a startling throw-back) post-World War II when women held on to their array of male jobs and began to be hired, however slowly, and to be promoted to managerial positions in institutions, including the police (Lynda LaPlante modelled Jane Tennison on an actual woman detective).

I suggest that the woman detective was an popular substitute for the “new woman” so distinguished by feminist literary scholars of the 1890s (which never achieved much popularity or was not lasting); she becomes liberated and a real woman as women in our western societies begin at any rate to achieve the right and education for financial and some real sexual independence. We see this in Horowitz’s Sue Rylands and I hope to show other women detectives from the post World War II era.

So as a follow-on from this framework, I hope from time to time to write blogs here when the writer is a male and the portrait less than really feminocentric; on detective fiction found in both books and films; and on Reveries under the Sign of Austen (when the writer is female and the work genuinely l’ecriture-femme, which includes for me a genuinely anti-violence, anti-war and pro-woman political POV, which by the way I do think Prime Suspect was and is: Gray Cavender and Nancy C Jurik’s Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect. The victims in these shows are often women tortured by male violence, young children, including boys destroyed and warped by male pedasty, immigrants, mostly women working menial jobs desperately, and yes prostitutes too, and women who murder (including one semi-accidental infanticide) too.

First up for Austen Reveries will be Amanda Cross’s Death in a Tenured Position and, for this blog, the older masterpiece, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (Inspector Alan Grant investigates the character of Richard III)


Of course Josephine Tey was a pseudonym; the author’s real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh, and the photo is of Jennifer Morag Henderson who wrote an excellent biography

Ellen


From Number 13 (Greg Wise as Professor Ander hard at work and Tom Burke as Tom Jenkins, a cheerful sinister presence)

Gentle readers and patient friends,

A few years ago, pre-pandemic, I wrote a series of blogs asking what is a Christmasy Story, and basically came up with a moral model, often, tellingly, involved with the death of someone (or near destruction), most of the time with a redemption, or renewal of hope in the future at story’s end. As I did this year over Trollope’s two American Civil War Christmas stories, I brought up how central to these winter tale traditions was the ghost story, mentioning in passing how Dickens’s A Christmas Carol differed so in its happy ending, poetic justice. Most ghost stories are Kafkaesque, nightmarish, uncanny, unnerving.

What I’ve been leaving out is then a mystery of why these have been so much a part of Christmas, becoming explicitly so in the Victorian era. M. R. James in particular is utterly out of whack with most professed goals of festivity, joy, forgiveness and whatnot. This year seeking once again to watch and talk about Christmas stories on my now ancient Trollope & his Contemporaries listserv (@ groups.io), I proposed reading his Stalls of Barchester Cathedral and watching (it’s on YouTube), the 1971 film adaptation. I did both, but then dissatisfied with the weak film, too familiar with the story, I cast about to see what other films, if any, were available as ghost stories, and lo and behold discovered that in 2005 and again in 2017 the BBC attempted to revive the old traditions of the 1980s and make 30-40 minute films of short ghost stories, but this time in all cases, from M. J. James. The first one I watched was A View from the Hill (which held and made me very nervous), and then found short reviews of these, rightly recommending them.


Wandering in a tomb: “Imagine, if you will … ”

I found (as in the earlier ones), superb but not super-famous actors involved, intelligent subtle scripts, e.g., Number 13 (which begins in bright cheerful light). They do not seem to me as masterly as those done way back in the ’60s (Whistle and I’ll come to You, and the brought back Andrew Davies’s Signalman), but they are in color (not a small thing still), so beautifully photographed, or like illustrations, and as a group, compel me to wonder not why people want the thrill of magic, but why, as C.S. Lewis insisted, pain remorseless terror tropes of inexplicability as part of the season’s diet of renewal, remembering, human communal activities.

I’ve no good answer to that, for it’s not enough to say it’s a metaphoric experience which makes us take into account our own powerlessness against the forces of the natural and social worlds. These stories are much more effective when the ghost is genuine, not a psychological projection. I did several years ago write about Oliphant’s ghost stories and the relationship of the gothic ghost story to Christmas. What is terrifying about Whistle and I’ll Come to You is you feel you have yourself brought the ghost out without quite meaning to, and you are not sure you won’t be tempted to do or somehow do that again. This resembles how Hyde begins to be able to come out of Jekyll and take over at will.  The horror is also in this demon’s mocking breaking pf fundamental taboos against dwelling on death’s remains (e.g., playing with a corpse). Sometimes there was a crime perpetrated by the now victim (as in The Stalls) and sometimes (in Number 13), our researcher is digging up from the past real cruelties perpetrated by real people connected to present people’s interests and is warned away.

I now invite you to watch A View from the Hill (the notable actors are Pip Torrens, David Burke, Mark Letheren)

I provide four others in the comments.

So there is a typical structure and mood to all M. R. James whether in verbal story form or film. He builds mood slowly; a character goes to a remote place meaning to do research into the past. When he does, he evokes either a lingering malignant presence whom others living there are half-aware of and too unnerved to speak. Small things are felt; say a claw put out, a cat’s meow; this then grows nervily, louder, and from just an intrusion becomes overwhelming in its brutality. The demonic presence attacks him swiftly.  The ghost or revenant is not always a male in other authors, for example in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, where the ghost is a woman in black with unforgettable ferociously hating eyes, a mother whose child was taken from her and let die.

When this eruption from some other realm is effective, the attack is fatal; the person vanishes forever; but it can also be the ending is inconclusive, and you are left waiting with that victim-person who is trying to flee, like say in A View from the Hill, where our previous researcher is waiting for a train that is not coming. What’s chilling is the obtuse person (Pip Torrens) he is visiting appears not to know about this murderous presence and yet is ever leading our victim-character into danger — and then walking off. A blow by blow account — if you need it.

But this is what he sees:


From far


Then he is suddenly inside

In A View from the Hill it’s this pair of binoculars that allows the central victim-hero to see and be inside a cathedral that is no longer there literally. He is then (apparently) hanged for doing this.

The closest contemporary novels that come near this are by Kazuo Ishiguro: his Never Let Me Go has the same realistic surface as a ghost story, while the science fiction that is going on is cruel, and its apparent rational mirrors the senselessness of some modern medical technology uses — and connects us back to Shelley’s Frankenstein. But no one thinks of these as Christmas stories.


M. R. James

And now this delightful documentary by Mark Gatiss, about M.R. James as a man, his career, how these ghost stories emerged, and a brilliant analysis of them. It is 55 minutes, worth every second of it — many clips from BBC years. (I apologize if the link only takes you to a blockED video. You can type in M R James + Mark Gatis into the YouTube search engine and that may take you to this documentary. Poke around.) Gatiss suggests an important literary source of James’s visual imagination are the pictures in the medieval illuminated manuscripts James catalogued. And that James was repressed probably non-practicing homosexual. One amusing moment: Jonathan Miller (who did a brilliant adaptation) quietly insisting on how we are to see what happens in that story as nightmares (no ghost there literally), as if reassuring himself …

Any thoughts, anyone? at any rate, back again (we hope) next Winter Solstice.

Ellen