Trent’s Last Case by E.C. Bentley

Don’t let the title fool you: Trent’s Last Case is in fact the first mystery featuring Philip Trent, E.C. Bentley’s gentleman of leisure turned crime reporter slash sleuth. Published in 1913, the book is a precursor to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, and Trent was repeatedly mentioned by Dorothy L. Sayers as an influence on Lord Peter Wimsey - this being, of course, the reason why I read this book.

Trent’s Last Case opens with the murder of Sigsbee Manderson, an American businessman and millionaire. Mr Manderson is found dead outside his house in the early morning – he’s been shot through one eye in a way that excludes the possibility of suicide. Puzzlingly, he took care to dress carefully before going out in the middle of the night for unknown reasons, but forgot his denture on his nightstand.

Philip Trent is called in to investigate the murder by an old friend with a personal interest on the case: his niece is the now widowed Mrs Manderson, and he fears that, because her experience of widowhood has been akin to that of the protagonist of Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour”, suspicions will fall on her. Trent’s objectivity is supposed to be an advantage, but it doesn’t take him long to get personally involved himself: the more he gets to know Mrs Manderson, the more drawn to her he feels.

Much to my delight, there are indeed quite a few similarities between Trent’s Last Case and Dorothy L. Sayer’s mysteries. The premise – a woman being suspected of a murder because she was in an unhappy relationship with the murdered man, and our sleuth falling in love with her – is reminiscent of Strong Poison (or rather, the other way around), which is another love story slash mystery. The characterisation may not be quite as in-depth as Sayers’, but then again I’m saying this after spending only one book with these characters; to be fair, they are satisfyingly complex and human. Most interestingly of all, this is a story about personal relationships, marriage, respectability, and what hides behind the “polite fictions” of society, as Trent calls them. This is one of the things I most enjoy about classic mysteries (and their precursor, the sensation novel): they allow a glimpse behind the curtain of respectability at a time when this was still a rare thing.

Bentley’s portrait of Mrs Manderson was a pleasant surprise: not only is she allowed a voice, but her marital unhappiness and her refusal to be a trophy wife are taken absolutely seriously. But then, what did I expect of a writer Sayers enthusiastically endorsed? The following passage, though worded a little dramatically, does a great job of conveying the dullness and despair of the life of an intelligent woman trapped in a world where she’s not allowed to do more than look elegant and be a society lady:

Can you imagine what it must be for any one who has lived in a world where there was always creative work in the background, work with some dignity about it, men and women with professions or arts to follow, with ideals and things to believe in and quarrel about, some of them wealthy, some of them quite poor; can you think what it means to step out of that into another world where you have to be very rich, shamefully rich, to exist at all—where money is the only thing that counts and the first thing in everybody’s thoughts—where the men who make the millions are so jaded by the work, that sport is the only thing they can occupy themselves with when they have any leisure, and the men who don’t have to work are even duller than the men who do, and vicious as well; and the women live for display and silly amusements and silly immoralities; do you know how awful that life is? Of course I know there are clever people, and people of taste in that set, but they’re swamped and spoiled, and it’s the same thing in the end; empty, empty! Oh! I suppose I’m exaggerating, and I did make friends and have some happy times; but that’s how I feel after it all. The seasons in New York and London—how I hated them! And our house-parties and cruises in the yacht and the rest—the same people, the same emptiness.

This brings me to yet another very interesting thing, which is Trent’s Last Case portrait of modernity. Much to my surprise, the other book this reminds me of was The Great Gatsby: both are acutely lonely stories set in social worlds where people are seen as disposable, and both deal with the ruthlessness of the modern world, particularly the world of money and business. As Trent is told at one point,

This is a terrible time in which we live, my dear boy. There is none recorded in history, I think, in which the disproportion between the material and the moral constituents of society has been so great or so menacing to the permanence of the fabric.

It’s interesting to find this state of mind expressed so clearly before the Great War. I’m far from a Luddite myself, and looking back on the early twentieth century from a distance things don’t seem as bad as all that. But knowing what we know, we can’t really just dismiss those who were pessimistic and wary of unchecked progress.

Trent’s Last Case is also full of other fascinating period details, like the fact that cars, telephones, and the collection of fingerprints were all still novelties that required some explaining. I couldn’t help but smile at this passage:

‘I expect you both know what the back-reflector of a motor car is.’
Trent nodded quickly, his face alive with anticipation; but Mr Cupples, who cherished a mild but obstinate prejudice against motor cars, readily confessed to ignorance.

As for the mystery itself, obviously I can’t tell you all that much, but I will say that it’s a good one. It’s a little convoluted and impossible for readers to guess on their own, but it’s satisfying all the same. The whodunit is supposedly solved halfway through the book, and it’s then that things get truly interesting. There are twists, turns, yet more twists, and always more to the truth that you suppose: you don’t get the full story until the very end. Best of all, Trent’s Last Case is very much a psychological mystery. More than the details of the crime, what keeps you reading is being eager to find out what motivated this or that person to do such and such – and that’s my favourite kind of crime story.

(Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll add your link here.)

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The Sunday Salon – Bookish Pet Peeves

At the risk of sounding like the Scrooge of book blogging, I have to confess that there are a series of phrases, words and ideas prevalent in literary discourse of all kinds of which I’m really not a fan. They aggravate me, bring out the three-year-old in me, make me inwardly grumble “UR DOIN IT RONG”, and, in one case in particular, even make me consider getting contrary slogans tattooed on my forehead, just because I can.

But before I go any further, bear with me as I make a short aside: I keep a .txt file in my desktop where I scribble down ideas for future Sunday Salon posts as they come to me - which often seems to happen while I’m working. What this says about my levels of concentration is perhaps best left unexamined. Anyway, the words “bookish pet peeves” have been there for months now, and part of the reason why it took me so long to develop this into a full post is because I was worried I wouldn’t be able to make it sound impersonal – which it absolutely is.

So let me start with a disclaimer: these things may annoy me, but that doesn’t mean that a person saying or doing them will ever annoy me, or that I’ll look down on them (it’d be absurd and hypocritical if I did, because as you shall see that I’ve been guilty of many of them myself). It’s possible that these turn up in book blogs, as they do anywhere else where books are discussed, but I’m really not talking about any blog or person in particular. I think we all have a bit of tendency to be easily annoyed in the abstract but much more understanding and forgiving when dealing with real human beings, which is just as it should be.

With that out of the way, here they go – my top sources of annoyance in literary discourse:

• The word “message” when applied to literature – A book that can be neatly summarised in one sound bite or two is probably not a very good book at all. I have always believed that literature, even when not as its best, is about much more than just disguisedly conveying a particular message. As the great Ursula Le Guin so eloquently put it in The Language of the Night, Any creation, primary or secondary, with any vitality to it, can “really” be a dozen mutually exclusive things at once, before breakfast.
  
  Besides, I dislike “message” because it has implications about authorial intent that “theme”, for example, does not. A “message” is something the author hides in the book for the reader to decipher – and therefore said author has absolute control over it. A “theme”, on the other head, is far from one-sided, and depends as much on the text as it does on an active reader. Most authors probably do try to communicate specific ideas through their writing, consciously or not, but I’m not at all a fan of the idea that they have absolute control or even the last word over how these should be read.

• The expression “the graphic novel genre” – You saw this one coming, didn’t you? I confess I have a bit of a tendency to blurt out “medium” whenever I hear it, which probably makes me sound like an irritating know-it-all. But I just can’t help it; it’s stronger than I am. Also, “Comics/Graphic novels ARE NOT A GENRE” might have been what I had in mind earlier when I mentioned forehead tattoos. I’ve gone on at length before about why this gets to me so much, so instead of repeating myself I’ll just invite you to click the link.
  
  (Seriously, though. They are so not a genre. And calling them one perpetuates so many erroneous ideas and misconceptions about them. Argh argh argh okay I’ll shut up now.)
  
  
• For very similar reasons, the expression “the YA genre” – to me this is every bit as absurd as claiming that the whole of adult fiction is a single genre. There are YA romances, YA mysteries, YA fantasy novels; there's YA science fiction, YA realistic fiction, YA dystopia, and so on. Once again, my problem with calling YA a genre is that it makes it sound a lot more samey than it actually is. I notice that people tend to see YA as a lot more homogeneous than, say, children's literature, and I wonder how much the fact that it's often referred to as a genre has to do with that.
  
  
• Using the words “novel” and “book” interchangeably – This leads to repeated references to “this novel” in reviews of non-fiction, short story collections, memoirs, etc., which kind of makes my head explode. It's also why I’m not completely comfortable with “graphic novel” as a replacement for “comic”, which results in the paradoxical term “non-fiction graphic novel” (though I do use it myself and fully acknowledge that “comic” has its own share of awkwardness).
  
  
• Mistaking a single character’s thoughts/opinions/worldview for those of the author, or reading everything autobiographically – This seems to happen with alarming frequency, and in my experience even in literary circles right after students have been repeatedly beaten over the head with Roland Barthes (I’m not exactly a big fan of his, but not because I think he’s wrong in this regard). When it comes to ideological readings of a novel, it’s especially important to base them on what the novel as a whole suggests, rather than on any isolated character’s stance. The second can of course be one of the things that reveal the first, but it’s never the whole story. Possibly you’re thinking that this all goes without saying, but sadly in my experience it really does not.
  
  
• The expression “this book transcends its genre” – Bonus points when applied to graphic novels, of course. To be honest, most of the time I’m not even sure what this means. I mentioned it in my fantasy reader’s FAQ a few months ago, so I won’t go on about it at length, but to put it briefly, it annoys me because it’s yet another way of putting a whole genre in the same bag. E.g.: “Fantasy is of course still bad; the only reason why Wicked by Gregory Maguire is good is because it ‘transcends’ it.” I was reminded of this recently when reading Savidge Reads’ excellent interview with mystery writer Sophie Hannah, who said:
  

  ‘Crime Fiction’ is a category that contains, as you say, writers like Kate Atkinson, Susan Hill, Barbara Vine, Karin Alvtegen, all of whom are great writers. I’m slightly uncomfortable with the idea of anyone’s crime novels being ‘more than’ crime fiction, because that suggests there’s a limit to what a crime novel can be, and I don’t believe there is.

  Exactly. The same goes for every genre, really.
  
  
• Using the term “simplistic” positively – this one just confuses me, and possibly my inadequate grasp of English is to blame here. To me, to call a book “simplistic” is one of the very worst things I can say about it: it means that it betrays the complexity of the world and of human nature by oversimplifying it; by not acknowledging nuances and portraying the world as black or white. So it really baffles me to read things like, “this was such a nice story, so sweet and simplistic”. Surely the writer means “simple”? Can the two words really be used interchangeably?
  
  
• The word “hype” – the misfit indie music fan in me is to blame here. I realise that people use the same word to mean different things all the time, but thanks to all the time I’ve spent in online music communities, to me “hype” will always mean “something hispters feel they have to turn their noses at because it has become far too popular”. An example of its usage:
  
  Person A:‘Have you heard the new Arcade Fire yet?’
  Person B: ‘Yeah. It’s just hype.’
  Person A: ‘Total hype.’
  Person B: ‘Meh.’ *Takes a sip of iced latte*
  
  The understanding being, of course, that the new Arcade Fire is completely devoid of any merit, but there will always be people who’ll claim to like it just because it’s cool to jump on the bandwagon. What those people don’t know, though, is that those who are truly cool will be the first to jump out of the bandwagon the second it begins to give any signs of getting crowded. I wonder if there’s ever a point when it becomes cool to jump back in?
  
  More seriously now, I don’t like “hype” because it sounds dismissive – it seems to be a way of talking of people’s enthusiasm for something in terms of its collectively, as if that made it any less valid or sincere. Possibly this is one of the reasons why I so loved Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Street – it is, after all, a passionate defence of shared pleasures. And on a related note, I also really don’t like the idea that being enthusiastic about something (individually or collectively) is a sign of lack of critical thinking, as if you couldn’t think carefully about something and decided that yes, you do love it passionately and shamelessly.
  
  
• One-size fits all book recommendations – This is possibly the trickiest item on this list, and it’s one I’m definitely guilty of myself. But the more I think about it, the more absurd it seems to me to universally recommend or un-recommend a book. People are so different, and what makes a reading experience precious is so often personal and unique. How can we ever really know if our enthusiasm or lack thereof will be shared?
  
  Hearing people say they wish everyone would read this or that book doesn’t really bother me, but it does bother me to hear “I don’t recommend this book to anyone”, or “I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly enjoy this book” (the latter in particular often has a touch of righteousness to it that really rubs me the wrong way). This could be because I’d much rather waste my time on what was, to me, a bad book than to miss out on a good one because I trusted someone else when they warned me away from it.
  
  I do know that the majority of us don’t mean any of these things literary even when we do say them, but they’re a short and easy way of expression the intensity of our like and dislike. I guess that as long as we don’t start thinking that they are or should be universal, there isn’t really a problem.

What about you? What are your own bookish pet peeves? And do you agree or disagree about any of the above?

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Atonement by Ian McEwan

Atonement is a story told in three parts: one set in a country house in the 1930’s, another during WW2, and the final one in contemporary times. It’s the story of how an introverted, imaginative girl’s mistake wrecked the lives of people she cared about, and of how those involved dealt with the incident over the course of their lives. This is a highly simplified synopsis, of course, but I’m afraid it’s all I can tell you, because Atonement is a highly spoilable book. Don’t get me wrong; the story’s brilliance doesn’t rely on a surprise or a twist, and I don’t think knowing what happened from the very beginning will ultimately make that much of a difference. But I know many readers prefer to go into a novel knowing as little as possible, and so for the sake of those who, like me, are latecomers to this particular party, I’ll stop here.

I loved Atonement from the very first page: I loved McEwan’s precise writing, his attention to detail, and his expert handling of multiple points of view (all of which reminded me a little of A.S. Byatt); I loved the world he was evoking, the slightly decayed country house, the family dynamics, the silences; I loved that the book immediately promised to be highly satisfying at a pure storytelling level, in addition to everything else. The three sections are different enough that they could almost be different novels, but in the end I loved them all equally, even if for different reasons.

One of my favourite things about the first part was how momentous it felt from the very beginning. This isn’t a result of the two instances of foreshadowing, but of the fact that the writing immediately makes what’s being described sound like the recollection of a turning point in the lives of all the characters. And so you wonder what could have happened that so deeply affected all those people; what made a seemingly ordinary day so worthy of being remembered. The intensity McEwan achieves here put me in mind of The Secret History, another book that had me on the edge of my seat wondering when it, whatever “it” was, was going to come. Both books achieve this sort of intense suspense without ever being heavy-handed, which I imagine is no easy task.

Once the nature of this particular “it” becomes clearly, which to me happened fairly early into the novel, it was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. But before I go any further, I have to confess that at one point the whole premise gave me pause. I’m going to try to explain why in a way that is clear to those who have read the book but won’t spoil things for those who haven’t – apologies in advance in case I wind up sounding too vague and awkward. The story might have made me uncomfortable if it had been a matter of smoke without fire, so to speak, as I think there’s far too much assuming that these situations are usually smoke without fire in our culture, and this is something that bothers me immensely. As it turned out, though – a story about someone being wrongly blamed for something that did take place, and that misplacement of blame being deeply rooted in class assumptions – I could love it without the slightest reservation.

One of the things that makes Atonement work so well is the depth of McEwan’s characterisation – that intense suspense I was talking about earlier is achieved not only because you want to know what happens next, but because you grow to care about the characters, and hope against hope that things won’t turn out too horribly for them. I think McEwan was particularly successful when creating Briony, the aforementioned introverted, imaginative girl. She does a dreadful thing, and yet it’s hard to hate her because you see her from the inside. You know perfectly well that other people’s versions of what happened, and especially of what motivated her, are not quite right. It’s surely no coincidence that early in the novel we are treated to musings on fiction’s ability to achieve exactly this (on which more later). This kind of self-conscious, calculated storytelling is hard to pull off well, but McEwan (again like Byatt, or perhaps even Atwood) does it very well. Even when he delves deep into metafiction, the narrative is perfectly sustained.

What really made the book for me was exactly this metafictional aspect. This was something that surprised me: in part three McEwan very nearly pulls a John Fowles, which again is not easy to do well. But oh, he makes it work. Probably not for everyone (somehow I have the impression that this is a book that is very well-known but not necessarily universally loved, though I might be wrong here), but I, being the metafiction junkie^* that I am, was absolutely delighted. At its core, Atonement is a novel about novels. Yes, it’s also about guilt and penance and complex family dynamics and class and sexuality and growing up, and the hidden, ugly side of heroism, and the horrors of war. But most of all, I loved that it dealt so intelligently with the power of storytelling and with the deep ties between literature and empathy. We tell stories because they help us realise that everyone else is as real as we are – that there are countless other lives, other mindsets, other selves out there in the world.

Briony’s incomplete grasp of this at age thirteen is the real source of the tragedy. She sees herself as the star of a drama – her play being performed at last – and everyone else as her satellite. The consequences of this are of course disastrous – and what better way to atone for it than to bring yet more stories, with their endless potential to humanise even the most off-putting actions, into the world?

I couldn’t be happier with my first experience with McEwan – On Chesil Beach next?

Favourite passages:

A second thought always followed the first, one mystery always bred another: was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid as affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed being a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face? Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving with equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.

It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.

Reviewed at:
The Literary Omnivore, Book Nut, Book Addiction, What Kate’s Reading, Care’s Online Bookclub, Bookie Mee, The Zen Leaf, Trish’s Reading Nook, Melody’s Reading Corner, Musings of a Bookish Kitty, Caribousmom, An Adventure in Reading


(As always, let me know if I missed yours.)

*Credit where credit is due: I’m pretty sure I stole this phrase from either Jenny or Fyrefly.

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Letters From a Fainthearted Feminist by Jill Tweedie

Letters From a Fainthearted Feminist is a collection of fictional letters from Martha, a stay-at-home mother of two, to Mary, her supposedly more “liberated” best friend. In the letters, Martha humorously recounts events from her daily life, makes wry and perceptive observations about gender issues, and talks about her struggle to balance her belief in gender equality with her very traditional lifestyle.

This is a book about what happens when idealism meets the constraints of daily reality. It’s also about something that shouldn’t happened, but in reality has: feminism’s occasional dismissal of the domestic; of traditionally feminine activities and lifestyles. Of course, the goal of the movement is not and has never been to replace a limited definition of what “proper” women should be with another, but the book so well works exactly because Tweedie is very much aware of this. She pokes fun at the failings and limitations of the practice of feminism without ever dismissing the theory.

Letters From a Fainthearted Feminist is written in a conversational style, but under the surface of Martha’s friendliness we find some serious sarcasm, constant denouncement of injustices and double standards, and plenty of acute observations. This is humour that comes from the inside, yes, but it’s not any less biting because of that. Tweedie’s writing is at times laugh out loud funny, and I loved it for that. But most of all I loved it for being so human – for her perpetual awareness that the world is not populated by monsters or saints, but by people doing the best they can.

Martha’s letters to Mary were first published in 1982, and it shows – in many ways, Letters From a Fainthearted Feminist is a very Britain in the 80’s sort of book. But this didn’t really bother me, because I’ve always believed that the idea that literature should strive for timelessness and universality is overrated. One of the reasons why I read is exactly to find out how the then and elsewhere differ from the here and now. There are plenty of references that timestamp this book, but personally I don’t see this has a bad thing – the clearly identifiable cultural and historical context actually add to its interest.

The tone of Letters From a Fainthearted Feminist reminded me at times of The Diary of a Provincial Lady – both are quiet domestic comedies with heroines who are far less conventional and much more prone to questioning the status-quo than it might seem at first glance. Fans of E.M. Delafield will likely enjoy this book.

Favourite bits:

Not that I think it’s done our Cause much good, some of the women who’ve made the Top Job. Men have managed to live under male monsters – Hitler, Stalin, Caligula, Peter the Great, Attila the Hun – without drawing any derogatory conclusions about their own sex, but let a woman add 2p to the cost of false teeth and all anti-feminist hell breaks loose. On the other hand, Josh voted for Mrs T and still thinks this makes him an honorary founder member of the Women’s Movement. Whenever I register an egalitarian complaint he says he voted for a woman Prime Minister, didn’t he, so how can anyone accuse him of being against women’s liberation?

So all day Tuesday I stayed in but I did, once, go to the loo. I have this weak bladder. When I got downstairs again, there was a card on the doormat. ‘Your repairman called but could not get an answer.’ Printed, it was, all ready for him to stuff, quick as a flash, through the letterbox and run off, chortling. Back on the phone to sleeping beauty, confined to barracks another whole day and the repairman finally cometh, regardeth the fridge and tutteth. Tut tut, he says. Nasty, that. Haven’t got the tools in the van for that. Oh yes? I say. Has this fridge broken down in ways no fridge has ever broken down before? Is this a First for Fridgedom? A breakthrough for Fridgekind? Has Dutch Elm disease struck again, is there dry rot in its private parts? The repairman’s eyes flicked from side to side, looking – I dare say – for the gents in white, and I wouldn’t have said no to a short interval in the funny farm myself.

Undeterred, she went on to say that she had tried telephoning me to tell me what time her train arrived but I had been out. Pause for implications to sink in. Daughter is Scarlet Woman, spends daylight hours togged out in Y-front frocks chatting up lounge lizards in sleazy Mayfair drinking clubs when should be suckling innocent babe and meeting clean-living Away Day Mother at Liverpool Street. However. She had then phoned Dear Joshua and got this charming girl who’d said Josh couldn’t meet her due to dining with Lord Dewberry that night. Wasn’t it nice, said Mother, that Joshua had such contacts, and nicer still that he’d forsworn them in order to welcome his Mother-in-Law and she only hoped I appreciated him as much as she did-
You’re always saying, Mary, that feminists should make friends with their mothers, but where do I begin? What possible way can I introduce mine to the Women’s Movement? Say to her, Mother, do you realise you are a member of an oppressed class? Mother, who’s squashed Father so flat all his life that he looks like a piece of lasagne with a moustache on one end? Mother, who wouldn’t recognise oppression if it leapt up and garrotted her? I read Nancy Friday’s book My Mother, My Self and all I could think was how lucky she was, having such an amenable mother.

Reviewed at:
Other Stories

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Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier

I have been writing and reading about biology and evolution for a long time now, and I am frankly getting sick of how “science” is pinned to our she-butts like donkey tails and then glued in place with talk of hardheaded realism. I am tired of reading in books on evolutionary psychology or neo-Darwinism or gender biology about how women are really like all the old canards: that we have a lackadaisical sex drive compared to men and a relatively greater thirst for monogamy, and, outside the strictly sexual arena, a comparative lack of interest in achievement and renown, a preference for being rather than doing, a quiet, self-contained nature, a greater degree of “friendliness”, a deficient mathematical ability, and so on et cetera back to the bleary Cro-Magnon beginnings. I’m tired of hearing about how there are sound evolutionary explanations for such ascriptions of woman’s nature and how we must face them full square, chin up and smiling.

From the Introduction

Natalie Angier’s brilliant Woman: An Intimate Geography is both an informative, accessible and entertaining science book about the biology of the female body, and a fascinating cultural history of the concept (or concepts) of womanhood. Each of the book’s chapters deals with a particular detail of female anatomy – the egg, the X chromosome, the uterus, the clitoris, the breast, the ovaries, female hormones, etc. Furthermore, there are chapters on evolutionary psychology, on medicine’s penchant for hysterectomies, on women and testosterone, on breastfeeding, on female aggression, and so on.

What’s really interesting here is that Angier writes about both the biological facts of the female body (and she makes the science sound more approachable and appealing than any other writer I can think of) and about the history of the cultural biases that have clouded our past understanding of them. To make it even better, she does so from absolutely the right perspective – Natalie Angier is clearly someone who both knows and deeply appreciates science. Much to my relief, she knows it more than well enough to be able to tell when someone is Doing It Wrong, and as a result she asks all the right questions about faulty methods, erroneous conclusion and personal biases without ever falling into easy and tedious old diatribes against The Evils of Modern Science.

The tone of Woman: An Intimidate Geography is enthusiastic and celebratory, but never naïvely so. Yes, this is a book that will tell you everything you have always wanted to know about female anatomy and that will inspire a sense of appreciation and awe in the process. But at the same time, it’s also a book that successfully avoids any essentialist pitfalls. It’s a book about the wonders of the female body, but not a book about how wonderful and special women are simply by virtue of being biologically women. Likewise, it’s not a book that espouses any limited definition of femaleness based on mere anatomy. Angier is perfectly aware that reproduction does not define women; that hormones, periods or a uterus do not a woman make. Though the book is written from a cisgendered perspective (and it’s really, really a pity that it lacks a chapter on trans women), she takes care to use inclusive language and not to limit membership to the female gender do those who possess such and such working anatomical bits.

Woman is also an unapologetically feminist book, in the sense that it constantly questions the gender binary and the Great Divide that supposedly separates men and women. As science keeps showing us, and as Angier keeps reminding us, we are much more alike than different, both psychological and biologically. Angier clearly places women at the centre of this book – she presents them as biological beings in their own right and not as deviations from the male norm – but her clear awareness of gender as a social construct keeps her sarcastic rebuttals of the biological theories of female weakness and inferiority from ever turning into a war of the sexes.

Speaking of sarcasm, I absolutely loved Angier’s voice, her irony, her enthusiasm and her sense of humour. As I said above, she makes an effort to be welcoming and inclusive, but at the same time, when she has no patience for something she makes it absolutely clear. This is particularly obvious on the wonderful chapter on evolutionary psychology, where she rebuts all attempts to use pseudoscientific shenanigans to naturalise social injustices and power differences between men and women. I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me, but my chin dropped when I read that such attempts have extended as far as to the oh so wonderful practice of shaming women for their sexuality. Of course no man will want to stay with a woman who gives it up too easily, the theory goes – how would he even know the kids were his? It’s only natural, then, that we have developed all those sophisticated social mechanisms meant to let “easy” women know how worthless they really are. It’s a perfectly sensible evolutionary strategy – what else?

My absolute favourite, though, was the chapter on female aggression. Angier starts with a brief overview of what is currently known about testosterone and aggression, showing that the link is nowhere as clear as popular wisdom would have us believe. She then points out that while the expression of anger through violent behaviour is considered acceptable and natural in males, in females it has been recurrently linked with madness. Women, being as naturally prone to aggressive behaviour as men, have had to find other socially acceptable outlines for their feelings, namely verbal aggression. I loved this chapter because it dealt with something that really, really saddens me, and that unfortunately I come across often (coming from men and women alike): the idea that girls and women are “naturally” treacherous, backstabbing and deceitful, while men take the morally superior path and express their dislike of something or someone upfront. If – and I say if – there is any truth to this at all, there are social causes that are constantly overlooked. I’ve of course dealt with my share of deceitful women in my life, but I’ve also dealt with deceitful men, and with women who are absolutely incapable of guile. It seems so absurd to suggest that this behaviour is intrinsically tied to gender – and yet I hear it all the time.

As you can probably tell, I highly, highly recommend Woman. It’s both a book that celebrates the specificities of being biologically female and a book that defies the limited ways we have defined and continue to define what it means to be a woman or a man. And what could be better than that?

Interesting bits:

The ancients also saw no difference between men and women’s capacity for sexual pleasure and the necessity of mutual orgasm for conception. Galen proclaimed that a woman can not get pregnant unless she had an orgasm, and his view prevailed until the eighteenth century. This is a sweet thought, one of my favourite glaring errors of history, and a roundabout acknowledgement of the importance of the female climax to life as we know it. Unfortunately, the insistence that an expectant woman was a postorgasmic woman spelled tragedy for a number of our foresisters. Women who became pregnant after rape, for example, were accused of licentiousness and adultery, since their swollen bellies were evidence of their acquiescence and their pleasure, and they were routinely put to death.

Men whose gonads fail to produce enough testosterone sometimes suffer from gynocomastia. Without testosterone to keep breast growth in check, the men’s small amount of estrogen has the opportunity to lay down selective depots of fat hurriedly, demonstrating once again that the line between maleness and femaleness is thin—as thin as the fetus’s bipotential genital ridge, as thin as the milk ridge in all of us.

This study has been done many times. If you take a group of babies or young toddlers and dress them in nondescript, non sex-specific clothes—yellow is always a good colour—and make sure that their haircuts don’t give them away, and if you put them in a room with a lot of adults watching, the adults will not be able to sex the children accurately. The adults will try, based on the behaviours of each child, but they will be right no more often than they would be if they flipped a coin. This has been shown again and again, but still we don’t believe it. We think we can tell a boy from a girl by the child’s behaviour, specifically by its level of aggressiveness. If you show a person a videotape of a crying baby and tell her the baby is a boy, the observer will describe the baby as looking angry; if you tell the person the baby is a girl, she will say the child is scared or miserable.

We’re not supposed to talk about women’s rights anymore, for to do so is to commit the sin of “victimology”, to act the weak whiner, the neurasthenic corseted Victorian lady. The charge of victimology, like that of political correctness, instantly squelches all effort at precise protest, neutering a complaint before it has been uttered, for complain is what victimologists do. But if you don’t ask for a raise, you won’t get one, and if you don’t snarl about an injustice, it won’t go away. If women are prejudged as women to be lesser this or that, if a female guitarist is assumed to “suck” before she has taken out her instrument and played a single note, if women are still blamed for being bad mothers because they work outside the home, and if women are told there is an evolutionary reasons that they don’t really want sex, or if they do they should hide it, then we are not done with our women’s moil yet.

Reviewed at:
A Striped Armchair
Care’s Online Bookclub
Booked All Week

(Have I missed yours?)

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Middlemarch by George Eliot

George Eliot named her ambitious seventh novel after the fictional small down in which the story is set, and subtitled it “a study of provincial life”. Attempting to sum up Middlemarch might be an entirely futile exercise, but if I were to do it I’d say that this is, above all, a novel that establishes a complex web of relationships, political machinations, spheres of influence, and personal likes and dislikes, and then goes on to explore how these affect the lives of a particular group of characters.

Although it was published in 1874, Middlemarch is set half a century earlier, between 1829 and 1832, at a time of great political upheaval and social change – the time of the Reform Bills that would extend (male) suffrage, of the beginnings of the railway system, of great changes in the practice of medicine, etc. It’s important to remember that this is a work of what we would today call historical fiction, and that this fact is not irrelevant for an understanding of the novel. One of the themes of Middlemarch is exactly the often forgotten individual in the face of the defining moments of history –as the novel’s brilliant closing lines remind us, we owe much to people who have been forgotten. Change is not merely the result of the actions of those we call heroes and heroines, but also (and perhaps mostly) of unremembered lives. There isn’t much that history can tell us about what hasn’t been recorded, but fortunately literature can attempt to recreate those lost stories and therefore fill the gap. For an excellent post on this very topic, please make sure you read Jodie’s review of Wolf Hall and The Lacuna.

In general terms, Middlemarch is a novel about unhappy marriages, frustrated and fulfilled love, ethical dilemmas, small town life, gossip, misunderstandings, foolishness, kindness, malice, ambition, intellectual passion, science, religion, politics, people living above their means, the weight of social expectations, the oppressive side of gentility – in one word, it’s about life. Of course, that’s an abstract and cold way to put it, and the novel’s strength lies exactly in its combination of a bird’s eye view of life in a small Victorian town and of a focus on specific characters. On the one hand, we have general Victorian social commentary (which is both historically contextualised and very contemporary), and on the other hand we have complex, flawed, realistic human beings, doing what human beings have always done and continue to do. George Eliot does not isolate her characters from their circumstances, quite the contrary, but her extraordinary characterisation makes them recognizably and universally human. She also excels at writing extremely moving moments between people: Mr and Mrs Bulstrode when the truth finally surfaces between them, several scenes between Will and Dorothea – these all brought tears to my eyes. This is not a romantic book in the sense we traditionally attribute to the term, but it’s something I much prefer: a book about the depth of human connections and everything that constrains them.

I feel like I could talk about Middlemarch in general terms all day and still not cover the half of what it’s about, so instead I’ll to discuss some of its main storylines more specifically. First and foremost, there’s the story of Dorothea Brooke, who the prologue seems to suggest will be the protagonist of the novel. This is more or less true, through Dorothea is almost absent for hundreds of pages at a time. Still, the prologue tells us what this is going to be a story about what happens to women who are passionate, intense, earnest, genuine, intelligent and infinitely intellectually curious, and yet live in a world that disallows all these traits in females, and who are therefore not allowed to find any outlets for their passion and curiosity. There’s probably some room for debate when it comes to whether or not this is what happens to Dorothea in the end, but still, the portrait rings true.

These women, we are told, are “the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity”, and “their ardour alternates between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.” When we first meet Dorothea, she’s an earnest and trustful eighteen-year-old who longs for excellence and for knowledge; for a mind superior to her own who will patiently tutor her until she can achieve greatness for herself. She thinks she finds this in Mr Casaubon, a learned man much older than she is, to whom she anticipates she will submit with nothing but pleasure.

However, readers aren’t in the least surprised when they find her crying less than a month after her wedding, or when they watch her struggle as she loses her blind trust in Mr Casaubon’s judgement, as well as her respect for him. That her husband could be wrong or could act unjustly comes as a shock to Dorothea – and kudos to George Eliot for acknowledging how painful this realisation is, for not making her naivety incompatible with her great intelligence, and for not making the whole process of her loss of faith in Casaubon sound silly in the least.

Dorothea seems doomed to be unhappy, mostly because “there is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.” I could accuse her of marrying foolishly; I could say I wish she had listened to her friends and loved ones. But I can’t bring myself to, because I’m only too aware that she wouldn’t have been any happier if she had followed other people’s advice and let them decide for her. She desperately needed to follow her own path, and yet—and yet I cannot help but wish it hadn’t brought her quite as much pain.

What struck me the most about Dorothea was her earnestness, as well as the condescension with which she was often treated. Because she was a woman, and a young one at that, she was frequently dismissed and not taken seriously. No, this is not surprising for a Victorian novel, but still it’s a story worth telling – and despite the centuries that separate us it’s something I can relate to. I could also see something of myself in Dorothea’s earnestness, in her constant attempts to communicate seriously and genuinely, and in the acute loneliness that followed when people didn’t respond in kind. There’s something a little tragic about being the only person in the room who lacks social artfulness, who doesn’t play power games, and who’s trying to have honest, soulful conversations about topics that aren’t deemed fit for polite society. In addition to all this, I loved Dorothea for her generous spirit and for her unflinching kindness – for being the only person who would say, “I believe that people are almost always better than their neighbours think they are”.

But to speak of Dorothea’s story in isolation is to betray everything George Eliot set out to do in Middlemarch. So let me move on to Lydgate, a doctor trained in Paris who moves to Middlemarch and begins to feel “the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity.” There’s a lot that I could say about Lydgate – I could discuss his worth ethics, and how this is portrayed in the novel in relation to class; I could talk about his scientific dreams and ambitions and what ultimately hampers them; I could talk of his view of science, medicine and progress, and how these are received in Middlemarch; and so on. But what interested me the most was Lydgate’s relationship with Rosamond. Here we have an unflinching and very perceptive portrayal of both the social and the private, emotional consequences of an unequal partnership between a man and a woman.

This passage, which comes towards the end of the novel, absolutely broke my heart:

He could not promise to shield her from the dreaded wretchedness, for he could see no sure means of doing so. When he left her to go out again, he told himself that it was ten times harder for her than for him: he had a life away from home, and constant appeals to his activity on behalf of others. He wished to excuse everything in her if he could—but it was inevitable that in that excusing mood he should think of her as if she were an animal of another and feebler species. Nevertheless she had mastered him.

I worry that this might sound accusing out of context, but in the book it really isn’t, I don’t think – mostly because Eliot carefully contextualises what led to Rosamond becoming this “animal of another and feebler species”. Because she was not raised to ever seen herself as an adult, a responsible or capable human being, or an intellectual equal of men, she doesn’t behave as one, and the result is misery for her and her husband alike. The story does seem to be more sympathetic to Lydgate than Rosamond, and sometimes the narrator treats her with ambivalence. But the context it provides, and the careful analysis of what make her who she is, prevents any of her less appealing traits from being presented as inherently female.

Besides, there’s the presence of Dorothea in the novel, which doubly ensures that nothing about Rosamond’s personality is simply explained away as a result of her femaleness. In Dorothea and Rosamond’s stories I see the first stirrings of feminism – all through the novel there’s a sense of gratitude to women like Dorothea, to whom we owe so much of the freedom we have today. Its counterpart could easily be a reproach of women like Rosamond for not breaking free of those limited moulds of femininity, but I think the story does manage to avoid that.

Finally, there’s the subplot that involves Fred Vincy, Rosamond’s brother and the son of a local gentleman. Fred is in love with Mary Grant, and as her father Caleb Grant (one of my favourite characters, and about whom I could write a whole post) is a working man, she’s considered to be beneath him by most Middlemarchers.

As I’m sure you can guess, this subplot deals with class quite extensively – with prejudice, yes, but also with the relationship between class and work. Fred’s father pressures him to become a clergyman because this is one of the few professions considered fit for a gentleman. Mary, on the other hand, says that the only thing that is undignified is to do something for which you have no inclination at all, and at which you’ll be no good – and that she refuses to have a mediocre clergyman for a husband. Fred’s dilemma gives Eliot the opportunity to comment extensive on the limited notions of “respectability” and on how these affected people lives. She manages to poke fun at conventions, but at the same time she takes the emotional and social consequences of openly defying them absolutely seriously.

I know this post is already ridiculously long (is the fact that this is the longest novel I’ve reviewed to date a valid excuse?), but I can’t end it without mentioning the narrator’s voice: in the fashion of the Victorians, she (I do of course know the narrator is not the author, but I’m going to call it “she” anyway) is given to commenting on the story as she tells it. This is a much maligned technique, but it’s one that I don’t find anywhere nearly as limiting as it’s often accused of being. In the case of Middlemarch, her voice most definitely doesn’t close the narrative, and it gives her endless opportunities for irony. E.g.: “It commences well.” (Things never began with Mr. Borthrop Trumbull: they always commenced both in private life and on his handbills.). Her aside are also sometimes slightly aphoristic, but somehow she manages to make them work. Another example:

There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs. If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all, to whatever confession we belong, and whether we believe in the future perfection of our race or in the nearest date fixed for the end of the world; whether we regard the earth as a putrefying nidus for a saved remnant, including ourselves, or have a passionate belief in the solidarity of mankind.

What I loved the most about the narrator’s voice was that although she can be biting and ironic, she’s never malicious – on the contrary, she’s always generous and humane. This ties in with why the asides don’t really reduce the story to a single interpretation or (dreaded words!) an overt “moral”. We’re not invited to judge the characters along with the narrator, but rather to consider them charitably and to acknowledge the many complexities of their humanity. I loved what A.S. Byatt had to say about this:

When I was younger it was fashionable to criticise Eliot for writing from a god's eye view, as though she were omniscient. Her authorial commenting voice appeared old-fashioned. It was felt she should have chosen a limited viewpoint, or written from inside her characters only. I came to see that this is nonsense. If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist. We were taught to laugh at collections of "the wit and wisdom of Eliot". But the truth is that she is wise - not only intelligent, but wise. Her voice deepens our response to her world.

I’m almost done here, I promise. Let me just say a few words on the experience of finally reading Middlemarch: I don’t know why I was intimidated for so long, really, as the only slightly daunting thing about this novel is really its length. But it doesn’t feel like a long book – or rather, it doesn’t feel like an unnecessarily long one. At the end of 900 pages, I felt slightly bereaved. I missed the characters dreadfully, and I desperately wanted more. And as I was reading I was never bored, never lost, never anything but fully immersed in the story. This is something worth remembering about the Victorians: whatever else they were, they were fond of plot and of telling a good story. And I’m sorry, my dear Modernists, but I don’t find that a bad thing.

Middlemarch is a novel of almost endless scope; an epic and bittersweet story about all the rights and wrongs that form a human life; and a story that tells even of triumphs with a tone of melancholy. I’ll leave you with its brilliant closing lines:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Other favourite passages:

“And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl’s life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her, and to whom she is grateful.”

(This is said by Mary Grant – Harriet Vane would very much agree.)

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

For my part I am very sorry for him [Mr. Casaubon]. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. Becoming a dean or even a bishop would make little difference, I fear, to Mr. Casaubon’s uneasiness. Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.

Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death—who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace “We must all die” transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness “I must die—and soon,” then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candour never waited to be asked for its opinion. Then, again, there was the love of truth—a wide phrase, but meaning in this relation, a lively objection to seeing a wife look happier than her husband’s character warranted, or manifest too much satisfaction in her lot—the poor thing should have some hint given her that if she knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet, and in light dishes for a supper-party. Stronger than all, there was the regard for a friend’s moral improvement, sometimes called her soul, which was likely to be benefited by remarks tending to gloom, uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring at the furniture and a manner implying that the speaker would not tell what was on her mind, from regard to the feelings of her hearer. On the whole, one might say that an ardent charity was at work setting the virtuous mind to make a neighbour unhappy for her good.

What others had to say:
Trish’s Reading Nook, You Can Never Have Too Many Books, Athyrium filix-femina (The Lady Fern), Becky’s Book Reviews

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As you probably know, a few months ago I invited my fellow book bloggers to read this book along with me and post their thoughts this week. It’s of course perfectly fine if you’re behind – I’ll be glad to add your link to this post no matter when you finish. I can’t wait to hear what everyone else has to say.

The Book Stop – Progress Report
Dolce Bellezza- Review
She Reads Novels - Review
A Victorian Tea Party at The Indextrious Reader, plus review and favourite passages.
Silly Little Mischief - Progress Report, Final Thoughts
A Good Stopping Point - Progress Report
Vishy's Blog - Review
A Good Stopping Point - Review #1 and Review #2

(Leave me your link and I'll be glad to add it!)

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The Sunday Salon - Literary Biographies: A Reading List

I’ve never been much of a reader of biographies, but a couple of recent reading experiences have left me suspecting that I might be missing out. The biographies of Dorothy L. Sayers and Rosalind Franklin I read in the past few months were informative, wonderfully written and difficult to put down. And more importantly, they were both fascinating and very personal accounts of periods of history that are of great interest to me. That’s what made me realise I might be more interested in biographies than I ever suspected, really – they’re a way to get up close and personal with history; of understanding how individuals experienced Big Events and how abstract social questions touched the lives of real human beings. It’s one thing to read, for example, about the history of feminism in the abstract; it’s quite another to read the life story of a woman who was directly involved in it all and whose private life was shaped by her beliefs. (Note to self: get that Josephine Butler biography asap.)

Since I can’t currently acquired any new books, I did the next best thing, which is to make myself a reading list. I’m not exclusively interested in literary biographies, but many of the historical figures I’m curious to know more about were writers, so this seemed to me as good a place to start as any. If you’ve read any of these, I’d of course really love to hear your thoughts:

• Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee – This has to be the most frequently recommended literary biography out there, and I assume it’s with good reason. The sheer size of this book intimidates me slightly, but I’m sure it’s a fascinating portrait of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, and I’d love to get to it before the end of the year.
  
  
• D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage by Brenda Maddox – I love Lawrence and I loved Maddox’s biography of Rosalind Franklin, so I’m very curious about her take on his relationship with his wife Frieda von Richthofen. From her previous work, I can tell that she’ll bring a perspective and sensibility to this book that will greatly interest me. (Also, I’ve just noticed that she has a new book coming out called George Eliot in Love – I think I’m adding that to my wishlist too.)
  
  
• The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell — Part of me feels bad reading a third party account of the Mitford’s lives, when there are books of letters and memoirs out there I could pick up instead. But Lovell’s group biography does sound like a fascinating bird’s eye view of the lives of these six sisters, who were involved in some of the major political and literary events of the 20th century.
  
  
• The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft by Claire Tomalin – I want to read this both because it’s about Mary Wollstonecraft and because it’s by Claire Tomalin. Tomalin’s name always seems to come up when I ask for recommendations of biographies, and as for Wollstonecraft, she’s of course an unavoidable name for anyone interested in the history of feminism.
  
  
• The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell – I realise this will tell me as much about Gaskell as it will about Charlotte Brontë, but that’s actually part of why I want to read it. I’m also curious to see how the Victorians approached biography. However, I’ve yet to read a book on the lives of the Brontës, and would love to complement this with a contemporary perspective. Suggestions?
  
  
• Learning Not To Be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti by Kathleen Jones – How sad a title is that? But I suspect it’s very apt too. I love Rossetti’s poetry, and have been meaning to look for a biography of her for years. The fact that she lived as a woman in Pre-Raphaelite circles is in itself enough to make me want to read more about her life. Also, apparently Kathleen Jones “looks at her life alongside that of other nineteenth-century women writers, notably Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson”, which makes it sound even better.
  
  
• Edith Nesbit: A Woman of Passion by Julia Briggs – Another excellent title, don’t you think? Edith Nesbit was an unconventional woman who lived in a time period I find fascinating, and who moved in Fabian and Bohemian circles. Add to this the fact that she inspired Olive Wellwood from A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, and how could I not want to read this?
  
  
• Capote: A Biography by Gerald Clarke – Tea Lady recommended this to my recently, when I first mentioned that I wanted to read more biographies. She said it was the best one she’d ever read, and as Truman Capote is one of my favourite authors I added it to my wishlist immediately.

Are you a fan of biographies, literary or otherwise? If so, what are your favourites? Anything you think I absolutely need to read? If not, do you find them tedious, are they just not your cup of tea, have you had any bad experiences with them ,or have you (like me until recently) just never considered reading them before?

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“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous short story is one of those classics I had missed out on completely until my fellow book bloggers convinced me that my life was incomplete without it – and with good reason. “The Yellow Wallpaper” tells the story of a woman’s supposed descent into madness – the protagonist, an unreliable narrator who tells her tale through brief undated journal entries, is spending the summer at a rented house to undergo a rest cure for a “slight hysterical tendency”. At the advice of her husband John, who also happens to be her doctor, she spends most of her time confined in a bedroom upstairs. She’s told to avoid all kinds of stimulation, including writing, and as a result she’s forced to write her journal secretly. Eventually she becomes obsessed with the ugly pattern of the yellow wallpaper that covers the small bedroom, and in the end—well, I won’t tell you what happens then.

I was prompted to finally write about “The Yellow Wallpaper”, which I first read some months ago, by Pickygirl’s fabulous review of Sarah Waters’ Affinity. She very aptly compares the novel to Gilman’s short story, which reminded me that one of the first bloggers to recommend it to me was Claire, exactly after I read Affinity. At the time she also mentioned Marghanita Laski's The Victorian Chaise-Lounge, and if I were to pick a third comparison myself it would be The Awakening by Kate Chopin. All four are extraordinarily powerful stories that deal with how stifling women’s lives often were in the Victorian era.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman makes excellent use of the unreliable narrator. The protagonist is seemingly acquiescent and ready to accept her husband’s diagnosis, as well as his judgement as superior to her own. But reading between the lines, we get glimpses of the anger, frustration and despair that she was not allowed to voice:

You see he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?
If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?
(...)
Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
But what is one to do?

What she craves is the very opposite of a “rest cure” – it’s stimulation and a temporary escape from an oppressive domestic existence, as well as being allowed to find solace in her writing. But her own ideas are dismissed because she’s “irrational” and “hysterical”. As a man, a husband and a doctor, John has full power over her, and even the best of intentions don’t change the fact that the result of his treatment is her devoicing and imprisonment. Furthermore, his pep talks about “strength”, “will” and “self-control” are not in the least encouraging – in fact, they amount to a form of victim-blaming.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” was first published in 1891, at a time when madness was the most common way to explain away female behaviour that didn’t fit the mould*, and it was used as a powerful tool of control - again, Affinity is a perfect example of this. (Note to self: read Mad, Bad and Sad soon.) In “Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper”, an article from 1913, Gilman tells the story of her own domestic entrapment and of her experiences with the Victorian medical establishment. Being kept away from her writing and from other forms of stimulation, she says, was the worst possible advice she could have been given, and the only thing that saved her was going against it.

I was amazed that Gilman was able to pack so much in only 6000 words. This is a story I definitely won’t soon forget. A few of my favourite passages:

He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction. I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.

(I found these lines immensely saddening and unsettling, especially in the context of happens in the end.)

At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.
I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman.
(...)
Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over

(I worry about spoiling the story for those of you who haven’t read it yet if I share more, so I’ll just say that I found the final image of the prison bars incredibly powerful and expressive.)

They read it too:
Bibliographing
Booklust
Fleur Fisher Reads
Stuck in a Book
The Reading Life
Notes From the North

(Have I missed yours?)

*Spoilerish note: The story seems to suggest at one point that the protagonist might have been suffering from postpartum depression, and I don’t mean to suggest that this is not deserving of medical attention– just not on the disempowering terms that are established here, of course.

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A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

A Little Princess is the story of Sara Crewe, who at the beginning of the novel is a solemn eight-year-old on her way to Miss Minchin’s Boarding School in London. Sara is the only daughter of the widowed Captain Crewe, and during her early childhood in India she was given everything a little girl could possibly desire. Likewise, it’s Captain Crewe’s wish that Sara be well looked after at Miss Minchin’s Academy – she’s to have a private sitting room, a personal maid, and all the comforts that money can buy.

Everyone is ready to think of Sara as an arrogant and spoiled child, but instead she’s compassionate, considerate, not given to putting on airs, and very much aware that her father’s great fortune doesn’t make her better than anyone else. Sara also privately wonders if her good temper is the direct a result of her privileged life, and whether she’d be a very different sort of person if she’d been less fortunate and had gone through privations. As I’m sure you can guess, before the end of the story Sara has the opportunity to put these conjectures to the test. But I won’t tell you how things turn out, in case you (like me) missed this lovely classic growing up.

A Little Princess is a sort of Cinderella story with a twist – no, Sara doesn’t marry a prince, and hers is not exactly a rags to riches story, but the main elements are still there. This is the story of a sympathetic heroine submitted to trials, hardships and great injustices, all of which readers can tell all along will be temporary. But the reason why the story works so well is because, temporary or not, Sara’s misery feels absolutely real as she’s experiencing it. I suppose that the inevitable happy ending is predictable, just like Daddy Long-Legs or The Blue Castle are predictable, but honestly, who cares? These are all charming stories, comforting exactly because of their identifiable patterns, and moving even if we can see their emotional climaxes coming from miles away.

One of the things I appreciated the most about A Little Princess was the fact that it was written with such respect for the psychological realities of childhood. I’m thinking of a scene in particular, when Miss Minchin asks Sara if she ever had French lessons. Sara says no, and Miss Minchin takes this to mean she cannot speak the language. What Sara really means is that she never needed French lessons because her mother was French and she grew up speaking French, but she finds herself tongue-tied and unable to explain the difference in the face of Miss Minchin’s impatience. I remember this feeling very well from when I was little – feeling small, powerless and devoiced, and being unable to correct an adult’s erroneous assumption even as you knew they’d get angry at you and think you had deliberately mislead them when they found out.

A Little Princess is also an absolutely fascinating story to think about in terms of class dynamics. I was surprised that Sara was so clearly aware of the arbitrariness of class boundaries, and of the common humanity that we all share despite them. There are several examples of this – the most telling being Sara’s kindness to Becky, the scullery maid, whom she can’t help but see as just another little girl:

“If you please, Miss Minchin,” said Sara, suddenly, “mayn’t Becky stay?”
It was a bold thing to do. Miss Minchin was betrayed into something like a slight jump. Then she put her eyeglass up, and gazed at her show pupil disturbedly.
“Becky!” she exclaimed. “My dearest Sara!”
Sara advanced a step toward her.
“I want her because I know she will like to see the presents,” she explained. “She is a little girl, too, you know.”
Miss Minchin was scandalized. She glanced from one figure to the other.
“My dear Sara,” she said, “Becky is the scullery maid. Scullery maids—er—are not little girls.”
It really had not occurred to her to think of them in that light. Scullery maids were machines who carried coal scuttles and made fires.
“But Becky is,” said Sara. “And I know she would enjoy herself. Please let her stay—because it is my birthday.”
Miss Minchin replied with much dignity:
“As you ask it as a birthday favor—she may stay. Rebecca, thank Miss Sara for her great kindness.”

Sara may be a rich heiress, but she lacks the sense of entitlement that many privileged people have even today, let alone in the early twentieth century. Her sense of compassion makes her acknowledge the humanity of everyone she interacts with. However, things are rarely clear cut, both in literature and in life, and what makes A Little Princess so interesting to think about and discuss is the fact that it only takes this egalitarian idea so far.

Sara is undoubtedly kind, but her acts of kindness are more often than not little charities that maintain the status quo, rather than actions that actually challenge the social rules she seems to be dismissing. This is only natural, considering her age and powerlessness for most of the story, but even as it humanises the working class characters, A Little Princess seems to suggest that Sara possesses some sort of born nobility that makes her more worthy of privilege than anyone else – or rather, worthy of a more refined kind of privilege. The gap between her and Becky never closes, even when Sara’s circumstances change. A servant like Becky is to be treated kindly, yes, but she remains a servant, and happy to be so.

Sara’s intrinsic nobility is part of what saves her in the end: even at her most wretched she’s not “one of the populace”; she does not have “the face of a beggar”. She is, in some ways, insulated from the poverty to which she descends by this aura of nobleness, and her destiny is to be a princess who can “give buns and bread to the populace.” I found all these apparent contradictions absolutely fascinating, especially in the context of the early twentieth century and all the social changes the century was to see. It’s like Frances Hodgson Burnett was overtly challenging the notion that social injustice is in fact fair, and that people should just be content with their “station in life”, and yet she kept slipping back into it in several little ways.

As I was saying, the story does absolutely work – first because Sara’s distress is real enough, secondly because she’s difficult not to love, and finally because even if it’s suggested that she stands above the “populace” by birth and education, she does remain aware of the arbitrariness of it all. A Little Princess presents a strange mix of social ideas, but for that very reason it paints a very interesting portrait of the early twentieth century.

Lest all my picking apart give you the wrong impression (as nerdy as it sounds, this actually is my idea of bookish fun), let me say again that I really loved this book – much more so than The Secret Garden, though I did like that one well enough. But A Little Princess was even more charming, and the story enraptured me so much more. Also, I loved it because at its heart this is a story about one of my very favourite themes: the power of stories and the imagination. It’s a story about how they help make us more compassionate by stepping into the shoes of fictional others, how they save us, how they can be a refuge, and how they give us hope.

I’m now more curious than ever to read Frances Hogson Burnett’s books for adults that have been reprinted by Persephone, The Shuttle and The Making of a Marchioness. Have you read them? Which one do you think I should get to first?

Favourite bits:

“Things happen to people by accident,” she used to say. “A lot of nice accidents have happened to me. It just HAPPENED that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them. It just happened that I was born with a father who was beautiful and nice and clever, and could give me everything I liked. Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? I don't know”—looking quite serious—“How I shall ever find out whether I am really a nice child or a horrid one. Perhaps I’m a HIDEOUS child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials.”

Anyone who has been at school with a teller of stories knows what the wonder means—how he or she is followed about and besought in a whisper to relate romances; how groups gather round and hang on the outskirts of the favored party in the hope of being allowed to join in and listen. Sara not only could tell stories, but she adored telling them. When she sat or stood in the midst of a circle and began to invent wonderful things, her green eyes grew big and shining, her cheeks flushed, and, without knowing that she was doing it, she began to act and made what she told lovely or alarming by the raising or dropping of her voice, the bend and sway of her slim body, and the dramatic movement of her hands. She forgot that she was talking to listening children; she saw and lived with the fairy folk, or the kings and queens and beautiful ladies, whose adventures she was narrating. Sometimes when she had finished her story, she was quite out of breath with excitement, and would lay her hand on her thin, little, quick-rising chest, and half laugh as if at herself.

“I dare say it is rather hard to be a rat,” she mused. “Nobody likes you. People jump and run away and scream out, ‘Oh, a horrid rat!’ I shouldn’t like people to scream and jump and say, ‘Oh, a horrid Sara!’ the moment they saw me. And set traps for me, and pretend they were dinner. It’s so different to be a sparrow. But nobody asked this rat if he wanted to be a rat when he was made. Nobody said, ‘Wouldn’t you rather be a sparrow?’”

“Oh, Sara!” she whispered joyfully. “It is like a story!”
“It IS a story,” said Sara. “EVERYTHING’S a story. You are a story—I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story.”

Other opinions:
Becky’s Book Reviews
You’ve GOTTA Read This

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Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton

Tooth and Claw is the perfect blend of fantasy and the Victorian novel: the story is about a family of some social standing but limited fortune, and it begins with the death of Bon Agonin, the family patriarch. Bon Agonin passes away without leaving much of a dowry for his two unmarried daughters, Selendra and Haner. Unable to support themselves, the two sisters have to rely on their brothers, Penn and Avan, and to hope to somehow be able to secure respectable husbands who’ll overlook the matter of the lack of monetary encouragement. But much like Austen’s heroines, the two sisters would much rather marry for love.

To their distress, Selendra and Haner have to be separated shortly after their father’s death, as neither of their brothers can afford to take them both in. Selendra goes to live with Penn, a respectable parson, while Avan, unable to take a maiden to the city where he lives and works without risking tainting her name (and therefore her marriage prospects), has to ask their older sister Berend and her husband Daverak to take in Haner. However, things get even more complicated when Avan decides to sue Daverak for taking far more of Bon Agonin’s inheritance than what was his rightful share – and Selendra and Haner know that as long as the feud lasts, they have no hope of being allowed to see each other.

By the way, if you’re wondering what exactly makes this story fantasy, that would be the fact that all the characters are dragons. But don’t let that make you doubt their humanity or emotional complexity, or the intricacies of their social world. I suppose that more than anything else, Tooth and Claw is a fantasy of manners (a term I learned from Memory and absolutely love). It’s a social comedy, a Victorian romance, and an absolutely delightful story.

Tooth and Claw has been referred to as Pride and Prejudice with dragons, and with good reason. Perhaps this makes it sound cutesy or gimmicky, but trust me, it absolutely isn’t. It’s also not a parody of the Victorian novel – there are touches of humour, but they’re mostly subtle and Austenesque. What this is is a novel that takes the themes of actual Victorian novels – powerless women who must rely on marriage to avoid poverty, ambitious young men, money, love, the social world, class, social inequality, women who lose their reputation through no fault of their own, snobbery, inheritances, respectability and reputation, and so on – and pushes them to their farthest consequences.

In the prologue of Tooth and Claw, Jo Walton says she wanted to create a fantasy world in which all the social conventions of the Victorian world were literally true. A great example of this is the fact that dragon maidens change the colour of their scales to bright pink once they have been sexually awakened. There is no hiding the fact that one is a “fallen woman” – not without the aid of risky herbal brews, anyway. This means that in Tooth and Claw, the ridiculous idea that in women budding sexual feelings in general and virginity loss in particularly entail some sort of irrevocable change is actually real. Of course, one could argue that the social reality of this myth in the Victorian world (and even today, in some parts of the world more obviously than in others) was enough to make it real, in the sense that it affected the lives of countless women. It’s exactly this idea that Jo Walton explores here, with very interesting results.

Class is another one of the major themes of Tooth and Claw – the story focuses on an impoverished but still privileged family, but there are hints of the struggles of those who work to keep their world in order. Haner in particular takes an interest on the treatment of servants, who all have their wings bound (another social reality make literally true), and Selendra is called a radical at a party for daring to say that she sees people as human beings (or, as the case may be, dragons as dragon beings), regardless of their social stance. Lest these seem unrealistic attitudes for genteel young ladies, let me clarify that the two sisters are particularly sensitive to classism because their father made his fortune through trade, which automatically disqualifies him from respectability in the eyes of some. This is only an example of what Jo Walton does so well here – she explores the intricate power dynamics associated with class, the subtle differences in rank, and the endless tensions these originated even among the genteel.

Tooth and Claw couldn’t rightfully be called Pride and Prejudice with dragons if it weren’t also a love story. And it is – or rather, it’s several love stories. There are happy endings all around, and though they may be predictable they aren’t any less charming because of that. Even though you can tell from the very beginning that everyone is bound to get their heart’s desire in the end, this doesn’t make the character’s struggles until they get there any less real or emotionally resonant.

I’ve mentioned that there was some humour earlier – this can mostly be seen in the narrator’s tone, which is pokerfaced most of the time but includes occasional remarks such as,

It has been baldly stated in this narrative that Penn and Sher were friends at school and later at the Circle, and being gentle readers and not cruel and hungry readers who would visit a publisher’s offices with the intention of rending and eating an author who had displeased them, you have taken this matter on trust.

Not to mention chapter titles like, “The narrator is forced to confess to having lost count of both proposals and confessions.” As everything else about this novel, the one is perfect, and it adds a lot to the charm of the story.

Jo Walton also says in the prologue that Tooth and Claw is partially based on Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage. If I were given to feeling embarrassed about gaps in my reading, it’d be my secret shame that I call myself a lover of all things Victorians and yet have never read any Trollope at all. Where do you think I should begin?

Interesting bits:

“Most maidens in your position would be only too glad to have any Exalted running after them, let alone one as handsome and amusing as Sher,” Felin said, deeply disappointed.
“There is so little power that we have, as females,” Selendra said. “Only to be able to choose to accept or reject a lover. We have to wait for them to ask, even then. You’re telling me to think about wealth and position and disregard what I feel.”

Bon Argonin’s gold, not that which he had passed on to his three younger children, but that which he had used three hundred years before to purchase the estate of Argonin and the title of Dignified, had been made in ways those dignified, illustrious, exalted, august and eminent personages we have chosen to make lords among us lump together and dismiss in a word as “trade”. True, Bon had shaken off these associations as soon as he could. He had used them to climb and achieve position in the world and, once he had achieved the position he desired, had dabbled in them no more. He had purchased his establishment, married his ill-drowried but indubitably gently born bride, and proceeded thenceforth to amass wealth and improve his estate through honest farming. All the same, through the succeeding centuries the stench of trade had clung around him a little. Much though he might speak of his youth on the Telstie estate with his widowed mother, and of his estate of Argonin, never mentioning the intervening period, there remained something of the city about him. The cities, as hardly needs to be mentioned, are anathema to all right-thinking dragons, except only for Irieth, and Irieth only when the Noble Assembly is sitting, or in the months of Budding and Flowering in those years, very rare of late, when the Noble Assembly shall hold no session.

Reviewed at:
Fyrefly's Book Blog
Stella Matutina
The Literary Omnivore
You Can Never Have Too Many Books

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