One Year in Books

Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

2011-05-20T13:44:00.001-07:00

PUBLICATION HISTORY:

Nights at the Circus was published in 1984 and is Carter's penultimate novel. It is generally considered to be her best work and won the James Tait Black Memorial award that year. Carter herself was both a novelist and a journalist.

SUMMARY:
Part I: This section is told through an interview conducted by Jack Walser, an American journalist, of a winged "aerialiste" named "Fevvers" in London, 1899. Fevvers, accompanied by her foster-mother, an old woman named Lizzie, generally get the better of the young American's predictably constructed questions. Fevvers has complete control of her narrative. She was hatched from an egg, found abandoned by Lizzie, and taken to Ma Nelson's brothel, a tight-knit community of sisterhood. Through Fevver's point of view, Carter's depiction of prostitution at Ma Nelson's signals that there is nothing shameful as long as relationships remain reciprocal and the freedom of choice is held up on both sides of the transaction. At Ma Nelson's brothel, Fevvers grew her wings, and slowly learned how to fly. As a young girl, her job would be to pose as Cupid at the brothel, and later, as "Winged Victory," carrying with her a sword. Ma Nelson's death in a terrible accident (she was run over by a carriage) led to the dispersal of the sisterhood. Fevvers tells how the former prostitutes do well, finding opportunities either in business or marrying, totally capable, having been fortified by their time at Ma Nelson's, to find their own way about the world. Fevvers, still an adolescent, goes with Lizzie to live with Lizzie's sister and brother-in-law, who have an ice-cream shop. When the family comes upon hard times, however, Fevvers decides to take up an offer of employment at Madame Schreck's establishment, a macabre place where men satisfy warped desires of their souls. This is a very different place from Ma Nelson's brothel, where men satisfy bodily desires. Madame Schreck's place is a kind of freak museum: its major characters include a Sleeping Beauty, the dwarfish Wiltsire Wonder, the transsexual Albert/Albertina, and Fanny with eyes on her nipples. There is also a black slave named Touissant who doesn't have a mouth but can write. Fevvers joins this crew, and learns all of their sad stories and how they each ended up at Madame Schreck's. One day, Fevvers tries to revolt against the enslavement of Madame Shreck, only to be carried away by a disturbed Rosicrucian man whom Madame has sold her for a high price. This man believes that if he should kill Fevvers in a sacrifice, he will be able to cure his own impotency. Luckily Fevvers escapes him because she has Ma Nelson's sword with her and she gets back to Lizzie and her family. She hears that the rest of the individuals back at Madame Schreck's have also effected their own escapes. Soon, an opportunity to join the circus arises, and Lizzie and Fevvers depart together. This is the end of the interview; exhausted and enchanted, Walser gets the idea that he will join the circus so that he might continue to get his scoop.

Part II: Narrated by a third-person omniscient narrator, this section follows the circus to St. Petersburg. The circus is headed by Colonel Kearney (accompanied always by his clairvoyant pig, Sibyl). Walser has joined as a clown. The circus camp is a lively, carnivalesque place. Its primary characters include apes that can learn in a classroom setting from a professor ape, a waifish girl named Mignon and a brutish Strong Man with whom she frequently has sex with, Buffo the clown (the leader of the clown troupe, who proselytizes about the privilege of how clowns "make [them]selves" and how clowns are even like Christ because they "subject [them]selves to laughter by choice), the Princess of Abyssinia and her tigers, and a host of elephants. Walser witnesses Mignon being brutally beat up by the Strong Man after he sees Walser attempting to save her from an escaped tiger. Mignon's story is given as a side narrative: it is a story of orphanhood, living on the streets, being taken up by the abusive charlatan Herr M. who had her impersonate dead daughters to fool grieving parents, and finally being passed on to the circus as the Strong Man's object of violence and sexual abuse. After being badly beaten up by the Strong Man this time around, Fevvers and Lizzie take her up, cleaning her up and, since she sings (without knowing what she sings, but nevertheless has a lovely voice), encourages the Princess to incorporate her into the act with herself and the tigers. The princess will play the piano, Mignon will sing and dance with the tigers. The women keep the Strong Man away from her. Walser is falling in love, meanwhile, with Fevvers. One night, Walser gets pulled into Mignon and the tiger's singing and dancing act, and afterwards, the Strong Man beats him to a pulp. On another night, Buffo goes crazy and nearly kills Walser. That same night, a tigress is shot to death because it was about to attack Mignon. Colonel Kearney's circus seems to be falling apart. Fevvers is still the most popular act, and she nevertheless pulls off success. Afterwards, the Grand Duke is so impressed with her that he invites her over. Fevvers, lured by his riches, decides to go and leave Lizzie behind. There, the Grand Duke very nearly succeeds in "diminishing" her into an egg and making her his toy (the narrative's use of the word "diminishing" highlights the relationship between his attempt to literally make her smaller and his demeaning her by seeing her as an object for his own use and pleasure). Luckily, she makes an escape, though barely: the Grand Duke manages to break her sword.

Part III: While on a train going through Siberia, there is a big explosion. Fevvers frantically searches for Walser but cannot find him. All of the other circus characters, minus the tigers and elephants, seem to have survived the explosion. Nearby the site of the explosion is a penitentiary started by one Countess P., who had murdered her husband. The aim of her panopticon-shaped penitentiary was to gather together all female murderesses and to try to make them penitent and reformed--her logic was that somehow that would transfer to her own reformation. Despite the extensive disciplinary system which she puts in place, one inmate, Olga Alexandrovna, finds a way to initiate contact with another inmate via a squeeze of the hand. Eventually, secret exchanges of glances and messages written in blood and excrement lead to a large scale revolution and the prisoners escape. They pass by the train wreck and see Walser amidst the rubble, still alive. They decide to continue on their way, intending to form an all-female Utopian community. Fevvers and the others soon find out that the terrorists who blew up their train were a group of peasant men who had heard a rumor circulated by the Colonel that Fevvers was marrying the Prince of Wales. The peasants thought that she might help them curry favor with the English royal family, who might then help them curry favor with the Tsar. The Colonel's rumor was just a publicity stunt, unfortunately; by now, the Colonel was already thinking about how to turn the train incident into good publicity for the circus. One of the peasant convicts decides to tell the party that the rest of his men will probably go on a shooting spree so the circus members decide to send in the clowns to entertain the men and to try to make them desist from violence. During a storm which hits as the clowns are performing, the circus members make their escape. They find an old music maestro in an abandoned conservatory who joins their party. Walser, meanwhile, has been caught up by a Shaman-led tribe and has lost his memory of who he is. The Shaman makes him drink his urine, and Walser has hallucinations. Though Walser remembers snippets of his past life--a song fragment, an epithet, for example--he is unable to piece together the whole. The tribe's mode of living is described as a kind of living in the present with no sense of history, and one of its central practice is the sacrifice of a bear. Walser becomes fully integrated into the tribe, and the Shaman even begins to think of him as a potential successor. Fevvers decides to go after Walser (Lizzie goes with her, but the Princess, Mignon, and the old maestro stay behind to form a musical group together) arriving on the scene of a sacrifice, however, interrupting the ritual and making quite an impression by spreading her wings (except one of them is broken, so she only spreads one of them). In the end, Fevvers and Walser consummate their love, with Fevvers on top smothering Walser below. Walser doesn't really recover his old self the American journalist, but this is a good thing: he now asks actually important questions of Fevvers like "What is your name? Have you a soul? Can you love?" There consummation then, is the true "interview." The novel ends with Fevvers's unrestrained laughter seeping out and infecting all the inhabitants across Siberia.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Female sexuality and desire: At the heart of Carter's novel is a strong, female character who is importantly erotically charged, unafraid of expressing her own desire (sexual or otherwise), yet not at all conventionally "feminine" about this eroticism and desire. Fevvers's eroticism is an overpowering one which makes Walser feel "vertigo"; their final consummation underscores her dominant position. She is big in stature, and comfortable as such. Her sexuality is also a much more expansive one than one which focuses on romantic attachment. I would describe it as closer to a maternal sexuality, which asserts its overwhelming power to comfort, to nurture, and to love all creatures, male or female.
Gender performativity: The notion of gender performativity is strongly suggested in Carter's text (even if before Butler's formalization of this concept in Gender Trouble, 1990). The circus more generally suggests the importance of masks and therefore the constructedness and performance of identity. For the female characters in the novel, gender performance is an important means through which they may expand and/or question traditional constructions of femininity. Standing as "Winged Victory" in the brothel, Fevvers suggests the association of stalwart strength with the female body. Her trapeze routine proclaims a freedom of movement and being which ignores and is completely unfazed and unaffected by the gaze of the audience, whether male or female. The expansive, maternal actions of Fevvers, Lizzie, or Ma Nelson are also all gender performances which suggest that to be female is actually something which might contain male sexuality: it isn't a maternity that is confined to the small space of the domestic sphere, it actually can bring about the re-making of the world. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is Fevvers, Lizzie, and the Princess working together to make Mignon's soul/self and in doing so, also remaking the Strong Man's soul, who as a result of Mignon's transformation, himself becomes more compassionate and expansively loving.
Postmodernism: Like Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, Nights at the Circus ascribes to the fluidity and instability a levity and playfulness (which also often verges on the gothic; "carvinalesque" might encompass both levity and gothicism). The process of Walser's "deconstruction" from the young American male journalist out for a bold adventure, to Walser the clown hiding behind a mask which becomes more and more real as time goes by, and finally his amnesia in joining the Shaman's tribe is fairly humorous. The ease with which Fevvers whittles down his "masculine" journalistic confidence in the categories of fact versus fiction, and cows any notion he might have of virility as stronger than the female not only deconstructs him, but belittles and diminishes him in such a way that makes his initial confidence seem comedic and absurd. In the end, however, Fevvers gives him back a measure of control (since now he is a postmodern subject capable of taking charge of constructing his own identities, having realized identity to be fluid): "We told you no other lies nor in any way strayed from the honest truth. Believe it or not, all that I told you as real happenings were so, in fact; and as to questions of whether I am fact or fiction, you must answer that for yourself!"
Female socialism: There is a strong thread of female socialism in Carter's text, which jives historically with the late nineteenth century/early twentieth-century associations of the New Woman with leftist socialist reform. Ma Nelson's brothel, the female prisoner's going off to form their own utopia and less obviously, the community to springs up around Mignon, are each examples of all-female societies which are based on love, cooperation, and shared visions of effecting social progress through shared and mutual burdens.

Omeros by Derek Walcott

2011-05-13T20:02:00.000-07:00

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Walcott’s most ambitious book-length poem, Omeros, was published in 1990. Shortly thereafter in 1992, he won the Nobel Prize. “Omeros” which is a corruption of “Homer” refers to a tradition of thinking of the West Indies as a potential site for a new civilization which would aspire to the heights of ancient Greece. The primary setting for Omeros is Walcott’s native St. Lucia, which had earned the epithet, “Helen of the West” in the midst of England and France’s colonial rivalry over the island.

SUMMARY/EXPLICATION:
Omeros is divided into seven books and sixty-two chapters, a kind of dual scheme. Each of the chapters are further divided into sub-sections. Formally, the poem is a hybrid form: it is in loose hexameter much like Homer’s, but with occasional pentameter and tetrameter lines which suggest a more folk-like character. The stanzas are mostly tercets reminiscent of Dante’s Divine Comedy without, however, the strict rhyme of terza rima.

Book 1: This initial book focuses primarily on introducing the major characters on the island of St. Lucia. In the opening scene, Philoctete is hewing trees to make canoes and displaying his work for tourists. We are introduced to Seven Seas the blind man, who doubles as one of the “Omeros” figures throughout the work. Ma Kilman owns the oldest bar in town, and her belief systems are a mix of Obeah African origins and Catholic influences. Major Plunkett and his wife Maud, originally from Ireland, have committed themselves to living abroad, though Major Plunkett adamantly tries to super-impose a Westernized history of St. Lucia, meticulously and obsessively drawing correspondences between St. Lucia and Homeric myth. In particular, Plunkett is obsessed with the pretty native woman, Helen, who for a time was the Plunkett’s maid. Achille is Helen’s lover but he is involved in a rivalry with Hector for her love. Helen is fairly proud of her beauty, and Maud resents her presence and influence on her husband. A cyclone’s destruction is described in great detail in this book, and the difficulty of maintaining order over the landscape greatly bothers Plunkett, whose primary occupation is that of a pig farmer. Finally, the poetic “I” (who is Walcott) intrudes into the first book as a kind of character living alongside the rest of the characters. He is told in this first book by his father in a kind of dream-like vision (Warwick Walcott died when Derek was a one year old) to find a way to give voice to the people of the island.

Book 2: This second book breaks chronological time and space through a flashback to Plunkett’s ancestor, a midshipman during the battle between France and Britain in 1782 over St. Lucia. The French are defeated, though the young midshipman perishes. One of the slaves which the English take is Afalobe, whom they rename Achilles. Back in the present time, there is an election—Philoctete and Hector join Maljo’s “United Love Party,” but they are defeated. The election scene demonstrates a failure of self-government after the colonial encounter, and how elections don’t have much of an impact on the everyday lives of the citizens. Major Plunkett, meanwhile, struggles with his fascination for Helen in a vivid scene where he can’t bring himself to scold her when she takes one of Maud’s bracelets. Helen moves in with Hector, preferring him to Achille. In order to make more money, Hector gives up fishing for the more lucrative (but far more oppressive and constrained) work of driving a passenger van. Helen announces that she is pregnant, though she is unsure whos’ baby it is. She boldly asks Maud to borrow money. At the close of the book, Achille is out on his fishing boat, In God We Troust, and begins to fall into a sort of hallucinatory vision of the Middle Passage. He wonders, for the first time, about his own identity.

Book 3: This shorter book describes how Achille goes back in time to the slave trade and back to his ancestral African village during a kind of dream or hallucination. He meets his ancestor Afolabe and learns about his origins--the different rituals and customs which Achille then realizes to be in the shadows of St. Lucian rituals and customs in his present-day life. Achille also witnesses the brutal scene of his ancestor’s enslavement through a raid. Afolabe enslaved becomes renamed as Achilles, a name which he accepts because, beaten down, it is simply easier to do so. When Achille makes him temporal and spatial return, he evinces a new interest in dispossessed peoples, including the Native Americans. His perspective has become more global.

Book 4: As if matching Achille’s now expanded perspectives, Book 4 opens up new geographic and temporal spaces. The first part includes scenes of Walcott’s own divorce while in New England, the Wounded Knee massacre in December, 1890 and the perspective of Catherine Weldon, a white woman who sympathizes with the Native Americans. Like Achille during the slave raid in his ancestral village, Catherine cannot do anything but witness the massacre of over one-hundred Native Americans by the U.S. cavalry. Walcott links the breach of contract in his own marriage to the breach of contract in the treaties signed between the Native Americans and the United States government. Book four also contains an extended imagining of Walcott’s own father, Warwick (who died when he was one) telling him he needs to visit various capitals of the Old World before he will be able to understand the experience of his colonial native home. Warwick Walcott tells his son that journeys are circular.

Book 5: On is father’s advice, Walcott visits four destinations: Lisbon, London, Dublin, and the Aegean Islands. Each of these four places has unique significance for the poet: Lisbon was an important site for the African slave trade, London bears the weight of being the center of English imperialism, Dublin called up associations with literary forebears like Joyce since Walcott analogized between the colonial subjection of Ireland and of the West Indies, and finally the Aegean Islands represent the cradle of Western civilization. What the poet learns, finally, is not to imitate, or use the structures that belong to these centers of (literary) culture to write the literature of the Caribbean but to focus more on gathering material from the immediate world around him.

Book 6: Back in St. Lucia, Hector is in a fatal accident because of his reckless driving of his passenger van (called the Comet). Achille and Helen reconcile after Hector’s death, and Achille also honors his friends memory. Maud also dies in this section, succumbing to cancer. After his wife’s death, Plunkett realizes the great burden which he has placed on his Irish wife who has always wished to return to Dublin, though she had learned to live in St. Lucia. He realizes too that his obsessive project of trying to find Homeric parallels to “build a history” for St. Lucia was futile: “Why not see Helen as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow?” Walcott, of course, has the same realization and essentially repudiates the methods of his own poem. The other major event which happens in this book is Ma Kilman’s successful healing of Philoctete’s shin wound. She finds a cure by following a trail of ants into the mountains to a specific African herb. Thus, the book is largely about reconciliations, and these reconciliations mirror the poet’s own maturing process and reconciliation to the native colonial landscape.

Book 7: Omeros is a character in this final book that serves as a kind of guide to Walcott. He underscores the lesson which Walcott has already learned, that he should concentrate on what he sees in his surroundings rather than worry about framing his account with appropriately authoritative literary structures. Major characters like Major Plunkett and Achille have also learned to be more present and aware of their surroundings; Plunkett gives up the project of writing a history and bringing English “order” to the land, and Achille returns to his original work of fishing. The final lines suggest a sort of continuity between the lives that these characters now live and the natural landscape: “When he (referring to Achille) left the beach the sea was still going on.”

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

2011-05-13T19:59:00.000-07:00

Edition: Great Expectations (A Norton Critical Edition)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:

Great Expectations was serialized in Dicken’s own periodical All the Year Round in weekly installments from December 1860 to August 1861 (the American serialization in Harper’s actually began a week earlier due to lighter copyright restrictions in America). All the Year Round, unlike his previous periodical, Household Words, gave prime space to serial fiction—this was a successful move for Dickens, as AYR’s circulation ended up greatly exceeding HW’s.

SUMMARY:

Great Expectations is narrated retrospectively in first-person by Pip, who introduces himself to his reader explaining that he called himself "Pip" because his father's family names was Pirrip, and his Christian name was Philip and as an infant, he couldn't really pronounce either. Early in his life, since he was an orphan, he lived with his sister, the formidable Mrs. Joe Gargery, and her husband Joe, a poor blacksmith whose own upbringing under a tyrannical father who beat him and his mother led to his being particularly mild-mannered before the tyrannical Mrs. Gargery. One day, Pip was at the graveyard looking upon the graves of his parents, when he encounters an escaped convict, who demands that Pip bring him back some "wittles" and a "file" to saw away the iron chain around his leg. Frightened by the man's threats that he will send a young man after him to devour his liver if he fails to obey him, Pip steals food from Mrs. Joe's pantry, saves food from his own dinner, and steals a file from Joe's workshop to take to the man the next day. When he delivers the food and the file the next day, Pip encounters briefly another convict. During the course of Christmas dinner, some soldiers come and tell them that there have been two escaped convicts and that they need Joe's help to repair some broken iron cuffs that they had found. The men at dinner (including Joe, Mr. Wopsle, the church clerk, and Uncle Pumblechook, a relative to Joe, in addition to Pip) go out with other members of the village to seek out these escaped convicts. They are found in the marshes, and Pip watches as "his" convict maintained a hold on the other convict, apparently thinking it good that they had been caught in order that he might turn in this other convict. Pip's convict also frees Pip from suspicion by telling the sergeant that he had stolen food from the Gargery's. The convicts are carried back to the hulks, prison ships bound for Australia.

For the most part, Pip wasn't receiving much of an education, except for when he would go to "learn" from Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt. This aunt, however, was often asleep, so really, Pip learned more rudimentary knowledge of the alphabet from a girl named Biddy who worked for her. Eventually, the plan was for Pip to be apprenticed to Joe, but in the meantime, he is summoned to a wealthy old woman named Miss Havisham’s house. Prior to his regular visitations to Miss Havisham’s, Pip encounters a stranger in a pub while with Joe, who has the file which he gave the convict at the beginning of the novel. This stranger gives Pip some money.

At Miss Havisham’s, relatives surround her, fawning on her and clearly interested in her fortune. Miss Havisham lives with a young beautiful girl named Estella; Pip becomes smitten with her and starts to feel ashamed of his own poverty and lack of education. This, of course, is Miss Havisham’s plan: because her fiancé had left her years ago, out of spite she has brought up Estella as a haughty temptress and torturer of men. Miss Havisham enjoys watching Pip play cards with Estella, and also engages Pip to accompany her on a circular route around a room where she has kept her (decaying, cobwebbed) bridal cake and decorations. All of the clocks in Miss Havisham’s house are set to twenty to nine, the time when her lover left. One day at Miss Havisham’s, Pip encounters a “pale young gentleman” (later revealed to be Herbert Pocket) who challenges him to a fight. Pip has no choice but to fight, and Pip actually emerges victorious though he feels badly and fears retribution. Retribution doesn’t come, however, and he forgets the incident for the time being.

Eventually, Miss Havisham allows Pip to be apprenticed to Joe, but having been exposed to Estella, Pip is ashamed of Joe’s illiteracy and desires a better life for himself. He engages Biddy to continue to teach him to write. One day, when Pip is given a half-day off and so is Joe’s surly journeyman, Orlick (who severely dislikes Pip) he goes back to Miss Havisham’s to catch a glimpse of Estella. She is, however, not there. On his return home, Pip finds that Mrs. Gargery has been horribly beat up and close to death. Mrs. Gargery is revived, but she is now basically an invalid. The weapon left beside her seemed to Pip to be the convict in the graveyard’s iron, but Pip doesn’t say anything. Orlick is a suspect because of a recent quarrel with Mrs. Gargery, but for the time being, they cannot find out the suspect.

About four years into his apprenticeship, Pip is met with a lawyer named Mr. Jaggers who informs him that Pip has an unknown benefactor who has intentions of making Pip into a gentleman. The one condition is that Pip should not seek to find out who the benefactor is. Pip, of course, thinks it is Miss Havisham and Miss Havisham has no qualms in making those around her believe this to be true in order to inspire their jealousies. Pip is to go to London to study under a tutor named Matthew Pocket; Pip associates this name readily with one Sarah Pocket often at Miss Havisham’s so his suspicions that Miss Havisham is his benefactor are strengthened. Pip has also seen Jaggers at Miss Havisham’s before. Armed with “great expectations,” Pip becomes a proud figure before Biddy, who has come to live with them since her great aunt Wopsle died, and Joe. Pip’s retrospective narrative perpetuates an ironic distance between the Pip excitedly making his preparations to go to London (going to the tailor and buying new clothes) and the mature narrator-Pip. The first volume closes with Pip setting off for London in a stage-coach.

In London, Pip is met by the son of Matthew Pocket, Herbert, whom he recognizes as the pale young gentleman. Later, Pip finds that his tutor (who lives in the suburbs) has a rather difficult wife, who resents that he is a private tutor, fancying herself royalty by birth. The Pockets have a household of children that Mrs. Pocket basically neglects; nurses pick up the slack. There are two other pupils of Matthew’s, Bentley Drummle, of baronet origins, and Startop. Pip soon decides to take up as Herbert’s London roommate in Barnard’s Inn and the two become great friends. Herbert is a bit naïve as far as making money goes; he wishes to become an insurance magnate but doesn’t seem to have much idea as to how to go about this. Meanwhile, Pip becomes better acquainted with Wemmick, Jaggers’s clerk who seems all business while in London, but allows Pip a look into his private life during Pip’s visit to his cottage which indicates that he is man of depth and feeling. Wemmick has made his dwellings meticulously charming and self-sufficient apart from the whirling world of London, and there, he takes care of his aged parent. Pip also visits Jaggers’s home, and gains no such knowledge of any sort of inner depth to the lawyer—Jaggers manipulates Pip and his companions (Drummle, Startop, and Herbert) to share more than they should about themselves at dinner while he himself remains tight-lipped about himself. Jaggers is every inch the professional and does all that he can to eliminate the humanity and the personal in his interactions with others. There is a mysterious female housekeeper at Jaggers’s who seems very afraid of him. Oddly, Jaggers shows to the dinner party her mangled wrists and says something about the strength of her hands.

One day, Joe comes to inform Pip that Miss Havisham would like to see him. On his way back to his hometown, Pip shares a coach with the stranger who had given him money in the public house and overhears that the money had been from the convict that he had seen in the graveyard. Pip decides to stay at a hotel instead of with Joe, and there he sees in the newspapers that Pumblechook has been opportunistically telling everyone that he had been Pip’s mentor in the past. Pip still harbors the great expectation that he will get to marry Estella and again he is disappointed when he sees her again. Miss Havisham offers no promises, and Pip has a strange interaction with Estella in which she informs him that she has no heart. Back in London, Pip confesses his love for Estella to Herbert, who gives him the good advice that maybe he should’t set too much on just “expectations.” Herbert and Pip attend a production of Hamlet (which Pip has heard about from Joe) featuring none other than Mr. Wopsle who has given up his religious occupation for acting. The next day, Estella writes him to tell him that Miss Havisham wants him to accompany her from London to Richmond. Pip of course obeys but nothing comes of his “expectations.”

Meanwhile, Pip and Herbert are getting into debts and the two of them, since neither of them are good at managing their practical monetary affairs, crunch numbers to very little purpose. Pip gets a note letting him know that Mrs. Gargery has finally died and he goes home for her funeral. The reunion with Joe and Biddy is bittersweet, and when he leaves and promises to be back more often, Biddy expresses her doubts and Pip feels her to be harsh even though she is probably correct.

When Pip reaches his twenty-first birthday, he begins to get a direct income of 500 pounds a year from his unknown benefactor. Pip decides to anonymously use his money to set up Herbert as a partner in a merchant business with a man named Clarikker. Estella, now established in London at the house of one Mrs. Brandley’s, receives visits from many suitors, Pip included. She doesn’t treat him as she does other suitors, however, telling him that she deliberately doesn’t deceive him like the others. Drummle emerges as more and more of a likely match for Estella. Two years later, at midnight one night, Pip’s convict shows up at his apartment for shelter. Pip learns that he is called Magwitch, and that he was his true benefactor, having earned money in Australia as a sheep farmer and feeling for the little boy who had once done him a kindness. Pip hides Magwitch (now under the name Uncle Provis) and involves Herbert. When Magwitch tells his life story to Pip, they realize that the other convict in the marshes, Compeyson, who betrayed Magwitch was also Miss Havisham’s betraying lover through a connection to her half brother Arthur. Pip is crushed by all of this information, decides that he should no longer use the money of his benefactor, and goes to Miss Havisham’s Satis House one more time to say good-bye to Estella before thinking to renounce his chances with her forever. At Miss Havisham’s, Pip learns that Estella has finally been engaged to Drummle. Miss Havisham seems to pity him, weirdly, but this is no solace. Pip walks all the way from Satis House to London, where he receives a note from a porter near his apartment from Wemmick warning him not to go home. The next day, Wemmick tells him that Compeyson is in London seeking Magwitch. Herbert has removed Magwitch to his intended Clara’s house, where she lives with her drunk father. Herbert and Pip plan to help Magwitch escape on the river and Pip buys a rowboat for the purpose. At the theater one night, Mr. Wopsle tells Pip that he saw Compeyson (recognizing his face from the night of Magwitch’s struggle with him in the marshes) behind him; Pip realizes that Compeyson is onto him.

More mysteries are solved for Pip when he goes to dine with Jaggers one day: Magwitch is actually Estella’s father and Jaggers’s housekeeper is Estella’s mother. Apparently she had strangled a woman to death and Jaggers had defended her successfully and set up her child, Estella, with Miss Havisham. Pip goes to Miss Havisham to confirm the story and finds her in an apologetic state. Before Pip can stop her, she has set herself on fire out of remorse. Pip manages to rescue her though she becomes an invalid. Back in London, Herbert nurses Pip back to health from his burns, and soon afterwards, Wemmick gives the signal that they should attempt to smuggle Magwitch out of town on the following Wednesday. Pip receives an anonymous summons from someone threatening his “Uncle Provis” if he did not meet them at the sluice-house near the lime-kilns near his native town by the marshes. Pip impulsively follows the note, feeling responsible for Magwitch and is unfortunately seized by Orlick at the sluice house who, before killing Pip, confesses the murder of his sister as well. Luckily, Pip is rescued by Herbert and Startop, who have found the note and rushed over.

Back in London, they attempt the escape. Unfortunately, they are caught by a galley that demands the surrender of Magwitch. Magwitch sees a man on the galley and rips off the wrap covering his face, revealing Compeyson. Pip’s boat capsizes, and Magwitch and Compeyson wrestle in the water as a steamer passes over them. Compeyson is drowned, but Magwitch emerges alive though badly wounded. In prison, Magwitch is sentenced to death. He dies before his execution however, and Pip doesn’t reveal to him that his fortune has been confiscated so that he might die thinking he has made Pip a gentleman.

At the end of the novel, Herbert’s firm does well enough for him to establish an Eastern branch in Cairo. He asks Pip to go with him to be his clerk, but before he accepts, Pip goes to his hometown once again, hoping to marry Biddy, realizing at long last that she was the one whom he should have loved from the first. He is shocked to discover, however, that she and Joe had married. Pip, Biddy, and Joe reconcile as Pip asks for their forgiveness for his pride and blindness. They graciously tell him that there is nothing to forgive.

Pip goes off with Herbert and successfully makes a living, returning eleven years later to find Biddy and Joe with a child named Pip. Pip has heard that Drummle has died, having treated Estella badly during their marriage. In the (unpublished) original ending, she has remarried a doctor, and he runs into her in London where she is in a carriage. Little Pip is with Pip, and she assumes he is his son and Pip doesn’t correct her. Pip says that she seemed changed and that “the suffering had been stronger than Miss Havinsham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.” The revised ending was more sentimental: Pip meets Estella back at the abandoned Satis House, and Estella reveals how she has changed in dialogue with Pip. They resolve, at the end, to part as friends, and as Pip watches her leave, he says he sees “the shadow of no parting but one” in the serial version (signaling the shadow of death), but cancels “but one” in the volume edition.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:

One of the most commented on and interesting features of the narrative is Pip’s first-person retrospective account. Because it is a retrospective account delivered by a mature narrator who feels quite differently than the Pip he is describing at each stage of his story, a number of more complicated narrative effects are enabled. I will discuss two in particular here: first, the retrospective first-person account enables a narrative of withholding, and second, it enables a narrative which constantly ironizes and undermines Pip’s younger self.

Withholding begins with the very first scene, in which the narrator Pip styles the Magwitch graveyard scene as if it is a random episode from the younger Pip’s life. The fact that it ends up being a kind of originary scene for Pip’s bildungsroman is withheld basically until the revelation that Pip’s benefactor was Magwitch. Also withheld is the significance of the unnamed town near the marshes which Pip grows up in: in the context of the global network, it turns out to be an important stop which connect the empire (significant because of convict deportation to Australia) to London which is further inland (I’m indebted to Jonathan Grossman’s reading of Great Expectations and transport networks here).

Pip’s depiction of his younger self is severely ironic especially when he narrates how he treats Biddy and Joe once he goes to Miss Havisham’s and begins to have “expectations.” The mature narrator makes the reader complicit in critiquing the young Pip. This early irony has a larger significance, however, when we consider the how the novel is really in the end about how his “great expectations” fail to become more than just “expectations.” The title itself becomes a bittersweet, ironic commentary on upward social mobility: a convict with the best of intentions fails at vicariously moving up on the social ladder through Pip even when he ends up with a lot of money.

Ultimately, there is something incredibly imprisoning and limiting about the entire (global) network of social relations where its players are constantly unable to exert agency to bring about the fruition of their hopes or expectations. And, it isn’t just Pip and Magwitch who get trapped—Estella is the other obvious example of a character who becomes trapped by circumstances which she is largely powerless over. The only characters who can finally live out “good lives” are those who essentially live without expectations of upward mobility or ambitions to live better: Biddy and Joe are one such example, and Wemmick is another. Biddy and Joe are content to live in the town near the marshes without knowing any more about the outside world than is necessary for a peaceful domestic life—when Pip tries to reveal more to Joe, he says that he would rather not know. Wemmick’s home away from his professional life similarly shows him extricating himself from the networks in which he cannot be but a partially blind agent: at his private cottage, though humble, he controls everything from food production (he has livestock and gardens) to the drawbridge which shuts his cottage out from the outside world every evening.

Armadale by Wilkie Collins

2011-05-10T10:57:00.000-07:00

Edition: Armadale (Penguin Classics)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:

Wilkie Collins's longest sensation novel Armadale was serialized in Cornhill Magazine from November 1864-June 1866. Cornhill Magazine was begun in 1860 by George Murray Smith (who employed Dickens's rival, Thackeray, as its editor) and aimed to be "safe" and "respectable" in its content. Armadale, then, was perhaps a mistake on Smith's part--its serialization alongside two conservative pieces of domestic realism, Gaskell's Wives and Daughters and Trollope's The Claverings indicates its significantly different register. Responses to Armadale, despite Collins's popularity through such previous works as The Woman in White (1859-1860), were generally negative and circulation of Cornhill actually declined significantly during Armadale's serialization. The respectable middle-class reading public particularly felt the character of Lydia Gwilt to be far too radically immoral for detailed depiction; in this later period, Collins's sensational fiction had reached more polemical heights than before.

SUMMARY:

Armadale commences with the two travelers arriving at the town of Wildbad in 1832. They are a surly Scotsman by the name of Mr. Neal, and Allan Armadale, a man nearing his deathbed, accompanied by his wife and baby son. Armadale is an Engishman of the West Indies, and his wife a beautiful woman of mixed blood. Armadale is in a state of paralysis when he arrives in Wildbad and needs someone to help him complete a final letter addressed to his son, to be delivered to official representatives and read by his son when he is of age. Because he wants to hide the contents of this letter from his wife, Mr. Neal ends up being the only person around fluent enough in English to complete the task. He begrudgingly agrees, and reads aloud the completed portion of the manuscript first to make sure of any necessary corrections.

This manuscript reveals the story of how Allan Armadale was once Allan Wrentmore until he inherited the Armadale estate in Barbadoes from his godfather. His godfather had thrown off his own son on account of some misdemeanors he had committed. The stipulation attached to the inheritance was that Wrentmore would take the name Armadale. Afterwards, Armadale needed a clerk to manage the estate, and hired Fergus Ingleby, who is later revealed to be the original Allan Armadale. "Fergus" takes revenge by taking Allan "Wrentmore" Armadale's place in a marriage arranged by Allan's mother to the daughter of Mr. Blanchard of the wealthy Thorpe-Ambrose estate in England. When Allan arrived at Madeira where he was to meet his future wife, he finds that Miss Blanchard has already married "Fergus," thinking him to be her arranged lover. A young maid, Lydia Gwilt, helped forge letters from Mrs. Wrentmore in order to bring about the marriage. Allan Armadale challenges "Fergus" to a duel, but "Fergus" is a no-show; he and his new wife sail for Lisbon in a timber-ship called La Grace de Dieu. Armadale engages his services on another vessel which Mr. Blanchard hires to capture the couple. La Grace de Dieu is wrecked during its voyage, and the members of Mr. Blanchard's vessel go on board to make rescues. Armadale locks "Fergus" in his cabin and leaves him there to drown. Armadale was never prosecuted for murder and he went back to the West Indies, taking on his current wife and making his life over again. Here, the letter ends. Armadale enjoins Neal to write the rest of the letter, which tells his son to avoid contact with the son of the true Allan Armadale and his widow, who had been born after his death. As it turns out once again, both boys, Armadale's own son and the widow's, are named Allan Armadale. Armadale's warning exhibits his superstitious belief that no good can come from the second generation of Allan Armadales meeting.

The narrative skips here to focus on the original Allan Armadale's widow and her son. This portion of the narrative is given as memories of Mr. Brock, a bachelor clergyman. As this widow was estranged from her two brothers as a result of her marriage, she took her son with her to Somersetshire, raising him in isolation and allowing Mr. Brock sole responsibility for the education of her son. When her son reached the age of sixteen, Mr. Brock came across a strange advertisement asking for the whereabouts of Allan Armadale (placed by the party responsible for delivering the murderer's letter to his son). The widow knows that the advertisement doesn't refer to her Allan, and begs Brock to destroy the newspaper and keep it from her Allan. Soon after a stressful visit from a mysterious veiled woman (later revealed to by Lydia Gwilt), Mrs. Armadale dies, and makes Brock promise her that he will keep her son away from the other Allan Armadale, the son of his father's murderer, and also Lydia Gwilt, the maid who forged the letter to enable her marriage.

Prior to Mrs. Armadale's death, a swarthy young man stricken by fever arrives to Somersetshire, and he is taken in. Allan Armadale, because he has grown up in such isolation, is open to new acquaintances to a fault, generously paying the young man's medical bills. When the young man comes to his senses, he says his name is Ozias Midwinter, and it turns out he has enough money to pay his own bills. Nonetheless, Ozias feels great gratitute towards Allan, and a sort of friendship blossoms between the two young men. Ozias leaves for London after recovering, though at Allan's prompting, leaves Allan his London address.

After Allan's mother's death, Mr. Brock writes to see if her brothers will take up friendly relations with her son. One of the brothers refuses, and the other has died, but the son of this deceased brother agrees to let bygones be bygones. Allan, however, has very little interest renewing contact with relatives that had shunned his mother, and instead goes with Brock on some travels which Brock hoped would help the grieving young man. They begin their travels in Paris, and Allan insists on seeing Ozias in London. Ozias is away on business when Allan calls on him in London; later when they meet up, it is revealed that Ozias has inherited some estate from relatives. Almost simultaneously, Allan learns that he is the owner of the Blanchard estate of Thorpe-Ambrose because of three unexpected deaths in the family. In order to give the ladies at Thorpe-Ambrose some time to grieve and to get their things in order, Allan decides to go on a yachting-cruise (his passion was building his own yachts) for two months. Ozias and Brock accompany Allan on this trip, during which time Ozias receives the letter intended for him from his father--he confesses to Brock that he is in fact Allan Armadale, but had thought nothing of staying away from his new friend until this letter came into his hands. Indeed, Ozias has had a hard life: after the death of his father, his mother married Mr. Neal, and the two of them shunned him and treated him badly. He eventually ran away, taking a bunch of odd jobs here and there, receiving his new name from a gipsy man who took him in. For most of his life thus far, Ozias had been shunned and shown no pity or kindness; eventually he wound up in a bookshop, where he spent many an hour finding solace in books. The kindness of Allan Armadale, then, was one of the first he had experienced. Brock, though initially mistrustful of Ozias, accepts Ozias's confession to him as a sign of his goodness, and tells Ozias that he believes he will break the spell of his father's superstitious letter and be a friend to Allan, provided he didn't reveal his true identity. Meanwhile, Brock is called away for clergyman duties, and the two young men are left alone together for the remainder of the yachting cruise. In an incident during a moonlit night, the two of them wander out to check out a wreck, which turns out to be none other than La Grace de Dieu. Ominously, their own boat slips away and the two men are stuck on the same vessel where Ozias's father had murdered Allan's father. During the night that the two men spend on the wreck, Allan has a frightening dream involving the following episodes: himself before a sunset and the "shadow of a woman," before a room with a "shadow of a man" where the man causes the shattering of a statuette, and finally before the "shadow of a woman" passing a glass to him via the "shadow of a man" and himself falling to the ground after holding the glass up to his lips. Ozias fears that this is a dream of the future, and that he himself is the "shadow of the man" and decides to write an account of Allan's dream down. Their friend, a Doctor Hawbury, puts Allan at ease by coming up with a "scientific" explanation for his dream consisting of linking elements of his dream to various everyday happenings Allan encountered in the last few days.

Coming upon his new estate, Allan decides to engage Ozias as his steward, not accepting a refusal. They learn that members of the town have contrived to throw a grand public reception on the occasion of Allan's arrival; Allan, wanting to avoid the ostentation goes to his new estate in secret. This turns out to be a bad idea, because the members of the town feel snubbed by him and he has much difficulty making amends. At his estate, Allan makes the acquaintance of Major Milroy, whom he has chosen to live as his cottage tenant over an old lawyer who has served his family for years--Allan peremptorily made his decision with the flip of a coin, without thinking he might offend the lawyer. Milroy has an invalid wife, and a young daughter, with whom Allan immediately begins a kind of flirtatious relationship. Meanwhile, Lydia Gwilt has been exchanging letters with an old woman named Oldershaw--these letters show a rather strained relationship between the two, but nevertheless, between them a plan to install Lydia as the governess for Milroy's daughter in order that Lydia might eventually win her way to becoming the new Mrs. Armadale is agreed upon. After all, Lydia looks young and charming for her age despite being thirty-five. When Mr. Brock sees Oldershaw and Lydia (recognizing Lydia in her veil from her visit to Mrs. Armadale in Somersetshire) in London speaking of Allan, he warns Midwinter that the veiled woman may be coming to Thorpe-Ambrose. Oldershaw sees Mr. Brock surveying them, and boldly comes up with a plan to waylay Brock: Lydia should dress up her Oldershaw's housemaid as herself in the veil, and this housemaid should pretend to get on steamer to Brazil. Oldershaw has a story for Mr. Brock: that her mistress was going back to Brazil to meet her husband, and that she was indeed the woman who had seen Mrs. Armadale and felt sorry for extracting money from her on her deathbed.

Midwinter meets with an old man named Bashwood, who has come for the purpose of coaching him in his stewardship duties. He seems unaccountably sneaky and obsequious, and Allan doesn't much like him. Allan soon decides to throw a picnic, inviting the Milroys, two of their friends, a widow and her curate son, and also the new governess since she is due to arrive on the day of his picnic. With the aid of Pedgift Jr., the son of the lawyer that Allan has taken into his service, the picnic is a great success, despite the somewhat unpleasant company provided by the widow and her son. Lydia Gwilt arrives during sunset, and Midwinter reminds him that the sunset and the "shadow of a woman" was part of his dream. Allan manages to maintain his levity, and is soon taken in by Lydia's great beauty. Midwinter has received a letter from Brock describing the features of the housemaid as Miss Gwilt's, and as a result, manages to allay Midwinter's anxieties because the Miss Gwilt he has met does not look like the woman of Brock's description. Lydia Gwilt, meanwhile, manages to enchant both Allan and Midwinter (and Bashwood, who soon becomes a kind of pawn for her). After Allan confesses to Midwinter that he is in love with Lydia and wants to marry her, Midwinter decides to leave for a time, citing his own anxious composition as an excuse. After he leaves, the invalid Mrs. Milroy's jealousy of Lydia Gwilt grows, and she comes up with a plan to check her reference "Mrs. Mandeville" (really Mrs. Oldenshaw), hoping to dig up some dirt on Lydia. Having found out from her daughter that Allan seems interested in Lydia as well, Mrs. Milroy dispatches Allan to travel to London to try to speak with Mrs. Mandeville; because Mrs. Oldenshaw has reverted to her old name, Allan has a hard time finding her. Pedgift Jr., savvier than Allan, manages to suggest a connection between Lydia and a certain house of Pimlico, an unsavory establishment connected to a "beauty doctor." Wishing to save face for Lydia, Allan refuses to admit his findings to Mrs. Milroy, who then gets her husband involved.

Soon, Allan finds himself with a bad name as far as the estimation of everyone else in the town goes, between the Milroy's anger over his refusal to reveal what he has found, and everyone else finding his secret digging into a woman's past to be highly inappropriate. Lydia herself decides to discontinue her service with the Milroys, cunningly underscoring her own respectability even though she is unable to answer unspecified charges against her. Pedgift Sr. writes to Allan, who has remained in London during all of this, strongly suggesting that he come back and show his face so people don't think he's trying to avoid the situation. In London, Pedgift tells Allan that he does not trust Lydia, and as a result of his great experience as a defense lawyer working for the most hardened criminals, can say with no small degree of certainty that she is no innocent woman. Using the safety of Miss Milroy as pretense, Pedgift manages to convince Allan that they need to dispatch a spy to watch Lydia's movements. Allan is reluctant, but wanting to be chivalrous to the poor Miss Milroy, agrees. When Midwinter returns from his leave, he runs into Lydia, who tells him that Allan has sent a spy to watch her. Midwinter, because he is in love with her, is furious on her behalf and can't control himself when he meets with Allan who tells him she tells the truth. Despite Midwinter's remarkable amount of self-control thus far, the two men's tense disagreement over Lydia Gwilt leads to the shattering of the statuette in the drawing room, just as Allan had dreamed.

The next section is told primarily through Lydia's letters to Mrs. Oldershaw and her diary. Horrified at the statuette incident, Midwinter runs away, but still, he seems fatally drawn to Miss Gwilt, and the two acknowledge their love for one another. He also decides to tell her who he truly is and the entire story. Miss Gwilt, however, likes to Midwinter about her own identity, refusing to acknowledge that she was the former maid of Mrs. Armadale. Midwinter departs to London to get a job as a journalist, and alone and pushed to the wall with debts, Lydia comes upon an old letter from a man ("a villain") with whom she was once associated telling her about a resolute woman who once impersonated someone's widow. This sets the wheels turning in Lydia's head: she might marry Midwinter and take the name Mrs. Armadale since that is who he really is, do away with Allan, and then come back to Thorpe-Ambrose with the marriage certificate saying that she is Mrs. Allan Armadale. These nefarious plans Lydia Gwilt hatches all on her own, and for the time being, she withholds these plans from Mrs. Oldershaw.

Allan and Neelie have reached a point where they have regained such an interest in one another that they plot to get married. Lydia overhears them while they consult volumes of law to see if they might get married. They determine, finally, that Allan should go to London to consult someone for help. Lydia takes this opportunity to also go to London, and at the train station, she contrives to make Allan her travel companion, leading to rumors that she and Allan Armadale went away together to get married. Before leaving for London, Lydia sends an anonymous letter to Major Milroy warning Miss Milroy against Allan Armadale, suggesting that his affections may be elsewhere. The result is that Major Milroy stipulates that Miss Milroy will go to school for six months and cut off contact with Allan; if the two of them should still wish to marry at the time, he would condone it. Lydia suggests that in order to kill time, Allan should take his yacht and meet herself and Midwinter after they have married in Naples, where he will be working for a while as a foreign correspondent.

Bashwood has happened to see Allan and Lydia at the train station and becomes extremely jealous and angry that Lydia has deceived him since he had thought he was on her side against Allan. Furious and yet still madly in love with her, he decides to consult his son who is in the spying business to uncover Miss Gwilt's past to him. Jemmy, Bashwood's son, learns that Miss Gwilt had in the past poisoned a husband, and gotten off with just the minor charges of robbery. Subsequently, she had married a Captain Manuel (who already had a first wife) but he ditched her. It was at this point that she had tried to drown herself (an incident which precipitated the deaths of Allan Armadale's relatives and his coming to own Thorpe-Ambrose).

By the time Jemmy tracks Lydia down, she has already married Midwinter, but Bashwood and Jemmy don't know it is Midwinter because the wedding registry reads Miss Lydia Gwilt and Allan Armadale, Midwinter's true name. After the two of them are married, things aren't great between them because Midwinter ends up being a kind of workaholic at his journalism. He also becomes extremely nervous, renewing his fears about Allan's prophetic dream. Soon after their marriage, Mr. Brock dies, and leaves a letter for Midwinter encouraging him to stick by Allan because he believes in him, and his faith leads him to believe that all will be well should the two of them remain close friends. Thus, Midwinter is torn between needing to stay away from Allan because of the superstition and his father's letter, and sticking with Allan because of Mr. Brock's encouraging words.

Allan's yacht actually does get wrecked on his way to Naples, but he survives. He then engages an old yacht, but has some trouble securing a crew for a cruise he wanted to take. It happens that at Naples, Lydia encounters her second husband, Captain Manuel, who has become an impoverished chorus singer. When he asks her for money, she lets him know that Armadale is a rich man, naive, and in need of a crew. When Manuel asks her what her interests as far as the Englishman Armadale goes are, she refuses to give him any more information. Luckily for Lydia, Midwinter's superstition has been at a high due to the third scene in Allan's dream playing out recently when Lydia mixed a glass of lemonade, handing it over to Allan via Midwinter (she doesn't quite confess in her diary that she has slipped something into the drink but it is strongly suggested--Allan doesn't drink, though, because he smells brandy, which he avoids). Because of his superstition, Midwinter thinks that he and Lydia should not going on the cruise with Allan lest they inadvertently harm him. Allan Armadale's fate indeed seems sealed as he sails off with Manuel and his band of cutthroats.

During a storm, the crew nailed Allan below the decks and shattered the sea with the ship's wreckage, themselves taking off. News was borne that the yacht had been wrecked with all on board, and Lydia sets off for London intending to claim herself to be the widow of the late Allan Armadale. Despite some misgivings because of her true love of Midwinter, she still decides to act in her own self interest. In London, she finds Dr. Downward (of the house of Pimlico) involved with opening a sanitarium. Lydia manages to get him to sign that he had witnessed the marriage of Lydia and Allan, but as the lawyers were considering her claim, Allan Armadale wrote a letter declaring that he was alive, having escaped from the wreck with the aid of one man in his crew. He is recovering abroad, and will return soon to London. When Midwinter returns to London, Lydia repudiates him and declares herself the widow of Allan Armadale. Her last resort is to get Allan into the sanitarium the doctor has started--she sense someone to tell Allan at the station that Neelie was in the sanitarium. Since Midwinter also waits for Allan at the station, he too decides to go to the sanitarium with his friend. The men are each assigned to a room and Lydia's plan is to pump carbon dioxide into the room Allan is staying in. Things go awry when Midwinter has switched rooms with Allan, again because of Midwinter's superstitious forebodings. Lydia nearly kills Midwinter, rescuing him just in time. In despair for her evil acts, she actually closes herself into the room after pumping it full of the poisonous gas. Lydia dies, and in the end, Midwinter becomes a successful writer, and Allan and Neelie get married and take up their place at Thorpe-Ambrose.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Armadale is told through a mixture of an unnamed narrator and letters. Beginning with the March 1865 installment (entitled, "Lurking Mischief") there is a marked switch of focus as Lydia Gwilt takes center stage: her exchange of letters to Mrs. Oldershaw and her own diary take over the telling of the story. Lydia's diary, which she says she begins in order to keep track of all her lies so that she won't mess up, is the perfect substitute for the semi-omniscient, unnamed narrator. Her diary does in fact become a kind of substitution for the narrator, who all but falls out of the second half of the novel. From the March installment onwards, it is Lydia Gwilt who controls the narrative more than any other character: she eventually even writes out Mrs. Oldershaw when she decides to withhold information about her plan to impersonate Allan Armadale's widow. With great skill, she maneuvers herself so that she has more information on others than she has on them, listening in on Allan and Neelie's plans, gaining Midwinter's confidence, and even reading Brock's final letter to Midwinter. Even the Bashwood episodes in the second half of the novel are just a kind of distraction, in which Bashwood's temporary ascendancy to privileged information about her is quickly neutralized by a few sweet words she doles out to him.

Lydia's scandalization of contemporary audiences may have been exacerbated by the omniscience which Collins allows her because of the way in which her omniscience changes the reader's relationship to her and to other characters. Through Lydia's eyes, for example, Allan Armadale seems more and more incompetent and vapid; her accounts of his inability to talk about anything except for yachts and love (for Neelie) are cutting and humorous, tending to seduce readers to sympathize with her. This seems to be Collins's project the whole way through, as Allan naivete is given from the start, but nowhere is it as negative of a trait as it is from Lydia Gwilt's perspective. More broadly, Collins's novel is scandalous because it perpetuates complicated reversals in the alignment between how sympathetic a character is and traditionally respectable social identities. Those of the most "respectable" backgrounds--Allan Armadale and Neelie Milroy--are highly unsympathetic: they are boring, they can barely understand books, they can't manage everyday affairs, they lack social graces, and they talk and think of nothing beyond conventional topics (leisure travel and marriage) for gentlemen and ladies (marriage). In contrast, those of more questionable backgrounds--Midwinter (whose racial otherness is another strike against him) and Lydia, find joy in books and writing, feel moved to depths by great music (Lydia listens to Beethoven) and works of art, and deftly manage their everyday affairs. Though these alignments explode conventional associations with respectability, in the end, Midwinter's capacity to turn his "smarts" towards good and Lydia's inability to do the same seems to return the novel to a more conservative middle-class myth of social upward mobility: though cast about by the world, the individual might triumph and win, through righteous means and his own ingenuity, a respectable place in the social hierarchy. Cornhill's readership, indeed, was all about classes of people who aspired to social advancement through honorable pursuits like education and industry. Yet, the very end, no consideration of Midwinter versus Lydia can cast aside the question of gender: in allowing readers access to Lydia's first person account via her diary, the reader gains insight into many instances where Lydia considers avoiding the evil act of doing away with Allan Armadale but then ends up sees no other way out of the miseries heaped upon her by her place as a woman. After her marriage to Midwinter, he has his career to focus on and she feels neglected and crushed by the abandonment--she really has nothing else to occupy her mind than to plot and plan in her diary. She confesses that there were times when she thought Midwinter's love might be enough to convince her to leave off her plans, but Midwinter's love fails because he does not prove to be a lively companion to her. A good marriage is the one thing that might save a woman, and having no other alternatives, she turns her unused "smarts" to something else, and in this way joins the ranks of many other smart Victorian female characters like Vanity Fair's Becky Sharpe, Middlemarch's Dorothea, or Miss Marjoribanks's Lucilla, who all manage to find different ways to spend their talents and intellectual energies within the constraints of their social position as women.

High Windows by Philip Larkin

2011-05-09T18:03:00.000-07:00

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
High Windows was first published by Faber and Faber in 1974 (hardback) and 1979 (paperback). The collection is Larkin's final one, second perhaps only to Whitsun Weddings (1964) as far as critical attention goes. Many of the poems in the collection were written in the 1960s, however; certainly the subjects Larkin references (the sexual revolution, disconnection from world war, declining religiosity, generational conflict, and so forth) are recognizably of the "60s." Larkin's poetry is considered as part of "The Movement," which reacted to (modernist) poetic obscurities with a characteristic clarity of language and form while also eschewing the direct social and political commitments/stances of poets like Auden (other writers of "The Movement" include Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, Robert Conquest, and Ted Hughes).

SELECTED THEMES/COMMENTARY:
Sterile environments:
Several of Larkin's poems in this collection vividly describe sterile, indoor environments which seem to stand for the emptiness and imaginative sterility of modern, urban landscapes (often in contrast with imaginatively fertile--but disappearing--pastoral landscapes). "The Building" describes a hospital, though the poem never names "the building" a hospital, in order to clear his descriptions of the building of prior associations. The result is a starkly defamiliarized image of a hospital as not a place of hope or scientific triumph over disease and death, but a "clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend / The thought of dying, for unless its powers / Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes / The coming dark, though crowds each evening try / With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers." In the sterile corridors, where people wait, not knowing if they "will be out by lunch, or four" or if they "have come to join / The unseen congregations whose white rows / Lie set apart above," nature (in the form of the flowers) seems weak and not to mention dead. "Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel" presents a Hopper-esque loneliness inside of a deserted station hotel, where "Clusters of lights over empty chairs / That face each other, coloured differently" stand, and where "the dining-room declares / A larger loneliness of knives and glass / And silence laid like a carpet." Things typically used for sociability unused and lights wasted on nobody emphasize the sterility of these objects apart from human life. The final lines, italicized ("Now / Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages") contrasts the sterility of these objects with nature, which continues to have an existence beyond everyday human commerce.

Religious substitutions:

"The Building's" religious diction (see above, "congregation," "cathedral," "transcend") links modern hospital buildings to churches of the past. The church or the cathedral are no longer places of worship in a world no longer devout or even spiritual at all; yet, the poem suggests that the impulse for worship remains and can be seen in gestures like the "weak, propitiatory flowers." "Vers de Societe" comments on the relationship between a completely secularized world and the rejection of solitude. Nowadays, "how sternly it's instilled / All solitude is selfish. No one now / Believes the hermit with his gown and dish / Talking to God (who's gone too); the big wish / Is to have people nice to you, which means / Doing it back somehow." These lines suggest that the justification for hermitage was religious, and without religion, there is no longer a justification for solitude. "Virtue is social," the new creed proclaims. The poet asks, in the end, "Are, then, these routines / Playing at goodness, like going to church?" expressing the same sense as in "The Building" that despite the disappearance of God, there remains in a secular society an impulse towards worship and ritual. The "new" rituals replacing going to church in "Vers de Societe" are dinner parties and small talk.

The first stanza of "To the Sea" introduces images of people enjoying the seaside, "Steep beach, blue water, towels, red bathing caps" and the second stanza explains their significance by referencing how these enjoyments continue into the present: "Still going on, all of it, still going on!" The poet's outburst on these things "still going on" sounds like surprise, though it is a pleasant one--in the final stanza, the poet lingers on the value of continuing such rituals: "It may be that through habit these do best, / Coming to water clumsily undressed / Yearly; teaching their children by a sort / Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought." "Show Saturday" perhaps contains one of the strongest expressions that new, secular activities actually do maintain some kind of important value, though it might not be a religious one. After the people leave the colorfully described Bellingham Show, the fair which the poet describes, he gently adds a kind of blessing: "Let it stay hidden there like strength, below / Sale-bills and swindling; something people do, / Not noticing how time's rolling smithy-smoke / Shadows much greater gestures; something they share / That breaks ancestrally each year into / Regenerate union. Let it always be there."

Generational conflict, legacies:
As mentioned briefly above in the publication history, High Windows is laced with references to the 60s, and so one of the collection's recurring themes is the conflict between generations and relating to this, anxieties about legacies. In "High Windows" the problem of how the older generation always thinks the later one has it better is explored. The poet, watching kids sexually "free" and using birth control, thinks "I know this is paradise." But then he imagines others of the previous generation thinking about the "freedom" of his own increasingly atheistic and secular age: "No God any more, or sweating in the dark / About hell and that..." This reflection prompts a turn in the poem, and the final stanza rejects these limited and adolescent senses of freedom with a sublime thought (beyond words) of a more radical and truer freedom beyond human understanding: "Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: / the sun comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless." Larkin's famed "This Be the Verse" alludes to Old Testament language of the sins of the fathers revisited on the sons to reject "mum and dad." Most of the poem is colloquial like its opening ("They fuck you up, your mum and dad") but reaches for a much more serious and graver notion of the human condition in the lines "Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf." These lines asks us to take seriously the condition of generational trauma; despite the ways in which people joke, in a post-Freudian era, of the ways in which parents "fuck up" their children, there is real pain in the misery which parents pass on to their children. "Posterity" is Larkin's poem in the imagined persona of his own biographer, Jake Balokowsky, who is an academic who doesn't much care for his subject matter: "'I'm stuck with this old fart at least a year; / I wanted to teach school in Tel Aviv, / But Myra's folks'--he makes the money sign--'Insisted I got tenure. When there's kids...'" While the poem ironically comments on the distance between how the biographer views his work (something to make a living) versus how others might idealize his work (a genuine intellectual pursuit), it isn't a poem which simply critiques the biographer's cynical attitudes. The lines clearly suggest that he does have something else he would have liked to do, but that the institutions which control modern academia and modern "living" more broadly don't allow him to pursue these alternatives. Thus, Larkin's legacy is not so much debased by Balokowsky but the institutional conditions under which "biographies" are manufactured. "Sympathy in White Major" is another poem with a clear persona whose ironical position in toasting himself emphasizes the emptiness of common ways in which people remember each other. The speaker offers a laundry-list of his accomplishments which are all bromides: "A decent chap, a real good sort, / Straight as a die, one of the best, / A brick, a trump, a proper sport, / Head and shoulders above the rest; / How many lives would have been fuller / Had he not been here below? / Here's to the whitest man I know--" Though such praises are definitively rejected in the letdown of the speaker's final line, "Though white is not my favourite colour," the poem leaves us wondering what other legacies are possible in remembering those who have gone. "Dublinesque" offers a different kind of memorial through the image of an Irish Catholic funeral hearse being followed down the street by "a troop of streetwalkers / In wide flowered hats, / Leg-of-mutton sleeves, / And ankle-length dresses." These images are suggestive of a kind of rustic mourning which Larkin seems to find much more genuine in its remembrance: "There is an air of great friendliness, / As if they were honouring / One they were fond of...And of great sadness also. / As they wend away / A voice is heard singing / Of Kitty, or Katy, / As if the name meant once / All love, all beauty." The name doesn't even really matter, genuine affect is in the rituals of their procession, their dress, their clapping and their singing.
Death, dying, aging:
Larkin explores death, the process of dying, and the changes in consciousness in old age in poems like "The Old Fools" and "Sad Steps." The persona of the speaker in "The Old Fools" goes through various stages of wrestling with what happens in old age: In the first stanza, he adopts a tone of superiority, asking crude questions such as "Do they somehow suppose / It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools...?" The second stanza attempts to describe, from a distanced, materialist point of view, what happens in death: "At death, you break up: the bits that were you / Start speeding away from each other for ever / With no one to see." The "oblivion" which comes with this breaking up, the speaker muses, was also there before life. The third stanza is more speculative and imaginative, and tries to think of being old in terms of a vivid metaphor, in which being old is "having lighted rooms / inside your head, and people in them, acting," but that the people and these rooms seem more and more distant and unrecognizable. The fourth stanza ends with the futility of speculating, since, as the speaker says in a matter-of-fact way, "We shall find out." "Sad Steps" also pictures the gap in consciousness between the young and the old. The speaker, an old man "Groping back to bed after a piss," sees the moon behind the curtains, and thinks that it is a reminder of youth: "The hardness and the brightness and the plain / Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare / Is a reminder of the strength and pain / Of being young; that it can't come again, / Bur is for others undiminished somewhere." The "strength and pain" is interesting, because it prevents us from reading the poem as simply an old man wishing to be young again. What is the "pain" of youth which the old don't feel? Is it of desire, ambition, in contrast to the humbled existence of the old man's "[g]roping back to bed after a piss?"
Nature's healing/pastoral traditions:
Much of Larkin's poetry contains Hardy-esque pastoral elements, in which nature offers a kind of continuing, healing force in face of man's destructive tendencies, his suffering, and his death. In "Forget What Did," the poet wants to give up writing painful diary entries, and desires that the blank pages fill with "celestial recurrences," a phrase which vaguely suggests renewable cycles in nature ("celestial" even suggests a divine quality, rare in Larkin's poetry). "The Trees," made up of three simple stanzas of abba, explores how trees also die eventually ("Is it that they are born again / And we grown old? No they die too.") but that each year, the blossoms still insist, "Begin afresh, afresh, afresh." Nature then, is not apart from humanity in that it also "dies," and so we might tale a lesson from its blossoms to begin afresh time and time again in our own lives. "The Trees" imparts renewal and continuity which humans ignore in face of a greater preoccupation with mortality. Other aspects of nature seem timeless and eternal, like the sun in "Solar"; the poet imagines the continuous giving and bounty of the sun in these lines: "Our needs hourly / Climb and return like angels. / Unclosing like a hand, / You give for ever." Larkin's appreciation for nature and the pastoral tradition manifests itself also in less optimistic poems; "Going, going" laments the certainty of the disappearing natural landscape in England. Finally, in other poems where humans encroach on or pollute the landscape, there remains a solace expressed in nature overwhelming resilience. The grotesque habits of the "Card Players" (one of the only sonnets in the collection) in a Dutch tavern seems to go through a partial purification process at the end, by "Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace!" More dramatically, in "The Explosion," when a mine explodes, nature stops for a second, in an aestheticized pause: "At noon, there came a tremor; cows / Stopped chewing for a second; sun, / Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmer." This might seem like a portrayal of an indifferent nature, but the brief, aestheticized pastoral moment ushers in a heavenly vision of the dead beheld by the miners' wives in the next stanza: "The dead go on before us, they / Are sitting in God's house in comfort / We shall see them face to face."

Translations by Brian Friel

2011-05-08T20:57:00.000-07:00

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Irish playwright Brian Friel's Translations was first performed in September 1980 at the Guildhall in Derry, Northern Ireland. Its production was managed by a theater company founded by Friel and actor Stephen Rea.

SUMMARY:
Act I: The action is set in a small Irish town called Baile Beag in August 1833. At the "hedge-school" held in an old barn in general disarray and filth, Manus, the son of the old schoolmaster, Hugh, is managing things before his father arrives. Manus tries to get Sarah, a woman with a speech impediment, to correctly pronounce basic phrases of introduction. Meanwhile, another pupil, Jimmy (also known as the Infant Prodigy) spouts phrases of Greek and Latin. Otherwise, we are to assume they are all speaking in Irish. Soon Maire, a young, attractive woman appears. Manus tells Maire about how someone named Biddy Hanna asked him to write a letter to her sister in Nova Scotia, and how Biddy Hanna was so clueless as to have asked Manus to write, "Thank God one of them new national schools is being built" without realizing that he was the son of the schoolmaster. Maire brings news of English soldiers living in tents in the town. Soon Doalty and Bridget arrive; Doalty is drunk and boasts about his ruse, shifting the poles of a "machine" that the English soldiers were using to confuse them. Manus explains that his father is late because of a christening he was attending. Maire and Manus seem to have intimate relations, and she asks him if he's going to apply for a job at the new national school. Manus says no because his father is going to apply for it and he doesn't want to be in the way of his father. Maire hints that she wants to go to America to escape from her rather large family ("There's ten below me to be raised and no man in the house.") The group talks about the new school, which will be mandatory for children 6-12 and which will operate in English. Hugh arrives, and conducts his "lesson" by imparting them news and stopping at certain words to ask his pupils about their Latin origins. He tells of the christening, the arrival of Captain Lancey of the Royal Engineers and his partner Yolland--the Englishmen, who are conducting an ordnance survey of the area, and of how he will be running the new national school. Suddenly, Owen, Manus's brother who hasn't been back in six years comes in and receives a hearty welcome for all. He is a "city man," and announces that he has brought with him Lancey and Yolland. Owen brings them in and serves as a (mis)translator as Lancey and Yolland explain their project. Lancey says that they will be making a comprehensive map of the entire country, in order that they might better assess taxation policies. Owen's somewhat lazy translations help the Englishmen to convince the Irish that the project will be for their own good. The act ends with Manus expressing concern that Yolland can't even pronounce Owen's name, calling him "Roland," and Owen reassuring him that it is just a "name."

Act II, Scene 1: The act opens with Owen and Yolland working together to Anglicize the names of local Irish landmarks. Owen criticizes Yolland's "romantic" view of the Ireland; unlike Lancey, whom Yolland describes as "[t]he perfect colonial servant," Yolland's imagination is prone to wandering, idealizing Owen's family and friends and ascribing a kind of Edenic status to the Irish landscape. He still can't pronounce Owen and proves generally unaware of Owen correcting him because he's so caught up in his own speechifying. An encounter between Hugh and Yolland ensues in which Hugh reveals that he has never heard of Wordsworth. This becomes an opportunity for Yolland to idealize Irish literature and myth. Yolland tells Hugh that he's learning to speak Irish, though Hugh doesn't much care. After Hugh leaves on some errands, Yolland confesses to Owen that he fears that the colonial project is "an eviction of sorts" and is ethically uncomfortable with his own part in the project. Owen shrugs off Yolland's "romanticizing" and essentially says that the old Irish place names are part of myths that people who live there don't even remember anymore. Yolland finally listens to Owen when he says his name isn't Roland. He is ashamed and horrified but Owen puts him at ease. Manus arrives and announces he has gotten a job at a school on an island called Inis Meadhon fifty miles away. Manus is reluctant to speak English even though he knows it because he resents colonialists like Yolland. Maire also comes by, and Manus tells her the good news as well. They all congratulate Manus. Maire and Yolland communicate with some difficulty, through Owen--she says there will be a dance at Tobair Vree, a name which Yolland has just learned and he is clearly overjoyed that he knows it. Drunk by this time, Yolland shouts out a bunch of Irish names of places and humorously throws in Bombay and Eden into the mix.

Act II, Scene 2: Maire and Yolland hold hands after the dance, and though they don't understand each other, they both talk. Maire comically tells him her only phrase in English: "In Norfolk we besport ourselves around the maypoll." Yolland lists off Irish place names, Maire corrects him. Eventually they kiss, and Sarah sees them.

Act 3: In the schoolhouse, Owen continues to work on place names. Manus comes in with a travel bag, about to leave. Apparently something has happened to Yolland because Yolland is missing. Manus asks Owen to tell the people at Inis Meadhon that he might be a while before going to the school. Manus leaves, and Sarah stutters sympathetically, "I'm sorry...I'm sorry...I'm so sorry, Manus." Doalty and Bridget arrive on the scene, bringing news of more English soldiers arriving and how Hugh, drunk, had been yelling out names at them ("Visigoths! Huns! Vandals!"). Maire comes in, talking of Yolland. She also doesn't know where he is, but caught in her own romance, starts listing off place names in England associated with Yolland. Lancey comes in and asks Owen to translate to everyone that if Yolland is not found in a day, they will shoot all the livestock in the town. In forty-eight hours, they will evict people and level their lands. Bridget rushes off to hide livestock while Doalty thinks about fighting the English. Jimmy and Hugh arrive, with Jimmy talking about how he's going to marry Pallas Athena. Hugh remarks while looking at James, how "it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language. James has ceased to make that discrimination." Hugh then concludes that they need to keep "renewing those images" to keep a culture alive. Hugh says he will teach Maire English because in his mind, he's made a kind of compromise wherein he wishes the Irish to claim English for themselves because it will be the only living language. James blathers on about endogamein and exogamein, marrying in and out of one's tribe (he's referring to himself in considering marriage with Athena, but also his comments clearly apply to Maire). The play ends with Hugh trying to quote ineffectually from the Aeneid, focusing on a passage telling of how Juno wanting to make her city the capital of all nations, but couldn't because of the destined rise of Troy.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Though Friel has been cited as saying that Translations is really just about language, it is clear that contained in the concern about language are very specific identity politics relating to Northern Ireland's encounter with England from colonial times into the times during which Friel was writing. Friel's own biography provides a useful context for the identity politics which Translations works through. Born in 1929 in Killyclogher (rural Northern Ireland), Brian Friel was actually registered as "Bernard Patrick," "Bernard" being a part of a trend to discourage Gaelic sounding names. "Bernard Patrick" might be a kind of symbol of a destabilized identity which mediates between his father's rural nationalism and his own move towards a more moderate "citified" position which critiqued, among other things, the backwards educational systems perpetuated by the Catholic Church which feared, above all, Anglicization. Translations certainly comments on the inadequacy of the kind of education which Hugh and Manus provide; the students learn in a filthy barn, the snippets of Latin and Greek which Hugh throws out at his pupils are meaningless and farcical. But at the same time Friel critiques a position which gives in entirely to the Anglicization processes promoted by the imperialists. Maire's budding Anglophilia is deeply satirized by her equally meaningless romance with Yolland, and Lancey's extreme measures deployed to find Yolland are absurdly punitive. Yolland's romanticization of Ireland and conflation of the poor, rural landscape with Eden is also satirized. It seems hat Hugh's idea at the end of the play that the English language must be accepted but re-colonized/re-appropriated by Irishmen is the moderate position towards which the play finally settles on. The image of Greece's destruction and the inevitable rise of Troy provides an allegory for Northern Ireland's destruction and inevitable Anglicization. Friel seems to advocate, finally, some kind of compromise position, but perhaps Hugh's forgetfulness as he recites the lines signals that this is in no way an easy compromise to hammer out.

New Selected Poems by Stevie Smith (Florence Margaret Smith)

2011-05-07T17:21:00.000-07:00

Edition: New Selected Poems of Stevie Smith
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The New Selected Poems (1988) of Stevie Smith were collected over a decade after her death in 1971. Interest in Smith's work was high in the 1980s; two different biographies of her were published, one in 1986 and the other in 1988.

SELECTED THEMES/COMMENTARY:
Death: Death figures in Smith's poetry as a frequently a kind of solace because of its certainty. Unlike God, Death when called will come, as the speaker asserts in "Come, Death." The speaker says, "I'd ask God to have pity on me, / But I turn to the one I know, and say: / Come, Death, and carry me away." In the short second stanza which forms the second half of this poem, the speaker finds Death to be sweet because of his sure subjection to the speaker's will: "Ah me, sweet Death, you are the only god / Who comes as a servant when he is called, you kno, / Listen then to this sound I make, it is sharp, / Come death. Do not be slow." The sense of Death as "sweet" rather than fearful makes it a companion charged with affect in other poems. "Tender Only to One" is a kind of love poem to death, in which the poet expresses her tenderness for only one, revealing at the end, "His name, his name is Death." "Company" is about how when other human company--friends, lovers, for instance--desert an old man, and he hears voices telling him, "Rely on yourself," Death comes as true company, who will surely not desert him at the end.

Academia, Literature: Smith explicitly distances her poetry from the literary canon and academic institutions; when she makes allusions, they are often irreverent and speak back to canonical poets ("Thoughts Upon the Person of Porlock," for example, humorously welcomes Coleridge's "Person of Porlock" and neutralizes the poet's indignance, even suggesting that he had already been stuck in the writing of Kubla Khan before the person's entrance). Poems like "Souvenir de Monsieur Poop," written in the voice of a self-important academic, scathingly critique the institutionalization of the literary canon and academic hierarchies: "I am the self-appointed guardian of English literature," he proclaims, following with a litany of blind "beliefs" without justification. He is devoted, of course, to Shakespeare and Milton, and Housman in modern times. He degrades youth and dogmatically upholds old age and "established classics" as the measure of wisdom. "To School" critiques the kinds of poetry encouraged in institutions of learning, asserting that the "Muse" has flown away from these schools, knowing better.

God/Christianity: As mentioned above in the commentary on how death figures in Smith's poetry, God (and more specifically, Christianity) repeatedly fails to give comfort or satisfying answers. Much of Smith's poetry speaks back defiantly against this lack of comfort and satisfaction, even while aware of this defiance's egocentricity. In "Egocentric" the speaker asks, "What care I if good God be / If he be not good to me," lines which are repeated again at the end of the poem as if creating a kind of egocentric mirror. The egocentric speaker's question, however, is one Smith takes seriously; the speaker is trapped and forced into her egocentrism because of the lack of sufficient explanation from God. This yearning for satisfying answers is repeated in many of Smith's other poems, perhaps most poignantly in "Oh Christianity, Christianity" and How do you see?," a longer poem which contains lines from "Oh Christianity, Christianity" in it. "Oh Christianity, Christianity, / Why do you not answer our difficulties?" the speaker simply asks. She follows with a series of equally simply-stated and earnest questions about how Christ could take on our sins, if he felt guilty, how he is a "perfect man" if man is by definition sinful, and how the Trinity is supposed to be unchanging when clearly Christ altered things. These are big questions, and the speaker asks them here not at all defiantly, and just the same as in "Egocentrism," receives no answers. In "How do you see?" the speakers doubts and questions transform themselves from yearning and desire into a more radical statement that Christianity is a just a "fairy story" and can't be real. But, because it has been so often the reason for doing "good," the speaker realizes that there is a real urgency to make sure our children learn to be good without Christianity, since they might soon all realize that it is just a "fairy story": "I think if we do not learn quickly, and learn to teach children / To be good without enchantment, without the help / Of beautiful painted fairy stories pretending to be true...we shall kill everybody, / It will be too much for us, we shall kill everybody."

Perhaps because God is so absent to Smith, she takes the opportunity to envision what He might be like, given his intransigent absence. "God the Eater" posits a gluttonous God feeding on human feeling, an idea which finds repetition in "Childe Rolandine" where an artist forced to work as a secretary-typist, suddenly decides to speak out the truth on how "There is a Spirit feeds on our tears, I give him mine, / Mighty human feelings are his food / Passion and grief and joy his flesh and blood, / That he may live and grow fat we daily die / This cropping One is our immortality." "God and Man" presents another possibility of God as a kind of fickle, flakey lover to man. The poem is written in the voice of God, exaggeratedly drawling, "Man my darling, my love and my pain," while also stipulating harshly, "Do not come till I call, though thou weariest first."

Animals and people: Domesticated animals (as pets, or in captured in zoos) often serve as occasions for critiquing human treatment of animals. "Parrot" is about an "old sick green parrot / High in a dingy cage"; the speaker wishes that his death might come soon to put him out of its misery. "The Zoo" reveals, through irony, the lack of human awareness of what he does when putting away a lion in a cage. A voice of authority tells a little boy that the lion "does not like you, little boy, / It's no use making up to him," wisely asserting that "God gave him lovely teeth and claws so that he might eat little boys." The poet chimes in, commenting on the irony of how despite such professions of understanding the nature of lions, humans cause the condition wherein "[h]is claws are blunt, his teeth fall out, / No victim's flesh consoles his snout, / And that is why his eyes are red / Considering his talents are misused."

"Nature and Free Animals" provides an explanation (and interesting defense?) for why people warp the nature of their animals. The poem starts with a didactic voice criticizing human domestication of dogs: "You have taught them the sicknesses of your mind / And the sicknesses of your body / You have taught them to be servile / To hang servilely upon your countenance." Later, we find that this is the voice of God, and not of the poet. The human's response is a reproach to God, suggesting that this is kind of the same thing which He does to humans, and if we are in His image, it is natural for us to do the same to animals.

Gender Relations: Relations between men and women in Smith's poetry are hardly ever satisfactory; selfish cads seem preponderant in her poetry, and so are victimized women who often participate in the process bringing about their victimization. "In Felice" is a good example of Smith's portrayal of these two types in heterosexual relations. The speaker is a woman who no matter how much she is ignored or cheated on by "Sir Rat," imagines he loves her. She delusionally repeats, "my heart is singing," even in cases where it is clear that her heart should not be singing: "No Madam, he left no message, ah how his silence speaks / He loves me too much for words, my heart is singing." "Valuable" juxtaposes the situations of girls in society and panthers kept in cages. Unlike the panthers, however, whose eyes say, "I am too valuable to be kept in a cage," girls themselves say "yes" to often to their own debasement and subordination, and need to learn how to say no. The speaker laments that "Nobody teaches anybody they are valuable nowadays." The speaker imagines the common retort from girls, that "I shall be alone / If I say 'I am valuable' and other people do not say it of me / I shall be alone, there is no comfort there." The speaker points out the difference between comfortable versus valuable, and how the latter is more important. Furthermore, "if everybody says it in the end / It will be comforting." Smith seems to think Christianity responsible for some of the cruelty against women which she observes around her; this idea is directly suggested in "How Cruel is the Story of Eve" in which the poet ascribes to the story "reponsibility / in history / for misery. The poet contrasts the story's unreality, its "legend" status, with the very real, "historical" harm which it perpetuates, imagining how the story "colours / All human thought."

"A House of Mercy" is one of Smith's autobiographical poems, on the house which she lived in with her mom and aunt and sister, in which she remained for much of her life. Smith has very positive associations of strength with their all female house, "For all its faults, / If they are faults, of sternness and reserve, / It is a Being of warmth I think; at heart / A house of mercy."

War: Romana Huk's recent study of Stevie Smith links her work to the two world wars which she lived through, reading against the grain of the assumption that because she spent most of her life in the suburbs, and styled herself as a bit of an eccentric, that her work doesn't really engage with the big questions of what poetry or literature more broadly had to bring to a post-war, traumatized western world. "The Poets are Silent" wrestles with the very question of the place of poetry after the trauma of war, providing the answer, in four short lines that silence is in fact a kind of poetic response in itself: "There's no new spirit abroad, / As I looked, I saw; / And I say that it is to the poets' merit / To be silent about the war." There is nothing to be said, but saying nothing is in fact saying something, and silence seems the most profound response to the experience of war.

Smith's poetry expresses alienation before the wars which happened in her lifetime, often figured along gender lines. In "The Little Daughters of America" (subtitled, Pearl Harbor, 1941), the bellicose, virile "Admirals Curse-You and No-More" have nothing to do with "the little daughters of America"; the poet points out the great gap between domestic images of patriotism and the combative spirit which carries on the operations of war. "I had a dream" similarly comments on the alienation of women from the battlefield, the speaker imagining herself as Helen of Troy, talking to the prophetic but cast-aside Cassandra. Helen becomes a kind of universal female figure, who views the men on the battlefield as possessing a spirit totally alien to her own: "Like the spirit of all armies, on all plains, in all wars, the men / No longer thinking why they were there / Or caring, but going on; like the song the English used to sing / In the first world war: We're here because, we're here because, / We're here because, we're here." Helen and Cassandra's positions in this poem are critical and intelligent before the drone-like mindlessness of the men on the battlefield.

Misanthropy/Post-Human Point of View: Perhaps related to Smith's suggestion in "The Poets are Silent" that words probably can't bear the burden of the world shaken to its core by the experiences of war, is Smith's frequent reference to a perspective beyond a human one to account for the universe. This often takes the form of a kind of misanthropy, rather disturbing in poems like "The Suburban Classes" in which the speaker suggests a pamphlet, "Free for every Registered Reader's table" which will tell the suburban classes, "Your King and your Country need you Dead." "The Face" describes a common face which the poet encounters in modern England, someone with a "monkey soul" (presumably signifying imitative and unthinking) "that bangs about, that beats a gong," embodying conventions and platitudes, "utter[ing] social lies." The poet concludes, much in the spirit of "The Suburban Classes," "You well may say that better far / This face had not been born." "The English," again, plays on a similar theme of how so many so-called "intelligent English / Of the Arts, the professions and the Upper Middle Classes, / Are under-cover men," signaling a modern-day loss of something deeper to humanity than such vocational and class designations as "of the Arts, the professions, and the Upper Middle Classes." Pessimistically, the poet notes that what is under the covers is often gone, and hence these men are now mere "corpse carriers" and what's worse, "infective" through their ideologies.

Smith makes the transition from misanthropy towards something potentially more uplifting in imaginings of a post-human perspective in a number of other poems. "The New Age" is probably the most explicitly post-human, decrying "how these crying people spoil the beautiful / geological scene." "Unpopular, lonely, and loving" problematizes love as a human emotion, the absence of which would mean less misery. "In Protocreation," the poet expresses a strong desire for the world before man's existence ("Oh had it but stopped then / Oh had there not come men") because with man came knowledge of good and evil: "There was no good deed and no crime / No oppression by informed mind / No knowledge and no human kind." These all are in existence because the human mind has created them. Smith turns often to the current animal world for a solacing perspective beyond the human one: in "Away, Melancholy," the speaker notes that nothing else in nature is melancholy, "The ant is busy / He carrieth his meat, / All things hurry / To be eaten or eat," continuing on to think about how "Man, too, hurries, / Eats, couples, buries / He is an animal also." Thus, if animal also, man ought to be able to banish melancholy, a mental construct of his own and not a necessary condition of existence. "Frog Prince" is one of Smith's more playful poems, in which the speaker is the frog prince, telling his non-human perspective of the fairy tale. Basically, the frog prince is happy before his "disenchantment" by the royal princess. He has been doing just fine as a frog: "I have been a frog now / For a hundred years / And in all this time / I have not shed may tears, / I am happy I like the life." The princess promises that with "disenchantment," he can be "heavenly," but as the frog notes, not happy.

The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

2011-05-07T00:12:00.000-07:00

Edition: The Way We Live Now (Oxford World's Classics)

PUBLICATION HISTORY:

Trollope's The Way We Live Now was published in twenty monthly parts between 1874 to 1875 (serialization in parts was, by this time, anachronistic). The title references contemporary discussions on whether society was improving from a moral point of view or degenerating. Trollope's Autobiography situates his own commentary alongside that of contemporaries like Carlyle and Ruskin. Also in the Autobiography, Trollope writes that as he "ventured to take the whip of the satirist" in writing The Way We Live Now, he found himself satirizing more than just the "iniquities of the great speculator who robs everybody," but also "intrigues of girls who want to get married, the luxury of young men who prefer to remain single, and...the puffing propensities of authors who desire to cheat the public into buying their volumes." Reception of Trollope's novel was actually fairly negative, critics often charging it with poor form, despite current views of the work as possibly his best--more on this in the critical analysis section (Source: Lindsay Sullivan, LitEncyc).

SUMMARY:

The novel begins with three letters written by Lady Carbury to three editors: Mr. Broune of the "Morning Breakfast Table," Mr. Booker of the "Literary Chronicle," and Mr. Alf of the "Evening Pulpit." She has recently completed a book called Criminal Queens and wishes for favorable reviews. Lady Carbury is a widow, whose son Sir Felix squandered away his inheritance, spending much of his time gambling and dining at the Beargarden club. Lady Carbury has high hopes, however, that Sir Felix will marry Marie Melmotte, the daughter of Mr. Augustus Melmotte, a wealthy financier of foreign origins with a "Bohemian Jewess" as a wife, and who had settled comfortably into the society of Grosvenor Square within a single year. Although it seems that the Melmottes have come to their money in shady ways (there were rumors of their being kicked out of Paris), all the important members of the aristocracy (including the Prince himself!) attend Madame Melmotte's ball. At the ball, Sir Felix makes some overtures towards Marie, though he isn't particularly enthusiastic: Marie is rather plain and unremarkable, after all. After the ball, Lady Carbury berates her daughter, Henrietta, for dancing with Paul Montague, a young man without immediate fortunes, but who is a partner along with his uncle and an American named Mr. Fisker at an investment firm. Lady Carbury wants Henrietta to marry Roger Carbury, a forty-year old cousin who owns a large country estate--in a word, a figure of "old money" who finds the wealth of "new money" like Melmotte's to be of disreputable character.

Roger Carbury and Paul Montague are also distantly related, and Roger has been something of a guardian figure for Paul in the absence of his deceased father and mother. The two are both in love with Henrietta, and so their relationship became strained. Henrietta has not admitted to loving Paul, but she steadily refuses Roger, telling him that she only likes him as a cousin. Meanwhile, Lady Carbury tries to get Roger to help her to regulate Felix's reckless gambling, but Felix is disrespectful to both his mother and Roger. Paul's partner Fisker has suddenly come to England, having decided independently of Paul that he wished to engage Melmotte in an investment scheme for a new railroad from San Francisco to Vera Cruz. Fisker uses Paul to get an invitation to see Melmotte, who ends up agreeing to putting his name to the scheme, since it is understood that he would not really be investing in the railroad per se but merely aiding in floating the shares of the railroad. Melmotte inspires confidence amongst other investors, and the scheme takes off, and ostensibly, the men will make money by puffing up the railroad and selling their shares for profit. Before leaving to go back to San Francisco, Fisker attends the Beargarden club and wins some money from gambling. Because Fisker clearly doesn't take the claims of I.O.U.s very seriously, he is happy to leave without collecting money from his English friends, but many of the Englishmen are anxious to send him off with something more than I.O.Us. The English lords manage to get together some money nevertheless.

Lady Carbury soon receives some bad news: Mr. Alf has allowed one of his staff to write an exceedingly crushing review of her book (this is, however, what Mr. Alf does because only bad reviews sell). The review points out all of the historical inaccuracies of her work. Mr. Broune and Mr. Booker, however, have done their duty and praised her book. To keep up appearances, Lady Carbury still extends an invitation to Mr. Alf to come to her house along with other literati. Mr. Alf makes as if he didn't know that such a review would be published, but this too is keeping up appearances. Lady Carbury writes to visit with Roger Carbury at Whitsuntide, largely because she has heard that the Melmottes will be visiting the Longestaffe's who live in an estate near Roger's. It seems that the Longestaffes have run into some money troubles, and are trying to get the Melmottes to buy one of their properties, the Pickering Estate. Dolly (Adolphus) Longestaffe, Mr. Longestaffe's son, is resistant to the idea. We find out later that the Longestaffes are in a much worse position than might be supposed at first; Mr. Longestaffe says they must give up their London townhouse. When Georgiana Longstaffe, his younger daughter, throws a fit because she will not be able to participate in London life during the "season" and hence will not be able to secure a husband, he agrees that she may go live with the Melmottes when in London (even though she declares them "vulgar").

When Roger's relatives arrive, he gives a dinner party, his choice of guests showing something of his independent character--he tries to bring together a Protestant Bishop and Roman Catholic priest. Sir Felix arrives at the Carbury estate as well, urged on by his mother to make inroads with Marie. Though Felix does in fact make some progress as far as winning Marie Melmotte goes, he also takes the opportunity of being at Carbury to meet up with Ruby Ruggles, a previous love interest who lives with her grandfather at Sheep's Acre nearby. Her grandfather wishes her to be engaged to John Crumb, a sort of country bumpkin but a good man whom Ruby shuns in favor of the good-looking, city-mannered Sir Felix. When Sir Felix gets up the courage to ask Melmotte for Marie's hand in marriage, Melmotte shoots off a barrage of questions at Felix as to his financial matters, and the conversation does not go well for Felix because he has nothing more than his baronet title. Melmotte has decided his daughter will be engaged to Lord Nidderdale, son of a Marquis. When Felix finds out that others involved with the railway are selling shares in order to profit, he thinks that he too would like to do so, perhaps by using the I.O.U.s he won from gambling to purchase shares.

Though Paul Montague is partial to Hetta Carbury, he has had a prior relation with one Mrs. Hurtle, an American widower, who causes trouble for him because she has followed him to London. It turns out that Paul had once been engaged to her, before hearing rumors about her having shot a man in Oregon, and of her husband potentially still being alive. Mrs. Hurtle is clearly a savvy woman, and she manages to guilt Paul into spending time with her. Marie, her heart won by Felix, tells him that even if her father resists the marriage, she actually has some money of her own that he had put in her name for his own financial security. She is confident that should they run away, she might draw from this stash. Meanwhile, Lady Carbury also trues to make inroads with Melmotte by introducing him to her editor friends trying to suggest that she might of help to him in making these introductions; Melmotte pays very little attention to her machinations. Lady Carbury, though, gets her own proposal from Mr. Broune, whom she rejects (on second thought, Mr. Broune is relieved when he sees just how dissipated and irresponsible Sir Felix is). At Sheep's Acre, Ruby rejects John Crumb's proposal for marriage, and her grandfather beats her, resulting in Ruby running away to live with her Aunt Pipkin in London. There, she has further liaisons with Sir Felix.

Meanwhile, Melmotte's financial success means that he will welcome the Emperor of China to his house for dinner and a party. People fight for tickets to these events, and Melmotte is pretty much at the apex of his power and influence, though some still consider him "vulgar," including Lady Monogram, who snubs her friend Georgiana for living with them. At a Board Meeting, however, Melmotte's shady dealings are underscored when he doesn't let Paul speak out his objections and reservations about the ethicality of their investments. He even tries to bribe Paul but this scheme fails. After the meeting, he gets Felix to sign away rights to Marie, promising that in return, he would help make Felix some money. The Longestaffe's Pickering Estate is sold to Melmotte, which he intends for Marie and Nidderdale after they get married. Back, briefly, to the Hetta, Paul, Mrs. Hurtle storyline, Paul finds Ruby Ruggles when he goes to visit with Mrs. Hurtle--it turns out that both women are lodging with Mrs. Pipkin. Paul reports Ruby to Roger Carbury, and resolves to himself that he will let Mrs. Hurtle go. This turns out to be ineffectual because Mrs. Hurtle is really good at guilt-tripping him; instead, Paul agrees to take her to Lowestoffe, a seaside town, on account of her health. Unfortunately, at Lowestoffe, they run into Roger Carbury, who is angry at Paul for Hetta's sake.

Marie soon convinces Felix to run away with her to New York; Felix agrees, despite the waiver he has just signed. The plan is to meet in Liverpool after getting their separately. Marie and her maid, Didon, make it onto the train to Liverpool, but they are intercepted--Marie is sent home and Didon takes the opportunity to continue onwards and move on from the Melmotte family. Felix, on the other hand, doesn't keep his side of the bargain because he got drunk and gambled the night away. Melmotte's success continues to grow, to the point where he actually runs for the Westminster Conservative seat in Parliament against Mr. Alf, the editor of the "Evening Pulpit." At Melmotte's dinner for the Emperor, however, several important attendees cancel at the last minute, largely because of some fresh rumors circulating of a potential forgery he had committed. These rumors were precipitated by Dolly Longestaffe, who has employed a new laywer, Mr. Squercum (his father's lawyers are Bideawhile and Sloe, not unexpectedly, rather useless), to look into a title-deed for Pickering which he did not sign but which yet had his signature on it. At the party following the dinner, the Emperor leaves early, and other guests take the cue and do so as well. Melmotte's downfall now seems impending, but he maintains his cool.

Georgiana Longestaffe is busy meanwhile, engaging herself to a Jewish banker named Brehgert. Mr. and Mrs. Longestaffe are horrified, and they forbid her engagement. In the end, Georgiana loses Brehgert. Montague finally having cast off Mrs. Hurtle, proposes to Hetta, but unfortunately, when visiting Ruby at Mrs. Pipkin's, Sir Felix learns about Paul's prior engagement to Mrs. Hurtle, and tells Hetta before Paul has told her. Sir Felix soon runs into his own troubles, however, when he goes out with Ruby again, and encounters John Crumb, who, fancying Ruby in trouble, beats Felix to a pulp. Crumb is arrested, and Felix carted off to recover at his mother's home. Hetta seeks advice from Roger, who tells her to go ask Montague herself. In an exchange of letters, Paul tries to explain himself to Hetta but to no avail--Hetta rejects him. Ruby, finally, is forced to accept Crumb, finally, when her aunt and Mrs. Hurtle contrive a plan in which she either accepts Crumb, or has to seek service as a nursemaid and live off of her own means

A rather humorous scene depicts Melmotte's first time in Parliament, in which he breaks a bunch of procedural rules and is clearly unfit for the role. Feeling the crunch from Dolly's investigations, and the fall in the value of his railway stocks as a result of plummeting confidence in his schemes, Melmotte tries to convince Marie to sign over her money to him. She refuses, and Melmotte commits yet another set of forgeries, signing for Marie and his own clerk, Herr Croll. People start defecting from Melmotte, and despite the greater and greater certainty that he will be arrested for his forgeries, he remains adamant about keeping up appearances in an almost heroic fashion. Marie, her father's daughter, also perseveres, visiting Lady Carbury and Felix to see if Felix might still marry him even when it is fairly clear that Melmotte's ruin would soon be a reality and not a rumor. The Carburys snub her. In Melmotte's final "performance" before the House, he gets up to address Parliament, but being drunk, falls over. Later that night, he is found dead, having ingested Prussic acid. Nidderdale is one of the first outsiders to find out about Melmotte's death because Marie asks him to come over. Dolly and the lawyers, Squercum, Bideawhile, and Sloe, find out about death when they arrive for a meeting with Melmotte. Nidderdale helps Marie and mother get in contact with lawyers, but everyone else pretty much leaves the two of them to fend for themselves.

Paul appeals to Roger for help with Hetta and Roger begrudgingly gives it. Hetta decides in the end to see Mrs. Hurtle, who, in speaking badly of Paul's treatment of herself, actually vindicates him to Hetta. This is her giving in, and a testimony to her strength, since Paul hasn't really been fair to her, shunning her primarily because of rumors in the first place. The rest of the novel feels like the tying up of "loose ends." Mr. Melmotte's debts are settled, Hamilton Fisker returns for a visit and makes inroads with Madame and Marie, eventually asking Marie to marry him. Paul decides to dissolve his share of the partnership with Fisker, and finally reconciles with Hetta and are engaged. Ruby and Crumb get married, and Georgiana finally settles on running away with a clergyman. The Bear Garden Club is closed for good. Mrs. Hurtle does manage to have a final interview with Paul, in which she again demonstrates her continuing influence on him--it is clear, at this point, that Paul isn't really capable of handling someone as complicated as Mrs. Hurtle, the innocent Hetta is probably the better match. Madame Melmotte engages herself to Herr Croll, Melmotte's clerk, and the whole lot of them--Marie, Fisker, Madame, Croll, and Mrs. Hurtle set sail for New York. Marie, having learned her lessons in love, makes sure to tell Fisker that their engagement is contingent on how she feels about his financial situation once she has seen his houses in San Francisco. Back in London, Lady Carbury finally accepts Mr. Broune when he proposes again. In a sort of odd chapter which seems to stand entirely on its own, apparently Lady Carbury has been writing a novel called "The Wheel of Fortune" this entire time. Mr. Broune reads it and encourages her not to continue writing. Mr. Broune really seems to have taken over everything for Lady Carbury at this point, even arranging for Felix to go abroad with a clergyman to Germany so that he will stay out of trouble. The novel ends with the happiness of Hetta and Paul, and Roger's decision to settle his estate on the couple, promising Hetta's son Carbury as his willful act of continuing to love her, though as a father-figure.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:

John Sutherland does a detailed analysis of The Way We Live Now's serialization and Trollope's writing schedule (Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37:3). A few of the key points are that Trollope worked on a really tight calendar (pretty much completing the entire manuscript in approximately 30 weeks), didn't go back to for revision as a result, and that although he kept to strict metrics (unlike Dickens and Thackeray) in that he wrote exactly 100 chapters, with 5 to each number, and later 50 per volume, a comparison between his plans and the eventual publication shows Trollope's flexibility in decisions as far as plot and character development go.

With respect to this last point, one particularly striking example of his improvisational methods was his decision, fairly late in his writing process, to kill off Melmotte. Sutherland shows Trollope's decision as not only having to do with considerations of dramatic or novelistic effects but also plot considerations, in this case, whether or not to avoid a trial scene. Overall, the flexibility evident from a work that came out so quickly offers an interesting view into what plot lines and characters Trollope takes up, even if not part of the original plan. Sutherland points out that there were originally three main theaters for Trollope's social commentary, but that the third one ended up overshadowing the other two. They are: 1) the publishing and literary world, kicked off by the novel's beginning with Lady Carbury and her "scene"; 2) the religious and political landscape of the countryside, as represented by the long section on the Carbury and Longestaffe estates during Whitsuntide; and finally, 3) the corrupt world of social climbing via the new professions in finance in London embodied by Melmotte. If there is a "hero" (or anti-hero) of The Way We Live Now, it has to be Melmotte because he is hands down the most psychologically complex and interesting character in the novel, and it seems Trollope knew it, in allowing Melmotte's theater to overshadow the others. Trollope's decision, when commissioning a cover for the monthly issues, to have the picture illustrate Melmotte's rise and fall seems to show a clear awareness of Melmotte's imaginative impact. (Roger, by contrast, seems hopelessly and disturbingly bland, even if meant as the most moral agent in the work).

I want to focus then, on a couple of passages on Melmotte that struck me as particularly revealing of how Trollope generates interest in him beyond his serving as an object of his "satirizing whip." The first is from the narrator's psychological explication of Melmotte as he contemplates his nearly certain downfall:

"Judging of himself, as though he were standing outside himself and looking on to another man's work, he pointed out to himself his own shortcomings...No idea ever crossed his mind of what might have been the result had he lived the life of an honest man. Though he was inquiring into himself as closely as he could, he never even told himself that he had been dishonest. Fraud and dishonesty had been the very principle of his life, and had so become a part of his blood and bones that even in this extremity of his misery he made no question within himself as to his right judgment in regard to them."

This description of Melmotte says that he possesses a completely different and radical system of morality than everyone else and that he simply cannot think himself out of his warped system. "Fraud and dishonesty" are so ingrained in him that they are normal, everyday operations. As far as such operations go, Melmotte actually does a pretty good job of being objective about how well he performs these operations; he's able to "stand outside himself" and "point out to himself his own shortcomings." This reflexivity is a trait which most other characters sorely lack. Though Melmotte's reflexivity is limited to his warped outlook on what constitutes the norm for morality, it works rather well as far as the operations of his own out-of-joint system go. This internal portrait of Melmotte as essentially different from everyone else seems strongly suggestive of madness, a concept which the narrator ponders in an extended passage on madness and suicide later on. Essentially, the narrator points out that no one says Melmotte is "mad," only because they don't find the reasons that he kills himself to be sympathetic from a conventional point of view (because, in this view, he brought about his own downfall). But what if, as I think the description of his radical difference (and even embodied difference, as suggested by the blood and bones) in orientation towards morality suggests, his madness is this difference, which he has no power to control or get outside of? Thus, the passage above seems in a way to exonerate more than condemn Melmotte. And finally, is there not something clearly seductive and heroic (yet full of pathos) attached to Melmotte's death, as depicted by the following lines? "Drunk as he had been,--more drunk as he probably became during the night,--still he was able to deliver himself from the indignities and penalties to which the law might have subjected him by a dose of prussic acid." In the words I have italicized, the narrator seems to go into free-indirect discourse, directly sympathizing with Melmotte's sense of "indignities" and "penalties," rather than with everyone else who would probably call these things "justice."

Deerbrook by Harriet Martineau

2011-05-06T01:32:00.000-07:00

Edition: Deerbrook (Penguin Classics)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Deerbrook was published in 1839 (in three volumes) and was Martineau's first serious work of fiction, having already made a name for herself as a journalist and social commentator. The novel met with lukewarm reviews, though George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte were among the novel's appreciators.

SUMMARY:
Having been recently orphaned, the two young women, Hester and Margaret Ibbotson, stay with their relations, the Grey's at Deerbrook. The two of them are from Birmingham, and are enamored with the beauty of the country landscape. The primary concerns of members of the village, however, seem to be local gossip. The girls' primary circle of first acquaintances include Mr. and Mrs. Grey, their daughter Sophia and son Sydney, Mr. and Mrs. Rowland and their children, Mrs. Enderby, Mrs. Rowland's mother, and Philip Enderby, Mrs. Rowland's brother and Mrs. Enderby's son, Mr. Hope, the doctor, and Miss Young, a governess. Mrs. Rowland is particularly malicious in her gossip, and generally does not get along with the Grey's because of they are religious "dissidents." Mr. Hope and Miss Young are distinguished from this crowd of people in that they seem to rise above the petty interests of the other villagers. In the early chapters there is an extended passage in which Miss Young reminisces in a manner of talking out loud, accepting her lot as a governess and limited pleasures because of her own position: once, she would have been accepted into society as someone's wife, but as a result of an accident, she had become lame and also lost her father. Miss Young, however, isn't bitter about her situation: instead, her acceptance has led her to embrace a marginal yet accepted position in Deerbrook society which has enabled her to live there and also retain a certain degree of independence. She delights, therefore, in observing the people around her in a deeper fashion than most. Margaret immediately takes to Miss Young and agrees to study German with her.

Eventually, both Mr. Hope and Mr. Enderby develop feelings for Margaret--Hope confesses his feelings to his brother Frank who is in India through a lengthy letter, and Enderby leaves a note for Margaret in the schoolroom. Miss Young shows the slightest hint of discomposure when she realizes that Enderby has feelings for Margaret; there was a time when he may have been hers before her fall and loss of her father. Meanwhile, Margaret and Hester continue to delight the people of Deerbrook, engaging in parties and teas. A freak accident in which Mr. Hope is thrown from his horse leaves him an invalid for a time, and the toll that this takes on Hester is seen by Margaret and others. Margaret and her sister have a candid conversation in which Hester reveals that she did not yet know how she felt about Mr. Hope until discovering to herself how she felt after his accident. After Mr. Hope recovers, Mrs. Grey takes on the duties of matchmaker and points out to him how Hester has looked unwell with worry over him. Mr. Hope, though he is really in love with Margaret, feels pressured by expectations and, as the narrator gives, "he decided upon making the great mistake of his life," that is, to ask for Hester's hand in marriage. He asks Margaret's advice before doing so, and finding Margaret overjoyed on behalf of his sister, convinces himself that though he might not love Hester, she is certainly a noble and good choice for a wife in theory and that anyone should be proud to make her his wife.

Hester and Hope marry, and go on a brief honeymoon to Oxford. During that time, Margaret works to furnish their new home (she too will live with them) and spends some time with Maria. Among other things, the two women talk philosophically of love and the nature of marriage--Maria, in particular, has a rather startling understanding of true love as a kind of death for individuals, fraught with difficulty. When Hester and her new husband return, they settle into their new life as a married couple, giving their first dinner party. Soon, a rumor gets started in Deerbrook that Mr. Philip Enderby was engaged to a young woman named Miss Bruce, and had been so engaged for a long time. Margaret finds that she cannot take this news without a significant amount of discomposure, despite her notions of herself as being generally calm about the whole thing. In fact, though she didn't know it, she had been expecting that Enderby would one day ask her for marriage. Mr. Hope and Hester have their own troubles; because Mr. Hope voted for an unpopular candidate in the local election, many of his patients shunned him and he began to lose business. Hester met with cold attitudes from the local tradespeople, and loses her own composure. To make matters worse, rumors begin to circulate about Mr. Hope stealing bodies from graveyards in the name of science. As a result of all of these tensions, relations between Margaret and her sister also deteriorate a bit, though they both do much to try to prevent this from happening.

One day, Margaret falls into a frozen pond. Hope is too late to be among one of the men who pulled her out, but he arrives just as she was emerging from the pond and she sees the agony on his face, and witnesses his low cry, "My Margaret." His feelings for her rush back, but he soon suppresses them again. Eventually, things take a turn for the better when Philip comes to town and reveals that his connection to Miss Bruce was a full fabrication, likely by his own sister, Mrs. Rowland, who didn't want her own family marrying a relation of the Grey's, and poor relations at that. Philip chides Margaret for believing the rumor, but she says it is more that she believed that maybe he had never loved her in the first place and that she had been mistaken. The two reconcile and things look up for the time being. For Mr. Hope, however, troubles continue and culminate in a riot inspired largely by Mrs. Rowland's rumors about Hope. An unruly mob burns Mr. Hope's effigy, and destroy his property. Inside, Margaret, Hester, and the servants stand strong. After the ordeal, Mr. Enderby tries to convince Mrs. Rowland to renounce what she knows to be untrue, and to answer for why she said that he would marry Miss Bruce. Mrs. Rowland does not come around, however, and vows to fight her brother against the Hope's, Margaret, and the Grey's. Mrs. Rowland brings in another doctor, Walcot, to replace Mr. Hope, but Hope refuses to leave town. Meanwhile, Mrs. Enderby takes a turn for the worse and dies, but not before Margaret and Philip have had a chance to tell her of their engagement.

Mr. Walcot turns out to be rather young and easily influenced, a sort of tool for Mrs. Rowland's vendetta. Thus, no one finds there to be much against him, so the Greys, the Hopes, and Margaret take him on a boating excursion. Enderby, who has left town to advance his career before marrying Margaret, returns during this excursion, and is oddly cold to Margaret. Mr. Hope ascertains that Mrs. Rowland has told him of Mr. Hope's initial attachment to Margaret rather than Hester, and Mrs. Grey confirmed Mr. Hope's initial surprise when she encouraged him to marry Hester. Mrs. Rowland has also fabricated that Margaret held an attachment to Hope previous to his marrying her sister. Devastated, Philip writes a letter to Margaret after his interview with Hope, vaguely berating her for not "trusting" him and revealing her past attachments. Margaret has no idea what he means, and says so much in a response, which is unfortunately intercepted by Mrs. Rowland and burned. Time passes, and Margaret resigns herself to such joys available as taking care of Hester and Hope's new baby, and takes on the cares of an increasingly impoverished household. They reach such a level of poverty that they must let Morris, the Ibbotson sister's old housekeeper, go. Still they manage to stand together through difficult times, and Margaret happily watches her sister and Mr. Hope develop a much healthier and mutually dependent and supportive relationship.

Soon, a fever comes to Deerbrook, and it is clear that Walcot is not up to the task of managing all of the cases. Though many leave the village, including the women and children of the Grey family, Margaret and Hester elect to stay behind to help Hope. Among the people that Margaret helps is a man named Platt and his family, a member of the country poor, whom Martineau depicts as highly superstitious, in addition to being desperately destitute. Margaret realizes as Platt dies that he was the man who came to their house one night when Hope was away to steal their food and money; she recovers from him a ring given to her from Philip. Among the villagers struck by the fever is Matilda, Mrs. Rowland's daughter. With her daughter on her deathbed, Mrs. Rowland allows Hope to come help, and renounces all that she has fabricated in the past. Philip has also returned to town, ostensibly because he still wants to make sure that Margaret and her family are okay. Mrs. Rowland comes clean, and Margaret and Philip reconcile. Matilda, sadly, doesn't make it. The novel ends with Margaret taking leave of Maria, about to begin her new life with Philip in London. Margaret confesses that she is now at ease with the state of Hester and Hope's marriage.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Martineau's task was to present a large-scale realist novel on middle-class country life, something hitherto unattempted. The indebtedness of Eliot's Middlemarch to Deerbrook is clearly evident. Besides the more superficial similarities like the characters Mr. Hope and Tertius Lydgate, both novels deal clearly with the limitations placed on an individual's capacity to act morally within the bounds of a particular social system. Mr. Hope's and Lydgate's struggle with continuing their profession is a direct result of their attempts to cast ethical votes, and to maintain an "independence" from petty gossip and politics which, they end up learning, is entirely impossible. Both men become deeply embroiled in what they have idealistically viewed as petty and beneath them, learning, humbly, that such petty things can end up meaning everything. For strong women in particular--Margaret, Hester, and Maria, the only social roles available are wife, if she should not lack both beauty or wealth, and governess if she should lack both. All three women struggle differently to live out socially acceptable lives given such constraints without losing sight of their own individuality. All three of these women end up finding solutions that "work" for each of them: Hester finds in Hope a husband that will temper her fiery flares of occasional jealousies such that she might freely live as her incredibly devoted and ardent self without fear of allowing her passions to get out of control, Margaret finds an apt partner in Philip (this relationship isn't really explored in depth in Martineau's novel, unlike Hester's and Hope's, so the only full picture of a successful marriage which Martineau offers is one in which the wife ends up under the "rule" of her husband, though she consents to this, and he is made better with her love and support), and Maria finds a way to hold a respectful position in society, earning her keep from a distance, which she comes to terms with as not loneliness to be pitied but a salutary solitude which grants her a more independent life than the likes of Margaret or Hester could live.

One of the more interesting inventions of Martineau's narrative is Mrs. Rowland, who is also kind of a victim of social forces. Though Mrs. Rowland is clearly the "villain" of the story and the narrator reveals very little information that would encourage readers to sympathize with her. It isn't clear, in the end, why exactly she holds such malice for the Ibbotsons: after all, she isn't exactly a woman of strong religious or political commitments such that the Greys' "dissenter" status would really be behind her continued, obsessive machinations against those associated with them. At one point, very briefly, Hope tries to explain his theory of what might be behind Mrs. Rowland's evil:

"I take hers to be no uncommon case. The dislikes of low and selfish minds generally bear very much the character of hers, though they may not be pampered by circumstances into such a luxuriance as in this case. In a city, Mrs. Rowland might have been an ordinary spiteful fine lady. In such a place as Deerbrook, and with a family of rivals' cousins incessantly before her eyes, to exercise her passions upon, she has ended in being..."

Here, Hope leaves off and Margaret concludes, "what she is." This is a very clinical explanation of why Mrs. Rowland commits evil, one which is appropriately relayed by the doctor. Margaret, however, prevents Hope's final "diagnosis," preserving, in a way, Mrs. Rowland's humanity and not turning her into merely a "case." What Hope's assessment reveals, nevertheless, is that he believes some natures to simply be "selfish," and prone to competition--in a city, where capitalism is the rule of life, she might be neutralized by other competition. In the country, there is no check on her selfish competitiveness, and so its exercise becomes excessive and uncontrolled. Hope's view here checks out with Martineau's solution for Hester, who also has certain tendencies that need to be regulated by social institutions (in her case, jealousy by marriage). The difference with Mrs. Rowland's case is that she lives under the wrong social institutions necessary for the regulation of her selfishness. Deerbrook's faith in social regulation if applied "correctly" seems to me to be one of the essential differences which sets it apart from Middlemarch. Social institutions seem more like realities to live with and to continually struggle and carefully contend with in the latter work, whereas Deerbrook seems to really hold faith in the capacity of social institutions to regulate innate human sinfulness, if only they were applied appropriately to each "case" of the sinful human.

Selections from Algernon Charles Swinburne (Poems and Ballads, 1866)

2011-05-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The first series of Poems and Ballads was published in 1866 and immediately met with considerable controversy and scandal largely because of its subject matter. Swinburne boldly covered topics like lesbianism, hermaphroditism, necrophilia and sadomasochism, and also made clear expressions of antitheism and pessimism more generally. In a famous review for the Saturday Review, John Morley called Swinburne a "scornful apostle of a crushing iron-shod despair" or "the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs." Swinburne's publisher withdrew the work, but Swinburne reprinted the text under another publisher accompanied by a personal justification of the work.

SUMMARY/THEMES:

A Ballad of Life
The collection begins with "A Ballad of Life" followed by "A Ballad of Death." Swinburne's imagery is immediately unexpected; in "A Ballad of Life," a woman has sorrow in her eyelids, holds a cithern of a dead lute player, and is surrounded by three men: Lust, Shame, and Fear. As he looks upon this scene, the speaker realizes that lust was love, shame was sorrow comforted, and fear was pity that was dead. Here, Swinburne revises orthodox conceptions of love, sorrow, and pity, showing their close relation to other values which may seem much more negative.
A Ballad of Death
"A Ballad of Death" continues the subject matter from "A Ballad of Life" but here, the lady has died and the speaker laments. He imagines seeing Venus, who tells him to "Arise, lift up thine eyes and see / if any glad thing be or good / Now the best thing is taken forth of us." In the rest of the poem, the speaker fondly describes in detail the beautiful sight of the lady's corpse, with lips "Sweet still, but not now red."
Laus Veneris (The Praise of Venus)
This poem is based on the medieval Tannhauser legend, in which the poet Tannhauser spends time with Venus in her subterranean home, emerging to seek absolution from the Pope. The Pope doesn't grant it, but later realizes that he should have when the papal staff breaks out in flowers. Tannhauser has returned to Venus by that time. Edward Burne-Jones created a painting in 1879 to accompany Swinburne's poem. In the poem, the speaker can't escape his desire, though he wants escape, through death: "Ah yet would God this flesh of mine might be / Where air might wash and long leaves cover me, / Where tides of grass break into foam of flowers, / Or where the wind's feet shine along the sea." The speaker also reveals clearly sadomasochistic tendencies: "Ah, with blind lips I felt for you, and found / About my neck your hands and hair enwound. / The hands that stifle and the hair that stings / I felt them fasten sharply without sound." The sharpness of desire, and its imbrication with pain directly has bearing on how the poet views his faith. Going before Christ, he realizes that he cannot receive mercy because he feels that the burning love which he feels is "more beautiful than God." The poet ultimately suggests that the intensity of his sensory and sensual experience communicated in violent yet sensual recurring images of "crushed fruit" and flames is like the intensity of Hell's fires, so what might he care that he should burn in Hell for enjoying erotic experiences in the present? Vividly, he writes, "And I forget tear and all weary things / All ended prayers and perished thanksgivings, / Feeling her face with all her eager hair / Cleave to me, clinging as a fire that clings..." This fire is clearly akin to "such-like flame / Shall cleave to me for ever; yea, what care, / Albeit I burn then, having felt the same?" The idea that there might be pleasure in Hell fire, if it should be like love's fire seems to be the logical extension of Swinburne's unprecedented ideas.

Isobel Armstrong succinctly reads the poem as presenting "two equally unsatisfying poles of Eros and Christ," though Eros is strong, it is not necessarily stronger than God. The matching of Hell fire with love's fire certainly suggests a kind of equality in inflicting pain.

The Triumph of Time
Written in ababccab stanzas. The speaker reproaches an unnamed lover for her infidelity: "We had grown as gods, as the gods above, / Filled from the heart to the lips with love, / Held fast in his hands, clothed warm with his wings, / O love, my love, had you loved but me!" He reflects on how time triumphs in that it perpetuates the transitoriness of all strong feelings. He laments beautifully that "It is not much that a man can save / On the sands of life, in the straits of time...Some waif washed up with the strays and spars / That ebb-tide shows to the shore and the stars; / Weed from the water, grass from a grave, / A broken blossom, a ruined rhyme." Eventually he reaches a kind of pessimistic resolution, saying that he will surrender himself by drowning in the sea, "the great sweet mother, / Mother and lover of men, the sea." This is kind of a scary sweetness, though, as she is "fed with the lives of men," "subtle and cruel of heart." The speaker's reasoning, however, is that death "is the worst that comes of thee," referring to the sea, and that although she feeds on the dead, his lover has done worse by feeding on his heart. Near the end of the poem, the speaker moves abruptly to talk about how he would rather be a "singer in France of old" who had a woman who loved him, bade him to live, and then who died right afterwards because for the speaker, "Love will not come to me now though I die, / As love came close to you, breast to breast." Ultimately though, the speaker's seemingly defiant acceptance of death doesn't really cement itself, he wonders longingly in the final lines, in reference to his lover, "...in heaven, / If I cry to you then, will you hear or know?"

Anactoria
Extreme, sadomasochistic desires are expressed in this poem which imagines Sappho's lesbian love of Anactoria: "I would my love could kill thee; I am satiated / With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead." Desire only grows, and having been satisfied, must now seek a realm beyond--the wish that the beloved may suffer pain and die: "I would find grievous ways to have thee slain, / Intense device, and superflux of pain / Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shake / Life at thy lips, and leave it there to ache." Cannibalism also forms a part of the speaker's desire, she expresses of Anactoria, "That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat / Thy breasts like honey! that from face to feet / And in my flesh thy very flesh entombed!" As suggested also in "Laus Veneris," this kind of intense love imbricated by pain is all the more attractive because it seems to rival the intensity of God: it is "crueller than Hell," "crueller than God." Ultimately it is even a resistance to God, in that the speaker refuses to be suppliant and satiated with the little things that God generally allots us with: she refuses to be "like those herds of his / Who laugh and live a little, and their kiss / Contents them, and their loves are swift and sweet..."

The Leper
In simple tetrameter lines rhymed abab, the speaker details his love of a woman who has gotten leprosy. Again his desire is in resistance to God: "Yea, though God always hated me, / And hates me now that I can kiss / Her eyes..." after she is a corpse. Everyone casts her out when she gets leprosy, but he takes her in, giving her water and bread because "such joy I had / To do the service God forbids." The poem ends with some ghastly images of her being dead for six months, while the speaker still holds "In two cold palms her cold two feet." "Her hair, half grey half ruined gold, / Thrills me and burns me in kissing it." Still, his dominion over her isn't quite enough for him, despite the radical intensity of his desire and devotion. At the end of the poem, he still envisions that "she kept at heart that other man's," and this undoubtedly yet bothers him.

Fragoletta
This poem unrestrainedly celebrates the unorthodox beauty of androgyny which the speaker claims is beautiful because of its strangeness: "I dreamed of strange lips yesterday / And cheeks wherein the ambiguous blood / Was like a rose's--yea, / A rose's when it lay / Within the bud." There's something deliciously transgressive about someone who isn't just man or woman, and the speaker feels oddly reverent towards the genitalia of a hermaphroditic individual, while also expressing sexually explicit desires without much abandon: "I dare not kiss it, lest my lip / Press harder than an indrawn breath, / And all the sweet life slip / Forth, and the sweet leaves drip, / Bloodlike, in death." The poem also connects something virginal to the strangeness ("virginal strange air") further signaling the pleasure in transgression.

Hermaphroditus
Written as four stanzas, each a modified Petrarchan love sonnet: abbaabbacdcdcd. The final sestet "cdcdcd" strongly suggests entanglement rather than the push forward of the traditional cdecde. The first sonnet describes the struggle at the center of the hermaphroditic experience: "Two loves at either blossom of thy breast / Strive until one be under and one above." There is actually quite a bit of despair in this, and the sense of entrapment paints a very different picture of hermaphroditism than "Fragoletta": "A strong desire begot on great despair, / A great despair cast out by strong desire." The second sonnet imagines a hermaphrodites as "a pleasure house" made by Love "for all the loves his kin" but ultimately a kind of mistake on Love's part because the unresolved struggle leads to Love himself not really wanting to enter in to this "pleasure house." The third sonnet offers some measure of redemption, admitting that there is yet something beautiful, other-worldly about hermaphroditism: "To what strange end hath some strange god made fair / The double blossom of two fruitless flowers?" (Yet, note that the flowers are "fruitless"). Finally, in the fourth sonnet, the speaker can't decide how he feels about hermaphrodite: there's kind of a both a love and a fear, "So dreadful, so desirable, so dear?"

Dolores (Notre-Dame Des Sept Douleurs - Our Lady of Seven Sorrows)
This poem is written in anapestic trimeter, usually a comic and light meter but in Swinburne's poem, clearly feels serious, struggling, desirous yet reverentially restrained. It is essentially an ode to Dolores, "Our Lady of Pain" (this address ends each stanza). Subtitled "Our Lady of Seven Sorrows," Swinburne makes the controversial move of linking an epithet for Virgin Mary to this pagan goddess of pain. The poet imagines briefly Dolores's origins, wondering: "Wert thou pure and a maiden, Dolores, / When desire took thee first by the throat?" This might suggest a development from Virgin Mary to Dolores, signaling that Dolores occupies a more advanced, mature, and ultimately more desirable way of living. Most of the poem spends time detailing the sadomasochistic pleasures that Dolores is goddess of, and prays to her to bring these pagan pleasures back to the Christ-loving world. In Blakean fashion, the speaker reverses traditional notions of virtue as a good and turns it into a vice. For example, he prefers the "raptures and roses of vice" to the "lilies and languors of virtue," associating happiness and passino with vice and laziness and wasting away with virtue. The novelty of inflicting or receiving pain is at the heart of the speaker's eagerness in what he feels to be a stilted modern age: "what new work wilt thou find for thy lover, / What new passions for daytime or night?" Here he is almost obsessive and can't help repeating the word "new" over and over again almost like a child awaiting gifts. Importantly, though, such eagerness is a result not of childishness but of great maturity: he is "wearied of sorrow and joy," key concepts of Christian morality and faith which no longer have the power to hold him. He suggests a need for a reversion back to classical times, when "the gladiator, pale for thy pleasure, / Drew bitter and perilous breath;...when the world was a steed for thy rein; / when the nations lay prone in thy porches." The speaker laments quite explicitly the Christian creed when he calls directly upon Dolores to "redeem" them, as if standing in for Christ: " What ailed us, O gods, to desert you / For creeds that refuse and restrain? / Come and redeem us from virtue / Our Lady of Pain." The final line, celebrating the "Joys of thee seventy times seven" directly beats out the "seven sorrows" of Mary.

The Garden of Proserpine
This is a poem of negation in that the speaker says he is "tired of tears and laughter, / And men that laugh and weep; / Of that may come hereafter / For men that sow to reap." He rejects any sense of futurity and wishes just to sleep, the state of being which the Garden of Proserpine offers. The garden is described by a list of things that do NOT grow there, except poppies (signaling forgetfulness). Unlike many of the other poems described so far, this speaker seems completely exhausted from the intense desires which have held such a fascination before: "From too much love of living / From hope and fear set free, / We thank with brief thanksgiving / Whatever gods may be / That no life lives for ever..." Read in conjunction with poems which deal primarily with the fiery and powerful intensity of unorthodox love and its capacity for wrestling with God himself, this poem acknowledges that such intensity isn't sustainable, and calmly finds comfort in death's release from such passions.

Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

2011-05-04T00:22:00.000-07:00

Edition: The Satanic Verses: A Novel

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Satanic Verses was published in 1988 (Rushdie's fourth novel). Its publication met with great controversy, resulting famously in a fatwa placed against Rushdie by leaders of radical Islam like the Ayatollah Khomeini. Rushdie's portrayal of the prophet Mohammed (as Mahound) was particularly controversial and considered to be blasphemous.

SUMMARY:
I. The Angel Gibreel
Two men, Gibreel Farishta, and Saladin Chamcha, are the sole survivors of a hijacked plane, the Bostan AI-420 bound for London, miraculously falling from the sky and emerging unscathed. Gibreel was a famous Indian actor, who had little regard for the women he bedded down with. One woman, Rekha Merchant, plunged to her death from a tall building along with her children in an act of protest against Gibreel. As he falls from the plane, Gibreel sees Rekha on a magic carpet, vowing to follow him with her vengeance. This section gives details on Gibreel's childhood and rise to fame, his spontaneous recovery from spontaneous hemorrhaging, among other things. Chamcha's history is one of rejecting his homeland, desiring to leave behind his past and become a true Englishman after one particularly traumatic encounter of sexual abuse. After a few years of education in London, Chamcha becomes estranged from his Indian parents, particularly his father. Chamcha's mother dies choking on a fishbone while refusing to hide during a Pakistani air raid; no one had come to her rescue because they were all hiding. Chamcha's father re-married another woman of the same name, and Chamcha goes of to settle permanently in London, becoming a voice-actor (and unable to land screen roles generally due to racism). Chamcha, bent on his own Anglicization and assimilation, marries a white, English girl, Pamela Lovelace. On a trip back to Bombay, a woman named Zeeny Vakil tries to "convert" Chamcha back to his roots but fails, despite a love affair that the two embark on. Chamcha is on his way back to London from this trip when the plane crashes.

II. Mahound
In a town called Jahilia, "built entirely of sand," the poet and satirist Baal is forced to write verses for the Grandee Abu Simbel against the prophet Mahound and his followers. Mahound's primary disciples are Khalid, a water-carrier, Salman, a Persian immigrant, and Bilal, a slave. Mahound preaches monotheism against the primarily polytheistic town and so does not have much luck. Abu Simbel suggests to Mahound a compromise: if his all-powerful Allah will accept three of the city's lesser Gods, he might win more followers and continue to live there. Mahound's uncle tells him he should consult the archangel Gibreel. Mahound goes in search of the archangel, who is reluctant to be summoned by this demanding Mahound. Hardly knowing what he is doing, Gibreel delivers the message that Lat, Uzza, and Manat are to be accepted gods, not on the level of Allah, but under him. When Mahound returns to the city, the message is met by taunts and rioting; he is rescued by Hind, Abu Simbel's wife, who tells him that Al-Lat demands equality with Allah. Mahound sees Gibreel again, and this time he gets the idea that the first message was actually from Shaitan, the evil archangel (Gibreel knows that it was him both times, actually). He goes back to Jahilia to reveal this new message. Again, Mahound and his followers are persecuted, and forced to leave the city altogether.

III. Ellowen Deeowen
Rosa Diamond, a woman of 88 years, claims to see ghosts, so she isn't all that surprised when she picks up Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha (both transformed into a kind of good angel, bad angel during their falls). Gibreel has a sort of halo surrounding him, and Chamcha has horns. The police come and arrest Chamcha, and for some reason, Gibreel is transfixed by Rosa and does nothing to help Chamcha. The central story in Rosa's life has been her brief encounter with one Martin de la Cruz, a married man with whom she had a brief tryst in Argentina, while herself being married to Henry Diamond. The narrative strongly suggests that Gibreel was Martin in a past life, and that is why Rosa has such power over him. Gibreel stays with her for a while, even making love to the old woman a little bit before she dies. Meanwhile, Chamcha is taken to a hospital detention center where he is shocked to discover that there are other changes to his form other than the horns (including new hoof-like feet). It turns out that there are other animal-men in the ward, and together, they hatch up a plan of escape. After the escape, Chamcha returns to his wife, Pamela, whom he finds in bed with his friend, Jumpy Joshi, a frail man who had always been unpopular with the ladies. Gibreel, after Rosa's death, gets on a train, where he runs into a man named Maslama, who recognizes him as Gibreel Farishta, famous actor but also treats him like some kind of deity. The scene shifts to Allie (Alleluia) Cone, a woman who climber Mount Everest with whom Gibreel is in love. In a classroom-full of young girls, Allie thrills them with stories of her climb and ghosts in the mountains. Gibreel finds Allie in London.

IV. Ayesha
In Gibreel's dreams, an exiled Imam (likely based on Ayatollah Khomeini) in London. Gibreel carries him to Desh, where he wars with the Empress Ayesha. Gibreel fights on the Imam's side, and defeats Al-Lat, Ayesha's deity. The rest of this section is about Mirza Saeed in London on his fortieth birthday, and how he sees outside of his window a beautiful girl named Ayesha eating butterflies in the garden. He is filled with great desire, and out of guilt, commences on a period of making love passionately to his wife Mishal. Mishal gets breast cancer, and has little time left to live. At the same time, Mishal has struck up a close friendship with Ayesha. Ayesha eventually says that the angel Gibreel has told her that the town must take a pilgrimage to Mecca, and that the Arabian Sea will part for them as they walk across. Mishal's cancer will be cured if she goes on the pilgrimage, Ayesha promises.

V. A City Visible but Unseen
Mishal in this section is the daughter of one Muhammad Sufyan, the proprietor of Shaandaar Cafe. His wife's name is also Hind. Sufyan and Hind have a rather unhappy marriage, characterized, among other things, by bad sex. Chamcha arrives before this family looking for a place to live; they allow him to stay. He talks to Mimi, his previous co-worker, on the phone to see if he might get a job again. The show which he had been on, The Aliens Show, was unfortunately cancelled. Gibreel, on the other hand, has been making new films, including one where he is an archangel in a city of sand, conveying messages to a prophet. Gibreel has told the media that he is alive because he never got onto the plane. During the time of Chamcha's stay, Mishal (who is just seventeen) confesses that she has been having sexual relations with a lawyer named Hanif Johnson. Both Mishal and her sister Anahita are fairly considerate of Chamcha, beauties tending to a beast. Eventually, Chamcha grows too big for the house and must leave--by this time, he has made quite a splash in London, a sort of devil-cult has grown up around him, his image plastered onto various commercial venues. Chamcha is moved to a nightclub where there is more space. The narrator offers Allie Cone's history in this section: her father was of Polish ancestry, and like Chamcha, wanted to blend in so he changed their names from Cohen to Cone. Allie had a sister, Elena, who had become a successful model but who had died in an "acid bath" at the age of twenty-one. Allie's career capitalized on her image as the "ice queen," and like Gibreel, managed to have many rather meaningless sexual liaisons. Allie found a different sort of passion with Farishta, however. Gibreel soon thinks that he hears God telling him to do work for him, to leave Allie. He commences on some delusional attempts to convert people, humorously thinking that he will redeem the city, a London A-Z map in his pocket. Rekha continues to show up to mock him. Eventually, Gibreel ends up once again with Allie after being hit by a car during his "missionary work." The man who hit him, Whisky Sisodia (who has a stutter), a filmmaker who thinks that Gibreel should return to the big screen. Gibreel is soon fully back in the business at Sisodia's urging, though Allie and Gibreel become more estranged as a result of his career. The doctors generally think that Gibreel's "visions" are due to schizophrenia.

VI. Return to Jahilia
This section is again narrated as part of Gibreel's dreams. Many changes have come to Jahilia; it is now no longer a "city built of sand," but a rather destitute, "prosaic" town. Hind has not aged at all, though her husband Abu Simbel has--she is the de facto ruler. Salman, the Persian immigrant, is telling Baal the poet that Mahound will soon return from exile. Salman's account of Mahound is now negative, having lost faith in the prophet's power because the rules that he receives from Gibreel always seemed so oddly convenient to him. Salman had tested the "word of God" by replacing words in Mahound's verses as he wrote them down to see if Mahound would notice. He didn't. After Mahound's return, Jahilia is subject to a number of new, strict rules. Baal spends a lot of time behind The Curtain, a whorehouse. The whorehouse happened to have twelve whores, and Mahound twelve wives. The members of the brothel decide to each act the part of one of Mahound's wives and to receive visitors as such. Baal is charged with marrying all of them, and thus becomes a gross parody himself of Mahound. Eventually, the brothel is shut down. The madame commits suicide, and the girls are taken to prison. Baal confessesto what has been happening behind the Curtain, and is sent to be beheaded. Soon afterwards, however, Mahound falls ill and dies.

VII. The Angel Azraeel
Chamcha finds his way to Pamela's house again and insists that he live there. She doesn't resist, though they don't rekindle a relationship--Chamcha allows Jumpy Joshi to continue to live there with his wife. Chamcha continues to work hard to reinstate his good-old English life, but generally fails. At a meeting where people were giving testimony in hopes to exonerate a man named Simba, Chamcha realizes that he lusts after Mishal Sufyan. He thinks he sees the angel Azraeel behind her though, signaling that she's off limits. Chamcha approaches Gibreel at a strange party (themed Dickensian times) and goes over to face his adversary, thinking to take revenge on him for betraying him at Rosa Diamond's. Before their encounter, the narrator embarks on a rather long exegesis on good and evil, and of how the two of them might be "different types of self," Gibreel a type which wished to remain continuous, and Chamcha a type which constantly preferred and selected for discontinuity. The actual encounter is a bit anticlimactic after all of this; Chamcha pretends to be an old friend, telling Gibreel about how his wife had left him for Jumpy Joshi. Gibreel, who had recently become very jealous because his career prevented him from watching Allie's every moment, goes after Joshi and hits him over the head and throws him into the Thames river (he survives). Chamcha is later invited into Allie and Gibreel's temporary home in Scotland. Chamcha works to make Gibreel crazy, impersonating voices of Allie's supposed lovers over the phone. Gibreel had been revealing many things in confidence to Chamcha about Allie's body when they made love, so Chamcha made the best of this information in his calls. Gibreel is particularly disturbed by Chamcha's impersonation of a poet who composes verses that suggest Allie is cheating on him. He can't get them out of his head and pretty much goes insane. The rest of the section is the scene of apocalypse: Simba is wrongly accused of being a murderer of Grandmothers (the Granny Ripper) and dies in jail. Race riots break out and buildings burn down. Gibreel takes on the role of Azraeel, angel of destruction, blowing his trumpet all over London. Gibreel and Chamcha meet again in the burning Shaandaar Cafe, where Gibreel forgives Chamcha and rescues him. In the fires, Joshi and Pamela die, as do Hind and Muhammad Sufyan.

VIII. The Parting of the Arabian Sea
This section returns to Ayesha's pilgrimage. Mirza tries to stop the pilgrimage, especially as it becomes clear that his wife is exhausted. Eventually, the old start dying, including Khadija, Sarpanch Muhammad Din's wife, and Ayesha says that there is no time to give her a proper burial. As more and more people die on the journey, doubts increase. There is a flood, and many of the pilgrims disappear afterwards. Mirza is about to convince Ayesha to give up, when miraculously, a bunch of butterflies bring back all of the remaining pilgrims. Doubts surface again, however, when Ayesha allows a baby found in the road to be stoned to death because it was likely "illegitimate." Desperate to make sure his wife is okay and an unbeliever, Mirza tries to make a deal with Ayesha, saying that he'll find a way to fly all of the pilgrims to Mecca--he suggests that she ask Gibreel, having the sneaking suspicion she'll give in because she might not be as confident about her notion that the sea will part as she was at the beginning. Ayesha resists the offer, and they reach the sea. As the pilgrims walk into the sea, they become dead, drowned bodies, but afterwards, eyewitness accounts by the survivors said that they had indeed seen the sea part. Mirza is the only one who did not see the sea part. Mirza subsequently starves himself to death, and on his last night of life, (fancies that) he sees the sea splitting apart, himself joining the rest.

IX. A Wonderful Lamp
Chamcha is called back to Bombay to see his estranged father who has only a few days to live, having contracted cancer. On the plane, Chamcha runs into Sisodia. Back in his childhood home, father and son are reconciled. Changez, Chamcha's father, dies with terror on his face for a moment, but then his mouth curved up into a smile. Chamcha wonders what it all means. His father's rather "radiant death" brings Chamcha together with Zeeny--he somehow feels that he has found himself and no longer needs to take on multiple identities. He joins Zeeny in a Communist Party event: a human chain of people linking hands throughout the whole city. This demonstration is interrupted by the news that Gibreel and Allie Cone were in Bombay, and that Allie had been thrown out of a window, and Sisodia shot, while Gibreel disappeared once again. Chamcha (the inheritor of his father's wealth) finds Gibreel in his house. Gibreel tells him in garbled and broken sentences how he had been plagued by the verses that he heard and that it was not he that pushed Allie over the edge but Rekha. At the very end, Gibreel takes Chamcha's father's (magic) lamp, which contains a gun. Gibreel places the gun in his own mouth and shoots himself. The novel ends with Zeeny calling Chamcha away, telling him, "Let's get the hell out of here" (which has a double meaning given Chamcha's association with the Satanic).

CRITICAL APPROACH:
Rushdie himself offers perhaps the most helpful comments as to how to read his book:

"If The Satanic Verses is anything, it is a migrant's-eye view of the world. It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis (slow or rapid, painful or pleasurable) that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity."

Rushdie's comment does the work of linking post-colonial concepts (migrancy, uprooting, metamorphosis) with post-modern concepts (disjuncture, metaphor for all humanity). As many critics have noted, perhaps the aesthetic achievement of The Satanic Verses is proving that a post-colonial novel can be simultaneously post-modern, implying, more importantly, that the lives of post-colonials might actually serve as not marginal, but central and universal. The multiply hybrid nature of these characters (on almost every imaginable level--race, culture, class, gender, religion, sane/insane, human/animal, human/angel) represents the instability of identity in a post-modern world. It isn't at all a story of center and margin, the results of the colonial encounter. Characters in Bombay and London in The Satanic Verses feel equally migrant, uprooted, and in a word, unstable in a world where individuals just can't be pinned down by systems previously believed to be stable like Culture or Language.

The Satanic Verses goes even further, however, than to deconstruct the ways in which people identify themselves by culture or language. Its radicalism is in its deconstruction, through magical realism, of man's very material being--Rushdie's novel takes post-modernism to its logical extreme. If such categories as culture or language fail to identify us for who we really are, then perhaps what we believe to be the very materiality of our bodies can't identify us for who we really are either. The concept is radical, but it is also funny (Rushdie himself has noted the intended playfulness and comic elements of his work). Gibreel's surprise when the questions of Mahound intrude upon his body or Chamcha's horrified discovery his new goat's body in the hospital detention center are comic scenes wherein human bodies realize that what they thought to be fixed boundaries in fact were not. Immaterial bodies like Rekha's ghost, for example, are also decidedly comic rather than horrifying; she keeps showing up at Gibreel's side, nagging and mocking him but not being particularly scary.

What might be the function of comedy and playfulness in this work? In the scene before Chamcha and Gibreel's confrontation at the "Dickensian Times" party (also funny), the narrator breaks in to offer a suggestion:

"What follows is tragedy. --Or, at least the echo of tragedy, the full-blooded original being unavailable to modern men and women, so it's said. --A burlesque for our degraded, imitative times, in which clowns re-enact what was first done by heroes and the kings."

Essentially, the tragedy of good versus evil to be played out between Gibreel and Chamcha has been repeated so many times that there isn't room for anything else but imitation and parody. Relatedly, the post-modern divorce between sign and signified and the rejection of the possibility of getting to any sort of stable Truth claim about the Human Condition which the divorce perpetuates prevents belief in grand struggles of good and evil. Everything then becomes rather light and playful, when the depths of Truth either don't exist or aren't accessible to the world.

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

2011-05-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

Edition: North and South (Penguin Classics)

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Gaskell's North and South was serialized in weekly parts in Dickens's Household Words from September 1854 to January 1855. Gaskell found the format limiting; she commented in a note to the volume edition that she felt that she had had to compress her novel. She added, therefore, expansions to the volume edition. In addition to narrative expansions, Gaskell also added epigraph quotations to the beginning of chapters.

SUMMARY:
North and South begins with the marriage of the main character Margaret's cousin Edith to Captain Lennox, and Margaret's subsequent departure from Harley Street in London to go back to Helstone, a country town in the south where she grew up. The wedding puts Margaret in contact with the lawyer and brother of the Captain, Henry Lennox. They exchange some niceties about Helstone, and Margaret feels that he belittles Helstone by making it out to be some kind of fairytale village and refuses to talk about it. To Margaret's surprise, Henry visits her back at Helstone a little while later, and after the enjoy an afternoon sketching together, he proposes to her. Margaret refuses him and he leaves. Meanwhile, Margaret feels that her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hale, don't seem quite as happy and at ease as she had remembered them to be. Mr. Hale, a parson, soon confesses to Margaret that he has decided to leave his post because of doubts that he had as to the true faith espoused by the Church of England. He proposes that they will move to a northern manufacturing town, Milton, where he will serve as a tutor. His own mentor at Oxford, Mr. Bell, had already connected him with a wealthy manufacturer named Mr. John Thornton, who will be his first pupil. Margaret is charged with the difficult task of revealing this plan to her mother, who is of generally weak constitution. Margaret accomplishes the task, and helps her father makes arrangements to move, suggesting that Mrs. Hale remove to a seaside town while she and her father figure out where they will live in Milton.

After settling into the smoky, gray environment of a manufacturing town, Margaret makes the acquaintance of Thornton, and thinks him rather coarse and inflexible. She also makes other acquaintances by chance in the street--Nicholas Higgins, a poor factory worker who is organizing a strike against factory masters like Thornton, and his ailing daughter Bessy who is sick from working at cotton mills. Thornton lives with his mother, with whom he is very close; after his father's failed speculations, Thornton, with the support of his mother built his business up and worked very hard to come to the wealth which he has now. His sister, Fanny, also lives with them, but she is rather vapid and snooty. Mrs. Thornton doesn't really take to Margaret, finding her to be ignorant of the ways of the north, a pampered southern aristocrat who does not appreciate or understand the strength of her son's industrious and manly character. Margaret, after all, is not shy to critique Thornton, especially when discussing the factory workers' strike, she takes a more humane position as to a master's responsibility for the well-being of his "hands." Thornton's philosophy is a capitalist par excellence, believing in the strength and efficiency of machines and ruthless competition, and maintaining a position of laissez-faire as far as the lives of his workers go: "But those hours [referring to the labouring hours of his men] past, our relation ceases; and then comes in the same respect for their independence that I myself exact."

Mrs. Hale's health at Milton continues to decline, and Dixon, Mrs. Hale's faithful maid and Margaret keep the news of her decline from Mr. Hale. Margaret continues to visit with the Higginses, sympathizing with their hardships, and also learning of the divisions amongst the working class: hearing about a poverty-stricken family (the Boucher's) and the difficulty posed by the holding out which the Union strikers require, Margaret begins to see the Union as just as tyrannical as the master's. Higgins respects Margaret for her so-called "plain-speaking," but does not agree. When Mrs. Hale takes a turn for the worse, Margaret is charged with the errand of asking Mrs. Thornton if they might borrow a water bed. At their estate, an angry, rioting crowd has gathered because Mr. Thornton had been attempting to use Irish workers to break the strike. Feeling the injustice which the crowd feels, Margaret charges Thornton to do his manly duty and speak to the crowd as a human speaks to his brother human. Margaret rushes out to face the crowd with him, and a pebble grazes her. Terrified at what they have done, the crowd retreats. After this incident, Thornton realizes that Margaret has taken harm upon herself while protecting him, and feels himself actually deeply in love with her. He asks her for her hand in marriage, which she insolently rejects; Thornton responds by saying that he will nevertheless love her, as a kind of defiance to Margaret's intransigence.

Mrs. Hale, feeling herself fast fading, makes a request that she might be able to see her son Frederick, who has been forced to take shelter in Spain because of his participation in a mutiny aboard a ship. Though Frederick's action was just, he will likely be hanged if he returned to England. Margaret and Dixon make arrangements for Frederick to visit his dying mother in secret. Mrs. Hale also requests of Mrs. Thornton to watch over Margaret as a mother might after she is gone; reluctantly. Mrs. Thornton agrees though she clearly resents Margaret for her pride and rejection of her own, dear son. Bessy dies before Mrs. Hale, and Margaret takes it upon herself to put Mr. Higgins in contact with her father in hopes that he might develop some faith in God which would have been so important to Bessy. The two of them strike an unusual sort of friendship through Margaret. Frederick's visit goes off without a hitch, and Mrs. Hale dies. Afterwards, Margaret suggests that Frederick go to London to seek out Henry Lennox to see if he might help him return to England legally. This turns out to be a mistake, because someone recognizes Frederick at the railroad station; Frederick pushes this man off the platform and boards the train for London and is for the time being safe. Unfortunately, the man dies (likely because he was a heavy drinker and drunk at the time) and Margaret is asked by an inspector if she had been witness to a young man pushing this man off the platform. Stoically, Margaret lies that she was not there, but Thornton has actually seen her. Thornton, thinking that Margaret was out with a lover, actually strives to protect her by canceling the inquest (he has the power to do this because he is the magistrate for the case). Margaret is devastated by this involvement because she realizes that Thornton probably thinks badly of her.

Tragedy soon strikes the Boucher family as well; John Boucher is found drowned in a brook, having committed suicide. Higgins feels badly for his own harsh treatment of Boucher and his pressuring him to maintain the strike. Boucher's widow is rather unsympathetically portrayed in the narrative; she is vulgarly selfish and not particularly responsible as far as tending to her own children goes after her husband's terrible death. On a visit which Mr. Hale makes to visit Bell at Oxford, he suddenly dies, leaving Margaret and Frederick orphans. Margaret is hastened to London, where she can stay with her Aunt Shaw and Edith. Eventually, Bell comes to take Margaret to visit Helstone, thinking it will do her good after the tragic experiences with which she has had to contend. Margaret finds Helstone changed from her idyllic remembrances, though of course, she too has probably changed from her experiences in the north. More tragedy follows when the old Mr. Bell also dies, leaving Margaret with considerable property as his heiress. In the end, Margaret becomes Mr. Thornton's landlord at Marlborough Mills, and also offers to give him some capital when he suffers financial losses. Margaret's own name is cleared when Higgins, who has decided to work for Thornton (now, a much more humanistic factory master), reveals to him that the young man on the railroad platform was Frederick and not Margaret's lover but brother. The novel ends with Thornton as a reformed master, figuring out a better system in which worker and master engage in greater human-to-human interaction and as a result, gain a more personal understanding of each others' roles and the value of these roles. Thornton and Margaret finally reconcile and decide to marry, symbolizing Gaskell's vision of a union between the ruthlessly capitalistic, industrial north and the more humanistic but somewhat stagnant south.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Gaskell's vision of a marriage between north and south crystallized by the marriage of John Thornton and Margaret Hale signals an acceptance of industrial power of machines as key to progress while also suggesting the need for human-to-human interaction between different classes in order for progress to work properly. Margaret's ability to find "human interest" and to connect people of different backgrounds and ideologies, whether Mr. Hale and Mr. Higgins, or Mr. Higgins and the Boucher's, is a corrective to Thornton's de-humanizing laissez-faire which sees his hired workers as merely "hands" (and even if he acknowledges their personhood, he wants nothing to do with that part of their existence). In turn, Thornton's powerful work ethic and faith in capitalism as a way of realizing greater heights of human productivity than ever-to-be imagined before is a corrective to Margaret's complacency in the stagnant, agricultural economy of the south. Though rich and poor might interact on a more personal, and less hostile relation in the south, hard subsistence remains a reality for large amount of poor southerners. The agricultural economy lacks projects backed by capital to carry society beyond this rather feudal state of relations between those who own land by birth and those who work on it in order to survive.

The title, North and South, however, was not Gaskell's original title: Dickens suggested it. Gaskell's title was Margaret Hale. While Dickens's title is useful insofar as it really pulls out the larger allegorical significances of Mr. Thornton and Margaret's marriage with respect to class and historical import, Gaskell's original title tilts the balance of this marriage in favor of Margaret's importance in the marriage. After all, Margaret ends up doing more than just helping to soften and humanize Thornton's capitalism; she also provides the capital for him to rebuild after suffering significant financial losses. In this sense, the "south" bears the greater burden, since not only does it correct the ideologies of a purely dehumanizing capitalist machine, but also pumps money into it so that it might continue to do the positive work of progress. Thinking of North and South as a story of an individual, too, underscores the importance of what an individual (and even more importantly, a woman) can do to contribute to wider workings of social progress.

Selections from Seamus Heaney

2011-04-30T09:35:00.000-07:00

Edition: Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
SUMMARY/BACKGROUNDS and COMMENTARY:
Collection: Death of a Naturalist (1966)
These early poems present local, rural images associated with Heaney's childhood--Heaney lived from his birth until his teenage years at Mossbawn, a family farmhouse. These poems, though pastoral, are not exactly peaceful ones. These poems were written before the so-called "troubles" beginning around 1968 in Northern Ireland so they don't wrestle specifically with recent political violence, but seem to nevertheless register a more abstract violence in the rhythms of natural life and farm-work which interacts with nature. The language and images of these poems are extremely physical and tactile, metrically, the poems possess a Hopkins-esque assertiveness and energy appropriate to images of rural disruption and violence. Sonically, these poems are filled with onomotapoeic effects. In his Nobel Prize speech later, Heaney would describe his early life at the farm as a kind of "creaturely existence," which I think is exactly what the tactility and physicality of these early poems convey.

Specific examples:
"Digging" links his father's digging for potatoes with his spade with his own "digging" with a pen. Tactile images like the "cool hardness in our hands" of the potatoes and the physicality of his father's work, "Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods / Over his shoulder, doing down and down" bring words close to the feeling of this kind of rural labor. This is, after all, the main subject of the poem: through the physicality of his language and the linked images of the pen and the spade, the poet is able to trace a kind of genealogy between the work of his father and his own work.
"Death of a Naturalist" describes the violence of "frogspawn" bursting; also the rot, the festering which surrounds this "frogspawn." The poet recalls filling "jampotfuls of jellied / Specks to range on window-sills at home...and wait and watch until / The fattening dots burst into nimble-/Swimming tadpoles." This "frogspawn" takes its revenge, however, on a hot day when he hears the frogs' "coarse croaking," the "slap" and "plop" of their "obscene threats." Similarly, in "Blackberry Picking," nature kind of fights back "where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots" and when the bath of blackberries inevitably rots. The poet writes, disappointingly, "I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair / That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. / Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not."
"The Diviner" describes the art of finding water with a "forked hazel stick." When it strikes water, the movement is sudden, live, and violent: "The pluck came sharp as a sting. / The rod jerked with precise convulsions / Spring water suddenly broadcasting / Through a green hazel its secret stations." Everywhere, nature seems to be bursting and rupturing, leaving in the wake of such violence a messy decay.

Collection: North (1975)
This collection was published following the breakout of intense political violence which had reached a peak in 1972 (the more violent Provisional IRA formed in this period, the infamous Bloody Sunday or Bogside Massacre also happened in 1972). In efforts to contain the violence, London issued a "direct rule" over the north of Ireland as a sort of temporary solution. North's attention to this violence is worked through images of bodies (ancient and recent) recovered from boglands; the ways in which these poems aestheticize corpses and the violence done to them has been fairly controversial. The second half of this collection moves away from these aestheticized images of violence, turning towards issues of the poet's place and responsibility towards the violence of the contemporary world.

Specific examples:
In "Funeral Rites" the poet is lifting coffins of dead relations and looking upon their corpses: "their eyelids glistening, / their dough-white hands / shackled in rosary beads." These are not merely aestheticized corpses but also Catholicized ones by the rosary beads, and later, melting candles, and "gleaming crosses" complete the picture. The lines are short (generally trimeter) and move quickly down the page grouped in an orderly fashion of four lines each to a stanza, reminding one of ritual and regular rhythms of religious ceremony. The poet seems to imagine that the religiously tinged aestheticization of the dead brings something redeeming to the violence, though it might be inadequate. This tension is expressed best in by following lines: "...Gunnar / who lay beautiful / inside his burial mound, / though dead by violence / and unavenged."

In poems like "Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces" and "Bone Dreams," words are associated with biological debris, as if words can do the work of ordering these bodily fragments, making them valuable and beautiful. The words are literally in "bits" in "Bone Dreams," fragmented but aestheticized: "White bone found / on the grazin: / the rough porous / language of touch" an "flit-find, nugget / of chalk, / I touch it again, / I wind it in / the sling of mind / to pitch it at England / and follow its drop / to strange fields." The "pitching" of these bone bits at England deliberately situates these bone bits in the history of and continual violence of English colonialism.

"Bog Queen" is a first-person imagining of the decaying matter having a sort of consciousness: she says that her body "was braille / for the creeping influences: / dawn suns groped over my head / and cooled at my feet." Later, the account talks about a memory of violence and (sexualized) trauma: "I was barbered and stripped / by a turf-cutter's spade."
Works like "Grauballe Man," "Strange Fruit," and "Punishment" seem to ask whether violence done in the past to a corpse is mitigated somehow by the absence of human physicality in the "matter" which makes up the corpse in the present. The "grain" of the Grauballe man's wrists "is like bog oak, / the ball of his heel / like a basalt egg. / His instep has shrunk / cold as a swan's foot / or a wet swamp root." The girl's head in the next poem is like an "exhumed gourd," a "strange fruit." These images suggest that neither of them are human anymore, so what does that mean for past violence? "Punishment" wrestles with this question, and even more specifically asks if calling attention to a body's state as non-human mitigates sexual trauma. In the beginning, the poet sexualizes the body, trying to imagine feeling "the tug / of the halter at the nape / of her neck, the wind / on her naked front." Yet she is "oak-bone, brain-firkin," so when the wind "blows her nipples / to amber beads," perhaps there isn't anything lurid about it at all. Still, the poet persists in imagining her history as a "Little adultress," but again, her current state resists these human characteristics that would make violence, sexual or otherwise, a problem. Now, she's just "darkened combs," "muscles' webbing," and "numbered bones."

The later poems in this collection move away from these more abstract wrestlings with violence, aestheticization, language, and "matter," drawing attention to the specific political contexts under which Heaney was writing. "Act of Union" are two sonnets in the first-person voice of England essentially raping Ireland: Ireland is eroticized as a female, England says, "Your back is a firm line of eastern coast / And arms and legs are thrown / Beyond your gradual hills." The moment of violence is in the second stanza, ending with England leaving Ireland ruined for all time: "No treaty / I foresee will salve completely your tracked / And stretchmarked body, the big pain / That leaves you raw, liked opened ground, again." Not particularly positive, to say the least, about the history of colonization and the continuing conflict into the late twentieth-century. "Summer 1969" describes the poet in Madrid, while hearing of violence happening on television. He retreats to the Prado, seeing paintings of violence (like Goya's "Third of May") and suggests that these images of art make violence seem more real than the journalistic accounts in newspapers and television. Both this poem and "Exposure" work through Heaney's own place, as a poet, in all of this violence and express anxiety over what poetry can do (or maybe can't do). "How did I end up like this," he asks in this latter poem, "As I sit weighing and weighing / My responsible tristia. / For what? For the ear? For the people? / For what is said behind-backs?" The tone here is self-mocking and severely ironic in using a rather "high" term like "tristia." In his Nobel lecture, Heaney explains that at the time he had moved with his family to Wicklow, south of Dublin, "Feeling puny in my predicaments as I read about the tragic logic of Osip Mandelstam's fate in the nineteen-thirties, feeling challenged yet steadfast in my non-combatant status..."

Collection: Station Island (1984)
This collection, highly autobiographical, works out on a very personal level Heaney's own sense of his vocation as a poet. Loosely recalling Dante's Purgatorio, the poet encounters deceased friends and literary precursors. Helen Vendler describes the eponymous long central sequence (divided into twelve parts) of this collection as a series of potential "alter-egos" of Heaney's, which he imagines he might have been instead. As a whole, the collection doesn't seem to resolve the central question of what a poet is to do amidst the reality of violence, what to do with his guilt or his responsibility.

Specific examples:
"Station Island" takes its name from a medieval place of pilgrimage which remains up to the contemporary age as such. The sections vary widely as far as form goes; many are dialogic, with the poet in conversation with different "alter egos" as Vendler argues. The sections detail available vocations, like farm, priest, or schoolmaster. The poet speaks with a missionary who has been disillusioned, failing and returning from the rain forest. The poet at first feels a "strange reversal," having come for confession, but then he is rebuked for his poetry might be the same kind of failed mission: "what are you doing here / but the same thing?" the father asks. "I at least was young and unaware." Many of these dialogues are difficult for the poet; another particularly damning one is his conversation with Colum, his cousin who died as a result of sectarian violence: Colum says, "You saw that, and you wrote that--not the fact. / You confused evation and artistic tact. / The Protestant who shot me through the head / I accuse directly, but indirectly, you / who now atone perhaps upon this bed / for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew / the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio / and saccharined my death with morning dew." The voice of Colum charges Heaney with the crime of aestheticizing death and violence, belittling its horror. Joyce is perhaps the kindest to him, telling him, essentially, to stop worrying about these issues and to just write: "Let go, let fly, forget." Joyce is belittling though, about the "pilgrimage," calling it "infantile," and a "peasant pilgrimage."

Collection: Spirit Level (1996)
Written a year after receiving the Nobel Prize, and two years after Ulster paramilitaries and the IRA signed a truce, this collection represents for many critics a break from Heaney's earlier work. Certainly the impasse which seems to characterize "Station Island" seems broken, and many of these poems lay claim to adequacy and value. In his prize speech, Heaney refers to the story of a minibus stopped on the side of a road by IRA terrorists. The passengers were directed to stand in a line, and Catholics were encouraged to step aside to acknowledge their beliefs. Assuming those who had stopped them to be Protestant militants, a Protestant squeezes the hand of the one Catholic old man in their company to signal he needn't step out. The old Catholic steps out to acknowledge his faith, and the rest of the Protestants are slaughtered. Heaney describes the work of poetry as "credit[ing] as a reality the squeeze of the hand, the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures." In another section of the speech, Heaney expresses his faith that there is an "adequacy" in lyric poetry for doing such work.

Specific examples:
Vendler characterizes the "value" of many poems in this collection as a kind of middle-age stoicism not particularly common to lyric (if only because so many lyric poets happened to die young). Characters in this collection, perhaps most obviously Hugh Heaney in "Keeping Going" move on with the business of everyday, seemingly mundane, everyday living in the face of the violence of man's brains being shot out against the whitewashed building: "My dear brother, you have good stamina. / You stay on where it happens. Your big tractor / Pulls up at the Diamond, you wave at people, / You shout and laugh above the revs, you keep / Old roads open by driving on the new ones." As if paralleling the saving grace in the performance of the ordinary after the trauma of violence, the language in this collection seems much simpler, concrete, and less abstract than in "Station Island." Poems like "Rain Stick" celebrate the simply joys of hearing the sounds of the rain stick; "Mint" calls upon the reader to look for "newness in the back yard of our life," the sprigs of mint that grow wild "beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles." These are both calls to regard the power of what might be overlooked and disregarded after so much of the horrific had happened. These sentiments are related to the poet's re-valuation of his vocation in this section: like St. Kevin in "St. Kevin and the Blackbird," the poet must strive "To labour and not seek reward," or like the "journeyman tailor" in "At Banagher," never "question[s] what it all amounts to." This steady, stoic work which the poet strives for isn't exactly the same as what Joyce suggests to him in "Station Island" which seems more revolutionary and "high," the middle-age poet doesn't seek to fly but to return to earth and work, as Caedmon sings during the time that he isn't doing yardwork ("Caedmon"). In these figurations of stoicism there is an obvious echo through allusion to the ancient world (e.g., the poet figuring himself as a lookout in "Mycenae Lookout" who is simply there to watch, with a "frozen stare" the destruction of Troy) and also to an Eastern, Buddhist sort of denial of self (again, as in St. Kevin's forgetting his own pain or self in the labor of holding his arms out for the blackbird's eggs to hatch). The poet no longer wrestles with writing to exorcise guilt or take responsibility, but chooses to write as a kind of witness to the other ordinary things of value that remain even after scenes of destruction and violence.

The Hidden Hand by E.D.E.N. Southworth

2011-04-29T16:47:00.000-07:00

Edition: The Hidden Hand (Oxford Popular Fiction)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Hidden Hand was serialized in The New York Ledger beginning in February, 1859. At the time, Southworth was the most widely-read woman novelist and also the Ledger was the most widely-circulated newspaper, making The Hidden Hand a clear best-seller. In 1857, Robert Bonner of the Ledger recognized Southworth's selling power and asked for exclusive rights to serialize her fiction. Furthermore, The Hidden Hand was serialized two more times before its book publication in 1888, and reissues continued for thirty years after that.

SUMMARY:
The old Major Ira Warfield, alternatively known as "Old Hurricane," lived alone at his mansion in the mountains of Virginia known as Hurricane Hall. The estate is surrounded by gothic natural surroundings. Warfield is a grumpy old man, who prefers not to leave the comforts of his home. At the beginning of the novel, he is telling his slave Wool to warm his bed as he will soon retire for the evening. It is late, but a parson arrives in the night, with the urgent message that Warfield must go with him to hear the last testament of a dying old woman. Warfield has been recently appointed a Justice of the Peace and his duty charges him to go. The two men go out then into the cold, stormy night. The old woman turns out to be Nancy Grewell, a mid-wife who has disappeared from the area for thirteen years. She tells a harrowing story of being caught up in the night by two villains. The villains charge her with delivering the twin babies of a masked woman: her baby boy dies, but the girl survives. The woman enjoins Nancy to hide and take away her living girl, bequeathing Nancy with a wedding ring of hers which reads "Eugene--Capitola." Nancy and the baby (whom she says she had hidden with her all along) are sold on board a ship bound for New York which is wrecked. The only survivors are herself, the baby (whom she has named Capitola), and a young sailor named Herbert Greyson. In New York, Greyson helps them get situated, and Nancy and her charge make do in an area called Rags Alley. The woman says that she raised the girl, and after thirteen years, has finally managed to make enough to come back to Virginia to tell this story. Before she dies, Warfield promises to take on Capitola as his own charge; it is clear that he is more intimately involved with this story than is revealed, since he and Nancy whisper knowingly about the house where the masked woman gave birth.

In New York, Capitola actually comes upon Warfield--dressed as a newspaper boy, since that was the only way she was able to make enough money to keep herself. The tenement houses in Rags Alley had been torn down for over a year so she had been cast out. Major Warfield also makes the acquaintance of Herbert Greyson through Capitola, who turns out to be Warfield's nephew--his mother had become estranged from her brother when she made a marriage which Warfield objected to. Warfield wanted to do well by Herbert, and promises to send him to West Point, and also to do well by a widow, Marah Rocke, and her son who had taken in Herbert and his mother long ago, and who had continued to care for him after his mother died. When Herbert tells Marah the good news, she is elated and seems to know more about Warfield than she will reveal at present. Meanwhile, back at Hurricane Hall, Capitola hears a ghastly story from Mrs. Condiment, the housekeeper, about how a former tenant, Henry Le Noir, had let six Indian warriors to their deaths through a trapdoor, and of how Le Noir's family was later murdered by the vengeful sons of these warriors and thrown into the same pit. Apparently one son of Le Noir's escaped.

Unfortunately, when Old Hurricane actually hears that the widow's name is Marah Rocke, he rages and takes back his offer. It turns out that she was once his young wife when he was an officer, and he had found her with a younger man, Gabriel Le Noir. Marah's version of the story, however, was that he had stolen into her room one night when Old Hurricane was out late and she had already been asleep. Marah is then thrown into despair once again that her lover does not believe her even after eighteen years, and begins to waste away. Concerned, Traverse goes to Doctor Day, who had been generously allowing Traverse to study with him for free. The doctor realizes that Marah was wasting away largely because of lack of human sympathy. With his beautiful daughter Clara's prompting, the doctor takes in both Traverse as an apprentice and Marah Rocke as a housekeeper. Naturally, by this time, Traverse has fallen in love with Clara. Capitola, meanwhile, feels trapped by her new guardian's rules; despite the bounty which he has lavished on her, she is used to having the freedom of roaming about. She breaks his rules and rides out further than she should have alone, and meets with an unsavory young man. She manages to outwit this young man and run away from him; back at Hurricane Hall, Warfield fumes and sputters. On another night when Warfield rides out on an errand alone, he comes home to Capitola parodying his fuming and sputtering.

The scene shifts to a meeting of outlaws, "Black Donald" and his gang, at an old woman's inn. This is the house where Capitola was born, and where Nancy Grewell had been taken many years ago. Gabriel Le Noir has stopped by to speak with Black Donald, telling him that his son (the young man outwitted by Capitola) had found Capitola Le Noir, apparently the daughter of the woman whom Nancy tended. The conversation makes known too that Capitola is a heiress to a fortune, and Le Noir says that Black Donald and his gang must hunt down and kill her. Black Donald manages to exact a large sum for the work: ten-thousand dollars, which he dreams he will put to go use in order to move west, join Congress, the Senate, and maybe even become president one day. Gabe reluctantly agrees. Black Donald hatches a plan to do some surveillance, pretending to stop by Hurricane Hall as a peddler of fine goods when the women are home alone. They get to talking about Black Donald, and Capitola bravely says that she'd like to see him. Black Donald takes off his disguise, and Capitola latches on to him screaming for his arrest. Black Donald runs away, though he could have killed her, he doesn't because he thinks her worth having some fun with before killing.

More is revealed about Gabe Le Noir's past when Old Hurricane tells the parson about the murder of Eugene Le Noir, Capitola's father and Gabe Le Noir's brother. Gabe killed Eugene and got his wife out of the way in order to secure his own inheritance of the large estate at Hidden House. Black Donald sends three outlaws to capture Capitola, who ends up being too smart for them, having seen them under her bed in her mirror's reflection. She manages to trap the outlaws in the house and call for help; luckily, Herbert has just come by and the three outlaws are carted off to prison. As all of these things were happening, Doctor Day had sent Traverse to Washington for college, and he manages to get a diploma in just three years. Doctor Day has plans for Traverse to set up his career further west, and to thereafter take Clara as his wife. The young couple is overjoyed. Black Donald soon manages a ruse to spring his comrades from jail by disguising himself as an elderly preacher. Tragedy soon strikes when the Doctor has met with an accident with a cart--eventually, he dies from his injuries, but not before telling Traverse that Gabe Le Noir is Clara's guardian (the will having been made years ago). Neither Traverse nor the Doctor know much about Gabe, and because he was the Doctor's wife's half-brother and a reputable man, the Doctor didn't think much of it. Verbally, though, the Doctor has told two people, Traverse and a Doctor Williams, that he would like Clara to continue to live with Marah Rocke. Marah of course knows Gabe, and worries about what to do when Gabe comes upon the scene.

Gabe refuses to honor the verbal directions of Doctor Day and the court decides in favor of him. Clara goes to live at the Hidden House estate. Capitola hears of a young woman staying at Hidden House and gets curious; she sneaks out and spends the night there. On her way, she runs into the clairvoyant old woman, "Old Hat" who tells her that she will destroy someone dear to her in order that she will rise in the world. Capitola scoffs. At Hidden House, Clara and Capitola (Day and Night) become fast friends, and luckily for Capitola, Gabe is not home. During the night, Capitola fancies she sees the ghastly figure of a woman who takes her ring. When she leaves Hidden House, she has indeed lost her ring.

At Hidden House, Clara fancies hearing a body being dragged downstairs, screaming. Soon, Craven Le Noir, Gabe's son, falls in "love" with Clara, or rather he and his father are plotting to get her inheritance. She escapes matrimony by a plan hatched by Capitola in which the two of them trade places. Clara goes to Marah, while Capitola goes with a veil with Craven to the altar. In front of a large audience at the wedding, Capitol offers compelling testimony against Gabe Le Noir and his son; in court, she makes a similar statement which leads to Clara being restored to Willow Heights, her father's property, taking Marah with her. Unfortunately, Traverse who is trying to make his career in the West doesn't hear about this, and having been unsuccessful in establishing a practice, enlists to go into the army bound for the Mexican War in order to pay off his debts. Herbert and the Gabe Le Noir (who is a colonel) also go off to war.

Back at Hurricane Hall, Craven Le Noir has fallen in love with Capitola and eventually proposes to her. She refuses him, and he slanders her reputation. She then challenges him to a duel and shoots him in the face with split peas in order to teach him a lesson. Capitola triumphs yet again when Black Donald makes another attempt to carry her away: she manages to trick him into sitting in an armchair placed over the trapdoor in her room. She springs it upon him and he falls, though he survives the fall (the trapdoor goes down to a cellar). Black Donald is taken to prison and receives a sentence for execution. Meanwhile, the scene shifts to the Mexican War, where Colonel Le Noir and another officer conspire to deprive Traverse of sleep, hence orchestrating his falling asleep at an important post and his execution. Herbert manages to eloquently defend Traverse in court, however, and Traverse goes free. At the end of the war, Le Noir is on his deathbed from his war injuries. He becomes repentant and gives Traverse's letters from Clara and his mother to him, raises him to the honor of ensign, and also gives a parcel to Herbert to be opened after his death.

Traverse doesn't go home, though, because he wants to return having made his career first. He goes to New Orleans, where he cures a rich Frenchman who heads a mental institution. It turns out that Capitola's mother is at the mental institution: she has been kept at Hidden House by Gabriel Le Noir for nearly eighteen years until dragged out of the house to the mental institution recently (hence the screams Clara heard during her stay). Gabe's confession in the parcel which Herbert opens upon his death concurs what Traverse learns from Capitola's mother. Traverse, Herbert, and Capitola's mom all return to Hurricane Hall, where Herbert is set to marry Capitola, Clara to marry Traverse, and Marah and Warfield are reconciled as well. Capitola, however, can't be happy because Black Donald is to be executed on their wedding day. At the last minute, she comes up with a plan to spring him from prison, giving him some tools that he had left behind in the woods. Donald becomes a reformed robber, and confesses to Capitola that he wouldn't have killed her anyways. The ending remarks that they didn't quite live "happily ever after," as each of the women would make necessary corrections of their men when they would be out of line.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:
Issues of serial publication: The success of periodical literature for a middle-class audience like The Hidden Hand was owed at least in part to the contexts of its circulation. Its serial publication was a closely-orchestrated event; it was common that before one novel's serialization was ended, advertisements would show up for the next. Specifically with respect to The Hidden Hand, the Ledger's Bonner sneakily bought room to print two installments of The Hidden Hand in the National Era, then announced that readers would need to buy the "great family paper," the Ledger, to read the rest.

Yet, cliffhangers are perhaps not as common as what one might expect from serial fiction whose subject was sensational, melodramatic, and (respectably) lurid. For example, Black Donald's plunge down the trapdoor happened in the middle of an installment, and readers are let in on the secret that he has survived the plunge in this installment before Capitola finds out later. I argue that there is a certain satisfaction for readers in observing characters finding out truths that readers already know, perhaps akin to something like being excited for someone's reaction to their own surprise party. This is, I believe, a more often overlooked feature of serialization--withholding not the truth of a mystery, necessarily, but characters' reactions to the truth. The Hidden Hand employs this trick throughout; indeed, the narrator herself acknowledges at the end when everything is revealed to Capitola about her past that the reader already knows all of this. It doesn't make it any less satisfying to witness the revelation to Capitola, however.

Genre, audience, and respectability: Certainly the sensational aspects of crime, murder, hired outlaws, mental institutions, etc. rendered some readers critical of such literature. A character like Capitola, too, breaks gender stereotypes and is clearly the "heroine" of the story, equally effectual in neutralizing Major Warfield's strict patriarchal authority (usually by revealing it to be humorous with strategies like parody), countering marriage proposals, and capturing a feared outlaw.

Yet Southworth's Hidden Hand is ultimately within the bounds of middle-class respectability. Readers are left to imagine what outlaws carrying away a young girl will do to her, what would be "worse" than murder, but these things are always left unsaid. In the end, any readerly assumption of Black Donald's lurid and sadistic tendencies is neutralized by his saying that he was not planning on killing her at all, and that he was just in love with her like any other honorable suitor. Capitola's gender-bending is often in the service of her own chastity, as Nina Baym points out in this article: she dresses up as a newsboy in order to protect her chastity, and this is why gender-bending ends up being okay. And ultimately, though she has boyish tendencies, she isn't just a boy with a girl's exterior, she is more sympathetic (and hence, womanly) than men, as evidenced in her capacity to love Black Donald and see him for who he was beyond his occupation as an outlaw. Her weapons against men are never violence but humor and strategem, and when she actually thinks that she has hurt Black Donald in springing the trapdoor, she is clearly distressed, like an "ideal woman" would be, if she had hurt someone. Thus, Capitola certainly crosses boundaries, but perhaps not quite as radically as one might perceive at first.

Autobiographical Vignettes by Zitkala-Sa

2011-04-27T19:25:00.000-07:00

Edition: American Indian Stories
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Zitkala-Sa's three autobiographical vignettes were published in the Atlantic Monthly in January, February, and March 1900: "Impressions of an Indian Childhood," "The School Days of an Indian Girl," and "An Indian Teacher among Indians." Zitakala-Sa was by this time taken up by the Boston literary coterie, and also published a number of stories and essays in Atlantic, Harper's, and Everybody's Magazine. One of her most controversial pieces was an essay entitled "Why I am a Pagan" in Harpter's, 1902. Eventually, the vignettes and other stories were collected under American Indian Stories by Hayworth Press of Washington D.C. in 1921.

Zitkala-Sa, a member of the Sioux American Indians, came of age during a time when American Indian writers had begun to transform traditionally oral literature into written literature, for purposes of preservation and also reaching larger audiences via the mechanisms of periodical culture. Much of Zitkala-Sa's literary career was concentrated earlier in her life; later on she became an important advocate for American Indians in Washington D.C., creating the National Council of American Indians in 1926 and holding a position as its president until her death in 1938. (Source: Deter Fisher, Introduction to American Indian Stories)

SUMMARY:
"Impressions of an Indian Childhood" chronicles a carefree and idyllic time for Zitkala-Sa, dominated by memories of spending time with her mother. The account is written from a retrospective viewpoint tinged with a tone of loss and remembrance--in noting, for example, how she recalls feeling "not wholly conscious of [her]self, but was more keenly alive to the fire within" she draws a direct contrast to how she felt stared down by "palefaces" on her way to school. From her birth to the age of seven, Zitkala-Sa learns of her mother's sadness at the deaths of Zitkala-Sa's uncle and sister at the hands of the white men, eagerly hears legends during the evenings from elders coming over to their wigwam for dinner, learns the craft of beadwork, and roams free outdoors with her childhood friends, chasing her own shadow or eating roots and gum from the earth. There are many humorous moments, such as when she poured lukewarm water from the Missouri onto some used coffee grinds to serve her grandfather when he came over. In retrospect, she is deeply grateful that he nevertheless drank, and when her mother returned to the wigwam, she too refrained from embarrassing her. Again, this is later contrasted with experiences of belittling and embarrassment at school. In her eight year, Zitkala-Sa encountered "two paleface missionaries" who offered to take her away to school. Yearning to ride the "iron horse" and to experience new places (her brother had already been away to school), she deeply wanted to go away to school despite her mother's deep reservations. Her mother relents, and speeding away on the horses and looking back at her mother's lonely figure, Zitkala-Sa says that she "no longer felt free to be myself, or to voice my own feelings."

"The School Days of an Indian Girl": The lines of regret that conclude the "Impressions" set up the lonely, self-conscious days that Zitkala-Sa spends at school. Though she would end up being an extremely apt pupil, even winning a state speech competition, her account downplays her successes and focuses on her difficulties. They begin on the train to the Quaker school she would attend--white mothers and children would stare at her and point at her moccasins. The school is a sterile, cold building with white walls, in direct contrast the colorful and warm surroundings of her home. She underscores in particular the loud noises of hard shoes on the floors, and the clanging bell which imprisoned them under a routinized regime. In a particularly traumatic episode, Zitkala-Sa remembers running away to hide because she did not want her hair to be cut; they drag her out and tie her to a chair and do it anyways. She remembers, "Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only on e of the many little animals driven by a herder." After this initial breaking in period, Zitkala-Sa began to learn some English, and to rebel in quieter ways--one time, she was supposed to mash turnips for a meal and she mashed so hard that the bottom of the jar broke and all the mashed turnips fell to the floor. Still, she learned the paleface's curriculum, including about the white man's devil, in addition to the "iron routine" of "the civilizing machine." After three years of school, she returned home, feeling alienated and unhappy, having lost her carefree innocence of her early years. Eventually, she decides to go back for a college career, which meets with displeasure from her mother. It was during this time that she won the oratorical contests, a victory downplayed by her sketch's focus on the racist white flag depicting an Indian girl which an audience member waved as she gave her oratory. When a prize is given to her, it almost seems like an afterthought.

"An Indian Teacher Among Indians":
She decides to become a teacher in an Eastern Indian school, avoiding going home to her mother on account, she says, of her "pride." She recalls her employer looking disappointed when he sees that she is "the little Indian girl who created the excitement among the college orators." She finally returns to her mother's house, when she is sent off by the school to find pupils. Her mother doesn't immediately welcome her into her arms, since at first she thinks that her driver is someone she has brought home. The misunderstanding cleared, her mother welcomes her. They have fallen on hard times--Dawee, her brother, had been fired from his position as a government clerk because he had spoken up against injustice perpetuated on their tribe. Returning to the school after visiting with her mother, Zitkala-Sa finds it to be woefully inadequate: student work was done up just so that the inspectors could grant approval and it was all about the satisfaction of those who "were paying a liberal fee to government employees in whose able hands lay the small forest of Indian timber."

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS: (Quotations from this section are from Fisher's Introduction)
A Harper's Bazaar piece on "Persons Who Interest Us" describes Zitkala-Sa as a "young Indian girl, who is attracting much attention in Eastern cities on account of her beauty and many talents...until her ninth year she was a veritable little savage, running wild over the prairie" but that "she has...published lately a series of articles in a leading magazine...which display a rare command of English and much artistic feeling." The description is indeed very much at odds with Zitkala's own account of herself and rather seems to treat her with the very attitudes that she seeks to resist in her account. Her stories far from tell of her progress from "little savage" to educated literary elite, rather, they are intensely critical of the sterile, routinized, surveillance-heavy, and freedom-killing nature of the "paleface" education system. As mentioned above, she hardly celebrates the moments which put her on the map as far as mastering a "white education" goes; winning the oratorical state competition is dramatized more for its triumph over racist attitudes than mastery of a white, rhetorical form. Back at home, she was treated as a valuable and reasonable individual, in both trivial situations like when her mother and uncle refrained from laughing at her mistake in making coffee and more important ones, like when her mother allows her to make the decision to go to school. Upon entering the train car, she is treated like an object to be stared at, and once at school, she is thrown up into the air like a doll and herded along with the rest of her classmates like animals. The piece in Harper's simply does the same thing to her, appropriating her as a celebrity-object to be stared at for her "youth," "beauty," and (vaguely enough), "many talents."

Zitkala-Sa's vignettes clearly show that she is not proud of her beauty or her ability to excel in a "civilized" world--she would rather not feel like she was being "looked at" and self-conscious, and she doesn't view her education as really all that valuable at all, compared to the things which her mother and older members of the Sioux knew. Learning to function in the white man's "system" is not necessarily to have a voice, as borne out by such statements as the one above, or by her brother's firing because he had spoken up against injustice. Interestingly, it is a negative review of one of her stories in a school newspaper that actually gets closer, perhaps, to getting her right: "All that Zitkalasa has in the way of literary ability and culture she owes to the good people, who, from time to time, have taken her into their homes and hearts and given her aid. Yet not a word of gratitude or allusion to such kindness on the part of her friends has ever escaped her in any line of anything that she has written for the public." This seems true in my own readings of her autobiographical material and I suspect she isn't "grateful" because getting a white man's education was something of a necessity for survival in a time during which her people, culture, and traditions would soon be entirely wiped out. There was no choice, and the education was no "gift."

It is, perhaps, not surprising, finally, that Zitkala-Sa moved from a more literary sphere to a more politically active sphere. There seems to be a way in which speaking at all in the press means subjecting oneself to be its property and losing control over one's own intended image and ideas.

Herland Charlotte Perkins Gilman

2011-04-26T17:41:00.000-07:00

Edition: Herland and Selected Stories (Signet classics)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Herland published in 1915 in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's own Forerunner Magazine (written, edited, and published all by Gilman herself--at its height of circulation, it had a readership of about 1,500), was the second of her three "Utopian" novels espousing her feminist and socialist commitments. Herland was preceded by Moving the Mountain (1911) and followed by With Her in Ourland (1916).

Gilman's commitments to feminist and socialist causes began around the time that she moved to California with her friend Grace Channing, in order to escape an unhappy first marriage. There, Gilman came into contact with the likes of Edward Bellamy, Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Her subequent travels also put her into contact with the Fabians, in particular, George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Gilman herself became a popular essayist and lecturer on her social and political beliefs.

SUMMARY:
The account is written from memory by one of three male explorers, Vandyck Jennings. Jennings tells the reader that he will not divulge any specifics about the location of their adventures, "for fear some self-appointed missionaries, or traders, or land-greedy expansionists, will take it upon themselves to push in." Jennings begins by introducing himself and his fellow explorers: Terry O. Nicholson is a well-off individual who enjoyed exploration and was good at mechanics and electricity, Jeff Margrave was a poet and a botanist, though he had taken the profession of a doctor. The narrator perceives himself to be the most "scientific" of the bunch; majoring in sociology with a wide interest in all sciences. Terry presents the most problems during their discovery of Herland, a civilization of only women, because of his man's man sexist attitudes towards women.

The idea to find Herland came to them during another expedition the men had been a part of. They had heard from the "savages" that there was such a place and decided to see for themselves. They indeed fly in on their biplane to a civilization of all women. The first women they encounter are three younger women in trees, who outrun the men when Terry has the idea of trapping them by using a necklace to lure them. The narrator describes these women as more like mischievous little boys than shy girls. More breaking of gender stereotypes occur when the men are easily captured by a bunch of older women, made comfortable, and enjoined to learn the women's language and to teach them their own. As comfortable as the women make the men, they decide to escape, through tying together bedclothes and other linen to lower out of the window. The men imagine having made their escape successfully, but it turns out that the women have been surveying their movement and they are brought back and made to understand that they will be treated as guests as long as they promise non-violence and cooperation. The men then apply themselves in greater earnest to their studies. During the course of their studies, they find out that Herland has not had men for two-thousand years: their civilization began with a group of captured women who rose up against male tormentors (who in turn had been enslaved by men who died out from wars and natural disasters). These women created a cooperative society based on united action and sisterhood, and soon a miracle happened: one of their women became pregnant with a girl child. This original mother brought forth four more girlchildren, who in turn brought forth more girlchildren when they reached adulthood. Apparently, parthenogenesis was spontaneously evolved, and this is how Herland came about without men.

As the exchange of information continues between the women and the explorers, it becomes more and more awkward for the men to explain some of their own practices, which clearly shock the women (though they are not judgmental or arrogant). The notions of taking milk away from cattle, killing them for meat, chaining up dogs, women confined to domestic duties, class distinctions, Darwinian economics, and competitive work are completely alien to this utopian, cooperative civilization. Instead, these women are what the narrator terms "Conscious Makers of People" - for them, motherhood and the growth and progress of their civilization make up the raison d'etre of their lives. Of course, not everyone can be mothers in the sense of bearing children; this problem of population is solved by women directing their mothering instincts towards raising children rather than bearing them. As the narrator learns more and more about their society, the more appreciation he has for their ingenuity. As far as education goes, they cultivated two kinds of minds, critics and inventors. The task of educating children is a privileged task reserved for only a chosen elite as education was seen as an essential part of motherhood and people making. As far as innovations in food supply, the women have found a way to enrich soil with waste products, thus preventing depletion. When the narrator asks about criminality, he is told that criminality has been eradicated by a negative eugenics, in which women with flawed tendencies are asked not to bear children.

When the men invited to lecture to young girls so that they might learn about other civilizations, it doesn't go too well for Terry; his narrow conceptions of gender leads him to think them all too boy like. Terry's rigid notions of gender presents significant problems later on when the women allow the possibility of restoring a bi-sexual civilization. The men end up naturally developing attractions for the three women which they encountered in the trees the day they "landed" in Herland. Jennings starts to develop a friendship with Ellador, Jeff with Celis, and Terry with Alima. Terry, seeing girls as a sexual conquest, ends up in many quarrels with the strong-willed Alima. Jeff is another kind of extreme as far as how he views women--he likes to play the role of gallant male, and hence deems women as a sex to be idolized and worshipped. Jennings strongly suggests that his and Ellador's relationship is the most healthful one; the two of them develop a natural friendship consolidated by mutual respect.

Through Ellador, Jennings continues to gain more and more intimacy with Herland. Education is not forced or compulsory, and there are no schools. Everyone learns a set of common knowledge, and then a separate set of specialized knowledge. To check the mind-narrowing aspects of specialization, everyone also takes on a few other branches of knowledge on the side. Because everything is geared towards growth, Jennings finds it odd that there is no real reverence for the past. Hence, their religion is very different, because like everything else, it has thrown of what it has deemed to be "backwards" ideas. Ellador is shocked, for example, to think of a belief in God as polluting infants with original sin as a lasting one. Additionally, the concept of eternal life sounds odious to her because of how natural it is to think of growth and progress through generations. The primary difficulty for the narrator after marrying Ellador is that she has no sense of male-female love. There is only love as mothers, and consequently they assign to fatherhood a similar importance. Try as he might to explain the mutual love between lovers to Ellador, she doesn't feel it. This problem manifests itself much more problematically for Terry, who tries one night to rape Alima because of his belief in having the right to "master" his wife in bed. He is successfully repulsed by Alima and a cadre of strong women, who subsequently decide that he must be sent home. In the end, it is decided that Terry, the narrator, and Ellador will all go to America, while Jeff will stay with his now pregnant wife Celis. The women of Herland also decide that there will be no bridge between the worlds established until Ellador brings back report; after all, they decide that though there are many wonders about the world from which the men came, there seems to be a lot of problems as well which they would best keep themselves apart from until there is more information.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
It is clear that for Gilman in these novels, fiction is more of a vehicle for social and political commentary; the story barely matters--the plot isn't particularly riveting or novel, the characters are rather flat caricatures, and formally, the first-person retrospective account of an adventurer is hardly a new format. This is something which Gilman's novels share with the utopian tradition more generally though, in which the conveyance of ideals of that utopian society reigns supreme. Gilman's most famous American antecedent is Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards (1888) which featured a socialist utopia and which was second only to Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur in popularity.

Gilman's utopia distinguishes itself in two major ways: first, she envisions a true socialist utopia as led by women, and second, for Gilman, the bringing about of a cooperative society requires first an intellectual awakening. Whereas novels like Bellamy's envision utopian social institutions that will carry out the necessary reform, Gilman's Herland advocates changes in thinking within each individual. The major change which she advocates is can be fairly straightforwardly gleaned from Herland: The basis of an ideal society must be cooperative rather than competitive, a shift in thinking which requires a revaluing of women's innate leadership as far as cooperation goes. In other words, the realization of a socialist utopia requires both men and women to re-orient themselves away from notions of marriage and female education that designate women to the domestic sphere and a support to men who accomplish the building of society outside of the home. Though Gilman clearly thinks of women as better at cooperation than men, she claims to have a greater commitment to humanity than a narrow "feminism"--she means to deconstruct false gendered binaries in order that both men and women can come together as people to recognize the constructive properties of cooperative society. When the women recognize Jennings as more like themselves than the other men, they clarify that they mean he is more like a person rather than a male (after all, Jeff and Terry are less whole people because of their stereotypical male behavior as the gallant and the cad, respectively).

Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys

2011-04-26T00:19:00.000-07:00

Edition: Voyage in the Dark (Norton Paperback Fiction)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Voyage in the Dark was Jean Rhys's third published novel, appearing in 1934 (but set in 1914, unlike her previous two novels which reflected contemporaneous times). The novel features portions from an earlier unpublished novel, Triple Sec. Rhys's original ending was to have Anna die, but her publisher thought this was too dark.

SUMMARY:
The novel is narrated in four parts first-person by eighteen-year-old Anna Morgan, who spent her childhood on the island of Dominica in the West Indies. She now lives in England as a touring actress with uncertain work opportunities. She begins with an account of her difficulty settling in England, where she always felt cold, and the towns seemed always alike, drab, and dark. At the opening of the novel, she lives with Maudie, an actress of twenty-eight years old. One day, she and Maudie meet two men on the street who work in "the city," signaling that they are pretty well-off. Anna becomes involved with one of them, Walter Jeffries. She becomes fairly attached to him even though she sees him only intermittently. He gives her money with which she is able to buy new clothes, and also takes care of her when she is sick. Anna is disappointed that she won't spend her birthday with him, because her birthday falls on a Sunday when he won't be around. Instead, she goes out with Maudie, who advises that Anna get as much money out of him as possible.

Walter introduces her to his cousin, Vincent, who connects her with a singing instructor. Patronizingly, Walter tells Anna that she should "get on" and that he would like to help her. One night, when drunk, Anna tells Walter of Dominica--of her father, a list of slaves which she had once seen, their church services--but he isn't too interested. Anna's stepmother Hester visits London, and shows Anna a letter from her uncle back in Dominica berating Hester for not sharing her deceased father's wealth with her. Hester doesn't respect Anna's uncle because he drinks, and because he has fathered many illegitimate children with natives. She reveals too that she feel she has done right by Anna. Anna tells Hester that she does not need her help and can do on her own, thinking she can depend on walter. Hester brings back many home memories to Anna; she thinks especially fondly of a native caretaker, Francine, whom she remembers eating mangoes and telling her stories. Soon, Walter decides to take Anna to the countryside with Vincent and his girl, Germaine. The trip is cut short because Germaine argues with Vincent. Anna is silent for much of the conversations, and the three of them often talk about her as if she is not there, infantilizing her. In one moment of anger, Anna smashes a cigarette but on Walter's hand, but she is sorry for it afterwards.

Walter eventually tires of Anna and drops her, charging Vincent with writing her an impersonal and patronizing letter telling her that he is "sure she is a nice girl" and that she should, simply move on. Walter has promised, however, to take care of her financially should it be necessary. Crushed, Anna sort of floats from one thing to another. She first runs into a woman named Ethel Matthews, a masseuse, who offers her to share rooms with her and to earn her keep as a manicurist. Anna also runs into Laurie, another of her actress friends, who introduces her to two men, Carl and Joe. Carl eventually pursues her, and they sleep together, but it turns out that Carl has a wife and must leave. Anna then spends one night with an unnamed man with a bandaged wrist, by whom she accidentally gets pregnant. Meanwhile, Ethel has decided to drop Anna because she has not really been a good business partner; Ethel writes a letter to Laurie telling her that Anna owes her money. Laurie takes care of Anna and suggest that she write to Walter to get money for an abortion. Walter sends Vincent over, who gives her the money but also asks for the letters that Walter has sent her back. Anna is sickly during her pregnancy and eventually gets a abortion; the whole ordeal occurs in a sort of haze for Anna, amidst more nightmarish memories of the Caribbean such as of being frightened of zombies and soucriants (devil women).

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Rhys's Voyage in the Dark bears some similarities to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (Rhys had a brief affair with Ford Madox Ford in 1924) in that it features a first-person narrator writing in such a way as to suggest an absence of artifice or pre-meditated structure. Both narrators write as if their words flow freely from them with very little sense of constructing a coherent story.

The form of Rhys's novel is significantly more radical, however. While the narrator of The Good Soldier gives a reason for the fragmented nature of his account--he is writing because of a retrospective psychological need to do so in order to deal with the trauma of his botched relationships--it isn't clear how or why Anna is writing her fragmented first-person account. Presumably, the account is also retrospective (in past tense), but it really feels more like she is speaking of what happens to her pretty much as it happens to her. The associations that she makes between her surroundings and what happens to her and her childhood experiences in Dominica give the narration a sense that somehow she is able to communicate to us what feelings and associations she had in the moment of her experiences. There is a strange tension, then, between the apparent lack of artifice in Anna's account, and the necessity of this being a crafted retrospective account in order for it to make sense as to when she would have the opportunity of writing. After all, Anna seems to passively allow things to happen to her and different people to come into her life, and the assertive act of writing hardly seems in keeping with the passive affect which her simple diction, flash-backs, associations, and stream of consciousness writing calls up.

And what are we to make of Anna's inclusions of letters--from Vincent, her uncle, and Ethel? It seems the first-person narrator is doing some kind of scrapbooking, which also seems pretty inconsistent with the Anna who describes finding the greatest relief in sleep. Finally, just to add one more complication to the notion of the narrative as a telling-as-it-happens first-person account: how would Anna have narrated her own death in Rhys's original version?

Perhaps these difficulties suggest a need to suspend disbelief, to recognize that it is not important that Anna probably couldn't have written this account. What simply accepting that we're able to enter into her first-person consciousness as things happen to her does is to allow us access to the impressions of an individual normally evacuated of all agency in telling her own story: the young, emigrant, working class chorus girl. This is partly Rhys's unusual recovery of her own autobiographical past (as she was from Dominica, and worked as a chorus girl for a time), not as a retrospectively constructed, reflective account which is the most "usual" type of memoir, but as a re-imagining of what that life was like as it was being lived.

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

2011-04-25T10:07:00.000-07:00

Edition: Four Quartets
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Eliot's Four Quartets grew out of a what was initially a single poem, "Burnt Norton," which ended up being the first of four poems. "Burnt Norton" was made up of discarded passages from his dramatic work from the 1930s, specifically, Murder in the Cathedral. After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, interest in the theater declined, and Eliot turned back to poetry, writing a second poem which takes the same five-part structure of "Burnt Norton" called "East Coker." During the writing of this second poem, Eliot decided on the overall sequence of the Four Quartets. The third poem, "The Dry Salvages," was completed in 1940, and the last poem, "Little Gidding," was completed in 1942. Their first publication as a set was in 1943 in New York, and 1944 in London.

SUMMARY/OVERVIEW/:
Burnt Norton
I. The poet expresses abstractions of time which privileges the notion that "time is eternally present" in reflective yet simple lines. A bird calls "us" into a rose-garden, "our first world" (alluding to Eden), where an unnamed "they" are, "dignified, invisible / Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves..." We look into an empty pool which fills "with water out of sunlight" and "they" stand behind us, reflected. The moment "they" are identified as children (our own past?) the bird tells us to leave.
II. The beginning of this second section is metrically nursery-rhyme like: "Garlic and sapphires in the mud / Clot the bedded axle tree." The lines expand with the introduction of a recurring image in this poem, "the still point of the turning world," which the poet insists, is stillness and not "fixity." This still point is this eternal present, a Buddhist-like state free from "practical desire" "release[d] from action and suffering."
III. The poet indicates "a place of disaffection," which is being stuck in "Time before and time after." To escape this temporality, one could descend, "Into a world of perpetual solitude / World not world, but that which is not world, / Internal darkness, depirvation / And destitution of all property / Dessication of the world of sense, / Evacuation of the world of fancy, / Inoperancy of the world of spirit." This begins to sound like Hell rather than Heaven, though both are empty of desire and notions of "time past and time future."
IV. This is a short stanza; it plays with the images of a bell, nature, and again, the still point of the turning world.
V. This final section admits and explores the limitations of words and music. Even though words and music don't die like people do, they aren't "still" and are subject to the burden of movement. "Form" and "pattern" perpetuate stillness, though, and might help words and music to get closer to the divine stillness of an eternal present which the poem has been holding up throughout.

East Coker
I. The poem begins, "In my beginning is my end." Images of destruction, decay, restoration, and renewal, collapses beginnings and endings. In an "open field," archaic, rustic rituals celebrating "matrimonie" and coupling go on, alongside the time of seasons, milking, harvest. "Eating and drinking" are juxtaposed with "Dung and death."
II. Again, the first part of this section begins with clipped, nursery-rhyme like lines which mix together imagines from different seasons, again collapsing linear time. The words which he has just used to try to collapse linear time, the poet says in the next section, are inadequate to the task. The section ends bleakly with the adage that "[t]he only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."
III. "O dark dark dark" reminds us of Milton's blindness, but also his faith: the dark is not a place of despair, but it "shall be the darkness of God." Didactic negations turn out to be the way of reaching (the inexpressible state of spiritual fulfillment--but it can't really be "fulfillment" since that signals progression). This is how Eliot expresses it: "To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. / In order to arrive at what you do not know / You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance...And what you do not know is the only thing you know / And what you own is what you do not own / And where you are is where you are not."
IV. Sin is figured as a disease and sickness, and earth is "our hospital." In battling fevers here on earth, the poet says he "must freeze / And quake in frigid purgatorial fires."
V. This section contains a direct reference to the World Wars, and the poets own "twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres / Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt / Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure..." Again, words aren't up to the task of expressing the still point of the world, the time eternal, the spiritual state which we need to realize. Yet, the fight to get there, to "recover what has been lost" is what we do. In fact, "for us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business," in other words, that's the business of Christ.

The Dry Salvages
I. The first section figures (the Mississippi?) river as a "strong brown god," who is forgotten in the building up of cities and the living in them. Yet, the divine presence of the sea remains everywhere though it may be "unhonoured, unpropitiated, / By worshippers of the machine."
II. This section revises the notion of an "end" and suggests that in time, there is only "addition" or accumulation. As one gets older, the poet says, time seems less and less like development or sequence (linear), but more like a pattern, which is another way of thinking of it as accumulation. The only true happiness is not in the things that we usually think of as "well-being," like "fruition, fulfilment, security or affection, / Or even a very good dinner" but a "sudden illumination" which can't be expressed as any kind of "meaning." This happiness is only available through Christ.
III. "I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant" links Eliot's poem to Eastern concepts of transmigration of the soul. The poet enjoins life travellers to "fare forward" and not to fare well; there is a sense of inevitability in change and to "fare forward" is to let these changes happen and to face them bravely.
IV. The poet prays to the Virgin on behalf of people living by the seaside, those who have embarked voyages, and the women who have been left behind.
V. This section condemns all sorts of life occupations to tell the future ("To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits, / To report the behaviour of the sea monster, / Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry, / Observe disease in signatures, evoke / Biography from the wrinkles of the palm...") as unreal--they are merely "pastimes and drugs." Instead, one ought to try to "apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / with time." This is the "occupation for the saint," although Eliot stops here and admits it isn't an "occupation." Ultimately, the closest we may get here on earth are to gain "only hints and guesses," "the rest / Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action."

Little Gidding
I. The poem begins with "midwinter spring" is a divine, eternal sort of season which feels "suspended in time, between pole and tropic." The second part of this section breaks into second-person address conditionals which essentially say that regardless what route you take, the notion of "purpose" will break apart. "You are not here to verify, / Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity / Or carry report. You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid."
II. After images of water and fire destroying the earth, a dead master speaks with the poet in terza rima, preaching purification and refinement of the soul by fire. Specifically, the master refers to the disciplined movement of "dancing" in the fire, again suggesting the importance of pattern (as in poems, music) in aiding a soul towards realizing the divine state of stillness.
III. This section explores problems of attachment (such as to country, "faces and places") and levels these kinds of loyalties in death: "We cannot revive old factions / We cannot restore old policies / Or follow an antique drum. / These men, and those who opposed them / And those whom they opposed / Accept the constitution of silence / And are folded in a single party."
IV. This is a short section on redemption by fire.
V. The poet asserts that "What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning," destroying once again the linear conception of time. A similar sentiment is expressed in "history is a pattern / Of timeless moments." He suggests a continuing exploration throughout ones life, however, but that the "end" of such exploration will be to get back to where we started "And know the place for the first time," strongly signaling a return to a state before original sin.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
The five-part structures of the poems in Four Quartets are reminiscent of The Waste Land, but late Eliot is significantly different from earlier Eliot. For one, Eliot's subject is more obviously Christian; Four Quartets primarily and explicitly works out the subject of time and mankind in relation to the divine. Stylistically, the poems feel like they are spoken by a "single consciousness" (according to critic Margaret Thormahlen, SOURCE: LitEncyc) rather than the fragmented consciousness of The Waste Land. Relatedly, Four Quartets feels much more personal in nature--indeed, autobiographical snippets further this overall sense (each poem is named after a place which was personally significant to Eliot). The invocation of a musical form of "quartets" alongside Leavis's reading of The Waste Land, however, forges an important connection between these works: both reject narrative as an archaic organizational principle and favor the abstraction of musical relationships as a substitute in modern times. In The Waste Land this new form is less explicitly aligned with a new conception of Christianity for the modern world, and the art itself seems to hold its own kind of power, but in Four Quartets, this new conception of Christianity is the whole point which art strives towards (but inevitably fails to completely reach).

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

2011-04-24T22:52:00.000-07:00

Edition: The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Waste Land was published first in October 1922 in Eliot's own monthly, The Criterion. The poem subsequently appeared in November in the American literary magazine, The Dial. A hardcover version was published by the New York's Boni and Liveright in December, and a handprinted version was generated by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at Hogarth Press in 1923. Lawrence Rainey suggests that this tripartite publication of The Waste Land--in journals, as a limited edition, and as a wider commercial edition--reflects Eliot's desire to produce a complex relationship between The Waste Land to a public greater than just the literary elite.

SUMMARY/OVERVIEW:
Epigraph: Reference to Sibyl in a jar wanting to die, she had asked for as many years of life as grains of sand, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. This is followed by a dedication to Ezra Pound (il miglior fabbro, the better craftsman, what Dante said to Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio).

I. Burial of the Dead
The poem begins with images of April, the winter, and the summer followed by snippets of conversation between Marie (the Countess Marie Larisch, friend to Eliot) and her cousin the arch-duke who took her out on a sled when they were children. In the second stanza, the voice of God interrupts, following with images of a wasteland: "Son of man, / You cannot say or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water." Excerpts from Tristan und Isolde interrupt. A famous scene with Madame Sosostris follows, there are descriptions of her Tarot cards: some characters on the cards are actually in the Tarot deck, and others are not. There is the drowned Phoenician Sailor, the Lady of the Rocks (Da Vinci), the one-eyed merchant, and the Hanged Man. The next stanza details images of London as an "Unreal City," where a crowd of dead people flow over London Bridge. The poet sees one he knows, and asks him about the corpse he planted in the garden last year.

II. A Game of Chess
An opulent scene with Cleopatra in her chair opens this section. A "sylvan scene" with Philomel appears above an "antique mantel" (the story is that Philomel was raped by her brother-in-law Tereus who then subsequently cut out her tongue so that she could not tell the story; some versions say that Philomel was transformed into a nightingale, which sings a sad song). A fragmented conversation between lovers (?) follows, one voice anxiously asking questions like what the other thinks, if he is thinking at all, what noise there is, what he knows, and what they shall do. The lover, who is in first-person, answers that they will play a game of chess. He then begins to talk about a woman named Lil's husband, who got "demobbed" or demobilized (released from armed services). In conversation with Lil, the first-person speaker callously tells her that she better give him a good time, because "if you don't give it him, there's others will." This conversation is interrupted by the pub announcement at closing time, "Hurry up please its time." The section closes with a string of goodnights merging into Ophelia of Hamlet's "Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night."

III. The Fire Sermon (title from Buddha's sermon against things of the world)
This section begins with an image of the Thames and a reference to Spenser's Prothalamion ("The nymphs are departed") juxtaposed with a bunch of modern, mundane images: "The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends / Or other testimony of summer nights." Another brief reference to Philomel interrupts, the "twit twit twit" and "jug jug jug" sounds of the nightingale. The famous Tiresias scene is in the middle of this section: Tiresias is an all-seeing seer, both male and female. S/he sees a typist at home awaiting "the expected guest," "the young man's carbuncular," "a small house agent's clerk." This young man seems to rape the typist; it is a rape in the modern city in the same poem as a classical rape. The rest of the section includes fragments from Das Rheingold, fragmented images of the river and what flows down it, another reference to a rape structured like an epitaph drawn from Dante ("Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew / Undid me"), and finally ending with Augustine's "burning" which in Confessions refers to sensual temptations.

IV. Death by Water
This very short ten-line section brings together images of the sea's rising and swelling with profit and loss, age and youth. Phlebas the Phonecian's death is a central image, whose bones were picked by currents under the sea, and who rose and fell passing the "stages of his age and youth."

V. What the Thunder Said
This final section begins with people present at Christ's crucifixion, followed by a lengthy description of mountains of rock where there is no water. Three people are walking, and one of the men don't recognize the third person--this is a direct reference to how in Luke 24 two men on the road to Emmaus do not recognize the resurrected Christ. Cities fall down and are destroyed; the poet levels all of the great cities to the same status by including them all together: "Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal." The penultimate part of the poem explores three different interpretations of a syllable God presents ("Da") in the Upanishads to three different disciples. "Datta" means "give to men," "Damyata" means "control for the gods," and dayadhyam means "compassion for the demons." The final section of the poem mixes "London Bridge is falling down" with references to the swallow (sometimes Philomel is a swallow and not a nightingale), a sonnet by Nerval, Kyd's Spanish Tragedie and the three words from the Upanishads. The final three words, centered and apart from the rest of the poem are "shantih shantih shantih" which means peace, rest, or tranquility.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Michael North's introduction to Norton edition of The Waste Land divides critical reception into basically two camps: formalist, New Critical readings which seek to crack the "code" and provide coherent explications of the work, and readings beyond the New Critics which seek to undo the integrity of some of these readings. Not having the space or time here to offer a more extensive survey of the criticism, I'll focus here on two that I like in particular, and which sort of go together, despite the one being a New Critical reading and the other a Marxist critical reading.

F.R. Leavis's formalist reading is a good example of the former - according to Leavis, The Waste Land was an effort achieve an "inclusive human consciousness" in the face of Machine Age fragmentation. Because the development of technology and mass culture led to an increased pace of life--a "breach of continuity" and "uprooting of life"--alternative forms of coherence were needed. The Waste Land is Eliot's solution to this problem of fragmentation because its organization is one which is based on something other than traditional notions of historicity or narrative continuity, namely, something analogous to musical organization. The different fragments of culture from different times and places exist together in the poem and are related to each other in the way that musical notes and phrases relate to each other in a single piece.

Franco Moretti complicates Leavis's formal reading by contextualizing what he refers to as the mythic arrangement of The Waste Land in a Marxist account of history. Prior to the modern age, the novel was supreme because the novel gets its form from the culture that it springs from. If there is a sense of rootedness and coherence in the culture, so too will there be in the novel. The rise of capitalism loosens the system linking of referents and signs; thus, a new genre is required which is independent of such relationships of historical reality and form. This genre is poetry, which subsumes past and present, far and near, under a new mythos.

The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield

2011-04-24T14:38:00.000-07:00

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Garden Party and Other Stories is a collection of short stories previously published in periodicals. The first edition came out in 1922, by which time Mansfield's health was on the decline. Mansfield's short stories are considered to exemplify and perfect many of the distinctive features of modernist fiction writing.

SUMMARY:
At the Bay consists of impressionistic snippets of family life by Crescent Bay. It begins with the early morning, the misty bay, sheep plodding along, and a shepherd and his dog. In one of the bungalows, Stanley Joseph Burnell runs out for a swim and is disappointed when Jonathan is there before him. Stanley is a regimented, "practical" man and Jonathan is much more free-spirited. Stanley goes back home and is in such a rush to get to work that he doesn't have time to say goodbye to the women. He expects them to all help him get out the door, and resents them for not doing enough. When he leaves, the women are relieved. The children, Kezia, Lottie, and Isabel run out to play with their cousins Rag and Pip. Pip has found an "nemeral" in the sand and shows it to the girls. Beryl, sister to Linda, Stanley's wife, joins a Mrs. Kember at the beach, whom her mother and many other people in the town disapprove of. Mrs. Kember is married to a man ten years younger to her, and likes to skirt improprieties. Beryl is shy as she changes in front of Mrs. Kember, who remarks on her beauty. Back at the Bungalow, Linda is alone. She thinks back to living with her father in Tasmania, on how Stanley is actually very soft-hearted and simple beneath his outer shell, and on how she doesn't love her children. A kind of conversation is exchanged between Linda and her little son in which it isn't clear what is outwardly expressed or simply thought, or imagined to be thought. In the afternoon, Kezia takes a nap with her grandma and they talk about Uncle William, who died of sunstroke working as a miner. They talk also of death, and Kezia tries to get her grandma to promise never to die. Alice, the servant, goes to visit Mrs. Stubbs at her shop, looking over some pictures of Mrs. Stubbs's late husband. Back at the house, the children play a card game in the warehouse, pretending that they are each an animal. Uncle Jonathan comes to pick up the boys, Pip and Rag, and speaks briefly to Linda, confessing that he hates his job and feels like an insect that keeps flying into a room and dashing itself between the walls. Linda appreciates his free-spiritedness, but knows that he will never be as reliable as Stanley. When Stanley returns home, he is apologetic about having not said goodbye to Linda; he has also bought some gloves for himself. She tells him it is okay, and tries on one of his gloves. At night, Beryl thinks about her desire for a lover, to not be lonely growing old. Harry Kember, Mrs. Kember's husband, turns up in the garden and asks her to go on a walk with him. She is torn and goes out at first, but then realizing that he is drunk, she runs away. The story closes with an image of the bay at night.

The Garden Party tells of a garden party given by a well-off family, the Sheridans. The story opens describing the ideal weather, the setting up of a marquee, and food preparations; the narration generally focalizes the thoughts of Laura Sheridan, one of the grown children of Mr. and Mrs. Sheridan. Laura fetishizes the working class men who set up the marquee, thinking to herself that class distinctions were "absurd" and ascribing to them a simple, naturalistic, and sincere existence which she would so much prefer to the "silly boys she danced with." In the midst of the preparations, they hear that a man who lived in one of the working-class cottages nearby had been thrown off of his horse and killed when the horse shied at a traction-engine. He had left behind a wife and half a dozen children. Laura thinks that they should perhaps stop the party; her sister Jose and her mother call her "extravagant" (ironically), sentimental, and lacking in common sense. Sympathy is a matter of proximity--of class, and of physical distance: after Mrs. Sheridan hears that the death isn't in the garden, she breathes a sigh of relief. The garden party goes on with great success. Afterwards, Mrs. Sheridan decides that it might be nice to send over a basket to the widow, and she lets Laura go over to the cottages. Faced with the reality of actually interacting with working class in the intimacy of their everyday living, Laura is deeply uncomfortable. The woman is ugly, puffed up, swollen, and red. Laura drops off her burden, and prepares to leave immediately, but manages to get a glance at the corpse, which, unexpectedly, she finds rather beautiful in its repose. She cries. On her way back, she is intercepted by her brother Laurie and the two of them can't find the words to express life: "'Isn't life,' she stammered," to which Laurie replies, "'Isn't it, darling?'

Daughters of the Late Colonel details the daily life of Josephine and Constantia, the two daughters of a tyrannical colonel who has just died. The two women have never married, and though they are unable to express the anguish of their limited living, it is apparent from their snippets of conversation. They are deeply afraid to settle their father's things, or to bury him in the ground. One of them even imagines their father inhabiting his clothing drawers. Small decisions like whether to keep the nurse or maid around, if they should wear black dressing gowns in addition to the black they wear out, or whom they should bestow their father's watch to become nerve-wracking ones for the two women. At the end of the story, Constantia recalls how she felt like she was living a more real life whenever she would creep out of her nightgown to see the moon and then thinks she has something "frightfully important" to say to Josephine. She forgets what this is mid-sentence, and Josephine says she has forgotten too what she has had to say.

Mr. and Mrs. Dove is a short scene in which Reggie, a man living with his overbearing mother, goes out to see the girl he loves, Anne, the last night before he is to leave for Rhodesia. Anne always laughs in his presence, even if nothing is particularly funny. Reggie is about to be rather sentimental about leaving her, but Anne snubs him by telling him to watch some doves outside. She describes how Mrs. Dove runs away laughing at Mr. Dove, but Mr. Dove keeps following her. This is an allegory for how she views their interactions. She explains this to him explicitly, and moreover says that she is unable to feel for him as he feels for her. Reggie turns to go and says he'll be able to take it if she lets him go, but, feeling badly because she is selfish and can't bear to be the reason for his loneliness in Rhodesia, she calls him back and he comes.

The Young Girl is a brief sketch of a seventeen-year old girl at a casino with her gambling mother. The mother wants to take her into the casino and leaves her little brother, Hennie, with the first-person narrator (a care-taker?). The young girl is very rude and dismissive towards her mother and has no interest in trying to get into the casino. Since she isn't twenty-one, she ends up having to spend time with the narrator and Hennie. They go sit somewhere, eating pastries, drinking tea, and chocolate. They go back to meet her mother, who, not surprisingly, is not ready for them. The narrator asks if the girl will stay in the car but she said she'd rather wait on the steps. She gives the most sincere, broken speech yet: "I love waiting! Really--really I do! I'm always waiting--in all kinds of places..." The narrator describes her "soft young body in the blue dress" at that moment as like a "flower emerging from its dark bud."

Life of Ma Parker is about the "hard life" of Ma Parker, who waits on an oblivious "literary gentleman." She has just buried her young grandson. The gentleman has had to "do" by himself for a week, and the kitchen which Ma Parker come back to is an atrocious mess. The gentleman, however, has thought that he has gotten along fine and that people made too much of "housekeeping." Ma Parker reflects on how she has never had a break, burying her husband, seven of her children, and now her grandson. She wishes to go somewhere, finally, to cry, but there is nowhere she can go--in most places she will be watched or questioned, the literary gentleman's house was not her space. The story ends with her standing in the rain.

Marriage A La Mode is about an estranged marriage between William and Isabel. William goes weekly to work in London; from the papers he reads on his train trip home, it seems he is a lawyer. On one particular weekend on his way back from London, William decides to buy fruit for his children because the last few times he has gotten them candy from the train station and they had gotten bored with the same gift. On the train back, William can't focus on anything except his idealized vision of what Isabel will be like at the station. When he gets there, Isabel meets him with a taxi full of her artist friends. Their conversation is full of banter, allusions, and vanities. Back at the house, Isabel and her friends ignore William and he even overhears some dismissive remarks they make about him. Soon, the weekend is over and he is to go back to London again. William decides to write Isabel a long, sentimental letter while in London. Isabel receives this letter and reads parts of it aloud to her artist friends, who, of course, ridicule William for his sentimentality. Isabel runs up to her room, and thinks to respond to him, but when she tries, she finds it is too hard and goes back out to join her friends.

The Voyage is the story of a young woman, Fenella, accompanied by her grandmother on a Picton boat taking her away from her father. It is evident that some kind of tragedy has happened involving her mother, but what it is isn't fully revealed by the snippets of dialogue. Her father sends them off for the voyage (he is clearly emotionally strained) and on the other side, they are picked up by a carriage and taken to the house of her grandmother and grandfather.

Miss Brill wears a fur animal around her neck to a weekly Sunday band performance. She goes to this performance every Sunday, reveling in people watching. As she takes great pleasure in thinking about people's lives as performance, she realizes that she too is an "actress" in this great drama of life. She is elated nearly to tears by her realization. A young boy and a girl sit next to her, and they make remarks about Miss Brill's faded looks and her ugly fur. Back at home, Miss Brill lays her fur to rest in a box and imagines that the creature sadly crying in there.

Her First Ball tells of Leila (the country cousin of the Sheridan children of "The Garden Party") at her first ball in the city. The story opens with Leila in a cab with her cousins, feeling jealous of Laura having a brother, and of their sophistication more generally. At the ball, Leila is whirled up into dancing, hardly knowing who any of her partners were. At one point she dances with an old, fat man, who disturbingly communicates to her a vision of herself growing old and watching the young women dance before long, while thinking vapid thoughts about the attention her young daughter is getting. Leila feels disturbed for a moment, but soon forgets him in the whirl of continued dancing.

The Singing Lesson intersperses the telling of Miss Meadow's singing lesson to her girl students and her distraught thoughts on a letter she had recently gotten from her lover breaking off their engagement. As she forces her pupils to sing a melancholy song, she rehearses snippets of the letter in her head, including a particularly cringeworthy line in which he had said he couldn't imagine marrying her without a sense of regret. She had noted that he had rubbed out the word "disgust" before replacing it with regret. Miss Meadow is totally unaware of the strain that she puts on her pupils as a result of her own feelings. The lesson is interrupted by a telegram from her lover saying that she should ignore his last letter. Miss Meadow's mood is immediately uplifted, and she returns to her pupils demanding that they sing mirthful lines with joyful feeling.

The Stranger opens with Mr. Hammond waiting with a crowd on the wharf for the arrival of his wife aboard an approaching ship. Mrs. Hammond had been abroad in Europe visiting their eldest girl who had just married. Mr. Hammond is extremely anxious and cannot wait to be alone with his wife, but when she finally gets off the boat, it is evident that she has made friends with everyone on it and must say goodbye to everyone individually. Mr. Hammond's impatience reveals a disturbing possessiveness; he can barely stand it when she goes alone to say good-bye to a doctor. Back at the hotel he has booked so that they might have some privacy, Mrs. Hammond's first thoughts were to read letters from her children. Mr. Hammond tries to get her to be with him, together, and not think on the letters for now. Soon, she reveals that a young man on the boat has died in her arms. Mr. Hammond cannot take that she has had such an intimate moment with someone else; his thoughts burst out in broken frustration on how "She'd--who'd never--never once in all these years--never on one single solitary occasion--" but he cannot finish the thought. The story ends with these lines: "They would never be alone together again."

Bank Holiday is a very brief sketch of the various entertainments that people engage in during the bank holiday. It seems mostly like mindless consumption, and the sketch ends with a vision of a crowd going up a hill towards the sun, not knowing why or for what.

An Ideal Family refers to Old Mr. Neave's family, whom people on the outside all imagine to be perfectly "ideal." He has a beautiful and capable son, Harold, who is a suave and handsome businessman, and then there was "Charlotte and the girls." Everyone thought the girls didn't marry because they were all just so happy together. And yet, something isn't quite right--Old Neave feels like his family has moved on without him, that he is too old to share their joys.

The Lady's Maid is an unusual account in the words of a lady's maid, Ellen, who is being asked questions by a new madame that she serves. The madame's questions are not given--only Ellen's responses.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Overall, Mansfield's modernist style is characterized by abrupt narrative breaks, snippets of vivid impressions, fragmented dialogue, and fluid boundaries between narration and the inner thoughts of her characters. These aspects of her writing allow readers an encounter with people and places which bears resemblance to how one lives life everyday. To explain this further, one of the recurring formal features of Mansfield's short stories is how she launches the reader into the story in such a way that it takes a while for the reader to feel oriented. It is usually unclear how the people that have been introduced are connected to one another, and even the impressionistic descriptions of the setting resist any sense of specific, geographical placement. This is how Mansfield suggests we experience everyday life; the stories become apparent to us only through our gradual apprehension of our confusing surroundings and our slow construction of relationships and causality. Relatedly, conversation in Mansfield's stories is often stilted or fragmentary, stylistically calling attention to the stilted and fragmentary experience of life as it is being lived. Her stories feel temporally concerned with the present, narrative often flitting in and out of characters's thoughts as they are having them in the moment--even if the thoughts are retrospective, they rarely reveal completely coherent life histories (as flitting memories rarely do as we experience them).

A distinguishing feature of Mansfield's "modernism" (as opposed to "postmodernism") is how her characters, despite being unable to express their deep suffering or their "real feelings" under the surfaces of the everyday lives, seem to evince that they do feel deeply a kind of "greater" and existence. Laura and Laurie's exchange at the end of "The Garden Party" is the perfect example of how characters who have generally shown themselves incapable of feeling anything beyond a false, sentimental sympathy at best actually feel that there is something to life which they cannot express with the language available to them. There are numerous other examples where inexpressibility actually marks the boundary between characters acting out their expected, scripted social roles and their existence beyond these roles. This latter kind of existence is in what Josephine and Constantia "forget" to say to each other about their suffering, in the young girl's broken speech about waiting, Isabel's inability to write to William, Mr. Hammond's broken thoughts on the inadequacy of intimacy in his marriage, Ma Parker's inability to find a place where she can cry, and Ellen (the lady's maid) saying that she will prevent herself from thinking about the marriage which she had given up in order to serve the lady. These moments of inexpressibility, rather than frustrate access to life's depths, actually call attention to them (unlike in postmodernism, which tends more to use language to call attention to inaccessibility or absence of life's depths).

Blake, or the Huts of America by Martin Delany

2011-04-23T13:15:00.000-07:00

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Martin Delany was born to a free mother and enslaved father in West Virginia in 1812. He was a prominent figure in the work of black newspapers, serving as the editor of The Mystery in the earlier part of the 1840s, and co-editing The North Star with Frederick Douglass from 1847-1849. In February of 1859, African-American Martin Delany appealed to William Lloyd Garrison to help him find a publishing house for his work, "Blake or the Huts of America" which was, at the time, being serialized in the Anglo-African Magazine (January through July). Only twenty-six chapters were published; 1-23 and 28-31 and it is unclear exactly as to why the complete novel was not printed. The complete novel was later serialized in weekly installments from November 1861-May 1862 in The Weekly Anglo-African. The black nationalistic orientation of the newspaper was particularly suited to Delany's work. By this time, however, the Civil War had begun and fears of an organized slave-rebellion came to be eclipsed by other concerns. Thus, though Delany's novel is easily "the most important black novel of this period," scholarly attention has been slow in coming (SOURCE: Floyd Miller, Intro).

SUMMARY (Anglo-African Magazine serialization, brief sketch of the other chapters in parentheticals):
The first chapter opens on Natchez, Mississippi prior to the Civil War, shortly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. Mrs. Franks is forced to sell Maggie, a faithful slave whom she treated more like a younger sister than anything else to her cousin Mrs. Ballard. Mrs. Ballard was to take her with her to Havana, Cuba as a maidservant. The deal had been settled between the two husbands--Colonel Franks and Judge Ballard. Maggie's husband, Henrico Blacus, a West Indian brought as a slave to the South comes back from an errand and needless to say, is furious. "Henry" (Henrico was re-named Henry Holland in America) expresses his disavowal of the other slaves' patience largely inculcated by what he perceived to be the false Christianity of their masters, embodying a sort of "the time is now" rhetoric.

Henry's rebellious attitude against Mr. Franks leads to his decision to sell him. Mrs. Franks, more sympathetic to the slaves, tells Henry that one Mrs. Van Winters is going to Cuba and she will arrange for him to be sold so he can go to Cuba. Colonel Franks manages to find out about this plan, however, and arranges for Henry's private sale to a particularly inhumane master, Richard Crow. Henry finds this out, and decides to be a runaway. Meanwhile, at the slave huts, Mamma Judy, Daddy Joe, and their friends celebrate and praise Franks as if they believe his ruse that he is giving Henry another chance.

Henry steals away, managing to send his and Maggie's baby son off to Canada. Before leaving, he tells his friends Andy and Charles that he is going to start a large-scale slave rebellion, and that he will make sure there is an organized movement in every state. He gives himself a maximum of two years to lay the groundwork for this rebellion. Soon after Henry runs away, slaves from other plantations start to disappear, and the white masters realize that there seems to be a broader movement. Amidst these happenings, one Major Armsted (a southerner) and Judge Ballard (originally a northerner) meet and converse about race and slavery. It turns out that the northerner is actually more fastidious about race, evincing his disgust about the ways blacks and whites mingle in Cuba. The men later meet up with Mr. Franks and one Captain Grason at Grason's plantation. There, they watch a slave boy being whipped for not readily entertaining them with antics. The slave boy was hemorrhaging from the lungs, and upon seeing this, Ballard couldn't take the sight and involuntarily grabs the whip from Grason to stop the beating. The slave boy ends up dying, and a footnote gives that this was a true incident.

Henry starts spreading the word about the slave rebellion. Able to read and write, and with much practical know-how about the plantation networks, Henry is able to get around without much suspicion. He makes a tour of southern states and speaks to slaves in their huts, inspiring them. Generally, Henry is able to garner much support for his plan, and realizes that many have already been looking forward to the day that someone would come to organize them. Among the things he witnesses is how the slave system inculcates mulatto and black overseers to treat blacks poorly (somewhat like what Stowe describes of black overseers trained for cruelty in Uncle Tom's Cabin). Henry becomes a revolutionary figure described epically and religiously by the narrator: "From plantation to plantation did he go, sowing the seeds of future devastation and ruin to the master and redemption to the slave, an antecedent more terrible in its anticipation than the warning voice of the destroying Angel in commanding the slaughter of the firstborn of Egypt." Henry's own rhetoric is high, preaching that "now is the accepted time, today is the day of salvation," Henry even goes amongst the Indians in Arkansas, who though also slave-holders, end up being sympathetic to Henry's cause after he speaks with an old chief. There is a slight hiccup in plans in New Orleans. Fifteen slave men gathered awaiting him as their leader, and Henry at first successfully lays the foundation for organization, but one man can't wait to be out for blood and makes a ruckus that night. The backlash is harsh, and this incident becomes a cautionary tale of sorts against disorganized, hot-headed rebellion which has not laid its foundations properly and intelligently. New Orleans subsequently laid "municipal regulations...most rigid in a system of restriction and espionage toward Negroes and mulattoes, almost destroying their self-respect and manhood, and certainly impairing their usefulness."

Having made his tour through these states, Henry returns to help get Mammy, Daddy, Andy, and Charles to Canada. He teaches him how to find the North Star, how moss grows on the north side of trees, and about compasses. On their journey, they meet up with two other runaways, one who looks white, so they pretend he was their master in order to get aboard a yawl to Missouri. While crossing Mississippi, Henry manages to convince a poor white ferryman that he should not be doing work for the rich southern slaveholder. Henry militantly threatens those in pursuit with a rifle. Unfortunately, however, they are soon captured.

[Here the Anglo-African Magazine serialization ends. In Part II, Henry goes to Cuba as a manservant, finds Maggie, and buys her freedom. There, he leads a revolutionary force aided by Placido, a Cuban poet and rebel. They plan to overthrow the Cuban government and prevent its annexation to the United States]

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Delany's separatist, black nationalistic politics directly speaks against Harriet Beecher Stowe's portrayal of the perservering Christian slave whose ultimate destiny is to resettle in Liberia and transform Liberia into a nation of Christian principles. For Henry, Christianity which teaches slaves to "stand still" awaiting salvation (usually, the rhetoric refers to salvation in the next world) is yet another tool used by masters to keep slaves down. For Delany, slaves must rise up and claim their own freedom in the current time; they are not to wait for a God supposedly asks for their patience through unimaginable suffering on earth. It isn't, however, that Henry doesn't believe in God--Blake is a critique of religious ideology espoused by white masters and passed on to their slaves which keeps slaves from realizing their human dignity here on earth. Henry's own rhetoric and the rhetoric of the narrator is often religious (Moses is a recurring figure in the narrative) and there is a sense throughout that Henry fulfills a spiritual destiny in his revolutionary leadership.

Perhaps one of the more controversial aspects of Henry's characterization is just how different he is from the other black slaves. He doesn't talk in dialect, he is described as a "scholar," and above all, his not having internalized the abjection of slavery perpetuated by an ideology of Christian patience and suffering means he even carries himself differently. This is evident to both blacks and whites alike. He is virile, intelligent, cunning, militant, and strongly principled, an opposite "type" to the gentle, persevering, loving, Bible-quoting (but unscholarly and limited in his literacy) Uncle Tom. The "Uncle Tom" figures in Delany's characterizations are revealed as delusional and naive. Delany tackles Stowe's abolitionism by boldly leveraging his own position as a black writer to show figures like Mammy Judy or Daddy Joe to be woefully inadequate to the task of realizing their humanity.

Selections from Edgar Allan Poe

2011-04-20T23:23:00.000-07:00

"The Fall of the House of Usher"
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
"The Fall of the House of Usher" was first published in Burton's Gentleman Magazine in September 1839. The poem included within the story, "The Haunted Palace" had been published separately in April of 1839 in the Baltimore Museum Magazine. Burton's was a literary magazine that also featured sporting notes. Poe took on some editorial duties at Burton's. Subsequently, the magazine was sold to George Rex Graham, and it merged with Atkinson's Casket to become Graham's Magazine.

SUMMARY:
The narrator arrives on horseback to the House of Usher, because his boyhood friend Roderick Usher has called him to help him out with a "mental disorder" having to do with an acuter sensibility than usual. The narrator describes how the mansion inspired a sense of terror in him. Once lodged at Roderick's house, the narrator learns of Lady Madeline, Roderick's sister, who has a cataleptic disease which physicians have been unable to cure. The narrator doesn't see any more of the sister than her silhouette, but hears her walking around the house sometimes. Roderick is excessively nervous, and in an attempt to soothe his nerves, the narrator paints and reads with him. "The Haunted Palace" is a poem which Roderick accompanies with guitar playing, focusing on themes of madness. One of Roderick's theories has to do with the sentience of "vegetable" and even inorganic things; this notion is applied to the house itself as seemingly having a kind of sentience.

One night, Roderick tells the narrator that Lady Madeline had died. That night, a storm hits the area. Roderick says that his sister will be temporarily entombed in the family vault below for a fortnight in order to avoid body-snatchers. As the narrator beholds the corpse of Madeline, he realizes that the two look very alike: Roderick admits that they had been twins. After several days, Roderick seems to get more and more nervous. The narrator too, begins to feel more nervous. The story continues through the week, its rising intensity paralleling the rising anxieties of the house's inhabitants. The narrator reads from the "Mad Trist" of Sir Launcelot Canning (a medieval work) in order to try to manage his and his friend's anxieties. Oddly, as the narrator reads about Ethelred breaking open a door, they hear a "cracking and ripping sound." When the narrator reads about a dragon's shriek, they hear a shriek in the house. Finally, when Ethelred defeats the dragon and reaches for the shield which falls to the floor with a ringing, they hear a metallic clanging. Roderick then tells the narrator that he has known for some time that he has entombed his sister before her death, and that she is now outside the door. As Madeline enters, Roderick yells out, "Madman!" as if in reference to the narrator. The bloodied Madeline makes for her brother, tackles him to the floor, and the two of them die in that moment. The narrator runs away from the house, and when he looks back, he sees the House of Usher split apart and sink into the nearby lake.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:
Poe's famous essay on The Philosophy of Composition (1846) puts forth his idea of a "unity of effect" in fiction which is best accomplished by the format of a short story, which may hold together the reader's emotion and attention in one sitting. "The Fall of the House of Usher" has often been cited as an exemplar of Poe's principle of "unity of effect." Poe had elucidated his principle of "unity of effect" as early as 1842, in a review of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales. Poe's favoring the form of the short story comes much earlier than the growing recognition of the short story as a particularly "American" form in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was published in Graham's Magazine in 1841, the resulting publicatino from the Burtons and Atkinson's merger. Graham's aimed for a wider audience of both men and women than its predecessors. Poe became the editor of Graham's in February of 1841, publishing many harsh critical reviews for which he became famous.

SUMMARY:
The story begins with the narrator's discussion of analytic abilities, which he distinguishes from calculative abilities. In short, there is more of an imaginative element in analytic capability, and "it is in matters beyond the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst is evinced." In playing a game, the analyst looks beyond the rules internal to the game and considers things external to the game--the psychology of his opponent, for instance. The narrator then tells a story of a case solved by the independent detective, C. Auguste Dupin. The narrator made the acquaintance of Dupin while in Paris. The two men shared lodgings, and on a walk one day, the narrator relates how Dupin's analytic capacities enabled him to figure out an unexpressed train of thoughts which the narrator had experienced. On this same walk, they find a notice of an unsolved murder. Two women, Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter had been brutally murdered in their homes. Fearful screams had been heard in the early morning, and when a group of people arrived at their house, the screams ceased and two people were heard to be talking. Various testimonies are given in this notice from different parties; they all seem to agree that one of the people talking after the screams ceased was a Frenchman but the accounts differed as far as characterizing the nationality and the gender of the second person.

Dupin begins his analysis by pointing out this strange discrepancy--particularly, that each of the different witnesses of different nationalities each thought the second person was a nationality other than his own. Dupin and the narrator then go to check out the crime scene for themselves. On their return, Dupin is able to make out the entire case. First, he goes through the possibilities of how the two people would have made their exits, establishing that they could have gone out a window that latched itself from the inside. Next, he deduces that the murderer must have been rather agile to have gone in and out of the window. Then, he notes how the murderer didn't actually steal any of the gold in plain sight at the crime scene, thereby establishing "something excessively outre" and moving towards the notion that the murderer might not be human. Finally, he describes the kinds of marks on the bodies, further concluding that they could not have been made by a human. In the end, he establishes that the murderer is an Ourang-Outang from Borneo. Dupin proceeds to write a fake advertisement saying the Ourang-Outang had been caught, luring the owner (whom Dupin figures out is a French sailor on a Maltese ship) to his home. The owner shows up, and confesses that the Ourang-Outang was the murderer. The creature had belonged to a friend previously, and he was planning to sell him, keeping him in his Paris apartment for the time. The creature escaped in the night, and jumped through the window into Madame L'Espanaye's house, murdering the two women and stuffing the daughter up the chimney when he saw that his master was clearly displeased and had the power to whip him. The wrongfully imprisoned man is thus released, and the case is closed.

"The Mystery of Marie Roget"
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
"The Mystery of Marie Roget" was published in three installments in Snowdens' Ladies Companion: November 1842, December 1842, and February 1843. The story was based on the real life crime of one Mary Rogers's murder: known as the "Beautiful Cigar Girl," her murder attracted national attention for months after an unsuccessful inquest. Poe claimed to be writing his fictionalized murder mystery in order to solve the real-life case. The narrator of "Marie Roget" refers to the story as a kind of sequel to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."

SUMMARY:
The narrator begins with observations on the nature of "coincidences," saying that he will offer details on a case which will evince "a series of scarcely intelligible coincidences" with the (real-life) murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers. The story is a kind of sequel to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" because it showcases once again the analytic capabilities of Dupin. In this case, a beautiful young woman named Marie Roget had taken up work at a perfume shop. She disappeared once, returning after a week and telling everyone that she had been visiting with country relations. Five months later, she disappeared again, and on the fourth day of this disappearance, her body was turned up in the Seine River. As in the real-life case, the newspapers built a sensation around the mystery of her murder; the police call on Dupin for help. Dupin's investigations go beyond just looking at official police reports--his main object of studies are the various newspaper reports. Most of "Marie Roget" is Dupin's close-reading of the different newspaper accounts, and his playing them off each other to get at the truth.

Dupin first discounts L'Etoile's attempt to throw suspicion on a man named Beauvais and to establish the seeming apathy of the family in relation to Marie's disappearance and death. Next, he discounts the "general impression" fostered by Le Commerciel that Marie had been assaulted by a gang of men. When new information of a potential scene of the crime comes up (two boys find in the woods a makeshift stone stool and ripped garments including a handkerchief labelled "Marie Roget" at the scene), Dupin is able to figure out that this was probably a scene got up later. He also points out that one Madame Deluc's account of a "gang of miscreants" who had been at her inn a little bit before she heard screams nearby had a contradiction which suggested that it was not a gang but an individual who murdered Marie. Having discounted the various suggestions given by major newspapers, Dupin moves towards settling the truth. He first settles that the body is in fact Marie Roget's. Then, he suggests the need to look at "collateral" events that might seem irrelevant to investigators confined to the regular "rules" of investigation. One of the major collateral events which Dupin brings in is the testimony that Marie had been consorting with a naval officer during her first disappearance. Dupin establishes that the naval officer murdered Marie, that he dumped her body into the water from a boat, and that they need only to trace to whereabouts of the boat to discover where the murderer had gone. The narrative closes here without the full resolution of the case revealed; the point has simply been to give yet another example of Dupin's analytic capabilities in action. The final remarks go back to the notion of coincidences and probabilities, reminding the reader that though there are many coincidences between the case of Mary Rogers and Marie Roget, there can be no suggestion that the results of the latter will have bearing on the former. After all, rolling two sixes doesn't mean the third roll is more or less likely to be a six.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS (for both "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget")
Both of these stories show Dupin doing much of his work much as a literary critic would, comparing testimonies in "Murders" and newspaper clippings in "Mystery." The stories call attention to the textuality of major public events, revealing the major ways in which understanding of what has happened is constructed by a web of testimonies and accounts from the press. In order to get at the "truth," the detective figure must navigate his way through this web of textuality, and then construct an alternative account of the truth.

This calling of attention to textuality in Poe's fiction has important implications for "real life." Although in "Mystery" the narrator cautions against drawing conclusions from coincidences, Poe knows that the reader can't really help but to note parallels. One such parallel that must occur to the reader (but which by the narrator's logic, can't actually be drawn) is that the unreliability of textuality in the fiction increases the chances of the unreliability of textuality in real life. But, there are other possible relationships made available by fiction other than X increases the chance of Y. In fiction, X might allegorize Y, or X might simply suggest the possibility of Y. Perhaps these relationships help get the reader out of Poe's trap.

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

2011-04-20T09:08:00.000-07:00

Edition: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Norton Critical Editions)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Although Jekyll and Hyde has since won critical attention for its literary merits, its original publication as a shilling paperback led to audiences questioning the work's merit and morality, linking it to the sensationalistic, "low" fiction that tended to be published in the same format. Indeed, Jekyll and Hyde appeared in January of 1886, just a year after Stevenson's story called "Markheim" was published, a sensational Christmas "crawler" which critics have linked to Jekyll and Hyde. Stevenson's own account as far as the writing of Jekyll goes is that a nightmare gave him the primary idea for his plot.

SUMMARY:
The account opens with a character sketch of the lawyer, Mr. Utterson, who isn't particularly warm or interesting but "somehow lovable." He had a "catholicity of good-nature" which made him the welcome companion of many, including his kinsman, Richard Enfield, briefly described as "the well-known man about town." On a walk one day in the evening, Enfield and Utterson approach an abandoned house, and Enfield tells a story in connection with that house (The geography of where they are in London is unspecific). One night, Enfield witnessed a strange man trampling over a young girl child. Needless to say, this caused a ruckus, and Enfield collared the man, demanding reparations from him. The man's name is "Hyde" and he takes out a key, goes into the abandoned house, and returns with a check in someone else's name. Enfield doesn't reveal whose name the check is in, because it is a respectable one--Utterson says, however, that he knows what name Enfield refers to because of some prior information that he had.

Back at home that evening, Utterson re-reads a will he has drawn up for his childhood friend, Dr. Jekyll, which bequeaths all of his money and estate to this same "Hyde" which Enfield has mentioned. Disturbed, Utterson thinks that he should find out more about Hyde. Utterson manages to make Hyde's acquaintance, and is struck by his aversion to Hyde even though he can't quite pin down what is wrong with him. Before confronting Jekyll about this unsavory character, Utterson visits Dr. Lanyon, a close mutual friend. Lanyon talks about how he doesn't know what has been going on with Jekyll in recent years; only that the two friends had been estranged for some time. When Utterson ventures out to Jekyll's house, he sees Hyde going into Jekyll's laboratory through a back door. Jekyll isn't home, and this disturbs Utterson. When Utterson finally gets to confront Jekyll about Hyde, Jekyll assures Utterson that it isn't a case of blackmail, saying that he might be rid of Hyde whenever he might choose to be rid of him. Jekyll enjoins Utterson to promise that he will carry out his wishes as far as his will went.

Approximately one year elapses, and the illustrious M.P. Thomas Carew is brutally beaten to death in the street. Carew had in his possession a letter for Utterson. It turns out that a maid has seen Hyde beat Carew to death with a club which belonged to Jekyll. Utterson again visits Jekyll, who shows him a letter from Hyde that informs Jekyll he has escaped and will not return. Mr. Guest, a clerk, compares this letter to a letter of invitation which Utterson receives from Jekyll and suggests that the handwritings are similar. Utterson suspects Jekyll of forging a letter to cover up for Hyde. For a time after Hyde's disappearance, Jekyll seems to have recovered his former spirits, entertaining friends and even reconciling, it seems, with Lanyon. Suddenly though, Jekyll is out of sorts, and refuses to see his friends. Utterson is further disturbed when Lanyon falls ill and dies. Before his death, Lanyon had left Utterson with two letters: one in his own hand to be opened only by Utterson, and the other specifying that it should only be opened upon Henry Jekyll's disappearance or death.

One night, Poole, the Butler at Jekyll's house, calls on Utterson, fearing that something has gone wrong--specifically, that Hyde has murdered Jekyll and taken over his place. Banding together, Poole and Utterson break into Jekyll's lab, and find the dead body of Edward Hyde, apparently having commited suicide by ingesting cyanide. Near the body is Jekyll's will, altered to leave all of his money to Utterson. Utterson also finds a letter from Jekyll addressed to him which directs him to read Lanyon's account because he has "disappeared, under what circumstances I have not the penetration to foresee." Back in his study, Utterson reads Lanyon's account, which tells of how he was called upon to do a favor for Jekyll via a letter: he was to break into Jekyll's lab and to retrieve some items from a drawer and to deliver them to someone who would come for them at midnight. That "someone" is Hyde, who mixes the contents of the drawer (some powder, and red liquid) and drinks it. Upon drinking this concoction, Hyde is transformed into Jekyll. Lanyon says that the sight of this transformation has shaken him to the core such that he will die soon. The final document that is revealed is Henry Jekyll's own account, which fully reveals how Jekyll tried to divide the "good" and the "evil" sides of his humanity through a potion. At first, his transformation into "Hyde," his evil counterpart, offered him the liberty to live a sordid, underground life of vice in London without repercussions to Dr. Jekyll's good name and character. Soon, however, Dr. Jekyll would find himself spontaneously and involuntarily turning into Hyde--his purely evil self was getting stronger and stronger. At one point, he locked himself out of his lab, and so needed Dr. Lanyon's help to retrieve his potion. In the end, Hyde proved too strong for Jekyll, and he ran out of potion (he was unable to replicate the potion because the first batch contained an unknown impurity which turned out to be effective for the transformation). Jekyll has written this letter while on the last draughts of the old potion, and he ends saying that he will not know what will happen when he becomes Hyde permanently: "Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? Or will he find the courage to release himself at the last moment?"

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Understandably, much of the critical work on Jekyll and Hyde has focused its energies on the titular figures: is Hyde a kind of racial "other" of Jekyll? A doppelganger whose enjoyment of freedom, and liberty comments on the limits Victorian social roles have on Jekyll? A lower figure on the evolutionary scale than Jekyll (especially as Utterson described Hyde as "tryglodytic" or ape-like)? Or simply, the evil part of man's nature because of being tempted by Satan during the fall?

I want to turn my focus, then, on some of the other characters and how they function in the narrative. In other famous late Victorian stories like Stoker's Dracula, upstanding members of society assemble documents together for the purpose of successfully discovering and then defeating the monster. Stevenson's group of respectable "professional men"--Utterson, Lanyon, Guest, and also Poole might be included as one who occupies a specific professional role, though not middle-class as the rest--fail, however, to discover anything at all and in the end, the monster destroys himself. Yet the narrative's inclusion of documents in the form of Jekyll's will, his letters, and chapter headings and subject matter that like official accounts like newspaper articles or court testimony ("The Carew Murder Case," "Incident of the Letter," "Remarkable Incident of Dr. Lanyon") reminds us of works like Dracula, sensation fiction novels like Collins's Woman in White, or detective fiction. These official or official-like accounts, however, are impotent as far as solving the mystery goes. The mystery is controlled to the very end by the possessor of the secret: Jekyll (and then Lanyon, in Jekyll's service) compels Utterson not to open the letters which reveal the full truth to him until after everything has been fully-played out. The reason given for Utterson's following these directions is the bond of friendship, of male camaraderie of early years. This camaraderie and close bonds of male friendship, however, prove to ensure Jekyll's final isolation. He is alone from beginning to end.

The impotence, then, both of the documents/testimony and of male friendship (and furthermore, the complete absence of female characters in the novella) might comment on the limits of middle-class bachelors living respectable, professional lives. Before the great struggles of human import (good versus evil), these men are rather useless: Lanyon broke off ties with his supposedly close friend Jekyll because Jekyll was thinking about ideas beyond the scope of what was acceptable for the polite scientific community, and Utterson's rather bland inclination to follow the rules of male homosociality prevents him from getting to the truth sooner so that he might help his friend. Perhaps, actually, the very first lines that sketch out Utterson's character are the most damning: he is fond of saying, "I incline to Cain's heresy," in that he would "let [his] brother go to the devil in his own way." This, exactly, is the whole problem with men like Utterson: he is well-liked because he has a "catholicity of good-nature" but as far as connecting with others on any level more than a superficial and tolerant friendliness (which polite society expects from him), he is fearfully inept.

Selections from Mysteries of London by G.W.M. Reynolds

2011-04-19T11:20:00.000-07:00

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
G.W.M. Reynolds, having lived in France as a journalist for some time before returning to England, was inspired by the popular French series known as the Mysteries of Paris by Eugene Sue. The Mysteries of London commenced publication in 1844 as penny issue installments and ran uninterrupted until 1856. There ended up being a total of 624 weekly numbers. Each weekly issue was eight pages of double-columned text and an accompanying woodcut. Other types of editions included a monthly issue of four weekly parts stitched together and an annual volume of 52 numbers.

SUMMARY (Selections from the First Volume):
Prologue: The prologue introduces London as a "city of strange contrasts," in which the greatest civilization also has the greatest vices. It asks the reader to imagine two youths, one taking the path of "noisome dens of crime, chicanery, dissipation, and voluptuousness" and the other "amidst rugged rocks and acclivities...but on the wayside are the resting places of rectitude and virtue."

Chapter I-V: The first chapter sets the scene with a thunderstorm. Amidst the storm, an effeminate youth with chestnut colored hair has lost his way in a bad neighborhood of London (Smithfield). Afraid, he dashes into what seems to be an abandoned house. The room which he enters has a black square in the middle of it, and he hurries to a back room where there is a trapdoor. Two "ruffians" soon enter the first room, and the youth finds that he has no escape. He can do nothing but to listen to how the two ruffians are planning a heist at the Markham house, and to hear them tell tales of how the place they were in used to be the haunts of Jonathan Wild, perhaps the most infamous criminal of the 18th-century. The fearful youth overhears the two men telling stories about how many people must have been plunged to their death through the trap door. The youth is soon discovered as he tries to escape, and he is so paralyzed by fear that he cannot run and faints. The two ruffians drag him back in, and indeed drop him through the black square, presumably to his death. Later, however, the Markham residence receives an anonymous tip letting them know of a potential heist. The next chapter begins with the meeting of two brothers, Richard Markham (age 15) and Eugene Markham (age 19) issuing from the house and meeting at the top of a hill. Eugene has been home to beg his father to help him settle debts that he had incurred after joining a regiment, promising that he would from then on not give in to the dissipations that placed him into debt. Their father refused, however, and Eugene resolves to go forth and make his own fortune in the world. Richard and Eugene agree to meet again in twelve years at this same spot, to compare who has done better in the world. It so happens that four years later, the father dies, and leaves his fortune to Richard. One day, Richard (who has generally kept to himself, sheltered) makes the acquaintance of the Honorable Archur Chichester, who introduces him to aristocratic life, in which (Chichester says) it is okay for single gentleman to take mistresses. Chichester invites Richard to meet his baronet friend, and also his baronet friend's mistress, Mrs. Arlington.

Chapters VI-X:
Chapter VI introduces the setting of a boudoir in a beautiful villa where the paraphernalia of men and women's toilette are mixed up. A woman occupies the boudoir reading as a female servant enters. The woman is under the guardianship of one Mr. Stephens, who requires her to dress up as "Walter" (hence the male toilette items) even though she is "Eliza," the real Walter's sister. In the course of a conversation with one George Montague, who also knows the secret that she is in fact female, she reveals that she is the youth at the beginning in the thunderstorm. She had survived her plunge and escaped. She also tells how she once went to an opera and won an invitation to Mrs. Arlington's, and made the acquaintance of Richard Markham there. The narrative then flashes back to Richard Markham in Chapter X, telling how he falls in love with Mrs. Arlington who then tells him her own sad life story, in which George Montague tricked her father out of all of his money (asking her father to give him money for speculation) and then left her afterwards. Richard promises to restore her to honor.

Chapters XIII-XIX: Markham continues his "learning" about the many sordid experiences in London life. Among other places, he is taken to "The Hell," a gambling house where he witnesses the devastating scene of a young officer losing all of his money and then shooting himself in the head. The description of this act is lurid--the man blows his brains out and falls over in a pool of blood. A police officer shows up and shines lantern on Markham's face; though innocent, Markham manages to get himself taken to Newgate.

Chapter XVII-XXIII:
In a "den of horrors" (before commencing with this story, the narrator makes some polemical statements about how what is to follow is not exaggeration), a mother beats her two children, a boy of seven and a girl of five, for not bringing back enough money from a day of begging. When the father comes home, she concocts a plan for him to take the boy on burglary heists. Her other plan is to blind the eyes of her daughter so that she will draw more compassion to herself and hence more money. She doesn't get a chance to do this (thankfully); after coming back from a night of drinking, the father hits her for berating him and murders her when she turns against the children. When he hits her in the head, she falls over and hits her eye on the edge of the table and fractures her skull. The father pretends he is going to fetch a doctor and leaves his children with the corpse of their mother.

Chapters XXIII-XXIX:
Back at the Old Smithfield House, the scene of the first chapter, the "ruffians" Dick and Tom hide Bill Bolton, the man who has murdered his wife, in a vault below the house, adjacent to where "Walter" had made his escape. Markham meanwhile has landed in Newgate, where his idealistic notions of the English system of justice are broken. Even before they are judged, prisoners endure privations in Newgate. The narration laments that he can only talk to his advocate, Mr. Monroe (friend of his father's) through grates. The other prisoners talk about which judges are lenient, how to act in their own best interests, and also which judges can be bribed and so forth. Markham is slightly cheered, however, by Monroe's visit. At Newgate, Markham meets a "Republican," Thomas Armstrong, who tells him how he was let down by George Montague who took his charity and then revealed all of his political secrets to the government. Armstrong is a noble man who speaks out against the wrongs of government and social institutions and has hence landed himself in jail. When Markham says that he knows Montague, Armstrong's superior character leads him to say that he forgives Montague. Markham also meets someone quite different, a "resurrection man" or a body-snatcher (someone who digs up bodies from the grave and sells them for science experiments). The body-snatcher involves Markham in shady dealings, asking him to accept packages for him. Meanwhile, in his dungeon, Bill receives food from Dick, though Bill is kind of losing it, imagining many scary visions including hallucinations that he sees his murdered wife. He hears that officials have offered 100,000 pounds for his capture so he must nevertheless stay put. One time he comes up the stairs to receive food from Dick, and the officers catch sight of him. Bill thinks Dick has sold him out, and kills Dick with a knife he has just asked for. Bill find out that it is actually the resurrection man that has sold him out. Bill is taken to Newgate, of course.

Chapters XLII-LVI:
At The Dark House tavern in Spitalfields, Markham, having found his way out of jail, goes in seek of the resurrection man to square away his own innocence through paying him. At the tavern, the resurrection man is late, and he manages to get his innocence signed away by Pocock (actually Mr. Talbot, another crook and friend of the baronet) and consequently doesn't need to pay the resurrection man. In another chapter, the work of the body-snatchers is given in detail through a description of a heist performed by the resurrection man and his gang for the surgeon. They have precise and exacting methodologies and successfully exhume a body without signs of the grave being violated. In later chapters, we are introduced to one poor Ellen Monroe and her father; they are so poor that she agreed to work as a seamstress earning only sixpence for seventeen hours of work. Ellen's story is one of compelled ruin: forced by circumstances of poverty and wanting to help her poor father, she listens to a hag's advice and allows her face to be used for a statuary making plaster casts. From there, she poses half-naked for a sculptor, and then eventually, fully nude for a photographer. One day, she finds that she is no longer pure or chaste of mind. The narration blames the old hag for deliberately leading her down a "road to ruin."

Chapters LVIII-LX: This section has one of Reynolds's most famous depictions of upper class corruption: on New Year's Day, 1839, the resurrection man and the "cracksman" sends a young boy into Buckingham Palace in order to find out enough information about the palace so that a heist may be planned. The young boy successfully penetrates the interior of Buckingham palace and even sits on the throne when no one is looking. Queen Victoria is kind of a dupe in Reynolds's treatment of her; her advisers seem to keep the knowledge of suffering subjects from her. The chapter on New Year's Day takes a quick detour from narrative to wax polemical on the subject of the wealthy versus the poor. A social chart with the industrious classes at the bottom, and the sovereign at the top illustrates the unethical burden placed on the "industrious classes" to support the few rich members of society. The differences between their meals on New Year's Day are included to illustrate the central theme of "contrasts" with which the prologue began.

[Mysteries of London in its entirety is about 4.5 million words in length; the wrapping up of its plot includes Eugene (who has been a liar and a cheater under many assumed identities) dying at last in his brother's arms. The one brother turns out good and honorable, and the other evil and selfish, though they have both threaded their way through the labyrinth of London. Eugene ends up marrying Ellen Monroe, after she essentially becomes a depraved villain who blackmails Eugene into marriage. In a much happier ending, Richard Markham helps an Italian state, Castelcicala succeed in its struggle for independence, and ends up marrying Isabella, the daughter of the new ruler.]

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Reynolds's work has not generally been included in the Victorian canon for obvious reasons of its status as "lowbrow" literature, but recent scholars have taken up his works in order to study the cultural moment which its popularity reflected. Generic sources for Mysteries are pretty clear: the Newgate novel, melodrama, and gothic writing. In particular, the 1840s experienced a kind of "mystery writing" craze, and Reynolds's Mysteries perhaps reflects this movement's apogee.

The antagonism between Dickens and Reynolds largely reflects how the two men viewed approaches to solving social problems. Reynolds was not afraid to be polemical; certainly, the bold declaration of the contrasts between wealth and poverty in the prologue and elsewhere throughout the series makes Reynolds much more of a radical. The sensational aspects of his literature were calculated specifically to inspire the "masses"--Reynolds did not want to be a respectable writer for the middle-class reading public. Dickens, for his part, said that he held Reynolds's "name with which no lady's, and no gentleman's, should be associated," referring specifically to Reynolds's participation in an unruly Chartist open-air meeting in 1848. Yet, to modern audiences, one can't help but to point to many similarities between Dickens's serial writing and Reynolds's. Oliver Twist showcases Dickens's own indebtedness to the Newgate novel, and many contemporaries commented too on the melodramatic aspects of Dickens's stories. Both men importantly explored the notion of the Victorian poor as being compelled by circumstance towards evil ends, countering dominant discourses of the reform era which located evil as endemic amongst the poor. Thus, though these men imagined themselves as deeply at odds, the line between what was a respectable way of expressing such notions and what was not wasn't always clear. Reynolds used many of the same techniques as Dickens to appeal to his audiences's sympathies, only that he stretched them further and aimed at inspiring a more radical social movement.

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett

2011-04-17T14:03:00.000-07:00

Edition: The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (Signet Classics)
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Country of the Pointed Firs was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1896. Chapters 1-7 appeared in January, 8-11 in March, 12-15 in July, and 16-19 in September. The eventual book publication included some additions, including the two final chapters. Due to the success of Country, Jewett published a few more Dunnet Landing stories over the course of her lifetime. Country is widely considered to be Jewett's best work and has earned her a place in the canon of American regionalism, a late nineteenth-century literary movement in which authors detailed the history, topography, customs, and lives in a particular locality.

SUMMARY:
The novel opens with the narrator revisiting the coastal town of Dunnet in Maine where she had been two or three summers ago which she describes as "unchanged" and with "the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities." She lodges with a Mrs. Todd, an eccentric herbalist and widow who had for a long time been in love with someone other than her husband, a man above her station that she had been unable to marry. The narrator is a writer, and in order to get work done, she frequently takes herself away to an old schoolhouse. One time, after the funeral of an old woman named Mrs. Beggs, the narrator is interrupted at the schoolhouse by one Captain Littlepage, an old, retired sea-captain who many regard as a bit "flighty" in his advanced age. Captain Littlepage makes an audience of the narrator, telling her a story about when he was once shipwrecked while on their way to Fort Churchill on the Hudson Bay. There, he was rescued at an old missionary station, where he lodged with a man named Gafett, who told him a story about how his own ship had been wrecked, after he and his men met with some strange encounters in the arctic. They had seen a foggy town beyond where ships usually ventured, with foggy-shaped men: Gaffet posited that it was a sort of purgatory for souls crossing to the next world. The story clearly affects the narrator, though she is inclined to view his story as apocryphal.

One morning, the narrator agrees to accompany Mrs. Todd to Green Island, where her eighty-six year old mother lived. They take a boat out, catching a haddock fish on their way. The narrator spends some pleasant times at Green Island, meeting the bashful but gentle William, Mrs. Todd's brother, in addition to her mother the gracious hostess. They make chowder together, drink tea, and at Mrs. Todd's suggestion, they sing some songs. It seems that there is evidence of some strain between Mrs. Todd and William's relationship; the sister is much more sociable and living at Green Island wouldn't be enough for her, as pleasant as it is. At Green Island, Mrs. Todd shows the narrator some old daguerrotypes of her family and also shows her a spot where she and her husband Nathan frequented during their courtship. Nathan had been lost at sea before he could find out that her heart had already belonged to someone else.

A visitor named Mrs. Fosdick, whom the narrator describes as like a "strange sail" come upon the horizon, arrives at Mrs. Todd's. Though Mrs. Fosdick proves inconsiderate as far as her not giving exactly when she was going to arrive, she is an old girlhood friend of Mrs. Todd's. Together, they reminisce on old times and tell the narrator a story about "poor Joanna." Joanna was a cousin of Nathan Todd's, who decided after being jilted by her young lover to live all alone on an island called Shell-Heap Island. No one could convince her to live elsewhere, and she made do all alone, with friends sometimes sending her some gifts. Mrs. Todd recalls visiting her once soon after her marriage to Nathan. Joanna received her kindly, but reiterated her commitment to staying on the island as a kind of penance for having committed sin of being apart from everyone else. Sometime after Mrs. Fosdick's visit, the narrator, out of curiosity, visits the place of Joanna's old dwelling on Shell-Heap Island. There, she muses how in everyone "there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness."

In the third section, the narrator tells of going on a "great expedition" out to the Bowden family reunion. Mrs. Blackett, Mrs. Todd's mother, has come for the occasion. Together, the three women ride out on a country road over to the Bowden family reunion. The reunion is a grand affair, showcasing the "hidden fire of enthusiasm in the New England nature," an occasion for sharing old family anecdotes, history, and touching base with old acquaintances. The narrator is impressed particularly with some baked goods with "elaborate reading matter" on them pertaining to the Bowden family. Leaving the reunion, the narrator feels as if she has been amongst old acquaintances as well and muses on how "it is the old who really value such opportunities [as reunions]; as for the young, it is the habit of every day to meet their comrades--the time of separation has not yet come."

The final two chapters tell of the narrator getting to know an old fisherman, Elijah Tilley, near the end of the summer. He isn't used to much company after his wife died eight years ago, and up until that afternoon, the narrator and others had found men such as himself inaccessible and secretive. The two end up becoming friends, however, in the brief span of the afternoon. It is soon time for the narrator to depart for the summer was over. Mrs. Todd doesn't allow for an emotional goodbye, but takes care to put together all of the narrator's packages neatly, including with them a coral pin which she was supposed to have given Joanna years ago during her visit, but which Joanna refused. Joanna had told Mrs. Todd to wear it and to remember her by, for the "love of both of us" (referring to Nathan and herself).

CRITICAL ANALYSIS/APPROACH:
The Country of the Pointed Firs is classed as an exemplary piece of local color fiction or regionalism, genres which are generally thought of as builders of national identity after the trauma of the civil war. Such works often detail the diversity of the American landscape, sketching out the customs, landscapes, and peoples of a particular local area, often referring to these locales with a sense of reverence, nostalgia, and sentimental feeling.

Characteristic of local color fiction, Country has no sense of an unfolding plot, but reads more like a series of sketches, and certainly the narrator embodies much nostalgia for the kind of community which she describes. According to Willa Cather later on, Jewett had referred at times to her work as the "Pointed Fir Papers" and "sketches," but not ever as stories. These designations are important because they give the sense of the work as a kind of archival account of a particular area at a particular time--in this case, the dying, maritime coastal communities of Maine. Jewett's narrator's goal in compiling this archive of her summer amongst the inhabitants of Dunnet is not, however, a project to revive or bring back a way of life which she comes to have so much affection for. The community's valuation of old acquaintances, tradition, old family stories, and the imaginative accounts which come out of a wandering maritime life deeply strikes a chord with the narrator, but she does not seek to carry these values back to her city life. As she steams away from Dunnet after the summer, she makes a point of how the Dunnet coasts were "lost to [her] sight." Indeed, it seems that it is Dunnet's isolation, its difference and disconnection from modern city life that makes it special for the narrator. The story of Joanna might serve as a kind metonym for Dunnet: Joanna's story is more precious for the fact that she had chosen to remain alone until her death. Captain Littlepage's account of the isolated arctic town, or the life of Elijah Tilley might be additional metonyms that convey a similar sense of affective power which adheres in isolation. Looking at Mrs. Todd from a distance as the narrator departs, she finds her "mateless and appealing," ascribing an almost mystical sense to her apartness and wholeness, though unmarried and disconnected. As an "archive," these "papers" mimic this contradiction of affective cohesiveness and isolation: they tell of a deeply moving experience, but at the same time the "past-ness" of this experience isolates it from the world to which the narrator will return.

It is interesting, finally, to think about this kind of archival account of New England in relation to earlier, pre-civil war ones like Hawthorne's. Hawthorne's accounts (see entry on Twice Told Tales) are less nostalgic and instead posit a kind of living history, in which ghosts of the American past continue to haunt the present. Stories are passed on from generation to generation; an assumption of historical continuity underlies them. Nostalgia (as opposed to continuity) in Jewett's post-civil war era work posits a break with the past. This important difference suggests Jewett recalibrates contemporary America's relationship to New England, the place of its origins, as one which values yet definitively breaks with the past.