Outlander 6: Episodes 5-8: Trauma, Transgression and Betrayal; Crisis and Separation

Lord John Grey (David Berry, Episode 5, “Give Me Liberty)

Dear friends and readers,

I complete my account of the sixth season of Outlander (see Episodes 1-4: Processing Grief … ). I’ve been so enjoying the sixth season, I’m telling myself by mid-December I’ll try again to read or listen to The Fiery Cross and then go on to A Breath of Snow and Ashes, both of which I have as books by Galbaldon and as CD sets read aloud by Davina Porter.

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

Episode 6: Give Me Liberty

Yet another basically reflective and retrospective episode. I was delighted to find that David Berry has returned. To my taste, he is the handsomest of all the male leads, and I’m “charmed” (really am) by the character. At one point he is wearing a lovely cream-colored outfit, but I could not find a still online of this scene.

This is another episode hard to disentangle and hard to replicate with the interweave so again I’ll just cover each thread. My framing will be the feature that comes with it: all about trauma and how trauma is affecting several of the central characters.

I had not picked up on how much Claire (Caitriona Balfe) is using ether – as one would a calming drug today. So at several points in the episode we her disappear after she takes a drug too. She sees and hears Lionel Brown (Ned Dennehy) as a haunting revenant.

Fergus (Cesar Dombey) is now traumatized because of his loss of his hand and the way other males and females too have treated him. During the episode he seems to disappear we are told after trading he began to work as a printer in one of the larger North Caroline towns, not far off from where Aunt Jocasta (Maria Doyle Kennedy) has her estate. We also hear she is funding him, and what’s more he is again printing subversive pamphlets. He is for the colonialists in the struggle in which Murtagh (Duncan Lacroix) was involved. Just one line from her but strong (because Maria Doyle Kennedy is a very effective presence) that she misses Murtagh: she is helping the “side” Murtagh died defending.

Jamie, John and black servant girl

This then involves Jamie (Sam Heughan). He has given up being an agent for the crown with the Indians because he does not want to be a mole. Claire and Brianna (Sophia Skelton) have told him the British lose – this seems to figure in his thinking. Lord John Grey first seen in the episode talking to the British representative and vouching for Jamie, and at first Jamie lies to him, but then tells him the truth, and Grey then alerts a meeting of the Regulators (?) on time so all escape.

A subplot involves Roger still helping a widow and her child finish a house and settle in. Everyone is talking, Brianna is jealous or worried Roger is being dragged in. We see in part he is — he is also a man who hasn’t got a role in the world that fits him anymore. But by end of episode Brianna pregnant again and Roger has supplied another young man as a substitute for himself.

An as yet nameless young man (later we find out his name is Henderson) appears to be having an affair with Malva – very dangerous because of her fanatic and tyrannical father. She seems to court punishment by prostituting herself. A scene I did not understand at all – we see Malva is visiting what looks like a half-alive and half-dead rotting corpse. She slices off one of his fingers. This is creepy gothic. I know she is not to be trusted.

Lizzie serving, Brianna and Roger at the table

Lauren Lyle as Marsali in this season comes into her own, in the various roles we watch her play – soon she will be joining Fergus we are told.
Ian not much there if at all in this episode. Lizzie (Caitlin O’Ryan) grows ill with malaria (malarial attacks repeat themselves) and we see the two twin male servants care a lot for her.

At end of episode suddenly Claire hears a tune that comes from a later period. I could not place it, but then we see (it seems) perhaps in prison but at any rate from the back, someone with a jewel he stole from Jocasta’s necklace in his hand. Long black hair from the back? Who could he be? I have not guessed it.

So a lot going on, much of it inward.

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

Episode 6: The World Turned Upside Down

Claire seeking out Tom Christie (Mark Lewis Jones)

Well at long last we are not quietly reflective and retrospective: this is a powerful deeply distressing and disquieting episode. Everything is turned upside down when Malva becomes pregnant and accuses Jamie of having sex with her repeatedly, liking it, and being the father of this coming baby! Before very long everyone in the settlement or on Fraser’s Ridge has been told about this. This happens about half-way through the episode.
It gets worse.

The first half of the episode is about a disease running through the settlement. Is it cholera? Bacteria carried in the water. Different people appear to have different diseases. Claire becomes very ill, and while Brianna is out, Malva and Lizzie meaning for the best (I’m not sure about Malva) chop off Claire’s hair until it’s very short. She recovers, but many die. Of course the 21st century watcher worries about the gossip about Claire as a witch.

Caitriona Balfe is more interestingly dressed than she has been in a few seasons. She has after all been in story about American pioneers. We see her in long skirts most of the time but now she dons a Napoleonic like long coat and a fine hat to cover her head. She visits Tom Christie to discover if he has the same disease she does, but the conversation goes badly. He walks her back though.

And now the shocking accusation. Christie with his daughter and son, Allan. It should be noted they are hardly ever apart and when I first saw them I thought they were courting. Claire had had a bad dream in which she thought she saw Jamie responding to one of Malva’s advances. She flees to a barn and Jamie follows after denying everything and throwing the Christies out. A confrontation ensues: Claire cannot disbelieve him but she is shaken: she does not belong here, neither do Brianna or Roger, all for love of Jamie. This does bring home to us how much they are giving up. But we see other moments where she and Jamie are missing Marsali and Fergus now. How Brianna is attached to her. Even Brianna is shaken because of her parents’ own unconventional relationship. He confesses the one night of love-making with Mary MacNab before he gave himself up to Ardsmuir prison.

Always generous, Claire visits (!) Malva and tries to talk with her but it is soon obvious it’s useless – Malva lies, calls Claire a witch, the brother backs her up. Claire gets angry and threatens Malva. Malva impervious

Malva morte

At the very end Malva is found with her throat cut, just dying or dead, and much to my horror, as Claire is the one to find her, Claire seeing how advanced the baby is (how big the bulge) performs a C-Section on her! (with a knife), of course now she cannot live; Claire pulls a tiny baby, but complete and it is just breathing and she works to resuscitate it, but it dies in her arms. I was terrified by this as I know she cam be blamed for a double murder! I gather it will take a long time in the book ( A Breathe of Snow and Ashes) before it is finally discovered who fathered this baby, and who did the murder.

This is violence enough. Very real. Very relevant to our world today (I’m thinking of women’s reproductive rights, what pregnancy is, the attempt to stop all abortions maybe even contraception &c&c in places in the US).

This is worrying for Jamie is gone off to the Philadelphia Continental Congress where he Is not chosen for a representative because his reputation now ruined. Back, we the whole settlement ostracize the Frasers and Mackenzies – Roger had been a central minister at the opening of this episode. Iain gets into fights on Jamie’s behalf; he goes to Claire and says he is the father for he did once have sex with Malva. Claire suddenly says that Roger came upon her having sex with Henderson (I wonder that was not brought out before or made public). Malva seems to be promiscuous – who knows who the father is?

Then Claire still suffering traumatic memories (Lionel Brown’s ghost and voice haunts her), takes some ether rather than answer the door. It’s Malva. She has a bad dream of Malva accusing Jamie and her. Wakening, she goes out to the garden and find there the dying Malva, and what I described above ensues. Claire is left crying with horror.

I finished reading the redaction of A Breath of Snow and Ashes in the second companion and find that Bonnet died in this book. What’s more there is a lot more military action going in. The film-makers have deliberately excised that stuff from both the 5th and now this season. The girl’s accusations and its results up to her death are there in the book more or less as told in the film. The title of the book refers to the season of winter, and I see at the end of the book the explanation for the brief obituary Brianna read, which brought her back in time is also revealed.

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

Episode 7: Sticks and Stones

This one feels like a cumulation of all the episodes of this season dealing with trauma; Claire is now utterly caught up with murder of Malva.
Then paratext of song this season is “the Laird that is gone …”

Brianna and Roger wished “safe travels”

Begins with Mrs Bug suggesting Malva was never to be distrusted, but Claire insists she never thought that way about her. Mr Crombie first appearance.

They are all standing around the corpse: brother (I cannot find any stills of him) curses Claire and Jamie; how did you go out there with a knife; did they see anything at all; father does not want to give her a burial in consecrated ground; Jamie says they will bury the bodies at the Ridge. Claire insists she thinks of Malva as life and light not darkness

Claire’s bad dreams woven throughout: it’s the voice of Lionel which is the voice of guilt; the most traumatic of all her experiences beaten and gang raped. Knocking at door. She is using ether – trying to medicate herself but making herself worse; haunted Ian out searching, asking questions. It was a Sin Eater who was missing finger parts and we now realize that’s who we saw Malva cutting.

Henderson — a likely candidate for Malva’s baby’s father

Anecdote episode with Henderson come to complain about questioning; it emerges that Roger saw him having sex with Malva and he gets indignant
Voice goes over all Claire’s history and “betrayals” and lies from first season on, with angry protesting voices at her at the time; she left when she should have stayed; stayed when she should have left (Frank’s voice, Black Jack’s)

Brianna and Roger now talking about it, he says he will do the service; as this episode develops Roger becomes more and more explicit that he wants to be a minister – finally this can be his occupation in this era

Roger as minister at funeral

All finally take note that something wrong or different about Lizzie’s behavior, she is caught in lies; Josiah and Kezzie have vanished

Perry Mason thought of by Claire (she wishes they had him there): who could have, who had the motive, who has opportunity and Claire says me: she is beginning to think she may have done it, rather that she wanted to do it.

Nightmare with Malva banging at door, shock she awakens, lost her temper and threatened Malvina: I’ll fucking kill you; Jamies there to contradict, sooth; over voice: funny we saw we are just human when we do bad things, not good ones.

Who is she now after all the roles she’s played? (Claire thinking)

There are contemplative images of them — an older couple

Story of Lizzie and Beardsley boys emerges; Lizzie feels she has done nothing wrong; eventually handfast with them both.

Talk about killing; eating animals (vegetarian explained); Jamie says big difference when Roger Mac killed a man in self-defense and this murder of Malva
Claire: because I came here I changed things: whole history of all; it was because she desperately wanted to be with Jamie – she loved him

Funeral scene: Allan (the brother of Malva) accuses them both – terrible scenes in the church. Quieter by the grave Jamie not to carry coffin; Ian can.

Claire going crazy she feels; losing it; Jamie says she must not lock him out the way she did not allow Jamie to lock the world out after Wentworth. She says she’d do it all again.

Brianna and Roger now decided on this career for him, a minister (it’s what his adopted father was); it seems to demand they go to Edenton as a family; Roger upset at how child is being taught to believe people become ghosts.

All now quiet, they are making dinner, and the posse of the Brown gang arrive and demand to take Claire away as under arrest

Episode does center a lot on Jamie and Claire — we keep returning to them

***************************************************
Episode 8: I am not alone

Jamie and Claire defending themselves early in the night

I put off watching this because somehow I found it so painful and anxiety-producing the first time round, but that was late at night and I watched it directly after S6, E7, Sticks and Stones. This time I could see reassurance set up by the end

The previously takes us way back: Brianna tells Roger she cannot tell if Jemmy is his. News of deaths of Claire & Jamie in a fire. Jamie gives Cherokees guns. Roger preaching sermon, he & Briana to Edenton so he may be ordained Presbyterian: this could be his fitting occupation. Your wife covered up to elbows in blood. The accusation. Brown: we have come for our wife to arrest her for the murder of Malva Christie.

A scene of 2 in a café modern eating fries … one a woman, cannot catch the other – slipped in …

The Posse comes, led by Richard Brown

They demand Claire, are Committee of Public Safety. Beardsley & Lizzie flee. A battle ensues. Men surround the house; Claire kills with rifle man who got in. Frees Jamie from crowd; they barricade themselves. Boarded up windows. House being destroyed by all out shooting. Brown found out Marsali killed his brother (Claire to Jamie). This is revenge, an excuse. Brown with a white handkerchief; they’ll go to Salisbury for fair trial; that’s the law …. Jamie shoots at them, they look like thugs.

Switch to Roger & Brianna and Jemmy. Talking of revolution; what’s happening in Boston; once Roger would dream to go, but now he’s here. I must think all be safe. They talk of how truths kept from them as children; she now accepts what happened … Back to house, Jamie and Claire fear firing of their house; by the hearth, with water, find food, Obituary says 21 January; this is May so they must survive. No plan. Outside men bivouac.

Roger and Brianna inside tent with child; beautiful love-making scene of comfortably married couple, laughter, she pregnant. This contrasts and compares to Jamie and Claire: condemned eat hearty meal; she’d choose cheeseburger &c (it sound like the meal we saw a opening still). Where is everyone? Ian? Lizzie? They remember the times he came near death, when she did. Fortune teller read his palm and it connected death with number 9. Jamie cites Prayer of Contrition.

Outside fisherfolk, Hiram Comb – come out, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live; they accuse him of killing Malva; Claire shouts hoarsely she was trying to save the unborn child and Jamie innocent. Accusation of revenge. Malva’s brother: you debauched and killed my sister. Scots people ride up with Lizzie but no go. Tom Christie arrives and manages a negotiation Witness and mediator. No reason you should not rest in your own bed. Frasers go back in. Guard set. Love-making that night. Knitted bodies. Jamie promises her this will not be the last time they see the house and environs.

Their last night — an expressive image

Daylight. They are in wagon. Shall I tend to their wounds? Christie brings her breakfast. No court at Salisbury; off to Wilmington; Tom Christie looking remorseful. Lizzie I am back, but she cannot help; Ian back but vanishes. People roused to throw stones. Calm reasserted

Brianna: are we there yet? They read New Bern Onion, Fergus printer. Poet’s corner – Marsali. Child has lice; they cut his hair and discover hereditary nevus like the one Roger has. So they are father & son.

Back to Jamie and Claire in wagon; Christie hanging round. Ian there, but not time yet. Don’t go away, lad I am with you Uncle.

Someone comes up; a man dies; Jamie brought out for drinking water: a trap, the rest ride off with Claire, shouting. Brown tells Claire his brother a lout but she is a murderer and he was his brother Mr Fraser sent to Scotland; Christie will not leave her, insists Jamie alive, he is there to protect her. Trip of fearful discontent.

Snap shot of Brianna and Roger still off with child to Edenton

Claire now over-voice: Tom Christie troubled; will not admit Jamie dead. Town (Wilmington) in bad shape. Corpse hanging. She is put in jail. Christie there: I would not have your deaths on my conscience. She is to trust him.

Switch to Jamie tied to post; just as someone is about to crush Jamie’s head, Ian’s arrow hits; we see him and Indians. All there, reassurance, and group now riding post-haste to rescue Claire (with Tom Christie protecting her). She (I) is not alone.

Finis for season — until next year when (we are told) there may be 16 episodes and then the series will come to an end. I have not included the more frantic and debilitating and humiliating seasons (Claire led by a rope, for example) because the over-all feel is stoical

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Outlander, Season 6, Episodes 1-4: A Season of Processing Grief; from A Breath of Snow and Ashes

Brianna (Sophia Skelton) helping Claire (Caitriona Balfe) to bathe — after she is brought back to Fraser’s Ridge from gang-rape (Season 5, Episode 12: Never My Love)

How many times have I put my hopes, my fears, my secret longings into the hands of a Being that can’t see, can’t hear, can’t even feel. How many times have my prayers been answered? Time is a lot of the things that people say God is. There is pre-existing and having no end. There is the notion of a Being all powerful because nothing can stand against Time, not mountains, not armies. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of, all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And if Time is akin to God, I suppose that memories must be the devil …. (from script, the overvoice for Season 5, Episode 5, “Perpetual Adoration”)

Friends and readers,

I loved this 6th season, which, while it basically adapts freely A Breathe of Snow and Ashes, like Season 5, also brings together material from a later and earlier book and re-arranges everything to the point the overall feel is very different (a handy list for viewing all recaps and commentary on Season 5). It is also, crucially and astonishingly to me, strongly dependent on the viewer having become immersed before and being totally involved before you begin. I’d say almost all the episodes had long sequences that were reflective and meditative, remembering and re-processing as it were — so how does this rivet new watchers? There is but one feature and it is all about trauma. We hear from all the major actors/characters, the central scriptwriters (those here since the first season), where they talk of each major character in terms of how processing grief is difficult; everyone processes grief differently; it’s real, violent, volatile. They are searching for their identity, what is the way forward; their past holds them. Some terrible things have happened; is Claire Teflon? No. Jamie is giving her space and time to heal; she has nightmares .. the feature goes over each character but dwells on Claire, Ian (“The Hour of the Wolf”), and Fergus. I am telling myself I must go back and finish reading/listening to The Fiery Cross and then go on to A Breathe of Snow and Ashes.

I admit since I found the fifth and sixth Outlander books so muddled, so without forward thrust, that for much of the previous season and all of this one too I relied on The Outlandish Companion: Volume II by Diana Gabaldon

********************************
Episode 1: Echoes (a straight recap with video clip)

Ardsmuir (New Craigmiller Castle)

Just a first impression, and w/o benefit of reading the source book at all. As I said a while back I got through only half of book 5 (The Fiery Cross); I’ve never opened book 6 (A Breath of Snow and Ashes). You are at a considerable disadvantage when you’ve not read the book in these sorts of film adaptations meant in part to be faithful and using the book for deepening. A brief read of some comments on Season 6 show Roger Moore back in central place (I imagine his movements away to other shows became fewer when the pandemic hit and much new programming delayed or cancelled but I could be wrong) and Gabaldon interesting herself to the point she says that much that she cared about made the transfer but not all; we are told the opening is not in the book but taken from elsewhere.

Certainly the opening was a surprise and to me a somewhat demoralizing one. We are back at Ardsmuir, way before Lord John Grey took over, not just after Culloden, but just after Jamie gives himself up (1753) – I did recognize the actor who played the first general. It is such misery and what we see is slowly Jamie asserting himself and the men gaining minimal rights. An ambivalent relationship emerges between Jamie and a man who is at the head of Protestant faction: Tom Christie (Mark Lewis Jones). I felt the loss of Murtagh and found that Duncan Lacroix is no longer in the cast at all.

Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire, 1773 (after flashback) dressed with attitudes which signify they’re older

Then we fast forward 20 years to 1773 and North America. I began more to enjoy it. I have to say that this episode reminded me of the opener in Episode 5: it moves slowly and is a gradual development of our favorite characters, showing us what they are at this point. I loved it but my feeling is if you are not already deeply immersed this may not grab you at all. Seasons 1-3 openers did, and Seasons 1-2 were especially exciting and melodramatic almost throughout. I grew to love 5, but I acknowledge others might not unless they were wrapped up in the characters already.

So basically Claire is slowly overcoming the trauma of the rape-beating; Jamie keeps close to her lest anyone attack her again; she is now inventing anesthetics but Brianna worries lest they be misunderstood and attacked again – part of the animus against Claire in Season 5 was her portraying herself as Dr Rawlings dispensing contraceptive information. And lo and behold there is Christie’s daughter, Malva (Jessica Reynolds), who seems at first simply a fanatic evangelical type sniffing around the “phosporus,” saying this is the stuff of the devil.

Yes Tom Christie turns up with his family; he saw the ad and wants to be part of the settlement. Jamie, a bit reluctant, nonetheless accepts them in. Tom is a tyrant to his family, and his son is going bad, partly a result of this repression and bullying. Marsali (Lauren Lyle) is pregnant again, but this time she has a bruise on her arm, and soon it emerges Fergus (Cesar Dombey) has become an alcoholic. She is deeply ashamed and he’s in denial: we are given clues some of this is the result of his having one hand and not being of service like the others. Problem here is this was not a problem before: he was always as active as ever (partly from Jamie’s influence but that’s not gone). Brianna and Roger (Richard Rankin) just there, in support (not given much to do beyond that). Young Ian (John Bell) active in hunting animals with bows and arrows; there is a conversation where he brings up the idea that perhaps Claire could help him change his destiny as he sees it with respect to his wife. This is the first we’ve heard of her explicitly.

Central scene is love-making, gentle and tender between Claire and Jamie – as befits this grandparent couple. Both of them have bad dreams or memories: Jamie’s shorter (of Ardsmuir) and Claire’s of the rape and beating. We see them as kind grandparents to Brianna/Roger’s children and one of Fergus/Marsali’s.

Plot-design of episode; governor’s aide arrives early to ask Jamie to become a chief crown agent dealing with Indians; he does not want to involve himself (as he refused in episode 5 – reminding me of Ross Poldark’s reluctance). The governor is going to tax the Frasers heavily for not agreeing to take on Indian tasks. But what happens is the threatening presence our enemy group (one must have a true villains) are what is left over the Brown gang, headed by Richard Brown (Chris Larkin), the brother of man who instigated the rape of Claire (hated her for helping his wife, his daughter) and whom Jamie murdered and returned in a body bag. The Browns demand that Jamie punish Tom Christie for stealing an object and Jamie is forced to whip him (we see a flogging of Jamie at the opening in Ardsmuir). Jamie hates this. Jamie now told Lionel (Ned Dennehy) will become the Indian agent. So at the end of the episode Jamie relents and takes the position as it would be dangerous for them, for the Indians, for everyone for such a gang to have power.

**********************************************
Episode 2: Allegiances (another recap, this time with still, more evaluative)

Tom Christie (Mark Lewis Jones)

I’ve watched Episode 2 now and find that it’s making me very curious about A Breath of Snow and Ashes. I have the feeling the film team has done the same thing they did for Season 5, from (more or less) The Fiery Cross. They have picked a few of the episodes, and rewritten and rewoven them to fit a theme (or themes) across this season. Despite the re-appearance of Roger Moore’s name in key places (writing too), it has the quietude of the fifth season, with this difference, I am continually worried or feeling anxious about our six principals: Jamie and Claire; Roger and Brianna; Marsali and Fergus.

The threat is from the people Jamie has allowed to build and live in their compound (the religious ideas of Tom Christie are paranoid and aggressive, including an obviously misogynistic inspired distrust of Claire as a witch), and now the Indians that Jamie has (paradox this) become an agent to the crown (George III) to. Every doctoring deed Claire does is worrying, and now Brianna, matching Claire’s invention of ether, invented matches.

Still brings out the quietly comic feel of the operation

Story: it opens with Claire trying to mend Tom Christie’s more crippled hand, which she says she will have to operate using ether on. As in later conversations when Christie brings up the idea God doesn’t want him to have a good hand, Claire refutes this with secular and ironic understanding. Marsali’s pregnancy is quite advanced and Claire now with Malva (dangerous because Christie’s daughter-in-law) goes to take care of Marsali. The baby is near birth, but something is wrong, and Claire dare not do a C-section, for that would kill Marsali. Claire also gets out of Marsali, the bruises are from Fergus; they fight intensely over his drinking. Jamie deputies Roger to go get Fergus who is very drunk when Roger arrives, and Roger becomes disgusted and angry with Fergus, who finally agrees to come.

Fergus with Claire

A second thread moving through this is Jamie and Ian’s overnight visit to the Indians who are asking Jamie to ask the governor to give them guns, ammunition. Jamie consults Claire as to the future allegiance of the Cherokee and she says she doesn’t know as she did not read that far into American history: this Is part of a scene where they make love.

Back to visit to Indians overnight: a supposedly comic scene of two Indian women trying to have sex that night with Jamie, stopped finally by Ian speaking to them. Jamie will only promise to consider asking the governor.

Fergus comes and he is transformed (one hopes more than momentarily) to the Fergus we knew: sweet, loving, he begins to make love to Marsali, as enormous as she is, sucking her breasts. He says in the brothel they did that to help women give birth. All leave the couple alone, but and eventually hear the baby coming. We see Marsali giving birth with Claire and Malva on either side, also Brianna there, but when Fergus takes the child after a few minutes he is horrified (“nain” he cries and runs off): the child is perhaps a Downs Syndrome baby; Marsali loves it immediately.

The thread of the Christie group appears again with Christie building a church; and an old woman in the group dying. Roger is to be minister at the funeral and lo and behold she awakens momentarily. Claire explains this – a semi-comic, semi-deeply felt scene ensues with the old woman alive but dying still is what happens. Again the modern ideas that Claire brings to this endanger her in the eyes of these people. A little later Jamie comes up to their compound and queries this building of a church before houses; Tom Christie stands up for this idea, and Jamie appears to allow it as long as the new church is neither Catholic nor Protestant specifically but rather a meeting house for all – he refers Tom to the opening at Ardsmuir where he, Jamie, resolved constant fighting by joining the Freemasons and telling the others too and thus defusing religious conflicts.

Bree and Roger, playful

Brianna and Roger are seen having private time together with her hurt because over the meal they had just before Marsali went into labor, everyone thought good news was a new baby, when it was her invention of matches. Only Claire seemed to understand how important and convenient these are. It’s frustrating to Brianna that her abilities have nowhere to flourish. They talk of how they have decided to stay permanently and how they have been trying to have another child with no result as yet. We see Brianna a little later walking to stables where she meets Ian. She overhears him praying for a child he apparently had with his Mohawk wife. Ian is bothered by Jamie’s refusal to ask the Governor – a refusal that the Indians learned of and came to be angry over. Claire says if Jamie gives them arms, they could end up the Fraser’s enemy as the Frasers right now are on the British (not rebels) side. Ian says that nonetheless the Indians deserve weapons if they are to be endlessly displaced by these white colonialists.

In another scene (I’m not sure exactly where these all occur in the sequence) Brianna and Jamie sit on the porch together talking and cleaning their two guns. Brianna tells Jamie that Ian had a child who is probably still with the Mohawk.

A small later episode shows Jamie talking to Mr Bug about some supplies he is taking with Kessie to trade; up to them comes Mrs Bug and Lizzie (Caitlin O’Ryan) and we see that Kessie and Lizzie have a flirtation going on.

The episode concludes with Jamie writing a long letter to the governor (at first from some dialogue we assume it is to his Aunt Jocasta); late at night Claire comes out of the bedroom to ask about the letter. He confides to her he is going to give it to the Major (then with them) to give to the governor to ask for the Indians to have guns. She says I thought you were against this. He replies that he now realizes that Ian’s allegiance is to the Mohawk, to these Indians, and that he, Jamie’s, allegiance is to Ian so he will do as Ian asked him to.

Just about all these scenes are quiet thoughtful ones, filled with mood and complex feelings – even quieter and less overt aggressive action than Season 5. I find I have no trouble staying up and watching intensely, ever worried for everyone and caring about them. Snow on the ground showing it’s winter. The whole episode is beautifully photographed throughout.

***************************************************
Episode 3: Temperance (detailed straight recap, emotional, with still)

Jamie offering Malva Christie friendship

I am now not puzzled altogether about the curious tone in which people who wrote about Season 6 when it was airing on Starz: the third episode is as oddly quiet, non-violent, non-active as the first two. Season 5 did have violence and action by the third episode – the fight with the Browns, then regulators versus the royal governor. The first sign we will have any is a newsletter that appears at the end of the episode telling of the Boston Tea Party. It’s not called that in the paper, but Claire refers to it that way. This is again a series of mostly non-violent incidents which are exemplary in different ways.

I looked at the summary of A Breath of Snow and Ashes in the 2nd Outlandish Companion and find it as unreadable as I found the last 2/3s of The Fiery Cross – there is no thrust forward but rather stories about our characters as they live an isolated life on Fraser’s Ridge. They are interwoven but again I’ll tell each incident or thread together as I cannot remember the order they are in as there is no weaving forward to some conclusion; they are self-contained. Another problem with these episodes is Jamie and Claire are too perfect, as are Roger and Brianna. The only un-exemplary character is Fergus – for Ian is also without any real flaw. I love them myself but recognize the incidents lack inner conflict. Yes, Claire carries on being haunted by images of Lionel Brown who insulted and raped her and uses ether sometimes to sleep. But that is not enough

By contrast, The Crown (Netflix series about British monarchy, 20th century) has shows Philip to be very flawed while we feel for him; and Elizabeth to be conflicted over how to behave towards him, angry and also torn in her role as queen.

So we have Tom Christie giving in and coming to have his hand healed – cut and re-formed and sewn the way Claire did Jamie’s hand – the man refuses ether (horrified by the idea) and won’t even bite on a piece of wood but reads aloud passages from the Bible with Jamie chiming in and holding him down slightly – he does scream from the pain. By the end of the hour (this time it is just an hour) he is healed, grateful, and takes away a copy of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, saying he thought novels were evil until he heard Jamie telling aloud tales at Ardsmuir. Now he agrees they are forms of escape and distraction. However, when he reads the book, we look over his shoulder and see him reading one of Fielding’s many ironic passages about love, and he closes the book, and returns it with a note to the effect “this is filth” and he had thought better of Claire.

Another incident occurs when Roger sees a baby in a basket floating on the river towards a water fall and its death. He jumps in, barely saving it, all the while realizing a group of boys had done this. They include Germaine, Marsali and Fergus’s son. He is incensed at their idea this child is a demon – because it’s a dwarf. The boys are scolded fiercely and then required to turn up to Jamie who gives them the choice of touching a red-hot iron or the baby. They had also thought they’d be burned if they touched the child. Of course, they choose the child and find they are not burned, and the baby behaves sweetly.

Marsali (Lauren Lyle) spinning

Roger has become the minister of the place and we see him deliver a sermon against superstitions about dwarves using the Biblical story of Moses. Brianna seems to have built a spinning wheel, and we watch Marsali learning to spin fibre into yarn or thread. Brianna needs to be doing something too.

Marsali is not having much success stopping Fergus from drinking to excess all the time; now he blames himself for having such a child. He tells Claire how he saw dwarves treated in Paris – it sounds like the dwarves here are Downs Syndrome children. Claire says none of that will happen now for they will take care of Henri-Christian. Fergus wants to know what happens to the child after they all age and die. At one point the Frasers are collecting rent (in just the way of the Highlanders) and one couple find Fergus “stinks” and say he is responsible for his freak child. He physically attacks them. Later Marsali says to Claire, Fergus has promised to stop drinking; but when he comes home, he is drunk as ever. She throws him out and says she’d rather have no man than a drunk one. And later in the episode Jamie is out in the wood and from afar sees Fergus slash his wrist badly; Jamie saves Fergus, and there is a scene of traumatic talk, with Jamie the father hugging his son and when they return it does seem as if Fergus will reform and accept himself again and his new son.

Ian and Malva are striking up a friendship. I had mistaken and the young man I thought her husband is her brother — but there is an important hint here: they are behaving as if husband and wife. We are of course to see love blooming in Malva, but Ian seems attracted. Touching dialogues about what they believe, her father’s cruelty (in one scene we see the father whipping her now that his hand is fine), but she mentions that her father would be upset if she had a “lover” and it’s implied even more were he like Ian – Indian like, not Christian. Ian says he does not know what he believes.

Somewhat improbably Brianna builds a glorious spinning wheel. She needs to do something but it is Marsali who sits turning fibres into thread or yarn.
Lizzie makes an appearance at one point and again we see she is courted by Kezzie. She appears very happy in her position as working beloved servant-companion.

Christie tells Jamie and Claire his group of people have accepted the offer of the Browns to protect them – Claire tells Christie this is a bad move.
The end of the episode has Major Macdonald returning with the guns for the Cherokee, and bringing the newsletter about the Boston Tea Party. Claire says “the storm” (or war ) has started.

For my part I love watching it because I’m fond of the central six characters and worry about them.

***********************************************
Episode 4: Hour of the Wolf (recap from an amusingly anachronistic POV, with 2 clips!)

Ian (John Bell) and his central rival, Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa (Morgan Holmstrom?)

Another quiet mostly retrospective and reflective hour — it’s curious that is the atmosphere because it includes a challenge and duel where one of two people could have been murdered. But no one is.

Ian’s Mohawk name was Wolf’s brother, and so the meaning of the title is episode devoted to Ian’s history, inner life, and watching him try to come to terms with what happened.

It opens with him remembering how he was initiated by rituals into the Mohawks, fell in love with girl whose name was so hard to pronounce, he called her Emily. They were happy but after the second bloody miscarriage, Ian was told the gods were against him being part of the tribe; Emily was given to the man called his brother, and he coerced into leaving.

Also early in the episode before they get to the camp, Jamie is giving Fergus the task of going with goods from the farm to trade for things needed, make money. Fergus is not drunk and says he knows what Milord is doing. Keeping him occupied. Jamie says he needs these things done, and as Fergus had said remembering their time in Edinburgh as printers, Fergus is a good businessman trader. Some of this was too didactic, but it’s beautifully acted and the film landscape and music and feeling is good.

These memories are prompted by a trip Jamie takes with Ian to the Cherokee to give them the guns. (Again as I’ve done before I am not trying to recap the episode because I’m not following the interlace. Some of the above is in a flashback Ian has when Jamie and he arrive at the Cherokee camp and discover Mohawks there, and (what a coincidence), just this brother who took Emily from Ian.

Before we get there Major (I’m not sure of this name) MacDonald has been at Fraser’s Ridge handed over these arms, and Brianna told Jamie that 60 years from now these Indians will be forced off the land — well after the revolution. So they will need these armaments. When they get to the camp, Jamie, now reflectively ethical, tells this to the chief. He explains his knowledge by his wife’s extra powers (so too his daughter). This is of course the cruel (infamous) Trail of Tears inflicted on these people during Andrew Jackson’s administration.

Another trader, a Scot, Alexander Cameron is there, and a fight erupts between him and Wolf’s Brother, and that’s the duel. Cameron cheats and turns to shoot before Wolf’s brother but Ian on the alert, shoots the gun (or hits it with a strong arrow), knocking it out of his hand. Wolf’s brother’s turn, but he does not kill the begging man, rather shoots in the sky. Ian acknowledges to Wolf’s Brother he can bear him having Emily (there appears to have been a daughter and be a son).

Back at Fraser’s Ridge, Claire is practicing her invented ether on Lizzie and Kezzie and Jo (I suspect the same actor plays these twins). It is worrying since Malva is watching, as her apprentice and she swears she will not tell the father, and looking at Claire’s notebooks, Malva appears not to take these as spells of a witch. Or so she says, but there is something insinuating about her.

At the close of the episode when Jamie comes home, Claire rushes to where he is, and in a barn they make love. The last still shows Malva watching them through a key hole.

Ian still has Rollo; in the previous episodes we’ve seen Adso drinking milk, sitting on the bed with Marsali …

What they must have done here is taken a group of incidents and meditations about Ian and drawn them together with knowledge of the coming wars against the Indians (the previous episode referred to the Boston Tea Party and heating up rebellion). Jamie again says she cannot be a rebel and Indian agent for the crown so he must give up this agency.

Upcoming: Episodes 5-8

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

From one of the many moments of consolation, grieving, holding together …

Gentle and I hope forgiving and flexible reader, I realize two years have gone by since I blogged on Season 5, and going further back, all these blogs began in 2017 (3 years after the first season aired). What’s more at first I was putting them on my Reveries under the Sign of Austen (where many remain, except those here on JimandEllen). At first I deemed them based on a woman’s quintessentially woman’s historical romance, with a woman at the center, but then realized how many of the film team were men and how often every effort was made to create a male focus, so I also blogged here. Nowadays I’m here because the series is so popular, it seems to me to have a non-gender specific audience, i.e., both men and women (even if women are the greater number of viewers).

I confess to blogging less often and using the images I find on the Internet available openly instead of snapping my own as I watch. It’s easier, less time-consuming, and these are most of them images the film-makers have made readily available to the public.

I am doing my best and my dream is now that when I stop the teaching to write about the Outlander books and films, together with the Poldark books and films.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Early Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala films: The Householder/Shakespeare Wallah to Roseland/Heat and Dust

The Householder (1963): husband, Prem (Shashi Kapoor) and wife, Indu (Leela Naidu) not getting along

Shakespeare Wallah (1965): daughter Lizzie (Felicity Kendall) and mother Carla Buckingham (Laura Liddell, Felicity’s real mother) playing Shakespeare

Roseland (1977): a few of the chief presences sitting around one of many tables just outside the dance floor

Heat and Dust (1983): chief characters: Nawab (Shashi Kapoor) and his kept man, Harry (Nickolas Grace) and the English Official’s Wife, Olivia (Gretta Scacchi) out for a picnic

Friends and readers,

Over the course of my life, I’ve seen at least 16 of some 40 films (and some several times) made by the whole M-I-J team or two of the three over half a century. A few are bound up with memories that matter: going out to the cinema one summer’s day with Thao, a young woman I am motherly towards, and Izzy and seeing the Chekhovian The City of Your Final Destination (2009, so very late, after Merchant’s death); one night very late, Jim asleep, I burst into hysterical tears at the sense of a life thrown away, in The Remains of the Day (1993) and rushed into a room in the front of the house so as not to awaken Jim; during our trip into Quebec one summer, about (I thought at the time) retreat, Heat and Dust (1983), and now I’ll remember Shakespeare Wallah (1965), studying, trying to understand the work of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala for a course I’m about to teach, and feelings about England deeply awakened by the poignancy of the characters having to leave India to go home …

While they are quite varied, I’d say at the core what makes them so often so compelling, so memorable is the true feeling caught or theatricalized in their actually usually quietly understated films; themes like memory, inexplicable longings, an undercurrent of melancholy. Film stories carefully developed, so the hidden life of social scenes is revealed before us. I didn’t chose the most striking shots from the many many brilliant actors who have performed for them, some of them almost unrecognizable by the time they were swept up into the film world (especially once Maggie Smith transformed) though the shots released to the public bring out the actor from the part to sell the picture:

A young Shashi Kapoor as Prem, the intensely frustrated, repressed (before his mother) and occasionally distraught husband in The Householder

Julie Christie as Anne supposed independent young woman come to India to research the life and places her great-aunt Olivia ended up in India in Heat and Dust

Ismail Merchant in one of the many short films he made with Ivory abut their work, and now to be found (if you are lucky), as features in re-digitalized DVDs, said what differentiated their work was they all worked with “heart, intelligence, art.” They were earnest as well as playful about their trade (Wallah can be translates into a trade). I find in their best moments, they approach the work of Ingmar Bergmann; there are also many fallings away, as they stumble, try for non-cinematic almost non-dramatic material (Roseland), attempt to please an audience with simply lush photography (The Bostonians). There is a love affair with the English southern countryside, though three continents, three cultures are their groundwork: India first (Southasia), then England (and Anglo places wherever found), then NYC (very late South America) and Italy (Europe). They could take a photograph: in their very first movies, The Householder and Shakespeare Wallah, they had the direct help of Satyajit Ray and his cinematographer from whom they learned much about cutting, editing. I feel they were drawn to the misty and intangible currents emanating from characters to one another

Felicity Kendall, the wandering half-broke troupe’s daughter, and Shashi Kapoor, the young Indian aristocrat in Shakespeare Wallah

Daniel Day Lewis as Cecil Vyse and Helen Bonham Carter as Lucy Honeychurch in Room with a View (1985)

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

I have vowed to make these blogs shorter and so readable; my aim here is to encourage the reader (and watcher) to watch the earlier films (1962-83), perhaps in the black-and-white versions off-putting at first (little is compromised, they are not bland)go to Amazon prime or YouTube (where many are to be found), rent one of the older DVDs from Netflix (or better yet, splurge and buy a newly re-digitalized version with features as long as the movie), so perhaps the best thing, swiftest is to make a picture worth a thousand words by linking in the whole of Householder from YouTube

with a precise, carefully observed detailed study of the film’s art and the human story’s appeal. What I can add as to the story:

The Householder is a close adaptation of Jhabvala’s apparently fourth novel (in books on her The Householder is said to be her first). Now I realize it has in embryo central motifs and types of characters she has throughout her fiction, from beginning (all India) to middle (English women drawn into India and their original personality destroyed by the experience) to end (cool stories of corrupt individuals exploiting vulnerable ones across the Indian/American divide), — you can see a parallel plot in way (putting aside too literal alignments) in Heat and Dust (which I chose as the end of the early films as it was their first true hit, and ever after they were too often tempted into cream and enigmatic evasion).

The Householder is also a utterly believable story of two young Indian people put into an arranged marriage, and then left to make it on their own with the husband, Prem, having a low level job as teacher on a small salary. One of the aspects of all Jhabvala’s novels is that as we begin (and in many of her novels this does not change) in pairs of characters supposed to spend their lives together at least one, sometimes both have no concern or love for one another, are not congenial and what’s more don’t expect to be (particularly true here). Prem is having a very hard time adjusting to teaching in a crude place with no help from colleagues, no education in education, students absolutely w/o any real motivation to learn what he’s teaching (a dialect of Sanskrit); Indu (Leela Naidu, also an actress in France) is given nothing to do, no one to be with, her only function to serve him and he’s gone all day. One of his big mistakes is to bring his mother to live with them — a greedy, self-centered woman, rather stupid. The wife flees back to her parents and what she remembers as a happy household of sisters when she discovers she is pregnant. It’s this period away that awakens our hero to his need of her and desire to be a successful husband (householder). Amanda Vickery did a three part series on men in the 18th century and one of hours was how men wanted and needed to marry to belong, to have status, to be seen as successful males. So often 18th century England resembles 20th century India.

There are remarkable scenes of fights between teachers, of his attempt to get a rise in salary and get his rent put down, a friendship with a young man very like himself, but having an easier time adjusting to what the society has given him as his fate. We are shown that marriage is no picnic at all — The Namesake of Jumpha Lahiri (a writer whose franker work teaches you much about Jhabvala’s) is an idealized depiction — in Jhabvala these males are just so rude and commanding to the imprisoned females whose feeble weapon is to strike back by being awful in conversation. Prem gets involved with very ego centered Americans who have come to India to escape to some sublime nirvana (as does Anne in Heat and Dust) and we meet both sincere gurus and crooks. This is a sketch of the kinds of people and social interactions which matter which she repeatedly, almost obsessively develops at length in her later stories. I hope women today in India in some classes are offered far more in life for real individual fulfillment.

A Daphnis and Chloe archetype underlies this story, for at its end we are asked to believe they are making a happy adjustment at last

Returning home together on the train

I’ve not got a video of the whole Shakespeare Wallah for free online, but I can supply some remarkable reviews, from the New York Times archive; in The Guardian, the professional Chris Weigand approaches with concision some adequacy on the film’s complicated arts: Bollywood and the Bard

In his Guardian obituary for Geoffrey Kendal in 1998, Ivory wrote about the tensions during the production with the veteran actor (Geoffrey Kendal): “He let me know how he despised the cinema – that the cinema was his enemy, causing theatres to be empty and tours to be cancelled.” But Kendal – who has an ease in front of the camera despite his lack of film experience – came to recognize that thanks to Ivory “it was the despised cinema that told the world of my existence and to a certain extent of my fight”.

Geoffrey Kendal doubting the value of what he has spent his life so beautifully on

And the despised cinema is here undeniably beautiful. Shot in black and white (for budgetary reasons) by Subrata Mitra, the film has a stately pace, is sensitively written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and comes with music by the esteemed director Satyajit Ray. The bumpy travels of theatre troupes often make for bittersweet comic escapades

And now my words:

A wandering troupe of actors have made a living traveling around parts of India doing Shakespeare and other classics (as the film opens we see a Sheridan play in progress before a mass group of boys in suits — white, Indian and one Black).

In 18th century costume performing on a bike

But they find they are no longer wanted in the same numbers or way. Gigs dwindle: the local places would rather Sanskrit poetry; the British schools are closing; they are paid much less. We see their truck break down on the road. They are aging, one man dies. The Gleneagles Hotel (pitch perfect that Scots name) that used to accommodate them – very British – is closing. Felicity Kendall is not comic in this and she is not thin — no need to be near anorexic in the 1960s. She and Sanju, an Indian man who rescues them on the road fall in love ad who has as his mistress, Manjula, a Bollywood star who performs one of their sexualized songs, Madhur Jaffrey (she is the Begum in Heat and Dust).

Manjula performing a Bollywood song and dance for Sanju

The poignant question is, Can They Stay On?

Exhausted, on the road, rainy, hot ….

So this is a version of Paul Scott’s famous masterpiece, Staying On, a story retold by Olivia Manning in The Rain Forest (franker and nowhere as well know, and yet more visionary, acerbic, yet in Manning our hero and heroine after some scarifying ordeals escape back; in Scott’s the man dies and we leave our heroine in a desperate situation, just holding on in a beauty shop and hostile hotel. They and this are all autobiographical: the Kendalls did live this way and in one of the features, a mature Felicity tells us at first her father was disappointed with the film as it did not show their triumphs, the fantastical fun they had living the way they did, it too emphasized the ending and sense of loss

We see several famous scenes from Shakespeare done very well in what seems an old-fashioned 19th century way (disrupted now).
Saying goodbye; her parents know it’s best for Lizzie to return to an aunt in the UK; they will follow when they find they must — now they will go round just doing “gems from Shakespeare”. The way it is discussed off-hand by ordinary people suggests a rollicking comedy (!), but while it does not end tragically and there are very comic moments, it is a melancholy and oddly realistic film.

It’s very realistic in the sense that we get feel for India. Jhabvala is the author of the script which while not as subtle as her later ones is very good — no book behind it. I am slowly beginning to appreciate her stories for the very first time ever –understanding her better and being older less emotionally involved, more distant myself.

These two films are a pair.

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

Roseland, the place and marquee

The dancefloor

I would call Roseland one of the team’s noble failures. They actually filmed in the real Roseland theater, and with some professional actors, used the aging and ordinary people dancing of an evening: the idea seems to have been to concentrate on the dancing itself, with the stories barely sketched and the repetitive obsessions of those who come to such places regularly emphasized. It has its moments (Geraldine Chaplin of the professionals manages best); there are some professional dancers who catch our attention now and again, but it is fatally unrealized because it is trying to show us that the shell of these places is quite other than what is unexaminedly celebrated briefly in commercial films and histories.

This evening’s task is nearly done. I am passing over the effective The Europeans (1979): sorry to do this as it features a young Robin Ellis (also Lee Remnick — see just below) is a Henry James story, about clashing cultures, which is picked up later on, as just the sort of thing that M-I-J were particularly good at. Its themes differ from those of the other early films and the film anticipate other Henry James stories as well as several of the later, E.M. Forster stories — all set in England — or the US as The Europeans seems to be. It is not one of their best; they grew better at this type as they went on.

Heat and Dust has been if anything over-reviewed. Jhabvala’s novel had won the Booker Prize (so it sold fantastically well). Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian

After 37 years, Heat and Dust stands up as an intelligent, ambitious, substantial picture – with flaws but also intriguing aspects that were perhaps not sufficiently understood at the time. Is the movie’s love story a diversionary heterosexualisation of something else?

Anne after reading her aunt’s letters seems (mysteriously) taken by their content, next to her Chidananda allowed back in (he lives off her)

Yes, the Nawab is homosexual (the team also had real empathy for homosexual men), and the ending is not happiness; Olivia and now Anne turn out not to be free spirits but frustrated women who allow themselves to become the sexual partners, Anne, for example, as deluded as the successfully for a bit stubborn shaved American with his faux-Indian name, Chidananda (Charles McCaughan), and her landlord Inder Lal (Zaki Hussain, another less scrupulous Prem). She does not know who the father of her child is, and her retirement for help in the transformed building that Olivia ended her isolated life in as far from self-actualization as Olivia. The Nawab we have learned is a corrupt thug.

Bradshaw concentrates on the wonderful performances, and hidden meanings that leap out today, as well as the facile nature of the Anne parallel (just compare a real depiction of such a household, with the wife subject to epileptic fits, the mother-in-law supplying counterproductive punishing remedies). I want to add that what helped make people keep coming to the film after they satisfied an early Booker Prize enthusiasm, is the simplicity with which the stories is filmed — almost the hollowed out nature. Like The Householder, Shakespeare Wallah (and the quietly complex The Europeans), nothing is over-produced or over-emphatic at all, even if feel of the film’s images and music is so sensual — which gave our film-makers their nuggets for turning to a commercially successful second half (later M-I-J).

What people remember best — who saw it — is the parallel plot, exquisitely dove-tailed into the same places — Anne (Julie Christie) comes back to India to see the place her great-Aunt Olivia’s (Gretta Scacchi) life played out, to understand it better by inhabiting the living context – and we go back and forth between the 1920s elegant Raj (once again Shashi Kapoor) with its desperate people and high violence (not seen by us but heard about off-stage) and the 1970s in exactly same places in India. The parallels including both women getting pregnant by the India man closest by, only Olivia has an abortion and the disgrace leads her to desert her (boring) English husband, Douglas (Christopher Cazenove doing a serious job a la Leonard Woolf) for the alluring (to Olivia glamorous because strange) Raj — a retreat which deepens when he is said to visit her only 3 times a year — in deference to his mother, the Begum (Madhur Jaffrey from Householder now grown 20 years older), and then stop altogether. Like so many of the women in Jhabvala’s stories, Olivia is utterly alienated from all the women she meets, and some have good advice, try to support her. Anne is your liberated young woman, but supposed sensible, with her affair with her landlord (Inder Lal) emerging slowly. But unlike Olivia, she stops short of an abortion

Anne stops the woman in mid-performance

and is seen joyously retreating to a building now a hospice institution, hospital, where we last watched Olivia live her life playing the piano, until the very end when (it is hinted) Olivia ended in desperate poverty. It seems the Begum has won at long last

Jhabvala presents these Indian mothers-in-law as vengeful when given any power

We have the saturninely bitter-witty gay companion, kept and bullied the Raj — Harry (Nickolas Grace, young in the 1920s, and made up to be very ancient in the 1960s; Grace played this type too many times — Brideshead Revisited, Dance to Music of Time. He can convey no wisdom to Anne now grown old, back in England so safer and more comfortable, but storyless — we learn nothing of the inbetween time — it is story which thickens out characters in films.

The two take tea many years later, miraculously Anne has aged little

Maybe what was liked were the scenes of playful social activity, rituals done so quietly (not much gossip) and dinners at length, Anglophilic with the important qualification none of the white men or women show any understanding or sympathy for the people they are supposed to be governing, except maybe Douglas at his table in the heat trying to dispense justice.

Maybe it’s his stiff white shirt and tie that make Douglas (Christopher Casenove) so unappealing to Olivia (Gretta Scacchi)

But unlike the stories of her later career, Jhabvala is willing to grant her heroines a refuge with the implication they have accepted being women alone or subject to others.

I recognize the types and themes  elsewhere in Anglo-Indian art (novels and films): people performing, a foolish American following gurus, who at the film’s end, somewhat unusually escapes relatively unscathed — like Lizzie, he is headed home to his aunt, in his case it seems almost a Kansas of Dorothy-like security and safety.

This is the paradigm for Adhaf Soueif’s Map of Love who gives the story post-colonial politics, with dollops of feminism, strong heroines in the past and present and the central heroine at book’s end her own person, bringing up a daughter, companion to her deceased husband’s elderly (kind and gentle) father in middle class Kensington.

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

Early in the partnership

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s most central theme in her books (as also Jhumpa Lahiri) comes from her thoroughly post-colonial roots; born in Germany of a Polish father whose nuclear family were killed in German concentration camps (he later killed himself), brought up in England (she writes in English), studying literature, she married to an Indian Bengali man, spending 25 years in India (read “Myself in India”), and the last phase of her existence in New York City. She was a perfect fit for the Englishman James Ivory who had come to India, and Ismail Merchant.  A major theme of her fiction — searching for, building an identity, which even people who stay put at first sometimes must do when the one nuclear family and community they live among seeks to impose an identity that violates their innermost nature which seeks actualization. This is the central theme of The Namesake (Lahiri also has a multiple identity now: Indian, English, US, and now Italian. It fits the Merchant-Ivory perspective as seen in the writing and interviews by and about them. She died in 2013.

Merchant appears to have personally been a secular man, but as an Indian born he grew up in a religiously-laden society, with opposing groups (Muslim, Hindi). In the online biography at wikipedia His father, a textile manufacturer, was the head of the Muslim League, and he refused to move to Pakistan at the time of independence and partition. “Family networks” enabled him at a young age to become friends with people influential and in the film industry. He studied at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai and received BA degree of University of Bombay, moved to New York City where he worked as a messenger for the UN, and showed his talent for attracting funds from Indian delegates for film projects. He was the producer, the man who made the money come, and when he died, Ivory turned out not have the capacity to generate funds. He and Ivory had met in 1961 when he was in the US on a scholarship in a New York coffee shop; at the time Ivory was an Ivy Leaguer with aims to work in artful cinema. He died in 2005.

Ivory’s biography in wikipedia tells us he came from middling people in Oregon, where he first went to University; he moved to the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, where he directed the short film Four in the Morning (1953). He wrote, photographed, and produced Venice: Theme and Variations, a half-hour documentary submitted as his thesis film for his master’s degree in cinema. The film was named by The New York Times in 1957 as one of the ten best non-theatrical films of the year. He graduated from USC in 1957. Here we are told Ivory met producer Ismail Merchant at a screening of Ivory’s documentary The Sword and the Flute in New York City in 1959; they formed their company in 1961. He wrote and or collaborated with all four books on them as a team.

Neither man seems ever to have married or had a public partner.

The three continual creative spirits grown older …

In Robert Emmet Long’s wonderful (full of wonders) and useful book, The Films of Merchant-Ivory:there are good biographies (much better than the ones I’ve provided), insightful details about stages in their careers, the gifts they showed, where learned their crafts, then descriptions and accounts of many of the films, many beautiful and thought-provoking photographs and stills. Long calls these three “unique uncommon individuals” who make “unique uncommon films.”

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Outlander Season 5, Episode 12: The Rape of Claire

The dream Claire (Caitriona Balfe) escapes into given precise focus; the reality of an aggravated assault by a gang of men blurred so Claire distanced from us into a ghost-like nightmare presence

You ask me if there’ll come a time
When I grow tired of you
Never my love
Never my love
You wonder if this heart of mine
Will lose its desire for you
Never my love
Never my love
What makes you think love will end
When you know that my whole life depends
On you (on you)
Never my love
Never my love
You say you fear I’ll change my mind
And I won’t require you
Never my love
Never my love
How can you think love will end
When I’ve asked you to spend your whole life
With me (with me, with me)
— Don and Dick Addrisi

Dear friends and readers,

This is the toughest episode in all five seasons but one, the rape and aggravated assault of Jamie (Sam Heughan) by Black Jack Randall, evil doppelganger for Frank Randall (both played by Tobias Menzies). The earlier profoundly distressing episode (S1;E15 and 16) differs from this last of Claire (S5:E12): Jamie is raped by one man who seeks to shatter his personality and make Jamie subject to him, be willing to be made love to and the writer and director shot the scene in graphic (revolting) detail; Claire raped but also beaten, brutalized, cut by a gang of men led by Lionel Browne (Ned Dennehy) who loathes and wants to take revenge on Claire for her ways of helping women socially (by advice) as well as medically (contraceptive means), and the detail of what is done to her is kept just out of sight; we see the effects on her body and face only. But I was, if possible, more grieved for Claire because she overtly suffers much so much more physically and emotionally while it is happening & seems to remain more consciously aware of things around her (she tries to persuade individuals to enable her to escape) — and she grieves afterwards for a time so much more despairingly.

Far shot of Brianna helping Claire to bathe turns to close-ups of Claire dealing with her sore wounded body in the denouement of the episode

In any case, in neither configuration is the rape treated lightly; in both the incident is found in the book. A regular criticism of any frequency of rape in a series (and this is true for Outlander as well as as well as Games of Thrones) is that it’s not taken seriously, there for titillation, suggests that women don’t suffer that much or want this; is not integrated into the film story; e.g., Jennifer Phillips, “Confrontational Content, Gendered Gazes and the Ethics of Adaptation,” from Adoring Outlander, ed. Valerie Frankel. None of these things are true of Outlander: in both cases and the other cases, e.g, Black Jack Randall’s attempt on Jenny Fraser Murray (Laura Donnelly); the hired assassin/thug of Mary Hawkins (Rosie Day), Stephen Bonnet (Ed Speleers) of Brianna Randall Mackenzie (Sophie Skelton), the incidents have a profound effect on the victim or her friends, or the story. The assault on Jamie was part of the assault on Scotland by England, turning it into a savagely put-down exploited colony. The rape of Claire is part of the raging fury igniting the coming revolutionary war, which we see the first effects of in this season in the burnt house Jamie, Claire, Brianna and Roger (Richard Rankin) come across (Episode 11). What happens to Jamie in the first season and Claire in this fifth goes beyond such parallels to provide an ethical outlook that speaks to our own time. We are in political hostage territory, traumatized woman treated as hated thing; with a modern resonance of violation of the soul never quite brought back to what he or she was.

Jamie has wrapped Claire in the same tartan he did in the first season’s first episode

Paradoxically artistically the use of a dream setting and images conjured up by Claire’s mind as she lays on the ground being violated makes the episode into an anguished, agonized lyric. We know that Roger first and then Brianna have longed to return to the safety and modern occupations of the 20th century, and tried to return, but found their home is now with Claire and Jamie in 18th century North Carolina, Fraser’s Ridge; Claire’s dream reveals she too longs to return, but with Jamie, who appears in the scenes except unlike the other 18th century characters who appear in 20th century dress (e.g., Jocasta (Maria Doyle Kennedy) as a modern upper class lady; Ian (John Bell) as a marine, Marsali (Lauren Lyle), Jamie is dressed in an 18th century dress. It recurs as frequently as the supposed real scenes of the 18th century, is thoroughly intertwined, alternated so the rape/assault action becomes almost ritualized). This has the effect of distancing us from the horror (for Jamie takes an unforgiving revenge and orders everyone lined up and shot), except again in the dream we see Lionel at the table and then as a police officer come to tell Claire and Jamie that Roger, Brianna, and Jemmy won’t make this Thanksgiving dinner (Jamie speaks of a turkey) because they’ve been killed in an auto accident.

The denouement did not have the escape dream in it but traces Claire’s difficult beginning inner journey not to remain shattered by this, but as she has done in other dire situations before, put herself together again, calm, control, stoic endurance slowly the way – with Jamie hovering in the background, Brianna offering to listen.

The closing shots as Jamie and Claire accept the future will hold further harsh experience, which may bring the death they have read in the obituary for them Roger located in the 20th century Scottish library

The background music was not background but foreground in feel and played over and over, “Never my love,” one of the most popular songs of the 20th century, is a key epitaph for the entire series of films and books: Jamie and Claire have built their life together across centuries, and drawn to them, all the couples and people of Fraser’s Ridge, because of this unbreakable unending love. I feel it speaks for the way I feel about Jim and prefer to believe he felt about me. It’s haunting rhythms and instruments riveted me.

A woman’s hands in mid-20th century garb putting on a long-playing record is among the first stills of the episode

The episode could not have been more perfect nor had more appropriate closing vignettes: Jocasta’s song remembering Murtagh (Duncan Lacroix). Ian’s traditional heroic behavior; Marsali killing Lionel Brown through injection when instead of showing gratitude for having been kept alive, he treats her with utter contempt reminded me of Mary Hawkins killing her rapist (second season). The playfulness of the characters who turn up in Claire’s twentieth century home. Brianna and Roger settling down to live the life of an 18th century couple on this family estate.

As they came to the Ridge from the scene of high violence, Jamie speaks the beautiful over-voice meant to encapsulate his code of life, and as he is giving his life to these people so they are all willing to accede to, form themselves around his identity too:

I have lived through war and lost much.
I know what’s worth a fight and what’s not
Honor and courage are matters of the bone
And what a man will kill for
he’ll sometimes die for too.
A man’s life springs from his woman’s bones
And in her blood is his honor christened.
For the sake of love alone
will I walk through fire again.

Read Full Post »

Outlander Season 5: Episodes 6-11: Women’s realm (birthing, birth control, breast-feeding &c); again anti-war, father-son-friendship bonding

Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie (San Heughan) bidding adieu just before battle of Alamance (Episode 7, “Ballad of Roger Mac”)

Friends and readers,

We covered The Fiery Cross and Season 5 in the context of the books and seasons thus far as a miracle of dramatic stillness and intensity; then Episodes 1-5 as a series of “her-stories,” using voice-over, remembrance, juxtaposition brilliantly. Episode 6-11 continue the emphasis on women’s issues, being a kind of culmination of discussions and dramatic events in previous seasons, with Claire now taking Marsali on as her apprentice and true daughter, while under the pseudonym of Dr Rowling she publishes advice on contraception and other women’s matters. This is interspersed with Jamie and Roger moving from antagonism, semi-alienation to an increasingly close friendship and alliance, and lastly wry ironic mutual interdependence. The father-son theme is reinforced by the return of Ian (John Bell), Jamie’s nephew-son, as Roger’s voice is silenced after he came near death from hanging, and Jamie repeats this feat of coming near death and then escaping, after he is bitten by a venomous snake. An outlook from previous seasons (especially over Culloden) re-asserts itself: Jamie has evolved to the point of a fierce anti-war stance (insofar as he is able), so that when Murtagh is senselessly slaughtered (and the grief of Jamie is terrible) Jamie at long last lashes out at the hypocrisy of the British establishment in fomenting these conflicts so as to tax and control the less powerful.

Marsali (Lauren Lyle) and Fergus (Cesar Domboy) seen working alongside Roger and Claire rescuing the hay (Episode 6, “Better to Marry than to Burn”)

One of many scenes between Claire and Brianna doing all sorts of daily things together, here they take an opportunity to walk along the sea (Episode 10, “Mercy ….”)

There are two weaker episodes, 6, “Better to Marry than to Burn,” where the patterned manners of the characters as they attend Jocasta’s (Maria Doyle Kennedy) marriage, produces a stiffness and artificiality reminiscent of some of the scenes at the French court and in Parisian elite society in Season 2 (Dragonfly in Amber). A sense of forced construction is also found in the clumsy machinations it takes for Jamie and Claire to set a meeting with Bonnet (Ed Speelers) as smuggler. This feeling is more prominent in Episode 10, “Mercy May Follow Me,” where underlying clichés when Bonnet kidnaps Brianna and threatens her and she pleads with him come out in a stage-y (corney) way.   Then the ease with which Jamie, Claire, Roger, and now Ian with them, find and beat up Bonnet in the midst of selling Brianna to a trader re-enforces this feeling of a superfluous almost filler episode.

Episode 6 is almost retrieved by Roger rescuing the crop of Frazer’s Ridge when locusts descend by remembering how smoke can drive them away (so he enlists all the people living there, and becomes a hero in ways that come natural to his character and knowledge). And Episode 10 transcends its clichés when at its close we see Bonnet being executed by slow motion drowning, hastened only slightly by Brianna becoming a sharp-shooter and shooting him with a long-range rifle in the head. Each of the young women in this series when raped, beaten, abused carries a rage in her that each satisfies when opportunity for revenge is offered (e.g., Mary Hawkins stabbed her assaulter through the chest, Season 2).

*************************************
The rest is marvelous.

Time is marked and measured in different ways, the colors of our lives were changing, the vibrant greens of summer faded beneath the ever-varied canvas of the sky, and blue violet shades of indigo dye, replaced by the russet tones of autumn, brown hues of harvest …

An over-voice time-passing sequence, Episode 11, “Journeycake”)

All Outlander combines a form of heroine’s journey that can be regarded as a counterpart to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey (see Patti McCarthy, “The Heroine’s Journey, Claire Beauchamp reclaims the feminine,” in Frankel’s Adoring Outlander collection; also Maureen Murdock, Heroine’s Journey). The call to adventure for the male here becomes a call which is also an awakening (think of Claire looking at the vase on her honeymoon, of her dissatisfaction with Frank and his with her). Then she crosses the threshold (the stones), and experiences deep changes within her over many trials, which in Claire’s case include meeting with a protective alluring animus, confronting false males, bonding with other women and becoming a mother. Books 3 (Voyager), 4 (Drums of Autumn) and 5 (Fiery Cross), move from a return, to ordeals to more thresholds, to making a home (yes all this effort to come back to make a nest), and becoming a powerful woman from having learned who she is and developed a path for herself.

A more specific vein of this journey is seen across the series (see Nicole M. DuPlessis, “Men, Women, and Birth Control in the Early Outlander books,” in Frankel’s Outlander’s Sassenachs): the first four books too deal with specifically the themes of birth, mothering, breast-feeding, abortion, rape: e.g., Claire helps Jenny in a breech delivery; Claire almost dies in childbirth; she develops a deep relationship with Mother Hildegarde (Frances de la Tour), Geillis’s witch-like (Lotte Verbeek) qualities includes her handing out of abortifacients, herbs, and herbs to induce early labor; Geneva’s (Hannah James) pregnancy by Jamie at Helwater; Claire’s offer to help Brianna abort the fetus once she realizes Bonnet’s rape of her may have led to her pregnancy (and Jamie’s objections). The Fiery Cross, taken as a whole, from the early episodes on wife abuse (a Bluebeard punished), tyranny over a daughter (Brownsville), an adoption of a baby) seems to intensify these with Claire now seeking to educate young women to prevent pregnancy, married women they do not have to accept physical abuse, Roger’s agreement to help stop Brianna from getting pregnant again. Perhaps the book moves so slowly because Gabaldon has taken on the function and content of unusually frank magazine articles.

Roger hung, lower part of his body seen (9, “Ballad of Roger Mac”)

Brianne realizing

Supremely moving, exciting, riveting were the episodes, 7, “The Ballad of Roger Mac,” and 8, “Famous Last Words,” returning us to the anti-war stance in the midst of terrible violence we saw in the Culloden sequence at the close of Season 2 (Episodes 9-12, especially 9, “Prestonpans”) and opening of Season 3 (Episodes 1-3, half each of “The Battle Joined,” “Surrender”): Roger is literally hung at the close of 7, just pulled down in time, and revived by Claire, he is unable to speak for most of 8, “Famous Last Words,” driven and haunted by memories (the directors were inspired when they decided to show the trauma through old-fashioned black-and-white reels)

There was a battle of Alamance between the Virginia Militia, mostly white upper and middle class British people born in the UK and lower class farmers (“regulators”) fighting excessive taxation (they had no representation) and the militia won — they murdered many of the regulators, gave no quarter — just the kind of thing Howard Zinn describes in The People’s History of the US, and happened at Culloden. We see Jamie and then a Protestant priest trying to persuade Governor Tryon against the battle; there was an offer of compromise, but he feels this will help his career to be seen to have crushed an uprising (if he can). I just loved how Jamie horrified and deeply grieved by the murder and death of Murtagh who dies trying to reassure Jamie (it’s just unbearable as he screams over his father-brother-friend “help me” [someone] and brings Murtagh back to Claire) cries out against what is written in history books and what happens for real

Will it be written in history, sir — that ye killed and maimed and paid no heed to the destruction ye left? That ye brought cannon to bear on your own citizens, armed with no more than knives and clubs? Nae, it will say that ye put down rebellion and preserved order, that ye punished wickedness and did justice in the King’s name. (then) But we both ken what happened here. There is the law and there is what is done. What you’ve done is kindle a war — for the sake of your own glory. [Tryon’s jaw clenches and his men move toward Jamie — protective of the Governor. No one speaks this way to Tryon. But Tryon waves them down.] GOVERNOR TRYON: Colonel Fraser. I had no personal stake in this, no need to glorify my exploits, as you put it. JAMIE: None but the governorship of New York. GOVERNOR TRYON: I told you I would not leave North Carolina in a state of disorder and rebellion. I have done what I have done as a matter of duty. And because you have done your duty, as promised, I’m going to overlook your insolence. JAMIE: Aye. My debt is paid and I’m finished with my obligation — to you — and to the Crown. You may have yer coat back, sir. Jamie wrests off the red coat Tryon made him wear, now stained with Murtagh’s blood, and lets it drop into the mud … (written by Toni Graphia).

Roger ends up so badly by chance; the same governor carelessly gives an order to have three men hanged. Roger had tried to reach Murtagh to tell him that Brianna remembered the battle would go terribly for the regulators Of course it’s too late to stop anyone. On his way back to Jamie’s camp, Roger encounters Morag Mackenzie he met in a ship coming over, whom he had saved from being drowned, together with her baby. Who is a relative of his clan. They hug and what happens but her thug of a husband (played by Douglas McTavish brought back as this different fierce character) fiercely acts out male jealousy, twists his wife’s arm, beats Roger up — with other thugs. Roger is just not a violent man. He goes missing and is not found until the last scenes when the family group comes upon him apparently dead from hanging. We had now and again seen him singing across the series. He’s a gentle soul – a professor is what Jamie has begun to call this son-in-law. Roger is no match for this world of senseless bullying male violence. He is thrown on a pile and taken up to be hanged. We see what the Governor’s (and Trump’s) much vaunted law and order really is.

Episode 8 brings home Ian with Rollo (his beloved companion dog) from the Mohawks, and it is Ian who goes with the stricken Roger to measure and survey a gift of land the governor has offered in compensation for his error. The return of Ian, his melancholy but joy upon coming home, Jamie’s attempt to understand, Claire’s reciprocal nurturing all form the mood of Roger’s slow recovery. The episode is punctuated by the black-and-white memories until near the end. It begins with a flashback to the 20th century where Roger had been teasing a class over what would one want to say when you are on your deathbed.

Jamie on the stretcher, Roger pulling him back to the Ridge (9, “Monsters and Heroes”)

Episode 9, “Monsters and heroes,” is the culmination of Jamie and Roger’s finding a modus vivendi for living together in understanding, respect and friendship. The monster is the venomous snake who bites Jamie’s leg and makes it swell, risking gangrene; the heroes Jamie, Roger, and Ian who all have to cope with this seriously limb-, if not life-threatening condition (Jamie comes near to having one leg amputated). At least 2/3s of the episode traces the close relationship and knowledge the two men for the first time gain of one another. Roger gets lost, he cannot kill anything much (he confesses he does not like to kill anything), but he understands infection and lances and sucks out the poison insofar as he can. He makes a miserable kind of stretcher and proceeds to try to drag Jamie home. Jamie is the one who misbehaves — terrified he will die, frightened for the three 20th century people dependent on him, he begs Roger to kill Bonnet for him, to promise this and promise that; he refuses to have the leg amputated if necessary, bringing down on him Ian’s wrath for the way he, Jamie, seems suddenly to regard disabilities — remember Ian’s father, Fergus’s loss of his hand (I thought of Hugh Munro).

There are almost no distractions of other episodes:  we hear of Jenny and Ian back in Scotland, a scene between Lizzie Wemyss (Caitlin O’Ryan) and Isiash Morton (Jon Tarcy) was put into deleted scenes; Marsali gives birth on her own with just a little help from Fergus. Thus we have long uninterrupted scenes of characters talking, interacting, Claire at Jamie’s bedside, her intense presence stirring in him a will not to die; her invented penicillin does not work because her needles and instruments were destroyed and she can administer it only as a drink, not into Jamie’s veins. The episode gives the woman an important role again; Claire is doctor, but Roger remembered to cut the snake’s head and top of body off, and when back in their cabin, Brianne remembers you can draw from it the venom which can act (it seems) as an anti-venom and herself invents a syringe. In the manner of almost all the episodes of the season, this one is self-contained, resolved almost fully by the end with Roger taking mild revenge by teasing remarks as he sits next to Jamie’s bed.

The stones into which Brianna, Roger, and Jemmy tied together disappear, presumably poof, and Ian left to stare

Episode 11, “Journeycake” is the fearful penultimate hour. It opens with an over-voice and montage, and time passing, and the family of four adults returning back from town to come upon a house burnt to the ground, all its inhabitants murdered or burnt to death, one shivering in pain near death. All four remember the obituary Brianna brought back to the 18th century of her parents being killed just this way. Lord John (David Berry) who has been given too little to do, is returning it seems for good to England, to take care of young William’s interests again. He will take Ulysses (Colin MacFarlane) with him. He gives Jamie another miniature of the boy and this gives Jamie a chance to tell Brianna she has a half-brother. It is discovered that little Jemmy can time-travel, Ian demands and finally is told the truth about Claire, and it is he who drives the three to the stones and watches them disappear into them near the end of the episode. The sorrow here is that Jamie’s deepest bonds are with these three people, including Claire and they are all safer in the 20th century. At its close, Jamie and the Fraser Ridge men have been tricked into leaving the house area, and the Browns who have several males who have reason to resent Jamie and hate Claire (particularly the one whose daughter she has protected, whose wife she has helped against his violence), who come and abduct Claire, murder one of the people in Claire’s surgery and leave Marsali for dead.

Next blog: the astonishingly powerful conclusion, Episode 12, “Never My Love”

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Outlander, Season 5: Episodes 1-5, Her-stories

Claire (Caitriona Balfe) in Boston Catholic Church, circa summer 1968

One of the many voice-over shots combining Claire’s images from different times in the series, different episodes & places, with accent on a character just choosing a new destiny

How many times have I put my hopes, my fears, my secret longings into the hands of a Being I can’t see, can’t hear, can’t even feel. And how many times have my prayers been answered (followed by a shot of Claire in 1772 having created penicillin from molds …)

Friends and readers,

Episode 5, “Perpetual Adoration,” seemed to me to epitomize in its most extreme form the kinds of experiences this season at its best offers: thoughtful retrospective framing or talk/feelings and characters’ memories deeply part of each sequence of scenes. In this episode Claire became an over-voice in a series in interspersed scenes mostly in a church in Boston 1968 (which, interestingly, are not to be found in the script on Instagram) contrasting with what’s happening in 1772 North Carolina; this over-voice was hitherto used most often in Season 1, but only once when (daringly) it’s Jamie (Sam Heughan) who does the over-voice is the theme the same: him meditating from an indeterminate present on the choices he has just made in the past, or deep past, or imagined future, like to marry, then stay with Claire (S1, Episode 9, “The Reckoning”) viz., “I’ve always known I’ve lived a life different from other men./When I was a lad, I saw no path before me …”

These scenes are not in The Fiery Cross either. They point us to the fantastical interwoven (images of the spider and web are in some of these monologues) movements in time and space in the five seasons thus far, and by extension all five books and to its core center, the motivation actuating many of Jamie and Claire’s decisions: their devoted love for one another. They are religious, making time a function of living in a space and time which are God:

Time is a lot of things that people say God is. There is the pre-existing and having no end. There is the notion of being all powerful because nothing can stand against time, and everything is taken care of, all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Remember man, thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return. And if time is anything akin to God, I suppose that memory must be a devil …

Another montage, this time with Jamie …

The idea combining the juxtapositions of events in 1968 Boston and in 1772 North Carolina in Episode 5 is quietly self-reflexively witty: a man named Graham Menzies, a Scotsman, whom she was to enact surgery on, told her of his unceasingly love for his wife, such that he keeps up a perpetual (daily) prayer time in church with her in his imagination. Menzies dies unexpected of an adverse reaction to penicillin, and she so moved by the experience, that she takes a leave of absence and persuades Brianna (Sophie Skelton) to come with her to London to where her first husband, Frank, had wanted to bring his daughter. (The wit is that the actor playing Frank is called Tobias Menzies; the character and last name do occur in Voyager: he is a patient Claire helps die of cancer.) Frank is now dead too; when in London she learns of the death of Rev Wakefield (James Fleet) and goes to the funeral in Inverness Roger (Richard Rankin) has created. This starts a relationship between herself, Briana and Roger, which will inform her that Jamie did not die at Culloden, and lead her to dare to go back through the stones.

Over-voice, montage includes Claire jumping out of the coach in the third season, into Edinburgh and walking to where Jamie has become a printer …

There is an echo of Claire’s voice-over in a scene with Joe Abernathy in a cafeteria where he comes to comfort her, and admits it was he who left a torrid historical romance on a coffee table for her to read (which she now has with her, The Perpetual Pirate …); she says to him: it’s “as if everything is pointing you towards something but you can’t quite put your finger on what it is … ” The last actual voice-over of the hour occurs in 1872 when Jamie comes back to her, he hopes having put an end to the military action he was pressured into against the Regulators (led by Murtagh Fitzgibbons [Duncan Lacroix]). Jamie has brought home a kitten (Adso) he found just outside the house he set on fire after he strangled to death Lieutenant Knox. Knox had just found out he and Murtagh were close kin and was determined to expose Jamie and start the hunt for Murtagh again. This kind of cold-blooded sudden remorseless action is unlike Jamie, and recurs in the last episode of the season when Claire is gang-raped — both instances involve someone Jamie loves intensely, A bonded with intensely.

God is merciful, God is eternal. Someday I will stand before God and I will receive an answer to all my questions, and I do have many questions. But I won’t ask about the nature of time. I’ve lived it

Having the voice-over with Adso (looks just like Jamie’s mother’s kitten with same name) brings out the optimism of Gabaldon’s outlook: she had been driven to stay alive by eating earthworms, insects, what vermin she could find, and now she will have milk, fish, and Claire’s chair

What kinds of incidents are these? We continue the story of Claire re-inventing pencillin, with Marsali (Lauren Lyle) as her apprentice; they together remove the tonsils of the two twins she and Jamie have freed from a brutal master; and they do not sicken but become better. Roger has returned from Brownsville where he as captain was recruiting men for the armed conflict against the Regulators, and we see him and Brianna making love, adjusting to their unexpected circumstances but beginning to think of alternatives. Roger finds the jewel that Bonnet gave Brianna and discovers that she saw, talked to, told Bonnet that Jemmy is Bonnet’s son; a fierce quarrel ensues. After Roger spends a night out in the wood, and and talks with Claire where the theme of time is again emphasized (he must not be “careless with [the] time” he has with Brianna), he returns home to her (their log cabin) and the two are reconciled. The hunt for Murtagh comes to a close when the governor decides to pardon the Regulators (this did happen) and then the curiously sudden chilling murder of Knox by Jamie (as described above) occurs. I believe we are to notice that Jamie burns the list of prisoners at Ardsmuir which Knox had got hold of and remember how such papers so precious to 20th century researchers function very differently to those who exist[ed] in the past. As I said in my previous blog, these episodes are quiet, self-contained with all the emphasis on inner lives, relationships, that work as a social fables.

*****************************
A quick synopsis:

Far shot of wedding: we can see in the audience all our favorite regular characters (but Murtagh)

Again in the previous blog I told of Episode 1, Roger and Brianna’s wedding, with three sets of lovers, much joyful celebration, a ritual ceremony of the men of Fraser’s Ridge, now including Jamie, pledging loyalty, all framed by the necessity of Murtagh’s having to leave to remain safe from the Governor’s militia.

Claire at work with women around her

Episode 2: “Between Two Fires” refers to how Jamie is being driven to pretend to seek out Murtagh and destroy the regulators in a battle. This is interspersed with quiet scenes where Claire despairs of her ability to help people because they will give to their very sick relative a treatment which kills him or her. With Roger’s help, she snatches one corpse (they bury something else heavy in a coffin) in order to do an autopsy; then hides and study the corpse — what a no, no for this era. It’s nerve-wracking to watch. She observes Marsali good at sewing, cutting up a lamb, bright as a reader and enlists her as an apprentice physician. In the episode Roger having a hard time adjusting to the macho demands of him in this lifestyle. This is intended to contrast to the concluding scene in a tavern of crude wrestling between women, gambling, and finally fierce dueling in which Stephen Bonnet (Ed Speleers) appears, cruelly and inhumanely taking advantage of a man who had given in, blinding and cutting his hamstrings.

Just after Roger has sung to the baby, Brianna listening, he carries off the wash …

Episode 3: “Free Will” An outstanding hour. Just before the middle of The Fiery Cross, Jamie and Claire come upon a scary house, dark, desolate, there to retrieve the indentured papers of two young men the master of this house had beat severely (whom Claire has cured of tonsillitis). Inside a wretched woman, Fanny, who says her husband is dead — the Beardsleys. He is not but near death; he used to beat and emotionally torture her; he has killed 4 wives before her. She now tortures him. Claire tries to care for him medically hasn’t the modern resources. Fanny gives birth to a child whose features and skin-color show her father was an enslaved African. The next morning the woman has fled, leaving the papers under the baby. Claire goes out to the clearing; Jamie ask the man if he wants treatment, to be left there, or to die. He is in horrific condition and chooses death. Camera switches outside to Claire waiting with the baby. A shot is heard. This delving into trauma has some sweet relief: we see Marsali doing well as an apprentice doctor. Brianna and Roger scenes where he urges on her returning to the 20th century. There are harder scenes too: of recruiting, a mother sends her sons off because the dangerous life offers opportunities and better food. The writer here, Luke Schelhas, brings out the obvious feminist perspective subtly (one not in the novel).

Marsali learning from and discussing procedures with Claire

Episode 4: “The Company We Keep.” I loved the moral of this one, spoken in voice-over by Claire.

Adultery. Betrayal. Dishonor. Excuses could be made, of course. I know I made my own when I was separated from Frank by a power I didn’t understand [slow motion called for so we see the young couple fleeing together on a horse where other horses, goats, and people chasing these get in the way of the fiercely angry male Browns stopping them] And yet whereve you are, you make choices — foolish ones, or ones that save yourself and someone else. All you can hope for is that the good will outweigh the harm that may come of it …

Jamie and Claire arrived at Brownsville where Roger and Fergus are supposed with a band of men recruiting. The Brownsville men savage, uneducated, hav shot at and demanded Roger turn over to them, Morton, a young men from Fraser’s Ridge; Morton has impregnated a Brownsville daughter intended for marriage to an older rich man. It emerges Morton is also already married but the marriage was made two years ago, didn’t work out. Jamie furious with Roger for having acceded to imprisoning Morton (as captain Roger is to protect his men first and now others have departed). Another young woman has given birth to a baby who has died. Back at Fraser’s Ridge Brianna has evidence that Bonnet has been sneaking around; she and Marsali converse, become friends, with Brianna realizing that Marsali has a fund of common sense courage and witty ways of expressing this. A convoluted set of scenes at Brownsville by the end of which Claire has given the baby to the young woman (though in a long walking-together scene Jamie has offered to keep the baby so he and Claire can bring up a child together — she wisely says this will not work the way he thinks), and Roger (remembering how he followed Bree to this century), and Claire and Jamie enable the young couple to go off to make their destiny together. As Claire’s over-voice is heard I thought of how 52 years ago now I returned to England, for a few weeks an illegal immigrant, married him with so little money, against the advice of all, and what a good life we had for nearly half a century. The writer here is Barbara Stephansky.

The young woman who has endured the death of a newborn, taking over the baby Fanny left behind ….

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

Ross (Aidan Turner) and Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) in the 2nd season bonding over the mine (scripted Debbie Horsfield, 2015)

I’ve now got three books on Outlander, two collections of academic essays, a masters thesis, and an academic style journal essay — on both the books and film series. All find much to interest, explore, and admire, especially in the areas of sexuality and romance as a genre. To date the only two essays I know of on the Poldark books have been written by me and presented at two conferences; otherwise all that exists are about five or six (excellent) essays on the film adaptations with the books of interest only as shedding light on the films, and except for me none of these credits the books or films with any originality or having brought anything unique to the TV channel/company they were made on behalf of or for. I don’t think that’s the fault of Winston Graham or either film series. While Graham’s Poldark books (especially the first seven) have never fallen out of print or become unavailable, and there are scholarly essays (two) on his contemporary fiction, the numbers of sales are nothing to Gabaldon. The series failed to stir enough interest or respect to demand a filming of all twelve books. The last season basically substituted a different story for Graham’s projected intertext between Books Seven and Eight.

Lord John Grey (David Berry) in love with Jamie, and Jamie reciprocates at least in chess games and conversation ….

Something in Gabalodon’s books and films are answering to needs and desires of today’s audience. The masters thesis, by Mary Heath, “Villains and Heroes: An Analysis of Outlander‘s Portrayal of Sexual Violence” begins by offering statistics to show that the program is credited with increasing the ratings of Starz substantially, and especially increasing the women watching the channel. This is not the place to lay out or even suggest what can be adduced. I hope if I can get myself to before I die (and once I stop teaching) to write a book on these two sets of historical fiction romances. For now, all four publications have chapters or essays analysing to her credit Gabaldon and now Roger Moore’s (he is what is today called the “showrunner” or has been until the 5th season the linchpin central presence of each season’s development, content, art) their presentation of the homoerotic and homosexuality in the Outlander matter. We have women’s friendships, and mother and daughter pairs, but no discernible lesbianism thus far.

I find in the fifth season something else to compel me: these stories in the books and films in the previous seasons no matter how masculinized (with males at the center of many episodes of the fourth through fifth season, transposition of what was domestic romance to action-adventure) represented another brilliant turn in the history of women’s historical romance speaking to women who are not embarrassed to listen, who have not been trained to despise this genre. I submit that the retreat of Roger Moore from active supervision and involvement with the show, Toni Graphia, Matthew Roberts, and a few other repeating names have gone further and even with a book as flawed as The Fiery Cross made beautifully artful episodes that are both feminine in feel, feminist in thrust, and counterhegemonic. I hope to show that in Episodes 6 through 11, we have anti-war sequences (to be fair, Episode 10, Prestonpans in Season 2 was strongly anti-war) and if not a repudiation of violence as a solution to life’s conflicts, a strong sense violence only makes matters worse, and (as with the Poldarks) what is wanted is community.

Claire and Jamie (Season 5, Episode 8, “Famous Last Words”) — in this season they are the older couple deeply in love still

I conclude with a summary of Eleanor Ty’s essay in Adoring Outlander, ed. Valerie Estelle Frankel, explaining “The appeal of Outlander: Melodrama, Gender, and Nostalgia.” A strong competent heroine, intelligent, passionate performing amazing feats of healing and nurturing, and a cadre of other similar heroines (I remember Mother Hildegarde [Frances de la Tour] in Season Two (Dragonfly in Amber). Melodrama: heart-wrenching scenes of emotional conflict and physical punishment: Jamie as Christ flogged by the Roman soldiers (Black Jack Randall in the first two seasons). We mourn for our couple’s losses of 20 years; what might have been (in 3rd season, siding with the powerless); our hero and heroine are both orphans. The Renaissance man as hero.

There is nothing Jamie cannot do when it’s sheerly a matter of his traits: reads and talks several languages, cultured, accomplished, loyal, skill with animals, born leader, released from prison he becomes a publisher. And she brings out how he is a virgin at first and yet complete warrior – remarking on surprisingly easily the book and film (episode: The wedding) carries this off. Then his devotion to, care of Claire, she is safe with him, knows how to comfort and make love (tasteful yet graphic enough)

Romance, Spirituality and Transgression: an elevation of earthy desires to a realm of sublime and spiritual. Here is where the fantasy element comes in. Sexuality is presented from a low perspective (earthly) and high poetry. You let the soul and body judge what is right — we move beyond reason, prudence, social conventions (in Season 5, the young couple they rescue from the Browns).

Claire revisiting Culloden in the third season (from Voyager, now 1968)

Nostalgia and elegy: Frank and Claire visit Culloden at the opening of the first season. Nowadays tourist put flowers by the Fraser stone. Starz pays enough to capture pastoral beauty of Scotland, highlights magic mystery (at its best not post-card like – though there are drops down – not enough spent in 4th season). A collective memory is put before us what, we are invited to assimilate a historical experience we did not live. The use of rituals among males bond them together — repetitive words, ceremonies (weddings) It’s said that the program did not air before the Scottish referendum lest it influence too many towards devolution …

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Andrew Marr distinguishes detective from spy from sorcerer stories

Sherlock Holmes (Jeremy Brett, 1980s BBC) — detection genius

George Smiley (Alec Guiness, Tinker, Tailor … 1970s BBC) — spymaster extraordinaire

Melissandra (Carice Van Houten), prophetess (Games of Thrones) — Cassandra-witch

Friends and readers,

This blog is a bit of departure from my usual modes. I usually zero in on a particular work or works; here I remain in general, and just cite examples briefly. What is left out (alas) are the moral inferences that Marr makes so precisely when he cites and goes over particular books and talks to particular authors.  (I no longer have the facility or strength of fingers or speed to get down accurately what he said.)  These inferences are mostly pessimistic, dark, unsettling utterances, often half-ironic.  So, again, in general, here is what he inferred: Detective stories today reveal an abyss of personal hatred, treacherous crime, fierce anger, resentment, not always associated with deprivation, sometimes the motive is revenge; spy  stories, a fearful terrain of ruthless totalitarian and fascist states; sorcery sagas, the return of atavistic amorality as part of uncanny superstitions. I add that we see in the latest of these kinds of works that women are made to behave in ways directly as violent and treacherous as men (this is not credible as at least studies of women who commit violence show); and men in the last 30 years are shown to be as sexually vulnerable and ambiguous in their sexuality.

You may recall I wrote about Andrew Marr a few weeks, calling attention to his wonderfully insightful literary documentaries (for lack of a better term — they are highly entertaining, witty, amusing). One series was on popular “thrillers,” the action-adventure type, at one time usually male-centered (Miss Marple and Harriet Vane were the exceptions who proved the rule), which he divided into “detective, mysteries;” “spy, surveillance;” and “sorcerer, fantasies.” On first impression as I listened to him offer the “rules” (formulas) for each, play clips, talks to authors, the types seemed to blend, but when I conquered my recent laziness, and at least tried to force my hands to write stenography once again, and read over what he had said, I realized he had made distinct and explanatory distinctions. I was surprised to think about how his formula linked on the surface such different seeming detective stories, showed how different they are from spy and surveillance action, and finally picked up on the fantasy elements of historical romance, so this usually woman-centered genre shares terrain with say (and this makes sense) the stories of Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin. I’m especially intrigued with the element of time-traveling in this last.

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

Lord Wimsey (Edward Petherbridge) facing Harriet Vane (Harriet Walter) — the amateurs?

Sam Spade (Humphry Boghard, Hammett’s Maltese Falcon) – hired private detective

Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren, Prime Suspect): DCI

So here are the the characteristics of detective mysteries (they cross into police procedurals as you’ll see): 1: there must be a mystery, a pattern to find, a puzzle element, ingenious; 2) the writer must play fair, and not deliberately lead astray, no supernatural agencies; 3) the detective must not have committed the crime, corpses about, not an idyllic place at all; 4) there must be locked rooms, impossible terms, keys are clues, multi-layer to unravel; 5) the detective is a kind of super-hero, we must watch him so as not to be fooled by a sleight-of-hand, do hard work, find what actuates motivates people; 6) crime must be believable, painful, almost doing it in front of us, with a pervasive sense of evil all around it; 7) the detective must get his (or) her hands dirty and must set the world to rights, then retreat, escape back to his lair; 8) he must follow recognized procedures; incremental tedious work, under social pressure, moving into rotten hearts; 9) we have the comfort of knowing the truth at the end; we adapt, recent ones are complex; 10) the detective must be flawed, must be difficult to get along with, withdrawn, not likable (Inspector Morse).

I am struck by how the murder mystery in the second half of Phineas Redux corresponds to the above

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

Alec Leamas (Richard Burton, The Spy who Came in from the Cold) — set-up betrayed spy

Gunther (Philip Seymour Hoffman, A Most Wanted Man — today’s fascist totalitarian states) — another set-up betrayed spy

The Americans, Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) — without identities

Then we have the espionage story (and movie): 1) they reflect the particular social conditions of their time, people with insider knowledge, about betrayal; the question of who is the real enemy comes up early, foreign people, a creeping paranoia; 2) you must create a climate of fear, ominous atmosphere; 2) spies’ loyalties are always up for question (The 39 Steps, The Americans, Greene’s Human Factor), a popular version of an existential nightmare; 3: the spy contacts his nemesis; 3) they can end up cast out of humanity (as in The Spy who came in from the Cold); 4: they are ever trying to adapt to changing times. I add the vast perspective and explicit political propaganda, often anti-communist still. They feed into fascism as they are nationalistic.

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

Claire (Caitriona Balfe) amid the ancient neolithic stones, Craig Na Dun, Mrs Graham her sorceress (Outlander, 1:1) — healer & white witch

Gandolf (Ian McKellen (Fellowship of the Ring) — wizard

The fantasy, science fiction, allegorical: 1) you must build a whole world, consistent in itself as to details too; the depth of detail compels us; weave real with fantastical, keep it coherent with a map; 2) there is a portal to this other world; 3)these are anti-enlightenment stories, matter from the atavistic, where the “easy” laws of science do not necessarily apply; it’s a spectrum of extremes; 4) fantasy nowadays uses the method of distilled wonder (a metaphor); a parallel to the feeling we let ourselves be comforted by, making a parallel to faery; uses folklore that does not in itself seriously frighten — think of The Hobbit; 5) there is a hero’s story, sometimes told by the heroine, a dropped down trunk, papers telling the story; 6) someone to help us cross the threshold; you move into unknown, there are ordeals, supreme tests, sometimes an elixir helps you return through to “reality” or today’s world; 6) we come upon counter culture (not necessarily a good world); Le Guin shows us a fascist take-over, with a wizard; barbarism, bitchery; 7) there are rites of passage or rites tht bridge generations and new Gods created; 8) winter is always coming, deep poignant melancholy for what’s just over the horizon, a kind of existential threat; and 9) some explore the deepest world of author (so an inward form), and/or are philosophic.

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

There you have it. Or do you or we? there are thrillers which don’t fit these paradigms, or slide over. So Daphne DuMaurier’s Scapegoat belongs to fantasy but remains in here and now — it’s not quite gothic either, as gothic’s sine qua non is supernatural and she would have us believed in her doubles, her twin men. Marr did not work in the gothic which has lent itself to formulas (some of which make fun of its furniture), nor ghost stories, the vampire and wanderer, nor specifically the female gothic. These would take several blogs … I have written of separate gothic stories and once in a while the gothic as such. I’ve a whole section in my website devoted to the kind: Gothics and ghosts, vampires, witches, and l’écriture-femme

M. R James, The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral — core evil presence

Illustration by John A. Williams for Mary Heaton Vorse, “The Second Wife” (1912) — this is the type Jane Austen made fun of and parodied in her Northanger Abbey, it is a type Nancy Drew draws some of its power from (girl as snoop into wild and weird territories)

Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) arrives (NA, scripted Andrews Davies, 2007) — female reader of gothics.

A 1970 version of a Nancy Drew — girl sleuth

Ellen

Read Full Post »

A magnificent Porgy and Bess at the Met

Porgy (Eric Owens) and Bess (Angel Blue)

Friends,

I have little to add to Anthony Tommasini’s finely discriminated strong praise of the new Metropolitan Opera production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess as realized by a group of effective nuanced performances — the nuance, subtlety, and self-reflexive comic distance, which the actor-singers brought to the parts did a lot to de-emphasize and re-shape most of the white perspective on black people. I invite my reader to click and read Tommasini on the individual singers and specific events within the opera on stage.

To me it was a splendid appropriately pitched production. I sat there mesmerized.  The songs were beautifully sung by each and all the performers, the play acted believably, the dancing, singing and then individual behavior of the large black chorus on stage made the action into a modern masque that figured the pleasure and repeatedly last minute, unexpected (yet perpetually expected) tragedies of the people in the streets and on the docks, in the apartments and in the symbolic community buildings, and its Esser-like structures. The opera reminds me of the couple of mid-20th century American operas I’ve seen, e.g., Aaron Copeland’s A Tender Land: it is an ensemble meditative lyrical piece. There are dramatic scenes and a story line, but the emphasis is the group, individuals stand for types within a group, acting out necessary roles.

I thought Owens as Porgy outstanding and Angel Blue as Bess perfect in each phase of her role — the acting was in general pitch perfect from caricature to deeply felt. Everyone else is supportive or contrasting (the two bully males who Bess succumbs to).  I was drawn by the strong women characters, amused by the comic males (Sporting Life was done tongue-in-cheek), aware of the stories and losses of individuals. Archetypes were used and strongly emphatic performances.

Sporting Life (Frederick Ballentine) and Bess (Angel Blue)

There was a continual use of comic exaggeration to distance us and make us think about what we are seeing and as entertainment:

Maria (Denyce Graves) and upside-down the bully Crown (Alfred Walker)

The applause at the end was thunderous, and without meaning to take away anything from what literally happened on stage, as John Berger averred long ago, nothing occurs in a vacuum and I felt that everyone watching and acting was aware we as a group are living in a larger society now driven by bigotry, a renewal of race prejudice and open vile violent punitive behavior not seen openly in several decades. To do this opera and in this lavish way is to create a meaningful counter-punch against all Trump and his Republican party and their ignorant voters can do and assert belief in. The production is selling out and more performances than originally intended are now scheduled.

One of many ensemble scenes — there is much dancing, some ritual-like

The opera has a complicated often thwarted history because it has had to make its way in a racist society. The talk here shows how the opera is being seen as rooted in its context; its past and the surrounding society then and now embedded in the present production which has a message of hope, at least endurance and survival in a better future. Now we attend to the use of African music, the songs of African-Americans intermixed with the Broadway music and song rhythms and how this is worked into mid-century operatic traditions, both sentimental and stereotypical. And it is still daring to have a home-y kindly aging disabled man for a hero, a heroine who is raped in one scene (when Crown drags her off from the picnic) but in others succumbs to temptation, who sees the better way and cannot leave off her addiction.

Bess and Porgy in a companionable moment

Just a taste of the memorable poignant sensual Summertime as sung by Clara to her baby, a lullaby (the soprano Golda Schultz):

For this production the Met has mounted a show of black performers at the Met since its inception: it’s made up of pictures and the memorabilia of all black singers, and dancers too who were in operas on stage. It’s called Black Voices at the Met, though some of the people commemorated are there for costuming, sets, choreography. It seems also to remember those excluded: Paul Robson is there

I end on two poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

We wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

Sympathy

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Wheelchairs & vases in historical fiction

Claire Randall looking longingly at a vase in a shop window (Outlander 1:1)

Strange, the things you remember.
Single images and feelings that stay with you down through the years.
Like the moment I realized I’d never owned a vase.
That I’d never lived any place long enough to justify having such a simple thing.
And how at that moment, I wanted nothing so much in all the world as to have a vase of my very own …

But I can still recall every detail of the day when I saw the life I wanted sitting in a window.
Sometimes wonder what would’ve happened if I’d bought that vase and made a home for it.
Would that have changed things? Would I have been happy? Who can say? I do know this:
Even now, after all the pain and death and heartbreak that followed, I still would make the same choice.

Friends and readers,

So, after all, I am going to the 50th anniversary conference of ASECS (American Society for 18th century studies) in St Louis, Missouri (! — where?). About a week ago the male scholar-professor for whose panel I gave my paper on Winston Graham’s uses of documentary facts and silences in the last ASECS emailed me to ask me if I wanted to submit a proposal for his panel, which request pleased me (it means he respected my paper) and whose new proposal had puzzled me:

“I Refute It Thus”: Encounters with Eighteenth-Century Objects (Roundtable) [Northwest Society for Eighteenth Century Studies] …. Proposals invited on any aspect of encounters with eighteenth-century objects, then and now, whether personal, professional, or philosophical; whether in texts, or with texts, or without texts.

Like many — almost all — of the Calls For Papers this year I just couldn’t get it — most of them were filled with jargon beyond me; this (thought I) must came from “materiality” theory, which (to me) is a hodgepodge of gobbledygok most of the time. So I asked him (as he had emailed me) could he explain in commonly used (natural easy) — English — for I would like to join in another panel with him. After a couple of days he did.

What I was thinking for this round-table was a set of 10 minute presentations on personal encounters with 18th-century objects, in mini essay form, that captured what essays can do, and connects with specific research you might be doing. It could be as simple as encountering an 18th century text, or an object associated with an author (Jane Austen’s turquoise ring?), or even encounters with objects in fictional texts. The main linking element really would be the essay/roundtable form, which allows for having fun with a topic. Some round-tables invite discussion because of the ideational content. This one would invite more “show and tell” responses from the audience with other encounters, I’m thinking

Well, all right. Not only did I get it, I found myself enthusiastic. I am it’s not too much to say profoundly engaged by historical fiction and romance. A couple of summers ago I taught Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover. The impetus or impulse for this book (so Sontag has said) was the collection of extraordinary objects and painting Sir Wm Hamilton gathered together, especially his vases.

An ancient vase found in Naples area

To teach the book and put this idea across I had bought a marvelous (expensive) art book on this collection published by the Sloane Museum, which owns a goodly part of Hamilton’s estate: Jane and Kim Sloan, edd. Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and His Collection. I passed it around to the class and we looked at a variety of real historical objects found in the catalogue and in Sontag’s book. With The Volcano Lover, I taught Daphne DuMaurier’s The King’s General. The class’s subject matter was historical fiction set in the long 18th century: this book is set during and in the years just after the 17th century English civil war in Cornwall. It’s an unusual book for her because closer to historical fiction than most of hers; it is far more thoroughly researched than most of her books, based on papers and documents about a siege at Menabilly, which ended in attempting to burn the place down, a real general (a cruel ruthless man), indeed many of the Rashleigh and other Cornish family and military characters really existed. Its impetus too (I can’t remember where I came across this — probably Margaret Forster’s biography or one of DuMaurier’s memoirs) was an old wheelchair (ancient type) that she claims she once saw (I am not sure this is true) in an old building on the grounds of Menabilly. She also tells a ghostly tale about half-ruined objects found in a closed tower, suggesting someone hiding away or imprisoned for years on end — haunted things left over from the 17th century civil war.

Said to have been Sir Thomas Fairfax’s wheelchair — DuMaurier says the one she saw was pathetically feeble and looked uncomfortable

The famed (since DuMaurier’s Rebecca) Menabilly with DuMaurier and her children during her long time there as tenant

I said nothing of how the central propelling image in Ahdaf Soueif’s tale of Anna Winterbourne’s journey into Cairo, Map of Love, is from John Frederick Lewis’s oriental paintings, still in a Kensington museum, which I had just reread, attended a class on, and blogged and written about too.

John Frederick Lewis’s Cairo: Indoor Gossip

But I did talk of Paula Byrne’s brilliant biography of Jane Austen, a series of essays meditating and ferreting aspects Austen’s life through the small things she owned and we can look at still: A Life in Small Things. How successful (so suggestive) is Deborah Lutz’s The Bronte Cabinet: she too writes lives of Brontes, using relics, this time objects connected to them through death — some might find this morbid. I didn’t and don’t. And how I remembered Martha Bowden’s perceptive study of historical romance and fiction, Descendants of Waverley, romancing the 18th century, dedicated a whole part to how real historical objects put into fiction makes them come alive, validates them, are vivid focuses.

Bowden traces fascinatedly how these novelists mix true realities then and now (say time) with fictionalizing techniques (e.g., richly subjective world historical characters), especially those using allusion and intertextuality (to music, plays, once or still extant historical paintings and relics, memoirs) … Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and Crossing the River (not covered by Bowden) include[s] a precious historical document, the scrap remnants of a past that have survived, and Phillips’s novels produce a take on this material that is sustaining and comforting today to those who today still suffer … where there is an intense desire on the part of a specific readership to go back and retrieve the past, to experience it intimately … there is a section on ekphrasis and the importance and uses of archeaology …

And so my proposal was accepted and then the panel also. So I’ve some delightful reading, re-reading, interesting thinking and dreaming and I hope effective writing ahead.

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

Kenneth Branagh as Thomas Mendip, the discharged soldier who says he longs to die

Cherie Lunghi whom the town longs to burn as a witch — she escapes by fleeing …

I would say most of the time Winston Graham does not turn to material objects for inspiration or begin (say) with manuscripts. He is a sceptic and when he does have a written document will point out how problematic it is (Forgotten Story, Groves of Eagles, “Vive le Roi”). He does have pictures and the collecting of art objects as central to a number of his suspense books (his characters are artists, connoisseurs, insurance agents, thieves) and every once in a while (no where often enough for my taste) a real book, author, piece of music painting, but he rarely names any, most are fictional (cited plays in the Poldarks). He will use an alluring allusion to enrichen his meaning (again mostly in the suspense books): in one of his best I’ve discovered, The Tumbled House where a now deceased writer, John Marlowe’s reputation is defamed when John Shorn, a supposed younger friend, driven by envy and perhaps a betrayal, accuses him of plagiarism, and Don, the son and Berenice, the daughter experience much trauma suing the man for libel (a kind of nightmare haunting Graham himself — who had a son and daughter): the writer’s son’s wife, Joanna, is a TV actress playing the part of the witch in Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning. This complex and Christianizing play preaches charity, tolerance, forgiveness — not that the wife whose adultery the novel suddenly swerves to focus on (to the detriment of the book) is at all to blame for what happens. Don and Joanna get back together at the end of the book in the same way as Ross and Demelza do at the close of Angry Tide,

When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity … Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

and the final moral that here is all we have, all we can have, so we must cherish, make do is the burning center of all Graham’s disillusioned texts.

All we know is this moment, and this moment, Ross, we are alive. We are. We are. The past is gone, over. What is to come doesn’t exist yet. That’s tomorrow. It’s only now that can ever be at one moment. And at this moment, now, we are alive — and together. We can’t ask more. There isn’t any more to ask … Graham, The Angry Tide, last utterance

Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza and Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark repeat in turn parts of the above passage with bits of sentimentalized love language thrown inm — done far too passionately, Debbie Horsfield, 5th season of her Poldark

The older series (script Jack Russell) had Angharad Rees say the lines softly, unchanged to Ross as what comfort could be found for death, and thus got closer to the book (1978 BBC Poldark 13:6)

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

Still all historical texts romancing objects begin with a kind of enchantment with the past, haunted by imagined passionate caring for what the objects stand for in the past: these prompt the minds of the historical novelist.

Today is the 7th anniversary of Jim’s death and his spirit is everywhere in this house in all the objects with me from our lives together. Here is Samuel Johnson on Sorrow: Rambler No. 47 

” The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment …  Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away.”

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Outlander, from Season 4, Drums of Autumn: a question of rape, violated heroes; Claire marginalized (2)

Brianna (Sophie Skelton), just after she’s been raped (Season 4, Episode 10)

Friends,

Since writing about the first half of Season 4: from Drums of Autumn: the American colonialist past, a book of fathers & ghosts, I’ve watched the whole of Season 3 (from Voyager) night after night, and found it was much better than I thought, and that paying attention to larger repeating patterns revealed the preoccupations of the serial drama (as opposed to the book), and brought out when the film-makers seemed to be treating challenging themes as a serious debate, and when they were providing action-adventure entertainment with a princess-bride and another violated hero at the center.

Roger Wakefield MacKenzie (Richard Rankin), like Jamie in the first and third season, singled out for harsh punishment

There were a number of online essays treating the season with real respect: one writer argued that our central mature couple, Jamie and Claire Fraser, were rare lovers on TV to talk and to listen to one another, and evolve as they interact; another thought Claire’s relationship with and treatment of Brianna, especially after Brianna has been raped, beautiful, a morally exemplary mother-and-daughter; while questioning some aspects of the treatment of rape over the second half of the season, much was done right. On the other hand, one “serious reflection” earnestly argued that this fourth season was a real disappointment because much that viewers had loved about the previous three was gone, especially the centrality of Jamie and Claire’s relationship; and a last said what had been radically exhilarating about Outlander (as a love story) was the full and frank treatment of love-making without presumably becoming porn, the presentation of female sexuality fulfilled, and now that the decision had been made to stop that, the serial drama had just about lost what made it a joy to watch. Maybe I missed them, but it seemed to me the recaps were much less snarky, with complaints mostly centering on the characterization of Brianna (I felt grated upon by the way all the characters but Mr Bonnet seemed to treat her child-like self-centeredness with a reverent worship, even her biological father Jamie when he questioned her behavior as prompting the rape), the picture-postcard landscape and use of sets.

The over-all patterns were fitted into a framework which made Jamie’s behavior and attitude the framework for all that was happening: the season began with him failing to rescue an old comrade from hanging, and it ended with him being required to find and arrest Murtagh, his beloved godfather, brother-in-arms. Claire was marginalized into a devoted wife, career-doctor when home-making (quite literal) gave her time. She never actively defied or openly challenged Jamie, even when he behaved with senseless violence to someone (Roger) he was not sure was the rapist. To be fair, he and she have come to understand one another and they share a set of humane and family-centered attitudes, and have come to support one another trustfully. That’s why they can talk and hear one another. I love this as well as what love-making we did have.

Jamie (Sam Heughan) giving Claire (Caitriona Balfe) a bath

But patriarchy won out again and again. The Indian woman at the end who is ejected from the tribal group for trying to negotiate over the hostage Roger; Ian’s exultation at becoming a “man” through taking violence near the end of the last episode are two examples that come to mind

The basic conservatism of the books emerged strongly – and sometimes appealingly — in the parallel relationship of Fergus (Cesar Domboy) and Marsali (Lauren Lyle); they cooperate and work together when she helped Fergus rescue Murtagh from prison (right there with her cart at the ready, pat). My very favorite sub-plot was the story of the older couple, Murtagh (Ducan Lacroix) and Jocasta Cameron’s (Maria Doyle Kennedy) coming together as lovers. It is so rare for older people to presented as having erotic needs and joys, as courting and going to be with another, and it was done with great delicacy. Unfortunately there were no promotional shots of Kennedy in her long flowing nightgown and loose hair but she was photographed as gorgeous and thoughtfully intelligent repeatedly, as well as passionate and witty and teasing with Murtagh

I thought also that the scene where Brianna is shown giving birth, and learning in the process how dependent she is on others emotionally effective:

More downside to this conservative romance masquerading as subtextual liberal ideas and behavior: the Native Americans did emerge as half-crazy savages, especially in the way they treated Roger and a preacher who had come to live with them and broke their taboos; the enslaved people were treated by the other characters as if they were equals to the principals and looked in wonderful health, beautifully costumed, and were all devoted service. The idea of sublime noble self-sacrifice came out in one pair of people opting to burn at the stake; Brianna as precious white girl was encouraged in her arrogance; Roger’s nearly complete abjection once he goes through the stones, coming back to the Indians to (in effect) die after he has escaped them was matched by Lord John’s improbable obedient behavior (a grown older man) to Brianna. Mr Bonnet’s mockery (Ed Speleers with his usual pizzazz) comes as a relief. The very worst or pits was the recourse to scenes where violence between men, beating one another up, or harrowing someone’s body or pride is seen as affording a solution to a conflict. And some of wha’s depicted is so unreal or improbable. I wished some fugitive from a Mel Brooks parody might mistake his or her way onto one of these sets.

The books are really far more complicated. For me the original frame for Outlander books (seen in the italicized soliloquies, which do carry on and are by Claire even into the fourth book but are hardly there in the films) is that of a woman seeking a personally fulfilling identity and escaping the one her 20th century society had on offer (Claire) and a really truly compelling tragic historical series of events (colonialism in Scotland, Culloden and the clearances). I hoped the Roger and Brianna in the 20th century would be interesting, but after a couple of sequences in the book, which are interesting, even touching, in the film the characters are turned into types which shows no interest or even understanding for real of what might actuate a later 20th century young woman or man: Roger is made into a throw back to mid-century in his attitudes and this becomes a victim-hero of male nightmare. But it still must be an adventure story it seems to me that what happens is Roger becomes part of the heroic individualism in US culture, twisted into a kind of culture of sublime death, with Brianna flailing out senselessly.

Jamie with Ian (John Bell) in the shadows nearby told about the rape of his daughter

It is true that a younger couple often displaces the original pair in popular saga romances, and sudden great jumps in time are common. The killing off of an original set of major characters the reader may have really engaged with. This is seen in the Poldark books: 11 instead of 20 years. One does not have to do this; cycles of books with recurring characters who don’t do this jump in time keep to the same central characters: Trollope’s Pallliser novels is an example here. by staying with the same characters and keeping them central you are driven to delve deep into the human condition over time and subject to chance. Gabaldon does prefer the idyllic: in Drums of Autumn the book a beautiful paradisal moment occurs when Jamie and Claire look for the land they mean to settle in and come across a feast of wild strawberries. I am drawn to this myself.

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

Claire comes upon a young George Washington

Some total “jumping the shark” began in the eleventh episode (“If not for hope”) when Roger becomes pure victim, Brianna goes to scold Bonnet (and whacks poor Ian who has offered to marry her), and the “perils of Pauline” action-adventure crowded action took over (though I admit the shots of our friends canoeing down river with the Indians were breath-taking). So for this second and final blog on the fourth season, I’ll detail just episodes 8 (“Wilmington”) 9 (“Birds and Bees”) and 10 (“The Deep Heart’s Core”). In the first Claire meets a young George Washington; and in the second and third Brianna is raped and we experience with her the aftermath of rape is maybe worse.

Season 4, Episode 9: Wilmington

We are now well into parallel stories. For our older couple, they have arrived in Wilmington where a theater is playing a miserable 18th century play (people in oriental outfits and the lines do sound accurate) and all the glittering powerful Brits have come. Jamie and Claire seen with baby (whose name I cannot catch) born to Fergus and Marsali who have also arrived.

Roger and Brianna’s reunion

Cut to Roger on-shore steadily faithfully seeking Briana and lo and behold he hears her voice asking after Cross Creek where she thinks her parents are. Joyous reunion, and into a room where they show they can make love on screen almost as well as Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe. Richard Rankin is shyer than Heughan (not as stiffly acting it as Aidan Turner ….). Now she says she loves him and they go through a Handfast ceremony first.
The secondary story — and I think it is actually secondary although it begins first in the episode — is also now filled with suspense. All has at last been set up. We see a play is about to be performed. Cut to Marsali making food. Fergus to her. How is the bairn?

I was moved by Marsali and Claire’s conversation about motherhood. That is very like a woman’s novel; it took contains part of the theme of this episode and the whole season: Claire says you may want to but you cannot protect your child from life beyond a certain point …

Jamie and Claire go to the theater — naturally they are invited by the governor and cannot say no. Who do they meet but young George and Martha Washington. Claire is just so excited and cannot resisting asking him if he has been ‘chopping down cherry trees?” he looks at her puzzled enough she has to make an excuse.

More important another high ranking man, Ferrante has some terrible wound – an untreated hernia — that Claire notices because he’s in pain. She offers to help but who is she? a woman? a healer? what’s that? Jamie learns that these upper class people have placed a mole with our Murtagh who is planning to rob a coach to take back the taxes he and his man consider stolen from them. Jamie dare not go and help but he somehow — we discover — has sent a message via Fergus. Good ‘ole Fergus at the ready, for on the road just as they are about to rob these people Fergus intervenes, Murtagh calls it off. Fergus tells Murtagh there is a mole among his rebels …..

Meanwhile at the theater Jamie prods the wounded man and suddenly Ferrante can’t take the pain any longer; he would have died but that Claire spoke up and suddenly it’s all hospital theater and she performs a minor procedure with thread, hot water and other stuff she somehow gets and gains the govenor’s admiration. He now knows why Jamie so respect her.

Message arrives: the robbery did not happen, Murtagh and his men not taken. Someone had warned them. Who could it be?

The episode uses juxtaposition so much I just can’t repeat it; suffice to say, Jamie and Claire’s story is back-and-forth with Briana and Roger’s.

Almost immediately after the handfast ceremony and love-making Brianna and Roger get into another quarrel. She becomes all riled up. Basically their rooted disagreements come to the surface — and startlingly they part. I admit I didn’t believe this could happen: it seemed improbable, slightly contrived: a deliberate separation to make for more suspense and anxiety. After going to such trouble to find her, he would not leave her. After she knew him and had said they were man and wife and the love-making that happened, would she just go off? By herself and in this dangerous place? It didn’t make emotional or practical sense. Remember they don’t have cell phones to keep in contact.

Still the dialogue is important: he accuses her of being childlike and I begin to think this is the theme and what makes us nervous about her. So what if he hesitated at telling her about the obituary; nothing he has said shows him to be authoritarian; she is twisting his words when he talks of consulting. Apparently she behaved similarly with her biological father, Frank, refusing to listen to reason. She wants what she wants regardless of anything around her and reality. It is true that common sensically in 1967 her parents are both long dead.

Then think about her behavior for this whole venture: She did not take any clothes with her, barely a map and one peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich. Baby comfort food. When she is walking through the highlands and nearly freezing, without food or water soon and is found by Laoghaire we are supposed to have realized why didn’t she prepare? When Claire crossed the first time, she didn’t prepare either but luckily she encountered Jamie …. ‘Nuff said.The second time she came she had a box of clothes, her surgical tools, other stuff.

What emerged quickly in Season episode 1 is Claire is at risk of rape immediately. From not only Black Jack Randall but the troupe around Jamie. Throughout her experience in the 18th century everywhere she is at risk of violence — but she knows this after the first hour, and after she is shown how to use a knife she is wary.

Brianna seems singularly unaware she is in danger – she has been sheltered all her life. She is startled to be taken for a whore and has nothing to counter this — she does not realize she should have her maid with her. A respectable young girl in the 18th century did not go about alone in the streets or into a tavern like this one. The maid did see her go off with Roger and I thought the maid would come to find her and interrupt. But I suppose why should she? she has no idea what her mistress wants and she is supposed to be subject to the mistress.And then when Brianna goes off like that it could be seen as suspiciously wanton by an 18th century person

Mr Bonnet begins to emerge as the season’s villain. He glimpses her when she comes into the tavern; he is gambling and sees him toying with her mother’s ring and pulls out money – which she thinks is a guarantee of respectability. Not so in the 18th century. Respectability is family, and knowledge of your past, all of which give status. Bonnet draws her into another room to make the bargain. Again she seems singularly unaware it is not a good thing to go where no eyes are upon her. But in this case that others know what is happening doesn’t help. It’s like someone in trouble in the streets or on a bus today and no one makes a move. I like to think they would act to prevent rape because it’s high violence, violation and the next step to murder.

Someone even closes the door on them. She is not raped in front of us but in another room. We are in the room just outside and we see no one soul lift a finger to help her. She screams in cries that call for help and we see she realizes no one is coming. That can have the effect of making people take it less seriously.

Then the camera switches to them and in his inimitable witty sardonic charismatic way Ed Speleers gives her ring. To him that she was not a virgin confirms the idea she could be a prostitute. He tells her he is a honest man who keeps his bargains. No he doesn’t– we have seen that before. The hour ends with Briana unsteadily walking away, stunned, hurt, now looking for her maid and room ….

During the whole of last episode and this for the first time I felt Sophie Skelton was up to the part. Hitherto it seemed to me Richard Rankin was so much better than she – he was far more nuanced, more depth. If you look at the stills of her, there is often something stiff or artificial, something self-conscious or self-regarding and it’s still there at moments, but on the whole she came up to the role last time with Menzies as her father and now this.

For 9 and 10, the episode commentary and evaluation continues in the comments.

Ellen

Read Full Post »