Dear Friends,

This is the second of three blogs on Azar Nafisi's memoirs. The first two are on Reading Lolitan in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. The first consists of an account of her life, of the general themes of the book, and summary and evaluation of Parts 1 and 2, the first briefly telling of Nafisi and her girls in 1997 and at length their discussion of Nabokov in the context of 1995 (the year they read it); and the second on her return to Iran in 1979/80, the early phases of the revolution, and her teaching at the University various classics (including Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Flaubert's Madame Bovary), but she really concentrates on Ftizgerald's The Great Gatsby and her students' reponse to this book in the context of the years 1980 to about 1982.

Now I'll speak of Parts 3 and 4. In brief, Part 3 takes place in the later phase of the revolution, when the state of Iran became an Islamic theocracy and went to war with Iraq, together with the crushing of all dissent through terrorizing citizens (murdering them, depriving them of any civil rights), the turn back to Sharia law and determined attempt to make women become instruments of men (be only mothers, wives, daughters, sisters) and contain any reaching for self-fulfillment, especially to insist they wear the burka whenever they leave the house. During this time she reads Henry James's novels and letters with her students. She also quits the university (or is forced out) because she won't obey all the rules. Part 4 takes us to the earliest phase of her time with her 7 chosen women and 1 male student. Apparently they began with Jane Austen, and this section concentrates on Pride and Prejudice and how Austen's books speak to the private lives of her female students. At its close Nasrinn, one of her students flees into the unknown, and she and her husband and family pack and flee to the US. I'll end on brief assessment of theme of heroic teacher.



Azar Nafisi lecturing recently

A lacunae: she never explains how it happened that her father, an ex-Mayor of Tehran was imprisoned and for a long while and never killed; she never explains why she and her husband were not imprisoned. Who did she know? what did her father know? What were her husband's contacts? Who protected her and her famiy. We are never given the slightest inkling. One does not expect to be told outright, but something should have been conveyed -- if only in the later sequel, Things I've been Silent About, which I will talk about in a third blog.

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Part 3: James

This section the most complicated of the book. We weave back and forth between narratives of what is happening politically at large and to Nafisi personally as a teacher and to her friends and associates personally, and her teaching and readings of James. It begins in 1980 and ends in 1989, with the death of Khomeini

Plot summary of the autobiographical and political events:

These chapters deal with the time when Nafisi was teaching at the university before setting up her women's reading group in her home In the university, they seem to have a set course, to be on a certain direction without having other things to worry about, such as marriage or moving to another country. This even seems to be true of Nafisi. She also talks of Henry James as a man who lived through the American civil war and World War One, and she tells a great deal about those who variously suffered from the war: by being fired, by torture, by death, by persecution I'm artficially separating out the politics and autobiography here. In the next section I'll talk about James's novels.

It's a transitional time from the early take-over by the Imams to the increasingly repressive tactics once they are firmly in power; we see the attempt of Mrs Rezvan (p. 179) to keep university going (she hangs onto and keeps the department going at any price), and she persuades Nafisi to return to the classroom as she feels irrelevant. Her magician (possibly her boyfriend, the ex-professor she describe sin Part 1) encourages her, besides she wants to be useful. She does not want to be like her other friend, Laleh. It's not enough to go to classes to read Persian literature; writing articles for learned journals is not enough.

Here we get the descriptions of strip searching. She is accused of being adulterous (slander notes -- typical of such eras; her husband encourages her to return.

The War between Iran and Iraq begins on p. 204, Chapter 19. Government has not done anything really to protect its citizens; has not prepared, pp. 207-9. Boys given a key to heaven. City resigned.

Chapter 27 begins with Nafisi going to visit her magician friend by invitation and the friend's apartment being in order but he not being there. The incident emphasizes the possibility that any of their lives could change at any moment: that they could be arrested or that they could be drawn elsewhere without any ability to tell others what has happened. Nafisi calls this person's best friend when she can no longer stand to wait by herself. She then picks up T.S. Eliot' s Four Quartets (mid-20th century highly-respected meditative poetry) and reads about time.

Nafisi brings out in this scene one of the greatest charms of poetry or any literature, that revisiting a favorite passage can bring back the past when one first encountered it. It encapsulates the emotions of the past and the present. The friend suddenly returns and tells the tale of having gone with the a young man (a kid) to bury his grandmother who was of a religion without an official presence in Iran. The boy has a ludicrous struggle to bury his grandmother; this provides an ironic contrast to the got-up funeral of Khomeini and all the hysterias around funeral parades. He has also been forced out of a good education and now has no prospects because he won't change his religion.

In chapter 28 Nafisi recounts watching American videos that were brought by a friend. She herself reads mysteries during the bombing. I have come across this idea that mysteries are ways of escaping the present again and again. When it's Christie, I understand as it's tongue-in-cheek in a way; but recent mysteries can be distressing; on the other hand, most of the time the "bad" guys are caught, pay for their crime and the establishment reasserts its power.

She says she sleeps with or near her children as the bombs hit nightly, moves her class to a lower floor so they can retreat to the basement during a bombing, and reports that after a raid, military marches are played negating any resumption of literary discussion.

Chapter 29 recounts the cease-fire in March 1988 when the universities closed. It is somewhat difficult to differentiate her students; she herself wants to protect them. She also often doesn't think of people as individuals but as typifying something or belonging to a certain role in her life.. For example, she writes p. 233, "The Iraqi dictator was by now a household name, almost as familiar as Khomeini, for he had nearly as much control over our lives." She mentions his control, but doesn't mention his name; of course, it is Saddam Hussain. In this chapter and the next two, Nafisi recounts the missile attacks on Tehran.

In chapter 30 she visits with Mina (whose brother was murdered early on and who is now working as a translator of genuine integrity, living in a much smaller house with her mother) and she writes eloquently: "It is only now, when I try to gather up the morsels of those days, that I discover how little, if ever, we talked about our personal lives--about love and marriage and how it felt to have children, or not to. It seemed as if, apart from literature, the political had devoured us, eliminating the personal or private" (237). I suppose this is fitting for James.

In this chapter we see how the personal becomes political; for women throughout the book, the political is personal.
During this time she finds herself under personal attack: she is accused of adultery, and poisonous letters circulated about her.

The war comes to an end. Yet, "the war with the external enemy was over, but the war with the domestic one was not" (239).

In the classroom Nafisi's remaining students are the committed modern ones They begin to resembles the group that will assemble in her home; some of them are there now. She writes: "Gradually, the real protagonists in class came to be not my regular students, although I had no serious complaints again them, but these others, the outsiders, who came because of their commitment to the books we read" (240)

In chapter 33 she describes the death and funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini. I remember reading about this at the time and was intrigued by her description of the millions who attend the funeral, mostly for the free food and drink despite the fact that the government thought of having a secret funeral for fear no one would come. She also describes the crowd rushing the grave and grabbing part of his covering so that he had to be removed and covered with another shroud -- all very unseemly for a funeral. But mostly that day seems remarkable in that his end made little difference to the way they were living in Tehran. But the huge parade and crush testifies to wild irrationality of these kinds of public events and they are used to fuel political riots -- as people get very emotional over beloved dead people.

In any event, in the final chapters, the classroom is interrupted by an incident in the corridor: a young man has doused himself with gasoline and lit himself on fire and run through the hall shouting revolutionary slogans. "It was ironic that this man, whose life had been so determined by doctrinal certainty, would now gain so much complexity in death" (253). Nafisi is trying to sum up the importance that she feels in recording the courage of her students.

Henry James




Henry James as a young man

James is relevant as someone who lived through two terrible wars and who wrotes novels defending living lives of integrity despite the cost. He retreated, was an exile, was "a perfectly equipped failure" in some ways, chose to try to live "all he could' -- privately;that he is refused to follow conventions and seek success as it was defined in his world (p. 201). Her experiences teaching James in this atmosphere begin at Chapter 15, p 194.

Chapter 35 (p. 249) contains the general account of James, the context in which we are to see him. She begis by summing up James, talking about the different kinds of courage in his works: Daisy Miller who is not afraid of conventions and traditions, Catherine Sloper who stands up to the people in her life, Strether who through imagination can empathize with others. I suggest that this is what Nafisi sees herself doing in this book.

She goes over two novels in more detail: Daisy Miller and Washington Square as books in themselves; she refers to many others as they are relevant. A student tortured and executed, p. 218: James is quoted, p. 219. The definition of success depends on what a society wants. A successful warrior; the point is this kind of success is what James never wanted, p. 201. In our society we'd have to include selling junk at high prices.

To some extent the misreadings in this chapter remind me of how lots of people can misread -- because you have to read through the irony and also be sophisticated enough to know that no one is all good and how to define what is good in the world. A Mr Ghomi thinks Daisy evil and deserves to die, p 195. The kind of reader who does not see him or herself in the characters but judges them as an oracle.

The description and discussion of Daisy Miller (pp. 194-200, Chapters 15-18). For a detailed account of the book and film, go to my blog Costume Drama, 1960s to 80s: Daisy Miller and The Europeans, " Nafisi describes Daisy Miller as a novel about what happens is a young girl defies mores and goes out with men without a chaperone; this is enough to isolate her because she is also American, not fully upper class; in the end she is ostracized and therefore gets more and more involved; she dies of malaria because she has gone out at night.



Daisy and Mr Winterbourne look into dungeon at Chillon: people throw down there to die (a parallel with what's happening in Iran then)

The second other short novel: Washington Square the more subversive book: about how parents can play adversarial role as well as supportive, or maybe rather. Catherine Sloper's father dislikes her: she is heavy, awkward, not what he wanted; there is a power struggle as he condemns and stops a young man from marrying her whom he calls an adventurer. He probably was. It's about the coldness and indifference of human beings.



Plain Catherine



The bully father and foolish aunt

It's to Nafisi about the courage it takes to say no to what others wants for you but you do not want.

This was Reziah's favorite book (Chs 26, pp. 222-225), the girl who was imprisoned, tortured and killed. Another analogy i found in Mina's life and decisions: she was: someone who quit, making tiny bits of money translating; a book is written for someone and you feel like writing it because you know you have a publisher and audience. There's a courage to die and a courage to live.

Nafisi speaks of Catherine as the heroine of this novella because she has heart, dignity and compassion. Although she is not pretty nor particularly witty, she rises above her father who has intellect, her lover who has beauty, and her aunt who tries to manipulate a marriage that would have demeaned Catherine. Catherine, according to Nafisi, is the only one who grows. They grow from the mistakes. I can think of Isabelle Archer in James's Portrait of a Lady, and the daughter in James's The Golden Bowl who judge so incorrectly, but who can rise above their errors and triumph in their compassion. self-respect is the important ingredient for James's triumphant characters.

So perhaps Razieh may have triumphed over her heartless executioners after all -- but hardly one most people would be content to have.

Key character in James is often the character who retreats to make a sanctuary somewhere, e.g., Clare in The American, p. 169. "Their essential (real) life goes underground.

She brings back James's real life and quotes his letters: we see the involvement of his family with a civil war: in the face of the brutal inhumanity of what goes on, James, like Whitman he visits hospitals (p. 214); during World War One, James says the deaths are so horrific, that you must make a counterreality (p 216). Many people did ignore or tried to, but so many died and all these deaths affected those not fighting. She weaves back and forth between increasing death, despair, to the point a student sets himself on fire, and she asks what literature can bring to an understanding of it.

James is quoted as a witness the way none of her other authors are - directly. His actual texts (rather than Nafisi's readings) are offered for insights on the human condition; for example James on the death of Rupert Brooke, a sensitive good man, poet, in a hideous battle:

"'I confess that I have no philosophy, nor piety nor patience, no art of reflection,' he wrote, 'no theory of compensation to meet things so hideous, so cruel, and so mad, they are just unspeakably horrible and irremediable to me and I stare at them with angry and almost blighted eyes (p. 219)



A mural by John Singer Sergeant, just after 1918, showing men gassed in battle. Nafisi wants us to imagine the horrors of the Iraq and Iran war (we may remember the US using FAE bombs on people in trenches in Kuwait: they were just burned to cinders). We have no pictures of the tortured peple.

This is then she connects to execution of one of her studnets: murdered (p 218). Razieh was a student she had who was imprisoned, probably tortured (it's easy enough) and then executed. Nassrin is the one who is repeatedly raped, passing her from one guard to another. p. 218 (that's her good behavior); she does survie. Prison life. Do we know what goes on in US jails which are privatized? It's said women's jails are horrific places when it comes to sexual abuse. (An episode in Moore's movie, Capitalism: A Love Story is about how teenagers were put in a concrete prison for little cause in a town in Pennsylvania when a corrupt politician allowed a capitalist to build one; only years later was it closed down. Think of all the misery and destroyed lives that happened there.

Now we hear bout the missiles, university closed down; it's a matter of time before she too must go underground again.

Stand back a bit: This book is about Nafisi's experiences with the government and university administrator's under the Islamic dictatorship in Iran. It is also about her relationships with Mr. Bahri and The Magician - much less about her husband and children - more abouther students.

In this section, there is so much ambiguity. James tests his main characters in such subtle ways. Winterbourne certainly has enough coldness to kill the physically fragile Daisy; yes, he does make a grave mistake about her. Larger issue of failure and exile: Nafisi has an interesting take on failures in literature: Nabokov's Pnin, Bellow's Herzog, Fitgerald's Gatsby and most of James's and Bellow's favorite characters. Says Nafisi, "They are people who consciously choose failure in order to preserve their own sense of integrity." What happens when you fall into a corrupted relationship and cannot escape: that's what happens to his Portrait of a Lady where the lady stays because of the vicious man's daughter and her own powerlessness.



Nicole Kidman as Isobel Archer, from Jane Campion's movie, she's no princess, someone harrassed and taken over

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Part 4: Austen



Jane Austen drawn from the back by her sister, Cassandra

Final section: we return to "present time" cell with students with whom she reads Jane Austen, and the emphasis is on Austen's most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice.

This is the one section which focuses on a book by a woman, and she does show the book as seen from a woman's point of view: so the discussion of this novel is counterpointed with what happened to women in the revolution: Sharia (p 261) was reinstated and the joke was it is a truth universally aknowledged old men want 9 year old virgins for wives. Many stories of women in the book, but usually not strictly as a woman: e.g., the teacher, a woman put in a sack and then shot and stoned to death. Nafisi does say there is no such thing as Islamic feminism, a contradiction in terms and horizons.

Well, for women the problem of marriage is at the center a question of freedom. Interestingly her most conservative religious student doesn't want to marry; she wants to spend her life otherwise,p. 288. Nassrin herself is the other person to leave: Nafisi leaves with money and belongings intact; she must flee in the night.

Plot summary of the autobiographical events in context:

We see her women students intensely involved in deciding who to marry: for most of them it does not seem to be a question of whether to marry. They don't see a life without marriage available, except ironically the most religious of them. We see one of them get engaged after a series of relatively brief social encounters where they are surrounded by others; we see the miseries of marriage (in this case one woman student is beaten by her husband), the pressures of family life (awful, something they seek relief from); the fatuous simpleton who is Nafisi's strawman throughout (after a while his misreadings get a bit too predictable) is of course a Mr Collins (p 291); the jackass from Pride and Prejudice. It's he who says Mansfield Park is a book that accepts slavery.

She retells her girls' stories to bring out parallels with Austen's novels. There is a bit of a contradiction when she denies the personal is political (after proving otherwise), and then goes on to show how the regime she lived under shaped the personal; this is not so since what she is showing is that radical regimes are what make the personal political. She does not call herself a feminist and may be avoiding this idea in order not to be so labelled.

The story of her students now brings us back to where the book opened. We now find out that the idea for this secret class came from their reading of "Dear Jane" whose tone simply led them into dancing which itself led to celebratory sexy "Eastern" dancing -- which we are told has this form of "unique" seduction not to be found in Western sexy dancing ("such a mixture of subtlety and brazenness").

Nafisi's clear pleasure in "Eastern" dancing then comes in: her idea is it's really superior to dancing in the west (sexier, more aggressive, more "calculating," "sophisticated" than poor Daisy Miller). She connects this dancing to dancing in Austen's novels to show us there is much sexual nuance in Austen's texts. I too find much sexuality suggested by Austen indirectly and directly. Nafisi, though, apparently thinks of Darcy as centrally very sexy (she must've loved Colin Firth in the film), and she asserts all her "girls" wanted to be Elizabeth. She assumes everyone does. I don't.



Here is a recent film showing Henry Tilner and Catherine Morland (Northanger Abbey) dancing

Jane Austen

Her reading of Austen begins at the bottom of p.267. I think Austen's books are about many things, and it's true that one is the daily cruelties we endure. On p. 311 she says this very well: this is about the outrageous way we treat one another at times -- through not acknowledging it we get away with that. Austen's books are especially about pressure on women to marry. A famous impoverished Miss Bates is mocked by a heroine in one scene:



Sophie Thompson as Miss Bates beginning to realize how she is being treated

Nafisi still leaves her relationship with the man she calls her "magician" opaque, but from a remarkably Victorian device (we are told in the same sentence that she woke up and began to talk to him) perhaps we are to take it he was her lover. She is more than once on the outs with her present husband. Her magician is her great source of wisdom, though she does listen to her husband who is much against their leaving Iran (p 287) and losing their position and money there. So her distress about being irrelevant shared by husband who does not want to move where he will have no power. The husband also argues that they are deserting their country; the husband loves the place; they can do a job that's important there. It's not just that they have connections and high place there and may well lose this. She is berated for her withdrawal from university by several people in this book. She apparently began to write this book around the time she quit her job (or was finally forced out).

She becomes a sort of aunt to her girls the way Austen was to her nieces. We see her counsel them about love; Nassrin has a lover and may be pregnant ( pp. 296-8) she and her husband meet Nassrin and boyfriend at a public concert, (pp., 298-301). Then we see the girls are not taught about sex life by mothers or aunts or older women friends so she tries to substitute (p.302). Austen has many of these older woman/young friend relationships in her books.e.g., Mrs Weston and Emma Woodhouse:



Emma: Mrs Weston counselling Emma

Austen is woven in, not dealt with in four straight pages and then dropped in the way James's novels are: so now we get her argument that Austen'sn novels are on pro-passion. we have the scene where Elizabeth is talking closely to Darcy about where she would be willing to move if she married (pp. 304-7). We do see Austen's heroines risk ostacism and genteel poverty (not the same thing as real poveryt) to gain love and companionship.

I like this: There are acts which are unforgivable (p 315) and Austen knows and shows this -- even if the person who doesn't forgive doesn't get to show it.



Elinor Dashwood enduring on

Last section turns personal and about the departure to actual exile

Things are getting more and more dangerous. See Chapter 15, pp. 307-11. People found dead -- the bookseller. Her relationship with her magician friend is dangerous, p. 313. Nafisi and her husband begin quarrelling seriously (p. 316) over whether to leave and peopel begin to resent her ability to leave or that she wants to

It's around Chapter 18 that the departure from Iran begins to loom large. Mrs Rezvan had been losing her power (p 293). Her women students are considering leaving and we hear about their conflicts over this. They envy her. Vexed relationships and quarrels erupt (p 317-19). The ridiculousness of petty reactions (p. 319) which come out of this. They feel she is deserting them, pp. 324-26; they quarrel with one another ver who wants to and will leave and who won't, pp. 326-7; Nafisi tells us she told them of her personal troubles, p. 328.

Nassrin and her boyfriend, Ramin, break up; she sees him as having same attitudes as older rigid males: she is either a virgin or a whore. She thinks her girls identify with Daisy Miller: Winterbourne saw Daisy as innocent or corrupted.

In the midst of all this, she meets Miss Ruhi again; someone who reads literally and moralistically; yet she misses the books even if she says they are not important. Pathetic story of someone misled by her false beliefs to deprive herself. (pp. 332-333); it can be anyone who makes a decision which throws away her inner life. I've known so many people to do that by this time, men and women..

The ending recalls Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and other autobiographical novels of writers where the writer has to leave the home country in order to find free space to write and a marketplace to publish in where he or she may be left in relative peace afterwards -- that is, not immediately castigated by all reviewers and people all around him or her as betraying them for disclosing truths.

She leaves the magician too and says unless you live an individual life how can you feel you've lived (p 339). Upbeat close is somewhat contradictory.

Disillusionment is also a theme in Nafisi. From the few comments she does make earlier in the book, though, it seems as if she used to be actively involved in student protest movements aiming at social change, but became first disillusioned at the contention within those groups themselves. Then even more so when their activism helped ring in an even more repressive religious regime than the Shah's worldly one.

She seems to have transferred this ealier political idealism to the world of art and literature, elevating art and the world of the imagination to make up for the deficits in the real world, another kind of emotional transference.

Dangerous though the creation of a group to read such forbidden literature must have been, I suspect, though, that you could also categorize it as a kind of inner immigration and withdrawal. Nafisi says at the end, as attached as she became to the group the more emotionally detached to the outer world of Iran she became. So the group was in essence the prelude to her physical emigration. Her repeated references to seeing the world through the mirrors and the windows of her room under line this sense of separation and a society already seen at a remove. At the same time in the closing pages of the book she does people like Mrs Reznan who kept people in the society and active justice.

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Teaching and reading. Nafisi's book is about teaching. How she went about it is to pick a group of very bright sympathetic students who are deeply engaged by literature and have them in her house. It's an ideal situation. They are desperate for her as mother-hen-comforter too. I wonder what their mothers/sisters/aunts were like. Girls are often strongly antagonistic to their mothers. Perhaps some of them acted as reinforcers of misery -- as many women are in this society, more than complicit, active on behalf of represssion as instinctively they (like male)s like them may feel this gives them power over others. Also a woman may suggest strong compromise to her daughter as as the only one available that's respected and safe. Lady Catherine de Bourgh is the dragon lady of this point of view and Mrs Bennet the foolish one.

A fault in the book is she didn't present their comments on the books in the sessions enough. I doubt they agreed with her views altogether. She omits money and class perspective in her discussions of real life -- she takse it for granted she should sit in expensive places and eat ice cream out of elegant glass cups.

It's a relevant book. Nafisi shows us what can happen when a self-righteous group gets full military control and is fueled by an intense religiosity and sense of rightness.

Once more on Sanaz: Nafisi was particularly good on what such experiences do to people, both the jailer/soldier/torturer and the ictim who wants out: Her jailors jokingly suggested that since she was wearing an extra garment, she might not feel the pain, so they gave her more. For her the physical pain had been more bearable than the indignity of the virginity tests and her self-loathing at having signed a forced confession. In some perverse way, the physical punishment was a source of satisfaction to her, a compensation for having yielded to those other humiliations. Self-hatred, self-flagellation, depression of self-esteem, self-destructive change of world view are caught up in that last line.

It's what we glimpse in Moon, Mr Keach, what Ashoke and Moushumi fled. Yet Gatsby at the end is still flying high and she seems to admire that. I can't. It's not altogether nuts to see her as enacting a romantic Scheherazade, western style. She mentions Scheherazade very early in the book so she sees this.
:
18th century rocoo painting of tapestry, Carl Van Loo, Scheherazade talking to a disciple.

Ellen

Dear friends and students,

As promised, the next two to three blogs will be on Azar Nafisi's remarkable "memoir in books:" Reading Lolita in Tehran. This is the third or fouth time I've taught it; I also read it with a group of friends online and we posted regularly about it over a period of 8 weeks on Women Writers through the Ages @ Yahoo. And I am now listening to it read aloud, and brilliantly, by Lisette Lecat whose plumy-posh British accent (the kind the cliche is true of, you feel you could cut glass with it) brings out the elitism and anger in Nafisi's tone, the latter I had missed until now. One of my students tells me it's now been translated into 23 languages!; it's in I-don't-know-what-reprinting, and remarkably sports the same muted titillating cover illustration: see the girls in burka reading "that forbidden book,"



The truth is the book is about reading quite a number of banned or suspect and therefore dangerous books in Tehran,and the one Nafisi and her girls began with was Austen's Pride and Prejudice.



Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet revelling in nature, lifting her face to the sky, something forbidden in Tehran even today

Tonight I'll summarize and comment on the author, general structure of the book, and Parts 1 and 2.

Everything we need to know at a minimum about Nafisi is included in this book. It's centrally a memoir of her life, and, as I've said numerous times on listservs, she is a witness rather like the women who wrote most of the memoirs of French revolution (see Marilyn Yalom's Blood Sisters) describing the experience of terror from the vantage of the upper class woman. Like most of them, Nafisi never admits that some form of socialism or strong economic reform and equality of opportunity was what was needed and the Shah never came near that; she also fails to explain why the Shah's secularism is and was such a threat to this traditional Muslim society. But because she did know and come from the relatively privileged sections of the educated and bourgeois public and was a woman and therefore ever at risk, she can tell a lot insightfully as long as you remember how much is omitted of what explains how a religious theocracy could take over.



Nafisi as a young married woman with her second husband, Bijan Naderi

A brief life: She was born in 1950 and is a daughter of the upper middle class who were doing well under westernization -- as were many people in other classes in Iraq. Her father was a mayor of Teheran at one point. He was imprisoned and probably his life in danger for a while. Like most other well-known Muslim women writers (part US, part UK, e.g., Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Jhumpa Lahiri) -- and many other literary Arab people writing in English today as well as African women who manage to publish (Tsitsi Dangarembga who wrote Nervous Conditions), Nafisi's education took place outside the Arab world, where there is a secular and scientific tradition available and women are allowed to learn it. Both Nafisi and Jhabvala were educated in England. She went to England in 1963 (age 13) but stayed much longer than originally intended: she returned in 1979, 17 years later. She attended college in the US, University of Oklahoma, where she did a dissertation on Mark Gold, a depression writer who was also a Marxist (p. 107) and wrote a famous popular biography, Jews without Money.

What it is to live in a country with no neutral public space: The revolution of Khomenei had occurred in 1980 (when Part 2 begins), there was a theocratic state, the law had returned to Sharia which is harsh and oppressive towards women; it also includes a strict moral code for men. This has the effect of isolating people and keeping them from interacting with one another outside their families. In the Arab countries religion and state jobs have never been separate from networking through religious groups. The family and religious authorities remain powerful that way.

There is not a public neutral realm such as we are supposed to have in the US where people's private lives and religion are to be kept out of the public realm where different kinds of people are to work together for business, progess, scientific and other kinds, for individual fulfillment (pursuit of happiness and property). Due to it we have had much of the progress technologically and socially we've had since the 18th century (the Englightenment which brought us the American and French revolutions among other things). US citizens don't have to worry or didn't if their scientific discoveries threaten a particular church's beliefs (as Galileo was forced to retract his belief that the earth went around the sun, that the earth moved).

An important reform which threatened these groups (religious and powerful people in a family network) was the attempt to secularize. That's what the Shah was doing, and that's what's meant by a modern world. It was to create a neutral space where people could get jobs and places in universities without religious and familial affiliations. A meritocracy. Individuals in a family could find jobs outside and without their family. Women need not bow to arranged marriages to get a position in life. For women the streets quickly became are a war zone of humiliation and physical punishment which can led to arrest and then much worse (flogged, fined, sometimes raped and then executed).

We see her working in the university of Teheran for a while -- the book works by flashbacks too. But as it opens it is 1995; she is now fired and has set up weekly secret meetings with a group of female students who showed a real love and interest in literature. Part I and IV take place in 1995: she and girls began with 1001 Nights, Scheherazade; then Pride and Prejudice or Jane Austen. When precisely they were reading Nabokov and Lolita we are not told. The young women are of different backgrounds, some "stricter" than others; some are married, some not; they bond through the experience and the books.

She did escape because she had the wherewithal to do it and the connections in the US to get another high ranking tenured position. Her politics are conservative. Her identification with the West is not disinterested altogether. She has had much personal advantage: she never asks where the revolution of these desperate people came from; it's just there, inexplicable like a hurricane. It comes from the abysmal poverty and despair and rage as and envy as a result. The religious groups with their power-hungry leaders took advantage of this. No social movement can grow in these religious dominated states; the reach of families remains controlling. No education to counter what they are told, or not enough.



Nafisi today, see her website and blog

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

The general structure and themes: Part I the first few pages we are in 1997 and Nafisi is about to leave and takes a photograph of six of the seven girls who formed part of her group. By page 4 we are in 1995 and the girls have formed their reading group and are reading Nabokov's Lolita, "Invitation to a Beheading" and "The Magician's Room."

Part II we are in 1980 and Nafisi returns to Iran as Khoumeni takes over from Shah: topics include her return after 17 years and sight of the airport, the first imposition of Sharia; her time as a student briefly in the UK and Switzerland then (longer) in the University of Oklahoma, where she married and wrote a dissertation on Mike Gold, depression writer, Marxist; analysis and fight in her classroom over Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, which she defends as ultimately about wealth as aspiration);



Nafisi as a girl waiting on a train station in the UK to go to boarding school

Part III; a couple of years later Iran and Iraq at war (she struggles with ever greater horrors and repression, they read Henry James's novellas and longer novels); Part IV, 1995 the first formation and first book, Pride and Prejudice, about the girls' lives and fates (as illuminated by the Austen oeuvre).

The book has three kinds of subject: 1) On the one hand the application of intelligence, feeling and work to make a book come alive to speak to the people reading it together. What the books meant individually, how they connected to what was happening about the readers, and how literature functions generally; 2) On the other, a portrait of daily life under despotism. Each of the four sections is presented so that a corresponding dominating author's work comments on it; and 3) Nafisi's own life as utterly subject adversely to the larger political changes going on around her. We could see the lives of her girls as told as either part of Topic 2 or 3.

The trope of the book is that of the heroic teacher or governess. As Ellen Moers says in her Literary Women this is is common in women's books. It's a displaced or partial mother role. Nafisi begins with a reference to Muriel Spark's Prime of Miss Jean Brodie where one of Miss Brodie's pupils snitched on her about her love life and Nazi politics and she was forced to resign her job. Nafisi says she wondered if any of her girls would betray her or the others and which one. In the event none betrayed her or one another. Other versions are Mary Poppins; or a narrator who is female and teacherly: Isak Dinesen.

The opening paragraph of Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran immediately introduces the reader to its subject matter: the study of (forbidden) literature with a group of seven female students in the privacy and secrecy of Nafisi's home, after she had been forced to resign from her academic post in Tehran in 1995. In a kind of ironic reversal, a male (he later turns out to be the liberal husband of one of the group), though reading with the same books, is excluded from the room, though as interested as the young women themselves.

Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie bought up. Miss Brodie (played by Maggie Smith in the movie) is about a teacher who looks upon books as deeply important in people's lives. She influences her students in all sorts of ways, some of them bad for the students and dangerous. One of them betrays her to the authorities for her politics (she is a Nazi) and sexual life (she is having an affair with at least one male teacher). She is fired.

An idyllic picture of Miss Brodie with her girls early in the movie:



At the close of Reading Lolita, Nafisi refers to another book by Muriel Spark, her semi-autobiographical Loitering with Intent. it's about how much fiction you have to put in an autobiography to make it dramatic; how you have to shape and point it. Again it's an ironic statement about the problems in writing memoirs. Miss Brodie had emphasized the particular importance of the liberty of the individual and the importance of the imagination in our lives in understanding ourselves and our worlds.

The third paragraph then suddenly jumps forward two years in time - there will be many such shifts in the book - to the now empty room and the packed bags of exile, but chooses to dwell on two strikingly and intentionally different photos of the same group. The first is of them all uniformly and indistinguishably dressed in the the black robes and head-dress forced on them outside; the second with them colourfully and individually dressed as they were in the private and paradoxically liberating, though enclosed, world of the 'room of their own'. Nafisi then goes to name and describe each one in turn, giving each one their individual personality and the reader a thumbnail sketch of their background (pp. 4-6). They also seemed to be providing a cross-section of various types of young Iranian women affected in different ways by the dictatorial regime, there seemed to be a merging of the individual and exemplary.

The theme of the class itself is described as being the relationship between fiction and reality, just as it would seem to be the theme of this book. In it Nafisi examines the shifting relationship between life writing and history, fiction and literary criticism. The sub-title, 'A Memoir in Books' points up the fact that the books discussed are attached to memories (subject of this term of writing about art is memory and imagination). Books are aide-mémoires, their contents affording parallels to events and emotions in the lives of Nafisi and her group and the discussion of them helping them to articulate and express what the outside regime would render inarticulate and silent.

Her choice of western writers for the group a significant one: Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, James and Austen. In her small literary group held in her own living room, she created a kind of intimate, but hot-house space, where art and literature were both oasis from and inner bastion against the often murderously fanatical, political, religious and cultural iconoclasts baying at and sometimes violently entering her door.

First an inner exile, later an outer exile herself, it's perhaps not so surprising then that she should turn to forced and voluntary exiles and aesthetes like Nabokov and James, Fitzgerald with his literature of 'double vision', or Jane Austen, who also commented with subversive irony on society's dangerous absurdities from her own living room. Flaubert's book, Madame Bovary was prosecuted for being amoral and he retreated from public life after that.

Fitzgerald satirizes seriously western culture; James shows what can happen to a girl who acts freely I study Daisy Miller with my students and show the film because if you agree with Nafisi's interpretation of Lolita, this is a short later 19th century version of the same story: misogynistic woman-distrusting mores impose on a girl their fantasies about her sex life and she dies for this. Austen is about women from a woman's point of view.

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

Part One: Lolita

Nafisi says she chose to put Lolita in her title because it is the one that was attached to the most memories, that became theirs: "This then is the story of Lolita in Tehran, how Lolita gave a different colour to Tehran, and how Tehran helped redefine Nabokov's novel, turning it into this Lolita, our Lolita.

One of the word games played for light relief in the group was based on the oft-quoted opening line of Pride and Prejudice. It's a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. All the girls gave their version, but the one I remember is the most macabrely satirical one: 'it is a truth universally acknowledged that a Moslem in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a nine-year-old wife' - the regime had dropped the legal marriageable age for girls from 18 to 9. No wonder, too, that 'Lolita' should be such an issue and reference point.

Lolita is about the sexual appetite of an older man for a young powerless girl.

Nabokov's Lolita is not the only text she deals with in this section, but she does deal with it centrally: Her take on that character, Humbert, is that he projects his own dreams, wishes and sexual fantasies on the young girl he abuses (though that is definitely not Humbert's own word for it) to such an extent that she ultimately has no identity of her own - she becomes his construct. He robs her of identity and ultimately the independent, individual life she could have had in the same way as the mullahs forcibly expect women to live their own dream fantasy of the perfect submissive woman and in doing so steal their lives, too. As she says Humbert Humbert confiscates Lolita's existence as the regime wants to confiscate that of her and her girl students.

In the book Lolita has nowhere to turn. The religious leaders put women down becuase they have a fantasy they are all sexually voracious. Unfortunately. the movie version of the book doesn't see the irony and really presents Lolita as sexually voracious; Kubrick identfied with the unreliable narrator or villai protagonist. Unreliable narrator is someone whose judgement you should not trust. A villain protagonist is obvious in meaning.

The outer manifestation of this is, of course, in Iraq, the enforced wearing of the veil or purdah. Nafisi's own refusal to wear the veil at the university led to her having to leave her position there, but she saw this imposition as a political instrument of repression, not a religious one. On the other hand, she is careful to show respect for those women like her own family relatives and students who had worn and wear the veil from personal choice and religious conviction, and not as a flag or symbol of oppression, as it were.

Lolita is not treated as an erotic book in the least. To Nafisi, the centre of the novel is not eroticism, it's fantasy, power and control: the power to inflict one's own fantasy and dreamworld on others in order to control and abuse. One of most disturbing aspects of the novel itself to me was it's extension of this control and manipulation to the reader. The reader revelling in the pornography is being degraded and abused. They may of course not care. I suspect that Nabokov uses the ironic unreliable narrator (or villain protagonist) as a cover for himself to write pornography and his readers to read it. This is Wayne Booth's reading of the novel in The Rhetoric of Fiction.

I'm drawn more to the other texts, "The Magician's Room" and "The Invitation to a Beheading."



Let's look at what she says about "The Magician's Assistant:" read pp. 33-34. In the first a man retreats and creates his own counter-universe. That is what she is doing with her students. she meets a man or friend in the book who is an ex-university professor and lives just this way and supports many.

"The Magician's Room" is a parable about how literature can support you when no one else does. How can great works of imagination help us in our present trapped situation? p. 19. Scheherazade breaks cycle of violence by telling stories, p 19. S

She shows how the universities began to be places going through the motions. Read pp. 22-23. Going through the motions. I think this is what has happened to modern universities, turned into factories for producing certificates to that good job. The violin is the meaningful music in the void.

We in the US do live in a culture which popularly denies meaning and significance to literary works unless they make money by selling to masses of people through low means (sex and violence). p 25

A debased world of antifeminism: Women are to return to the home to be baby-machines and comfort women. Of course it's much worse here, p 28

This section includes the first story of torture, p 31. A long one of Sanaz, pp. 73-74 -- her crime was to go out in a mixed group of boys and girls. My guess is she's never been the same. She shows how her girls and she (and others in the regime) face a future without security and a fragile and disloyal present, p 39. Alas, I'm afraid this reminds me of aspects in the US today -- much milder but there. For example, ordinary life is one set up in a way that far from promoting close trust and affection, rather promotes authoritarian behavior, secrets, distance, manipulative, not kindness, tact, but relying on power. Result is outside in organizations one finds a persistent brutality, p 67

The central analysis and presentation of commentary on Lolita is placed on pp 40-44. She argues that the novel does uplift us; that it's a tragic novel and thus the center is a person who fought and the novelist who presents us with a celebration of insubordination against betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life, p 47

For myself I can't read Lolita and find it sickening and scary. Here is one still from the movie which does justice to the ugliness of Humbert's mind:



Chapters 18-22 take us back to the lives of her students. We have the story of police barging in and chasing a tenant; of Manna and Nima & the narrow minded professor, p 68; Sanz's story of arrest and torture, pp. 69-73 is the most harrowing section of this part. What happens is gradually the book deepens and stretches to show this kind of horrible experience occurring to many daily.

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

Part Two: Gatsby

This section has much more about the politics and public world of Iran. It takes us back to when she returned to Iran and taught in the university. Her teaching of Gatsby and a series of American books (including Huckleberry Finn) and Flaubert's Madame Bovary takes place in a classroom where there is at least one (and probably many more) hostile student. She ends up putting the book -- and herself -- on trial. I've read critics which are sceptical about this: doubting she did it.

The section traces the willingness of all sides to commit atrocities: Orwell said the thing to remember about atrocities is all sides do it, and all sides lie about it. So the leftist students in Oklahoma torture someone. We see people vying for power ruthlessly on all sides. We see that beyond ideology what fuels their behavior is a lust for power, to revenge obscure hurts and insults and not-so-obscure ones -- injuries from class and sexual and other humiliations and deprivations -- to control others.

As the section opens, we see Nafisi, whose family had suffered under the Shah's regime, go back during a brief window when she and her friends believed the revolution would mean a new dawn and a better way of life for all, something which soon turned out to be wrong. She is made to feel a stranger in her home, an alien from the time she lands. She joines the liberal and left-wing groups who join Khomenei thinking to gain broader support. They were just being used for the moment, and she soon quits.

There starts to be an Orwellian, 1984-type quality to this section, when Nafisi is teaching Twain and Hemingway at the university of Tehran, while groups of people are demonstrating outside the American Embassy. Read paragraph on p 102. When you read something in the newspaper, you suspect the opposite is true. Section includes fates of many colleagues: put in bags, shot, stoned. Did happen. To teach is to risk betrayal by students who will run and tell the authorities on her.

Nafisi thus teaches Gatsby to her class at The University of Tehran during a period of great political turmoil. The Marxists and strict Muslims seem to be battling it out, and everyone is anti-American and anti- the deposed Shah who was supported by the Americans. When a student tells Nafisi that he is "telling her for her own good" - what threatening words those are - that she should not be teaching Gatsby because the novel is immoral, Nafisi decides to put the novel itself on trial. Her classroom then becomes every teacher's dream: total involvement, but this is for real and scary. Nafisi herself defended
the novel, and as she says, "This after all was not merely a defense of Gatsby but of a whole way of looking at and appraising literature_and reality, for that matter." With students as prosecutor, defending lawyer and jury, the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby was opened.



Daisy and Gatsby (the movie sympathetic to Gatsby); Daisy and Tom (the movie shows how they are US ideals)

The prosecuting student calls Gatsby a rape of Islamic culture: adultery goes unpunished, Gatsby is a liar and charlatan, and there is no exalted model for women. Only Wilson is OK because he becomes the punishing god. The rest of the book illustrates the decadence of American culture and materialism. He ends with a great line: "This is the last hiccup of a dead culture!" The key here is the student reads the book literally. Any mention of anyone bad must form an example for readers to imitate.

The defense attorney, a woman, takes Gatsby back to literature and asks if a novel can be judged "...because the heroine is virtuous? Is it bad if its character strays from the moral Mr. Nyazi insists on imposing not only on us but on all fiction?" She then directs the class to the text and Fitzgerald's characters. She shows how Jordan, Tom, Daisy are dishonest and careless. She ends by characterizing the dream: "The dream they embody is an alloyed dream that destroys whoever tries to get close to it. So you see, Mr. Nyazi, this book is no less a condemnation of your wealthy upper classes than any of the revolutionary books we have read."

When Nafisi, herself is called to defend the novel, she presents the theme as the loss of dreams. Empathy is at the heart of the novel, p 111. We are to read metaphorically. p 141 where we can see underlying pattern for Loman and Gatsby. Representatives of wealth and power are the most dishonest.

The last pages of the section are Nafisi's experiences in the turmoil - ducking bullets, witnessing the university becoming more repressive, a feeling of loss. Demonstrations take the place of classes with mob rule holding sway. At one of the last faculty meetings, Nafisi is defending her right not to wear a veil. In autobiography: the magician of Part I turns out to be a professor who was pushed into quitting, forbidden to teach great books, he left, pp. 138-39.

She fast forwards to being in the U.S. and getting faxes and e-mails from former students who tell her of murder of new students, the children of the first revolution. She imagines a conversation with the student who defended her against the Islamic Revolution years earlier. In this conversation she asks him, "Tell me, old sport-what shall we do with all these corpses on our hands?"

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

The truth is the US at war in Afghanistan and elsewhere is also adding to the number of corpses every day (as one of Graham Greene's characters in The Ugly American says). What one has to be careful of is not to say this does not happen here at all. Existences are confiscated by the thousands and thousands in US prisons; one can rebel in the US but only in the right way (don't risk treason charges or be a socialist); many are left invisible and unemployed by the privileged and powerful who control places, behavior and money -- and women are at a real disadvantage. So while we are not a state which practices terror directly on its citizens, our hands are not clean to people outside and inside the borders of the land.

Ellen

Dear Readers,

Here's are some photos of my room.  
. 


That's my desk, and to the side a wall or Jane Austen books, near it another of Anthony Trollope -- my stills and pictures are meant to surround me like nest of comforts -- you can just make out Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth, some from the Palliser series (picturesque shots of women friends in the park) ...  Canaletto provides my screen saver.



The other side of the desk; my library table. You can see Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwoood, a Constable picture of Salisbury cathedrale where Trollope says he thought of The Warden, impressionism, there's Diana under a tree with a cat.

I remembered it after rereading a poem, sent me by my dear friend and fellow poet, Farideh:

from Desk
By Marina Tsvetaeva
(In a letter she wrote to Pasternak :my desk is kitchen table)
Translated by : Elaine Feinstein


My desk , most loyal friend
thank you. You 've been with me on
every road I've taken.
My scar and my protection.

My loaded writing mule .
Your tough legs have endured
the weight of all my dreams , and
burdens of piled-up thoughts.

Thank you for thoughening me.
no worldly joy could pass
your severe looking-glass
you blocked the first temptation,

and every base desire
your heavy oak oughtweighed
lions of hate,elephamts
of spite you intercepted.

Thank you for growing with me
as my need grew in size
I've been laid out across you
so many years alive

While you've grown broad and wide
and overcome me. Yes ,
however my mouth opens
You stretch out limitless.

You are a pillar
of light.My source of Power!
You lead me as the Hebrews once
were led forward by fire.

A couple of days ago she asked me how I discovered poetry and came to translate Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara and work for a number of years on the poetry and life of Anne Finch, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wortley Montagu (among others).  Well,  I discovered books.  I'm an only child, I did have cousins and aunts and uncles but none of them except my father (now dead) were at all congenial or read serious books that I know of.  Two of my aunts read popular romances (my father's sisters), ; some were probably capable of reading but never did -- they were poor, under pressure and schools and American culture made no effort to encourage reading for real.

It's wonder how I did it in a way. I'm the first of my generation to go to college never mind getting a Ph.D. Like some of the stories the people on Wompo tell, I just gravitated to what I could find for solace in life and it turned out to be books. I found myself isolated at around age 18-19.  I was anorexic (I weighed 78 pounds), miserably married (I divorced my first husband at age 21) and really with only a couple of friends I rarely saw. As a girl my father had a wall filled with old classics and my mother belonged to the book-of-the-month club. My father took me to the library as soon as I was old enough to take out a child's book and read it on my own and he read to me (e.g., RLStevenson's "Sire de Maltroit's Door" and "A Lodging for the Night").

When I went to college, I found I loved what I was reading and could lose myself in writing and reading.  I must've been about 19 when I sat on a bench with one of these girlfriends and told her and myself how I would try to survive and more than endure life, get something out of it I find joy in. I faced the reality of my lack of social skills in politicking and my lack of connections; I gave up on making money. I told myself that my goal would be modest, but I would stick to it. How I was going to spend my life writing and reading I didn't know but I was gonig to hold to that.

Then again in the 1980s when I was in my late 30s I found myself living in Virginia with a baby on an apnea monitor and I began to go to a research library at night, and I found these poems by Renaissance women I never knew existed. I was so excited. Then I found the poems of Vittoria Colonna in French translations by Suzanne Therault; I loved them and wanted to translate them. Then I loved one of Gambara's poems and so that started it.

And I think along the way I did now and again make decisions which saved me from spending my life working for money. We have a small house and never tried for a big one. We have not decorated it fancily at all.  We have modest old cars. We don't try to "entertain" as it's called. I never made an expensive event for myself in marrying nor my older daughter. I did pay for their colleges but it was within reason. I never borrowed any big sums. My husband had a government job which provided health care and a pension.

Farideh who is Iranian called me a Darwish:  "a person who prefers a spiritual life in this world and doesn't exchange his or her inner life for or with money and power."  to which I siad, it wasn't that I preferred it necessarily. It was that I found myself unable to cope with the world given my position in it: I hadn't the connections, power, know how, social skills to put myself forward. I didn't like the social world most of the time in any comfortable way.  So I choose a path I could do. The alternative was suicide or take some horrible 9-5 job 5 days a week of work that was soul destroying, well a living suicide.

I was able to pull it off because I found a loving man I was congenial enough with who respected and supported me and encouraged me to write. 



Jim in the early morning, still in his robe, our front room: his rocking chair, not far from the fire place.

He helped me create this room of my own I described on my first blog (which I have now recreated here below).  I sometimes think we made a mistake when we had children, as we cannot help our daughter very much but she has become our friend, a comfort and real presence who we offer ourselves to. We did goof when we left NYC. But both decisions were natural and the second forced on us at the time; going to DC gave him a good job in the government where through merit he could rise (not so possibly any more), and which we live off of still, from his pension (he too lacked connections and money and power and his social skills are not great either).

She told me her son has written a novel (at age 16) and it was published. I know her daughter reads Austen in Farsi and they watch the films together. I have to tell her Izzy has written a novel, a publisher shown interest and we are waiting to see if the company will publish it. Here is Izzy with and without our girl cat, Clarissa-Marianne.



And now for where I read and write from, beginning with this photo from the photo albums at Women Writers through the Ages at Yahoo (where I have a set of photos of writing places for a number of women writers -- from magazines and articles on the Net)



By the puzzle pieces on the table, we see she did love puzzles -- as the photo was published before her recent memoir with jigsaw puzzles.

On wompo we had been talking about where we write from and how it's a reflection of our psychic needs. But as with
partners/husbands/companions/significantothers, it's often hard to predict for our social and writing selves in public are not the same as these selves in private nor can we see how others see things.

For myself while I have written away from my "workroom" (see below), as in a small house in Desert Island, one summer I did all the Austen calendars (extracted them from the books) while sitting in a very quiet nook, a window nearby, looking at a lake where I heard only loons - tranquillity, stability, a sense of security, all of which are things needed by me (craved0, mostly I've written in a small room in my house and herewith is a description.

I invite others to describe their writing or reading spaces as comments or meme blogs.

I post at all sorts of hours, but try hard to keep it to before 9 in the morning after 8 in the evening (though I break this "rule). I live in a small private house (that's a NYC term which means unattached) in a neighborhood once made up of similar houses. No more. Most have been renovated and expanded. Don't ask. When the 4 blocks where the houses look like mine were built, people had  an ideal of much grass and space between houses so there is still a lot and a wide sky one can see. The most recent houses have this ideal of filling up the lot and opulence and they build fences and plant high trees.

I post from a room 9 feet by 12 feet. My daughters used to call it Mommy's workroom; but a part of it has my husband's desk. It's not a study distinct from the rest of the house as most of the rooms are lined with bookcases like this one. It is the only one where there are desks and tables for writing. It does have a bookcase with nothing but Jane Austen books and another with nothing but Anthony Trollope books. I don't know how tall the room is. The ceiling is high enough.
 
It has two large windows: in all the rooms of my house 2 of the walls have large windows. Built before air-conditioning became more or less universal in Virginia. To the side of me one window has an awning and in spring and summer finches sometimes nest there, make babies and have ferocious fights over the territory (if a second couple comes along). I like watching them. Out the front of my house I see the street, grass, my wooden fence. If I stand and peer out I can see a pink tulip tree which much of the year is bare; it has green leaves just now. Across the road down the street are some cherry blossom trees. Also lovely for said three weeks.

We have no less than 6 computers in this room, 6 monitors (some are servers), a scanner, keyboards galore, and a printer. Much of this is my husband's. Every man his own Houston space center. I understand how to use one computer and one machine which plays DVDs and videocassettes, and the scanner and printer.

I have managed to stuff three tables into this room, two library ones on which sit some of these computers and a microfilm reader my husband bought me for my birthday one year -- from a local junior high.

My desk is large and old. I bought it in 1972. Mahogany with deep drawers and a wide surface. I have books in piles on the floor in baskets. Books on my desk, including dictionaries Italian, French, Fowler's Modern English usage, my beloved Thesaurus which I've owned since 13; it was my father's before me. It has gotten me through everything I write. I keep it in my lap when writing for publication. I have had it recovered recently. It's the second book I have done this for: the first is my French Larousse.

Those parts of the walls which are not covered with bookcases (which do furnish a room -- we have 43 across the house) have posters and cut-out pictures Scotch-taped up. I have rows of photos and postcards trailing up, across on top, and down again -- postcards from friends (Diana has a bunch), photos of me and Judy Geater and me and Angela Richardson when we spent an afternoon in London together. Diana under a flowering tree looking at a cat. I have a big poster of Clark Gable gambling as Rhett Butler (my favorite) too and Ronald Colman in Lost Horizon (looking very drunk and melancholy), numbers of coloured print reproductions of late 18th century picturesque/ gothic scenes (Claude, Hubert Robert), [photos of friends. Lamps.

My younger daughter sit in her environment in a room behind me, also two windows, also a couple of computers, also books, but many other things different from mine, including a huge stereo outfit.

Where do other post from? What part of the world or your patch of the earth? What time? What does the world look like from your seat? Environment.

It's a wonderful subject, for we are not just talking about literal space, but a psychic space we create for ourselves to
dwell in while we read and write; some need a room and tranquillity, but some prefer (as we've seen on Wompo) to be among people or on the fringe of activities; like me and Fran (who sent to WWTA description of her room) some do have a certain room to return to; others have a space inside a house or their office (s?).
 
Mine has evolved. Yes it began with a desk that was to be my central area -- and it has remained so even if "I" now share that area with a computer. But next to the computer is my writing space and space for immediate books wanted. But now I have more tables: my room is not big so I have accommodated but two. Hmmm. I also do have bookcases so that may account for my only fitting two tables in: next to me (close to heart, near at hand) is a bookcase stuffed with jane Austen books (by and on) and notebooks, xeroxes, and notes and another across the way a bookcase filled with Anthony Trollope books & notebooks, xeroxes and notes. To my back are two large bookcases mostly stuffed with folders but some books, and mostly on women poets and writers (big spaces for Anne Finch, Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara -- though they have migrated outside the room too). My art books are two long shelves in the front of the house; Jim my husband has two long shelves on top of them of music books (his love).

I too enjoy the neighbor's gardening. That tulip tree I so love has never been worked on by me :)

Jim comes in here sometimes, but not often -- even though to the right of me is his desk and all above, around and below it all those computers I mentioned which I don't understand but provide our blog, our website, and he calls "our servers." Since he so rarely uses (he has as I wrote turned the front room into his workroom too) it, I have one of my two fans on his desk area for writing facing me. Laura (now on this list) used to like to come in and talk at length with me when she lived here; Izzy comes in to watch Jane Austen movies with me -- as I have the only player in the house which will play the British tapes Judy has kindly sent me (and only they plus a couple of Region 2 DVDs I bought) play the whole of these movies.  Once upon a time Laura would come in here to talk privately.

As an adjunct I have no other space. I've been told the lecturers' room is my space too, and I've seen adjunct colleagues actually work there. I can't. People come and go, and I just don't feel right there. It's stigmatized in my mind.

ON Wompo someone developed the idea of psychic space which struck me as good, but then I thought about Anthony Trollope. Basically he wrote everywhere and anywhere. Famously, he had a long-time servant get him up at 4:30 in the morning so he could write until 9 as he had to get to work (for the post office, sometimes to an office, sometimes by travelling) by 10 and he forced himself to produce 250 words a day. But he also wrote on trains (he made himself a small desk), on boats, and all day long in the interstices of his job. He worked for 37 years full-time while producing novels in the first part of his career. I've two reproductions of rare photos of him, one which shows him standing up looking alertly at something and writing away. So he wrote standing up too. Probably the only place he didn't write was when he was on horseback (I assume he didn't, but who knows?). In his case he was (I think) a compulsive writer; he wrote to escape and kept it up all his life. He tells us in his autobiography that before he began to write, he would dream his stories, and learned to discipline himself to work them into coherent narratives. So writing was simply getting down what he was escaping to -- all the livelong day apparently and he could do this all his life and when surrounded by others.

And also earlier women before the 19th century: how often the space they had was not theirs properly and they had to endure much hostility. Germaine de Stael who (it's said) wrote standing up in her own study lest she incur the ridicule of her father. She was hiding her writing from him. Jane Austen is said to have written in a room to which access was had by a creaking door. The creak enables her to thrust her papers below her desk so as not to be observed writing. I've thought the story of Austen an exaggeration, but now I think to myself her nephew's description makes this experience sound so cozy and accepted by her. Maybe it was not. Fanny Burney wrote late at night to hide her writing and wrote her final manuscript out in a forged hand. Imagine that.

But not to be sad this warm afternoon, it seems that most people who do write have to have and do get some space and time for themselves, women over the centuries and in repressive cultures too.

Today I look out my window and see this bright sunny autumn day -- variegated leaves and autumn chrysanthemums and flowering bushes too still. I can dream here.



The long shadows of a day and life richly spent together, with recent addition of two cats -- one named by Izzy, and one by me and Jim:



Clarissa-Marianne.  She has a passion for dead leaves. She is also a bundle of anxiety, on the edge. ever giving and seeking affection, alert, on the run, move, tenacious, bold and vocal.



Ian, quieter, loves to stay in his grey round bed (his pod we call it), stands off to the side watching, sometimes aggressive but often wary, cautious, hesitates, likes to sit and watch, or sleep.

Ellen

Dear Friends,

This is an addendum to a blog I wrote a a couple of months ago now on Bobbie Ann Mason's The Girl Sleuth and children's literature.  First I want to restore to the Net a poem I had on my old blog which I neglected to retrieve and now have found in my files:

To Nancy Drew on her 50th Birthday

by Kathleen Aguero

What secret does the old clock hold now?
Where does the hidden staircase lead?
It's time to mount the 99 steps,
accept the secret in the old attic.
The clues have been there all along
in your diary, in the old album,
in the velvet mask you struggle
to remove. You need to answer the invitation
to the golden pavilion, read the mysterious letter
of your own blood, lean against
the crumbling wall and listen
to the mystery of the tolling bell.
Although you wish you'd never started on this quest
for the missing map, now you have
it in your hand, you must follow it
to the message in the hollow oak, cross
the haunted bridge to face the wooden lady
and the statue whispering what you do not
want to hear.

The Psyche quest and sanguine victory as analyzed by Anne Williams in her book on female gothic and seen in Austen's Northanger Abbey is before us.

Yesterday for what is beginning to feel like an umpteenth time, I spent part of the last off three sessions on Bobbie Ann Mason's Girl Sleuth and once again it went over wonderfully well. Once again the students asked to talk about the book (they are semi-volunteers and all were girls) did very well.  They are all but one strong feminists (and she's no anti-feminist either) even if they wouldn't use the term.  One girl waxed witty over Nancy Drew and compared the 2000 incarnations to Barbie dolls.  And once again afterwards the class afterwards had good talk.  This time better than usual in the second class, for quite a number of people in the second class and a few in my first had even passionate talk about the stereotypes we come across in such books, and in movies and on TV today -- and did not exclude themselves when it came to talking about the influence of such self-alienating norms.  I should say I contribute myself to such talk  -- talk about how I was influenced frankly -- this is important in getting them to talk to one another.

Well thoroughly stirred, I went looking for some more articles on the Prom Queen of them all, and great Sleuth, Nancy Drew and found three good articles from an issues of Lion and Wardrobe, Journal of Popular Culture and one with the narrower name (but not purview), Nancy Drew and Company: culture, gender and girls' series. 



Deirdre Johnson pointed out the parallels between the supposedly liberated Nancy Drew and Elsie Dinsmore, Nancy Tillman Romalov showed how sexuality is presented, expressed, and explored through the gypsy images; J. Randolph Cox reviewed a study of, Stratemeyer's syndicate maker,and a fourth (my favorite), Sally E. Parry dwelt just on Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton: Nancy upholds the ideology of the present establishment (class, exclusionary arrangements, race privilege) and she behaves in an independent, de-emotionalized way where what is valued is public recognition; Judy cares far more about moral relationships she gets into with others; hers is a much more problematic world where she herself has obstacles to helping others; she has many more personal relationships that are developed and her inner world and home life are presented more richly; she doesn't care about recognition in the way of Nancy. 

Revealing, it's Nancy Drew who has been the more wide-selling heroine in the US. These series books are alive and well it should be mentioned: in all sorts of kinds of books that do not seem to be series but are (from science fiction to cartoon characters), books are made as a product by a firm or publisher to suit what they think will sell and what they want to promote themselves and of course young adult fiction made to fit formulas -- though it should be said there are authors who within this kind of formula present meaningful stories.

What was troubling though was one article which showed how since the 1920s-30s, the appearance of these heroines has shown a deterioration in dignity, independence, self-respect and sheer adultness.  As will be seen in the cover illustration above, Nancy was originally pictured alone, climbing the archetypal stairwell, flashlight rather than candle in hand.  The Psyche story and imagery of the female gothic is there as she dares to break taboos and search out adventure.  But then in the 1940s to 60s, she undergoes a change to where she is a docile-looking teenager, much dowdier and fearful, looking perplexed often,



Judy Bolton comes from this era, and even the original pictures give us a more dependent teenager -- on her way in looks to the suburbs of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique



That's Peter, her young husband, with her.  Note the 1950s fashions in the second: the older cover has Judy in an older woman's outfit.  In the third, she pets a cat and wears a headscarf (as I still do sometimes).  As Judy was my favorite of all the series' heroines, here are yet more covers:  Judy Bolton Reprints.

Things have gotten much more dismal lately:  a cover from the 80s show Nancy as a girl who is no longer in control



and recently she has become a sex-object, a sort of Barbie doll with muscles:



A far cry from this early cover of the thoughtful introspective heroine:



As you will see from the comments, the covers of French Nancy Drew (Alice Foy) show the same sexualization:



The second is a more recent cover than the first.

Should I conclude that in these series (as with other books), publishers deliberately dumb-down and present caricatured pictures to attract a wider coarser readership, and the more thoughtful or discriminating girl bypasses what's on the front, lives with it, and as she grows older sees through it?  Perhaps.  Especially as in books like Maureen Corrigan's Leave Me Alone I'm Reading and various modern feminist mysteries (with active female detectives at the center) show reading girls who go on to be reading women turn back tot the older images, as in this recent cover (the introduction is by one of these new feminist mystery writers):



I imagine Harriet Walters' face just out of sight.

On these, see Feminist Contributions to the Literary Canon: Setting Standards of Taste, ed. Susanne Fendler, and the article on "The Transformation of a Literary Genre—the Feminist Mystery Novel" by Marion Frank. Frank’s optimistic or positive attitude is partly the result of her central focus: Dorothy Sayers’ and particularly Gaudy Night (from which my pseudonym comes); the other author she goes into at length (whom I’d never heard of before) is Joan Smith.



This still from a Nancy Drew movie shows us the intrepid sleuth.

On the other hand, a perceptive mystery reader from my WWTTA list wrote recently that:

"I’ve always thought mystery stories in particular a rather good barometer or sometimes even harbinger of the changes in the perception of gender roles over the last hundred years or so and I’d class some of my own favourites in the genre as ‘feminist women’s novels of action’. What I have noticed, too, though lately is that quite a few of these formerly empowered and empowering serial female detective figures have suddenly become vulnerable victims of violence, rape and murder themselves, which doesn’t seem to augur well and may well reflect a conscious or unconscious sense of impotence in the face of so much present violence and conservative backlash…..."

And I do know from having gone to an MLA session on these books, that in the last decade they have been picked up by gay and lesbian readers and turned into satiric and sexy camp.

So I do mourn the passing of the earlier pictures, e.g.,



and think these later covers are participating in the reactionary overtly inflexible sexual stereotypes of modern popular culture which are perhaps increasingly influencing girls' mystery and women's detective fiction.

Ellen

Dear Friends,

We "did" Halloween for the first time in a while.  The weather has been (except for continual sinus attacks as the air to me is often burny and itchy and I can no get no medicine whatsoever that helps), it has been beautiful aesthetically:  leaves all turned yellow, red, orange, peach, shades of auburn, cantaloupe-colored parasols along the sidewalks (yes we do have some).  The leaves have begun to fall and the autumn flowers (chrysanthemums) are everywhere, with their violet colors added to the riot of color as in this sad but memorable picture by Mary Cassatt:



Mary Cassatt, Lydia in Autumn

As darkness threatened (it did not come until after 7 as until this morning we have been suffering under Daylight Savings Time), we put a candle in our pottery pumpkin. I had put a light on the roof of our ceiling over our stoop and put that on.  Much to our delight and our cat's perplexity (and excitement) children actually did come.  Several five year olds in expensive costumes: princesses, space men -- with a discreet parent on our path just behind. A few (black) groups who came up from where we have some welfare houses in the valley.  And some other (white) groups from up here on the hill..  I had bought earlier in the day chocolate kisses, and kit-kat milk chocolate wafers.  I gave them out.  Children are so transparent: I had taken my dentures out to eat (this was during supper) and I came to the door, the child looked astonished. Where are your teeth, she asked? I only have a few said I.  Are you a witch said the other?  I remained very cordial and a third child said "I like her" as I filled the basket.

I noticed again as I had three years running that the young couples around us do not have candles in pumpkins and do not send their children trick-or-treating. Instead they darken their houses, dress their kids to the nines and go to exclusive children's parties the adults have made up.  No wonder I am uncomfortable in this neighborhood. What happened this year is more kids came and we were the only house on this particular block open.

Then around 8 or so, Jim, or the Admiral as I used to call him on my old blog, got all dressed up. He put on his tux with a lovely black silk shirt underneath it, and his glossy black shoes, worn only (in my remembrance) when I had my moments at the Reform Club:  we went to a dinner there one night and the next I gave my paper to a gathering of the Trollope Society. Maybe also a couple of New Year's Eves and a partly or so in NYC at a Club affiliated with the Williams?

I had black pants, black blouse, black waistcoat, scandals and mask. He had a mask too.

We had trouble finding parking but managed and walked down the avenue for 20 minutes. It was fun to see groups of varied size and ages dressed up: some people extravagantly, some a little, and some like us, minimal.  Draculas were popular, witch hats naturally. Ghost tours.

We got to the Torpedo factory where there was said to be a masked ball. (The Torpedo Factory gets its name from its origin as a torpedo factory in WW2; in the 1960s, it was in desuetude (as much of Old Towne then) and civic-minded people who know how to raise funds with little help from the City Council, turned it into an art center; now it also hosts commerciallly weddings, dinners and the like.  Tonight was for free (but cash bar) but later versions of the same kind of civic-minded people those who also brought us the Fringe Festival in DC this summer and previous ones.

Well it was not quite a masked ball, but nearly. On one side of the great hall was an exhibit and on the other a band played.  A tiny space for dancing and hardly anyone daring. The other watching. We went up to the balcony and watched for a while with others. There was a marvelous acrobat who did startling unsafe stuff with long strips of silk from the ceiling. Powerful young women with a lithe body --  like circus people.

When the band changed, we did manage to get into the circle of benches and then because we really wanted to, we began to dance. Others joined in gradually. Dancing nowadays is not really done in couples but individuals on the floor mingling back and forth with one another. I danced with a women in purple and  a witch hat (whose husband in a jester's outfit would not get up) who had encouraged me earlier when she heard I say I was shy.  The music was this hard beat, not true rock and roll but you move your body rhymically to it, and then you let go and start to make gestures and so on.

Alas, the gig came to an end and there was another group to set up.  The group spirit working up is thus deflated and people wander off.  We tried to go outside to look at the water at the quai and board walk but it was pouring by that time. (Ah, didn't I say it drizzled on and off most of the night and sometimes rained hard.)   The next band was pure hard noise so we left then.  We had had pleasant talk with people -- I had had anyway.

Then walking back and seeing less people but still there and in bars and restaurants bands playing and people dancing and voices wafting up.  Izzy has not wanted to come, but she had some Scots CDs going, marvelous music which I had gotten last year at the MLA for free and today we will go out to see Juliet Binoche in Paris.

We had put out the candle in the pumpkin before we left, and when we got home, we subsided into books, magazine articles, coffee for me, and the cats crawling around us, wrestlng now that we were home.




Helene Funcke (1869-1957), Landscape with Boat (autumn landscape), and Still Life with Peach

Ellen

Dear Friends,

On Wednesday I was moved to put the following poem by Margaret Atwood on Wompo:  It's from a section of her Collected Poems, Power Politics, 1917: a series of incisive, plain spoken (the bare style) powerful statements, eloquent, they exhort us today still as the world they describe has just grown more so:

Here is a three parter:

They are the hostile nations

i

In view of the fading animals
the proliferation of sewers and fears
the sea clogging, the air     -
nearing extinction

we should be kind, we should
take warning, we should forgive each other

Instead we are opposite, we
touch as though attacking,

the gifts we bring
even in good faith maybe
warp in our hands to
implements, to manoeuvres

ii

Put down the target of me
you guard inside your binoculars,
in turn I will surrender

this aerial photograph
(your vulnerable
sections marked in red)
I have found so useful

See, we are alone in
the dormant field, the snow
that cannot be eaten or captured

iii

Here there are no armies
here there is no money

It is cold and getting colder

We need each others'
breathing, warmth, surviving
is the only war
we can afford, stay

walking with me, there is almost
time / if we can only
make it as far as

the (possibly) last summer.

I wrote about my motives for putting it there as follows:  Of late some personal experiences and what I've been reading online and in weekly periodicals, as well as friends' stories of their lives and those people they know have begun to persuade me that there will be no improvement in lives for most people in this next 8 years at all, indeed more ground will be lost -- less jobs for anyone, at less pay, more of daily experience controlled and limited by the interest of large corporations and institutions (I now can't even get myself working sinus medicine), and war and more war (military power) to shore up the power of such conglomerates, no matter how or what such wars smash. Margaret Atwood just published a new dystopia; I'm not much for science fiction (can't read it), but what I read about it shows how sharp and insightful she is from her earliest realistic novels (Cat's Eye) to what I was reading tonight.

A long thread emerged with women saying "Amen" and they agreed.  A happy result is Farideh Hassanzedah put one of her poems on the list and has now rejoined WWTTA:

Have a talk with Time.
Try to understand him,
and let him understand you.
Reconcile yourself with him---
forget the conflicts,
the repeated offenses,
his axe 's strokes.

Don't knock at the doors of kings.
Walk on , walk on without regret
for what you leave behind.
Let your footsteps be your country.

Don't carry weapons,
Don't pile up treasure,
or seek a grand title .
Don't engrave your image
on a kingdom's coins,
or sign your name
to secret documents.

Don't be a statue
in a public square.
Don't build a museum
or be a museum exhibit.
As you walk this earth,
don't act like a priceless antique.
Don't mask your face with mosaics.
Don't play the buffoon
or the martyr.

Put your exile
on the tip of your tongue,
and say a kind word with a smile,
without a trace of arrogance or grandeur.
Kind words have neither arrogance or grandeur.

The house of your love
Is the nightingale's tear drops.

Be sure to tell him:
I love you
from the heart of my heart.
From the heart of my heart
I love you.

The heart of your love
Is the nightingale's wings.

Delighted, be always delighted.
Be fruitful like any tree
beside a river.

Take your delight
from the earth—
where else will you find it?
Go with an elegant grace
even in the midst of ruins,
and let the world be yours
without its sad mythologies,
its labyrinths.

Adapted from a long poem: THE TRANSIENT THINGS by: RAAD ABDULQADIR

It put me in mind of Anna's Barbauld's Evenings at Home, an enormously popular and influential book in the 19th century.  These were revolutionary teaching stories showing that learning occurs in contexts, situations, and as opposed to early primers where impossibly good children learn pious lessons and lists of words, she situates her learning  -- as does though less entertainingly, skilfully and humanely, Felicite-Stephanie Genlis in Les Veillees de Chateau (Evenings at the Castle, which in her letters Austen says she is reading and enjoying).  But the book is more than this:  the little pieces are also satiric fables and moving hymn-like poems of quietude and peace.   One I want to use to end this meditation meant ase anti-war, anti-fascistic militarist controlling society (where the discourse is such and experience set up such that there is no place to complain for yourself, let alone make a general statement that can be effective):

Calling Things by Their Right Names

Charles. Papa, you grow very lazy. Last winter you used to tell us stories, and now you never tell us any; and we are all got round the fire quite ready to hear you. Pray, dear papa, let us have a very pretty one?
Father. With all my heart-What shall it be?
C. A bloody murder, papa!
F. A bloody murder! Well then--Once upon a time, some men, dressed all alike ....
C. With black crapes over their faces.
F. No; they had steel caps on:-having crossed a dark heath, wound cautiously along the skirts of a deep forest ...
C. They were ill-looking fellows, I dare say.
F. I cannot say so; on the contrary, they were tall personable men as most one shall see:-I-eaving on their right hand an old ruined tower on the hill ...
C. At midnight, just as the clock struck twelve; was it not, papa?
F. No, really; it was on a fine balmy summer's morning:­and moved forwards, one behind another ....
e. As still as death, creeping along under the hedges.
F. On the contrary--they walked remarkably upright; and so far from endeavouring to be hushed and still, they made a loud noise as they came along, with several sorts of instruments.
C.  But, papa, they would be found out immediately.
F. They did not seem to wish to conceal themselves: on the contrary, they gloried in what they were about.- They moved forwards, I say, to a large plain, where stood a neat pretty village, which they set on fire ....
C. Set a village on fire? wicked wretches!
F. And while it was burning, they murdered-twenty thou­sand men.
C. 0 fie! papa! You do not intend I should believe this! I thought all along you were making up a tale, as you often do; but you shall not catch me this time. What! they lay still, I sup­pose, and let these fellows cut their throats!
F. No, truly-they resisted as long as they could.
C. How should these men kill twenty thousand people,
pray?
F. Why not? the murderers were thirty thousand.
C. 0, now I have found you out! You mean a BATTLE.
F. Indeed I do. I do not know of any murders half so bloody.

Some of my favorites too are about cats. 


A cat named Darcy and his friend:



We are thinking of giving our cat, Clarissa, a middle name: Marianne, in honor of her penchant for dead leaves.

Ellen

Dear Friends,

While away at a recent 18th century regional conference, I splurged on two books, the first Devoney Looser's very enjoyable. British Women Writers and Old Age, 1750-1850, and the huge paperback version of Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia's British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century. What a milestone. 906 pages!  I was chuffed to see the picture I used as mascot here at first and still have on on Library Thing is on the cover: Georg Friedrich Kersting's (here called) Woman Embroidering. I had thought she was writing or reading, but looking now, staring intently I can make out a thread hanging from the table.  The background is a fashionable green of the era; it comes out too dark; it was thought to be contemplative and appropriate for quiet private rooms, which were a new thing then).

But when I began to read it, I was disappointed.  Alas. The same problem I discerned in Backscheider's book is here: they can't seem to tell a good poem from a bad or poor one. It's a representative selection.  Oddly, they are aware of this for in their introduction, they go on about how subjective aesthetic decisions are, and half-say they just give up on it. No. One evaluates; that's a central task of anthology makers, histories of literature, and criticism.

This matters: so Paula Feldman's British Women Poets of the Romantic Era, Joyce Fullard's British Women Poets 1660-1800 where an unerring sense of not only great (exhilarating, alive, interesting, moving, satiric) poems are chosen especially from a woman's ponit of view, and Roger Lonsdale's masculinist approach in Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, and the more general but still alive to what's good Andrew Ashfield's Romantic Women Poets (1770- 1848) will be those that keep women's voices alive.

This is a historical volume; it has some great poetry and is set up very interestingly -- the scholarly parts of the book are very good -- and it is so big that there is much beauty here. Maybe the problem is they eschew feminism too; there is very little anger in this volume at all. Scotched out. But the real problem is the anthology doesn't make the argument from the texts themselves as such.

I will however read it slowly and learn and share what I can.  I am now wondering if she got the idea for the picture from my review where it is placed at the bottom :)

Ellen

Dear Friends,

On Austen-l and Janeites, we've had a revealing thread on an article Emily Auerbach published in an online journal on Twain's well-known strong distaste for Austen.  I was not surprised to find the man on Austen-l and Janeites who repeatedly writes on Austen in such a way as to make the texts reflect  a masculine sexuality and place them in a context of famous male texts took up Auerbach's argument delightedly:  Twain was only teasing, and really loved Austen, read her continually (!)  It's a piece of special pleading in line with her anti-political (which means conservative) book, In Search of Jane Austen:  she positions herself with those who trivialize the strong dislike some males manifest to books  by Austen and aspects of her image (spinster, very intelligent, ironic, dry):  sometimes insecure sexually, but more often variously bored, threatened and irritated, resentful of texts which seem to stand for all that in women's culture seeks to control their sexual impulses to put them at the service of women's needs and a nuanced ethical morality and mannered way of life.

Reading just Twain's comments in the jotted notes (ferreting them out of Auerbach's piece) beyond the frank hatred sent to Howells one see he dislikes Austen.   Twain sees how awful are the awful characters but he also dislikes the good characters; from the texts quoted by Auerbach he plainly doesn't like S&S. He can't stand its central heroine, Elinor for example. It's a dark book and you might think he could swallow it but it's too woman-cented and the sex kept too under control for him: the woman's point of view is central to the book, how exploited and vulnerable & the masculinity reshaped so we have sensitive aimiable "worthy" men.

Auerbach calls the piece an article she's quoting from but to me the notes read like the kind of thing a person writes in a commonplace book. Writers keep commonplace books. Perhaps Howells was trying to persuade Twain to give Austen a chance; Howells admired Austen and may be said to have writen Austen-, and James-like books American style.

The Howells argument is a red herring too.  Howells and Twain were good friends and Howells would not misunderstand Twain. It's a long complicated friendship but to take the most famous example, when Twain got so drunk on one social occasion and made a fool out of himself, and was condemned by others, Howells understood the man had been mortified and disliked the snobbery and felt very uncomfortable around it. Hence his overreaction in drinking too much. The scene is written up by Howells in The Rise of Silas Lapham. Twain could have been teasing Howells but in context these are harsh, shrill condemnations and they resemble D. H. Lawrence's diatribes.

In her book In Search of Jane Austen Auerbach shows a disposition to be against "policitized" criticism which is a stalking horse phrase for assuring readers they will find a conventional establishment point of view as to morality. In this article she in effect shows she is someone not at all concerned with feminism or women readers or men's approaches to women's books -- the sort of scathing reviews we've seen of the recent unsexy Emma by Sandy Welch, a return to a woman's film adaptation of Austen -- I would like to compare it with Fay Weldon's myself and will eventually.

I see this essay as part of Auerbach's antipolitical agenda. Her book is good but she's never ever heard of feminism.  She trivializes: "grumbling."  How quaint he is, and how we should laugh.  She's not at all bothered by men who won't watch Emma Thompson but prefer action movies. She doesn't give the inferences of all this. It's worse than special pleading; it has a reverse agenda against candor and truth about how men regard women's art. I'm not saying men should not like action-adventure films nor have to like costume dramas and film adaptations.

This is a significant agenda she presents -- and hurts women writers and women's art. The sexual distaste here not just by Twain but the two men who write more softly whom she quotes in her conclusions is at the core of why in situations where 90% of the editors and publishers are men, hardly anything by women gets published, why women's movies are regularly dissed.  That's what's important about what they write and also this special pleading. The kind of reaction to the recent Emma 2009 (read Gill, a British journalist) comes out of the same gut reaction. This new Emma represents a return to the unsexualized feminine take on Austen of the 1970s and early 1980 mini-series on BBC.  The two actors playing Mr Knightley and Mr Elton (Jonny Lee Miller and Blake Ritson respectively) were Edmund Bertram in the last two MPS (1999, 2007): they have no wet shirt moments, are not presented doing super-explicit masculine acts (like chopping wood, shooting animals, playing male games indoors); they are neither macho male in type nor sensual-sensibility types; the women in the series are dressed in a 2009 return to Hugh Thompson type illustrations. Fussy.  From the over-the-top hostile reactions to this Emma, we see Twain's point of view is common.  His frankness is not, that's all.

But he was not writing for publication we should remember but to a trusted friend candidly.

The attitude of Auerbach is shared by other women who want to get into print.  All four big awards to women this year went to women whose books eschew all women's issues; Mantel's Wolf Hall has a male narrator who is deeply conservative sexually and there is no critique of that at all. This is how Helen Vendler made her career; she persists in erasing as worthless hundreds of years of great poetry by women. By writing this way Auerbach cannot hurt her career :)

Another angle here that makes me write is this way of trivializing and reversing Twain's (and Lawrence and Nabokov) feeds into the sexing up of Austen by commercial and other people.  It erases the real reasons for some virulent dislike one comes across of Austen repeatedly and so leaves the way for claiming Austen is sexy and wow men can and do read and like her.  So she's okay.

Of Twain's works I like best myself his Life on the Mississippi, a great American book of the land and culture.  I also like some of his short stories, especially the gem "Journalism in Tennessee," not enough reprinted.  Huckleberry Finn is an American masterpiece but I've had experience with black students deeply hurt by it so I no longer teach it.  He would not be grateful for such an article about himself. He'd probably make fun of it though from what angle I leave others to imagine.

Ellen

Dear friends,

I saw this extraordinary film, Sabiha Sumar's Silent Waters about a week ago and want to say something about it before it fades away.  The DVD comes with a Human Rights statement, Film Notes by Human Rights watch, a director's statement, and q and a on human rights.  Its purpose is to show how male violence forms and ends up aimed at women because woman have no recognized rights in custom.  That she also wants to show the pernicious resutls of having societies where there is no opportunity for educational or other adult fulfillment for most of the population may be seen in this article, Sabiha Sumar: Workign for the Arts and Woman's Rights by Laila Kazmi and how she gets no help from Pakistan or most of its people: No support from Pakistanis at Home




Early scene of Ayeesha (Kiron Kher) and her son, Saleem (Amir Ali Malik, in movie -- before he turns against her.

We begin with Ayesha, a middle-aged Muslim woman who is living with her cherished son, Saleem; she has bad dreams whose content is gradually unmasked and unexplained thus:  she is alive today because in 1947 when the murdering and riots broke out between Muslims and Hindus, she fled those in her family (Sikhs) who targeted her for murder (they wanted to force her to jump into a deep well). I have heard this before: Sikh men murdered "their" women lest they (these men) "lose" their honor because of the new union of these states: the idea is a confused unarticulated one: somehow other men will rape them or get hold of them or the Sikhs will "lose" "their" women. She flees the well her relatives mean to throw her down and meets that night with a kind Muslim man who attracted to her offers to marry her right there. She does.

Fast forward and the husband is long dead and she has few connections or abilities to find her son a good job.  (We are now experiencing this form of finding a job in the US where less and less can one find one based on one's abilities, certificates, institutions, and there's a turn back to this family-network, nepotism, cronyism ancien-regime style).  He has exquisite talent playing the flute, but there is no money for lessons, no place in university or training for him; there is not school he can go to which will enable him to get a self-respecting job.  She has managed to find one for him, from a far-away male relative working behind a grocery shop.  Well the boy just hates this prospect as his horizon.  He is all she has. She works hard to make food for him and keep their house quiet, clean, peaceful.

He begins to involve himself with a gang of thugs who rationalize their lust for power, bullying others, drive to control women by their religion and hatred for Hindus.  He gains intense self-esteem in this group but it's dangerous and they are densely frightening people.  One result of an intricate series of events is it's discovered that his mother is a once Sikh woman after these thugs attack the Sikhs and the Sikhs defend themselves. At first I had felt for the Sikhs as vulnerable and under bigoted racial attack, but I soon learned their behavior towards women was as dismissive and exploitative as that of the Muslims.  They think they own women the way the Muslims do -- as an animal, a trophy, a symbol they can destroy if it loses its value and makes them despised.



Even after all this time, the Sikhs want Ayeesha back as theirs; this Sikh shows the necklace she had been wearing is a Sikh one; she is rightly afraid they will proceed to kill her. Better later than never..

The son insists his mother go to a marketplace and declare she is Muslim so she will not be taken by the Sikhs and he can hold up his head in front of his thug-friends,, but this is dangerous and she won't.  We begin to see that she hasn't gone for water for herself all these years.  She has kept herself apart (very like Mary Lady Mason of Trollope's Orley Farm or one of Austen's heroines).  Slowly she is ostracized as men tell "their" women to avoid her; she loses a group of girls she has been informally tutoring  in tolerance. Her son begins to hate her for this, hate her.  The son has moved from liking his mother going out to a wedding, to his resenting her school for girls where she teaches them tolerance from the Koran:





The son also had a girlfriend who early on in the film we see kiss on camera (very daring for an Indian film); he enjoyed her company and conversation. Now he becomes alienated from her as a liberated woman for he knows his gang of friends would not approve.  In reality he and the gang are jealous she goes to women's college. He then becomes disgusted by what charmed him: her physical appearance and gaiety. He needs to be with his gang of male friends first and foremost and must not risk their disapproval. One scene has these thugs coming up to the local women's college, and trying to brick up the girls by making the wall around the school much higher

At its close the movie fast forwards past its 1981 locale (when most of the action takes place) to today where this apparently more middle class girl (she was in a  woman's college) is a successful older career woman watching TV and she sees this woman's son on TV as part of a fanatic group.  .

We see one of Ayesha's friends try to stay with her; we see the son's girlfriend try to help her, but they are so threatened themselves. We see how important she was to her pupils and the girlfriend's college is to the girls. 



Ayeesha and a wavering but still loyal friend.

I leave everyone to imagine the quiet devastating end, which is swift. Silent waters. She jumps in a well rather than be killed or inhumanely treated by Sikhs or harassed and driven from her home to wander the streets. A swift simple shot. There she is in the distance standing on the rim of the well. And then she's gone. Forever.

As opposed to Jane Campion's  Bright Star, this story moves along quietly and its content makes us feel after a while that we must stay silent while the. The story and characters carry themselves. I loved her many speeches, the tone she took. At the opening of the film she tells a friend when others want nothing to do with us (or want to hurt us) or some beloved or needed person dies that one must let things and people go. The tone was plangent and accepting.   She stood bravely alone for much of her life since this husband died and we see her stoicism and enjoyment of little things in life:  meagre food, talk with a pleasant person (her son's girlfriend).  Something she said reminded me too of Andrew Davies's Elinor who when she is told Edward is married, tries to keep sane and calm and says, there's nothing new here, nothing we weren't expecting, it's just as we supposed and so there's nothing new to grieve for.

Needless to say (not always a bankrupt phrase), this is a feminist pro-woman classic.  Women are victims.  The film-maker shows us how useless it is to argue against this sense of male honor (they can't listen past their huge egos and desperate lack of self-esteem) and how it is used to frighten women, and especially when young girls.

The film is in Urdu and shows some of the characteristics of all Indian films. There is dancing -- fully integrated -- at the opening we get to one of these frightening weddings.  Everyone is dressed super effeminately and the bride made into  an elaborate fetish.  There is the characteristic or typical plot structure of South Asian films: the opening horror, and then cut to a first half which is more pastoral, and then cut to the second where a modern world (not necessarily filled with modern thoughts sometimes more savage as this one) is contrasted. This one ends in despairing loneliness, stasis, death for the heroine..



Towards the end she is losing heart and falling sick, doesn't want to get up out of bed and face the day.

Not one to miss and a director, Sumar Sabitha, whose work is really worth watching. While reading and watching many female films and plays we decided their women's communities shows girls hostile to one another, and they true hurting people are not sympathized with. Sumar shows us how relationships stagger when they are broken up and how dangerous it is when one hafl of humanity must cater to a suspicious other.  Indian cinema can be superb:  see my blogs on Bend it Like Beckham, Water, and Fire and on Lagaan, Guru, and Bombay; Mississippi Marsala and Charulata.

The books to read this one with are Asnie Sieierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul, Shirin Ebadhi's Iran Awakening, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, and Things I've Kept Silent About.

Ellen

Dear Friends,

This term I assigned Lahiri's The Namesake to my classes, and thus read it for fourth time, and from a set of audio-cassettes listened to Sari Choudury read it aloud beautifully a second time. I found I liked it much more than I had previously, partly because I'm beginning to understand it better.



Tabu as Ashima at the close of the film: now grown middle aged, a widow, she rests on her strength and memories (Namesake)

I've come to realize her subject elaborated, developed, explored is people who are outcast in some way (sometimes caused by their own gifts and personality within), who don't fit in and have trouble with the identity their culture gives them or the one they acquire.  Until recently most novels about immigrants coming into the US would be about poorer people and how they struggled to assimilate and succeed in a worldly sense too. By contrast, neither Gogol or Moushumi in Lahiri's The Namesake has trouble getting into a good American school and becoming a respectable professional; discuss how their equally complicated problems in assimilating in other aspects of social life lead to their decision to marry and the break-up of the marriage.  Finally the new generation finds their identity in books and their fields of study. The old one slips away (Ashoke) or finally breaks free (Ashima, whose name means without borders).

I see her as yet another descendent of Austen, partly for her use of free indirect speech, partly because she writes as a woman and (in the words of Terry Castle) “a certain strengthening awareness is passed—from woman to woman —through the genre of the novel itself." Paradoxically, the last part began to fall off when the character to the fore was a woman type I usually can’t identify with: Moushumi. 



Zuleika Robinson as Moushumi receiving phone call from lover, Dimitri (Pierre in the film), her mother-in-law, Ashima i the next room

The first third of the novel was the traditional virtuous heroine, suffering: Ashima, the wife in the traditional marriage.  The last third is the woman who breaks her marriage deliberately by having an affair and keeping her life apart from her loving husband, Gogol. I found myself furious oddly the first time because she seemed so cold; I felt sorry for him: I hadn’t liked her as amoral somehow and so easy in life. Yet the second time I read it I realized in some ways she was me; I was gripped by her story and what she would do next. I couldn't' predict.   I was dialoguing with Lahiri through this book, and also looking at two women: Ashima and Moushumi. I could never be Ashima nor Moushumi -- two extremes I was dialoguing with the author through.

Jhumpa Lahiri, recent photo

Lahiri was born in London, but grew up in Rhode Island, with a teacher and librarian for parents, upper class Indians, Bengalis to be exact, just like in the book; she went to Barnard for a degree in English and then studied creative writing as a graduate student, and now lives in New York City.  Attracted to Calcutta from whence her family comes. 

I've read all three books thus far: Interpreters of Maladies (short stories), and Unaccustomed Earth which I think shows a growth in power and realism from Namesake; it's even better, shows the hardnesses of people to one another which not really found in Namesake; Jhumpa is her nickname (pet name), not her formal name (good name).

Most of the stories are about Indian immigrants in the US; but some are about Indians in India, or Indian-Americans returned to India, or Anglo-Americans interested in India, or...well, the national categories are themselves part of the complexity she's trying to explore and explode.  Most of the stories are about women, or couples, or young girls.  Two that last long after reading are about outcast/displaced women in India, and their uneasy relationship with the communities surrounding them.  There are comic touches, but they're not funny stories; they're carefully constructed, beautifully told, realistic accounts of the ways human beings come to identify themselves, or not,
with a family, a culture, a nation, a place on the map.

I've read all three books thus far: Interpreters of Maladies (short stories), and Unaccustomed Earth, which I think shows a growth in power and realism from Namesake; it's even better, shows the hardnesses of people to one another which not really found in Namesake; Jhumpa is her nickname (pet name), not her formal name (good name).  The characters find adjustment to life itself and real people's emotions and dreams an obstacle to finding meaning for themselves.  They can't get accustomed to earth. We see parents and children at intense odds, with the parents wanting freedom and to pick a new partner late in life and leave the child; with breakups of arranged marriages

There is much allusion to different and other books and culture in the novel. The most obvious is to Gogol's "Overcoat," the story Ashoke was reading in the train when it crashed, and which saved him because his hand moved near a page and it called attention to him. Akaki Bashmachkin, returns to the earth and steals back his overcoat from the powerful official.  He is a shy, humble, easily bullied clerk who is kindly, dutiful, and therefore ridiculed by everyone; he saves a long time to get himself an overcoat; it is very cold in Russia. Having finally achieved his overcoat, he goes to a party (so full of himself), allows drink to befuddle him and leaves; his overcoat is brutally stolen from him on the way back; he can get no help from the police, and grief-striken he tries to get a powerful man in a department to find the overcoat and arrest the thieves and fails. He dies.  Then his ghost appears on the streets of St Petersburg grabbing coats from people; the important personage is on the way to his mistress's house, assailed by Akaki as a ghost and terrified.  He rushes home and ever after is not such a foolish snob as he had been.  Early on in the story a fuss is made about Akaki's name: and the mother after rejecting all sorts of possibilities chooses his father's name, alas it means shit. It's a remarkable story which combines satire and mockery with great tragedy, a critique of society and human nature which is devastating.



Irrhan Khan as the young Ashoke reading "The Overcoat" on the Indian train

Ashoke is right about this story: you could say the heights of comic anguish and tragic despaire are there, the presentation of social life as cliques run by strong domineering types (of which Gogol is not one). It's as if instead of getting into her book through the characters she shows us, the abysses of grief, loss and displacement one can know, she alludes to it through the book that means so much to Ashoke. In Ashoke we have an early encounter with death, saved by Gogol's Overcoat and it makes him want to flee the old country and set up life in a new safer one. He is a man apart like Akaki. We don't see enough of him within.

Lesser allusions to Sand's He and She: Moushumi reads and Gogol is drawn to. Dimtri goes round reading Man Without Qualities; Moushumi when young reads Pride and Prejuduce, now she's read so much French (or pretends to); Ashoke read Graham Greene's The comedians.  Intellectual education means a lot in this novel: it saves Ashoke and he goes to the US for it; Gogol and Moushumi find themselves; worlds to belong to, Ashima rereading her magazine at the opening, becomes a part-time librarian.


Ashoke and Ashima (Tabu)

Gogol taken by architecture, the Taj Mahal, finds himself in Italy too



Sal Penn as Gogol entranced

There are problems with her presenation of with arranged and romantic marriage plot-designs: some flaws:

What makes the importance of arranged marriages in Indian and other traditional cultures is it's what's held onto to keep the family system intact. The whole idea is to make a large family system where it's in the prudent interest of the individual to conform as the whole family supports the individuals in it.  You can only keep this up if the older people get to choose the new members. The younger ones may have a veto, but they cannot pick someone who the parents or family group would not see as advantageous to them socially and financially.  I stress how in Indian such marriages don't break up, but that they do in the US and Lahiri was idealizing.

Gogol reacted against arranged marriages and his Indian culture but could not find it in himself to like upper class American culture which (without the big family group) can be lonesome, anonymous, end in broken relationships and depend on things, money, prestige items for individuals.  That after all Ashima really assimilated better than he did. She created a new family; he could spend time with Maxine, but not enter into her world and follow it the way Moushumi does with Donald and Astrid in Brooklyn.

Moushumi's sexual infidelity is something people are uncomfortable talking about except to call it "cheating."  But she is there, alternates with Gogol, and I think is a contrast to Ashima and we are not supposed to dislike her. Myself I did for her coldness. I think she reflects aspects of Lahiri just as strongly as Gogol, and Ashima.  Lahiri has said she took a pet name because people couldn't pronounce her formal or good name -- as Moushumi's name is hard to pronounce.  We are not told enough about Ashoke. Like Decclan in Toibin's Blackwater Lightship he is kept from us, the painful center of the novel, the man who after coming near death, left India.

In Gogol and Nikil and later Moushumi and his sister Sonya, we see assimilation the ideal, but we see in Gogol and Moushumi this breaks them.  Gogol struggles with and against both his Bengali and American heritage: he goes for upper class whites and yet doesn't know how their families work; see them as individuals living alongside one another.  He keeps his distance from his father while his father is alive because it's a threat -- he loves the man too much.   To go for a Bengali girl was to try for a ready-made solution his own lifestyle didn't fit.  Moushumi was even more unbalanced:  forbidden dating and white men, she becomes overweight; she opts out of stupid American vulgar culture too; she finds herself in Francy but only through abject sex (promiscuity). She tries the upper class white life but is rejected by Graham who can't bear the Bengali tight model. She thinks she can accept the Bengali ways but finds herself bored silly with Gogol.   Her identity is through her French studies; for Gogol he combines a distanced approach to Bengali culture and his mother with an identity as an architect loving Italian architecture.

I've realized I was misreading the book and found myself very much liking the promiscuous secondary heroine. Her problem like the young hero's is they are so conflicted they almost have no identity. ON top of that she's a young woman; to obey is repression; to take a Bengali husband, never to date, to obey her parents completely.  She has much more to contend with and the only way to overturn it is to become extreme in the other direction, i.e., promiscuous.  The novel is the problems and conflicts of assmilation on a rather profound level.  the book also shows the young man and woman trying to free themsevles of the group.

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Ashoke and Ashima with Gogol, the first baby

On some flaws or problems in the novel. it's a contrast between arranged and romantic marriage. We see this looming large, and there it's very revealing too, with the proviso that

            she does not herself show that the purpose of an arranged marriage is to make a family alliance which then can be used to network and in the story of her upper class characters lives (who get very good positions high in university and semi-glamorous jobs, like curating textiles at the Metropolitan Museum) and she presents their getting jobs as if it's the easiest thing in the world.  In other words, she avoids the hard stuff that causes such arrangements. Also that sometimes people marry for such reasons and then they don't manage to get that great niche.

        She also makes the arranged marriage couple good and kind of tenderly loving people so avoids the central problem: a lack of compatibility is only part of the reason for hard core misery: if you get stuck with a cold, abusive, indifferent, or mean-tongued person for exmaple, it's not the incompatibility of intellectual interests that's the problem.  It does matter terribly who you have sex with and how their temperament affects yours and vice versa, can you do things together beyond taking care of children and a house.  Ashima and Ashoke find their meaning in continually going out to others; they don't stay with one another in small circle that much.  As in Anne Chanan’s A Good Indian Wife, we have an arranged marriage and it goes well, because Ashima believes in it and Ashoke is a gentle tender man. But we do have a woman pulled out of her culture and set in a place she has no understanding of or ties. But she is the strong one of the pair

Unfortunately Maxine and her parents, Lydia and Gerald, are a caricature of upper class New Yorkers. So too Donald and Astrid.



Lahiri stays away from Sonia too.

    For me problems in the book include keeping Ashoke away from us; my own problems in sympathizing with Moushumi. Not enough of them. 

    In comparison to J. L. Carr (A Month in the Country which I read with my classes this term), and like Patchett in Bel Canto, Lahiri is something of an escape because than escape (which Lahiri allows) I find myself in these books confronting messy cruel life where there was nothing redemptive or consoling. There is because some of the characters stay together in Bel Canto and most of them in Namesake. They stay together in A Month in the Country but it doesn't always help.

Landscapes analogously used; along with emphasis and use of food show how much this is a woman's book.  Here is a remarkable moment in the film, Nair gives away how alienating she finds Christmas decorations, all neon on lawns: Ashima in the center just received news of husband's death, somehow made more jarring by unreality of these commercial absurd lights



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Technique and structure:

Structure of consciousness in story: in A Month in the Country we had a first person narrator in retrospect; in Bel Canto a third person narrator telling the story as a flashback who is detached and ironic; here we have a third peson narrator but she enters into the consciousness of her characters so we see and feel the world from the point of view most predominatly of Ashima and Gogal (Nikhil), a few important moments for Ashoke, a couple of extended pieces for Moushumi.  We never see the world from Sonia's point of view. 

This is not the same as the first person because the author is not there, and leaves us to be at a distance from Mr Birkin; here the author moves in and out of the characters, and sometimes uses free indirect speech which can have her comment gliding into the character and also next to the character.  It was first done very successfully by Austen in Emma. She's not the first to do it; others had in 18th century novels, but Emma is the most controlled and obvious and one still most read from earlier period.  We are going to have another third person where the novelist moves in and out:  Daisy Miller (Mr Winterbourne)

Chapter 1, 1968: Ashima's consciousness, pages 10-22, Ashoke's (and we learn of this devastating motivating train accident). Ashima's consciousness lasts until p. 66
Chapter 2, pp. 22:   boy is born, Gogol, still 1968.  On p 66 (Chapter 4) we make our first move into Gogol's consciousness as a young boy and that lasts until p. 159. 
Chapter 3, 1971, p. 48:  On p. 73 we first meet Moushumi, reading _Pride and Prejudice_ by Jane Austen rather than watching TV conventionally.  I suggest  is used to characterize one of the younger heroines as both highly intelligent and quietly subversive. She reads it at a young age.  It's a kind of joke.
Chapter 4, 1982, p. 78.   I'm not so sure how to take the reference to "The Overcoat" where story is retold to Gogol and he hears this jaundiced account in school, pp. 89-92.
Chapter 5, p. 97: Still Gogol.
Chapter 6, 1994, p. 125  Still Gogol.
Chapter 7, p. 159: sudden return to Ashima's consciousness, with Gogol's returning upon the event of Ashoke's death, p. 169 and we stay heavily with Gogal until p. 246 (Chapter 10 given wholly over to Moushumi), with two exceptions: 
Chapter 8, p. 188.  Between pp 211-14, we have a brief glimpse of Moushumi, and a few few pages of her consciousness, pp. 211-14
Chapter 9, p. 219. Also of p. 219 the narrator moves back and forth from Nikil to Moushumi as we begin to see she is hiding from him her dissatisfaction. We see his with her friends, but it remains a minor irritation supposedly.  It's not told from her point of view so much as we slip into her mind and out of it and are given a feel of her detachment.  Gogol from pp,. 229-45.
Chapter 10, 1999, p. 246-67.  Here we have the opposing consciousness, Moushumi's. I'm uncomfortable because she's such a liar.
Chapter 11, p. 268.  Back again to Gogol on p. 268-73 and we feel very much for him as pathetic
Chapter 12: Ashima pp.l 273-79, and it ends on the quietly lost Gogol, pp. 280-91  He has lost his overcoat too.   Same kind of desolate atmosphere as "The Overcoat"

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The family (Gogol a boy, Sonia in the carriage)

Imagery

Imagery of the novel is important:  Lahiri is into things; the surface of her book dwells on things and whatever is the fashion of the moment. Skeins of images: what happens on trains. How houses and landscapes reveal aspects of their characters and where they individually are in the plot-arrangement.  Trains: Ashoke nearly dies and decides to go to the US; Gogol meets Ruth, travels to her, at night leaves Bridget, reads on the train in the movie at the end.  Airports there too, to the US, to India, to Cleveland (to death). Babycarriages.

The point is ephemera and our landscapes matter; they define and shape us.  The food, shoes, what people wear, and trains and modern buildings and houses and landscapes as opposed to traditional ones back in India.

Houses and landscapes: each figures forth some portion of the character's journey and by the way they behave in the house, and their attitude towards it tells us a great deal about them.

       The small cold apartment in Massachusetts where Ashima is taken to:  dismays, disappoints, not what she dreamed was US, and yet she tells relatives only good things;
        Pemberton Road (as in Pemberly), the suburban house, the dream house for middle American, they do not move and she begins to create world of Bengalis around them, no grass at first, all new, no history;
        The homes of relatives in Calcutta, no privacy, no air conditioning, how miserable the children.  As Ashima reread her magazine, so they reread their books and listen to records.
        Gogol's tiny apartment in NYC as bare of personality as his father's in Cleveland: they are alike in their lack of imposing themselvse on environment; urge to go within;
         Maxine's parents' apartment, an ideal to Gogol, only Maxine a child in it and they don't look to see for her comfort (in summer); the lakehouse again an ideal, but Maxine in a shack and after all the Bengalis would have been miserable. Ashima and Ashoke need a living world of continual presences to be together in;
       Gogol and Moushumi's upscale apartment at odds with their Bengali wedding, a crack in ceiling;
        Donald and Astrid 's brownstone undergoing expensive renovation again something of a caricature of upper class whites in NY.
         No house for Ashima at end; Ashoke slipped away into death; Moushumi returns to her French books and identity, Gogol to his archectural worlds (and Italy) and no longer threatened to his father in The Overcoat.

I've written about the film by Mira Nair on my previous blog.  There I omitted how the movie makes something of an intense ghostly presence of Ashoke at its close (resembling the ghost story aspect of "The Overcoat.") ; its scenes are rearranged so as to keep Ashoke before us in the minds of the characters, like the one where Ashima with Sonia in her arms watches Ashoke walk Gogol out to the end of a barrier in the ocean and tells him how you can come to the end and see there is nothing beyond.  It also (I now realize) in the way of Indian movies, begins with a crash, a scene of terror, and then builds a contrast between traditional ways of life, especially in India and modern (in both India and the US -- there appears to be no traditional family life in the US in this film, a result of the book's caricature of upper class white family life, the only family life beyond that the Bengali families we see).



Ashoke with Gogol as a child

One of my students wrote two good essays on it which I've put on line:  Fathers and Sons (about the novel); the use of landscape, past, and dramatic scenes in the film. Natalie Friedman's "From Hybrids to Tourists: Children of Immigrants in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 50:1 (2008) is an stimulating essay.



Gogol and Moushumi (Zuleikha Robinson) upon their marriage

A fun scene: Moushumi and Gogol rise and begin to dance Bollywood style in their white robes and then fall on one another and go to bed to make love.

Ellen

Dear Friends,

What could be more appropriate for reverie under the sign of Austen than a realistic, sceptical biography of her rival (as she saw him, even in 1817), Walter Scott? 

Over the past month and a half for an autumn retrospective on Walter Scott on Trollope19thCStudies at Yahoo, I've been reading John Sutherland's new ground-breaking biography, The Life of Walter Scott.  While it's not based on any primary material not known, and makes heavy use of secondary (other critical and biographical studies), it has the great merit of telling the truth accurately with no obfuscation in clear lively English, something apparently not done frequently in Scott studies until very recently.  It resembles his sceptical and disillusioned literary biography of Mary (or Mrs Humphry Ward), is similarly psychologically perceptive and written in a lively wry style. 

When you finish this biography, Scott's use of anonymity (the pseudonymous "author of Waverley) is not a mystery or anomalous; it's essentially characteristic of the man who kept much of his activities a secret; his carapace and self-guard was a continual masquerade.


Walter Scott (1824) by Edwin Landseer

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The boy and young man

To begin with, in Chapter 1,  Sutherland situates Scott in a dream of primal freedoms in Scottish history. As a boy and man these allured him, as did mythic genealogies for his family.  Sutherland then goes over the real genealogy back to Scott's great grandfather (which is about as far as one can go for real in the sense of influence), and then moves onto Scott's early years.

This early time is very important and shows up characteristics of Scott that never left him and he had formative experiences. He had a very good memory and was a deep feeling little boy.  His mother was loving and tender but endlessly pregnant and didn't have much time or space for her crippled third son.  Probably Scott had infantile paralysis and he limped afterwards all his life. This crippling was central to the way he was treated. He was frail, probably sensitive and was sent to live in the country with grandparents and loving kind aunt, Jenny (father's sister).  This Aunt Jenny functioned as mother.  The boy was precocious and very much encouraged by his grandparents, made a pet of.

He did find himself having to return to the crowded household in Edinburgh and it was miserable for him there. His eldest brother was a bully and the next not much better. His father was a grasping hard man and gave the boy a minimal public education, with as soon a possible putting him in university briefly and then making a Writer of the Signet out of him.  Sutherland points out how many fathers there are in Scott's fiction and how most of them are pretty bad.  Redgauntlet's father is the exception (a later book)

A significant early visit was to Bath to help his health.  He picked up an English accent there. There are the usual horror stories of boys' schools at the time. Efforts were made to keep Scott away from the cruellest schoolmasters (who would beat boys).  His nuclear family came up in the world and moved to the new town, but Scott's roots were also in the old and worlds of servants.

Much of the chapter is on what we can glean of the boy's inner life, what he read, how much he remembered.  I found myself very moved here and (oddly I suppose) identified or found myself remembering my own childhood where when I was 18 months old I was sent to live with my father's youngest sister (a kind sensitive woman, but poor, with 3 children of her own, 2 stepchildren, and she was alcoholic, and I loved her), then at 3 to Jewish grandparents (where I met my very kind grandmother and remember experiences of very like Scott is said to, like how she would play cards with me and how aware I was of how kind this was of her, and her troubles too, she was a woman who had been matched with a man she was not congenial with, and how I moved about only not in a wild country but in a slum, southeastern Bronx). The moving around, the going with relatives (even a kind aunt), the good memory from a very good age which Sutherland attributes to Scott (on good evidence if numbers of his stories are fantasies) reminded me of myself. I feel that a child's memory is made more vivid and the child remembers more if there is disruption of routine and sudden changes, and that's what happened to me.  Each new event is startling (or unnerving or scary) and I at least reacted to them strongly and remember more from my early childhood than a lot of people seem to be able to.  I do admit my feelings about it to myself and hope I don't fantasize too much :)  I've compared "notes" with relatives (all of them but one now dead) on what I remember and know these early memories have been to some extent shaped by what I've been told since, but I try not to keep what I've been told separate from what I remember. Hard to do.

So Sutherland shows the earliest origin of Scott's peculiar sycophancies and how he identified with the law so that in a book like Heart of Midlothian what saves Effie  is justice and rich unelected potentates not her heroic sister.  But as Sutherland says actually Effie would have died.  Scott early on was led to identify with the professions of his father and male relatives and cling to this for security and respect. On the other hand, Scott was not heir, the third son and he could have rebelled but he didn't.  We also can see that Scott's later ruthlessness and determination to be as rich as possible, control much that was around him, probably came as a survival reaction and attempt to gain later in life what he had been deprived of when young.  Later on Sutherland shows the great coldness of Scott to towards those dismissed and hurt by the system. A woman will complain about something and be punished for it, and Scottscarcely regards her. This reminds me of the high Tory, ruthless of the journals who excludes people without remorse from jobs or places and works hard to keep up conservative propaganda.

In this part of his biography Sutherland suggesst that Scott's son-in-law's early biography of is more sceptical and disillusioned than you think. Scott told a lot of fibs (or lies) about his great precocities and feats which are unlikely. He has himself in school as central to other boys and them following him about. Most improbable. Fantasies he wove later on which he would not let go of.  But then that probably shored up his identifications with the powerful.  Not much about women when he was young,except the kind aunt and put-upon mother with no time for him.

In Chapters 2-3, Student and Apprentice, Getting Forward, Sutherland shows us Scott's father rushed him through school to give him the forms of a gentleman's education, too accelerated for the boy to pick up much, especially given his frequent absences for sickness. So Scott educated himself, and remarkably well, but as any self-educated person he went for his own interests. 

He was as a personality remarkably "pliable to authorityy," "no poet in his youth was "less non servam").  A vein of subservice runs through his work reflecting the way he followed for his own advantage Henry Dundas (a principle Tory satrap giving out plums,  and therefore a social dictator, "Henry IX of Scotland); the worst of this is the way for his life he bowed down before Robert Macqueen, Robert Braxfield, a real brute in a wig, who engineered horrific punishments for anyone who could be caught or seen to be working against the establishment (transportation, hanging). Scots law, Sutherland reminds us, was rooted in Roman law.   Law to Scott was an instrument of control (not justice, certainly nothning to do with achieving equalities or rights).

At the same time Scott was reading romance, touring with one friend particularly, John Irving.  Absurdly improbable descriptions of Scott's prowess as a walker and great jollity. Sutherland shows Scott to have been singularly immune in real life to the charm of peasants (this reminds me of Trollope). Scott and Lockhart continually present Scott as rock-climbing, schoolyard brawling, but the list of serious ailments to say nothing of his lame leg makes all this impossible. In fact Scott was nervous, often preferred to stay in and read. He was a tall talker.

His life was suddenly changed at the death of his older brothers.  Robert had been a bully and heavy drinker and helped on by one Captain Robert Scott; he died of malaria at 41. At the death of Robert, this Scott took on Walter; Robert Scott was an antiquarian, bookish too (or could be) and they visited castles together, shot and became close. This Scott influenced some of Scott's portraits of older men.

He did begin to go against his father's desires for him by declining to be his father's partner and keeping up more college for a while.  Sutherland here shows us Scott's noctural activities in clubs and making friends (and later useful contacts).

Getting forward is about expeditions, career building and "finding a wife."  Expeditions is in making friends, going with some of them to collect antiquities and anecdotes (hoarding ms's, coins, relics, non philosophical history which Sutherland defends vigorously).

The truth about Scott's early career as an advocate is he didn't get on. He didn't make a lot of money and didn't get many clients: "For someone with Scott's contacts, the lack of fees was ominous."  So the way Scott got on was securing sinecures; therefore if he has any Whiggish or other propensities he would have had to hide them. Here's where we see him backing the cruel Braxfield to the hilt. A man named Muir who was an effective leaders of a Friends of the People society was destryoed for "sedition" (he had peacefully advocated universal suffrage and annual parliaments); he was transported. Witchhunts of the 1790s in which Scott participated as an underling and supporter are described.

Three women. It's here Edgar Johnson comes out a fatuous fool. 

A digression that's not a digression:  I've read a number of Scot's novels because I took a course as a graduate student with none other than Edgar Johnson. He actually had the nerve to simply sit there and read his book aloud and not one student protested (not me either). By the end of the term, there were 3 students left attending. I don't remember his outlook anymore, but he was certainly a Victorian celebratory type. I have his book on Dickens which I did read (I never read Johnson's book on Scott -- after all it was being read aloud to us) and it is the same sort of thing: nothing of a modern psychoanalytic kind of understanding. Unlike Ackroyd, Johnson (as I recall, I may be misremembering) thought Dickens had sex with Ellen Ternan, but he never brought any insights or thought about this relationship to bear on the fiction. It's this old-fashioned kind of thematic criticism which to me is finally unsatisfying: it doesn't explain what's there enough at all, nor why it continues to have power.

I don't have space to go through how Sutherland shows all the insinuations of Edgar Johnson about Scott's early romantic love life are naive dreams which don't fit the facts (chronology as we know it).  There were three. The one who counted most was Jessie: she was a shopkeeper's daughter, and they had a physical affair on and off for a couple fo years. There seems to have been a bastard child who was got rid of somehow (sent out for adoption, given to an obscure family member -- it's still common in some institutions run by religious groups in the US to today to try to force a girl to have her child and then force her to give it up for adoption to a "worthy" [read religious] couple who haven't got children).  Finally she married elsewhere when a deaf aunt died, and left her a bit of property and a medical student married her. She nurses a lifelong resentment for Scott every after.

The second is the nonsense about "the green mantle." This refers to Wilhelmina Belsches who it seems Scott never had a chance of marrying and was attracted to and Lockhart told stories about that don't make sense when you compare it to her engagement and marriage dates to another; her higher rank than he, much more money.  Sutherland finds the pictures conjured up by Johnson charming. I don't.  What's told is not the sort of thing that's real or rooted in any personal experience; it's all blather this stuff about "pure love" from afar. Sutherland suggests it's a kind of unexamined front for what Scott was really getting up to. I'd liken it to the stories of his great prowess and jollity when he was really nervous and at home reading or quietly with a this or that friend gathering materials he later used in his novels and writing. 

Apparently Scott did see Wilhemina in a green cloak.  Throughout this loving from afar and attraction on Scott's part (there is no evidence of what Wilhelmina felt one way or another). Scott continued his affair with Jessie. It was Jessie's necklace he wore and Jessie who kept him from prostitutes in Edinburgh.  Rather quickly a rival supplanted Scott's desires, a man with a title and ties to financial institutions William Forbes.  Women were married off to further the ambitions of the men in their family. Sutherland discerns Scott's father in some of this refusing to pay or offer to pay the huge dowry and settlement the match would have cost him.

How heart-broken Scott was we cannot tell says Sutherland but it was only a few months later he married Charlotte Carpenter who was an equal match for rank and property and prospects.

I did find myself remembering Scott's very quiet or sober and moving objection to Austen's morality in Emma. He says surely we don't need anyone to encourage prudence and worldliness in novels, as that is done quite enough in life, and a couple of other such sentences (on the side of romance). It's at such moments I think we might say we see the older Scott's memories for real of what he lost or could have had if he did have any personal liking for Wilhelmina.  It's at such moments (and they are not I repeat not infrequent in his fiction and even more his criticism) I like Scott.

From his journal by the way he seemed to get along with his wife, but there is no sense of intimate companionship or support; rather it's a partnership both understand. I can't remember much about the children any more but if Scott did take advantage of one daughter, leant on her, he also was tied emotionally and this was what was done to girls as a matter of course. Sutherland shows Scott's father had done the same to a sister of Scott's.  Girls could be used this way: they had no recourse to school, were not trained for profession and the gentry ones could only marry where they met, and their movements were strictly conttroled; so partents could refuse them marriage and then use them as upper servants in effect (no matter ow this would have been covered up and rationalized and we see these girls miserable, with nervous breakdowns and so on; maybe beging a governess for some was escape as in Claire Claremont). That's what Wordsworth did to his one daughter until late in life when she finally escaped him and her mother. It's no real excuse of course since it's not that hard to find others at the same time acting decently (e.g., Southey who as a person except for his obdurate cruelty to women writers rather decent).

What bothers me about Scott's lies, Lockhart's refabrications and the fatuous romancing of Edgar Johnson is they reinforce cruel and pernicious stereotypes of masculinity and women's lives.  If they made his life easier and kept his reputation up, they distort what is valuable in the books, which is all we have left that's worth anything.



Cover illustration of recent edition of Heart of Mid-Lothian (Porteous Mob by Victorian painter, Drummond), a novel actually about a young woman seduced, impregnated and then accused of infanticide when her baby is born dead

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Young adulthood, poetry, early scholarly and biographical work

In Chapters 3-5, settling down, and building an endurable life, the book continues debunking hypocrisies and fatuities step-by-step and giving a real picture of Scott's life and work. 

Getting forward ends on Scott's marriage to Charlotte Carpentier. Both were eager to find partners and that helped too: for both it was time.  Charlotte was apparently the daughter of the Marquis of Downshire, and the portrait of Fairford (very appealing) in Regauntlet is a portrait of Scott's de facto father-in-law. Charlotte was educated in a convent and her brother helped by the count's interest to a lucrative post in the East India company. Another man replaced Fairford:  Wyrriot Owen who left Madame Carpentier money to live.  Fairford married and gave Mme Charpentier an allowance and she lived in France.  When Charlotte was dying, she did call for or mention this real father of hers.

She helped Scott live a far more social life than he had known, having a kind of salon in Edinburgh, but there was intense dislike between Scott's parents and his new wife, and life was pretty awful between them all at home.  Apparently Scott's father again did all he could to ruin this marriage (disliking the Frenchness, Catholicism of the woman) but didn't succeed in time (he died).  The marriage became slowly a prudent mutually affectionate partnership. Four children were born and in the early years Charlotte was in good health; later not, and we don't know why.

Scott turned to literary work now that his marital social life and working life too was partly settled.  He had gotten a sinecure through making the right impression on Dundas: every after he was Sheriff of Selkirkshire.  He got an underling to do much of the work and kept the money. He doesn't come out too badly here; he was to decide the big cases (most were these venomous kind of petty money and property squabbles Leonard Woolf describes in his dark novel about village life in Sri Lanka, the sort of thing people murder one another over with subtexts about sex and pride.)  Scott mostly was very humane, didn't hang people and writes that for the most part most of these cases should not be in any court in the first place. Sutherland doesn't say this but I should think Scott learned more about human nature here and its relationship to authority and law.

The early ballads about horseness Sutherland puts down to Scott's compensation for his lameness. One place he could keep up was on horse and he liked to ride and wrote about riding as high romance. He had gone to London with his translations of Goethe and met the right people and also Monk Lewis to help him. But such a project could go nowehere; anyway as St Clair would say the texts were sold far too expensively. They were also strange to English peopel and erudite.

So he came back to his friends in Scotland, one Heber sound like a nice type. Scott gets involved repeatedly with people who are reclusive, men who are probably homosexual and sensitive literary men. It's through these acquaintances and his abiilty to also connect to people like Percy and Ritson (both who themselves hated one another) that really led to his career. Bourdeius would call this social capital and Scott's abilty to make and keep friends -- he was socially able.

The long chapter on the Ministrelsey of the Scottish borders is fascinating. I don't want to summarize the details as it would take too long and people can read it themselves who are interested -- by which I mean much of this doesn't shed that much light on Scott's novels and poetry and criticism. What does I'll now recount beyond that Johnson and Lockhard wrongly made fun of and misrepresented John Leyden (one of these central friends and associates) as a uncouth half-mad genius who became this learned person all by himself and they didn't give him the central credit for what was produced which he should have gotten. It was due to Leyden it became a 3 volume big work. Leyden himself is a credit to the Scottish educational system at the time, showing what can happen when education is given out to people based on principles of democratic universality.  He was seen to be very bright and got to university for 7 years.  Scott did give him a lucrative position in India to pay him off and that's what he wanted, but he is not properly credited in the book.

Much of the footwork of gathering the ballads was done by these other people who themselves often had not much to do (or much money).  Scott was a married man and he had his job in Edinburgh for 3 sessions a year.

Scott never it seems says anything that can be construed as for progressive thought -- at least not in his public and daylight self or life.  The theory behind Minstrelsy is also all wrong and pro-aristocratic.  He stayed with idea that the ballads are the product of a few aristocratic types, and are Scottish. In fact at the time there was enough knowledge to know some of the most famous poems are redos of earlier French pieces and they do rise from communities, perhaps from individuals originally but are much changed in transmission and women could have therefore had a hand in them too.

This Minstrelsey set Scott's career off.  The Ministresley volumes would only reach a limited set of people, but they were the right people and Scott began to write in a vein that was fruitful for his fantasy life. He began to write originally these ballads which whipped up his id and appetites and dreams. They are very gory and violent but also insipid and probably mroe than a little repetitive and dull. I've seen this kind of thing in early English anonymous verse from the middle ages.


Meanwhile Scott's uncle died and left him a lot money.  He and Charlotte have a townhouse in Edinburgh which they kept for 25 years. He also settled through connections in a lovely country house which cost him only 30 pounds a year; it was amply big for the four children, it was in Lasswade. He need never have been broke. (p. 73). Some of his income also came from his being in effect a top police man.   It never mattered to him how broke the people around him were, how miserabl these wars were for them.  His downfall was vanity, pride, and it reminds me of my neighbors (really) who buy houses which are just fine and then go into big loans to make them huge and fancy and impressive. (The depression here in the US only hits some classes; the Bushite types are many of them still just fine; Obama has done nothing to cut into their incomes at all; his tax changes just bring us back to Reagon years.)

In chapter 5 we see Scott take up with some society ladies and write a poem which pleased one: Cadyow Castle -- vivid trailer for violent movie really. This was still ballad stull  He gets involved with the Ballantyne brothers, one of whom Sutherland says was a crook and the other deluded. And he takes up a working writing life like Trollope"s: he gets up early in the morning and for the first three hours writes away.  

We are told repeatedly Scott's one sin was his love of Abbotsford and he went into bad debt because of that and then the Ballantyne brothers failed. It makes him sound relatively innocent -- after all it's not such a bad failing to want to make a beautiful estate that is today still treasured by the many who visit it.



Abbotsford, dreamt about over photos by those who can't afford to

But according to Sutherland thus far, in fact Ballantyne brothers were from the get-go financed by Scott. Through his connections Scott borrowed money to get them started and keep them going. He brought other authors to them, and he began to make needed money by his editions and criticisms of Swift and Dryden.

Is this so bad?  Well, partly relying on Quayle, Sutherland characterized Scott as more than worried about provision for his family, but as someone avid for money, property, higher rank, prestige, and willing to do anything to anyone to get this. One story here:  Scott ruined his younger brother, Daniel. Daniel made two mistakes: when sent to the Carribean he did not savagely put down a slave revolt and was not kept on in his job.  Scott castigated him for lack of courage.  Even worse: Daniel fell in love with the housekeeper to the Marquis of Abercorn. Scott was mortified and deeply angry. Now how could Scott visit the Abercorns with his brother involved with their housekeeper.  Scott was at the time flattering and cajoling this pair of people, especially the woman.

A digression: I'm also reading at this time Arlette Farge's Fragile Lives and she talks of the intense anger, real wrath and revenge taken by families on anyone who persisted in marrying beneath them or someone who would not aggrandize the family. In France there were lettres de cachet, but for the most part she can't give particulars as the police records don't have them. Lettres de cachet were used because you just went to the king, he could sign, no habeas corpus law was in place.  Farge is astonished at the rage: I'm not. The family members are like Mrs Norris: they hate the person who shows us their viciousness.

Back to Daniel: Daniel got Miss Currie Laugh pregnant and marriage was not an option. He had in fact been sent away to prevent this and the baby was born out of wedlock. Then (as in Farge) he had the temerity (and disgusting lowness) to return to her and live with her again. It seems he may even have married her on the sly. How low can you get? Daniel like Scott's older brother drank himself to death. He collapsed. Scott would not attend his funeral. Lockhardt covers this all up, and then tells us how Scott felt all this remorse and gave us a picture of Daniel as a hero in Fair Maid of Perth. Apparently Edgar Johnson goes on about this.

How good of him.  But it appears Scott did not (as Lockhardt claimed) provide for Daniel's son by Miss Laugh. He did give the boy 100 pounds to be apprenticed to a clothier in Edinburgh, but when Scott went bankrupt, he informed the boy that he could not continue payments.  The young man was cast adrift with 10 pounds; his mother could or would not help him and he vanishes from "good society."  The mother did marry again, this time to Mitchell of Selkirk, a gentlemen of a small standing in his town. She had been an educated women (a housekeeper is not nothing). 

Sutherland says of Quayle's book, The Ruin of Walter Scott, that Quayle treats Scott as an enemy and villain and he does not.  It's true that Sutherland makes Scott's motives understandable and shows him to be deluded over the youngest brother (endlessly supporting him even after he was discovered to be an embezzler).  One might say what worse could one say than Sutherland here? Apparently Quayle shows an intense "innate greed" and other behaviors in the Ballantyne business that are even more ruthless and inexcusable.  For Scott was behaving the way people of his type behaved at this time, particularly with his values, outlook and as a person wanting to climb up no matter what.  He would have been supported as pious by many had this story got out; and it was probably known. 

Another non-digression:  The Ruin of Sir Walter Scott by Quayle, is a very old-fashioned hard back copy (dead cheap). I can see Quayle is an expert on the Ballantyne family; I don't know how much I can get into this one which is so detailed but I can pick up Quayle's attitude towards Scott in the opening epigraph:  "O what a tangled web we weave/when first we practice to deceive" (that's from Marmion) and also the picture of Scott which is an unusual one showing Scott not looking like some eternal monument but with his eyes bloodshot and also looking shifty or bleak and angry, askance, and his face tired and grim. I like it better than any other I've seen; he's more human. Looking a little closer at the picture of Scott in Quayle's book, I find it's by Andrew Geddes and I'd describe it a little more fully as  his eyes bloodshot and also looking shifty or bleak and angry, askance, and his face tired and grim. His lips are set tight and yet he looks like he is about to laugh (or grimace).  His hair is slightly awry too. I do not wonder why this one is not better known -- like Cassandra's portrait of Jane Austen, this reality is not wanted.  I remember how Virginia Woolf said how that much that we read is so dull and bland and a wasteland and it need not be that way at all.

The man described in Sutherland's biography is the man I met in Scott's journals. I was startled by three elements in the journals:  one, the genius.  Nothing in Scott's fictions come near his character sketches.  His character sketches in his fiction are for the most part bland in comparison and stereotypes with nothing political for real brought out.  He really captures real people in their actual setting. It gives you insight into how he could manipulate others.

Which gets me to two: I did dislike the man as I read on.  How ruthless and cold he could be.  I found him actually actively working to prevent liberal and other progressive types from being taken on anywhere. It was no skin off his nose in a couple of instances.

Three: melancholy. The man was partly a depressive. He was very sensitive and did love beauty and appreciated how hard and dark the world is. This comes out towards the end of his journals.

I'd like to stress I didn't read them through. Too long. I dipped and read and dipped.  But I certainly got enough to agree with Carlyle that Scott could have written so much better.  He wrote down and (like Trollope) censored himself to fit a political agenda. If he goes well beyond this, which he does at times, it's his unconscious and better self coming out.

What really gets me is how Edgar Johnson, a man of our time, covered all this sort of thing up too.  I was too young ever to ask Coleman Parsons any serious questions about Scott. I wonder what he would have said. He told me he was at Columbia at a time when salaries were low and if it hadn't been for his family, could not have persevered in his career.  So who knows?  Nothing he ever said or wrote came near what you can find in Sutherland.

Well, Scott maintained an extraordinary pace and did so many things all at once and then drove himself to write book after book once he and Ballantyne went bankrupt.  In fact he didn't save Abbotsford for himself -- I haven't gotten there, but know that it went into a kind of receivership for a while.  In the journal I read the last three years he did little at long last and just travelled a little out of Scotland (to Italy) at long last.

He did write for money and his books show this. I came across a wry comment by Anna Barbauld where reading his poetry she quipped something about how it was the product of a need to sell and quickly. Now this is before the novels had begun :). 

Briefly, Scott himself funded the Ballantyne brothers and did all he could to undermine Constable and others. Very close and unscrupulous dealings by the way with people like Malone whose scholarship Scott relied upon but didn't pay for or acknowledge. Meanwhile he was churning out these appalling poems -- The lay of the Last Minstrel was however popular. It has a lot of alluring picturesque descriptions (set in the verse) which appeals and was published with suitable illustrations.  When Ballantyne went under, it was Scott who was going under. Basically he lived well beyond his means and kept making books he couldn't get the money for (well beyond his own); the cost of running the business (which included him using someone else as a front for a Tory quarterly) was just about even and then he went and gave up his Ashetiel property where he was a tenant (he couldn't bear to be a tenant) and moved into the extravaganza of Abbottsford.

On Abbotsford Sutherland is very good: he pictures it for us and says  how it was built and who did it.  He demonstrates it's been very influential, far more than super-respected architects because it answers to a dream of the past which is popular. I have just gotten to Waverley.  And Sutherland is exposing the myths here too: about finding the opening six chapters six years later and ho hum going to it. At the same time Sutherland shows what a genius Scott could be. His Dryden is the first sociological and close reading literary biography in English. He felt for Dryden: Scott seems to admire all the some people today find what is worst about him: how he changed sides when he needed to, his party man, his extreme conservatism towards the end.  If he ruthlessly used the work of others, he used it to make the first modern studies of a period in the way we understand it, sort of anthropological, an outlook which informs the novels.

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The novelist




Arthur's Seat, Craig's Tower by Wm Turner

What a sort of relief when one gets to Waverley.  While Sutherland does justice to Scott as an original critic, his activities to enrich himself enormously, put up his status, and grasp the hands of a press which he could control (I think this is like Dickens, Bob, who I regard as a canny businessman when it comes to getting his own press and his hard-dealing with publishers), and his behavior to various people and ruthless politics just are so offputting.  The fun of this part is partly seeing Sutherland expose the fatuity and (shall I call it) Victorianism (in the worst sense) of EJ (Edgar Johnson).

But when he gets to the novels although he's hasn't the space to get at the inner life of the novels at their finest, he is very good. I've gotten up to 1820 so I've now read past Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, and the English phase.  Sutherland divides the books into Scottish phase, English phase, and then (dropping these categories), a kind of breakthrough in Bride of Lammermoor.

He spends 12 close packed pages on Heart of Midlothian as one of Scott's "very imperfect masterpieces" and I've not got the time nor would it be really helpful to summarize as the argument and analysis is so complicated. For this kind of section alone though I'd say this biography is worth it. (Garside's critique is the result of academic politics and his career bias.) I think I'll just emphasize that Sutherland presents Heart of MidLothian as "the first nonpornographic novel in the English language to deal with "the tricky matter of contraception, infanticide, abortion, and the embarrassing propensities of the working classes to breed." Alas, as I feared, Scott is actually on the side of the law which would hang Effie Deans ("pour encourager les autres" to quote Voltaire's succinct quip on this mindset) really for succumbing to seduction and then desperate and understandably not behaving according to codes which would at least have not murdere dher when she gave birth to a stillborn child.  Why do I want to read a heartless book?  A good question. I should say according to Sutherland The Heart of Midlothian sold manically: huge numbers of books.

Sutherland devotes far fewer pages to both of The Abbot and Monastery than, and sees The Abbot as a sequel (a first sequel in the English marketplace, Sutherland thinks) intended to make up for inadequacies in the rushed Monastery. (We shoudl not forget this writing is for money, big money and Scott wanted this bad and drove himsel.) In the event, The Abbot and Ivanhoe were seen in context by sophisticated readers as about very hot issues. In the case of The Abbot Queen Caroline who was treated very badly by the king and then died. Scott's novels were topical and present adulterous women as a vexing issue but he does glamorize Mary to an extent it took a very long time for her to be de-glamorized and become unsympathetic (only in recent movies where Elizabeth is now replacing her -- as in Cate Blanchard's and Helen Mirren's embodiments). Again he's on the wrong side and doesn't see how this is compensatory victimhood thrown out to women to wallow in.

Sutherland proposes an interesting topical slant on Ivanhoe. I could summarize the concise explanations for Old Mortality too. The Antiquarian is more like Heart of Midlothian: long, densely packed and too rich a book and analysis.

However, what Sutherland is talking about is the conscious Scott, the conscious message we might say that can be read in these books. I would argue that it's the unconscious mythic level of another level of Scot'ts writing self that we can find depths and interests in both in the picturesque passages, the characters and actions and also the narrator's ruminatons.  And I think it's this level of Heart of MidLothian I'd like to acquaint myself with again -- if I can read it at night.  Sutherland is enormously readable (like Trollope); Scott as a novelist is not.

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The Tory Grandee and influential man behind the acrimonious hack-attack journals of the time

Sutherland's tale of the real Scott in the journalistic world of his times and his son-in-law Lockhart is important.  The opening of Chapter 12 tells all sorts of things I didn't know about Lockhart but am not surprized at.  First once Scott is the author of these famous stupendous best-selling novels and has gotten his hand into and controlling a press (Ballantynes which he funded and exploited for his career) and a couple of notably Tory quarterlies, to say nothing of his positions in the Scottish establishement, plum houses, and connections, he wields patronage Big.  He got John Wilson (the great attacker of Barbauld by the way), the chair of Blackwood's instead of the qualified Sir William Hamilton:  Sutherland calls this a Caligula like appointment, and say it was justified to Soctt on groups of the man's Tory politics and (to Scott) amusing wit.

Then we get the story of Lockhart:  his nickhame was the Scorpion, and Sutherland says he most of the time was "saturnine," misanthropic, and often venomous outside his knack of a very few chosen friendships. I knew that Scott made his career from the journal but not what shits the pair were together.  Lockhart came to Abbotsford and fell in love with the place; he would not be the first or uncommon for marrying to get a certain father-in-law. I knew this as also his descriptions of Scott go beyond sycophancy into idolatry. I didn't know how often they veer so far from the truth (until I read this book and Quayle).

Scott did warn Lockhart against the kind of brutal satire the journals of the time did promulgate (maybe Keats was really done in by one of these; they didn't help a TB victim I'm sure).  First John Scott, editor of Baldwin's openly accused Lockhart of being the secret editor of Blackwood's and attacking the "Cockney school of poetry" on political grounds, and he had the courage to call Scott a man with a "penchant for hoaxing and masquerade;" in brief, John Scott ended up dead; Lockhart challenged him and then after publicly branding John Scott a liar and coward (not so at all), retreated to leave his second, Jonathan Christie to murder John Scott in a duel.

Scott then urged Lockhart to mend his ways and Lockhart wrote an "excruciatingly dull classical romance Valerius; only Walter Scott ever found merit in it. Walter also showed little sympathy for John Scott on his deathbed.  Scott then did all he could to insinuate his son-in-law into the higher echelons of tory power and get him a career as a London editor. Lockhart rose only to be "the eventually embittered editor of a decayed Quarterly Review."  It was often venomous.  His one book that has lasted is his life of Scott

In character I have to say (from my reading of the journals)

John Ballantyne died, and Scott wrote for him a set of introductions to the novelists's library; it was a gift as he didn't charge. The man has TB and Scott then insisted he work hard to publish the novelists' library against Constable.  John did die; Scott was kind ot his family: John left Scott a non-existence 2000 pounds, earning Lockhart's scoffing at him.  Quayle, who is the biographer of the Ballantynes outlines this phase:  when John died, Scott lured James back into the business on advantageous terms to get someone in place.

Scott then started a magazine called the Beacon; it was intended to be ruthlessly Tory in every way.  It slandered a whig, James Wilson and one James Stuart who thrashed an editor in the street.  According to Sutherland, those in the know who knew the realities of the literary commercial marketplace world, especially magazines had begun to see that Scott was "a provocateur of unprincipled literary ruffianism". Gibson threatened Scott with a challenge (once you were challenged in this atavastic male atmosphere that reigned then you had to fight somehow or other or would be bullied and ridiculed out of all social places by thug-types). James Stuart was not satisfied with not knowing and when the attacks on him were resumed, he managed to find out the writer was Alexander Boswell (I wonder if and how related to James); a duel ensued, and Stuart murdered Boswell, and was acquitted (defended by distinguished Whig lawyers, Francis Jeffreys and Henry Cockburn).

Lockhart wrote that Scott had nothing to do with the Beacon; it is not at all persuasive; Scott founded, designed, launched the thing. He knew what was written in it (from his journal). Boswell had dined with Scott a couple of days before the murder, a dinner Scott recorded he much enjoyed. Sutherland writes: "although he could contemplate the death of John Scott as the disposal of so much dung, the shooting of his nobleman friend affected Scott deeply. Lockhart said as how a duel in St Ronan's Well memorializes Boswell.

It was a scummy world that of early 19th century journalism, but Scott did nothing to restrain Lockhart and for real encouraged him. Sutherland ends: "he was an accomplice before and after the fact and bestowed favours on those who did his party's dirtiest work."

No wonder so much in his novels are aksi dull; he (as Carlyle says) hiding fundamental aspects of his personality all the time.  The difficult years of Scott's youth (crippled, sensitive and so accused of not being manly, no secure mother nor supportive father or loving person to be absolutley depended upon, only the contingent kind aunt, the third brother) -- led to an adult so determined not to go under he overcompensated into ruthlessness, innate greed (he never had enough to satisfy him) and clawing his way to the top of the hierarchies of his era.  Indeed we also see a kind of deep anger coming out, and lack of compassion for most others vulnerable.

The thing is such a childhood could produce an opposite effect: someone who identifies with the vulnerable and hurt and wants to bring them along with him or her.  So yes there's no reason to like him especially. Sutherland's book has great explanatory power and gives context for Carlyle's famous assessment. But he does forget the writing self and he continually leaves out or minimizes how there is an artist's self which comes out differently and he is not inward when he gets into the books either. He has little patience for the melancholy sensitive Scott we do find in the books. Now that self was in his public consciousness too and helps explain how good he was at making friends.

Chapter 12 ends on succinct analyses of Kenilworth, The Pirate, and The Fortunes of Nigel.  Kenilworth was influential if only because if inaugurated the three volumer for the century to come.  He suggests the complete disregard of historical realities shows a kind of contempt for Scott's readership.  Carlyle thought this too.

Kenilworth's mixing of history and events is so complicated, I leave it to others to read good introductions or Sutherland: it is meant as a celebration of English nationhood as a pastiche Elizabethanism; many of its incidents are now enshrined as having happened (Raleigh putting his cloak on the mud before Elizabeth I; and it became a main source for illustrated Elizabethanism.  Sutherland suggests analysis of its inward text (which we did on ECW and I invite people who are interested to join, determinedly search the archives) is as worth doing as Goethe's Elective Affinities. I agree for the portraits of women, men, and sexually.

The Pirate is one I've not read and is here presented as based on stories Scott was told by friends; Scott loved "the thresholds of history" he said, "the ancient rough and wild manners of a barbarous age ... just becoming innovated upon and contrasted by the illumination of learning and instructions of renewed or reformed religion."  The descriptions of the Northern Isles is what it's famous for. The Fortunes of Nigel (another one I've not read) is said to be really about the coronation of 1821, and come out of the concoctions of (false) nationalism, highlander traditions all cooked up by Scott. Scott in fact knew very little about militant women (who appear in these books) as he did the life of the NOrthern Isles at the time or on the oceans.

Scott's price was beginning to go down at this point but he was still milking the Ballantyne firm ruthlesssly, taking its capital out to build Abbotsford. Ballantyne thought Abbotsford was part of his security; it wasn't.

Yes novels were written in three volume form frequently before Scott's time:  Austen makes fun of the 297 page "rule" (or maybe it's 279) for each volume in one of her texts.  But it was in a sort of institution exploited for commercial gain.  Kenilworth was retailed not just as 3 volumes, but for a guinea and one half, and in a luxurious binding and octavo.  That's the ticket until late in the century. Novels were marketed in instalments and then published in this way and only a couple of years later came the cheaper editions.  This way of marketing enabled people like Trollope and Dickens to grow rich by their ability to write to this formula and extract a high fee (Trollope) or develope their own publishing press (Dickens did this in his magazines). St Clair points to how convenient this was to the establishment too in controlling what books reached the public.

So Scott led the way for this Victorian tool of commerce.  

A curious quotation: Goethe's response to Kenilworth was he would never read a Scott novel again. He had too little time to waste on what he could not "learn" anything from. Sutherland points out how Scott completely re-arranges history.  Goethe would not have been interested to read for how Scott regards sex and women and murder :).  Sutherland (I think I said) says that you can gain as much from close reading of Kenilworth as Electrive Affinities:  that second book is well chosen as EA is a stunner when you are reading for attitudes towards love, marriage, sexuality, deeply iconoclastic, brilliant, disturbing and (I think) utterly accurate about human nature.  Goethe saw Kenilworth as a low in commercialism in Scott.  It did make pots of money, and (I agree -- read it with Judy on ECW about 2 years ago) is a rapid fast read, just what people say is true of Ivanhoe is actually true of Kenilworth. Ivanhoe is slower going.

I should mention I am noticing that Sutherland often quotes Herbert Grierson's 1938 Sir Walter Scott book when he is discussing the novels.  I am wondering if in fact that is a good book for analysis.

**************************
Almost Done:  Crash and Carry on Regardless

There's a memoir I love (by Nuala O'Faolain) called "Almost Done" -- it takes her into middle age.  I've read several more chapters as can be seen from my header and can't summarize all that I've read.  Rather I'll give succint synopses; 

Chapter 13 tells of how Scott almost single-handedly (well, with a little help from all his well-placed and favored friends) engineered a royal visit which made it seem as if George IV was a spectacularly popular man, and where Scott invented a number of hitherto unknown traditions out of scattered habits, clothes, history which are now used in nationalistic celebrations of Scottishness; then Sutherland goes into Redgauntlet, another of Scott's finer and genuinely interesting novels.  What's remarkable is its subjectivity -- it's epistolary for about 1/3 through. It's here we are told Scott's journal began and became his "best writing" of his last years. That this one hero (as well I think as the antiquary) is Scott's alter ego can be seen in one of Darsie's (the hero's name) letters journal entries in Redgauntlet:
 
     "Yet, in the meanwhile, the exercise of the pen seems to act as a sedative on my own agitated thoughts and tumultuous passions. I never lay it down but I rise stronger in resolution and ardent hope.  A thousand vague fears, wild expectations, and indigested schemes, hurry through one's thoughts in seasons of doubt and of danger. But by arresting them as they flit across the mind, by throwing them on paper, and even by that mechanical act compelling ourselves to consider them with scrupulous and minute attention, we may become the dupes of our own excited imagination; just as a young horse is cured of the vice of starting, by being made to stand still and look for some time without interruption."



On line image of a page of 1814 manuscript of Waverley

I wonder if this isn't a key to the impulse to write for many writers. It's brilliant and important as a statement about the experience of writing. Trollope and James can give us analysis of how their imaginations work, but they do not tell us how the act of imagining and writing lifts them from their narrow selves and depression and circumstances.  When Sutherland quotes this kind of passage, I know he's a great biographer as well as understands books.  I would say the above is the kind of passage I've been pointing to when I say what I read Scott for and there are more of these in his novels than is ever supposed when you read literary readings or interpretations or criticisms of his texts.

Chapters 14 and 15 are "The Crash" and "Working for Creditors."  I couldn't myself give a real precis since I don't understand the finer ins and outs of bill discounting (so I sometimes get lost in a Trollope book. Suffice to say Scott along with Constable and Ballantyne (all three knew what they were doing) borrowed hugely and weren't making off their presses what they borrowed; on top of that Scott creamed off a lot of the money for building Abbotsford and whatever else he needed to make the right splashes, as for example, when he married his heir off to the "right woman" (who at least Scott liked but not the son very much and she never produced any child). It made Lady Scott just miserable (remember her, the socialite) and her very last years were awful -- she had had this bad illness since the 4th pregnancy and child and she died fairly young -- as did all Scott and her children.  Sutherland says Scott was not very sympathetic; I can see he (like many writers) spends huge amounts of time reading and writing and that's the life he really lives (so to speak). EJ and Lockhardt (Scott's cheerers-on) go on about how honorable Scott was when he could have declared bankruptcy, but had he done that he would have lost his house and status, and by letting him keep the house, and try to keep paying the creditors had a hope of getting something and he of not losing all he had worked to gain.  On the plus side, Scott had made the novels a respectable potent form (we talked of his when this weekend in response to Nick: historical, marxist, European, a vehicle for nationalisms, and certainly now men took over); Ballantyne had run a small town newspaper, now he was teh head of a printing factory with major UK-wide important publications for the world of culture in many areas; Constable went from a second-hand bookseller to a powerful publisher.  Constable lost most and so did his family (and Scott did behave badly): Scott "demonized Constable" (blamed him); for Ballantyne, Quayle is apparently an heir, but Daiches tells of Scott's callousness as he continued to live comfortably when his two ex-colleagues and erstwhile friends went down the drain. 

Chapter 16 is Magnum Opus.  Remarkably Scott did carry on writing and wrote some remarkable books:  Fair Maid of Perth is one (the most bloody novel Scott ever wrote). He was aging and no longer well, but it does seem he could forget all consciously and throw himself into his books.  He had put into Constable's head the idea of collecting and publishing all his fiction.  It's a good marketing step and was later used by George Eliot and G.H. Lewes for her fiction, Henry James for his. It makes an automatic landmark and if it builds on previous popularity or at least some niche, it can "make" an author part of the canon.

I was pleased to find in Sutherland that he agrees with me that Scott's journal late in life is a work of genius often and Scott was moving from the novels to autobiography at the time.  But this influenced no one as it was not published until much later and only recently whole and unabridged and uncensored.  I regret Sutherland does not go into Scott's excellent biographical and critical essays of his contemporary novelists, perhaps because they are mostly of women? (eg. Austen, Smith, Radcliffe).  Nor Scott's Tory series of novelists; by contrast Barbauld's earlier one contains almost equal women novelists and writers from the later 18th century and various types of novels (Scott goes for his predecessors), and also heterodox ones.



Scott's study

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Last years

It seems obvious to me that Sutherland does not like Scott the man, though he admires him for his tenacity and worldly successes.  That may be seen in the ending of the book. Most biographies end somewhat sadly, with a sense of tragedy -- as the subject usually dies and death rarely comes without much grief. 

This is not true of this book.  It carries on rather in its tone of bring out the truth at last in the context of exposing the falsities of what has been written (mostly by Lockhart and Edgar Johnson).  We are told all of Scott's failing intellects, the later unhappy years of his nuclear family, their relatively short lives, his persistence in writing, and Sutherland sees that his friends and business associates should have encouraged him to rest, and they did not.  Maybe he wouldn't let them :).  And he himself had not been kind to others; why should they be so to him?  He had not chosen friends for their decent natures.  Towards the end the one partner who kept him going was Cadell (not Constable or the Ballantynes who he had variously betrayed) and it was Cadell who helped him publish and sells widely his Magnum Opus (his works). 

He did write more original works: the book on witchcraft is a early version of serious anthropology (I've actually read about half of it), Anne of Geierstein (like Fanny Burney's last book) is about aging people; there were more Tales of my Grandfather (which Scott kept the profits from somehow or other); Count Robert of Paris, marred as it is by Scott's incoherence and his son-in-law's censorship and whole-scale rewriting, shows the grotesquerie of humanity, its customs and societies powerfully.

He was also (as Sutherland says) "an odd kind of bankrupt."  He had 1600 pounds (in effect) unearned income each year, lived in one of the finest private houses in Scotland rent-free, and beyond that kept 1000 pounds a year from his pen (beyond the Grandfather Tales).

Ellen

Dear Friends,

I've been reading Margaret Atwood's poetry and essays on and off for some years now; a few years ago, I read her historical novel (Booker Prize type), Alias Grace, and now this past month, managed her remarkable women's novel of girlhood and growing up, Cat's Eye.  I have no patience for science fiction or allegory, but what I've read of hers, I know that taken together she is one of the major voices of our time.  Survival is a great work about Candian literature.  She has a conception of Canadian literature (English and French) as desperate, as a place and people that have been imprisoned/dominated/shaped by two empires of arrogance: the US and UK, and as a culture whose landscape is strongly hostile/indifferent to human life so must be struggled against.  Her chapter on women in Canadian literature turns up types, a couple of which are central and which Susanna Moodie conforms to to a "T." The hard older "negative" woman, powerful, neither Diana or Venus but some combination of Hecate and Rapunzel.  She uses the archetypes as part of her reductive way of grasping essences in the book.  Her way of describing the imagery and symbols of French Canadian literature reminded me of Willa Cather's The Shadow and the Rock, a historical novel set in 17th/18th century French Canada.

Her Journals of Susannah Moodie are a cycle of poems wherein she shows the way women cope with predecessors is not to erase or knock them out or conquer them, but rewrite and assimilate them into their own work.  Here's the first poem by Atwood which is a play on the opening chapters of Moodie's powerful Roughing It in the Bush:

Disembarking in Quebec

Is it my clothes, my way of walking,
the things I carry in my hand
-- a book, a bag with knitting --
the incongruous pink of my shawl

this space cannot hear

or it is my own lack
of conviction which makes
these vistas of desolation,
long hills, the swamps, the barren sand, the glare
of sun on the bone-white
driftlogs, omens of winter,
the moon alien in day-
time a thin refusal

The others leap, shout
          Freedom!

The moving water will not show me
my reflection.

The rocks ignore.

I am a word
in a foreign language.



Emily Carr, a later 19th to mid-10th century Canadian artist and memoirist, Fir Tree and Sky

 Moodie's memoir, which we read on WWTTA (a small women writers this on Yahoo I own and manage] together). is one of the great travel and emigration memoirs of the 19th century. I wrote about this weekly on WWTTA but at length and cannot reproduce them here. I'd have to put them on my website. Her Aias Grace tells the story fo a young woman accused of murdering her employer, and it's against Susannah Moodie's apparently unsymnpathetic account. It's a complex emigration and Jane Eyre story which she shows Moodie got wrong. Ditto on this profound passionate novel. It won the Booker and was almost made into a movie (with Cate Blanchett it was said).

She belongs under the sign of Austen for she writes as a woman and from a woman's point of view.  Alias Grace may be considered an imitation of older books in the Bronte mode; Cat's Eye is a heroine's text (in Nancy Miller's formulation).  The comparison of Cat's Eye with Emma is in the 8th entry below.  Now I write much less as I read and so here can reproduce my journal or weekly entries to WWTTA:

Cat's Eye was summed up by Fran on WWTTA with her usual insight and concision:

    "On the surface it's about main protagonist and first person narrator Elaine Risley's return to Toronto, the hated town of her childhood, for a retrospective exhibition of her successful art work. This visit then turns more and more into a retrospective of her own life and the personal, social, artistic and political developments that accompanied and helped shape, but also to a certain extent warp, it.
   Re-emerging, hitherto repressed, childhood memories force her to confront and deal with a past she'd preferred to forget or view at a cold, ironic distance, as refracted through the cat's eye marble of the title - especially those issues of girlhood mobbing you mention, Ellen.
   On another level, just as the often ironically distorted pictures in the exhibition reflect these unresolved issues and relationships in Elaine's life, in this novel Atwood also picks up on many of the themes, symbols and characters from her earlier novels, developing them further to forge them into a strongly associative intertextual network so that the book itself in effect becomes both a retrospective and highly successful culmination of Atwood's own work and ideas up to that date (1988).
   It's also wickedly and dryly funny in parts. One of those has to do with women's fashion, shop assistants and changing room mirrors, an episode that came flashing back to mind when struggling with same in London recently"

I wrote about it weekly on WWTTA and here is a condensation of my take which I'll set up as a journal of reading:

Entry 1:

It seems to me a novel written from a dual aspect: on the one hand, girl- or even childhood, and how the world seems half-mad and also just what you noticed as you grow up.  This technique is famous in the US in _To Kill a Mockingbird_.  Harper Lee uses it to show us the world of cruel institutionalized racism, repressive sex, and all that was the "old south" through children's eyes.
   Atwood has a different target and here thus far although she's a little bullied by her friends, Carol, Cordelia, and Grace, I think she holds her own pretty well too.  The mocking voice of the later person also writing the book (the retrospective older voice) puts them in their place and shows up the values they are enacting. I find it a witty (it is funny) depiction of girlhood from a modern feminist standpoint -- not that common; I know of one in essay form I enjoyed (in French) by Chantal Thomas.
   She's also targeting materialistic culture and what gives prestige and so on.  There I must admit I was a fastidious and girlie girl and really think I wuold not have enjoyed being an entomologist's child and feel sorry for Elaine's mother although Elaine is presenting her as an ideal in a way, thorough going unconventional individualist. NOt quite because she follows her husband about and lives on his salary, does what he wants.
   As in good women's novels, there's a continuum of women's lives before us.
   Boys are depicted too and with sympathy. I didn't go to a school where hitting was allowed and it was more progressive in outlook than Elaine's but hers resonates.  The business of two doors is funny.  Yes boys and girls are needlessly faultlined often.  Lining up in size places. Why?  That's how we did it in my school. It was a need for some form of order and discipline.
   As Fran says we also have an older woman on her second marriage, returning to Toronto for a retrospective of her art.  This reminded me of Jane Eyre and so many heroines who are painters. I can't say I'm fond of what Elaine paints though and do think there is an ironic distance between the main characters and Atwood. Elaine is not grateful to her promoters and there's wryness here, as well as in the glancing depictions of Elaine's first and present husband.
   Much on Canada. Without being able to say why it seems to me a Canadian novel. I've read Atwood's wonderful book on Canadian literature its motives and there is a Canadian literature. I passed the playing with marbles and so know why the book is named Cat's eye but not really how the image functions quite -- though it puts me in mind of a really grim book by Carson McCullers with a similar title (because of the title).

Entry 2:

   "I've read on in this, mesmerized but also becoming distinctly uncomfortable.  It is about bullying among girls, and I cringe when I see how Elaine succumbs, and also to some extent, Carol to Grace and Cordelia.
   We talked about girlhood books -- this is one, except there is no record of reading much. I realize this is not Margaret Atwood, the heroine is a distinct different self and I ask myself if Atwood made the heroine not a reading girl, because if she was perhaps she'd be more of a loner and just walk away. Elaine does sometimes walk away, but not enough for her peace or self-esteem.
   We talked about dialoguing with books (on Rachel Cuskl the recent novelist, Saving Agnes her best known novel), well, I find myself as I read remembering that after age 12 I had few or no friends for periods of time, and thinking to myself, whew.  My father said I was neither a follower nor a natural leader and had to become one or the other to join in.  At any rate, as I read this, I remember back a bit and say to myself I didn't miss anything worth experiencing as I stayed with my books.

Entry 3:

   "To connect yet more to my blog about girls' books; boys' books and girls' often have as the great villain a child or young adolescent who is a bully, and gets a group around him or her. He or she humiliates and needles in public. And there's no law against this; even custom doesn't sufficiently do anything at all at this age to curb it. Teachers turn a blind eye -- and I've seen parents do that too, much to my horror.
    What's remarkable in Cat's Eye is how Atwood gets it right. Most of the bullying in these pop books don't go so far as really to capture quite what the experience is.  What she does is she shows how bullies work secretly. Elaine is forbidden to tell others; the things she's driven to do are what's not visible and she's afraid to disobey.  What happens to Carol is Carol breaks off; she won't do it all and thus discovers she can free herself, for the two "powerful" ones don't ostracize her.
  And how these things work on a lack fo self-esteem. The particularity and detail are therefore hard to take and memorable because it really is what one can experience.
   Boys bully differently.  They are more overt because their culture allows aggressive and encourages macho male taunting.  They also (I suggest) free themselves from it quicker. They seem not to have the need for perpetual companionship in the same way. Far more girls go to camp in the summer. Boys are not as docile: they are harder to toilet train and they won't be curbed for camp activities in the same way.  When I was in sleep away camp (once and never again) I noticed the male camp counsellors reasoned more with the boys, were actually more respectful of everyone.  The women counsellors often bought into the false terms of the bullies and reinforced sexual stereotypes a given girl was said not to come up to.
  I was mocked for all my books and reading by my counseller as well as other girls and also eating habits.
  Yes there is a lot of literary allusion but Elaine herslef is not a reader. Maybe I'm giving myself away too much for wanting that, but I did think to myself that in my case and I've seen thsi with others that reading girls have a defense: they can retreat into their books (and nowadays to TV and DVDs and so on and others can do this. But they can be smarter and sometimes, just sometimes common sense can make her see what his bully is, confrront her in front of the others and free yourself. Now you will be ostracized probably anyway, but it does count down on the self-torment.
  Elaine is shown to have self-torment.
  Versions of all this in much much muted forms can carry on in women's groups later on -- well in my experience they are much muted, but then I learned a pattern of keeping away a lot.
   Mirrors yes -- there were a lot in Alias Grace.

Entry 4:

  "Just to link another startlingly frank aspect with hard-to-take things in movies -- and hard to know how to take them.
   Elaine picks her feet, nay she pulls the skin off her feet in strips.  Eeek. I had thought it very rare until very recently to come across realistic or not-uncommon forms of self-injury in obsessive-compulsive modes, but Atwood proves me wrong.  I know how we are to "take" I should say:  as part of the evolution of a girl's personality under intense social pressures and pyschological needs/distress, the pain and absorption cuts down on phenomena coming in and thus relaxes, so we are to feel for her the way we do how she submits to bullying.
  It is part of what makes the book so riveting and real.
  I too have had the experience where I can see why something is included, and in a way be glad it's there because it's right and yet find it hard to take and almost wish it wasn't.

Entry 5:

   "I put two professional pieces in the files of WWTTA: the first an essay linking other novels by Atwood with Cat's Eye, and the other a review in WRofB. The reviewer does worry the question Whether the novels aer "uneasy" about women (polite term for disliking women, misogyny stalking along in the deep background). I'd say no and (though hard to prove) would suggest that Churchill's Top Girls and a few other of the films and plays we discussed were misogynist, but not this. To me, this is about human nature itself, even if we don't see the boys. Maybe because: they are not there so we have no inditement but we could. Elaine does prefer boys and finds them easier to be around.
   I read on and discovered three more features which startled me but struck me as true. The mothers of these four girls appear to know what's going on, and actually do nothing, countenance it.  Elaine's mother says at one point she is helpless. Is she?  Grace's awful mother appears to enjoy knowing her daughter is a bully. This comes out when they actually come close to killing her by getting her to go fetch a hat in a freezing river.  I have seen this and not to describe it, but I did go up to a woman and told her her daughter was a monster, and stopped her daughter from doing something to mine. I did rescue her. The woman was livid, and I told her she was vicious for bringing up her daughter as vicious.
   But what a tiny drop in a sea I am aware.
   Then, there is a suicidal impulse going on in Elaine and that is part of why she's susceptible to bullying. She says when she breaks away finally after this episode, that she couldn't help herself but stay with them and didn't know why. She also plays games of disorientation (p. 185 in my old edition), like when she imagines herself outside her body.  I've done this sort of thing, not imagining myself outside my body but deliberately making myself aware of how odd our bodies are and (what is behind your eyes anyway when you look into a mirror, why an outside down retina, no soul, no soul) you take your hand and ask whose is it, and so on.
   There is deep psychological distress here. The biting her lip until it bleeds is anothers self-injury to soothe and calm herself by hurting herself worse and getting absorbed.
  When people talk of autobiography and veils (optics) in ficiton, there is often this implicit assumption the writer is more aware than they are. Maybe it's so painful they can't look, or (like Atwood who seems very sharp and not inclined to emotional muddle) they say it's no use to look too carefully, does no good.
   I'll end paradoxically on Drabble's Patterns in the Carpet. Not unexpectedly to me, that autobiography tells less about her painful vulnerable inner life than a number of her early novels. Is she conscoiusly hiding in the autobiography? Probably she choses not to tell a lot of things, but does that mean in the novels she choses to tell?  Or does it come out without clarity?
   Especially when the writer has impulses which are socially strongly verboten. This includes sexual orientation, strong dislike of the way social organization in society is arranged (competitive and performative) and erotic behaviors. These sort of cover the ground for the authors I"ve brought together.
   Again I have no answer, but I wonder if essays written somehow seem to assume more self-conscious awareness in writers."

Entry 6:

    "This is an extraordinary novel. I certainly got on with it last night.  She moves onto high school life and her depiction of its perversions is just brilliant. She manages to create a wry stance that is ironic: at times it's like she's a person from Mars looking on at the antics of these frantic people. It's a strong presence: she does not herself have to imitate them but sees the absurdities of high school life.  She herself also begins to take over the dominant place between her and Cordelia.
   She doesn't critique the values and norms of this society but rather shows us the adolescent craziness in reaction. I am seeing why the title. She is looking out with a cat's eye.
    The implicit portrait of her mother as a woman refusing to be complicit, refusing to lead her life dressing herself, making up.  We can see the mother retreated into wifehood as a shield.
   She does though provide ammunition for those who would say this is misogynist or at least prefers men. Her real respect for her brother, and the way she presents him as somehow above it all more than she, more sensible, feels like a product of his being a boy.
And it's not presented as he is this way because the norms for boys make them more comfortable than girls but as it's better to be a boy, they are not so driven, they are calmer, they do better in some subjects."

Entry 7: 

   "What's happened now is Cordelia has turned into the weak personality and Elaine (our heroine) the strong one.  This is fascinating and my feeling is true to life.  One can't predict how a personality will turn out. We see much more of Cordelia's family life, where for example, the women (all girls, a mother) are encouraged to play up to the father.
   It emerges that Elaine's unconventional father and retreating mother were in fact healthy enough for her.
   I do find myself throughout preferring the sections where we fast forward to Elaine the artist today. They are easier to take. She is now almost (but not quite) renewing a relationship with her first husband who is a shit and whose present wife has left him.
   The deepest interest for me is the development of Elaine's personality. This is finally a heroine's text: at its center is the complex heroine we are probably to identify with. Well, I don't like her as she emerges :).  But like Emma, maybe I'm not supposed to.  She is certainly real, as she gets impatient and bored by Cordelia, and almost falls for Husband No 1, Jon, again. I love her scepticism.
   I do wish she were more of a reader, and find myself remembering Heroines who stick in their poetry now and again.  That Elaine doesn't is a signal to me how far from Atwood is this heroine. If aspects of the novel and heroine are autobiographical, the book and central presence as a whole is not -- though Atwood does love to draw and her Susannah Moodie poems appear in an art book of great beauty she did with a fellow artist.

Entry 8: 

    "As I come to the end of this remarkable novel, I think to myself, does it belong to the type of novel Mary McCarthy's Group (which I have never been able to get into) represents? 
   By this I mean to suggest to myself that it's a novel about what happened to this set of young girls.  The heroine, Elaine, begins in present time and her present life, and then she moves back to have a long central section about her girlhood and young adolescence. Each girl's background and situation is accounted for and we see them interact, and then slowly we see how they grew a little later into adulthood, and what happened to each.
   It remains a comfort book since the heroine is clearly among them the relative winner. Cordelia ended in an asylum her relatives put her into; it may be that the woman who looked like Grace comes to Elaine's show and is now a rigidly narrow moralist, retreating into a version of what her mother was, only more waspish because the role is now threatened.
  Atwood treats the feminism of Elaine's new associated and her show skillfully.  First through her flashback technique and juxtaposition, she does reveal how hard it is for a teenage girl and then young women to cope with sex as presented practised (so to speak). She shows how slowly she was drawn into marriage, and Jon's hostility to what makes her life meaningful.  Her loyalty to her daughter.  She also has a heroine who admires boys and wants to be one in part (which is part of what may make this book called anti-women).
   Then the feminism she encounters is presented as alien to her, making her feel insecure and perhaps threatened and as something strange.  It's for comedy but I also think a rhetorical technique to make us identify with the heroine still.
   I can't love this book the way I can say Austen's because finally I can't identify with or recognize myself in the heroine that much and there are aspects of her personality which I regard as very real and nowadays would admit to myself.  Like her coldness to Cordelia in one of their meetings before Cordelia is put away (what a phrase).  I can't warm to her. I want to warm to her :)
   It reminds me of Austen's Emma in this. In her case Emma was the bully and we don't see the inward trajectory of Harriet's moving away from her. So this is superior to the early book in its awareness and compassion, for Atwood herself compassionates Cordelia and even Grace and certainly Elaine's mother.
  Stephen, her brother, is kept from us, leading a successful professional life, but not a personally happy one we can see. 
   Also for its intricate art -- different from the other. Controlled cyclical -- very much a woman's art. 
   But it makes me want to read more of her early novels. When we read Alias Grace, I bought an omnibus book of her early works which includes Surfacing and Edible Woman.  This book will help me get to them at last.

Entry 9:

   "I finished the novel the other night. I found it ended very well. Having just written an email on women's friendships in art, I'll just say that on the concluding page, Elaine cries for Cordelia.  That was a beautiful moment."



Emily Carr, In Autumn

Here is the last poem from Journals of Susannah Moodie. The book I own is an art book supervised by Atwood where she had a friend artist make the separate pages into works of abstract and modern art appropriate to each poem.  For this last poem the recto side a black page, in the center the well-known picture of Susanna Moodie, the one we had on our site for so long. Just the center.  The facial mask. The verso is grey-white and the poem in grey-black letters:

"A Bus Along St. Clair's:  December"

It would take more than that to banish
me:  this is my kingdom still.

Turn, look up
through the gritty window:  an unexplored
wilderness of wires

Though they buried me in monuments
of concrete slabs, of cables
though they mounded a pyramid
of cold light over my head
though they said, We will build
silver paradise with a bulldozer

it shows how little they know
about vanishing:  I have
my ways of getting through.

Right now, the snow
is no more familiar
to you than it was to me:
this is my doing.
The grey air, the roar
going on behind it
are no more famliar.

I am the old woman
sitting across from you on the bus,
her shoulders drawn up like a shawl:
out of her eyes come secret
hatpins, destroying
the walls, the ceiling

Turn, look down:
there is no city:
this is the center of a forest

your place is empty.



Emily Carr, At Sitka

Ellen

Dear Friends,

Reveries under the sign of Austen also includes women writers whose work is in some way directedly indebted or in time closely connected to Austen's.  For tonight I want to speak of Ann Patchett's Bel Canto (published 2001 by HarperCollins, won the Orange Prize).  Her detached, ironic narrator  who maintaining an apparently comfortable, benign universe shows us the terrors and horrors of the world, satirizes and ironizes these.  I've spoken on my old blog of Pattchett's Magician's Assistant but of Bel Canto only in passing.  Bel Canto shows a real understanding of the true nature of kindness, which I think Austen did have.  Patchett celebrates beauty however we reach it. 



Monet -- a painting of great beauty

Her book Bel Canto is a gift (in which she sometimes meditates what is a gift,, when gifts are really valued.

As all the world who knows of this novel know the story line, characters, outcome are based a real hostage taking incident in Peru.  So in the book in an unnamed South American country powerful (=well-connected and rich) guests at a lavish party are taken hostage at the Vice President's mansion. The fiction closely parallels the real event.   In 1996, a group of young "terrorists" took 400 people hostage at the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, Peru.  Both stand-offs lasted for months, but in Patchett's retelling, the clash of language, culture, and fear behind the mansion's walls also becomes a story about the power of music and the power of redemption.

The ending counts and the book's mirrors the real ending.  The Peruvian government did finally assault the place -- just as the US government has done everytime the hostage takers don't give in.  And of course public accolades of congratulations.  The way the deaths were spoken of minimized it:  14 rebels (including leader and two teenage girls), 3 others died.   The three others were Peruvian soldiers and a hostage.  The single hostage. No hostage was killed by the group who took them.  A judge also died of a heart attack, 25 wounded in gunfire, of which 2 were said to have serious permanent injuries.  Many of the terrorists were teenagers, and some surrendered, but they were "executed" anyway -- a Beatriz is.

As originally written the book ended with the deaths of two of our pair of lovers:  Carmen and Mr Hosokawa: 

  "One shot fixed them together in a pairing no one had considered before: Carmen and Mr Hosokawa, her head just to the left of his as if she was looking over his shoulder" -- for eternity.

As originally written our coda was the prologue.    Originally Patchett wanted us to begin with who would die.  Whole thing would be ironic instead of mildly suspenseful.  It would darken the work but also lose tension.  She was persuaded to tack it on to the end: -- the two left-over lovers (Gen and Roxanne Coss) marry one another, so as to remember, to keep the other alive. This time round reading it I can see it doesn't change the devastating close or the comment on the irrationality, egoism and (as seen in this book, this is the author's stance one we need not agree with) uselessness of political rebellion, negotiation, reform -- for those who run governments are determined to keep power, and I think (rightly) show to be legal terrorists.  She did chose her incident carefully; but it's not uncommon for terrorists to hold onto hostages; after all, that's all they've got, this is their playing card (the civilian). 

I put an essay on line which attacks the book as on the side of whites, upper class, elites Jane Marcus-Delgado; I think the writer has misunderstood the whole point of this book politically.  While it is a fantasy idyll in the way of Francis Hodgson Burnett's Secret Garden -- where song, a house, being cut off from a hard anonyous competitive world for money -- it also is savagely ironic. It means to criticize these governments for killing these people.  Patchett does make them very human: she tells  us Benjamin's younger brother is in solitary confinement and has been tortured for giving out pamphlets; after Benjamin is savagely slaughtered, we learn the brother was simply shot dead. Carmen is not present a low or brutal or beneath anyone; she and Roxanne are like sisters we are told. I realize there is an awful line celebrating Roxanne's blonde hair, blue eyes and petite stature, but there are equally lines celebrating Carmen's dark beauty and Beatriz's boyishness. We are told too that that blonde hair is fake and as the months go by Roxanne turns into someone with brown hair with a shimmer of silver through it -- grey.

In other of Patchett's books daily life seems benign in Patchett, as long as you don't look and think about your circumstances.  She has a real understanding of what real kindness is (I think few do) and this fuels her book as a kind of gift and delight as we watch the characters interact.  At least if you're like me and appreciate kindness. I've discovered not all readers do (not all people -- especially if they're not kindly themselves).  She's funny on the mesmerizing dreams TV offers, and there are tons of allusions to operas.  

She says she had in mind Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, a novel of redemption and despair where a young man escapes the modern world into a TB sanatarium; in Gale base she says her themes are "the construction of family, the displacement from home, a life that is at once benign and dangerous.

Bel Canto a marvelous song to the human spirit which is intelligent, well-done and realistic in a limited way about the human spirit.  One of its deeper thrusts is to show us how people in our modern world have to connect with others they'll never see again, interact with strangers.  She makes of the hostage incident an enchanted place -- an enclosed garden.

Patchett does not mean to be realistic and is deliberately creating a sort of temporary Utopia, showing how people who apparently have nothing in common in normal life might be able to links when they are thrown together by circumstances. That is, ordinary life ignores our best gifts, inner nature, what counts most to us; then we are re-mixed and these other things suddenly count because they are of use or because you are not threatened if you bring them out -- ability to play piano, love of games, desire to learn to read. 

We are often told life's a battle and we need to fight hard and be hard.  She shows us life's not a battle because it's so irrational that chance undercuts effort, and achievement is an illusion.  She has wonderfu vibes and nuances about how people go about life daily as if what they are doing is so solemn and serious when not only is it catch as catch can -- safety is a dream because you never know what's coming around the corner next.  Each person makes others part of their dreams.  The inferences of the book include the great worldly successes we spend our life getting are not what make us happy; indeed they give no room for the best parts of our characters to emerge.  They also often come to us by sheer chance and not for the work and talent we have.  The vice-president is really much
happier as a hotel concierge and would be better at it.  He's exploited and spends a life under pressure pressuring others in order to survive outside this hostage house.

There is the important theme of the irrelevance of language. Music alone transcends limited cultures; on the other hand, Gen, Mr Hosokawa's tanslator is continually needed.  People learn things:  to cook, to play chess, to sing, other languages

It's like a comic opera. We have two sets of lovers: our upper class one, Mr Katsumi Hosokawa  (our superrich venture capitalist everyone came to meet) and Roxanne Cosse (the soprano diva), and we have our lower class one, Gen and Carmen (one of the "terrorists").  Many operas and comic plays have lovers sneaking around at night; sometimes they get into the wrong bed.  Gay couple and serious or grave one.  Our gay couple is Roxanne and Mr Hosokawa, our serious or grave one Gen and Carmen, especially Carmen with her dreams. We have confidants: Roxanne and Carmen.  Adoption of children. I love undercutting of macho male stereotypes in the vice president, Ruben Iglesias whose real vocation is a concierge and housekeeper.  The lifting of guards we keep up and making contact for what counts.  Roxanne and Carmen in bed making one another's hair and Roxanne feels she is Suzanna from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro and Carmen the countess (this softens the reality that Roxanne is the upper class one). There are so many references to different operas which are beautifujl, and recall beautiful music or ideas (as in the narrator's descriptoin of how Roxanne sounds when she sings Rusalka, Mr Hosokawa's favorite).  It's like a tragic opera:  everyone dead on the stage at the end, or at least the important people. Or it's a tragi-comedy.

When the hostages are finally rescued, Mr. Hosokawa steps in front of Carmen to save her from a bullet. Do you think Mr. Hosokawa wanted to die? Once they all return to their lives, it would be nearly impossible for him to be with Roxane. We are to feel he would rather have died than live life without her

Of course it's improbable, utterly disparate from what we know usually happens when such incidents go on:  real humiliation, real terror; the hostages themselves intensely angry, fearful.  Perhaps this time it did not because the people captured were intelligent and sophisticated and their captors decent and genuinely wanting reform and to better their countrymen's lives.I'd call Bel Canto a cream puff in a steel case.

The steel is in the constant undercutting ironies, the deaths at the end, the use of a real incident, and the continual sceptical ironic (verbal ironies) about life by the narrator in which all that happens is presented as a game played this and that way.  Which game you end up playing and how you do it is a function of the circumstances and props you happen to end up surrounded by.  Plot-design irony: at the end it's unjust and perverse and cruel.  And second reading through: dramatic irony as we know how it's all going to end. These are the sorts of lines of thought and themes that provide the steel, the rapier.  And she's well aware that dreams of cruelty abound.  Every once in a while the curtain is pulled up and we see a gesture, glimpse terror and utter total deprivation and injustice in the lives of the hostage's family members and  the lives of the young hostages.

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One cover

Notes on the characters:   Central presences:  Mr Katsumi Hosokawa, the Japanese businessman (a Mr Knightley and he is called Mr); Roxanne Coss, the opera diva (an Emma),  Gen Watanabe, Japanese translator; Carmen who wants to learn to read; lesser but have important function in the plot-design:  Father Argeudas whose music and bookselling friend sends the box of music; Simon Thibault, French ambassador who continually remembers his wife Edith and loves to cook; Coss's accompanist who kisses her as the novel opens and who is the first to die (from diabetes),  Joachim Messner, the negotiator who has the "magical ability to go in and out of the front door at will" (p. 138), Ruben Iglesias, the vice-president who is there and emerges as a central person for keeping everyone in order (a sort of wife, hostess, concierge).

More minor but clearly characterized hostages:  Some extended passages given to Victor Fyodorov Russian businessman who falls in love with Coss and gives us his memories of a beautiful book of pictures (art book) owned by his poor pre-soviet union grandmother (he wants to return to his brother, Mikal who will be all alone but for him). it may be fiction - he may be making this up it's hinted. Mr Tetsuya Kato who in "real" life is a vice president at Nansei and no one knew spent his offhours playing the piano; in life no one knew; Esmeralda, the housekeeper and childcare taker in Vice-President's house (children, Marco, Rosa and Imelda) Masuda, the president who stayed home to watch his favorite soap opera. Jokes about Beatriz who plays hard ball with the boys but loves to watch Maria on TV. Many jokes about what TV means to people's dreams.

Terrorists:  Carmen whom Gen falls in love with, Beatriz (dresses in strongly masculine way) who loves to watch Maria; Generals Benjamin, most intelligent and controlled who suffers badly from psychosomatic skin reaction and wants to free his brother (his brother is murdered later after the raid), loves to play chess, good at it; Alfredo, Hector (the most violent); young boy, Cesar who wants to learn to play music and hides in a tree when his feelings are hurt; Ismael who has yearned to play chess and gets to play with General Benjamin when Mr Hosokawa gives up his spot in the game. Stop a moment to read Ishmael's story, p 189.  Ruben dreams of adopting one of the boys.  They are La Familia de Martin Surarez (not La Direccion Autentica, much fiercer):  LFDMS.  A joke.

Minor mentions:  Gibert and Franciso, boy terrorists, Dr Gomez who escapes by lying about his kidneys; Loren Falken, German businessman, Oscar Mendoza, businessman (scene about what is sin); Ledbed and Berezovky, Russian businessmen.  Cameo roles:  the music seller, Manuel on the other side of the wall listening.

The more you know about opera the better.  Characters:  are they complex? I think they are often less than fully dimensional; we are given enough to know what we need to know but no more. They are like Chaucerian types; they fit roles and are the kind of person we expect to be in that role made benign. By contrast Jhumpa Lahiri's Namesake is endlessly psychological and J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country suggestive.  This is a story driven story.  Communicates through imagery of song and art and narrator's ironies.

 The story is told by a narrator who is looking back and recounting the events that took place. What do you think of this technique? Did it enhance the story, or would you have preferred the use of a straight narrative? 

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

Notes on the structure of the novel. There are ten chapters.

1.  Chapters 1-4, pp. 1-129:    Settling in.  We are introduced to characters, situation, stasis.  Ends on finding Kato to play.  .
2.  Chapters 5-6, pp. 131-96:  A new family forms with music and Roxanne at its center.  We see Gen emerge as translator, Ruben as concierge.  Each of the characters who have importance and are singled out takes on some new life as the life itself is organized.  The first loving pair begins to form:   "Tonight in the china closet," Carmen said, 'Teach me tonight'", p. 196.
3.  Chapters 7-9, pp. 196-288:  high flights of fancy and fulfillment.  Dreams expressed.  Togetherness.
4.  Chapter 10, pp. 289-318:  dark signs from Messner, and sudden sharp and sudden deaths just as everyone is intensely concerned with immanent things.

5.  Epilogue:  marriage of Roxanne and Gen who go to live in Italy; Edith and Simon Thibault back together.  Two pairs again.  Originally Patchett intended that we should have this as prologue.  Originally she wanted us to know who would die, who was left standing. Another reason the editor may have pushed her to change the structure is we read wanting the characters to live.  If we knew they wouldn't live, we would not read with the same appetite.  Rather than make for irony, it might make us not want to read the book in the first place. On the other hand, I feel were a movie to be made out of it, the movie would begin with the violent death scene and this coda and then work forwards in flashback fashion.  Flashbacks work forwards -- Swift's Last Orders gets across meditation through flashbacks, but unlike book they move strictly chronologically forward.



Another cover (showing ties to girl's mystery stories like Judy Bolton)

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

Questions to think about:

1. Even though he is given the opportunity to leave the mansion, Father Arguedas elects to stay with the hostages. Why does he decide to stay when he risks the possibility of being killed? As the narrative states, why did he feel, "in the midst of all this fear and confusion, in the mortal danger of so many lives, the wild giddiness of good luck?" (pg. 74). Isn't this an odd reaction to have given the situation? What role does religion play in the story? Importance of ritual and community.

2. There are numerous instances in the story where Mr. Hosokawa blames himself for the hostages' situation. He says to Roxane, "But I was the one who set this whole thing in motion." Roxane replies with the following: "Or did I?" she said. "I thought about declining…. Don't get me wrong. I am very capable of blame. This is an event ripe for blame if I ever saw one. I just don't blame you." Is either one to blame for the situation? If not, who do you think is ultimately responsible?  The world bank, the capitalists and wealthy around the world, spearheaded by US military power.

 3. The garua, the fog and mist, lifts after the hostages are in captivity for a number of weeks. "One would have thought that with so much rain and so little light the forward march of growth would have been suspended, when in fact everything had thrived" (pg. 197). How does this observation about the weather mirror what is happening inside the Vice President's mansion?

 4. At one point Carmen says to Gen, "'Ask yourself, would it be so awful if we all stayed here in this beautiful house?'" (pg. 206). And towards the end of the story it is stated: "Gen knew that everything was getting better and not just for him. People were happier." Messner then says to him, "'You were the brightest one here once, and now you're as crazy as the rest of them'" (pg. 302). What do you think of these statements? Do you really believe they would rather stay captive in this house than return to the "real" world?



Canaletto - dream house and gardens

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

Bel Canto in the context of Patchett's other novels and a memoir:

In other of her books, she sets up situations that are crisis like or extreme in some way:  her recent book, Run opens with a young white woman who as a single mother has adopted two black children; all is going swimmingly, until she dies and her white family then finds they have two new children amongst them.  She then develops what might happen to show how racism operates in the US.

The memoir is called Truth and Beauty.  Patchett met her friend, Lucy Grealy, while she was in college.  Lucy had been diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma, a potentially fatal cancer at age 9 and she had undergone terrible operations to fix her face which this disease had warped badly; the operations had not helped very much.  It could be said they made her look worse.  I've seen photos (online): she doesn't look that bad, but children can be very cruel. 

Gearly's chin was deformed more than anything.  She became promiscuous, let's say overeager to be liked, to make friends, and was vulnerable to bullying and sexual aggression and would end in hysterical behaviors.  Grealy's memoir is called The Autobiography of a Face was strongly praised: she's dead.  It's written with great candour as she tells of peer rejection, humiliation, endless operations.  Really makes you feel the caustic pain.  She tried to become a writer and poet and did not succeed.  It's not easy to make money from writing.  Grealy appears to have died from a combination of drug addiction, partly brought on by taking the stuff as pain medication, an overdose and despair.  Half-meant suicide, not uncommon.

Patchett's memoir is upbeat.  It's very odd in some ways:  no sense of judgement.  Not that I mean she should have judged her friend, but it is lacking any sense of anger or evaluation.  Patchett has been criticized for exposing her friend as she prints letters by Gearly which make her unsympathetic, very clinging, demanding.  I'll give an instance:  after all these operations you'd think Gearly wouldn't want another:  she went for breast surgery to make her breasts bigger.  This is painful and dangerous -- it does affect the immune system and brings on problems.  No where does Patchett register there's anything askew. Gearly bought into the beauty myth and her divergence from it destroyed her.  Somewhere Patchett could say something like this.  She turns away from it. She says she has no gift for villains; I think her imagination soars in idealized dreams and she remarkably takes us with her - for the fiction is meant to be moral amd we are shown good people.

Two of her other earlier novels  The Patron Saint of Liars, and The Magician's Assistant, she shows a strong tendency to present people as fundamentally benign, not seeking to harm one another, no malice, no motiveless or causeless spite. The Patron Saint of Liars, is also set in a sort of temporary community. In that  novel, the characters are a group of unmarried mothers brought together in a home where they wait to give up their babies for adoption, and, again, it all becomes rather unsettlingly idyllic, with loving descriptions of cooking, meals, nurturing and relationships which are built. Again, I kept finding myself thinking about the reality of the women who really lived in institutions like those shown in the film The Magdalene Sisters.  Such places are often punitive; far from nurturing; rather like welfare offices. Women filled with guilt and shame and often no one to help them much later.

The Magician's Assistant is about working class women's lives in small towns in the US.  Again Patchett made it seem as if it's really enjoyable to shop at Wal-Mart.  The idea was the reader should try to understand the experience of life of a woman for whom this would be possible, but it came out as too soft on human nature itself.

In all these cases she takes on intimate realities of people, especially women.  Sore spots. Poverty in a ruthless capitalist environment and dying small town, pregnancy out of wedlock was the old-fashioned term, hostage taking.

To conclude, Bel Canto a marvelous song to the human spirit which is intelligent, well-done and realistic in a limited way about the human spirit.  One of its deeper thrusts is to show us how people in our modern world have to connect with others they'll never see again, interact with strangers.  She makes of the hostage incident an enchanted place -- an enclosed garden.



Ellen

Dear all,

I usually don't write negative reviews of sequels (or movies) on my blogs because I find there's little point to doing so.  This is popular literature and it's a sort of waste of time to evaluate follies, absurdities, and faults so evident they fall into kitsch and pastiche (especially when there are readers who like this sort of thing).  But I feel honor-bound to say something of Hazel Holt's My Dear Charlotte as I was sent a copy of the book by the publisher upon my agreeing to write on Austen-l or blog about it.  The copy may be a pre-publication or proofing one as I found a couple of paragraphs which were repeated on pages (not caught in proofreading).

Hazel Holt is someone who also writes "cozy" mysteries (an oxymoron in itself), called "The Sheila Malory" series; she has edited a book of letters by Barbara Pym (A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Letters),  and written a biography of Pym, A Lot to Ask.. She has a background which shows she belongs to the elite classes of England (she went to Newnham College, Cambridge) and probably through conferences and connections became acquainted with Pym.  I have not yet read her biography though I mean to if nothing else but to see the contrast between her writing for audiences of autobiography and editions and this sequel. 

Holt's edition of the letters is partly credited to Pym sister, Hilary Pym, so it's an approved one.  The introduction appears to have been mostly written by herself. It's written in strong attractive modern English, vibrant enough and leads the reader to think there is much insight and original thought and incidents in the letters. Alas, not so.  They are entries of Barbara Pym's daily life, probably never meant to be published, and give a picture of the life of this woman and the kind of unconventional passionate writing that went into her novels is not found here.  She is presented as someone with a pleasant life, a good deal of chit-chat:  "this dance wasn't so bad, Woolf's A Room of her Own "Most delightful and profound," and if she had time she'd write about it, but she doesn't.

She has written an epistolary novelette, My Dear Charlotte, said to be taken from Austen's letters. First off, she chose the online edition by the great-nephew, Brabourne, These are bowdlerized, re-arranged, turned into sweet spinster stuff insofar as he could.  This is our source, not Chapman's early edition or the recent full one by Deirdre LeFaye.  Granted LeFaye's is hard to use (it has three different apprendices and they are not cross-referenced), and may be expensive in hard-copy; but it's available in libraries and does contain the harder Austen as well as in many of her moods.  If they are a censored remnant, they contain a real personality (as Brabourne's does not).  Austen's letters are often acidic,  very often, businesslike and sometimes plagent (only towards the end); the gossip is often grotesqueries with a hard physical edge; much spite, and some enthusiasms now and gain.  Holt appears to know this for memories or tiny slices of lines from LeFaye's edition are brought into My Dear Charlotte here and there, but, as the publisher on the outside tells her and her website too, this is Austen from Brabourne.

Not that that could be a killer if the text had an inner life of its own.  I regret to report the novel is poor or weak because it has no genuine life in the way of Holt's introduction to her edition of Pym's letters. She has altered her tone so that it is a light pastiche.  It reminds me of Georgette Heyer except Heyer is a thick impasto carried along by Junior High school level stories of love and romance (circa 1950 or mid-20th century in outlook).  My Dear Charlotte is a continual citation of surface details of costume, mild details of martial and dating arrangements Holt has studied and known about, hu hom descriptions of assemblies and balls in which nothing much happens, certainly not to the heroine whose name is Elinor Cowper.  The second is an allusion to the poet Cowper (ah had Holt only chosen Crabbe who Austen said was her husband in spirit).  Why Charlotte? I don't know.  There is a Charlotte Grandison in Sir Charles Grandison, but among the many weaknesses of this book is Charlotte writes no letter.  This is a letter novel which is more like a journal divided into entries.  There is no back-and-forth perspective at all.  Elinor, the book's one real character, then, at book's center never herself seems to have a passion or feeling that is real, only endless compilings of details of fashions, of marriage arrangements, the mildest of feeble social commentary, hardly gets involved or engaged on any level of deep emotion with what happens around and to her. 

As a reader of Anothy Trollope I at first thought Holt was alluding to Trollope now and again (there are character's names and placed which remind me of his books, such as the rich man's beautiful estate of Monkton from He Knew He Was Right), but then I realized all the allusions could easily come from Joanna Trollope's pastiche romances written under the name of  Caroline Harvey; they have titles like Parson Harding's Daughter, and the covers have line drawings of lightly or colorized of places like the Taj Mahal made picturesque.

The text comes with an introduction by Jan Fergus, a respected Austen scholar; she has a biography of Austen where she depicts Austen as a businesswoman first and foremost in her attitude towards her writing. Perhaps Fergus is being a businesswoman here, as I'm told that Holt is well-known as a writer in England.  The cozy mysteries sell; so do Barbara Pyms novels marketed under similar aegise. these characterization is unfair to some of Pym's, e.g., A Few Green Leaves, which I believe was nominated for or won the Booker Prize (albeit not to be that trusted as it too operates like a coterie).  Jan Fergus's praise is puzzling (unless she's a friend). If Fergus says the book is in the tone of Austen: not at all. It's true that in Fergus's introduction, Fergus talks of Austen's letters in a way that makes her view of Austen's letters sound like E.M. Forster:  Forster called them the letters of a spiteful or nasty spinster-old maid, narrow in purview. Forster was appalled. Fersus talks of Austen as funny in code words which mean amusingly nasty and implies these are jokes not to be taken seriously, and the books are complacent about life. I don't agree, and will leave the write to contemplate a typical remark (in LeFaye not Brabourne):

     "Anna has not a chance of escape; her husband called here the other day, & said she was pretty well but not equal to "so long a walk; she must come in her "Donkey Carriage."--Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty.---I am very sorry for her.--Mrs Clement too is in that way again. I am quite tired of so many Children.--Mrs Benn has a 13th... (Jane Austen's Letters, ed. Le Faye 336, Letter dated Sunday 23- Tuesday 25 March 1817

This is not a jealous spinster; this is a woman who is glad she has escaped endless pregnancies and the destruction of her life's fiber and time through them, and out of this outlook is one of several veins of serious social criticism we can discern or glimpse in the letters. Admittedly not much for these letters were to please Jane's sister, Cassandra, a conventional woman, and they were read aloud in the family circle

Fergus also attributes serious criticism to Austen's books. But then as Fay Weldon says in her letters to her niece about Austen's art, rememember people will say anything. Holt has a reputation, friends and perhaps Fergus knows her. Nowadays too blurbs and introductions to books are increasingly over-the-top unreal praise (exaggerated screams accompanied a recent Austen sequel, a wretched incoherent lifeless putting together of phrases and memories from reading Austen, Donald Measham's Jane Austen out of the Blue. It's one merit is a picturesque glossy cover. The cover to My Dear Charlotte is one in the eminent domaine reprinted on many of these sequels and Austen's novels themselves, "Miss Harriet and  Miss Elizabeth Binney" by John Stuart (1741-1811).

So, in the spirit of F. R. Leavis, another sequel to cross off ....   Not that all sequels are bad; two excellent ones are Elizabeth Jenkins's Harriet, Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club. Much better -- because alive with an author's individual soul and made up out of a real world they inhabit, are original rewrites and take-off:  Anthony Trollope's Small House at Allington (S&S), Dr Thorne (P&P), The Bertrams (MP), Ayala's Angel (NA), E. H. Young's Jenny Wren and E. M. Forster's Howard's End (both S&S).  For a voice reminiscent of Austen's, I recommend Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

For my part I think a sequel needs to have the writer produce a style consonant with her own spirit, rather as in a historical novel, and rewrite the original book from a new critical perspective, say as in the case of the brilliant Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin out of Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  A genuine rewriting of Austen's letters from say another invented correspondent who did exist but whose letters have been destroyed (Martha Sharpe), in another real voice, might be of real interest.

I had agreed to take a copy of the book and review it partly because my good friend, Diana Birchall, said she was intrigued and had taken a copy and we could compare. You will find her remarks in the first comment to this blog

Ellen Moody

Dear Friends,

As I was watching Part 24 of the 1974 BBC Pallisers, a beautifully picturesque and yearning, melancholy scene between Jeremy Irons as noble, well-meaning Frank Tregear, and Anna Carteret, as Lady Mabel Grex who  is now wrenchingly regretful that she had given up Tregear two years ago now that she sees him at Matching and taking up with Lady Mary (played winsomely by Kate Nicholls), a few lines delivered by Irons had the tone, the very accents of Ronald Colman when he makes one of his poignant rueful appeals



Irons as Tregear in such a moment speaking to Carteret close by, looking up, as Mabel


I was struck by a realization that a central mode or mood of film adaptations of older books which are also older costume drama is the elegiac.  And that this is rarely available to modern contemporary films.

You need the slow graceful pace for at least a few moments; you need the distance so that you can lend yourself to believing such sentiments can be uttered and at length; you need the beautiful surroundings ,the subtle long-drawn developing characterization in a seriously-taken story.



The drawing room in this part of the series has become green as a meadow, lit with sunlight.

The next scene is the curiously memorable one of the grown children (Silverbridge, Gerald, Lady Mary,, Duchess, Mrs Finn and Lady Mabel) processing out to the grounds of matching on a fine spring day -- one's heart stops at the sense of a precious moment caught from the flux of time.

Last night I was watching the antepenultimate part (the third before the last) of the 1984 BBC Jewel in the Crown:  Sarah Layton (Geraldine James) and Guy Perron (Charles Dance) finally consummate their love (Nigel Rowan having disappointed her centrally when he will not help her with what she regards as desperately-needed information about Ronald Merrick). They must part, but first they walk in the summer residence of the one of the high officials of the Raj after strolling through a garden of the Nawab. Again this strongly elegaic mode.  The book, The Making of the Jewel in the Crown, had this fine melancholy riverscape with suggestive hills and houses on its cover:



And throughout the book are line drawings, picturesque style, of typical buildings, gardens, festivals associated in the imagination the the Raj.

I remember reading how the Arcadian mode is central to costume dramas of these types; now I'm thinking yes "the allure of green thoughts," but not out of a fresh Arcadia, rather a fractured elegiac dream.

This fits the Austen movies I'm so involved with -- today I managed to paginate my typescript, and finally subdivided Part 2 into its parts; I gathered what essays and books I have on Indian and Bollywood cinema and I Have Found It, systematically gathered the now many Persuasion Online essays on the various movies (and read one on Lake House, a free adapation of Persuasion), read the opening chapter of what appears to be an excellent suggestive subtle book on Austen's novels, Susan Morgan's In the Meantime. 

So here's where I am with respect to my book project.  I've been worrying the question why I love these film adaptations of great books as historical costume drama so.  Well, now I've reached a new clarifying realization and a new turn or phase in the ms.

And I had this thought too: I wonder if I was happier in some ways before I came onto the Net and began to realize that most of the world lived in these tight communities of people endlessly seeing one another, which little groups of people gave them occasional contacts to other people; before I realized how endlessly socializing other people are and saw the patterns of other lives. I've joined in now and learned (as I wrote on a blog now lost) that I failed to understand what friendship was about for most people: for a very few it means for a very few people intimate close support (and sometimes this is a family member), but for most it means a kind of being together half-performatively, using one another when you can (social capital Bourdieu calls this), and breaking away to move elsewhere with relative ease. The way some people do not marry primarily for love (companionship) but money, to be in a relationship which connects them up again, there seem to be some who do not even need the one or two intimate supporting companionship.

I didn't know this.  All I ever wanted was that supporting companionship.  This is about my temperament and it connects back to why I love this particular type of movie.  What is the function of friendship is the question I ask myself. 

We are reading Emily Dickinson's poetry, letters, biographies about her for a couple of months on WWTTA, and I've come to the temporary conclusion that this kind of thinking was not behind her strange enforced isolation but rather a severe nervous breakdown she could not get over. Then in order to get better she really needed to get away from the people and circumstances which brought it on, and given her time, class, milieu, temperament (how could she have travelled alone), she couldn't, so she did the next best thing:  stayed alone to struggle to hold onto her sanity.  You might say this was her version of the travelling women I've come across.  It looks like exactly the opposite choice, but they both derive from the same realities of human nature and how friendship functions for most people.

Ellen

Dear friends,



Sarah Layton (Geraldine James, close up)

I thought I'd mention how much I am enjoying the 1984 mini-series, The Jewel in the Crown, written by Ken Taylor, directed and produced by Christopher Morahan (I wonder if he's related to Hattie Morahan), with some episodes directed by Jim O'Brien, starring Tim Piggot-Smith, Peggy Ashcroft, Eric Porter, Geraldine James, Judy Parfitt, Art Malik, & many other great actors and actresses. filmed for four months in India:



It took me about 2 to 3 years to listen to all four books read aloud by dramatic readers from unabridged texts. I'd listen in my car going to and from GMU; I didn't go straight from one set of tapes to another; sometimes I'd listen to as many as 3 or 4 novels inbetween, but eventually I'd buy another box of cassettes.  And I've read three of the four novels, read his Staying On twice (once I planned to teach it) and have seen the film adaptation of Staying On, directed by Silvio Narizzano, written by Julian Mitchell, produced by Irene Shubrik, starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.

Still can this possibly account for the intensity of my response?  Tears come to my eyes when Barbie comes on:



Barbie (Peggy Ashcroft) driven from Rose Cottage

I find myself mesmerized, and as I listen to the Jewel in the Crown read aloud again (yes I've begun with the first novel of the set, going through them all in my car again) I hear Eric Porter's voice for Count Bronofsky:



Count Bronosksky (pink cigarettes and all)

I feel such a sense of joy when the characters are happy, I just get such pleasure out of it. How I love Sarah Layton (Geraldine James). 



Sarah Layton riding (perhaps Geraldine James,perhaps a stunt woman hired to ride as Sarah)

The minor characters too.  Rosemary Leach as the snobbish, irritating, bad well-meaning all heart advisor, Aunt Fenny, Stuart Wilson, again the cad (he was Ferdinand Lopez in the Pallisers), Jimmy Clark.

Really out of all proportion to what it's worth. I've bought myself The Making of the Jewel in the Crown and look at the pictures. Tomorrow I go back to my project on the Austen moves, having finished my review of Wm McCarthy's Anna Barbauld.  I am up to Pallisers 11:23 and only regret I am coming to the end of these, but tell myself now I will turn to Barchester Chronicles and have at least 3 more mini-series of Trollope to go through in the same minute way. My love for these films keeps me going at this arduous work.  Why?

They reach me at some deep place.  I suppose this is like Izzy's response to Ice-skating.  My feeling is that these movies provide me with companionship of ideal people in controlled gracious circumstances. I am not so lonely; I am not threatened when with them. Their stories are made out of beautiful art that itself is shapely and gratifying.  They behave in ways I dream people ought to.  So no matter what might be critiqued (ambiguously at that too),whether it be seriously about rape and intense miseries,



Hari Kumar (Art Malik) and Daphne Manners after both are in effect raped



Daphne speaking to Sister Ludmilla (Matyelok Gibbs)

maybe because they are about intense anguish that cannot be assuaged (as Ronald Merrick's as ultimate outsider who is getting back somehow or other, making himself useful to all who despise him and would reject him if they knew of his homosexuality for certain),



Merrick (Tim Piggot-Smith) trying to save Teddy Bingham (Nicholas Farrell)

I revel in them.

I invite anyone who has read this to say why he or she loves (or dislikes) costume dramas, of the historical or film adaptation kind.

Ellen

Dear Friends here at Livejournal,

I feel I ought to say that I sometimes post on Austen and Austen-related topics on my other blog, Ellen and Jim have a blog, Two. Also that over the past two years I have had the good fortune to interest an editor at the Jane Austen Center Magazine (an organization attached to the Museum in Bath) who a while back put on the website my calendars drawn from Austen's novels, and who has recently been putting essays in the form of postings  I wrote for Austen-l and/or Janeites on this website.  For example, my argument that Jane's aunt Jane did indeed steal the lace.


The shop where she pilfered the lace

Now the kindly editor has gone to the trouble of editing (abridging) the postings I wrote for Jane Austen's World and Austenprose on the last 25 years of edition of the 6 well-known novels (with the fragments increasingly thrown in). Thus far five have gone up:

Sense and Sensibility

Pride and Prejudice

Mansfield Park

Emma

Persuasion

I have but one edition to go and that's Northanger Abbey, together with Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon:  to buy this edition by Oxford is to buy a journey through Austen's career.



I hope to continue my relationship with her for a long time to come, and will on occasion announce any publication that appears there here.

Ellen

Gentle friends,

I have two films to recommend tonight:  Agnes Varda's autobiography, Les Plages, as virtuoso film-making, and Ang Lee and James Schamus's Taking Woodstock as yet another personal allegory about Lee's difficulty in achieving independence from his father; to which this time is (or once again) added a strong homosexual character as a friend of the hero.



Varda in the film



Jacques Demy

It's much more than an autobiographical film, though it is that in spades: candid, intensely projecting and involved.  It's about film itself, how we imagine our worlds from pictures (she begins with a series of photos and mirrors she puts on a beach),



about both how unreal film is (concocted) and how real (we see her filming a lot).  The angle is both sad and disillusioned and intensely yearning, hopeful, celebratory as she looks back.  She does manage to take the viewer through the main events of her life, and suggest portraits of the people she was closest to and who meant most in her career; she tells of her relationships with first the father of her first child and then Jacques Demy, who was her co-film-maker and husband of many years and died in 1989 of AIDS (in his last months she made a film of his life with him next to her). 

She shows her genius throughout.  The life also becomes a kind of clothesline on which she hanges or intersperses clips from films she made; she has an unerring sense of what is a resonant phrase (one older actor in one film thinks of how he hopes someone will visit him tonight), a brilliant sequence of images or events. (Herein much poetry resides.)  Much is on location so we go to California where she lived for a time too -- though we keep coming back to the beach and to her long time house in a courtyard.  A sequence of her family (children, grandchildren, cats too) is like a dream while the overvoice reminds us of how much a family joy is an abstraction we make up in our minds. She talks with a cartoon cat (she and Jacques had many a favored cat):




She shows her politics. She filmed the Black Panthers, the Vietnam protests, the students in 68 in Paris, and (a wonderful strong sequence) feminists protesting strongly against forced baby-making, cruel abortions (no anesthesia) and all sorts of injustices: no half-hearted presentations here at all. how unashamedly she photographs herself: old, aging, heavy, her skin mottled and how she films other women the way they really look -- as well as the beautiful stars she did have in a few films. No anorexic supposes sexy women here.




She takes her politics clips up to today's wars in Iraq, Iran, Israel, Afghanistan. She may be 80+ but she's as involved as ever.



Her office

My husband, Jim, says he and I saw her Vagabond about a girl who refused to be imprisoned in office work and is homeless and we watch her wander about the world. I don't remember any other, but I sure what to make up for lost time.

Two weeks before that we made it to Taking Woodstock. The review had characterized it as dull and wondered why we were not given clips of the performers (Janis Joplin anyone?).   Well, what's valuable is we are made to experience Woodstock as say one person who had little power might have: our hero never gets to the center to see or hear clearly what's happening. 



It's also autobiographical, but like other of Lee's movies, not frankly so.  Men are not allowed to be. Once again we have a story of a father and son.  Lee is most interested in the young male at the center who is trying to wrest independence from a father. Unlike previous Lee films, though, there is now a harridan of a mother to stop him and who has made the father's life miserable, and threatens to keep the son in babyhood. This I think is Schamus as a Jewish man working through his own hangups. As ever too, our hero has a transgressive iconoclastic friend whom he relies on:



Henry Goodman as Jake



Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Dan

The character Dan has been remarked upon as the most interesting in the film after our hero and his father (the mother is presented unsympathetically even if she's excused by her memories of the holocaust she is a doped as presented).  I'm beginning to think that this continual foregrounding of a deeply sympathetic admirable homosexual male as the friend of the hero is something Schamus is responsible for more directly than he admits. He built up the homosexual character in The Wedding Banquet so appealingly.  So is Schamus himself gay? or bisexual?  I don't know.

These belong under the sign of Austen because the first is a woman's film, in characteristics (cycical, subjective, keeping to humlity); it's deeply anti-false sentiment and yet is so inwardly moving; the second is by the director of the 1995 S&S (whose themes swirl around family internecine intangible warfare so to speak).

Ellen

Jane Austen Book Club even meets in the hospital; one of the good sequels, movie Robin Swicord, book, Karen Joy Fowler

Dear Friends,

This past May my good friend, Diana, in her "Light, Bright, and Sparkling" blog wrote an entry called "The Selling of Jane Austen."  She made the excellent observation that the world of Jane Austen studies has been corrupted by the ability of people to make big money on movies and sequels, and is now ridden by venomous quarrels because prestige projects and personal career agendas can be promoted by working on texts which can be attached to the name "Jane Austen."  Really anything goes if it will attract attention, money; you need only appropriate her texts in some way but the more sex (Nights at Pemberly anyone?) and the stupider and more inane (Zombies, Twilight), the more wide-selling. And for scholars you can speculate just about any allusion into Austen's texts at this point.  (9/12/09: this morning she added Jane Austen and the Jackals, where she also reviews three books, one of which, James Austen's poems, is an important addition to the genuine Austen canon.)

Among the scholars willing publicly to join this bandwagon is John Sutherland, who is none too scrupulous when it comes to creating a limelight for himself by being provocative.  This past weekend, he used the occasion of a review of Claire Harman's book, Jane's Fame, to argue (reasonably enough) that  there is more sex in Austen than is admitted because of the Victorian-sentimentalization way she has been read.

Harman argues that there have been two major turns in Jane Austen's reputation thus far: the first her nephew's 1870 memoir which framed her as chaste, retiring, good, sweet, a retreat, idyllic, harmless comedy under which perspective her books began to be seen as popular and at least Pride and Prejudice become a mega-hit; the second occurred in the 1990s with the making of several lavish costume dramas, especially the spectacular 1995 BBC/WBGH Pride and Prejudice, starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, and then amused himself by likening Harman's stance to the motives or outlook of Rozema in her 1999 MP, Davies in his P&P, NA, and S&S, and the makers of a recent porn video, Porn and Penetration.





Mary Crawford and Fanny Price in incipient lesbian partners after a rain in the 1999 MP



Catherine Morland reads the most titillating passages from Lewis's the Monk and has sexy dreams in 2007 NA

There is more sex in Austen than is admitted. In Sense and Sensibility, we have two back story heroines impregnated by men not their husbands, a clandestine engagement between Lucy Steele and Edwards Ferrars ("these past four years"), and Marianne lets us know that she would have succumbed to Willoughby but that he made her no promise and didn't engage himself to her, so that "he's not so bad as you think."  Allenham is the place where they shied away.   In Pride and Prejudice Lydia runs off with Wickham and her letters to Elizabeth shows she was no virgin by that time; we are told that as a later married woman, she never lost her reputation (while Wickham gambled to support them). Mansfield Park brings us Maria Rushworth's and Henry Crawford's fornication (perhaps at Sotherton while they rambled outside that fence) and then adultery at the country house weekend; in Emma we have a clandestine engagement so Frank and Jane could have petted heavily, but since she was so willing to give him up rather then endure the torment he subjects her through making her jealous, she would break it off.  She becomes ill with migraine headaches when she thinks she might lose him and about how he has treated her, but it is left vague, so that the torment is as much from her coming probable future as a governess (slavery she says). It's true we somehow don't feel much sex happened between the Captain and Anne Elliot in Persuasion 9 years before it begins, but enough intimacy did; and perhaps more than that between Isabella Thorpe and Captain Tilney in Northanger Abbey.



The back story made torrid prologue in the 2008 S&S

However, what has been happening is an increasingly sexed  up Austen by no means in her texts. For example, due in part to Austen's use of irony and suggesting of stories Emma glimpses but cannot see the whole of or understand and gets wrong too, people are concocting wildly anachronistic stories from this text.  A paper by Arnie Perlstein at the recent Chawton meeting argued that Jane Fairfax is pregnant, John Knightley the father, the baby born in the novel and attributed to Mrs Weston, Mrs Elton in love with Frank. The only evidence adduced is Jane's not being able to eat much.  Perlstein assumes that when Jane Fairfax can't eat much that means she is having morning sickness; what we have is Miss Bates's reference to the family's pulmonary complaint (a probability of incipient TB or consumption). He never mentions John Knightley's visit to Highbury and where he discussed Jane's visits to the post office to get Frank letters (this would be a cover), nor the nuances of custom that we see in the novel, for Jane is engaged and has been promised; yet on the other hand, there is no public sharing of their relationship (which judges looked for when condemning a young man for seducing a girl in ancien regime France).  The rest of the paper was flourishing statements about how much the writer would reveal to us.  The procedure reminded me of Tweedledee and Tweedledum in Alice in Wonderland where the twins say if they say a thing is so (X=Y) it is. I doubt Davies would laugh.

Edith Lank and her sister once had fun with Austen's not quite controlling the ironic perspective some years ago: they wrote that Harriet's father and mother were either Mr Knightey and Mrs Weston (whence their influence) or Miss Bates and Mr Woodhouse (Miss Bates's name is Henrietta). I discovered that according to a calendar I could work out in the novel Miss Bates visited her sister having baby Jane at around the time she would have had to leave to hide her condition.  It was all tongue-in-cheek, mine as well as theirs.

My real wonder if how far is this Emma theory like that of Spencer's Becoming Jane (which is unscrupulous and shows signs of bad faith).  I've seen some behavior on the Austen-l and Janeite listserv to suggest this may be so. For example, when I wrote some of the above on Austen-l, there was a wild spree email insinuating that Mr Martin gathering walnuts for Harriet Smith was salacious and that walnuts=a man's balls. It was more than an attempt to shout down common sense; there was a cunning glee to it.  This email is why I connected the theory to the movie scenes (Davies gets a great kick out of his "wet shirt" scene, points to a similar chopping wood scene in the 2008 S&S, and probably enjoyed replacing Radcliffe with Lewis, and having the actress read Lewis aloud and having another nake person in the tub scene), the marketing of the sequels, and videos (described by Sutherland).   Other than that the context is the one outlined in The Selling of Jane Austen.

Other theorists of this type on the two Austen lists don't promote themselves with this stuff. Elissa has Jane pregnant by Frank but is content to think so or say so on the lists without fanfare.  Hers is the equivalent of the long filling in of scenes and interpretations of Austen's books with the characters made into people found frequently on these lists; on my ECW list with Sylwia I've talked this way just a little.  I used to do it more in the mid1990s (that is, I used to go on in a psychologizing vein about the characters such that I began to leave the story). What is being done is really incipient (or fragments of) fanfiction.



Witty wet-shirt scene from 2008 Lost in Austen, a riff on the 1995 P&P, a kind of fanfiction tongue-in-cheek



Renee Zellweger as obedient Bridget wearing ludicrous Bunny outfit to please Hugh Grant character, 2001 Bridget Jones's Diary, satire

I used to not know what to make of an older paper which was titled "Why is there no sex in Jane Austen," and it's argued that Austen eschewed open sex in order not only to maintain her personal reputation, but also to be able to discuss female issues and problems as central to the texts.  I would now argue this putting sex into Austen places her in a male-dominated context, and makes her books men's stories (Oedipal often). 

It's simply true that males are sometimes embarrassed to go to Jane Austen movies nowadays, even though the stories are rearranged and characters reconceived enough to make the men central characters, there at the climax no matter what it is (and climaxes in Austen are not always about love).   In the biopic movies she is presented as in despair because forsooth she'll never or have babies. Had she done that she would not have had time to write. I've come to the conclusion the attempt to find allusions to major canonical works by men (much praised) is an attempt to make Austen more respectable and of course the writer of such studies by placing her in a male tradtion.



Renee Zellweger as Miss Potter who finds time to write, draw, and buy her own house

Ellen

A photograph by Dorothy Lange, Girls at Lincoln Bench School, Malheur County Oregon, October 12, 1939


       . . . .Could you shrink from so simple an adventure? No, no, you will proceed into this small vaulted room, and through this into several others, without perceiving anything very remarkable in either.  In one perhaps there may be a dagger, in another a few drops of blood, and in a third the remains of some instrument of torture; but there being nothing in all this out of the common way, and your lamp being nearly exhausted, you will return towards your own apartment.  In repassing through the small vaulted room, however, your eyes will be attracted towards a large, old-fashioned cabinet of ebony and gold . . .  Impelled by an irresistible presentiment, you will eagerly advance to it, unlock its folding doors, and search into every drawer--but for some time without discovering anything of importance--perhaps nothing but a considerable hoard of diamonds (Northanger Abbey, Chapter 20)


She found 100 ivory elephants in the cabinet (from David Godine illustrations)

Dear friends,

A few weeks ago I discovered that two of my old blogs on girls' books did not make it to my new one. I liked those and grieved to think they are lost forever. So I thought to myself I would at least rewrite about a couple of books on girls' books. One I'm teaching this term is Bobbie Ann Mason's Girl Sleuth: In Search of Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton and Cherry Ames:  one could say I teach courses nowadays by assigning a few of my favorite books. This class is Advanced Composition in the Humanities class.  I hope to add blogs about women's books particularly connected to Austen or her era as I go along.


Sitting on Cherry Ames, among others

My love of such books remains under the sign of Austen's parody in Northanger Abbey where Henry Tilney imagines Catherine Morland getting up at midnight with a fragile light like all true gothic heroines and goes in search of adventure.

Bobbie Ann Mason goes in search of lost time and tires to remember her experience of reading poplar books at the same time as she analyzes them from an adult and feminist perspective.  The basic  thesis of the book is that the impulse to be a detective, to solve a mystery which is often equated with liberation and adventure turns out to be way to tidy up the world, to mark it safe for the present powerful establishment and retain the status quo -- so her book is not only about children's literature, since it's about the very popular genre of mystery stories, she also reveals the norms and suppositions behind these.  And not just in US but versions for different countries (Sue Barton, nurse replaces Cherry Ames), plus these books travel. I've had young women from Nigeria tell me their favorite book was Nancy Drew one and bring in an old copy printed in Europe. Presumably shipped to Africa.

What appears to "tweak" the present world in a more liberal or enlightened or humane direction actually reinforced the present establishment and its ideas.   While this is so obvious in the earliest series and the original versions of the later series, it is still true of today's syndicated series books. The girl--or boy, from the The Hardy Boys or present syndicated popular adventure books for boys-who seems free and powerful if anything but; or he is policeman or policewoman holding up the present order. Like detectives of popular formulaic detective fiction whose great wisdom provides the happy ending so shows universe to be a good place.

Further, the morality of these books which in each generation seems somewhat forward looking is really of reflection of what the average person is thinking according to the public discourse (what gets into the papers, what the average teacher says, syllabuses constructed by education department and boards of education).  They are controlled by what publishers are willing to publish and parents willing to buy.

Where once a vein of unashamed snobbery and a view of women which held their lives were to be fulfilled in the home caring for children and being supported by husband prevailed we now have a new ideal ("political correctness").   Boys in these books were to be manly:  the sort of values one sees afflicts the men in Swift's Last Orders.  It would appear we are for all people being equal; enlightened or more varying and wider-ranging ideas are asserted. But the reality of the story lines shows us that a mere veneer is being used under which we are encouraged to despise the poor, those with crude manners, the old distrust of "sex" is kept up.  Any indulgence from an older strict morality is punished.  We are encouraged to admire glamor and glittering prizes and upper class manners just as strongly as ever.

Anything which might disturb the order--such as even a belief in the supernatural--is explained away.  Mason sees supernatural as main way in which these books embody the "unknown."  The girl goes around the world with a broom sweeping "evil" away.

She gives context and purpose of her book in her autobiographical preface. This is a time when critics are studying popular culture; children have often preferred pop books to force-fed classics.  To return to these gives relevance to early periods of our lives where we spent time in popular culture without thinking about it. Our hidden lives.

With the very earliest of these popular books (Honey Bunch), we are in the period before a lot of money can be made, and in a period where only a minority of children went to school beyond age 12.  Some terrible racist books come from this era:  Little Black Sambo for example.  The Bobbsey Twins offer fictional nests, escapes from bullying, unkindness poverty and trouble. Today people are more conscious but we have groups strong to repress books that are outside their values from getting into the schools.

It's interesting that from the very beginning there was an attempt to show girls doing things, individual girl's brave struggles.  I think the idea we have the Victorians all despised women and wanted to keep them wilting flowers is overdrawn.  First of all many women worked since only a small percentage were middle class and could stay home.  They did not work in professional occupations, and it was thought to be for the family.  Stayed home when they could.   Staying home was a middle class ideal and influential. You were ashamed of yourself in part, and working class women did heavy work, for little pay often. Written to a formula but children did love them Girls did things, but they were upper crust. Money from daddy, girls upper crust   Stereotyped roles for sexes:  Boys on a single-minded mission to become manly; girls had three episodes in their lives: menustuation, marriage, motherhood. They off escapism with security.   Nancy Drew did stand out.  Strong accomplished and seemed independent  No mother about.

Nancy Drew. 



The key to the Nancy Drew image and the popularity of the figure as Bobbie Ann Mason sees it is not only does she satisfy two contradictory or opposed stereotypes, but the sheer snob appeal of the figure.  The figure appeals to the longings for the power, trappings, lifestyle, and aura of the upper middle class.  Not aristocracy.  Nancy is not Lady Nancy.  Again and again throughout the chapter everything Mason talks about relates back to Nancy's class status. The sex is strong but it's insidious and not recognized. All those who are evil are somehow sexy.  Nancy is endlessly repressing Ned.  He is an emasculated figure.

I'd like to admit these books were part of what made me idolize England. My favorite books were ones I found in the library, and not the more recent paperback vintage. My father was a reader and told me about books he knew:  Mary Poppins in the Park, Secret Garden, Dickens, Jane Austen.  So I thought maybe an English gentleman was the very best kind of husband a girl could have. I married a version:  poor boy who went to one of these schools as a day boy, hated it, but was himself incultured that way.



A haunted maze-garden, from a 1984 Shades of Darkness series (a Christman story, "The Maze")

Judy Bolton was not written by a syndicate and then rewritten every 10 years like Nancy Drew and Bobbsey Twins and others. The strongest section in the book is that on Judy Bolton and Trixie Beldon because here Mason is more ambivalent and finds more genuinely  positive elements in these series.  In the case of the Bolton books there was an author; she hasn't let them be rewritten into pap.  They do show Judy marrying and after a while the male, Peter, is the central agent:



He appears on most of the covers of the new series (alas it's being rewritten and marketed)

Margaret Sutton. She is willing to talk of the appeal of these books in ways that acknowledge deep-seated needs and desires in human nature without castigating them.  Books have individuality; some real imagery and scenes. Such as love of gothic:  this is a kind of romance that has long been favorite among women, though it's not fair to say men don't read gothics.  They do, but not quite the same kind.  Stephen King is a gothic.  Male gothic is more violent; women go for mysteries and ghosts; attics are part of this female gothic:  a place to escape to. She finds good humane values in the Bolton books too.Trixie Beldon:  except for nonsense about how miserable it is to be rich (all these servants around cluttering up the place), she makes a good case.

Glamour Girls:  up in the clouds, in hospitals, in ad agencies, in the movies. Rich picturesque places far away.  Beverly Gray, college girl (ivy league):  a moment in which the hack writer writes real prose with feeling, thought, individuality at least minimally there.  Helen Wells's Cherry Ames, Vicki Barr, better written, more stylish, more thought out, p 109:  Cherry Ames has original source in World War Two fervor.  Vicki Barr stories really about creating homes for herself, males are brothers and fathers. Connie Blair, most sexist, least inspiring.

Recent junior novels and praise for them shows you can't trust views of committees of teachers.  Committee choices of books are often conventoinal; they alienate you from your real self in other ways.  Problem of self-alienation due to norms we can't and really don't want to meet.  Betty Cavana books: we meet girls trapped by sex roles.  Mason herself wrote a series called the Carson girls

The crux of the problem:  these books have not gone beyond Louisa May Alcott, though this is a picture of favorite book from my childhood and I loved these illustrations:



The girl sleuth is perpetually a girl, perpetually disconnected, a virgin or unmarried.  There is a need for a heroine who becomes a woman who is an adult. Imposter Tea:  Nancy Drew series continues to thrive on descriptions of gourmet and luxurious eating:  latest book is a cookbook,; some of the more obvious snobbery and racism cut; at the same time characters more simplified.  Carson Drew still the reward. New emphasis on team work brings us back where we started, Outdoor Girls Series feature emerging youth class, privileged by early sophistication and postponed adulthood, p 136

Truth is fundamental values of American society changed very little from the beginning of the 20th to the beginning of the 21st century:  no challenge, no healthy truths about sex and our hidden lives straight. In Mason's early career:  she tried writing this kind of stuff; she went to New York to work on a magazine. She went on to write Shiloh and Other Stories (remarkably effective reflections of lower middle class people living in Kentucky); Clear Springs, autobiography, effective story of a vet who is disabled coming home to live with a niece, In Country. A movie was made.  She explores American here and now, the middle part of the country. She really really read for role models in this manner. She rejoiced and felt better when they read of powerful women who assert themselves against struggle. Feminist movement has freed women to talk of these things in ways they never did before, but not to go to the center of the problem which is sexuality and the taboos and contradictary pressures put on them.

Flaws in book.   She idealizes the workplace.   The modern workplace is the product of capitalism.  That she does not acknowledge she is arguing to create more people deeply engaged with the profit, vanity, pride, money, ambition motive is curious.  That she never talks about losses and gains.  In every social rearrangement there are winners and losers. There are only so many places on top.  She doesn't go into marraige: the books don't, but she allows us to skim over it as do the books. So central thing insisted that women do is not explored:  recent Jane Austen bio movies insisted she was miserable because she never married.  There's no evidence for that whatsoever, much on the contrary. She could have a writing life. She could have a writing life. however, marriage is satisfying and having children can be too. It's an occupation respected by society (if not paid) and she does not knowledge this nor the difficulties women have (very real) in going to work and caring for a family.

I would say outlook of book is upper middle class in its assumptions of people's expectations and what they can get from workaday world. She assumes work outside the home is fullfilling.  That when you "go out" there you get freedom.  There is sense of this. She need not go on about it, but there should be some acknowledgement. She also discounts too strongly the escapist motive which is important for adults and children. 

She is a wonderful writer I should add and her Clear Springs a moving memoir of her growing up in Kentucky.

Still I think the book is an eye-opener.  It was and still is genuinely ground-breaking.  The only one of its kind I know of.  It makes the reader think about what books he or she really might have read in childhood and why.  We can recognize ourselves. She's right that books like this for boys and girls have played an immense psychological role in the history of children and their culture and thus formed us.  A good similar book is Deborah O'Keefe's Good Girl Messages

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Remedios Varos, A Paradise for Cats

A brief history of children's literature:    Earliest children's books by which I mean books written for children specifically begin around the turn of the 18th century, 1790's, around time of French revolution. Before that children given Bible, Aesop's Fables, chapbooks with stories that we would recognize as folk and fairy tale.  Seven with one bound.  Jack, the Giant Killer.  Snow White and Rose Red.  Also tiny readers to go with chalk slates.  They were also in Europe given the Bible to read, but the Bible is hard, has a lot of sex and violence and it was more they were told stories from the Bible (like you would have a child's book today)

Attitudes towards childhood changed; new enlightened notions about development, about children not being little adults.  Important in this were ideas of Rousseau and various educationalists in 17th through 18th century. which only slowly altered European middle class households in the 19th.   First books were however, highly didactic.  Goody Two-Shoes. Eric or Little by Little.  We would find them insufferably moral. Since Victorians demanded their novels be sex-free, some of the novelists' novels could be read by 11 year olds (David Copperfield), also interest in childhood makes novelists choose to tell stories from time of hero or heroine's younger life.

Nineteenth century sees these patterns: In school upper class boys learned Latin and Greek; middling classes went to day schools to learn practical things like reading, writing, 4 kinds of arithmetical procedures, and sew and crafts. Around 11-12 some children graduated into adult reading, many stopped reading.   Boys began university which was often professionally oriented (law, medicine, the church) around 12.  Other boys apprenticed, went to sea.  Girls did not. Stayed home, at best by mid-19th century went to finishing school. The great real aim was to protect her virginity for the male; keep her sheltered and obedient.

Early children's classics of later 19th century are written as labor of love by people who are themselves people who write for adults.  Alice in Wonderland written for a real little girl as a present; Beatrice Potter's first books written for a child-friend. o money in it.  Not an industry.

As standard of living goes up and public education spread in 1870's we get first longer books published for money for children.  Time of The Secret Garden.  Wind in the Willosw.  The Little Princess actually was a play originally.  One could call this still the golden age of children's literature since it was not quite an industry, not truly commercialized, and yet books being produced. However, unless you got them in stallments in magazine form only the elite child could have them. In fact in the 1930s such magazines Girls' Own and boys' version sold popularly.  These are rather crude; it's in the book we find more complexity and more playfulness as in Winnie the Pooh typical, first written for child, and then published.  Period may be said to have lasted into World War II. Basically adults have far more disposable income and the coming of the paperback brought down the price of books.
   
Children's literature as a industry born after that.  Beginnings seen in syndicated books like Honey Bunch and Hardy books, and in magazines for boys and girls.  Really took off since 1950's.  Since the 1970s and 80s we get a prize culture.  Books are awarded prizes, very often these are (as in adult marketplace, inventions to sell books by publishers)  Rich and fertile.  Some wonderful books for children are written nowadays.  But a lot of trash and junk.  Some mediocre.

Adults control what can be written and shape it:  children seen as investment.  And dreams we have later on grow out of these, for me there is an indirect link by way of Dorothy Sayers and Harriet Walters as Harriet Vane that leads to Petherbridge as Lord Peter with his brilliance, sensitivity, humanity and butter-colored hair



Twilight with a rose

Ellen