To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive — RL Stevenson: a blog on books, films, art, music, culture
Here’s why I’ve not posted for weeks: I wrote this to a literary women, Anne Boyf Rioux, in answer to something she wrote to me on her substack newsletter: I had had sent one of my foremother poet postings: Muriel Rukeyser
Very unfortunately since I last wrote on this substack newsletter, I had a stroke (Jan 30th, 20240) and now find myself painfully trying to recover. Among the abilities I seem to have lost is typing. I have many ” side” problems like this (insomnia, constipation); centrally I cannot walk w/o a walker and am in danger of falling. I’m physically weak. Where I was for many years (until Jan 29), a rapid touch typist I cannot get my left hand to type anything but slowly and inaccurately. I have been trying to get access to therapy for typing, and as yet have failed. I discover Kaiser might not have such a service. I am again waiting to see — now next week. They provided therapy at the rehab (I was in one for a few weeks) and now at home; but hardly enough. I discover I don’t have medicare but medicare advantage paid to Kaiser– and nothing else. I find nothing on the Net; if this new offer by Kaiser is another sham, I shall try AARP, but feel I will again confront no living services. I’m told of complicated software I probably cannot operate without an at home teacher. It is a kind of death for me.
To a friend at Olli at Mason: I can read and this isolation is bad for me so I am going to try to teach a mini-course online (4 weeks in June at OLLI at AU), using all I had created at that last OLLI at Mason. Going to try to do a Trollope talk using handwritten notes. I walk a little better but still need a walker and in danger of falling. I signed up for women’s rights class and the Sayers during summerat Politics and Prose (though they are pricey) online
I rush to write this brief review lest Anatomy of a Fall, an independent film leave the theaters before my reader can find time to see it. I was prompted myself to rush out partly because it was given such rave reviews and a friend urged me to go, citing the many prizes/rewards. It has been acclaimed by reviewers who views I respect — and others too.
More it was/is described as a mystery thriller, complete with gripping trial where a woman is accused of murdering her husband and setting the death up to look like suicide. I saw no detective cited but decided this was down my alley of endeavor for these last many months to see and understand why so many detective fictions/films with women at the center or written by women are so popular right now. The opening plot-design: a man falls from a high terrace, apparently a suicide, becomes the center of a murder accusation: that the wife threw him down; their relationship has been strained since their son had an accident in which his eyesight was badly limited, during a time when the husband was supposed to be taking care of him.
No surprise that I discovered the point of the courtroom drama was to offer opportunities for flashbacks and impassioned testimony by our heroine, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Huller) against a ferocious predatory prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz), whose accusations were endlessly laced with unacknowledged misogynistic slurs depicting her as a promiscuous (with other women no less!), a neglectful mother more interested in writing her books than home-schooling her child, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) as the long-suffering victim, the husband, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) does — as well as renovating the house he bought for them in his home-town, cold to said husband, violent. The riveting matter comes when she (and we) discover that he tapes her far more than he admitted and these audio/videos are played in front of us. Then we see/hear her slap her husband, hear him break glass, punch the walls frantically.
The son
What made it fascinating is that Sandra was not presented as a saint; she had acted the way the prosecutor claimed (affairs, looking out for her own career); she also (it turns out) blamed her husband for an accident to their boy that happened when the boy was left with the husband’s care: an accident that severed his optic nerve so he will never see well again. She shows a rare honesty in her intelligent defense of what she did, and anger at her husband for coercing them into leaving London for this retreat. She thinks he has reached a writer’s block and has been finding, inventing obstacles to get in his way. It fits into the best of these thriller/mysteries where the depth and interest is in the unfolding of the couple’s relationship to one another and to their son. It uses conventional tropes: the boy’s relationship to his dog, Scoop, becomes central to the outcome of the trial. Also important is her friendship with the male defending lawyer
The aim it seemed to me was to show a woman’s real life and expose how the court rules as well as attitudes of mind of prosecutor, judge, and populace are against her. The judge is a deeply unsympathetic (I felt towards the defendant) woman. Her team, the defense lawyer, Maitre Vincent Renzi (Swan Arlaud) and woman defender, Maître Nour Boudaoud (Saadia Bentaieb), seem continually stymied, ruled against. I won’t give the verdict and what happened away but would like to reassure my readers that the film is feminist, anything but misogynistic because of her deeply charged determination to tell the truth because she does believe it will rescue her. The film urges you to live your life in the way your nature intended; and shows you an instance of somehow who tried to live for real, managed some soaring (and writing of books) and yet remained pragmatic, practical, disillusioned about everything all but her son and her work (writing).
I loved the final scene of her lying down on a couch, her arm over the dog’s body in an embrace the dog nudges into.
This is a contemporary woman’s film, showing how transformed the genre of mystery-thriller, once a sina qua non for macho stories, with evil femme fatales at the center, or in the 1930s sleuthing spinsters — to dramatizing aspects of the hard lives of women today.
A. S. Byatt or Antonia Susan Drabble Duffy (1936-2023) died yesterday, and I want to remember and to praise her work tonight. I direct the reader to the NYTimes obituary which gives the bare facts of her life’s chronology, concise general information about her better known books and famous or celebrity-type autobiographical “information” about her (her quarrel with her sister, Margaret Drabble). Penguin is somewhat better as their obituary tells you how she built her career: through her job/position with Chatto and Windus. This is very like Jenny Uglow who morphed a long career with Chatto and Windus into a far more successful (from the point of view of her readership and the quality of her books) long (in both sense of the term — her books are long and the list of them long) series of brilliant biographies and histories.
Unfortunately when I was reading Byatt’s books avidly, studying them minutely, scrutinizing them by the inch, I was using Write (WRI) files and tonight I have failed to be able to convert these to rtf or txts or word documents. As usual, I don’t know what steps I am omitting. So quite a large number of files from the 1990s are lost to me. I cannot therefore provide details on her style or the structure of her booksor names of characters. Here is what I remember. They tell of how I fell in love with her Possession, A Romance, and among other things, drew a calendar or timeline as well as outlined the interlace of past and presents in the book. I taught it once to a very patient class; looking back I wonder how many of them read the book, a few loved it the way I did and I found some long-saved student papers about it. I loved the long epistolary sections, the journals, the description of Brittany. I knew and know still it is no feminist book, and its woman’s art is like that of Outlander, perhaps even more compromised. Its innermost heroine, Ellen Ashe, has been too terrified of a man’s penis to allow Randolph Henry Ashe, the book’s historical hero, a gentle tender Victorian poet who combines traits of Ruskin, Browning, Tennyson and G.H. Lewes, to ever fuck her. The phenomena of women’s lives are put before us through several heroines in the past and present. The central Victorian heroine, Christabel LaMotte, is modelled on an amalgam, a composite of George Eliot crossed by Charlotte Bronte, with her poetry and isolation making her a Christina Rossetti and imitator of Emily Dickenson.
Another Pre-Raphaelite cover though the story is set in contemporary Britain (for some this might be their favorite novel)
I went on to read another novel I’ve never forgotten, Still Life, written just before Possession, the first book I ever read which described a woman in labor. It gripped me to the last stunning page where our heroine turns into a still life. I tried to convince myself I loved Angels and Insects. I was able to read a great deal of its first novella, about Tennyson’s grief over Hallam’s death as a jump-off about the Victorian obsession over omnipresent death; and of the second novella, a rewrite in some ways of Austen’s Persuasion, a book also bout “the” Victorian obsession with atheism and death, this time with seances. But much of both of them were written in such dense and abstract prose, I could not understand her meaning. The unreadability of this one for me is also found in The Biographer’s Tale (whose hero’s name, Phineas, suggested an Anthony Trollope connection) where the fascination for the author was the relationship between photography and the real presence of people. I could never get into The Children’s Book at all. Babel Tower, another interlaced romance (following upon Still Life) was readable, just, but The Whistling Woman (the next in a Fredericka Quartet) with its extraordinary accomplished woman who nonetheless, is the center of a terrifying violent sexual scene with an abusive husband, and moves into a feminist phase, defeated me. Very frustrating.
Byatt had a French phase: one of the stories is about a teenage girl studying Racine; another Proustian
I had a repeat experience with her short stories: the first volume, Sugar and Other Stories was filled with stunning contemporary stories. I remember one was about an old woman living alone and thus old women as such; “The July Ghost,” was a transfer of her intense grief at the sudden death of her 11-12 year son in a bike-car accident into a powerful ghost story. But as she went on, these short texts also become dense, this time with archetypal imagery, where one was required to parse them rather than read them. They turned away from any realism, and were like paralyzed frozen pictures.
Earlier today I was thinking about her non-fiction narratives because I have been reading one very great one, John Sweet Wood’s The Sewing Girls’ Tale — about a rape in later 18th century New York City, how this morphed into a trial where class came before gender, and then a riot, an attempted suicide, a cause celebre in newspapers of the time, a civil suit &c&c. One of these earlier Byatt narrative non-fictions, UnRuly Times, centers on Wordsworth and Coleridge as real men and poets, as telling more truths about their sex lives than the traditional biographies — and also their personal relationship to their radical politics (insofar as they were radical). I still remember the scene of Dorothy Wordsworth weeping on a couch as in another room her brother, William, and his wife, Mary, were in bed together. Byatt thinks Dorothy and William were lovers (as do a few other Romantic scholars). In her non-fiction narrative books the quality stayed the same as far I can tell, but she didn’t write many.
Now I wonder about these covers — what audience do her publishers think her books appeal to?
Again, I loved her Imagining Characters, a series of conversations with Ignes Sodre about 6 women writers, to wit, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and less centrally Iris Murdoch (about whom she wrote a book), Willa Cather and Toni Morrison (perhaps today I could try to read that). The final conversation is about the relationship of the characters in specific novels to their reincarnation in films, which has some of the most insightful remarks on these writers and adaptation I’ve read. But when I dipped into her literary essays in Passions of the Mind, I discovered them to be very good, but more conventional, the sort of writing you would expect from a Leavisite (her first book was a wooden imitation of D.H. Lawrence). They represent a falling off from Imagining Characters. Much more interesting are her series of lectures, History and Fiction (as she wrote narrative history and historical fiction), though there she finally gave away why finally I couldn’t go further with her (nor she with herself): she looks to “fathers” and “forefathers” as predecessors, with the only women allowed in mainstream 19th century women, two very veiled angry ones (Murdoch and Cather) and Morrison (I do believe because the later novels are so difficult to understand and thus attracted Byatt).
What happened to her, what the explanation for her turning away from an imaginative fictional exploration of the woman’s matter she began with, I do not know. I can’t read the postings and notes I made at the time. Now in 2023 if you look at the list of her books you see a general falling off in the mid-1990s, and a silence for 20 years. I once heard her speak about George Eliot and she talked like she had marbles in her mouth, and was too eager to make her intellectual points — it was on one of those features on DVDs, this one Andrew Davies’s marvelous film of Middlemarch (1994). The one authorized biography by Richard Todd I have tried is discreet to the point of being useless except as the kind of traditional literary criticism which eschewed all disquieting political or autobiographical truths. I see her as a privileged person — the middle class intellectual Yorkshire home, went to the best schools, met her peers as a writer. She says she felt isolated in these places, alone, did not fit in. I will say her sister, whom I’ve written about in my Reveries Under Austen, Margaret Drabble seems to me to have fulfilled her gifts far more steadily and fully. We are told the girls were rivals for their mother’s love and Margaret won repeatedly.
Tonight I wish I had time to try again with The Whistling Woman
In her older years
She was an extraordinarily gifted fictional writer, and for a few years produced a couple of literary masterpieces in the genre of romance fiction, and some fine works of interpretative scholarship. In the early 1990s before I got onto the Internet and was able to reach other people, she made my spirits soar with the beauty of her prose and the passion of her feminine anguish, yearning, hard experiences (these mostly in the first volume of short stories). I felt less lonely with the woman who could write Possession; she seemed to love the books I did, and she reached for an underbelly of the sexually distraught that I have known. Perhaps I should place her in the Austen Reveries blog, but I think she might have preferred this one. Seemingly impersonal. Her official website is devoid of words, offering only enigmatic book covers. Like Ellen Ashe and Christabel LeMotte from Possession, what was she unwilling to tell of. In Still Life there are so many characters phoning crisis centers but we hardly ever hear a resolution of their crises. Its heroine also ends in stillness or death.
For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Day: Thursday mid-days, 11:50 to 1:15 pm,
F406Z Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now
8 sessions online (location of building: Tallwood, 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, Va. 22032
Dr Ellen Moody
We’ll read & discuss one of Trollope’s masterworks with an iconic title, The Way We Live Now. It’s a prophetic mirroring of our own era. Our aim is a close reading of this novel against the background of its own era & our own. Trollope dissects a crook financier who rises to the top of his society & wins a parliamentary election. We’ve an acutely insightful satire on literary marketplaces then (& now). The multiplot patterns includes a separated independent American widow, & a group of spirited women, whose stories bring in a host of women’s issues. We glimpse venture capitalism over railways in the southwest US, and by extension the post-colonial world. The core of this Trollope novel like are psychologically believable vividly alive characters. You could regard it as another face to other 19th century great novels (e.g., Middlemarch and Bleak House), an ethnographic milieu study. We’ll also discuss the fine 4 part serial scripted by Andrew Davies featuring David Suchet.
Required & Suggested Books:
Trollope, Anthony. The Way We Live Now, ed., introd, notes. Frances O’Gorman. NY: OxfordUP, 2016. Or
—————————————–——————————–, ed., introd, notes Frank Kermode. NY: Penguin Classics, 1994.
There is a readily available relatively inexpensive audio-recording of the novel read by Timothy West reproduced by audiobook as 2 MP3s.
There is a also a brilliant film adaptation in 4 parts, scripted by Andrew Davies, directed by David Yates. Featuring David Suchet, Cillian Murphy, Mirando Otto, Matthew Macfayden, Shirley Henderson, Anne-Marie Duff, Maxine Peake. BBC One, WBGH, 2001. Prime Video but not available in all locations. It’s on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+way+we+live+now+full+movie. You can find as a DVD for sale for $8.99 used. It used to be available on Netflix as a DVD. Daily Motion: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6wzlev
Cheryl Campbell as Matilda, Lady Carbury (TTWLN)
Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion. You don’t have to follow the specific chapters as I’ve laid them out; I divide the books to help you read them, and so we can in class be more or less in the same section of the book. This part of the syllabus depends on our class discussions and we can adjust it. Please read for the first week, TWWLN, Chs 1-12
Sept 21: 1st week: Introduction: Trollope’s life and career. The context. Read for next week Chs 13-25
Sept 28: 2nd week: TTWLN. The immediate characters and their relationships. Read for next week Chs 26-38
Oct 5: 3rd week: TWLLN. Wider themes of money-making and class, the literary marketplace. Read for next week Chs 39-51
Oct 12: 4th week: TWWLN. The use of letters, places, treatments of males; the male career. Read for next week Chs 52-64. If possible, have seen the 1st quarter of the film adaptation (Part 1).
Oct 19: 5th week: TWWLN. The women in the novel. Their relationships with one another as well as men. We begin our discussion of the film adaptation. Why does Davies switch the presentation of the two main storylines? Read for next week, Chs 66-78. If possible, have seen the 2nd quarter of the film adaptation (Part 2)
Oct 26: 6th week: TWWLN. Is the book prophetic? what is relationship of our present situation to the Eurocentric colonialist past? How does the modernization of the sexual behavior of these characters affect the storyline? does it? Read for next week, Chs 78-90. Again, if possible, have seen Part 3 of the film adaptation.
Nov 2: 7th week: TWWLN. Is this a tragic book? or a satire? Why does it feel so large and rich and even global? How does Davies present the men in the film adaptation so as to make them sympathetic to modern eyes? In what ways are the women stronger in the film adaptation than the book? Read for next week, Chs 91-100. If possible, have finished the film if you can.
Nov 9: 8th week: TWWLN, have read Appendices 1 and 2 at the back of the book. How do you feel about these endings? is the conventional nature of them go against the grain of the book or with it? Did you like the endings of the film couples better? why? Is this one of the great realistic novels of the 19th century or not? How does the form the book takes now differ from the form originally envisaged? is it much improved? why? is it still not all that much changed?
Lionel Fawkes, “You are, I think, Miss Melmotte” (from the original illustrations to TWWLN)
Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography and Other Writings, ed, introd., notes Nicholas Shrimpton. NY: Oxford Classics, 2014
—————-. “A Walk in the Woods,” online on my website: http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/nonfiction.WalkWood.html
Gerould, Winifred Gregory and James Thayer Gerould. A Guide to Trollope: An Index to the Characters and Places, and Digests of the Plots, in All of Trollope’s Works. 1948: rpt Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987 (a paperback)
If you want to go further, some recommended outside reading:
Gates, Barbara. Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes & Sad Histories. Princeton UP, 1998. Very readable.
Mill, John Stuart, The Subjection of Women. Broadview Press, 2000. Online at: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_stuart/m645s/
Green, Mark. “Trollope’s Children: Matilda Carbury,” The Trollope Jupiter, August 25, 2018. https://thetrollopejupiter.wordpress.com/2018/08/25/trollopes-women-lady-matilda-carbury/
Heineman, Helen. Mrs Trollope: The Triumphant Feminine in the Nineteenth Century. Athens: Ohio UP, 1979. This is the best of several recent books. See also Fanny Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. Pamela Neville-Singleton. NY: Penguin, 1997.
Herbert, Christopher. Trollope and Comic Pleasure. University of Chicago Press, 1987.
McMaster, R.D. “Women in The Way We Live Now,” English Studies in Canada, 7:1 (1981):68-80.
Moody, Ellen. “On Inventing a New Country: Anthony Trollope’s Depiction of Settler Colonialism,’ Antipodes: Journal of Australian and New Zealand Literature, 31;1 (2017):89-119
————. “Epistolarity and Masculinity in Andrew Davies’ Trollope Adaptations,” Upstairs and Downstairs: British Costume Drama Television from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Pp 79-9
Overton, Bill. The Unofficial Trollope. NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1982.
Scharnhorst, Gary. Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth Century American Journalist. Syracuse UP, 2008. See also Kate Field, Hap-Hazard. Bibliolife, 2010 (facsimile of 1883 book of essays): Ten Days in Spain. BiblioLife, 2010 (facsimilar of 1875 travel book).
Snow, C. P. Trollope: An Illustrated Biography NY: New Amsterdam Books, 1975. A fairly short well written biography, profuse with illustrations and a concise description of Trollope’s centrally appealing artistic techniques.
Steinbach, Susie. Understanding The Victorians: Culture and Society in 19th century Britain. London: Routledge, 2012.
Sutherland, John. Trollope at Work on The Way We Live Now,’ Nineteenth Century Fiction 37 (1982-83):472-93.
—————–. “Is Melmotte Jewish,” in Is Heathcliff a Murderer. Oxford UP, 1996.
Surridge, Lisa. Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction. Athens: Ohio UP, 2005. Includes a chapter on He Knew He Was Right.
Tanner, Tony. “Trollope’s The Way We Live Now: Its Modern Significance,” Critical Quarterly 9 (1967):256-71.
Tosh, John. Manliness and Masculinity in Nineteenth Century Britain. London: Longman, 2005.
Vicinus, Martha. Independent women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1930. Virago, 1985. See my summary and analysis: https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/martha-vicinuss-independent-women-work-community-for-single-women-1850-1930/
Cillian Murphy as Paul Montague, at Lowestoffe with Mirando Otto as Mrs Hurtle, waltzing with Paloma Baeza as Hetta Carbury at the Melmotte ball
From Between Two Worlds: Juliette Binoche as Marianne Winkler, an uncover journalist working with people who clean luxurious ferries in the dead of night
Dear friends,
So here I am with the second part of this blog, only this time I begin with a good movie, again focusing on women, which I’ve just seen and want to recommend, and then go on to the four poems I want to share. Between Two Worlds is based on Florence Aubenas’s The Night Cleaner, a best-selling memoir of a journalist who presented herself as another near destitute person to an employment agency, where she is led to take a low paid gruelling job as a cleaning person in a team driven to do far too much for them in a brief period of time. Like The Miracle Club, it’s directed and written by women, with a nearly all women cast, and like them is getting mostly luke-warm reviews, which this time concentrate indignantly on the attention spent on the hypocrisy of passing and using other people’s trust and friendship to produce a book. (An English language version of this is Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, by contrast, curiously enough treated with real respect.)
I find the supposed discomfort with Binoche and the story-line as narrow and unfair as the reviewers find the POV of the film. It’s the experience itself, what it’s like to live such a life, and the knowledge that huge numbers of people in the world’s economies now are driven to such extremities (3 jobs with barely time to sleep), treated harshly and indifferently. I found myself remembering my 27 years as an adjunct and the snobbery and hard work for a derisory salary I was subjected to; remembering my daughter Laura’s two years working with a team of lighting and decoration experts who did the same kind of hard work in the dead of night at stop speed, pushed on harshly by supervisors; I saw it with two women friends, and they too when it was over, had been excited and moved to remember analogous experiences of their own. The gig economy now reaches millions of people in the US. Not only go see it, but vote to help unions, to re-distribute taxes so the wealthy pay their real share, and the money used to create reform, change and better working lives for all people.
***************************************
And now I have four more poems to share that I know Jim loved to read from poets who were his favorites. For Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, e.e. cummings and C.P. Cavafy Jim had several books each, sometimes it was just books of poetry (cummings 4 books), sometimes books of letters and a life (Auden and Cavafy), and sometimes studies of the poetry with just one book (Larkin).
The poetry by Larkin Jim inclined to most was not the famous shocker types (“This be the verse”) but more the longer ones drenched in history (around churches, chapels, buildings), but he quoted the most
High Windows
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
I’m probably going to be quoting the famous poems here, for again with W. H. Auden I see some longer moving meditative pieces that are too long, but I cannot resist (with its very own picture)
Musee des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1555 (oil on canvas) by Bruegel, Pieter the Elder (c.1525-69)
His is a messy poetry.
*****************************************
e.e. cummings Jim appreciated the love poetry, the erotic stuff, the lack of pomposity; many of them are impossible to replicate in a blog, for their effect is dependent on stanzaic playfulness, breaking with regular punctuation. Jim found cummings to be joyful, and I’ll copy one of those I think his best, very allusive:
Ithaca (so many translations, this by Edmund Keely)
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
For this I have a video of another poet reading aloud his response:
When you set out from Ithaca again,
let it be autumn, early, the plane leaves falling as you go,
for spring would shake you with its quickening,
its whispers of youth.
You will have earned the road down to the harbour,
duty discharged, your toll of labour paid,
the house four-square, your son in the full of fatherhood,
his mother, your long-beloved, gone to the shades.
Walk by the doorways, do not look left or right,
do not inhale the woodsmoke,
the shy glow of the young girls,
the resin and pine of home.
Allow them permit you to leave,
they have been good neighbours.
Plank fitted to plank, slow work and sure,
the mast straight as your back.
Water and wine, oil, salt and bread.
Take a hand in yours for luck.
Cast off the lines without a backward glance
and sheet in the sail.
There will be harbours, shelter from weather,
There will be long empty passages far from land.
There may be love or kindness, do not count on this
but allow for the possibility.
Be ready for storms.
When you take leave of Ithaca, round to the south
then strike far down for Circe, Calypso,
what you remember, what you must keep in mind.
Trust to your course, long since laid down for you.
There was never any question of turning back.
All those who came the journey with you,
those who fell to the flash of bronze,
those who turned away into other fates,
are long gathered to asphodel and dust.
You will go uncompanioned, but go you must.
There will be time in the long days and nights,
stunned by the sun or driven by the stars,
to unwind your spool of life.
You will learn again what you always knew —
the wind sweeps everything away.
When you set out from Ithaca again,
you will not need to ask where you are going.
Give every day your full, unselfconscious attention —
the rise and flash of the swell on your beam,
the lift into small harbours —
and do not forget Ithaca, keep Ithaca in your mind.
All that it was and is, and will be without you.
Be grateful for where you have been,
for those who kept to your side,
those who strode out ahead of you
or stood back and watched you sail away.
Be grateful for kindness in the perfumed dark
but sooner or later you will sail out again.
Some morning, some clear night,
you will come to the Pillars of Hercules.
Sail through if you wish. You are free to turn back.
Go forward on deck, lay your hand on the mast,
hear the wind in its dipping branches.
Now you are free of home and journeying,
rocked on the cusp of tides.
Ithaca is before you, Ithaca is behind you.
Man is born homeless, and shaped for the sea.
You must do what is best.
Here the poet is online reading aloud:
I never had this kind of courage; Elinor Dashwood is more my gravatar. You may note that all four of
these are bookish, literary, even cummings depends on our remembering Chaucer.
Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) and Henry Tilney (J.J. Feilds) entering the realm of the ancient Abbey, crossing the bridge (2007 Granada/WBGH Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies)
For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at American University
Day: 4 Tuesday mornings, 9-45-11:15 am online,
Study Group 1620: The Heroine’s Journey
Office located at 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington DC 20016
Dr Ellen Moody
Description of Course:
We will explore the archetypal heroine’s journey across genres and centuries in the western Eurocentric tradition, from classical times to our 21st century female detectives. Our foundational books will be Maria Tatar’s The Heroine with 1001 Faces (written as a counterpart to Joseph Campbell’s famous and influential The Hero with a Thousand Faces), and Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey (click to reach the whole text online for free). Our four books will be Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales; Elena Ferrante’s Lost Daughter; and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. We will discuss what are journeys, the central experiences, typical plot-designs, characterizations, and events of the lives of our heroines of classical myth, fairy & folk tales (and connected to this historical romance and time-traveling tales), realistic fiction, and the gothic (and connected to this mystery/thrillers, detective stories). There are two recommended films as part of our terrain to be discussed: Outlander, S1E1 (Caitriona Balfe as Claire Beauchamp transported), and Prime Suspect S1E1 (Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison). I will supply some poetry (Atwood, Carol Ann Duffy, Marge Piercy), two scripts (for the serial episode of Outlander and the 2022 film adaptation of The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal), and one parodic modern short story (“Rape Fantasies” by Atwood), all as attachments.
Leda (Olivia Colman) stopping off to look at the sea sometime during her journey there and back (Lost Daughter, 2021)
Required Books (these are the editions I will be using but the class members may choose any edition they want):
Margaret Atwood. The Penelopiad. NY: Grove Press (originally O. W. Toad), 2005, ISBN 978-1-84195-798-2
Angela Carter. The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales. NY: Harper and Row, 1981. ISBN 0-06-090836X (reprinted with new codes many times)
Elena Ferrante. The Lost Daughter, trans. Ann Goldstein. NY: Europa, 2008.
Jane Austen. Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman. NY: Norton Critical Edition, 2004. ISBN 978-0-393-097850-6. Another excellent (good introduction, good materials at the back of the book) modern edition is the Longman Cultural text, ed. Marilyn Gaull. NY: Longman (Pearson Educational), 2005. ISBN 0-321-20208-2
Strongly suggested films:
Outlander, Season 1, Episode 1, called “Sassenach” Written Roger Moore, directed John Dahl. Featuring: Caitronia Balfe, Sam Heughan, and Tobias Menzies. Available on Netflix (and Starz), also as a DVD. I can supply a script for this one. Prime Suspect, Season 1, Episode 1, called “Price to Pay 1 & 2.” Written Lynda La Plante, Directed Christoper Menaul. Featuring Helen Mirren, John Benfield, Tom Bell. Available on BritBox, YouTube and also as a DVD
Kauffmann, Angelica, Penelope Taking Down the Bow of Ulysses (18th century)
Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion
June 6th: Introduction, Atwood’s Penelopiad, with a few of her Circe poems, and Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Big O” (from The World’s Wife)
June 13th: From Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales read “The Bloody Chamber” (Bluebeard), “The Courtship of Mr Lyon,” (Beauty and the Beast)”Puss-in-Boots,” “The Lady of the House of Love” (Sleeping Beauty plus), “The Company of Wolves” (Little Red Riding Hood). Please have seen Outlander S1, E1. Another movie you could see is the 1984 Company of Wolves, an extravagant fantasy bringing together a number of Carter’s fairy tales and fables; she is one of the scriptwriters. It’s available on Amazon Prime.
June 20th: Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, with Marge Piercy’s “Morning Athletes” If you are interested, see the film adaptation, The Lost Daughter, scripted & directed Maggie Gryllenhaal; while much is changed, it is absorbing and explains the book (Netflix film, also available as a DVD to buy); it features Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, and Jack Farthing (as Leda’s husband). I can supply a script for this one too.
June 27th: Austen’s Northanger Abbey, with discussion that links the gothic to modern mystery-thriller and detective stories. I will send by attachment Margaret Atwood’s “Rape Fantasies” (a very short story). Please have seen Prime Suspect S1, E1-2. If you are interested, see the film adaptation, Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies, directed by Jon Jones; while much is changed, this one is also absorbing and adds to the book (available as a YouTube and DVD); it features beyond the two principals, Carey Mulligan, Liam Cunningham (General Tilney) and Sylvestre Le Touzel (Mrs Allen)
First still of Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison, late arrival at crime scene, driving herself (Prime Suspect, aired 6 & 9 April 1991, “Price to Pay”)
Select bibliography (beyond Tatar’s Heroine with a 1001 Faces and Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey):
Atwood, Margaret. Recommended novels, non-fiction and poetry by her: The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye, Lady Oracle, The Blind Assassin; Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, Women and the city: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism; The Journals of Susannah Moody … various editions.
Beard, Mary. Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations. Liveright, 2013. Early refreshingly jargon-free feminist readings of documents left to us.
Bojar, Karen. In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018.
Carter, Angela. Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings [non-fiction, essays, sketches, journalism], ed Jenny Uglow, introd. Joan Smith. NY: Penguin, 1998; The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. Penguin, 1979.
Choderow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: Univ of California Pr, 1978
Cavender, Gray and Nancy C. Jurik, Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect. Urbana: Univ of Illinois Press, 2012.
Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 2004.
Finley, M. I. (Sir Moses). The World of Odysseus (a central lucid informative classic study of the Homeric epics) Penguin, 1956. Also Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (the ancient world was a slave and captivity society); Early Greece: The Bronze and Archaic Ages (straight history and archaeology) and Ancient History: Evidence and Models (teaches you how to think about what is evidence, and what you can do with this evidence).
Frankel, Valier Estelle. 3 books: Symbolism & Sources of Outlander: Adoring Outlander: On Fandom, Genre, and Female Audience; Outlander’s Sassenachs: Gender, Race, Orientation, and the Other in the TV series. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015-17 (also on later books, Duane Meyer, The Highland Scots of North Carolina, 1732-1776. Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina, 1961.)
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. 1983; rep, rev Harvard UP, 1993.
Gordon, Edmund. The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography. London: Chatto & Windus, 2016.
Hirsh, Marianne. The Mother-Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Indiana: Bloomington UP, 1980
Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. 2nd Edition. Chicago: Univ of Illinois, 1995.
Moody, Ellen, “People that marry can never part: A Reading of Northanger Abbey, Persuasions Online, 3:1 (Winter 2010): https://jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol31no1/moody.html ; The Gothic Northanger: A Psyche Paradigm, Paper delivered at a EC/ASECS conference, November 8, 2008 online: http://www.jimandellen.org/austen/gothicna.html ; The Three Northanger Films [includes Ruby in Paradise], Jane Austen’s World (Vic Sandborn, April 6, 2008: online: https://janeaustensworld.com/2008/04/06/the-three-northanger-abbey-films/
Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981.
Southam, B.C., ed. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion: A Casebook. London: Routledge, 1968.
Stevenson, Anne. “Diana Gabaldon: her novels flout convention.” Publishers Weekly 6 Jan. 1997: 50+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 15 Apr. 2016. Online.
Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood, Starting Out. Canada: Harper Flamingo, 1998.
Tomalin, Clair. Jane Austen: A Life. NY: Vintage, 1997.
Williams, Anne. The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: Univ Chicago P, 1995.
Claire (Caitronia Balfe) among the stones, just arrived in 1743 (Outlander S1, E1, 2015)
The ensemble for King Lear: Patrick Paige as Lear, Michael Milligan as fool, Shirine Babb as Kent, Matthew J Harris as Edgar
The director and a few of the actors know the deep pessimism and agony of what humanity is, is the core of the play, that it is utterly serious, but the actors have been encouraged to demean and undermine it with coarse humor, and project its impact through the techniques of action-adventure noise & (for the women) sexy costumes
Amanda Assucena as Anna, José Pablo Castro Cuevas as Vronsky
So to sum up, this is a ballet which fails to tell in the most primitive terms the story of the book, caricatures the depths of the characters, leaves out much that counts that could have been used for dance, and emphatically ends on the worst of morals.
Dear friends and readers,
Nonetheless, far be it from me to suggest you should not rush out and see the King Lear (Peter Marks who never does stint praise) being performed at the Klein Theater in DC this spring: after 3 hours of it you will be moved, shaken, at times unbearably rivetted (when the Cornwall and Regan pluck out the eyes of Gloucester there is no flinching). Page has such a resonant voice and thoughtful dignified as well as raging compassionate presence, he probably matches any other performer I’ve seen (that includes Ian McKellen, 2018, and Anthony Hopkins, 2016, the fool played by the inimitable Karl Johnson).
As to the Joffrey’s Anna Karenina, the long central dance sequences of Anna and Vronsky finally making love, of upon marriage and exile from society, him becoming irritated and disdainful, and a later time of ecstasy after a vilifying social experience, a threesome of the two with Edson Barbosa as a raging Karenin probably go as far as dance without moving into pornography and violence can, to figuring the emotions of such encounters. But denuded as it is of everything else in the novel, I do advise rather taking in one of the excellent film adaptations, listening to the book read aloud, or, if all else fails, read the magnificently plausible book.
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I’ve put off writing about the first experience (I saw the Lear two weeks ago now) because I was unwilling to counter the ecstatic screams of praise I’ve seen nearly everywhere on King Lear as it seemed uncharitable. I was aware while watching this (often very young) company how hard they were working. They seemed driven to somehow affect the audience to some overt reaction, and when the three actresses playing Goneril, Regan and even Cordelia, became vulgarly raunchy, with coarse gesturing towards sex, I put it down to eagerness to believe that Shakespeare was not some “solemn dude” Other reductive gleefulness jarred but I do know that there are places where Shakespeare’s King Lear creaks — the opening triadic ritual, Edmund’s awkward self-congratulations, the chronicle-like war scenes near the close are felt and maybe it is salutary for glamorous mystification of audiences to come to an end. But now I know a number of the actors came from a training school or program run by the Shakespeare theater: the company was saving money by not hiring seasoned professionals.
So it is a simply highly uneven production. Patrick Paige is just superb in every way; he has all the nuanced feeling and depth of thought and anger and pathos one looks for and he carried the show. What a resonant voice he has. The actors playing Gloucester (Craig Wallace) , Edgar and Kent were best after him. Edmund (Julian Elijah Martinez) has some quiet sarcastic turns. Most of the others were either adequate or not at all. All three actresses (four by the end) playing the three daughters were either overdone or wooden (let me spare their names). Oftentimes the ensemble was just too noisy, or loud when they mean to be rousing.
Visual motifs that will stay with me: Lear and the fool behind him with a woolen hat and two battered suitcases — this recalled the Lear with Anthony Hopkins with him and the actor playing the fool walking about with a shopping cart and their things in it. The sets were at times inspired and the hard action, and wildness was done well. I’d say see it and get what you can; they work hard and mean well — the deepest feeling came out of the sequences on the heath, the abysmal poverty of the shack they find themselves in. It was terrifying the scene where Gloucester’s eyes are plucked out – done with driving flair; the whole audience was shuddering — a sense of how frequent in our world is torture. A couple of satiric lines over politicians seemed apt for today. A new inspiration was the quiet death of the fool. Hitherto the fool just vanishes in the text and all productions I’ve seen; in this one he dies of cold, and exhaustion and is covered by a tent blanket.
Near the denouement
The very ending scene of most Lears is what we are all waiting for. Page chose to speak the final famous lines over Cordelia’s body so quietly.
*************************************************
Opening screen and set; intermission showed screen of snowing…
The Joffrey Anna Karenina is another matter. The reviews tell us to go because it’s such a prestigious company; it’s beyond me how the quality of the dancing is something apart from what is represented (we are told to refresh ourselves so as to understand what is faintly represented); and then there’s how these things are done. The point here is to explain what these reviews are avoiding saying.
I have now read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina three times (in two different recent and good translations) and listened to it read aloud superbly well by Davina Porter. I’ve watched at least seven different adaptations. I am aware of just how punitively Tolstoy regards Anna’s behavior, how much the book presents a patriarchal perspective, how it glorifies the holding to conventions (the Levin and Kitty story) and finally slides over the misery of Anna’s sister-in-law, Dolly, at the hands of Anna’s brother, Stiva (played most effectively by Matthew McFayden, 2012) and in Tom Stoppard’s script (2012) But it also shows how ambiguous and distancing is Anna’s relationship with her husband, how needlessly cruel Karenin is over the child, how impossible it is to live apart from a community who will not accept but deride you.
To even begin to get the meaning of this novel, one must have all three couples, and present them in equally understanding ways, which is what Tolstoy did. This Anna Karenina just about omitted the Stiva-Dolly story, and presents the Levin-Kitty story as if there were no downside (and there is in the novel). The Anna dancing scenes presented her too consistently and especially towards the end as simply a victim. Deprived of her son, she is available for kicking. We see her become a drug addict — so the pity that she is ostracized from company is lost. The company chose to have Anna’s death a horror gothic scene, and then turn to a complete joyous ensemble surrounding Kitty and Levin that was like something taken out of Oklahoma, with no sense of humor or boisterousness.
This comes early on; there is no period of doubt where Kitty is attracted to other men
I suppose the worst lack was the omission of the early scenes of Kitty and Levin’s romance take place on an ice-skating pond. I really (perhaps naively) expected some thrilling ballet over ice — or pretend ice. Just about every movie I’ve seen includes these scenes.
They did need to use pantomime for without it there was no understanding why Dolly looked so glum and Stiva useless, helpless. But I read the company is above that sort of thing. The first we saw her son was the scene where Karenin takes the child from her.
There was an effective moment with Anna seen on one side of the stage (in her slip) and Vronsky painting her on the other. They opened on the train station and Anna’s arrival, but her meeting with Vronsky over-rode anything we might learn of Stiva or Anna’s husband. In the closing her image was presented large with the doctor injecting her with some drug over the railway set. She looked ghastly all right. Then we saw her body naked made large on the screen. Maybe spare yourself.
Almost all the reviews show this scene of Karenin presenting Vronsky with Anna
I don’t say this company didn’t work hard and probably the dancing was superbly well done. But long live patriarchy silently screams this ballet. Watch out if you trespass. I went with a friend and we were moved to discuss how in the last couple of years women have lost such ground in the US, not to omit Islamic nations around the world. No woman in the US today should get pregnant: it is too dangerous for her. She said shows how the #MeToo movement is struggling to survive.
Nicola Paggett in the 1977 movie as she walks into the snowy world towards the end of the film; Stuart Wilson was Vronsky; Eric Porter as Karenin. This BBC production remains the best adaptation of Anna Karenina in English; it shows real understanding of the center people.
The Kennedy Center appears to be returning to what it all too often did before the pandemic: get in shows from elsewhere and rely on the glamor of names to pull audiences in.
A photo of Anna Madeley as Mrs Hall and Ella Bernstein as Eva Feldman, an evacuated Jewish child — done so as to evoke 1940s photos
“Snuggling down in the Yorkshire Dales to save a few cows turned out to be just what the doctor ordered last winter…” (Anibundel of the first season playing providentially almost just as the pandemic hit)
Dear friends and readers,
This is my third season watching this latest and 3rd iteration of James Herriot’s series of books, All Creatures Great and Small, and, as was to be expected, the matter has taken further turns away from the book. I find not totally to my surprise that I never posted on the first season, only its Christmas special albeit in the context of the series, the original movie and Herriot’s books. I also never posted on the second season as a whole, only giving it honorable mention as among a series of fine women’s films for 2022. This third season I’ve gotten to the point that I watch it as appointment TV, Sunday nights at 9 EST, and then re-watch it on the computer (WETA passport) so as to understand anything I misunderstood and savor it! Indeed, I keep up with Samuel West on twitter about the series, and was glad/relieved to be re-assured it will be back for a fourth season, one which incorporates the realities of World War Two as sifted through its comfort-show lens.
Opening paratexts — not as witty and varied as those of the Durrells but the same sort of entrance gate …
I feel I should say something in praise of it, yet am held back (as I was in previous years) by my sense of its shamelessly softened realities that intellectually I do not fall for, but emotionally cannot resist. The promotional photo put out by the series after the airing of the Christmas special embodies the formula: they offer suggestions of in-depth trauma controlled and distanced by the story and characters’ good natures so as to push the watcher into near tears as we actually watch everything turning out well after all. Anibundel calls it pastoral perfection. Sometimes they can overdo it and in the third season there was more evidence of this, as for example, when they were paradoxically insensitive as they tried to appeal to too many contradictory cultural impulses as in the use of a Jewish evacuated child also to stand in for a Christian child opening her magical presents on Christmas day surrounded by patiently pretending adults. Most of the time they have tact and quick pace enough not to insist on an over-motivated improbable anxiety by Nicholas Ralph as Herriot (still ostensibly the central hero) when confronted by a bullying authority figure; Callum Woodhouse as the boyish Tristan pulls this off much better since at the same time Woodhouse has a presence which remains wryly humorous.
For me what stabilizes the mix are the many tales of suffering animals, some of whom die despite what is depicted realistically as veterinary care. I can believe in these skeins and cry over people upset because their pets (in effect) need rescue. I must not be the only watcher for whom Mrs Hall is turning out to be as central a character as Siegfried Farnon (seen more fully as a hurt sensitive man by Samuel West previously played somewhat similarly by Anthony Hopkins). They are our caring parent presences. The women remain in their traditional subordinate roles, supportive of their men, while strong in their own right; class status remains respected, ethnicity (British Indians are now added to the black farmers, assistants and one wife we’ve seen).
Siegfried and Mrs Hall dealing with a problem cooperatively
I admit up-front last night’s ACGS was over-the-top in two ways and in the third parallel story overdid it (egged the compound so we would understand the theme), yet it touched me intensely, I was in a state of anxiety waiting with Mrs Hall, worried Edward would not come (and when Mrs H returns home and sits down with Siegfried the first question he asks is, “Did he come?”), then I did feel bad for her at his awkwardness, but glad he brought out his accusations. To tell the truth, I’m with him; at the last moment as they walk along towards the train she blurts out “I panicked” — that’s about it. When she discovered he was stealing, she became frightened she’d be blamed, and she needed a place to live, a job. She thinks she loves him above all, but unlike a parallel Dickens’s text where we are to accept at surface value what Mrs Rouncewell (Bleak House, who also gave up a beloved son to fit into the hierarchical society) says (Mrs R does not say she loves George above everything), there is enough there to show us the son is partly correct in his assessment of Mrs H’s loyalties. She put him in jail. The second story of the weeping older man with his dog who is all the man has in the world did make me cry — alleviated by the comedy (if you can call it that, it was strained) of Siegfried “training” another boy. It was really too much to have Rachel’s younger sister (I think of her as Rachel not Helen) leave school so we could see Rachel show how loyal she is to the child herself — again undercut somewhat by an awareness this is not the best decision — or only if the girl genuinely wants to stay in this small world, which has been made idyllic and which Herriot has chosen when an adult and after a superior education.
His most moving, Episode Episode 3: the backstory killing of all the horses in WW1 still in Siegfried’s mind, told very well by Judith Cheney, a member of Trollope & his Contemporaries @ groups.io
“Siegfried in a flashback memory of the end of WW1, Siegfried was ordered to put down all of the war horses which would not be transported back to Britain. The white or dapple grey horse he killed was the horse in the scene, he & other soldiers found a horse which had been whinnying in pain wounded on the battlefield. They rescued & rehabilitated it. These horse killings had broken S.’s heart & deeply affected him for the rest of his life. (Remember the racehorse episode back a season or two?)
The superior officer who ordered Siegfried to kill all the horses may have been the man whose horse he was now again being told to put down on the Seabright estate – from the dialogue: Siegfried to this racehorse’s owner, ” Oh no you don’t, you’re going to stay & watch it this time.” Siegfried is able to save this horse however, by his gentleness & mounting him bareback, he is able to gallop him off over the hill & thus prove him rideable, with time & proper handling & kindness.”
A couple of recaps told me that this kind of episode where the accent is on sorrow and lost can be complained about — and also that there is more of this in this series than is explicitly appreciated. One trick is to keep the depths in the backstory: we never experience what happened to Mrs Hall and Frederick years ago, and our account of it remains incomplete.
I should say now (about the fakery) — I’ve probably said it before — Yorkshire is NOT eternally green, the skies do not ETERNALLY shine. Beige, brown, grey, yellow — yes some sunny days but certainly not in most of the winter. This is Wuthering Heights country. Rain, cold damp, raw — one of podcasts from WETA about the program has a British person who knows better but never a peep out of her. Wintertime days are very short. Very grey. But nevertheless I love their brightly colored animated paratexts, for Christmas covered with white snow. Flaws include that Woodhouse is getting too old to play the awkward semi-innocent (!) male; and Rachel Shenton as Helen is not given enough to do. The gaiety of the show is supplied by this innocent or overtly young non-predatory male. He is so easily controlled by his new love, the British Indian young woman, Florence Pandhi (Sophie Khan Levy)
The dog is hers
The film story does not yet go overtly into politics, but with World War Two coming up, they cannot slide over the threat of Nazism and fascism; instead they render these things hintingly and as beyond everyone’s conception. I doubt they will ever come near the true explanations of the evil’s facets (as Foyle’s War did and does almost every time): the existence of hopelessness and the need to escape into worlds of destruction would astonish these characters as crazed nightmares are precisely the sort of thing this series is an antidote for. The characters all stand firm in their belief the world is fundamentally a good place. Good medicine is what they mean to offer for those who can enter into the wholesome comfort of bargaining that works out well for almost all.
This is more sheer fun than the show and captures something archetypal about each of the characters:
Edmund and Fanny reading Cowper together (1983 Mansfield Park), discussing it …
[Edmund] made reading useful by talking to [Fanny] of what she had read (Mansfield Park, close of Chapter 2)
Dear fellow readers and friends,
I wonder if you have noticed that alarm bells have been ringing these past few weeks, shall I say once again? Literary criticism has lost its way (Stephan Collini, “Exaggerated Ambitions,” from the LRB), with academic politics as the main culprit (Merve Emre, “Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism,” The New Yorker). The larger and (for teachers of English literature and other humanities subjects) pragmatically worrying developments of sudden and catastrophic-feeling declines in enrollment, have lead over the past few years to what Bryan Alexander, a professional futurist, has been cataloguing as “the Queen Sacrifice:” many colleges simply get rid of their humanities departments. They are not generating enough income from outside places (grant authorities, corporations), or respect, and the fundamental cause cited is lack of interest, lack of enrollment (This time Virginia).
When a department is thrown out so are all the tenured faculty.
It’s this overhaul of college curricula and not just in the US (I’m referring to the UK universities, also English speaking and reading) so as to eliminate whole areas of study that has motivated seriously meant essays, e.g., Evan Kindley, “Departments on the Defensive,” NYRB; and again from The New Yorker, Nathan Heller’s accurately titled analysis, “The End of the English Major: Why humanities are in free fall“. The immediate explanation is the astronomical fees for a degree, and the purpose of college as providing training and certificate for a good job, something you can do someone will pay you for, so future with healthy financial prospects, especially if you spent a lot. The Atlantic tells us the students are wrong to think these other majors will produce better job prospects: Benjamin Schmidt, “The Humanities are in Crisis,” with huge numbers of persuasive statistics going back to 2008. But no one believes this.
And of course then come (also from The Atlantic) sneers, scepticism and mockery
One important mechanism causing this not mentioned in any of the above, is the withdrawal of state funding from many colleges and the necessity of the college turning to corporations for funding. When I first when to work for George Mason University more than half its income came from the state; I believe when I left it was under 20%. Corporations get to put influential people on boards and they want studied in colleges what will make them money: docile students. I saw with my own eyes politically conservative people preferred for jobs over liberal ones.
Thus no one should be surprised another aspect of this is the slow elimination of anti-colonialism and anti-patriarchal militarism as embodied in “Women Studies” — in some places long ago become “Gender Studies,” having got rid of the objectionably narrow (!) or “red flag” word (“Women”).
There is no need to be apocalyptic. Another angle of this seems to me eternal: when I was in graduate school, many of the other students hated the requirements for reading older literature. Spenser’s Fairie Queene is still a favorite work to decry when imposed on everyone. Among the first “reforms” in the Vietnam era when college students demanded change, was the removal of required courses, and within majors like English, the removal of hard courses that to me made it into a discipline with a recognizable area of knowledge all were to know: a course in linguistics for real; requirements that you read other languages; requirements that you take survey courses and then pass exams outside the classes on the history of what you were learning. In the 1970s the demand that English majors study Anglo-Saxon literature in the original was dropped from British colleges’ curricula.
I have had the (to me at the time) shocking experience of being told by fellow graduate students that they hated to read long or hard or old books, or read at all. One guy told me he was there to read and learn to imitate Hemingway. Around the 1980s mark it was common to find departments made up of students there to become modern writers themselves, or, worse yet (as Collini would doubtless say), use and read theory to “interrogate” what the canon had been, and begin our job of saving the world by deconstructive close readings (now I’m mocking this post-Leavisite point of view) of older canon-based books by mostly white males and adding to these books by women, by people of color, by non-privileged and marginalized peoples.
And apart from the pressure of relentless unconditional (unmitigated) capitalism as a way of life all have to endure in the US (and elsewhere) what we study as part of the English canon is to many outdated — for example, Cowper’s beautiful later 18th century autobiographical meditative poem, The Task (what Edmund and Fanny are reading just above). Latin and Greek went at the turn of the 19th century, to be eventually replaced by scientific medicine. I remember how when I told Jim in the 1990s of the suggestions made in one of the Chair’s meetings on how to make the English major more attractive, he laughed and said they were trying to argue their buggy whips were better than anyone else’s buggy whips when cars had now replaced the horse and carriage. He himself was a computer software scientist who had switched from the higher mathematics for his Ph.D. to software inventor, teacher and finally Program Management (he worked at the famous DARPA) for his quarter of a century career.
What we seeing a cumulative effect: the slow erosion is become landslides.
I have something simple to say. Paradoxically around the time of the spread of theory (and its horrible jargon) and the resultant switch from aesthetic and moral points of view to seeing texts as mirrors of cultures and history so that the literature class becomes a kind of cultural study I felt “we” were having a failure of nerve. People just didn’t believe that literature, that reading books and understanding them for just for themselves mattered. The book was a way of learning cultural history. In several of the above articles, college students today are quoted as loving to read and wanting to, but not seeing literature as anything but personal entertainment, in function a hobby.
What did I learn when I studies literature as a graduate student: I learned how to read a book, so that when I finished it, it had some meaning for me outside the particulars of the stories’ action, evaluative gossip of characters’ personalities, and a kind of literal appreciation for beautiful or riveting description (setting), clever witty allusions to other works. I learned also how to write and to talk about (recognize first as in Forster’s Aspects of Fiction) the imagined elements that make up books and many years later films so as to make sense of them so that they were relevant to my world, my inner life. Learning to write that way lead me to learn how to teach others to talk and to write that way.
Now I’m not the only person in this world that thinks learning how to understand a book (or movie) and disseminate it to others is an important matter. In my Sylvia I blog last week I wrote about the lawless (no longer will any degree or knowledge of education be required in people who manage and rule colleges) and Nazi-like censorship and erasure of whole areas of knowledge going on in Florida and elsewhere: scary ruthless policies of repression across Florida Colleges. How this is spreading to other states. Where does Nazism come from, fascist movements, the inability to grasp who or what it is in your interest to vote for? Ignorance, a lack of real education or miseducation.
Anyone who has read my blogs regularly has to have come across my analysis of books and movies, of authors’ works, of kinds of books and movies (genres) — that’s what this blog and my Austen reveries are predominantly made up of. Or I hope they are. Last week over on my Austen blog I was on about Women’s Holocaust Memoirs; if you haven’t picked up from this blog I’m a feminist who nonetheless loves romance, you must’ve been skimming (see my Outlander series).
So, my friends and fellow readers, that’s what it is. People have not been making clear what is being learned at the core of the humanities or literature or history or other subjects for study and for ourselves adding to about and by the human arts. We don’t want to admit this simple set of formulae are at the heart of what is taught and what is learnt and what is disseminated.
I will close with the latest example of my education. The London Trollope Society is having a conference in Oxford, Somerville, this coming September and they called for papers on Women and Trollope. After having read The Belton Estate recently (I’ve been meaning to write a blog but have been remiss), I came up with this:
Intriguing Women in Trollope’s Fiction
Using a gendered perspective, I will discuss women characters who act, think, and feel in unexpected ways, whom recent readers find hard to explain, and cause controversy. I’ll focus on lesser known as well as more familiar presences.
My first & central pair will be Clara Amedroz and Mrs. Askerton from The Belton Estate. Most essays have been about how Clara at first prefers the glamorous, guarded, demanding and upper-class Captain Aylmer to the open-hearted, farmer-like, affectionate Will Belton. I will dwell on Clara’s refusal to give up her friendship with Mrs. Askerton, a woman who fled an abusive husband and lived with him before her husband died, thus enabling Mr. Askerton and her to marry.. Mrs. Askerton is stunningly unexpected in her generosity of spirit and mix of conventional and unconventional views. The first half of my talk will move from Clara to other young about to, just married or not marriageable women whose lives take them in insightful directions, e.g., Lily Dale, Miss Viner (“Journey to Panama”), Lady Glencora, Emily Lopez.
The second half of my talk will move from Mrs. Askerston to sexually and socially experienced disillusioned women, e.g., Madame Max, Mrs. Hurtle, Lady Mabel Grex, Mrs. Peacocke (Dr Wortle’s School), as well as older mature women who are mothers, and whom Trollope takes seriously, e.g., Lady Lufton, Mrs. Crawley, Lady Mason.
Trollope dramatizes what might seem perversities of behavior these women resort to as contrivances to get round a lack of concrete power (used against them, sometimes by other women, e.g., Lady Aylmer) to try to achieve results they can be happy or live in peace with. The point of the talk is to show how Trollope probes and makes visible psychological and iconoclastic realities in his women characters’ lives..
I believe that if I wrote this paper, I would have something to bring to other women — and men too — about Trollope’s depiction of women that could be important to them to realize. Now it might be rejected. Probably will be. I’ll be in competition with people with titles of all sorts, fame, and it’s not presented conventionally, and not aimed at what fans of Trollope might find reassuring. Or not what’s wanted for other reasons. But I believe in it, I believe it’s good. I believe in good readings as useful. I don’t want to compliment myself further. The point here is to defend the humanities and English majors as serious people learning something as important as Program Management.
An interim blog: this is me thinking out a few semi-conclusions I’ve come to after a couple of months of reading books about women detectives (history, literary criticism, culture, feminist) and reading and rereading a few such books by men and women. As I’ve written on my Sylvia I blog, I seem to be going through something of a transition after living in this world without Jim for some 9 plus years. Part of this is I am liking books I used to not be able to read, and able to accept optimism and at least sympathize with (understand in a new way from an outward transactional POV) some conventional transactional pro-social-ambition perspectives.
To get to the point here, I find that I can’t resist reading and watching new kinds of material in the detective, mystery-thriller, spy genre kind, which I’ve come back to seeing as closely allied to the gothic. Not that I altogether rejected books with women detectives at the center: my first Internet pseudonym was Sylvia Drake, a minor character in Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy night, and my gravatar for my political blog is a small picture of Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane looking thoughtful.
From Strong Poison: she is supposed the murderer and this is in prison, she is talking to Lord Peter Wimsey (Edward Petherbridge)
The reading came out of my preparing for my coming The Heroine’s Journey course this winter. As you can see, if you go over the look, there is no example among my four slender book choices of a female detective novel. That’s because I couldn’t think of one slender enough for such a short course until I came upon Amanda Cross’s (aka Carolyn Heilbrun’s) Death in a Tenured Position. Most recent and older female detective novels are average size, say 350 pages (Gaudy Night is about this size) because often many combine a “novel of manners” (or domestic romance) with the detective formula. But I found it to be a central category because since surfacing in novels in the 1860s, the type has multiplied in appearances until say today there may be several TV shows featuring a female detective available all at once.
Although I’ve found dictionary-type books with lists and essays on women writers and their detective novels (Great Women Mystery Writers, ed Kathleen Gregory Klein, truly excellent; By a Woman’s Hand by Jean Swanson and Dean James, 200 short entries which have the merit of naming the author as well as the detective and offering enough information to give the reader a gist of what type of mystery fiction this is), it has been very hard to find any essay-like books treating just the category of female detective fiction by women writers. The nature of the material (influences, who’s writing what, movies as a group-creation) has led to many male writers putting female detectives at the center of their series, and many female writers putting male detectives, and these mixed gender creations (so to speak) are often superb in all sorts of ways.
Sue Rylands (Leslie Manville) is also intended to appeal to older unmarried career women (the spinster trope transformed & modernized at last)
But as there is a real, findable, and demonstable fault-line and difference between male and female writing, and films made by mostly men or mostly women, and visual art, and music too, and one of my aims as a teacher and writer is to keep women’s literature alive and make it more respected; I’ve been after just the books by women albeit in a multi-gender context. I’ve also tried to stick to films where the central author originally (or continuously) is a woman, and evidence shows women directing, producing, doing set design. The qualification here is all of these are shaped by the kind of detection mystery genre the book/film is written in. I’ve followed Andrew Marr centrally here; Julian Symons’s Bloody Murders is also indispensable.
I’ve come to a few tentative conclusions.
I agree in part with Kathleen Klein’s brilliant analysis (The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre) of the depiction of female detectives mostly in books, but equally by men and women that often these may easily be read and are in fact intended (when conscious) as anti-feminist (meaning the movement for independence and equality) portrayals from a male (in some eras on TV lascivious) POV.
This POV is on display in right now in the incessant arguments and brutal put-downs of Miss Eliza Scarlet (the ever patient Kate Phillips has played many an wholly abject woman, from Jane Seymour in the recent Wolf Hall, to Tolstoy’s hero Andrei’s long-suffering wife, the 2016 serial by Andrew Davies) by “The Duke” Inspector Wellington (the pugnacious, overtly insulting professional police detective played by Stuart Martin, doubtless chosen for his resemblance to the matinee idol type, Richard Armitage) who reiterates constantly a woman cannot be both a real or natural or happy woman and a detective; who needs strong men around her to protect her. Injury was added to insult in the most recent episode (Season 3, Episode 2) where a story was concocted whereby a mean and bullying ex-friend, Amanda Acaster, who repeatedly humiliated and nowadays derides her, is also used to criticize adversely Eliza’s character: Eliza is supposed now to have felt for Amanda trying to have a career using the same manipulative amoral tactics she did when the two were young. She is not charged though her measures were what encouraged a gang of thieves to use her restaurant as a front. But look she surpasses Eliza in the Victoria sponge cake line. The costuming of the program shows some knowledge of the illustrations for such stories in the 1870s/90s, the music is very good, and lines are witty (though usually at Eliza’s expense) and I’d call the presentation stylish. I have spent this much time on it as it’s contemporary and its perniciousness extends to endorsing bullying and mocking non-macho males (Andrew Gower as a homosexual man controlled by his mother).
In many of these detective stories especially the hard-boiled type, and since the 1990s, the woman simply takes on male characteristics, and when she doesn’t and displays genuine female psychology, set of values, life experiences, and is as competent as the males and not just by intuition, by the end of a given book or series, we are to see she has not lived a fulfilled life, which must include marriage and motherhood. This is how Prime Suspect finally ends. In medias res, the female detective of whatever type is often allowed genuine common women’s lives characteristics and we see themes and archetypes familiar in women’s literature, e.g., recent film instance of the mother-daughter rivalry paradigm in Annika where the older heroine is divorced and lives with her teenage older daughter. There is now a line of disguised lesbian socially-conscious fiction, e.g., Val McDermid, seen in film recently featuring Karen Pirie played by Lauren Lyle, of Outlander provenance, dressed in unemphatically non-binary ways
But I don’t agree wholly with Klein (or others who write from her vantage). At the same time, the way out is not to trivialize and pretend to treat as playful amusement “the lady investigator” and her now many daughters, grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters, all the while lightly coming to the same conclusion as Klein, with some face-saving and genuinely rescuing qualifications. This is the vein taken by Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan in their The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction: a very informative as well as insightful book; it covers amateur and private detectives as well as the spy genre, which Klein does not. Nor is it to ignore this aspect of the genre altogether: Lucy Worsley in her Art of Murder manages this, at the same time as she (curiously) denies that the mass audience for this kind of thing understands it as fantasy (that most murders are not solved, and when solved not by brilliant ratiocinative nor super-scientific techniques, but rather information from people involved) but out of a thirst for violence and fascination with death (this does ally it to the gothic).
What we need to remember is the history of the genre: it first emerges in the later 19th century when women could get jobs and income on their own, go to college as woman (usually women’s colleges). The whole larger genre of detective fiction develops its characteristics when you first have men hired in visible numbers and a real police force. So there were male models for male detectives but no female models for female detectives. This changes (Miss Scarlet and the Duke is quite a startling throw-back) post-World War II when women held on to their array of male jobs and began to be hired, however slowly, and to be promoted to managerial positions in institutions, including the police (Lynda LaPlante modelled Jane Tennison on an actual woman detective).
I suggest that the woman detective was an popular substitute for the “new woman” so distinguished by feminist literary scholars of the 1890s (which never achieved much popularity or was not lasting); she becomes liberated and a real woman as women in our western societies begin at any rate to achieve the right and education for financial and some real sexual independence. We see this in Horowitz’s Sue Rylands and I hope to show other women detectives from the post World War II era.
So as a follow-on from this framework, I hope from time to time to write blogs here when the writer is a male and the portrait less than really feminocentric; on detective fiction found in both books and films; and on Reveries under the Sign of Austen (when the writer is female and the work genuinely l’ecriture-femme, which includes for me a genuinely anti-violence, anti-war and pro-woman political POV, which by the way I do think Prime Suspect was and is: Gray Cavender and Nancy C Jurik’s Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect. The victims in these shows are often women tortured by male violence, young children, including boys destroyed and warped by male pedasty, immigrants, mostly women working menial jobs desperately, and yes prostitutes too, and women who murder (including one semi-accidental infanticide) too.
First up for Austen Reveries will be Amanda Cross’s Death in a Tenured Position and, for this blog, the older masterpiece, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (Inspector Alan Grant investigates the character of Richard III)
Of course Josephine Tey was a pseudonym; the author’s real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh, and the photo is of Jennifer Morag Henderson who wrote an excellent biography
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 