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Archive for the 'women's poetry' Category
Posted in 18th century, 20th century culture, 21st century culture, Costume drama, feminism, Film adaptations, film studies, Ghost stories, historical fiction, literary scholarly work, Movies, novels of sensibility, Outlander, post-colonialism, romance, Time-traveling tale, women's novels, women's poetry, women's art, women's lives, tagged heroine's text, Highlands movie, Outlander, post-colonialism on November 7, 2022| 3 Comments »
Brianna (Sophia Skelton) helping Claire (Caitriona Balfe) to bathe — after she is brought back to Fraser's Ridge from gang-rape (Season 5, Episode 12: Never My Love)
How many times have I put my hopes, my fears, my secret longings into the hands of a Being that can't see, can't hear, can't even feel. How many times have my prayers been answered? Time is a lot of the things that people say God is. There is pre-existing and having no end. There is the notion of a Being all powerful because nothing can stand against Time, not mountains, not armies. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of, all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And if Time is akin to God, I suppose that memories must be the devil …. (from script, the overvoice for Season 5, Episode 5, "Perpetual Adoration")
I loved this 6th season, which, while it basically adapts freely A Breathe of Snow and Ashes, like Season 5, also brings together material from a later and earlier book and re-arranges everything to the point the overall feel is very different (a handy list for viewing all recaps and commentary on Season 5). It is also, crucially and astonishingly to me, strongly dependent on the viewer having become immersed before and being totally involved before you begin. I'd say almost all the episodes had long sequences that were reflective and meditative, remembering and re-processing as it were — so how does this rivet new watchers? There is but one feature and it is all about trauma. We hear from all the major actors/characters, the central scriptwriters (those here since the first season), where they talk of each major character in terms of how processing grief is difficult; everyone processes grief differently; it's real, violent, volatile. They are searching for their identity, what is the way forward; their past holds them. Some terrible things have happened; is Claire Teflon? No. Jamie is giving her space and time to heal; she has nightmares .. the feature goes over each character but dwells on Claire, Ian ("The Hour of the Wolf"), and Fergus. I am telling myself I must go back and finish reading/listening to The Fiery Cross and then go on to A Breathe of Snow and Ashes.
I admit since I found the fifth and sixth Outlander books so muddled, so without forward thrust, that for much of the previous season and all of this one too I relied on The Outlandish Companion: Volume II by Diana Gabaldon
Episode 1: Echoes (a straight recap with video clip)
Ardsmuir (New Craigmiller Castle)
Just a first impression, and w/o benefit of reading the source book at all. As I said a while back I got through only half of book 5 (The Fiery Cross); I've never opened book 6 (A Breath of Snow and Ashes). You are at a considerable disadvantage when you've not read the book in these sorts of film adaptations meant in part to be faithful and using the book for deepening. A brief read of some comments on Season 6 show Roger Moore back in central place (I imagine his movements away to other shows became fewer when the pandemic hit and much new programming delayed or cancelled but I could be wrong) and Gabaldon interesting herself to the point she says that much that she cared about made the transfer but not all; we are told the opening is not in the book but taken from elsewhere.
Certainly the opening was a surprise and to me a somewhat demoralizing one. We are back at Ardsmuir, way before Lord John Grey took over, not just after Culloden, but just after Jamie gives himself up (1753) – I did recognize the actor who played the first general. It is such misery and what we see is slowly Jamie asserting himself and the men gaining minimal rights. An ambivalent relationship emerges between Jamie and a man who is at the head of Protestant faction: Tom Christie (Mark Lewis Jones). I felt the loss of Murtagh and found that Duncan Lacroix is no longer in the cast at all.
Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire, 1773 (after flashback) dressed with attitudes which signify they're older
Then we fast forward 20 years to 1773 and North America. I began more to enjoy it. I have to say that this episode reminded me of the opener in Episode 5: it moves slowly and is a gradual development of our favorite characters, showing us what they are at this point. I loved it but my feeling is if you are not already deeply immersed this may not grab you at all. Seasons 1-3 openers did, and Seasons 1-2 were especially exciting and melodramatic almost throughout. I grew to love 5, but I acknowledge others might not unless they were wrapped up in the characters already.
So basically Claire is slowly overcoming the trauma of the rape-beating; Jamie keeps close to her lest anyone attack her again; she is now inventing anesthetics but Brianna worries lest they be misunderstood and attacked again – part of the animus against Claire in Season 5 was her portraying herself as Dr Rawlings dispensing contraceptive information. And lo and behold there is Christie's daughter, Malva (Jessica Reynolds), who seems at first simply a fanatic evangelical type sniffing around the "phosporus," saying this is the stuff of the devil.
Yes Tom Christie turns up with his family; he saw the ad and wants to be part of the settlement. Jamie, a bit reluctant, nonetheless accepts them in. Tom is a tyrant to his family, and his son is going bad, partly a result of this repression and bullying. Marsali (Lauren Lyle) is pregnant again, but this time she has a bruise on her arm, and soon it emerges Fergus (Cesar Dombey) has become an alcoholic. She is deeply ashamed and he's in denial: we are given clues some of this is the result of his having one hand and not being of service like the others. Problem here is this was not a problem before: he was always as active as ever (partly from Jamie's influence but that's not gone). Brianna and Roger (Richard Rankin) just there, in support (not given much to do beyond that). Young Ian (John Bell) active in hunting animals with bows and arrows; there is a conversation where he brings up the idea that perhaps Claire could help him change his destiny as he sees it with respect to his wife. This is the first we've heard of her explicitly.
Central scene is love-making, gentle and tender between Claire and Jamie – as befits this grandparent couple. Both of them have bad dreams or memories: Jamie's shorter (of Ardsmuir) and Claire's of the rape and beating. We see them as kind grandparents to Brianna/Roger's children and one of Fergus/Marsali's.
Plot-design of episode; governor's aide arrives early to ask Jamie to become a chief crown agent dealing with Indians; he does not want to involve himself (as he refused in episode 5 – reminding me of Ross Poldark's reluctance). The governor is going to tax the Frasers heavily for not agreeing to take on Indian tasks. But what happens is the threatening presence our enemy group (one must have a true villains) are what is left over the Brown gang, headed by Richard Brown (Chris Larkin), the brother of man who instigated the rape of Claire (hated her for helping his wife, his daughter) and whom Jamie murdered and returned in a body bag. The Browns demand that Jamie punish Tom Christie for stealing an object and Jamie is forced to whip him (we see a flogging of Jamie at the opening in Ardsmuir). Jamie hates this. Jamie now told Lionel (Ned Dennehy) will become the Indian agent. So at the end of the episode Jamie relents and takes the position as it would be dangerous for them, for the Indians, for everyone for such a gang to have power.
Episode 2: Allegiances (another recap, this time with still, more evaluative)
Tom Christie (Mark Lewis Jones)
I've watched Episode 2 now and find that it's making me very curious about A Breath of Snow and Ashes. I have the feeling the film team has done the same thing they did for Season 5, from (more or less) The Fiery Cross. They have picked a few of the episodes, and rewritten and rewoven them to fit a theme (or themes) across this season. Despite the re-appearance of Roger Moore's name in key places (writing too), it has the quietude of the fifth season, with this difference, I am continually worried or feeling anxious about our six principals: Jamie and Claire; Roger and Brianna; Marsali and Fergus.
The threat is from the people Jamie has allowed to build and live in their compound (the religious ideas of Tom Christie are paranoid and aggressive, including an obviously misogynistic inspired distrust of Claire as a witch), and now the Indians that Jamie has (paradox this) become an agent to the crown (George III) to. Every doctoring deed Claire does is worrying, and now Brianna, matching Claire's invention of ether, invented matches.
Still brings out the quietly comic feel of the operation
Story: it opens with Claire trying to mend Tom Christie's more crippled hand, which she says she will have to operate using ether on. As in later conversations when Christie brings up the idea God doesn't want him to have a good hand, Claire refutes this with secular and ironic understanding. Marsali's pregnancy is quite advanced and Claire now with Malva (dangerous because Christie's daughter-in-law) goes to take care of Marsali. The baby is near birth, but something is wrong, and Claire dare not do a C-section, for that would kill Marsali. Claire also gets out of Marsali, the bruises are from Fergus; they fight intensely over his drinking. Jamie deputies Roger to go get Fergus who is very drunk when Roger arrives, and Roger becomes disgusted and angry with Fergus, who finally agrees to come.
Fergus with Claire
A second thread moving through this is Jamie and Ian's overnight visit to the Indians who are asking Jamie to ask the governor to give them guns, ammunition. Jamie consults Claire as to the future allegiance of the Cherokee and she says she doesn't know as she did not read that far into American history: this Is part of a scene where they make love.
Back to visit to Indians overnight: a supposedly comic scene of two Indian women trying to have sex that night with Jamie, stopped finally by Ian speaking to them. Jamie will only promise to consider asking the governor.
Fergus comes and he is transformed (one hopes more than momentarily) to the Fergus we knew: sweet, loving, he begins to make love to Marsali, as enormous as she is, sucking her breasts. He says in the brothel they did that to help women give birth. All leave the couple alone, but and eventually hear the baby coming. We see Marsali giving birth with Claire and Malva on either side, also Brianna there, but when Fergus takes the child after a few minutes he is horrified ("nain" he cries and runs off): the child is perhaps a Downs Syndrome baby; Marsali loves it immediately.
The thread of the Christie group appears again with Christie building a church; and an old woman in the group dying. Roger is to be minister at the funeral and lo and behold she awakens momentarily. Claire explains this – a semi-comic, semi-deeply felt scene ensues with the old woman alive but dying still is what happens. Again the modern ideas that Claire brings to this endanger her in the eyes of these people. A little later Jamie comes up to their compound and queries this building of a church before houses; Tom Christie stands up for this idea, and Jamie appears to allow it as long as the new church is neither Catholic nor Protestant specifically but rather a meeting house for all – he refers Tom to the opening at Ardsmuir where he, Jamie, resolved constant fighting by joining the Freemasons and telling the others too and thus defusing religious conflicts.
Bree and Roger, playful
Brianna and Roger are seen having private time together with her hurt because over the meal they had just before Marsali went into labor, everyone thought good news was a new baby, when it was her invention of matches. Only Claire seemed to understand how important and convenient these are. It's frustrating to Brianna that her abilities have nowhere to flourish. They talk of how they have decided to stay permanently and how they have been trying to have another child with no result as yet. We see Brianna a little later walking to stables where she meets Ian. She overhears him praying for a child he apparently had with his Mohawk wife. Ian is bothered by Jamie's refusal to ask the Governor – a refusal that the Indians learned of and came to be angry over. Claire says if Jamie gives them arms, they could end up the Fraser's enemy as the Frasers right now are on the British (not rebels) side. Ian says that nonetheless the Indians deserve weapons if they are to be endlessly displaced by these white colonialists.
In another scene (I'm not sure exactly where these all occur in the sequence) Brianna and Jamie sit on the porch together talking and cleaning their two guns. Brianna tells Jamie that Ian had a child who is probably still with the Mohawk.
A small later episode shows Jamie talking to Mr Bug about some supplies he is taking with Kessie to trade; up to them comes Mrs Bug and Lizzie (Caitlin O'Ryan) and we see that Kessie and Lizzie have a flirtation going on.
The episode concludes with Jamie writing a long letter to the governor (at first from some dialogue we assume it is to his Aunt Jocasta); late at night Claire comes out of the bedroom to ask about the letter. He confides to her he is going to give it to the Major (then with them) to give to the governor to ask for the Indians to have guns. She says I thought you were against this. He replies that he now realizes that Ian's allegiance is to the Mohawk, to these Indians, and that he, Jamie's, allegiance is to Ian so he will do as Ian asked him to.
Just about all these scenes are quiet thoughtful ones, filled with mood and complex feelings – even quieter and less overt aggressive action than Season 5. I find I have no trouble staying up and watching intensely, ever worried for everyone and caring about them. Snow on the ground showing it's winter. The whole episode is beautifully photographed throughout.
Episode 3: Temperance (detailed straight recap, emotional, with still)
Jamie offering Malva Christie friendship
I am now not puzzled altogether about the curious tone in which people who wrote about Season 6 when it was airing on Starz: the third episode is as oddly quiet, non-violent, non-active as the first two. Season 5 did have violence and action by the third episode – the fight with the Browns, then regulators versus the royal governor. The first sign we will have any is a newsletter that appears at the end of the episode telling of the Boston Tea Party. It's not called that in the paper, but Claire refers to it that way. This is again a series of mostly non-violent incidents which are exemplary in different ways.
I looked at the summary of A Breath of Snow and Ashes in the 2nd Outlandish Companion and find it as unreadable as I found the last 2/3s of The Fiery Cross – there is no thrust forward but rather stories about our characters as they live an isolated life on Fraser's Ridge. They are interwoven but again I'll tell each incident or thread together as I cannot remember the order they are in as there is no weaving forward to some conclusion; they are self-contained. Another problem with these episodes is Jamie and Claire are too perfect, as are Roger and Brianna. The only un-exemplary character is Fergus – for Ian is also without any real flaw. I love them myself but recognize the incidents lack inner conflict. Yes, Claire carries on being haunted by images of Lionel Brown who insulted and raped her and uses ether sometimes to sleep. But that is not enough
By contrast, The Crown (Netflix series about British monarchy, 20th century) has shows Philip to be very flawed while we feel for him; and Elizabeth to be conflicted over how to behave towards him, angry and also torn in her role as queen.
So we have Tom Christie giving in and coming to have his hand healed – cut and re-formed and sewn the way Claire did Jamie's hand – the man refuses ether (horrified by the idea) and won't even bite on a piece of wood but reads aloud passages from the Bible with Jamie chiming in and holding him down slightly – he does scream from the pain. By the end of the hour (this time it is just an hour) he is healed, grateful, and takes away a copy of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, saying he thought novels were evil until he heard Jamie telling aloud tales at Ardsmuir. Now he agrees they are forms of escape and distraction. However, when he reads the book, we look over his shoulder and see him reading one of Fielding's many ironic passages about love, and he closes the book, and returns it with a note to the effect "this is filth" and he had thought better of Claire.
Another incident occurs when Roger sees a baby in a basket floating on the river towards a water fall and its death. He jumps in, barely saving it, all the while realizing a group of boys had done this. They include Germaine, Marsali and Fergus's son. He is incensed at their idea this child is a demon – because it's a dwarf. The boys are scolded fiercely and then required to turn up to Jamie who gives them the choice of touching a red-hot iron or the baby. They had also thought they'd be burned if they touched the child. Of course, they choose the child and find they are not burned, and the baby behaves sweetly.
Marsali (Lauren Lyle) spinning
Roger has become the minister of the place and we see him deliver a sermon against superstitions about dwarves using the Biblical story of Moses. Brianna seems to have built a spinning wheel, and we watch Marsali learning to spin fibre into yarn or thread. Brianna needs to be doing something too.
Marsali is not having much success stopping Fergus from drinking to excess all the time; now he blames himself for having such a child. He tells Claire how he saw dwarves treated in Paris – it sounds like the dwarves here are Downs Syndrome children. Claire says none of that will happen now for they will take care of Henri-Christian. Fergus wants to know what happens to the child after they all age and die. At one point the Frasers are collecting rent (in just the way of the Highlanders) and one couple find Fergus "stinks" and say he is responsible for his freak child. He physically attacks them. Later Marsali says to Claire, Fergus has promised to stop drinking; but when he comes home, he is drunk as ever. She throws him out and says she'd rather have no man than a drunk one. And later in the episode Jamie is out in the wood and from afar sees Fergus slash his wrist badly; Jamie saves Fergus, and there is a scene of traumatic talk, with Jamie the father hugging his son and when they return it does seem as if Fergus will reform and accept himself again and his new son.
Ian and Malva are striking up a friendship. I had mistaken and the young man I thought her husband is her brother — but there is an important hint here: they are behaving as if husband and wife. We are of course to see love blooming in Malva, but Ian seems attracted. Touching dialogues about what they believe, her father's cruelty (in one scene we see the father whipping her now that his hand is fine), but she mentions that her father would be upset if she had a "lover" and it's implied even more were he like Ian – Indian like, not Christian. Ian says he does not know what he believes.
Somewhat improbably Brianna builds a glorious spinning wheel. She needs to do something but it is Marsali who sits turning fibres into thread or yarn.
Lizzie makes an appearance at one point and again we see she is courted by Kezzie. She appears very happy in her position as working beloved servant-companion.
Christie tells Jamie and Claire his group of people have accepted the offer of the Browns to protect them – Claire tells Christie this is a bad move.
The end of the episode has Major Macdonald returning with the guns for the Cherokee, and bringing the newsletter about the Boston Tea Party. Claire says "the storm" (or war ) has started.
For my part I love watching it because I'm fond of the central six characters and worry about them.
Episode 4: Hour of the Wolf (recap from an amusingly anachronistic POV, with 2 clips!)
Ian (John Bell) and his central rival, Wakyo'teyehsnonhsa (Morgan Holmstrom?)
Another quiet mostly retrospective and reflective hour — it's curious that is the atmosphere because it includes a challenge and duel where one of two people could have been murdered. But no one is.
Ian's Mohawk name was Wolf's brother, and so the meaning of the title is episode devoted to Ian's history, inner life, and watching him try to come to terms with what happened.
It opens with him remembering how he was initiated by rituals into the Mohawks, fell in love with girl whose name was so hard to pronounce, he called her Emily. They were happy but after the second bloody miscarriage, Ian was told the gods were against him being part of the tribe; Emily was given to the man called his brother, and he coerced into leaving.
Also early in the episode before they get to the camp, Jamie is giving Fergus the task of going with goods from the farm to trade for things needed, make money. Fergus is not drunk and says he knows what Milord is doing. Keeping him occupied. Jamie says he needs these things done, and as Fergus had said remembering their time in Edinburgh as printers, Fergus is a good businessman trader. Some of this was too didactic, but it's beautifully acted and the film landscape and music and feeling is good.
These memories are prompted by a trip Jamie takes with Ian to the Cherokee to give them the guns. (Again as I've done before I am not trying to recap the episode because I'm not following the interlace. Some of the above is in a flashback Ian has when Jamie and he arrive at the Cherokee camp and discover Mohawks there, and (what a coincidence), just this brother who took Emily from Ian.
Before we get there Major (I'm not sure of this name) MacDonald has been at Fraser's Ridge handed over these arms, and Brianna told Jamie that 60 years from now these Indians will be forced off the land — well after the revolution. So they will need these armaments. When they get to the camp, Jamie, now reflectively ethical, tells this to the chief. He explains his knowledge by his wife's extra powers (so too his daughter). This is of course the cruel (infamous) Trail of Tears inflicted on these people during Andrew Jackson's administration.
Another trader, a Scot, Alexander Cameron is there, and a fight erupts between him and Wolf's Brother, and that's the duel. Cameron cheats and turns to shoot before Wolf's brother but Ian on the alert, shoots the gun (or hits it with a strong arrow), knocking it out of his hand. Wolf's brother's turn, but he does not kill the begging man, rather shoots in the sky. Ian acknowledges to Wolf's Brother he can bear him having Emily (there appears to have been a daughter and be a son).
Back at Fraser's Ridge, Claire is practicing her invented ether on Lizzie and Kezzie and Jo (I suspect the same actor plays these twins). It is worrying since Malva is watching, as her apprentice and she swears she will not tell the father, and looking at Claire's notebooks, Malva appears not to take these as spells of a witch. Or so she says, but there is something insinuating about her.
At the close of the episode when Jamie comes home, Claire rushes to where he is, and in a barn they make love. The last still shows Malva watching them through a key hole.
Ian still has Rollo; in the previous episodes we've seen Adso drinking milk, sitting on the bed with Marsali …
What they must have done here is taken a group of incidents and meditations about Ian and drawn them together with knowledge of the coming wars against the Indians (the previous episode referred to the Boston Tea Party and heating up rebellion). Jamie again says she cannot be a rebel and Indian agent for the crown so he must give up this agency.
Upcoming: Episodes 5-8
From one of the many moments of consolation, grieving, holding together …
Gentle and I hope forgiving and flexible reader, I realize two years have gone by since I blogged on Season 5, and going further back, all these blogs began in 2017 (3 years after the first season aired). What's more at first I was putting them on my Reveries under the Sign of Austen (where many remain, except those here on JimandEllen). At first I deemed them based on a woman's quintessentially woman's historical romance, with a woman at the center, but then realized how many of the film team were men and how often every effort was made to create a male focus, so I also blogged here. Nowadays I'm here because the series is so popular, it seems to me to have a non-gender specific audience, i.e., both men and women (even if women are the greater number of viewers).
I confess to blogging less often and using the images I find on the Internet available openly instead of snapping my own as I watch. It's easier, less time-consuming, and these are most of them images the film-makers have made readily available to the public.
I am doing my best and my dream is now that when I stop the teaching to write about the Outlander books and films, together with the Poldark books and films.
Annie Leibovitz — Through a Lens; Elizabeth Bishop — The Art of Losing through Books, Maps, Illustrations
Posted in 20th century culture, biography, feminism, film studies, Foremother Poetry, literary scholarly work, Movies, Poldark, visual art, women's poetry, women's art, women's lives, womens' films, tagged book illustrations, heroine's text, male violence, photography, women artists on January 31, 2019| 9 Comments »
Scarlett Johansson by Annie Leibovitz — although Johansson is not capable of nuanced subtlety she was right for Mary Boleyn (the comments has a biography of Mary Boleyn)
Johansson with Javier Bardem (I remember Before Night Falls), another Leibovitz concoction
Instead of the famous "Art of Losing:"
I will be good; I will be good.
I have set my small jaw for the ages
and nothing can distract me from
solving the appointed emergencies
even with my small brain
— witness the diameter of my hatband
and the depth of the crown of my hat.
I will be correct; I know what it is to be a man.
I will be correct or bust.
I will love but not impose my feelings.
I will serve and serve
with lute or I will not say anything.
If the machinery goes, I will repair it.
If it goes again I will repair it again.
My backbone
through these endless etceteras painful.
No, it is not the way to be, they say.
Go with the skid, turn always to leeward,
and see what happens, I ask you, now.
I lost a lovely smile somewhere,
and many colors dropped out.
The rigid spine will break, they say —
bend, bend.
I was made at right angles to the world
and I see it so. I can only see it so.
I do not find all this absurdity people talk about.
Perhaps a paradise, a serious paradise where lovers hold hands
and everything works.
— I am not sentimental.
— Elizabeth Bishop,
One blog which should have been two: I got carried away with a woman artist and foremother poet , but it is really not overlong (if you will only visit twice; come two times — why not?):
The second woman photographer the OLLI at Mason class on American Woman Photographers was to watch a movie about and discuss was Annie Leibovitz. In the event, there was a weather report telling everyone in Northern Virginia we were in for some mighty brutal cold and it would rain ice, snow, and just pelt us all. Since the gov't agencies in charge of cleaning and making the roads safe are underfunded in Fairfax (where the OLLI at Mason resides), all schools were closed as of the early morning. I can't say the day was warm, but we were nowhere near Antartica, and the precipitation began around 4 when it was still 39F, so it began to rain and eventually it did rain ice for a while and then later 3 inches of snow. The next day the same story: everything closed when it need not have been. So the American Poetry class on Elizabeth Bishop's poetry was also cancelled.
However, the kindly and well-meaning (and frustrated) volunteer teachers sent everyone the URL to the American Masters film of Leibovitz we would have seen, and I watched it by myself and now share it with you
What the film suggests is that Annie Leibovitz is not a woman who can articulate or talk about her art in any coherent reasoned way, at the same time as she takes brilliant shots, has an eye for the arresting costume, gesture, featured actor or actress or somehow semi-numinous person and can capture a portrait of them either in movement among others or facing the viewer which is intensely revealing or (less articulately) riveting to the memory so that we remember the image and want a copy ourselves.
This is unexpected since her longest life partner (15 years) was one of the more articulate writers and speakers of the 20th century, Susan Sontag. Years ago I went to an exhibit of photography by Leibovitz featuring Sontag's life. She said in the film she loved best photographing beloved family members and friends and those she had been intimate with, could feel utterly comfortable with and hoped her subject felt likewise: ""You don't get the opportunity to do this kind of intimate work except with the people you love, the people who will put up with you. They're the people who open their hearts and souls and lives to you. You must take care of them."
She had three daughters (two by surrogate mothers) who mean a great deal to her. Iconic with a dog:
Beyond the bare outline offered by wikipedia, you can read this life story. The magazine Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker have been important in her life. In the film she admits she had periods where taking drugs with her subjects and alone took over too much. Although presented to tempt a student into buying an essay and submitting it as his or her own (plagiarism), this critical analysis of Leibovitz's art should give us pause: there is voyeurism, sensationalism and a strong bent towards the commercially riveting. You will not find on this blog the notorious photograph of John Lennon clinging to Yoko Ono as if he were cat seeking comfort from his mother, in fetus-like posture. Also not here her many nudes. She photographed to make humane political arguments (so to speak) but also powerful and vulnerable people whose reputation or integrity has since been questioned (see A Decade of Power). She's published books of photographs, of celebrities; many glamor shots of stars looking ethereally or sexily beautiful. Men too. She captured Mick Jagger and his band leaping through the air.
I was startled by the film, for I found some images I had been drawn to and taken off the Net to save were by her. Especially this of Keira Knightley as Dorothy on the yellow brick road; her famous friends are actors who I recognize but cannot place
In sum, her art is arresting, voyeuristic insightful — she captures the gothic within us. Susan Sontag. Her Three Children too.
This photograph pf Elizabeth Bishop is not by Annie Leibovitz:
The line from one of her poems: "the island within" is its caption, and that she was "the loneliest person who ever lived."
She is wondrous at traveling through books: her opening lines are often her best moments and her thesis:
"Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete
Thus should have been our travels:
serious, engravable.
The Seven Wonders of the World are tired
and a touch familiar, but the other scenes,
innumerable, though equally sad and still,
are foreign. Often the squatting Arab,
or group of Arabs, plotting, probably,
against our Christian Empire,
while one apart, with outstretched arm and hand
points to the tomb, the Pit, the Sepulcher.
The branches of the date-palms look like files.
The cobbled courtyard, where the Well is dry,
is like a diagram, the brickwork conduits
are vast and obvious, the human figure
far gone in history or theology,
gone with its camel or its faithful horse.
Always the silence, the gesture, the specks of birds
suspended on invisible threads above the Site,
or the smoke ising solemnly, pulled by threads.
Granted a page alone or a page made up
of several scenes arranged in cattycornered rectangles
or circles set on stippled gray,
granted a grim lunette,
caught in the toils of an initial letter,
when dwelt upon, they all resolve themselves.
The eye drops, weighted, through the lines
the burin made, th elines tha tmove apart
like ripples above sand,
dispersing storms, God's spreading fingerprint,
and painfully, finally, that ignite
in watery prismatic white-and-blue.
Entering the Narrows at St. Johns
the touching bleat of goats reached to the ship.
We glimpsed them, reddish, leaping up the cliffs
amog the fog-soaked weeds and butter-and-eggs.
And at St. Peter's the wind blew and the sun shone madly.
Rapidly, purposefully, the Collegians marched in lines,
crisscrossing the great square with black, like ants.
In Mexico the dead man lay
in a blue arcade; the dead volcanoes
glistened like Easter lilies.
The jukebox went on playing 'Ay, Jalisco!'
And at Volubilis there were beautiful poppies
splitting the mosaics; the fat old guide made eye.
In Dingle harbor a golden length of evening
the rotting hulks held up their dripping plush.
naked and giggling against our knees,
I saw what frightened me most of all:
A holy grave, not looking particularly holy,
one of a group under a keyhole-arched stone baldaquin
open to every wind from the pink desert.
An open, gritty, marble trough, carved solid
with exhortation, yellowed
as scattered cattle-teeth;
half-filled with dust, not even the dust
of the poor prophet paynim who once lay there.
In a smart burnoose Khadour looked on amused.
Everything only connected by 'and' and 'and.'
Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges
of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)
Open the heavy book. Why couldn't we have seen
this old Nativity whlie we were at it?
— the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light,
an undisturbed, unbreathing flame,
colorless, sparkles, freely fed on straw,
and, lulled within, a family with pets
— and looked and looked our infant sight away.
In a way she's competing with the pictures: I've read
it somewhere that the essence of poetry is in the line;
the unit the line. Each of her lines is a world in itself,
and filled with more serious true content than the
illustrations she looks at.
She begins with the idea that the illustrations tell us what we should have seen, but soon moves on to suggesting that they tell us to be false tourist and not to see what is there.
What is there? This poem comes from a 1955 book called _A Cold Spring_, and we see that the anxiety, fear and prejudice against those who are
different from us which is fuelling the nonsense of the "war on terror" so that we are to ignore every and all statements of the people who rebel against the US in the countries we occupy or use our military to enable other powerful groups to occupy. All these people are simply plotting with hatred against the Christian empire — we are told.
She is as sceptical as Jhabvala. This is the content of the non-western women writer of women's books, but note here it's not used to argue for accepting individual repression or escaping it. This world is too relentlessly simply what it is: each living unit intensely going about its egoistic appetitive unexamined life. Bishop records some compassion: the dead man in Mexico, dead nature, the little pockmarked prostitutes.
Yes it is all very frigthening. Maybe better to look at the 2000 illustrations and study the concordance to them and keep our mind on them.
Nothing explained. What have we been missing all this while. What as children we are to allow our time to pass entertained in this way. We should be looking at that dark ajar.
This seems to me as great a poem at Rich's "Diving into the Wreck." Maybe Bishop is however distracting us by these illustrations
I find I never wrote a foremother poet blog for Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79); much as I'm deeply touched by some of her life-writing poetry, her plangent controlled desperation, I find her use of geography and mythic creatures makes up a wall of avoidance I can't get past except by speculation, which is unsatisfactory. The biography sent us omitted her lesbianism, her years of ceaseless alcholism, that her positions as a teacher were gotten for her by the elite clique of American poets she belonged to (by origin, her family she came from the Boston Brahmin group, which included Robert Lowell who was physically abusive to her as he was to Elizabeth Hardwick). Her early life was very sad, but so too her later sometimes harrowing one abroad and in the US. Strange the flight to Brazil: what did she think of the reactionary gov'ts? No clue is offered. She could not have ignored them altogether — or could she with her books, maps, illustrations. Her work & life crucially significant. Her sad life, her wonderful poems. I print unusual ones: her art of losing through books, illustrations, maps, and alas alcohol and retreat
Don McCullin, from Landscapes: Somerset Levels Near Glastonbury 2010
This New Yorker essay by Claudia Roth Pierpont is superb: Elizabeth Bishop's Art of Losing. She left a fat book of letters, many on punctuation. She is said to be "the most popular woman poet" after Emily Dickinson (!). I can only understand that if it's like the popularity of Robert Frost: from misreading or preference for distanced strangeness (and geography) Many of her poems will be well-known to readers of modern American poetry, but here is one you may not have come across:
by Elizabeth Bishop
I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling finger-tips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow.
There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, hat sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep
She was mistress of the sonnet form.
And this is so kindly to another women poet whose poetry is deliberately set up to keep her life and us at a distance, who apparently was unable to get from under her tyrannical narrow-minded mother's domination, not even to find an apartment of her own far away from far off Brooklyn:
Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore
From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning
please come flying.
In a cloud of fiery pale chemcals,
please come flying,
to the rapid rollng of thousands of small blue drums
descending out of the mackerel sky
over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water,
Whistles, pennants and smoke are blowing. The ships
are signaling cordially with multitudes of flags
rising and falling like birds all over the harbor.
Enter: two rivers, gracefully bearing
countless little pellucid jellies
in cut-glass epergnes dragging with silver chains.
The flight is safe; the weather is all arranged.
The waves are running in verses this fine morning.
Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe
trailing a sapphire highlight,
with a black capefu of butterfly wings and bon-mots,
with heaven knows how many angels all riding
on the broad black brim of your hat,
Bearing a musical inaudible abacus,
a slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons,
Facts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan
is all awash with morals this fine morning,
so please come flying.
Mounting the sky with natural heroism,
above the accidents, above the malignant movies,
the taxicabs and injustices at large,
while horns are resounding in your beautiful ears
that simultaneously listen to
a soft uninvented music, fit for the musk deer,
For whom the grim museums will behave
like courteous male bower-birds,
for whom the agreeable lions lie in wait
on the steps of the Public Library,
eager to rise and follow through the doors
up into the reading rooms,
We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping,
or play at a game of constantly being wrong
with a priceless set of vocabularies,
or we can bravely deplore, but please
With dynasties of negative constructions
darkening and dying around you,
with grammar that suddenly turns and shines
like flocks of sandpipers flying,
Come like a light in the white mackerel sky,
come like a daytime comet
with a long unnebulous train of words,
from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bride, on this fine morning,
Apologies for not being able to replicate the stanzas.
Bishop to Moore, Elizabeth to Marianne is a beautiful beautiful love poem of longing, friendship as love. It reminds me of a poignant letter by Jane Austen to Mary Lloyd, looking forward so eagerly to when they will be together again. I'm glad to see Jane and Mary did have their night on the floor together, their reading, walking, talking. It appears that Marianne in Brooklyn did not make it to Elizabeth in Manhattan.
One last:
"Crusoe in England"
A new volcano has erupted
the papers say, and last week I was reading
where some ship saw an island being boonr:
at first a black fleck – basalt, probably —
rose in the mater's binoculoars
and caught on the horizon like a fly.
They named it. But my poor old island's still
un-rediscovered, un-renamable.
None of the books got it right.
Well I had fifty-two
miserable, small volcanoes I could climb
with a few slithery strides —
volcanoes dead as ash heaps.
I used to sit on the edge of the highest one
and count the others standing up,
naked and leaden, with their heads blown off …
My island seemed to be
a sort of cloud-dump. All the hemisphere's
left-over clouds arrived and hung
above the craters — their parched throats
were hot to touch.
Was that why it rained so much …
I often gave way to self-pity.
"Do I deserve this? I suppose I must,
I wouldn't be here otherwise. Was there
a moment when I actually chose this?
I don't remember, but there could have been."
What's wrong about self-pity, anyway?
With my legs dangling down familiar=ly
over a crater's edge, I told myself
"Pity should begin at home." So the more
pity I felt, the more I felt at home.
There was one kind of berry, a dark red.
I tried it, one by one, and hours apart.
Sub-acid, and not bad, no ill effects,
and so I made home-brew. I'd drink
the awful, fizzy stuff
that went straight to my head
and play my home-made flute
(I think it had the weirdest scale on earth)
and, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats.
Home-made, home-made! But aren't we all?
I felt a deep affection for
the smallest of my island industries,
No, not exactly, since the smallest was
a miserable philosophy.
Because I didn't know enough.
Why didn't I know enough fo something?
Greek drama or astronomy? The books
I'd read were full of blanks;
the poems — well, I tried
reciting to my iris-beds,
"They flesh upon that inward eye,
which is the bliss …" The bliss of what?
One of the first things that I did
when I got back was look it up.
Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of food
and love, but they were pleasant rather
than otherwise. But then I'd dream of tings
like slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it
for a baby goat. I'd have
nightmares of other islands
stretching away from mine, infinities
of islands, islands spawning islands,
like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs
of islands, knowing that I had to live
on each and every one, evntually,
for ages, registering their flora,
their fauna, their geography.
Just when I thought I couldn't stand it
another minute longer, Friday came,
(Accounts of that have everything all wrong.)
Friday was nice.
Friday was nice, and we were friends.
If only he had been a woman …
He'd pet the baby goats sometimes,
and race with them, or carry one around.
— Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.
And then one day they came and took us off.
Now I live here, another island,
that doesn't seem like one, but who decides? …
I'm bored, too, drinking my real tea,
surrounded by uninteresting lumber …
The local museum's asked me to
leave everything to them:
the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes,
my shedding goatskin trousers
(moths have got in the fur),
the parasol that took me such a time
remembering the way the ribs should go.
It still will work but, folded up,
looks like a plucked and skinny fowl.
How can anyone want such things?
— and Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles
seventeen years ago come March.
(Geography III, 1976)
A painting by Doreen Fletcher of vanishing England ("The architecture of the ordinary"), the area in London called Spitalfields, caught by her and her colleagues with scrupulous reverent meanness (to paraphrase a Joyce phrase for his Dubliner — another course I'm taking) — Bridge over Regents Canal Bow, 2018
On teaching Diderot's La Religieuse — & the 2 film adaptations
Posted in 18th century, 18th century novels, feminism, Film adaptations, historical fiction, literary scholarly work, novels of sensibility, politics, social criticism, Teaching, women's poetry, women's lives, tagged Denis Diderot, heroine's text, La Religieuse, rape, The Nun, trauma on November 1, 2018| 5 Comments »
Suzanne Simonin after harsh punishment thrown into a dungeon (2013 La Religieuse, Pauline Etienne)
The second text I assigned as required reading for my The Enlightenment: At Risk? course has been Diderot's The Nun (La Religieuse), which most people read in Leonard Tancock's translation for Penguin. It is a superior translation to Russell Goulbourne's for Oxford World's Classics, but for the sake of the introduction (much fuller and more informative as well as having an insightful close reading), and the inclusion of the hoaxing "practical joke" letters which Diderot first sent a benevolent philanthropist-friend (left out by Tancock), next time I'll assign the Oxford. From the class discussions, and responses to even a short clip of the 2013 film adaptation by Guillaume Nicloux, featuring Pauline Etienne, Isabelle Huppert, Martha Gedeck, and François Négret (the truly powerful Jacques Rivette 1966 version has never been made into a DVD), I can state unequivocally that Diderot's novella was far more effective in communicating what Diderot meant to than Voltaire in his Candide.
The reason is not far to seek. The Nun, however early in the development of the novel (like Defoe and Prevost, there are no separate chapters, there is much fuzziness when it comes to the relationships of time and place to the incidents, there are inconsistencies in the use of first-person narrator &c&c), has at its center a deeply felt psychologically compelling portrait. Her situation is complexly and realistically (in terms of the situation as set out) explored; each section where she is cruelly punished, scourged, emotionally and physically tortured for attempting to protest, to get out of the convent she is being imprisoned in, for attempting then to go to law to escape, is relentlessly, persuasively and exquisitely realized. I can't say the people in the room enjoyed the novel, but most were riveted enough to think about social coercion, silent violence, the twisted perversion of human nature or what we think are natural impulses), trauma and its effects. Though some critics talk about the text as libertine, and as inviting vicarious sexual voyeurism in the last section where the mother superior is a an aggressive semi-self-hating lesbian, no one in this class showed any evidence of such titillation — unlike what I've seen in response to Lovelace's hounding, harassing, and teasing of Clarissa in Richardson's epistolary masterpiece Clarissa. (Early on I described Clarissa, we read an excerpt of Diderot's Éloge de Richardson, and I suggested that The Nun couldn't exist but for what Diderot learned from reading Richardson's novel and imitated from it.) In a way I gathered those who did respond to Voltaire's Candide took some pleasure from the hard jokes, there was little pleasure in such an exposé — it was like reading stories from the anthology I reviewed, Speaking about Torture, edd. Julie Carlson and Elisabeth Weber. There were at the same time genuinely original insights — one woman pointed out the mother who so berated Suzanne Simonin (our heroine's fictional name) for poisoning her existence was not sinful; it was the mother who committed the sin; her daughter was innocent. I hadn't thought of that.
A summary:
Diderot and his friends had heard of this case and played a practical joke on the sentimental heart of M. de Croismare, a philanthropist. A series of letters fooled him so they had to pretend Suzanne had grown sick and died. Finally they confessed; it's said that Croismare was not upset but I wonder. Like Madame Roland's Memoir, La Religieuse was first published in 1796, in his case many years after his death.
Diderot has a problem: he felt in order to gain sympathy for the nun, he had to make her religious; the reality as far as we can tell (and makes sense) is most girls who didn't want it weren't religious; they wanted to marry. Suzanne does not; she is presented as wholly innocent: that's another element hard to believe because she also enjoys the lesbian sex.
First person narrative has real problems: the narrator has to report her own compliments. I've been trying to emphasize analogies with other forms of imprisonment, hostage situations, violations of one's body and identity (like rape) but it is also seriously a critique of the whole idea of monasteries and nunneries as deeply wrong for human nature.. He means it – Diderot is not attacking the church as the central of the worst evils of the ancien regime as Voltaire does (intolerance, barbaric punishments, thinking life a sin) but he is attacking this way of life imposed on people from many angles
Story falls into three parts. Opening section about how and why she is pressured into going into the first nunnery, Sainte Marie, and we can say that the time there where she is wheedled into taking her vows and just goes to pieces and hates it; she is sent home. There was such a place, established 1763 and it was a place that Marguerite Delamarre spent a long time at. The mother superior at the first place wants to win new recruits.
Second and longest section, she is sent to Longchamp: there is repetition because she was scapegoated. I'd call it humiliated in public, scourged in Sainte-Marie, but here it goes to high lengths. First she has a kind mother superior, Madame Moni whose regime is reasonable; no sourging, allowed all sorts of liberties, but she is urging Suzanne to take vows and that is not what Suzanne wants; she dies and then Sister Christine takes over –- she is mean and cruel, sadistic. It is there Suzanne writes her plea to the lawyer and her friend smuggles it out, and the lawyer makes the case. There we see the visitation of these powerful men. All the lawyer can get for Suzanne is a change of convent. He pays her dowry.
St Eutrope, Arpagon. We are never given this third mother superior's name… We get stars or dot dot dot – or hyphen. This was a device used in novels to make readers think some real and powerful person was involved Suzanne is a bit of a prig, and she seems to disapprove of the mother superior's lax ways but it's really that there is no rule, it's all her whim and caprice; this week she is cheerful and in love with the natural world, next week she is guilty. Mother superior's guilt is played upon by the father viciously (natural feelings are perverted) and she becomes crazed with guilt and repression. Suzanne is blamed and she finally escapes; it's not clear if the man who helps her escape is the same one who assaults here Dom Morel.
This is only to find herself a victim of attempted rape, dragged to brothel and finally working as a laudress and from the original hoax that is when she writes M. de Croismarre.
I find the ending very poignant, and if we don't have the letters Diderot faked and sent to Croismarre (as one does in the Oxford) it is more plangent in its way. Clarissa dies at the end of her ordeal – as does Ursula, and perhaps Theresa
Suzanne's one compassionate friend (2013) — the recent film emphasizes the woman's community perverted and the friendships as well as the lesbian story (Isabelle Hibbert plays that role)
I did at first try to downplay the attack direct on the Catholic church's practices, doctrines and especially elevation of celebacy in our discussion, even if in one long passage it's obvious that Diderot (like Voltaire before him) is intent on showing the harmful social arrangements and practices the powerful state Catholic religion was responsible for, and encouraged (getting rid of daughters where you could not afford a prestigious dowry to place her in a high position flattering the family). But as we talked I began to see that was counterproductive. One must begin there and Diderot's investment in the story was pointed out by one of the people in the class after I described the fraught relationship Diderot had with his bigoted Abbé brother: nothing Diderot ever did could appease this man or soften his demands that Diderot believe as fervently and act as austerely, punitively as he. Diderot used a vow he made to the brother to excuse himself from trying to publish his radical works, which paradoxically freed Diderot to write for 20 years great works without worrying what the public would think. Luckily most of this has survived — the critics and scholars seem to think. I also repeated the story that Diderot's daughter, Angelique, reported in her memoir that his third sister died of insanity after she was put into a convent: it is thought from over-work but who knows. He has in The Nun at least two unforgettable portraits of young women driven mad by the conditions and ideas they are forced to live with.
Jacques Rivette has Anna Karina play the part more gently, and more openly vulnerable (1966)
Nonetheless, I moved on to generalize as there we were involved. (It did turn out that one man as a young man many years ago had voluntarily entered a monastery; he said after class, he had had no trouble getting out.). Just at this time I've been following a good Future Learn course from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland on Understanding Violence Against Women and had been reading Victor Vitanza's Chaste Rape. I'll start with the latter:
Kate Millett's The Basement
I had seen The Nun as a Clarissa story: in the center Suzanne forced to become a nun by the cruelties of her family, coerced, harassed. I also saw the hideous treatment she is meted out by the other members of the nunnery (they humiliate her, strip her naked, force her to whip herself, starve her, leave her to be filthy, scream at her, make her walk on pieces of broken glass) as a parable of what can happen in a prison and when you are outcast in a community whom you have openly rejected. Now I saw this is a story just like all the stories of rape except without the open sexual attack –- which is not necessary. It is very like the real events retold by Millett in The Basement where a woman is coerced into agreeing with her captors' evaluation of her, loses her pride, self-esteem, identity, her very personality until the point when she is asked further to hurt and to berate herself she gladly agrees. Vitanza says the purpose of rape is not the sexual attack centrally; the point is to violate your ego and self-respect to the point you never forget the experience and are traumatized. This helps explain why women are so upset by rape and assault attacks and that fucking does not at all have to occur. Public humiliation is enough. Like a hostage, when such a victim is kept for weeks, he or she can easily be driven to kiss the tormenter for the smallest relenting, the smallest glass of water or kindness.
After one of the sessions of horrifying treatment, Suzanne is told her lawyer has obtained a change of convent for her. He lost the case to have her freed but he can do this. What does she do? she gives her most precious objects to the cruel superior mother; she begs those who thew her into the dungeon physically to take other favors form her and kisses them and thanks them. When the overseer comes who has the news she can move and he forbids her to see her lawyer, she says that she has no desire to see him and when there is an opportunity she refuses. This cannot encourage the lawyer to go on helping her. He might think her forbidden but he might think she doesn't care.
Diderot's tale also anticipates what happens to Offred-June in Atwood's dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale where she takes on the values of the Waterfords, Lydia and everyone else – like Suzanne. In the second season of the TV film adaptation, the film-makers move away from the original humiliation and enforced fearful docility and cooperation of the victim and make her a heroine to American watchers by having her hold on to violence herself and manifest an active desire for revenge and hatred; the American TV Offred-June does not utterly prostrate herself as Suzanne and the woman in The Basement do.
Suzanne is obviously such another as Levi in the concentration camp; people in solitary confinement and beat the hell out of and mistreated in US and other tyrannical nations' prisons … I would not have been able to put Suzanne at long last next to Clarissa without Vitanza's hook. Paradoxically he takes us past the way rape is discussed by de-centering the sex.
As for the Future Learn course, one of their advisors is Judith Lewish Herman whose Trauma and Recovery I know well and have long admired. So from watching and reading along with this Future Learn course I summarized:
Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery
Although Diderot started by a hoax — the typical case of based on a single real woman: Marguerite Delamarre. In 1752 at age 35 after several years she tried to have her vows annulled; she was turned down but the testimony showed an awful life; she tried again 1758, again turned down, she was still alive in 1788 when the convent was finally dissolved. What happened to her we don't know. I say typical because young women were regularly forced into nunneries. The case of Galileo's Daughter as retold by Dava Sobel from the 100 letters this girl left is heart-breaking and unforgettable. Gifted, socially engaging, she was cowed, starved, left in ignorance to die young – and he knew it.
The core of the Diderot's story is violence against women, sometimes silent, sometimes overt – through law and custom. The perpetrators deny her right to have bodily security. To tell and/or seek help is to be punished. We see the impossibility of recovering from trauma in this situation. She lacks control over her environment, people helping her don't consult her – she has experienced prolonged and repeated trauma so she is numbed – how to put back peace in her life; she has to be provided with safety, with a community to live in, work to do that's meaningful, that she feel she is in charge of herself – problem won't go away until society changes – until power relationships change. She is never given any opportunity to use her gifts for music and when last seen has been threatened by rape, a brothel and now lives hidden as a laundress. I assigned one recent essay which argued that the males in the tale have all the power: Suzanne's mother is subject to her angry husband; her daughters have to pay their husband steep sums; the men in charge of the nunneries are harsh. The lesbian nun is driven into neurotic self-hatred by the priest who forbids Suzanne to have anything to do with her. At the same time, the one person who genuinely helps her with nothing to gain is the lawyer Manouri who even pays her dowry to enable her to move to the third nunnery, and pursues her case on her behalf as far as he is able.
The lawyer in the 1966 film has a stronger role, more prominence
According to the studies of the Strathclyde group: men believe they have the right to control women and whatever they have to do to achieve this is fine. The society is set up so that all authority figures have the right to transgress women's bodies to force compliance in whatever way the society declares is fitting and to its interests. The way the female gender is trained, submissive, secretive, obedient, supposed to appeal to men, make their relationship with men central to survival fits into this paradigm. Violence against women begins early, in the girl's earliest years. (I knew this.) It takes the form of setting up coercion in such a way that you prevent the girl from learning a skill, or idea that is enabling, or gives power to act freely on her own behalf. Later on when she is married (forced or seeming to choose), more than half the battle is done for the husband whose pride is made to inhere in controlling her to do his bidding and act out of and for his interest first. A silent violence against the child is secondary; it's first aim is against her mother who is kept in an invisible straitjacket this way. The aim is twofold, mother and child, and we see this in The Nun, only the mother is absolutely faithful to her role as vicious instrument (as are the women who perform FGM on other women. They resent women who are not cowed and maintain self-pride. This secondary violence of women on girl children and sisters on sisters is seen with searing clarity in The Nun. Herman (like Adrienne Rich) brought out how compulsory heterosexuality is central here too: and in The Nun, the one act that is seen as bestial and beyond all forgiveness is lesbian love, yet whatever comfort and help Suzanne gets is from other girls who identify and say they love her: Ursule, Agatha. I remember Miss Temple in Jane Eyre's story — until she marries. It is also important that no where helps the girl or women genuinely to find another role beyond wife, mother, as equally fulfilling.
To conclude, life-writing and trials bring into public awareness these kinds of psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people, but it is rarely retained for long. The woman remains so ashamed, and she carries on being punished for telling (especially when she does not win her case and she often does not) of these secrets men and society want to keep unspeakable and deflect attention from. The strong and lucky and men will deny the existence or even validity of such feelings so as not to have to deal with them.
While perhaps Diderot's Rameau's Nephew like Voltaire's Letters on England, would have brought before the class the sceptical and original ideas of the Enlightenment (Diderot had to make Suzanne religious in order to gain sympathy he felt), I could see from the fifteen pages I assigned it would not hve had the impact the other did.
On the two movies: Jacques Rivette's The Nun versus Guillaume Nicloux's The Nun.
English Lake District and the Borders tour: the Wordsworth circles, Keswick & a stone circle (2)
Posted in environmentalism conservation, literary scholarly work, nature writing, romance, women's poetry, women's art, women's lives, tagged 19th century art, Regency Romantic literature, Travel Writing, Victorian on August 24, 2018| 11 Comments »
Tarn Haws — a place we stopped at where three lakes intertwined nestled in hills (@Dorothy Glass, one of the people who had a remarkable camera, attached to a computer back in the hotel)
"Prologue to the Lakes District" with apologies to Geoffrey Chaucer
By Margaret Lapetina August 2018
In August, after daffodils ended season
Come Pilgrims from the colonies, for this reason–
To the lakes , to walk the fells , all most enthused
Road scholars, –funny spelling though
They mused.
A group of scholars, you know who you are
For Romanticism to Turbulence travelled far.
To share their knowledge they did yearn
And gladly would they teach and gladly learn.
Our psychologist bard named Bob
Reading Wordsworth did a daffydilly job
After dinner in the poet's home.
For his pains, he was lauded and
Did admit to being chuffed when we applauded.
Poor Dora, sister-bound to William
In her time not praised for her words' worth.
Today, the world would not dare ignore her
She might have had the chance to be our Nora.
Nora writes, and researches, publishes and edits;
Commands our great respect, to her great credit.
Sisters L. And G, all smiles and harmony
Long grown in years of mutuality
At dinner played a trivia game with Rick
Alas, they say he drove them quick–
To drink!
The doctor, Steve, in lean and quiet power
Eschews the scalpel now to photograph the flower
He wandered every bastle tower, strode on every trail
He seemed to take delight in fine detail
Suzanne ,the Carolina girl
Enjoys this second chance at traveling her world
To England is in thrall.
A late arrival, Cape Cod Sarah
Lifelong learner, seeks it all.
We hear she has a special yen for Hadrian's wall.
From loss to strength; though short she stands quite tall
And thus is to be well admired by all.
Our Dave, who on his sweater sports a safety pin
Will help to bring the next election in.
With Sandy he has sailed Italy before
And now they stand in Windemere in awe.
On seeing Carlisle church's window art
Dorothy, an expert in this part,
Taught some of us the elements to parse
The mysteries of the stunning stained glass
A Rick there was, and that a worthy man
To subjects erudite and small his fine mind ran
Over dinner he brings laughter and good talk
Outside he seeks to help all ladies as they walk.
In darkness he will offer light
He is the very perfect gentle knight
Host Peter J would rather make his way
By foot, we guess ,on fells than drive the bus each day.
He entertains with facts, tales nice or gory
Driving over Hardknott telling stories.
By far the best, the Wednesday highlight
Was dodging bullets in the twilight
Through the military camp …
No wonder he prefers the sweet green fell
He makes us love it and the sheep as well.
And so we thank you, from our 16 seater, Peter.
What irony prevails to name host Anne, Anne Strange?
Could not the world agree to rearrange a
name to celebrate her warmth and charm, her ease
To call her Anne the Friendly, pilgrims please?
For cycling through the sun and rain in Spain
she'll do 200 kilometers, no strain.
A riding holiday to end the year.
And so we wish her well, Anne-not- Strange, my dear
Road scholars we, though not of Chaucer's place;
I hope, time comes, to see again each face …
I'm back from my Road Scholar touring experience, and like last August's at Aigas House, in Inverness, Scotland, I mean to share what I can. I've written a different sort of framework: A Canterbuy Tale, the human dimension because this time the people on the tour made the experience what it was a lot more than last, where (without meaning to regret this at all) the time was shaped far more by John Lister-Kaye, Lady Lucy, and the various interns. Romance and Turbulence, the title given the itinerary by Road Scholar, is a mix of cultural, landscape, social and physical activity (moderate) events. Accordingly, I'll divide my story into artists (the Wordsworths, Beatrice Potter, Johns Ruskin); ruins and archeaological sites; landscapes and towns. There were three lectures and a film and I'll bring them in as they occurred. Within this division, I'm more or less going chronologically.
The first evening we were together, Peter, one of our guides, walked with us from Lindeth Howe Hotel to Lake Windermere, the largest of the lakes. We were near the busy town of Bowness from which many cruise boats (day long, a couple of hours) come and go. Lots of shops, quick food areas, tourist items on sale (for local English people too) and an amusement park. Eventually we discovered there are long lines for the ferries up and down the lake to various smaller towns.
The next day we spent the morning at Wordsworth sites. First Dove Cottage (not far from the hotel).
Dove cottage — before renovated for conservation and tourist gazing by the Wordsworth Trust site
What is most memorable is how small and plain the rooms are, low the ceilings, yet at the same time it was not a hovel, but a gentleman's residence. The house had much of the original furniture, and you saw chairs and tables one could sit in and work at, provision for different kinds of tasks, all set out in an orderly way. Downstairs one or two of the rooms had been part of an inn; there was a separate place in one room for cooking, in another for quiet activity. Upstairs was room that was flooded with light and it has a day bed, a desk, chairs, a built-in bookcase: William Wordsworth's study; there was a room for the children, which was lined with newsprint paper to keep out the cold. The people in the rooms talked of how Wordsworth deliberately lived more meagrely than he had to in order to participate in the community: well he was and was not one of them. So too undoubtedly his sister, their poetic and political visitors. At Rydal Mount, it was emphasized that he was a generous man to all the people he and Dorothy came into contact with — he had more money then. That he was liked by the local community and sociable enough. I imagine he was respected if thought a bit odd.
From the outside
We then went into the directly nearby Wordsworth Museum. What an astonishing array of Wordsworthiana this place has — and impressive rich archive of manuscripts and older printed books. There were several full exhibits (lots of plaques, writing, pictures, book printed and manuscript) about the various woman associated with Wordsworth — taking off from the book The Passionate Sisterhood. The men were not left out: relics of Shelley, Southey and the radical Thelwall, an exhibit about DeQuincey (for a while a good friend of the Wordsworths). I was very impressed by the numbers of letters, pictures, paraphernalia of all sorts, and the lists of manuscripts just in the open rooms. The portraits were remarkable; a number I had never seen before (DeQuincy, again early on a frequent visitor)
Robert Southey — this was one there (he supported several of these people eventually)
Every attempt was made to bring the women to the fore in all the museums we were in; one of the exhibits here was titled to emphasize the women who lived in the cottage and visited, and kept it up and wrote. I was surprised at the amount of material about Mary Shelley, for after all she never came here and was not directly part of this group until after Shelley's death and she became a woman of letters herself. But there is so much more about her to show visually than some of the Wordsworth women.
Here is one by Sara Coleridge, Samuel's daughter, which reveals that she needed opium to help her sleep: an eerie poem: life was not so easy in that cottage or the others these people inhabited:
The Poppies Blooming all around
My Herbert loves to see,
Some pearly white, some dark as night,
Some red as cramasie;
He loves their colours fresh and fine
As fair as fair may be,
But little does my darling know
How good they are to me.
He views their clustering petals gay
¬And shakes their nut-brown seeds.
But they to him are nothing more
Than other brilliant weeds;
O how should'st thou with beaming brow
With eye and cheek so bright
Know aught of that blossom's pow'r,
Or sorrows of the night!
When poor mama long restless lies
She drinks the poppy's juice;
That liquor soon can close her eyes
And slumber soft produce.
0′ then my sweet my happy boy
Will thank the poppy flow'r
Which brings the sleep to dear mama
At midnight's darksome hour.
From Peter Swaab's edition of Sara Coleridge: Collected Poems, 2007:
She was Samuel Taylor Coleridge's daughter; she was Robert Southey's niece; she was an accomplished translator who was proficient in six languages and who published her first translation (a three-volume treatise, from the Latin, about equestrian tribes in Paraguay) when she was just eighteen; she was a nineteenth-century mother who suffered from bouts of anxiety, post-natal depression and, finally, breast cancer; she was a writer of children's books, a theologian, an editor of her father's works; she was an artist's model, first for William Collins' painting in oils of her as Wordsworth's Highland Girl in 1818 and then for a watercolour by Edward Nash in 1820. Invariably, all these other facets of Coleridge's life and work jostle with her poetry for scholarly attention. Faced with the difficult task of selecting a particular angle or approach, no one to date who has made the decision to write about Sara Coleridge has chosen to make her poetry a prime focus of study. And the reason for this, I think, is because Coleridge's poetry is markedly different from the kind of poetry we're more used to reading.
When it came to writing poetry, Sara Coleridge stuck closely to the advice Robert Southey later gave a young Charlotte Brontë. She was content to "write poetry for its own sake; not in a spirit of emulation, and not with a view to celebrity." She was, in the best sense of the word, an amateur who pursued poetry-writing for the same reasons that anyone pursues any recreational hobby: "Just as I would have any one learn music who has an opportunity, though few can be composers, or even performers of great merit," she explained, "I would have any one, who really and truly has leisure and ability, make verses. I think it a more refining and happy-making occupation than any other pastime-accomplishment
The piece de resistance was a talk by Melissa Mitchell, Assistant Curator about what we can learn from working in archives on manuscripts. Ms Mitchell quoted Philip Larkin on two values: the magical, a relic before the present person's eyes and in hand of the literal circumstances of the writing; the intimate: we reach a level of closeness and shared experience to see private letters. She had a digital copy of a letter in the museum written at age 16 by Dorothy Wordsworth to a friend, Jane Pollard: the sheets are completely filled and only cross-hatched (to save money) on the outer part of the paper which served as an envelope. One feels one gets close to the creative process by what Dorothy describes of her behavior towards others and by what intelligent company reviewers could glean from visits. We see how sad Dorothy could be, how her aunt and uncle behaved meanly, coldly, harshly to her (their standards for dealing with wards is I hope not replicated today). Dorothy's hope lies in joining her brothers, she dreams of sharing a cottage and making a garden.
Here is one by Dorothy after many years of living with William, and then with his wife and children and amid all the other romantic poets and writers: she still was a person who remained apart in herself:
Harmonious powers with nature work
On sky, earth, river, lake and sea;
Sunshine and cloud, whirlwind and breeze,
All in one duteous task agree.
Once did I see a slip of earth
By throbbing waves long undermined,
Loosed from its hold—how, no one knew,
But all might see it float, obedient to the wind,
Might see it from the mossy shore
Dissevered, float upon the lake,
Float with its crest of trees adorned,
On which the warbling birds their pastime take.
Food, shelter, safety, there they find;
There berries ripen, flowerets bloom;
There insects live their lives—and die:
A peopled world it is, in size a tiny room.
And thus through many seasons' space
This little island may survive,
But nature (though we mark her not)
Will take away, may cease to give.
Perchance when you are wandering forth
Upon some vacant sunny day
Without an object, hope, or fear,
Thither your eyes may turn—the isle is passed away,
Buried beneath the glittering lake,
Its place no longer to be found.
Yet the lost fragments shall remain
To fertilize some other ground.
(1828-29; 1842)
See my "Foremother poet: Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855).
Mitchell didn't finish her talk as there were so many good questions and the answers took her in other directions from this letter and manuscripts as such. We don't have all Dorothy left as her grandson crossed out lines to make her writing illegible. Dorothy was a deeply passionate young woman, she seemed so different from many people, slightly (or a lot) wild. Mitchell took down from the shelves of the room (like Chawton a room set aside for first editions of the writers of the era) a first edition of Milton which had been Wordsworth's own copy; it was rebound either by Wordsworth or shortly after his death and Ms Mitchell read aloud a description on the inside by Mary Wordsworth about the rebinding of the book. It was an emotional experience to hear this kind of talk. Mitchell told of the story of Dorothy's anguish the night before William married Mary (and how Dorothy wore the wedding ring that night on her hand) and the finding of the love letters of Mary and Wm which show they were tenderly in love. At the top of the museum is an exhibit intended to remind the visitor of Dorothy's last years suffering senile dementia: the state of medicine at the era is seen in a replica of her last bed and the treatments attempted to alleviate her helplessness.
The politics of era and fine line these writers had to walk not only socially but politically, was eschewed and the presence of Pitt's gov't. We were not quite told how William was just finally (through patronage) offered a paying job, nor of the kind of surveillance, pressure and destruction that could be wreaked on any of the individuals in the circle who became too overtly radical in his public lifetime. Think of the imprisonment of Leigh Hunt, with whom, and about which experience Daisy Hay opens her book (see below). I cover this in my review of Kenneth Johstone's Unusual Suspects: Pitt's Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s:
The bookshop is worth going to because upstairs they have older used books and the volumes up and downstairs have been carefully chosen and culled to include the best scholarship on the writing and visual art of the region. I bought two paperbacks I could carry by authors whose essays I've enjoyed:
We had lunch as a group in an old pub in Keswick and then were left to our own devices for a couple of hours. I found a good bookstore with little trouble. It was place for local people to sit in the square and talk, there were all sorts of ordinary shops and tourist places intermingled. I went to an art exhibit of lovely watercolors and then in the church found an historical exhibit about mining in the area and some remarkable chalk drawings of the mines and quarries sometimes executed with the picturesque in mind. I wished I had had room in my case to bring back some of these pictures that I saw.
Keswick, central town square
On the road again, "in the minibuses," we passed by and made a quick visit (half an hour) to a famous slate mine, now turned into a perpetual shop for items made of slate for passersby and tourists to buy. One must keep in mind how what these sites are today are places for visitors to come and look at as snatched out and preserved pieces of history. That is their function and so they direct themselves to those who are using the sites to have (they hope) numinous or pleasant experiences. Every attempt is made to declare the site special, somehow lifted from the ordinary, and (to my mind) these are only successful when not too many people come to them and they remain relatively unchanged or are (as in this case) openly redirected as a store
Slate Mine — we stopped by several later in the week — I bought a new pair of earrings and a barret (to replace the one I had to give up going through security at one point because forsooth it made too much noise and I had a plane to catch and no time to cope with explanations)
Then we drove to a high point of a hill and looked down on Buttermere, a spectacularly beautiful lake just as the sky is darkening, whereupon we drove in another direction way, higher and higher, in circles, and suddenly found ourselves stopped at the bottom of a hill. Climb it and you find yourself in a small circle of neolithic stones.
Castlerigg can be found in wikipedia and is said to be among the most visited of the neolothic stone sites of Cumbria. The question is of course what were these open air temples or airy-buildings for? I wish we had had more lectures or that the guides could have furnished more information, but what they said was true: we don't know for sure what these circles were used for. This small one had the merit that on that day it appeared to our eyes relatively unknown (the guide suggested this) so there was no crowded parking lot, and only a few people around. It was late in the afternoon, and I could see it's quietly taken care of or it would not last. It's a kind of time capsule today; seen a couple of centuries ago Keats was not that impressed: "Scarce images of life, one here, one there,/Lay vast and edgeways; like a dismal cirque/Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor…" Maybe the weather was bad that day: we had sun, if not as much as in the photo: its landspace is protected by the National Trust
Castlerigg
An extraordinarily good book I bought when visiting Stonehenge, Avebury (both crowded with tourists, restaurants, tours) and Stanton Drew (like Castlerigg left alone basically) with Jim, Laura, and Isobel, Christopher Chippindale in his Stonehenge Complete tells of how vulnerable these stones are to defacement and from the weather. Peter talked of control of the weather by neolithic farmers and told a couple of stories: I suspect cruel sacrifices may have gone on in one, but like many historical sites de mémoire, the shell of what was can now be made to harbour and represent quite different meanings. Such preserved places carve out a space which can image present-day human resistance to the destruction and chance and loss; they can stand for the opposing impulse: human resistance to taking into account what really was — though this was not true of the Road Scholar tour as we went to the grim prisons (I'll talk of the Hermitage, a castle with dungeons on the Scottish side of the border and Etal Castle (near Flodden Field another day). They show us too since they have been left to survive what human beings potentially can reverence and make socially functioning places to come to and experience together. Somehow the places become something more in memory after we left them.
In the evening after dinner three of us, me, Barbara, and Sara, accompanied a seemingly tireless Peter on a sort of zig-zag hop until we reached the top of our local Windermere pond. He said he had had enough of being on a bus for many hours. He is a 76 year old man, originally from London, now lives in a small house on a sort of island in Cumbria. He was ever pushing us higher and higher and we actually got to the top and gazed out across the landscape just near the hotel:
This is one of the hotel's promotional shots: it does show the gardens which have been much developed since Beatrice Potter's day: a short history:
it is not a big glamorous modern hotel; rather it is a converted and expanded country mansion (not that big originally, imagine 9 rooms on 2 floors, with a stable nearby, plus kitchen garden). It was owned by Beatrice Potter first as a summer home, then a place to put her aging mother. During WW1 a tiny hospital, then a bed and breakfast, now a hotel. It is just outside Bowness, a large town on one shore of Lake Windermere, not far from where Wordsworth once lived. I should add it now has 30 plus "guests, 4 common rooms (for different purposes), dining room with piano, bar, office, kitchens&c, three medium gardens (the largest of which supplies the photo perspective), parking lot …
Paul Scott's Staying On, a coda to his Raj Quartet
Posted in 20th century culture, environmentalism conservation, feminism, Film adaptations, film studies, general, historical fiction, literary scholarly work, mini-series, novels of sensibility, Poldark, social criticism, Trollope, women's poetry, tagged 19th century art, Anthony Trollope, Booker Prize, Downton Abbey, heroine's text, male violence, post-colonialism on October 12, 2017| 9 Comments »
Lucy reading Sarah's letter telling of the coming of Mr Turner (Staying On, 1980)
"We should write to Cooks," suggests Lucy, "and ask them to put us on the tourist itinerary. After the Taj Mahal . . . the Smalleys of Pankot" (she is not without a sense of humor)
I've been posting so much less because I've been reading books and essays as parts of projects directed by aimed-at (from accepted proposals) papers, essays, talks, and teaching, not to omit a face-to-face book club (my first),listserv discussion groups (now I'm down to two at most) and a book project (Winston Graham, Cornwall and the Poldark novels was its working title but my perspective has changed). However, I don't want to give up blogging because I love this kind of communication: natural easy English, liberty. responses far more numerous and quicker than anything one gets from a printed piece because blogs readily reach people.
For the "Booker Prize Marketplace Niche" course I'm teaching the first novel has been the 1979 winner, Paul Scott's Staying On, and I became deeply engaged by the book's central presence, Lucy Little Smalley (yes the names in the Scott's fiction are partly allegorical), in a re-watch the 1983 Granada mini-series, The Jewel in The Crown (how I wish I had time to reread the four books); as important was the class members' careful reading of the novel and genuinely unbiased (disinterested is the better word for what I mean) debate and conversation in class.
Scott wrote that he had been much influenced by Anthony Trollope and certainly the political outlook of his books which shows how our most fundamental experiences are shaped by social, ethnic, racial class, position in a colonialist state is reminiscent of Trollope's all encompassing political vision. I've written about the Raj Quartet, the books and mini-series as among the great achievements in fiction of the 20th century.
What is distinctive about Staying On? It's colonialism told from the angle of the displaced lower status white European, a mood piece about two people living on an economic disaster precipice as the man's pension is tiny and he is dying, and they are outsiders in the newly re-formed capitalist, colonialism, multi-racial Indian societies. Lucy our heroine maintains herself in sanity by holding on to her dignity and composure in the midst of her husband's continual inflicting on himself brooding over petty and large raw humiliations. Scott has always been deeply sympathetic to the feelings of the aging elderly people. A large question is that of identity: who are you in this global world? we see the outside of Tusker (a name redolent of elephants) an irascible man alienated and disillusioned after a lifetime of service (as he saw it) to India. One of the things that's remarkable about the book is how slowly it moves.
Lucy bringing the box with papers and putting it in front of Tusker to deal with for her
A minor Colonel in the Raj. Tusker would not return to live in Engaland. They represent the last "withered survivors," and now 25 years later they are living on a reduced income. Why didn't he want to go back –- he said they could live better in India. Why else? He had served for a couple of years as an advisor to the Indian new army from which he retired; then about 12 years a commercial job (box wallah) with a firm in Bombay where they went once to London in 1950. It turns out he was wrong; they would have been better off returning to where they originally belonged. He is irritated perpetually, acid, falling physically apart; Lucy sees this and is frightened and has been trying to get him to tell her what she will have. He has been avoiding this, guilty, aware he has mistreated, not appreciated her all their lives.
His one friend is Mr Bhoolabjoy, Francis, Frank, who wants to enable him to stay in the quarters. Frank's enormously fat wife, Lila, is driven by spite and greed to want to kick her Anglican tenants out after selling the building they are in. She is ambitious, ruthless, the new commerce is probably going to destroy her. Grotesque comedy comes from her size against her husband's: he is ever serving her, waking up inside her enormous body. There is some stereotypical misogyny in the portrait of the wife. Mean, cold, exploitative, Lila bullies her husband, idle – as the book opens she had ordered Frank to write a letter to Tusker telling them in effect to get out because they have no legal lease. This demand and his failure to comply in the way she wants provides the thinnest skein of story line moving ahead – by near the end of the book he has written an unsatisfactory one, trying to be kind and when he finally does what she wants and gets to Tusker, he has this massive heart and we are back where we began, Lucy at the hairdresser with Suzy (having her blue rinse), people having to do something about her husband, now a corpse in the garden.
What is Bhoolabhoy like? Non-ambitious, has mistresses and does as little as he can get away with. Lila is gross, unscrupulous, could come out of Dickens who has many hateful domineering women. Francis and Tusker live for their money evenings together, where they drink, talk, dine, play cards. How does he treat Lucy? Not well. Not ambitious either of them.
Bhoolabhoy and Tusker
His wife, Lucy, is the book. Her parallel is much less evident as her primary relationship is with Tusker: it's Susy, the hairdresser, Eurasian, living precariously on sexual earnings (from Francis, from Father Sebastian, see below) too. Susy Williams, I wish we knew more of her. Eurasian, born Chapel so an English dissenter, she does Lucy's hair, she gets money from Frank by having sex with him – he doesn't lack for appetite.
Sarah Layton has written to say that a man named Turner (associate of Saraha's professor husband) is coming to interview her and in her loneliness – she says she and Tusker never communicate — she rehearses in her mind what she will tell him. And her tragic history (Chapter 10, pp 132-141) of thwarted talent. She begins by saying she was happy in Mudpore, a prince's state and then remembers back to when she typed letters: made fun of by Mr Coyne, one of the bosses, as left over "Virgin of the Vicarage" (p 133). Her job in Litigation in England had been fun, she had been courted by Mr Coyne. She lived at the Y and Miss Martha Price took her under her wing, got her a flat – Miss Price we begin to realize is lesbian, loves Lucy – and is very hurt when Lucy falls in love with Tusker Smalley — as she loved her as an intense friend . Basically Lucy gives up everything she has built for herself for this man.
In the garden by their lodging next to Smith's
She is fringe gentry (she is mocked in the UK when she takes a steno job which lowers her status), whose condition is parallel to that of subaltern women in her employ. The novel is told through the subjective soliloquies of Lucy (the prevalent presence), her Indian servant Ibrahim (who understands her and values his domestic position, the Indian landlady's husband, Francis Boulabhoy, caricatured as subject to his ruthless wife's erotic and cutthroat appetites, but like Lucy, having a dignity and moral position of his own. Tusker is there, but much less because his dark angers would change the whole tone of the book, which is ironic comedic plangent. It's structured cyclically (as is his Raj Quartet), beginning with the sudden death from a massive heart attack of Tusker, and then arranged as flashback of memories and present experiences acutely realized.
The book is intertextual: Lucy had joined a dramatic society and despite her non-aggression had a chance at a part, which probably means she could act – The Housemaster – a play from 1936, Ian Hay, an all male school is destroyed when a woman and three daughters related to them disturb the peace. Very English. She did something similar in Rawalpindi.. She could have had a part in The Letteras Leslie Crosbie, a play by Somerset Maughan where Bette Davis played the part (she kills a man who rejected her and is acquitted) in a film by William Wyler. and Tusker discouraged her. A third play is called The Wind and the Rain – it was a popular ballad at the time. Very minor English plays of this era which were popular. Like you might go to a community theater today. Deeply uneasy comedies.
How much a dress meant to her; always low, looked down on but she learned rules of club and game and acted these out, and her reward at the end is to be left isolated. She's cut off from her country of origin, her culture. I don't think she is made fun of – she maintains composure and dignity until the last page when she loses it – her dignity hides her sorrows and is the source of her strength – that she goes through the forms. When he dies suddenly despite all the obstacles Tusker among others creates she is planning a dinner party. Gallant lady — for Susy, Francis and Father Sebastian, a black Anglican priest who has taken over the church, Father Sebastian; only Francis wanted to come.
Ibrahim yawning
Second most frequent POV is Ibrahim, though it might be Bhoolbhoy has more interior monologue. Who is Ibrahim? He is the central servant of the house and they are continually firing him. Mrs Bhoolbhoy is refusing to take care of the grass, to fix anything and Ibrahim hires Joseph (another remarkable presence, so glad to have any job, so servile apparently) to do this demeaning work. He is one level of Indian and Mr Bhoolbhoy another. He maintains a comic impartiality. He helps his memsahib whenever possible. He does the shopping, cooking, keeps them all going. Note the quiet ironies:
Ibrahim regretted the passing of the days of the raj which he remembered as days when the servants were treated as members of the family, entitled to their good humours and bad humours, their sulks, their outbursts of temper, their right to show who was really boss, and their right to their discreetly appropriate perks, the feathers they had to provide for the nest when the nest they presently inhab- ited was abandoned by homeward-bound employers. Ibrahim had been brought up in such a nest. He still possessed the chits his father had been given by Colonel Moxon-Greife and a photograph of Colonel and Mrs. Moxon-Greife with garlands round their necks, Going Home, in 1947. He had also inherited and preserved the two letters which Colonel Moxon- Greife had written to his father from England. Finally he had inherited the silence that greeted his father's two letters to Colonel Moxon-Greife inquiring about the possi- bilities of work in England …
We have three people trying to make sense of their worlds, who they are, and they can't – Lucy, Mr Bhoolabjoy and Ibrahim. Smaller characters: Father Sebastian, a black man, Anglo-Catholic and now in charge of the church. Reverend Stephen Ambedkar – administering to people's spiritual needs takes generous swigs of wine.
Scott objected strenuously to the usual comparison, that ensues early in discussions of Scott's fiction: with E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. That too includes rape but it is kept to the margins and the book told from a male point of view, while in Staying On Scott keeps up female subjectivity as his major medium. Forster's people are gentry who visit; they are tourists, part of an imperialist overlay of job and place-seekers, or on holiday. Scott's characters are embedded in the central work of the society, administrative, church, political, economic, social capital is what they depend on. A habitas if you will. He saw the work of the colonial administration as the expression of their ideology; when the ideology failed, was exposed for the hypocrisy it was, so they were crushed. In his books we see Indians, Hindu and Muslim crushed by the imperialists. Staying On differs because the petty powerful local Indian people have taken over as they often did in local instances, and Hindus, Muslims, and any whites that get in anyone's way of profit destroyed. A strong idealism underwrites the books. Racial and ethnic and religious persecution are motifs that emerge early in other books. People in close units all dependent on one another. Feed off and prey on another but also sustain one another.
Moment of frenzied behavior by Tusker over papers
A little on Scott's life (the lamp):
Paul Scott. Born 1920 and died 1978. So not long lived. Given how frequently and fully he wrote about India and also other places abroad in the British commonwealth (Africa once) you might think he grew outside the UK borders. Not so. He grew up in London and as he said many times his use of India and the history of colonialism and exploitation seemed to him a metaphor which could reach out and cover far more than the class, gender, money, and by extension school, status, rank system he grew up in. You at once expanded your vision. At one level Lucy Smalley is still the "old" vicar's daughter from 19th century novels displaced, the marginalized subaltern governess married off to a fringe gentry person.
It's important to know he was a closet homosexual: he lived an outwardly heterosexual life because in his time you still were punished in all sorts of direct ways. You could call him bisexual – hermaphodite. What's really remarkable is how heroines are central to all his books – they are the subject narrators, he writes a kind of l'ecriture-femme like Henry James. He was much influenced by Trollope who as far as we know was straight heterosexual but Trollope too leans heavily on women's points of view. Raj Quartet: opens with rape and the girl who is raped is our first central voice, then Edwina Crane, a missionary never married, spinster, attacked on the road, burnt herself to death in a suttee when the man she worked all her life dies in this incident; the nun-nurse, Sister Ludmilla, the companion who becomes an outcast, Barbie Bachelor, and the traditional deeply humane "virtuous" in the modern ways heroine Sarah Layton (Geraldine James) – all women have sex, Sarah is driven by her family to have an abortion.
Schooling he went to Winchmore Hill Collegiate School in London, a good school but left at 16 to become an accountant. His family were commercial artists, interacting with the lower echelons of London Bohemianism in its entrepreneurial artistry. They wanted him to have the safe remunerative career. He married in 1941, Nancy Avery, herself a novelist, short story writer, they had two daughters, he lived quietly with them and groups of friends.
World War two was transformative. He was sent to India in 1943; there for three years the first time as an officer cadet in World War II. As an air supply officer he traveled widely throughout India, Burma, and Malaya, moving easily in the varied society of civilians and military, of British and Indians. After returning to England from India in 1946, heworked his way slowly up to become part of a literary commercial world. He used his accountancy degree to join a small publishing firm, Falcon and Grey Walls Press, as company secretary. In 1950 he became a director in a firm of literary agents, Pearn, Pollinger and Higham (later David Higham Associates). He had written poetry and drama during and after the war, but now he turned to fiction and produced five novels between 1952 and 1960, when he gave up his work as a literary agent to devote himself to writing the longer and more substantial novels that he had been wanting to attempt for some time.
In 1964 he returned for the first time to India, financed by his publishers, and there found inspiration for The Raj Quartet and Staying On. The British Council enabled Scott to make further visits. In 1976 and 1977 he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He died of cancer in London in 1978, shortly after receiving the Booker Prize — but the first film was in the offing. He knew Staying On was to be filmed, but never saw the film, and he could not have foreseen Christopher Mornahan's Raj Quarter which he would have loved.
Lucy enlisting Ibrahim
The seeds of Staying On at the end of his ilfe: in 1972 Scott returned to India and saw the world as it was evolving in the provinces; stories about left-over sahibs being published. Scott's friend Mollie Hamilton showed him a letter by her mother, Lady Kaye, a widow, lonely harassed pitifully vulnerable; he was influenced by the stories by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (e.g., A Backward Glance). (Years later Jumpha Lahri tells of Indian versions of such women.) Another friend, Maisie Goodbody's husband died suddenly while on the toilet in a hotel. Goodbody would tell Scott of how they had to haggle at the bazaar and every week were harassed and would think they coudn't get through another week and yet would. This couple living in decaying hotel – opposite people, Goodbody the elegant wit, and his wife, ill natured, raw, sarcastic. There was a Eurasian woman like Susy, manufactured cameras trying to make money.
He finished the book in 1976 and a friend in the theater saw potential for a film with Ralph Richardson as Tusker and Celia Johnson as Lucy. Tusker contains strong elements of Scott. It was a bleak and bitter time in Scott's marriage. In brief, his wife had not been able to work at her career the way she could have. He had become alcoholic with incessant work and self-repression. He did love her but not sexually. She started proceedings for divorce when he got his position at Tulsa, she would not communicate with him. He asked her to stay and she refuses. The daughters conflicted. He wrote a letter like Tusker's closing one to Lucy, revealing his understanding of his failure, only Tusker is kind, loving while Scott's is harsh, raw, unforgiving how he didn't get to go to university, how he pours himself into writing – very egoistical, felt himself in this letter a sense of waste and failure.
A little on Scott's earlier writing:
The Alien Sky is an earlier slender novel also set in India, which deals with a theme that becomes the issue of Staying One: tragic alienation that comes to a man who has dedicated his life to India and Indians and is now rejected at Independence, his former proteges unwilling to shake his hand. The character of Tom Gower is skillfully drawn and encapsulates the moral dilemma of the colonial who genuinely feels that his work, now discredited, has been worthwhile. The second major character in The Alien Sky is an American, Joe MacKendrick, who is traveling in search of his brother's past. The pattern of memories juxtaposed with present experiences that echo the past and the figure of the solitary traveler who seeks to piece together a story became familiar modes of presentation in Scott's later work. The Corrida at San Feliu is about himself as a writer, how he writes novels.
Daphne Manners (played by Susan Woolridge (Scott said he began the novel with the image of a girl fleeing violence …)
The Raj Quartet itself:
Raj Quartet is a story that begins with a rape, and folds out in layers of responses and development of the original cast of characters involved directly and indirectly. Alas it reminds me of our own culture only make the Indian young men blamed for the rape into Black young men in Central Park; beaten up, sent to jail for years and never properly publicly vindicated. These crimes are skillfully linked to the political turbulence of the "Quit India" riots of 1942, and the response to the civil unrest forms the major part of the novel, with the reactions of civil and military forces, of Indian judges and English memsahibs, of petty criminals and Indian princesses all woven together to give the novel its rich texture and alluring moral complexities. Not only do different characters reveal different views of the same incident but they present them through a variety of literary forms. The reader must evaluate letters, memoirs, formal reports, a journal, a legal deposition, and omniscient flashbacks, all dealing with basically the same events seen from different points of view. As Scott adds layer upon layer of detail to the plot, it becomes clear that making any kind of moral judgment of the events or the people involved in them is going to be hard. Trollope's first novel is about a young Catholic Irish man accused of murdering an English officer and he ends up hanged because the people running the state make him a scapegoat for revolutionary Catholic Irish groups. The Macdermots of Ballycloran.
Daphne Manners is willing to go out with Hari Kumar but when they are attacked she shows her racism by refusing to tell the truth: the two were having sex in the Bigighar Gardens; and by getting him to promise not to tell, and not standing with him she condemns him to helpless silence. The characters we see cannot escape being racist. Sarah Layton, the traditional and decent heroine who is a major voice in the second novel involves herself with an Indian Muslim man but she marries a white professor. She accedes to pressure and has an abortion when she gets pregnant by someone else. Scott does not present us with unreal victims and innocents. Barbie Bachelor, Mabel Layton's companion, turned out as soon as the kind high officer's wife dies, is one of the untouchables of English society – hers is the chief voice of the third book. The last book deals with the partition and brings in world historical characters.
Hari Kumar (Art Malik), the hero of the Raj Quartet, kept off stage most of the time — Scott invested a lot of himself in this deeply betrayed character
Put another way, Staying On, set in 1972, satirizes the new India of sophisticated, wealthy businessmen and politicians, corrupt property dealers, and fashionable hairdressers, as Scott depicts the now elderly and fragile Tusker and Lucy, who first appeared in The Day of the Scorpion as rather dull but useful appendages to the military station in Pankot, still making their home there after the other British have gone home. The profusion of characters found in The Raj Quartet has been distilled to these two figures. Tusker's death at the opening of the novel leaves the remainder of the narrative–with most of the emphasis on Lucy's thoughts … a miniature Raj Quartet in low key. We look at character's memories through flashbacks, very delicate approaches to corruption and emotional pain.
I culled the above this from various books I read, the brilliant literary biography by Hilary Spurling (which I read years ago), Paul Scott: A Life of the Author of the Raj Quartet. Jaqueline Bannerjee's Paul Scott (a slender concise perceptive study), K. Bhaskara Rao, Paul Scott, a Twayne product filled with clear information and background. Two very good articles: Chotiner, Isaac. "Revisiting the Raj," The New York Times Book Review. September 10, 2017,p. 13; Weinbaum, Francine. "Staying on after the Raj," Journal of South Asian Literature, 17:1 (1982):225-29.
India photographed in the movie (POV Lucy in a car)
As to the movie, Staying on is a gem of a TV film featuring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard who were so brilliant and compelling in Brief Encounter. The acting throughout is pitch perfect, but perhaps Saeed Jaffrey stands out. Written by Julien Mitchell, directed by Silvio Narizzano, it is more comic, less poignant until near the end. The film does not begin with Tusker's death, but with a scene of Tusker's drunken humiliation in his decline. In general it moves forward in chronological time, using only occasional present time flashbacks; Celia Johnson speaks aloud a number of the soliloquies Lucy thinks of herself as speaking to Mr Turner. It is accompanied by alluring Indian music, filled with shots of India. Her final words in the book and film:
but now, until the end, I shall be alone, whatever I am doing, here as I feared, amid the alien corn, waking, sleeping, alone for ever and ever and I cannot bear it but mustn't cry and must get over it but don't for a moment see how, with my eyes shut, Tusker, I hold out my hand, and beg you, Tusker, beg, beg you to take it and take me with you. How can you not, Tusker? Oh, Tusker, Tusker, Tusker, how can you make me stay here by myself when you yourself go home?
I wish I had taken down what the various people in my class said about the book and film. Subtle and fine readings. I'll content myself with the one woman who said at first she couldn't understand why this book would receive such an award, but after immersing herself, she understood.
Lucy busy about the house
Scottish Highlands Tour from Aigas House: the West Coast; Priories, Museums, & Castles; Celtic folk music & women's poetry (3)
Posted in 20th century culture, environmentalism conservation, politics, women's poetry, women's art, tagged Scottish art, Travel Writing on September 6, 2017| 8 Comments »
George Bain, for his Book of Kells, Plate 14, and a mural: Highland games
One last briefer blog on my Road Scholar Tour in the Highlands area just around Aigas House. I've arranged my memories (from notes on a stenographer's pad) thematically, and so we have left scenic drives and walks. Non-human animals, ruins, a small museum, lunch in an apparently well-known pub liked by tourists (and it was the one place I was at where the food was pompous and absurd, and I could find very little edible so the less said the better). On Thursday night there was the splendid treat of Celtic folk music by three musicians who appear also to live at Aigas House, which prompts me to end on the house itself.
Western Coast, Isle of Skye … much that we saw looked like this from the bus ….
Thursday was the long drive day – to the Western coast and back; part of Friday we drove around the Black Isle, a peninsula. We used observation equipment to see birds (all sorts), bottlenose dolphins (sunning themselves on stones in the sea), deer — and everywhere sheep (including black face, rams) and goats. We sat by a lovely beach in a quiet cove. Some brave souls were actually trying to get into the water. There was what was farmed, what was grazed, where there are attempts to bring back the original plants, trees, and landscape. Attempts have been made to have a railroad going through some of this but there is just not enough traffic.
On the West Coast tour, we got as far as across the way to the Isle of Skye whose "song" serves as one of the thematic tunes for the opening paratexts of Outlander. I discover that I can no longer transfer YouTube music and videos to another site so you will have to be satisfied with these (said to be) original lyrics;
Speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing
Onward the sailors cry.
Carry the lad that's born to be king
Loud the wind howls
loud the waves roar
Thunderclaps rend the air
Baffled our foes
stand by the shore
Follow they will not dare
One of the most interesting drives was around a bay which served as a military installation during World War 2 — one can still see the re-fueling installations, places for submarines and planes to land. We stopped off at an exquisite museum, very small, a perfect place: Groam House Museum or Taigh-Tasgaidh Taigh Ghroam). Downstairs was relics of Pictish art, complete with stories of savage rites around some of it; upstairs the work of a local artist, George Bain (1881-1968), who is said to be recognized as an artist of "national significance." He worked during World War One and there were drawings and paintings of the local area in that time, of his time in Bulgaria, and later work in a children's art center; he is important for having studied, understood and and re-created central Celtic patterns and designs. Here is a picture by him of an ordinary day for someone driving through the area:
Bain, George; Highland Picnic; Groam House Museum; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/highland-picnic-166734
Two ruins of note: an 18th century Priory in Beauly, in much better shape (destroyed by wars rather than time) 12th century Fortrose Abbey, Erchelss Motte (a museum of archaeological sites). The guide had much to tell about one of the Beauly Priory early abbots who amassed a great fortune for himself (not easy in the 15th century), robbed his nephew of what was due him, and left the first endowment for the present University of Edinburgh. Frontose Abbey, a later 17th century building was in much better shape; it was one fought over in the Civil War, Cromwell had meant to destroy it and didn't but I find I did not take any photos. I did not get to Ercheless Motte: it was one of those places where a choice of place was given and I chose a walk by a lake (loch).
Beauly inside — we were shown where the prior is said to have made very comfortable quarters for himself; I kept asking about some stones dedicated to mid-20th century people but the guide would not answer (not in his remit?)
Blair Castle is notable because of its continuous existence as working place and political linhpin where a family connected to the most powerful in the UK lived, or some which was used by some institution got-up for the moment (it was a hospital during the two world wars) from before the time of Robert Bruce until today. The family members appear to have had no interest in art (mostly sportsmen and women having babies and social lives), but the family included Lord George Murray (he was deeply against fighting that day at Culloden) and a couple of other highly controversial (and sometimes executed) people; the place was burnt down more than once; it contains relics of its Balmorality period, of the empire the younger sons traveled to. The place is nowadays painted white (which seemed to me ludicrous somehow, it made the building unreal, like a piece of cake). This entrance hall shows typical sets of guns, fireplaces, mahogany.
I saw intelligent faces on the people, sportsmen and women alike, a interesting nursery recreated. A fascinating recreation of a ship during Nelson's time — by one family member. In the shop, there was a slender biography on sale of a female member of the family who spent her life embrodering exquisitely; more interesting (but no biography) plaques and photos in the house showed a woman who was among the first women MPs and a fervent supporter of the labor party. Like Longleate, the place is today supported by the tourists (there are summer gardens with sculptures in them), by having on places for picnics, racing and shows of horses, working and tenant farms. There is a generosity of social spirit: local people come to walk with their dogs. The usual sheep and cows in the fields.
Not the band lodged at Aigas House, but instruments they are using are what was used, and they sat close together
Thursday night after dinner was great fun. We as a group were invited to get up and speak, sing a song, tell a story. I was the only one of the 16 to stand and read aloud some lines of poetry I thought in the spirit of place. I quoted some of it as the epitaph to my first blog. There are many beautiful pastoral passages in John Lister-Kaye's books: "All deep thought leads to the spirit" is his; give the natural world a chance. Rachel Carson: "There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after the night and spring after the winter." "Reserves of strength" in the beauty of the earth and living things. A couple of the guides stood up and talked of how they felt about their work. The musicians then said they'd bring the "tone down a bit" and gave us some rollicking and melancholy songs. Bag-pipes much used. I remember tonight some of the most enjoyable passages from Johnson and Boswell's twin tours are evenings of dance, song, and drink.
I haven't got a text from that night to share so hope this poem by a 19th century Scottish woman poet will do: if it's not jolly, it's not as desperately sad as so many of the Gaelic songs' lyrics originally were. It comes out of that tradition as a Scottish woman's poem:
Who hath not treasured something of the past
The lost, the buried, or the far awav
Twined with those heart affections , which outlast
All save their memories? these outlive decay:
A broken relic of our childhood's play,
A faded flower that long ago was fair
Mute token of a love that died untold.
Or silken curl, or lock of silv'ry hair,
The brows that bore them long since in the mould.
Though these may call up griefs that else had slept,
Their twilight sadness o'er the soul to bring.
Not every tear in bitterness is wept.
While they revive the drooping flowers that spring
Within the heart, and round its ruined altars cling.
— Isabella Craig-Knox (1831-1903)
I come back to the house. The next day I was told one of the musicians was blind (I hadn't noticed) and he and the woman among them lived on the estate, she in the Lister-Kaye gatehouse lodge with her autistic son. The son was said to come to the great or central house frequently to talk to people. Perhaps the most remarkable thing was this place, Aigas house and its surrounding lands. It upstairs and behind the scenes. Its show spots.
Dining room (aka Baronial Hall where most of us ate — also in the nearby small library)
It was like living in a version of Downton Abbey vastly updated and kept up for quite different reasons, but the connections were clear: one can see the Granthams becoming tour masters to keep their estate and income flowing in. All the people stay in cottages around the estate; the "staff" who come and go (including bus drivers and all sorts of people like tour-bus drivers) stay in the house in the turrets and other tucked-away places. I didn't walk around the estate half-enough: it was cold and at night dark. I was told the remains of the iron-age fort were a few rocks.
It was easier to cuddle into bed, rest and relax in the bedroom in the cottage I was in with Winston Graham's Poldark novel, The Angry Tide. My roommate had a copy of Outlander, which some evenings she read too, probably much more appropriate. I've listened to this fist of the novels read aloud very well by Davina Porter, and have now finished watching the second season of Outlander, the mini-series, and will probably listen to Dragonfly in Amber read aloud by Porter too.
What I mean to end on is the familiar comfortable intelligently done hospitality of Sir John and Lady Lucy Lister-Kaye was crucial. When we left on another big bus, she and he (Sir John had both hands up and was waving away) and all the staff on hand at that moment came to the door, lined up and waved us goodbye. Just like in Downton Abbey.
Photograph in the house
The early Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, & A Room of One's Own
Posted in 20th century culture, Edwardian drama, Film adaptations, novels of sensibility, political novels/films, women's novels, women's poetry, women's art, women's lives, tagged Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf on April 13, 2017| 1 Comment »
Vanessa Redgrave as Clarissa Dalloway coming down the stairs (opening of film)
I've carried on reading Virginia Woolf, and feel I am moving more deeply into what is valuable in her, and seeing what does not quite come up to high excellence: though all she writes has integrity, she can seem to nod. She mirrrors her class, her era, is not sufficiently widely read in women's writing because they were not available to her, or to most of us, until the 1970s — and then many do not avail themselves of earlier women's art and books. That's what I have my Austen Reveries blog for — to call attention to great art by women whose work is not sufficiently known (as well as Austen and 18th century art).
So the last 4 weeks I've reread her Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse & (after a long hiatus) A Room of One's Own. I've watched the 1997 film adaptation of Mrs Dalloway, directed by Marleen Gorris, scripted by Eileen Atkins (who used to enact a one woman virtuoso couple of hours of Virginia Woolf for an evening's theater); the (to me misogynist) very bad 2002 The Hours film (based on Michael Cunningham's post-text to Mrs Dalloway, directed by Stephen Haldry, screenplay David Hare), and now the 1983 TV film (as it's called) To the Lighthouse (screenplay Hugh Stoddart, directed by Colin Gregg). Only in Mrs Dalloway had any major roles in the making of the film been taken by women. As I watched To the Lighthouse, I found myself remembering my childhood watching the film To the Lighthouse:when I was young my family had a house on Long Island where we'd spend long weekends on a beach. Alas I don't know that now nor will probably again — I'd be the grandmother …
I've been taking my first course as a student or class member at the OLLI at AU, where we are called "fearless readers" for studying Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own, and essays from The Common Readers and a few other places. It's been an enjoyable and stimulating experience (not least because the professor doing it is such a confident relaxed and serious teacher (all at once) and I'm learning how to teach better too. The central themes of her mature fiction are feminist, deeply empathetic towards what is not institutionalized, individual liberty, how we are caught up in time, history, the spaces we find ourselves in. At least in these early works.
Mrs Dalloway was not "covered" on our group reading of Woolf (as just too well-known, as already read by all of us), nor A Room of One's Own (ditto). Despite or maybe because of the surface conventionality of Clarissa's day, Mrs Dalloway questions the bases of that conventional life, filled with much despair, injustice loneliness, so many people as puzzled wanderers on the earth going about routines. It's an artfully controlled counterpart to Joyce's Ulysses a day in the life and world of Clarissa, which takes in remembered past time, deep time before that (before Clarissa was a possibility), such an array of imagery capturing life's smallest and biggest things. Mostly upper class people: the snobbery of the characters is seen in everyone's apologizing to a vicar's wife, so Woolf does see that. The question of the novel is how to take Clarissa: is it as ironic as Austen's Emma, or are we to enter truly empathetically into Clarissa's consciousness. Probably we are to see Clarissa's limitations and yet bond with her. The central idea uniting the story of the traumatized (permanently shattered) Septimus Smith and the self-sheltered Mrs Dalloway is that (as she thinks) you must not "force the soul." Septimus killed himself to save his soul from the unscrupulous morally moronic Dr Bradshaw.
In the film Septimus and Rezia (Amelia Bullmore) cornered as the doctor and his "aides" demand entrance — his crime, he said he wanted to kill himself
Life is made "intolerable" for those inner lives demand, need individual liberty in their outer ones. The professor took us through a lesbian reading of Mrs D which brings us a parallel underlying structure. Sally and Clariss's kiss is a rare depiction of lesbian orgasm (and therefore famous):
It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush, which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come close, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cacks and sores. Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus: an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over — in a moment.
She suggested that Georgia O'Keefe's art is a visual equivalent. The imagery of the crocus, the inner soft vulnerable part of the flower occurs repeatedly in the novel in erotic places. Here is O'Keefe's Autumn Trees: The Maple:
Atkins and Gorris's Merchant-Ivory Mrs Dalloway carries itself so lightly and yet reaches down to the depths of distraught terror (Rupert Graves is superb as Septimus); the use of younger actors and switching back and forth brought out how layers of time are woven into the book's angles of narration.
The young Clarissa and Peter — in the novel Clarissa continually remembers a love courtship many years ago
The film feels fluid, unforcedly symbolic. The iron gates are everywhere and they are what Septimus falls upon. The haunted nature of everyone's experience through pained and joyful memory creates the tone of piece which is meditative — and comic because of the asinity of Lady Bexborough (Margaret Tysack) and Hugh Whitbread (Oliver Ford Davies). Michael Kitchener managed to convey Peter Walsh as someone who had his heart genuinely broken. Yet at the end resigned with Sally (Sarah Badel as the aging lesbian love, now respectabily Lady Rossiter):
Redgrave plays Woolf as someone who embraces life, not fragile, keeps people from intruding. Dropped is her detestation of Miss Killman in the book. Miss Killman resented far more fiercely than Austen's Emma resents Miss Bates because Miss Killman shows up Clarissa's privileged existence and seems to be stealing her daughter, Elizabeth; this parallel between the two books shows how closely Mrs Dalloway also "comes out of" Austen's art (as did Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out).
Laura Knight, Lamorna Cove, or On the Cliffs
On Woolf's To the Lighthouse, I now wonder how much Woolf had in mind Johnson and Boswell in the Hebrides, Skye as a refuge (from Culloden literally), shifting is the mode — mostly deeply recognizably Cornwall, St Ives, but what are we to do with the Scottish sublimity of the Antiquary (read by Mr Ramsay), the sea in which William Cowper "perishes all alone," the dark memories of Westmorland (where Wm Bankes and Mr Ramsay once walked), the killing fields of WW1 (written about by the quietly gay poet of the piece, Mr Carmichael). The sounds of the sea, the moon, the lighthouse itself, geology back in time, replace the music, contemporary green parks and flowers and killing fields of Mrs Dalloway's everyday life. The middle section of Time Passes is stream of consciousness detached from any recognizable character: the time of aeons for the 10 years between Mrs Ramsay's death and the longed-for reaching of the Lighthouse. It is a work of mourning, griefstruck meditation using stretched out time in the way of Proust, while Woolf is killing Mrs Ramsay as the angel in the house preventing her from living the life of a writer. I recommend Su Reid's memories of her many summers in Cornwall applied to To The Lighthouse (in Cornwall: The Cultural Construction of Place, ed Ella Westland).
I've been watching the film To the Lighthouse this evening. Again, it put me in mind of when I was young and my parents and family had a summer house on Long Island and we did have joy on the beach. And now I have no chance for such experiences,as no ties to such a family group. To the Lighthouse is nostalgic (like the Dalloway film). I didn't cry just thought of what once was — as the screenplay, the words are astonishing. They are an amalgam of passages from other works by Woolf which suggest connections between the sea of To the Lighthouse, and the "waves" of all her other works. Rosemary Harris delivers a contemplative monologue about the nature of Woolf's verbal creativity in effect.
An iconic moment: Rosemary Harris as Mrs Ramsay, holding James's hand, catering to him
As to actors, there's a very young Kenneth Branagh playing Charles Tansley, the serious student, Suzanne Bertish a wise Lily Briscoe. Each of the Ramsay children is given a moment of characterization and individualized actor. In the film Mrs Ramsay's death come on slowly, not the sudden collapse of the book (suggesting the world drained the life out of the woman)
Rosemary Harris is the angel on the beach, in the house, Michael Gough the rough well-meaning Mr Ramsay (having Oedipal struggles with James)
I've gained a couple of new rich source books: A small neglected superb book for its rich assortment of suggestive black-and-white photos of Woolf and Leonard, their houses, streets, the Hogarth Press, countryside around Monk House, Cornwall, and concise intelligent readings of her novels is Monique Nathan's Virginia Woolf, and there is now a Mrs Dalloway Reader, ed Francine Prose, filled with relevant writings on the Dalloways by Woolf herself (including her sections on the couple in Voyage Out and Between the Acts), wonderful letters, brief appreciations.
A Room of One's Own is problematic: There is too much exaggeration for lack of knowledge of women's literature. Woolf will say there is no writing about mothers and children until the 20th century. Not true. We now know there were many women writers around Shakespeare's time: most of the learned lady kind, but they wrote thoughtful political treatises, poetry, translations. She also diminishes and lambasts earlier women's achievement far too much: in the last 100 years we have found a tradition of women's writing in all spheres of life, not all their novels were dreadful (except of course those by the in this treatise paragon Jane Austen), her demand for an "incandescendant approach to writing is unreal. Woolf is writing several decades earlier than the 1970/80s when women's literature before the 19th century came back in print and the writing of women in the 19th multiplied dramatically. She also makes such a paragon of Austen: it's absurd the way she attributes to Austen perfection; there is the idea that Bronte (Charlotte) had the greater genius, but Woolf never explains what she means by this. It does feel like nagging at moments too. I have an idea why it is no longer read. Three Guineas is preferable, the much more mature work.
That said, it's startlingly a propos at the moment: it explains to you why Trump, a cunning corrupt moron was preferred to Hillary Clinton, utterly reputable, highly intelligent and capable. So much she asserts is true of most women until the 19th century, still true of women in traditional cultures today. There for men to have sex with, give babies to, and obey authorities. Stay indoors much of their lives, or kept away from larger public world for long stretches. The brother and heir comes first. Deep shame over sex inculcated. Reading A Room of One's Own makes me so sorrowful for those women and books, whose art is still thwarted, stymied, stigmatized, and rejoice for those who have stuck it out and achieved a measure of self-fulfillment. Clarissa chose the safe kindly Richard Dalloway; many women today can choose the daring career, but the treatise demonstrates amid much push back and at crucial points lack of empathy. A Room of One's Own does end very well: Mary Carmichael can at long last try a novel, and she does; she has around her so much pressure not to, and what we can do for her is work for her so she shall have space, money, time, self-esteem and liberty even if it means to do this in the present circumstances for most of us means working in obscurity and poverty.
I will jump to the later Woolf soon, and read Between the Acts next ….
LES INSOUMISES
(photo by Pascal Victor/ArtComArt)
A photo from a French staged play reading of Virginia Woolf's writings
My edition of Charlotte Smith's Ethelinde has been published!
Posted in 18th century, 18th century novels, feminism, Foremother Poetry, literary scholarly work, novels of sensibility, political novels/films, romance, women's novels, women's poetry, women's art, tagged heroine's text, post-colonialism, Regency Romantic literature, wife abuse on November 26, 2016| 3 Comments »
Charlotte Smith (1749-1807) by George Romney (1792)
Sonnet 69 from Elegiac Sonnets
Written at the same place [where refugees land], on seeing a seaman return who had been imprisoned at Rochfort
Clouds, gold and purple, o'er the westering ray
Threw a bright veil, and catching lights between,
Fell on the glancing sail, that we had seen
With soft, but adverse winds, throughout the day
Contending vainly: as the vessel nears,
Encreasing numbers hail it from the shore;
La! on the deck a pallid form appears,
Half wondering to behold himself once more
Approach his home. — And now he can discern
His cottage thatch amid surrounding trees;
Yet, trembling, dreads lest sorrow or disease
Await him there, embittering his return:
But all he loves are safe; with heart elate,
Tho' poor and plunder'd, he absolves his fate!
Although I've been putting my blogs on historical fiction set in the 18th century, both in film and in novels on this blog (e.g., Poldark and Outlander), and have now and again put teaching 18th century texts (Fielding's Tom Jones) and enjoyment in reading and viewing arts and music and books of the era, I've kept scholarship in the area in my Austen reveries blog. Hence I've not posted much at all about Charlotte Smith, a consuming interest (in her life) and love (for her poetry and some of her novels) in my life now for many years (see More First Encounters).
Charlotte Smith was a great and profound poet in the later 18th century, the mother of romanticism (with Wordsworth a father, and Radcliffe, mothering the Gothic), and an absorbing original novelist. I attended the second conference devoted just to her at Chawton House Library in Hampshire this past October, gave a paper on her as a post-colonial writer, and after a five-year effort published the first affordable paperback scholarly edition of her second novel, Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake.
The purpose of this blog is to encourage anyone interested to buy it at Valancourt Press, which will take you to Amazon, and its occasion is a wonderfully thorough and insightful blog by the novelist, literary critic and publisher, Tyler Tichelaar:
Charlotte Smith's Ethelinde: A Missing link between Romanticism and the Gothic, to which I append my comment and then some:
I didn't sufficiently emphasize in my introduction the book as a romantic novel, though I did talk about the poetic landscape and how (from contemporary reviews and a contemporary almost immediate French translation), it seems what most struck people. We have to remember that Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest was first published in 1790, the same year as Ethelinde, and The Mysteries of Udolpho came four years later. So this novel was a revelation. In the sequence where Ethelinde goes to her father's tomb, she anticipates and imitates the haunted gothic of Victorian fiction. I probably didn't think of the romantic connections because it's a rare novel by Smith where she does not include any of her poems. Maybe because she thought she'd created poetry in words enough with the landscapes. I agree with Robert the book does not feel very Burney-like, Smith is so corrosively angry in her satire on awful characters. But I feel certain all these women read one another. I also forget Smith's novels became part of the Jacobin novelists of the 1790s too (Rogert Bage's Hermsprong, Thomas Holcroft, Godwin's Caleb Williams, Wollstonecraft's Maria; or The Wrongs of Woman) and Walter Scott wrote a long beautiful perceptive appreciation.
Valancourt has brought the book out as a hardback. I conclude it's selling well — for a book of this sort. The publisher & editor has indicated to me he's not really interested in going on to publish another by Smith: his business seems to have begun by concentrating on publishing rarer older gothic and Victorian novels (out of copyright) but in the last few year more contemporary and gay novels have been added to the list. If he should change his mind, I think I'll ask for a payment this time 🙂
Several Smith novels are available as Broadview Press editions, e.g. Celestina; Kentucky Press, e.g. The Young Philosopher. A couple others are available in good facsimile reprints but no notes and no introduction, no bibliography (e.g., The Banished Man, about war-torn Europe and France from an emigre's perspective). Montalbert is in one of these reprints of ECO texts where there are four tiny pages per page, but you can buy it cheaply. Even The Romance of Real Life is available in an OCR facsimile.
Marchmont is now the only novel by Smith not available in an affordable edition. It was Marchmont I and the publisher spoke as an alternative to Ethelinde when we first discussed the project, and I probably chose Ethelinde because it's historically more important (see above — it was a revelation), and I'd read part of Ethelinde. And yet Marchmont is a powerful book — it has this extraordinarily frank depiction of a debtor's prison (anticipates Dickens) and makes use of a terrible siege in France, Toulon, and so calls attention to the reality that the "terror" of and many of the early directorate's actions were a reaction against invasion from other capitalist-royalist national leaderships with their armies and the complicated politics within France. Trollope's La Vendee is about the counter-revolutionaries in the countryside.
Fragment Descriptive of the Miseries of War
To a wild mountain, whose bare summit hides
Its broken eminence in clouds; whose steeps
Are dark with woods; where the receding rocks
Are worn with torrents of dissolving snow;
A Wretched woman, pale and breathless, flies,
And, gazing round her, listens to the sound
Of hostile footsteps:–No! they die away–
Nor noise remains, but of the cataract,
Or surly breeze of night, that mutters low
Among the thickets, where she trembling seeks
A temporary shelter–clasping close
To her quick-throbbing heart her sleeping child . . . (1797)
from Smith's The Emigrants
Smith deserves to given her rightful place in the literature of the era and be read for pleasure by more modern readers than the usual academic specialists at long last. I'm so glad Valancourt made an appealing compact edition.