Summer syllabus, OLLI at AU: The Heroine’s Journey

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)

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Trollope’s The Warden at the Trollope London Society’s Online Group reads

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

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DC Spring theater: an uneven King Lear; a downright dismaying Anne Karenina

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

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All Creatures Great and Small: Season 3: new levels of grief and comfort and muted gaiety

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

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Alarms Bells Ringing: the disappearance of the college English major as individuals and as a discipline

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

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OLLI at AU: 20th century Italian Memoir and Novels, spring 2023 syllabus, online class

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

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A tangent I can’t resist: Women Detective Stories

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

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Into the Woods at the Signature Theater, Arlington: very well done, very touching

The baker (Jake Lowenthal) and his wife (Erin Weaver)

This musical needs no recommendation, but perhaps this particular production as a seasonal favorite does

Gentle readers and kind friends,

The world may be about to burst into flames or drowned seven fathoms deep, people killed senselessly and maliciously or for profit everywhere we look (recently especially the world’s cup with millions watching anyway), a mad-dog version of an older political party about to take over the US House of Representatives, with the aim of doing nothing but destroy, but this year Washington DC can boast of several emotionally fulfilling productions — which (I think) do this by returning to faery tale and fantasy. The usual Folger production is at the Roundhouse in Maryland (and it has been too far for me or I would have seen it more than once), a wonderful Tempest, Wicked at the Kennedy Center, still sparkling, I’d say utterly iconic (the witch looks like Margaret Hamilton), and this past week, I enjoyed the National Theater fantasy caricature of MAAN.

What I liked about this Into the Woods — I’ve seen a number, including a year after Jim died, the Disney adaptation (see the blog for discussion of Sondheim’s motives and ideas about the faery tales) –,  is its clarity. What a wonder.  It is not over- nor under-produced. You were allowed to pay attention to the outlines of the interwoven stories, the characters’ lines, and their simple or archetypal emotions. I don’t know how they managed such a fresh feel, but they did it

At turning points in the plot-design, the whole cast gets together around the storyteller to hear where we are and project togetherness

Perhaps, as may be gathered from Peter Marks’s review (Washington Post), it was just that you were able to grasp the common human emotion driving this fantasy character in his or her ordinary predicament (she cannot get pregnant, the young boy will not be able to make a living, the little girl as a woman is impeded by a predatory male wolf), several of them desperate.

Cinderella in her Russian peasant outfit — the outfits seemed to me redolent of Russian peasants in archetypal movies (especially that of the Baker)

The Cinderella core paradigm of envy among women feels the least humanly convincing, the most exaggerated: the stepmother and three sisters resonated least for me, were most artificial because they were all made so ugly. Curious, the incidents that today hit home: the prince, when his princess has disappeared, aggressively seducing and lying to the baker’s wife, and the witch as the mother who in her need for her daughter’s love rationalizes she’s protecting her, when she’s preventing her from living. I this time admit the witch’s lines to Rapunzel “Stay with me:” “Don’t you know what’s out there in the world? … Stay at home … Who out there could love you more than I? …

Stay with me
The world is dark and wild
Stay a child while you can be a child …

did not resonate as much. I feel the original witch-look (Nova Y. Payton) was too much a caricature, and her black-sequined glamor gown made her not sufficiently a mother, more too much of a “black mamma” sexual object. There is such a thing as over-modernization because our favored cultural images and gestures are so very artificial, relentlessly competitive, and heartless. So there the simplifying didn’t work; the witch role was over-the-top, done somewhat crudely

Alex de Bard as Little Red Riding Hood shrugging off two mothers

I call the ambiance clarity, for this is the first time I realized how many of the characters actually die. Hitherto I thought of this as a story where we are shocked by the unexpected sudden unprepared death of the baker’s wife, but in fact (taking faery as fact), Little Red Riding Hood’s mother and grandmother die, Jack’s mother dies, the storyteller at one point is no longer with us, and I never felt assured the blinding of several characters was reversed. I had taken it the first half ends happily, so we are left to wonder what can keep us to a second half?

The spiky paratextual theme song (“Into the Woods” we go) is essential for keeping the impetus thrust forward going

I wondered what more was there to say? It is really common for Sondheim’s musicals to fall off in the second half (especially clear in Sunday in the Park with George). That was the feel as we re-began . But soon we began to see a lot could happen — that’s why we need all this wishing: the statements “I wish”  begins the production and one more ends it.

Disaster strikes in the form of a never-seen female monster-giantess. Feel free to allegorize? We watch our left-standing characters re-group again and again — after some squabbling. I remembered the death of the Baker’s wife since it was emphasized in the Disney film (and the other deaths skipped or slid over somehow), but that this was the incident in the film which provoked the lyrics that I began to keen over once again: here it was Red Riding Hood who suddenly missed her grandmother

Sometimes people leave you
Halfway through the wood
Others may deceive you.
You decide what’s good.
You decide alone.
But no one is alone …

Jim has left us (me and Izzy) halfway through the wood. I just moved stiffly further back in my chair as I tried to dissociate myself from the audience, theater, all about me, lobby outside. Once again I was not quite recovered when four of the characters and baby were left bonded into a new family, and then, one by one, the disappeared characters returned  onto the stage, and became part of a singing your soul out ensemble.

Don’t miss it. Magical fairytale, It’s a Wonderful Life without the miracle. Dogged as does it.

Cast towards the end singing their hearts out

I need to tell you how I managed to go. I had a win last week when I went to the Phillips with the same friend who accompanied me to this musical and then in Shirlington to dinner out in a quiet restaurant with delicious Thai food. So I am no longer immured at night even if public transportation has once again been cut — as long as there is not yet another cab or bus to take once I arrive near my destination. Very nervously I obtained the address of the restaurant from a waiter, clicked away on Lyft, went outside when it said 1 minute to go and found the car (by license plate) and man (by name, Khalid).  It is against the backdrop of what’s happening across the world, a reactionary deprivation of the majority, more and more isolation from many causes (though we have had a pushback this election cycle) that these musicals (that do not refer to the Christian myth) can best be understood.

Ellen

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Much Ado About Nothing set inside a TV news-as-entertainment program — Shakespeare Theater Company at the Harmon Theater (DC)

Beatrice (Kate Jennings Grant) and Benedick (Rick Holmes) as TV news anchors

Readers and friends,

As many local people (DC, Maryland and Virginia) know, the Shakespeare Theater Company’s production of Much Ado About Nothing (now running until Dec 11th) has been getting rave reviews. Some acknowledge you have to suspend your common sense when it comes to matching words to the action, or consistency in what happens right before us; the reviewer’s reply:  “So to Shakespeare purists I say: Reason not the need.” Supported by a strong case (I agree a number of the center actors are very good), we are to turn ourselves over to those who want to give a party

Intermittently the stage revolves and we find ourselves at a ball (this is the last scene of the play)

I don’t like being called a Shakespeare purist:  to me that means I want to see Shakespeare’s play for real at some level, a production that does justice to his text and genius. I think rather that we need not dismiss Shakespeare at all, that the production does present a coherent enough reading of the play, its transformations witty  & some appropriate. I admit as the play opened, my first reaction was to feel appalled: for a start, the characters were not following the original play’s script. I could barely hear Shakespeare’s language, there were flashing lights everywhere, lots of noise and neon. How did the production win me over until by the end I was enjoying it and had participated in genuine grief and happiness from the play?

We were in SNN (Shakespeare News Network) and hearing of episodes in Shakespeare’s other plays retold in reductive or caricatured funny ways; these punctuated the action, and they became more hilarious and more daring as the play went on. Some of the funniest had Shakespeare’s other characters’ lines as tweets. The two central stories gradually unfold, and as far as I could tell, most of Shakespeare’s best lines were kept: perhaps Kate Jennings Grant as Beatrice was too loud, too aggressive; she was (I felt) overdoing the assertion, but she was matched by Rick Holmes as Benedick undermining her. What they were doing (and I’ve seen this in other productions of MAAN) was trying to cover over, blend together two disparate stories: Hero and Claudius come near tragedy, and far from iconoclastic, and subversive of anything, they are over-the-top conventional. So the actors (Nicole King and Paul Deo, Jr) were made to speak what they had similarly loudly and with accompanying comic and romantic business also dressed absurdly:

Hero (King), Beatrice and Leonato (Edward Gero)

The theme of Shakespeare’s play is the danger of gossip, of rumor, of misinformation, and it’s from that angle the news-show as entertainment fit its themes. I found myself amused by the ingenuity of the appropriation’s details. We were worked through the farce of Benedict being fooled into thinking that Beatrice loves him and Beatrice vice-versa, with them listening from behind going into all kinds of conniption fits. Then the actors were working so hard, meant so well and at moments winked past their costumes and the action to signal to the audience. Beatrice ends in a garbage bin; when she emerges hurls a piece of pizza across the stage, she looked pointedly at us to applaud her. That sort of thing. Then we see the videotaping of two characters dressed up to resemble Hero and another man. A kind of falsification of evidence we are familiar with. As in all productions, one is then pushed into the pathos of Hero and made to feel the cruelty of the way the men humiliate Hero and her father, never giving either a chance to explain or justify themselves, and become emotionally involved:

Margaret (Dina Thomas) to the side; Benedick as in all productions ends on the side of the women

Then back to farce with the intervention of Dogberry (Dave Quay), Verges (David Bishins) and two unnamed cops as an incompetent surveillance team and secret service; at moments it all felt inspired as we moved back to hear more of what was going on in other of Shakespeare’s plays (everyone dead on the stage in Hamlet, the war in Egypt not going so well &c&c). In the better productions I’ve seen this interlude of Shakespeare’s play is not downplayed but used centrally as it was here:

I’m not going to make it better than it was. Like this summer’s DC production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream, this was a frolicking, rollicking version of one of our national ritual plays meant to rouse us out of ourselves — and here, however lightly, skimmingly, to comment on our own world that has such ridiculous TV shows:  it won’t bear philosophical or political scrutiny. I wished too that Gero had been given more space and time to convey Shakespeare’s old man’s grief (I remember when he was doing the heroes of Shakespeare’s plays), but it is a kind of compliment to this play if it were not such a trek for me to get there, I’d see it twice so as to take in what was happening. I wished I were closer to the stage to hear what was said or we had surtitles.

I’d like to end on the idea that were it filmed as Kate Hamil’s dancing Sense and Sensibility has been, I’d go to see it in a theater or (better yet) stream it up close to me on my computer in my home. At the same time, as with Hamil’s staged production, a lot was done that was fun that only works in a live theater. Each time I go to a play since the pandemic entered this later stage, I am reminded that wonderful as it is to watch them from London on my computer, much is lost without the lived real presences and its accompanying sense of risk taken.

Ellen

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“The irony of A Christmas Carol reboots in the age of billionaires”

A Whole Lot of Humbug (New York Times)

Dear friends and readers,

This NBC review of two new movies for the Christmas market is superb and ironic; at moments nearly scathing: Anibundel offers a sort of history of Dickens’s story in commercial terms (how many sold), a concise synopsis, and then these two new rewrites (?): Scrooge and Spirited, the animated one with a stellar cast (including Olivia Coleman and Jessie Buckley).

The irony of “Christmas Carol” reboots in the age of billionaires is “too bad neither “Scrooge” nor “Spirited” knows how:

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/netflix-christmas-carol-reboot-spirited-misses-elon-musk-irony-rcna59889

Egbert says the ide of Spirited is there is a spirit industry in the business of redeeming a new miser each year; Metacritic finds Spirited a “whole lot of Christmas fun”

Scrooge, the animated one, is [more than] “slightly off key (another NYTimes review)

As Anibundel says, today’s super-rich are not finding redemption by being charitable …. I add they are not seeking redemption even …

FWIW, it seems from her description these contemporary versions have not made Scrooge into a miser. To make the “trick” work the very rich old man must both be a miser, seen as socially isolated, finamentally alone and somehow embittered.  Central to the assumptions of the modern versions of Dickens’s tale is it is terrible to be alone; to keep Christmas is to be with others in a kindly spirit.

Opening scene of 1951 movie

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FWIW, my feeling is Dickens’s story would have to be so changed to speak to people today that it would really take the sort of thing a brilliant sequel or post-text once in a long while does. Some new character or perspective not in the original, or some minor character. The new character or perspective is Mary Reilly (Valerie Martin) out of RLS’s Jekyll and Hyde. The minor characters. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Stoppard) out of Hamlet.

Donna Reed as the unmarried Mary in It’s a Wonderful Life

A minor character ignored is the woman Scrooge loved as a young woman and who rejected him, and is seen fleetingly working in a poorhouse. Why has no one thought to re-write a post-text centering on her? Give her a memorable name? Remember her in the last scenes of memory of in the presence of Christmas present? … Probably not, and this morning I cannot locate my DVD of the 1951 movie and this moment is nowhere on the Net. Only the absurd picture of George Bailey’s wife, unmarried, an old maid librarian (a fate worse than death in It’s A Wonderful Life); Scrooge’s ex- grown old finds worthy fulfilling self-sacrificing (of course) charity to be performed.

See my review of the British 1951 movie, A Christmas Carol, with the imitable Alistair Sim, where the film-makers and audience could still respond to Dickens’s ghost tale.

Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey

I’ve written many reviews of Christmas movies meant for the Christmas market and others which have become Christmas movies over the years. But as a reboot, It’s a Wonderful Life deserved a blog of its own.

Roubaix in A Christmas Tale (a recent favorite with me)

Ellen

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