Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tender is the Night is the story of the rise and fall of a promising psychiatrist by the name of Dick Diver, as well as the story of the dissolution of his marriage to Nicole Warren, who was formerly one of his patients. Though published in 1933, Tender is the Night is mostly set in Jazz Age Europe, namely in Switzerland and France. The novel opens with a section told from the perspective of Rosemary Hoyt, an eighteen-year-old movie star who meets Dick and Nicole one summer in the French Riviera. Rosemary quickly falls in love with Dick, and also feels drawn to the beautiful Nicole and the glamorous life the couple seem to embody. However, as the novel progresses it becomes apparent to Rosemary and to the reader that the Diver’s relationship is far more complex and less enviable than it first appeared.

It took me about a hundred pages to properly get into Tender is the Night, mostly because I had a bit of trouble figuring out who and what the story was really going to be about at first. The fact that the first chunk of the novel is from Rosemary’s perspective threw me off, which apparently is not an unusual reaction. In fact, Fitzgerald considered largely revising the structure of the novel, avoiding the flashback at the beginning of part two and making Rosemary’s section come later in the book, but he never got around to implementing these changes before his death. Personally I can see the pluses of both structures, but I would have to spoil the ending of part one for you to properly explain why.

There was a lot I liked about Tender is the Night: Fitzgerald’s always gorgeous prose, the evocation of Europe in the 1920’s, the fact that it deals with the personal and social wounds inflicted by WWI. The social world of this novel is close to the world of the final section of Virginia Wolf’s To The Lighthouse, only with a considerable different focus. It’s a sort of limbo world, stuck between what we think of as modernity and the values of the Victorians and the Edwardians, and I’m always drawn to novels that explore it. However, there were a number of reasons why I didn’t connect with Tender is the Night nearly as much as with The Great Gatsby.

First of all, the novel deals extensively with mental illness, and I couldn’t help but keep having flashbacks of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and sensing a sort of ghost story lingering behind the one we were being told. I’m not entirely comfortable with the way the concept of madness is presented here (and yes, I am aware of when it was written, but then again, Gilman’s work predates it). On the one hand, I wouldn’t dream of denying that someone who ceases to be able to function needs help; but on the other hand, there’s the fact that often a breakdown is not a sign you’re somehow damaged, but actually the only appropriate and reasonable response to what is happening to you – and any form of help you receive has to acknowledge that.

Now we reach the point in which I move into murky waters, which is to say, recur to autobiographical approaches despite having repeatedly proclaimed that I’m very wary of viewing literature through this angle. And I am, generally speaking, but sometimes I do feel their lure. All I can say for myself is that I never claimed to be a hundred percent consistent. Tender is the Night draws heavily from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s personal experience, namely his marriage to Zelda Fitzgerald and her mental breakdown and institutionalisation. The heavy psychoanalytical focus of the novel was inspired by extensive conversations he had with Zelda’s doctors when she was being treated.

If we think of Nicole as somewhat inspired by Zelda, that other side of the story I kept wondering about as I read Tender is the Night actually does exist. In 1932, she published Save Me the Waltz, which is based on many of the same experiences as her husband’s novel, and provides a contrasting view of her breakdown and the dissolution of their marriage. Needless to say, I’m now dying to get my hands on it and see how the two compare. Fitzgerald was not pleased that his wife had written a novel so heavily inspired by their personal life, even though (or perhaps exactly because) he was to go on to do the same.

The reason why the story as told in Tender is the Night felt incomplete to me is because I couldn’t really grasp what Nicole had done to Dick, exactly, other than be unhappy (which to me can’t really count as something you inflict on a partner). As any great piece of literature, the novel is open enough that you can read it in multiple ways – it’s not just one thing, and it doesn’t point in a single direction. But one of these possible readings is the story of a potentially brilliant man ruined by an unstable, even parasitical woman, whose recovery comes at the cost of his submission. I’m less than thrilled with this angle of the story, not only because of the sexual politics but also because of how I conceive of relationships in general. How much blame can an intimate partner you commit yourself to voluntarily really shoulder? (Bex at An Armchair By The Sea, however, read Fitzgerald’s portrayal of Nicole’s recovery far more generously than I did.)

But I was saying, the novel is of course far more complex than just this: there’s also the class/financial angle, which plays a considerable role in Dick’s ultimate fate. Nicole is a heiress, so Dick’s marriage to her gives him access to a large fortune and a luxurious lifestyle. As in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald explores the corrupting power of these in great detail. I thought it was interesting that Dick’s financial reliance on his wife (the money he invests on his mental hospital comes from her) put him in the same position of futility and dependence that countless women were expected to be in without complaint throughout history. Yet in his case, its effects are devastating.

This brings me to the final reasons why I felt a bit of a disconnect from the novel: on the one hand I can see how it’s moving, and yet on the other hand much of its emotional power relies on a close adherence to strict concepts of achievement and failure I find hard to get behind Nevertheless, I’m glad I read Tender is the Night. The writing and the insight into the 1920’s were more than enough to make it worth it. Many thanks to the wonderful Classics Circuit for the incentive to finally pick it up.



Interesting bits:

“See that little stream--we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it--a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”
“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco—“
“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn't. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty-five.”
“No, he didn’t--he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle--there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”
“You want to hand over this battle to D. H. Lawrence,” said Abe.
“All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love,” Dick mourned persistently.
“Isn’t that true, Rosemary?”

They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

Here I am in what appears to be a semi-insane-asylum, all because nobody saw fit to tell me the truth about anything. If I had only known what was going on like I know now I could have stood it I guess for I am pretty strong, but those who should have, did not see fit to enlighten me. And now, when I know and have paid such a price for knowing, they sit there with their dogs lives and say I should believe what I did believe. Especially one does but I know now. I am lonesome all the time far away from friends and family across the Atlantic I roam all over the place in a half daze. If you could get me a position as interpreter (I know French and German like a native, fair Italian and a little Spanish) or in the Red Cross Ambulance or as a trained nurse, though I would have to train you would prove a great blessing.

They read it too: Mad Bibliophile, A Guy’s Moleskine Notebook, Park Benches & Bookends, Melody & Words, An Armchair by the Sea, Leeswammes , Giraffe Days

(You?)

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1, 2, 3, 4!

Photo Credit

things mean a lot is four today! I’ll spare you the usual paragraph about how quickly time has passed and how it often feels like I only started blogging yesterday, though in my defence, it would be absolutely true. I can’t really afford to do a giveaway this year, so this will mostly be a thank you post. Thank you for being there. Thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts and interests. Thank you for so often challenging me to see things from new angles. The other day I was reading a book called Reading, Readers and Librarians, and I came across a quote that perfectly expresses one of the things that I appreciate the most about blogging:

Reading is a very individual activity and a very communal one. The act of reading is done individually and sharing it makes it communal. One of the joys of reading is sharing the thoughts and feelings a book has provoked in you with others.

Thank you for allowing me to do just that. It has made me a better reader, and it has made reading even more rewarding – something I wouldn’t have thought would be possible before I started.

The last couple of months of my life have been quite stressful, and also a little strange blogging-wise. Because my free time is much more limited, I don’t feel as involved in the community as I used to. I don’t have nearly as much time to engage with other bloggers and readers, to participate in fun bookish events, or even for discussion posts that I know will be time-consuming. This makes it easy to feel that I’m past my peak, that I don’t know anyone anymore, that I’m not really bringing anything new to the table. I miss feeling more a part of things, and sometimes I worry I’m doing this on auto-pilot. But on the bright side, I’m finally learning to let go of the silly but persistent belief that if I can’t be here a hundred per cent, I might as well not be here at all. Sharing the books I read with all of you is what I want to be doing, time limitations and all.

It can be easy to lose motivation lately, but when I think of everything blogging has done for me, I know I don’t want to go anywhere. I can safely say I’d probably be a different person today if four years ago I hadn’t randomly stumbled upon the Once Upon a Time challenge and decided to create a blog so I could join the fun. I wouldn’t be in library school if not for all the awesome librarians I met through my blog. I wouldn’t have discovered many of my favourite books and authors, and I might not have pursued what are now some of my main interests. And perhaps most importantly of all, I wouldn’t have met what are now some of my favourite people in the world.

So again, thank you for everything. At the end of the day, I know I want to stick around for many more years.

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What I Don’t Know About Animals by Jenny Diski

What I Don’t Know About Animals is a difficult book to describe: it’s stuck somewhere between a memoir and a nature book, while at the same time being something entirely different from either of those. Jenny Diski writes about the history of her relationship with animals – from her impressions of the idea of them when she was a child (in the form of book characters, plush toys, trips to the zoo or TV shows) to her relationship with her cat today, by way of LOLcats, a serious case of arachnophobia, or elephant watching in Africa.

But reminiscing is not what What I Don’t Know About Animals is all about: Diski’s effort to understand humankind’s relationships with the species with which we share the planet includes both field research and thoughtful examinations of difficult questions. She visits a sheep farm in spring and witnesses its owner’s efforts to keeps lambs alive, even as they know these lambs will meet their death only a few months later; she examines vegetarianism and veganism and her own rejection of them; she considers he own inability to include a visit to an abattoir in her research; she learns how to ride a horse; and so on.

I particularly liked Diski’s honesty and willingness to acknowledge her own shortcomings without excuses, defensiveness, or any kind of self-righteousness. She knows she’s far from perfect, but she’s ready to consider difficult questions all the same. I also liked how she doesn’t attempt to exclude herself from any of the problematic aspects of our relationship with animals: this isn’t a book that points fingers at others, but rather a thoughtful, ponderous work filled with far more questions than answers.

What I Don’t Know About Animals also includes a fair share of history of science and of animal research. I felt that she was unfair to behaviourism at first (claiming that subjective experience is untestable and therefore must remain outside the real of experimental science is not the same as denying its existence), but later on she says:

I went to talk to Donald Broom, the world’s first Professor of Animal Welfare at Cambridge University’s Department of Veterinary Medicine. Although he’s a behaviourist, he told me that he didn’t discount the emotions or feelings of animals at all. Behaviourism, he said, was misunderstood by those who thought its practitioners took no account of the experiences of the animals they tested in labs. The point was that with animals being so variously different from human beings, it was difficult to assess their welfare needs unless they could be properly tested. Certainly, animals had emotions and feelings, it was quite wrong to suggest they didn’t, but we can only reliably (as opposed to intuitively) know what these are by measuring their physiological effects.

Which is fair enough. Her visit to Professor Broom’s lab raises a lot of questions about the issue of animal testing, and Diski’s complex feelings on the matter match my own quite closely. She doesn’t feel that we have the right to use other species for our benefit, but we make the choice to do so for the benefit of our own – to research serious illnesses, to test vaccines, to potentially save lives, or to simply increase knowledge. Whether or not this is at all ethically justifiable is of course a complex and divisive question. Personally I draw the line at unnecessary cruelty: if we’re going to do it at all, we should do it with as little fear, pain and discomfort as possible. Diski does mention Temple Gradin, who uses a similar argument for the meat industry, but I find that the cost/benefit balance is quite different in that case.

For Diski (and for me), it’s not a matter of who’s a worthier life form, who has the “right” to inhabit the earth, but of intraspecies solidarity exerting a stronger pull in most of us than interspecies solidarity. I reject the idea that this is inevitable or ‘right’, but I can see why it happens. Of course, as with everything else there are no set rules, and there might be frequent exceptions if people have to pick between humanity as an abstract concept and concrete, real animals they know and love.

I would have liked to see What I Don’t Know About Animals do a more in-depth explorations of the frequent sense of entitlement with which humankind relates to animals. Early in the book Diski says she means to write from a secular perspective and rejects a faith-based position of ownership/stewardship over other species, but in the end the book didn’t explore these ideas in much detail at all. But considering it goes in other interesting directions, I can’t really complain. A few more interesting passages:

Dolittle has to prove himself sane in court (and fails) on account of his desire to communicate with non-human animals, and though he is rescued from the madhouse, he is never more than that typical, harmless and faintly ambiguous eccentric with which literature and showbiz like affectionately or sentimentally to toy. I take Dolittle’s fancy perfectly seriously, as a proper and not at all mad longing. I recognise the longing in myself and I think it presents a general ache that we popularise and render quaint because we know it to be unachievable. Dolittle’s desire is an expression of our own. If we could talk to the animals, if they could talk to us. The massive black hole in our understanding of the creatures with whom we share the planet, as vast and compelling a mystery as the universe, is intolerable, not just because we can’t talk to the animals, but because it reminds us of how we can’t really know any other consciousness, not even those of our own species.

Anthropomorphism always worries me. That remaking of otherness as a replication of self – visually, morally or allegorically. The ‘cuteness’ that we see in animals, which has nothing to do with them but only with the onlooker, distresses me. I observe my own automatic humanising assumptions towards the young of other species, the ‘feelings’ which I suppose when I see an animal in pain or alone or dying, and try to keep it under control. I dislike or disapprove of the colonising aspect of finding easy connection with animals, while at the same time aching for it and identifying it in my relations with animals. The balance of the affect is always ‘There are somewhat like me’, rather than ‘I am somewhat like them’. We deny dignity and selfhood, whatever that might be to whatever creature it is, by making sentimental assumptions about why, what or how an animal is experience. Animals are not there for us to relate to, I want to insist grimly when folk coo or laugh at their behaviour, but it’s what we (and I) want to do most with animals, as well, of course, as eat them and utilise their fur and skin and other parts for our clothing, accessories, scent, cosmetics and medicines.

(Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll be happy to link to you.)

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Once Upon a Time & Indie Lit Awards

I’ve been staying away from reading challenges this year for the most part, but it’s hard not to make an exception for Once Upon a Time. Carl’s challenge was the reason why I started blogging in the first place, so it will always be special to me. As I’m trying to keep reading commitments to a minimum, I’m going to do The Journey, which only requires participants to read one book. Here are a few possibilities:

• Something in tribute to Diana Wynne Jones (sob), possibly Enchanted Glass
  
• Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue
  
• The Tricksters by Margaret Mahy
• West of the Moon by Katherine Langrish
  
• Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier
  
• Whatever else strikes my fancy

If you can think of any fitting books you think I really ought to read, I’d love to hear about them.

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And in what are actually somewhat related news, I wanted to tell you that I’m a panellist for the speculative fiction category of this year’s Indie Lit Awards. The Indie Lit Awards are run by Wallace and Ti, and they looked like so much fun last year that I knew I wanted to be involved. In addition to Speculative Fiction, they include Biography/Memoir, GLBTQ, ‘Literary Fiction’, Mystery, Non-Fiction and Poetry. As so much of what book bloggers attempt to do, the awards are simply meant to be another way of drawing attention to books we love and want others to know about.

My fellow panellists for the speculative fiction category are Pam, Judith and Sally, and our fearless leader is Trisha. To make the award process run as smoothly as possible, Trisha had the excellent idea of keeping a running list of eligible books published so far or to be published later this year. The Indie Lit Awards long list is compiled from nominations by our fellow book bloggers, and although they aren’t open until September, you can help by reading speculative fiction published this year or by telling us about it. If you have something to suggest, head over to Trisha’s blog and let her know. I can’t wait to see what will end up on the list. If it’s anything like last year’s, we panellists are in for some excellent reading.

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RIP Diana Wynne Jones

Thank you so much for the stories. Thank you in particular for Fire & Hemlock, which is one of those books that have become deeply ingrained in the person that I am. Thank you for creating such memorable and human heroes and heroines, and for giving me the opportunity to spend time with them. Thank you for always respecting the intelligence of your readers, regardless of their age. Thank you for being a constant reminder than in children’s literature as anywhere else, fun and complexity can joyfully walk hand in hand. Thank you for creating stories I always felt I could come home to – they were often dark, but never despairing; warm and welcoming without being naïve. Thank you most of all for the kindness, wisdom, humour, heart and deep intelligence that permeated your books. They made the world a better place.

You will be very, very missed.

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Sexual Science by Cynthia Eagle Russett

I suppose it’s only right to begin by giving you fair warning: Sexual Science is chapter one in a new series we shall informally call “Ana reads a lot of nerdy and hard to find, expensive or niche books from the awesome academic library she currently has access to, because she’s mourning in advance the loss of said access come September.” I’m dealing with this approaching loss by a) compiling long lists of library books I want to read (which include titles such as Victorian Suicides: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers, etc. Hmm, do we have a pattern here?) and b) daydreaming of a world where every reader has access to every library. September is of course a long way away, but it will be hard to find time to pursue this list because of the other list I really have to get through: my list of dissertation-related books. Which I’m also excited about, of course. But as always, the books you don’t have to be reading are a little bit shinier.

Anyway: Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood is, as the back cover so well puts it, a “chapter in the annals of human folly”. Cynthia Eagle Russett takes a close look at how Victorian science, particularly biology and emerging disciplines like psychology and anthropology, was used to maintain and justify the gender status-quo. Scientific claims that naturalised the ideology of the separate spheres – the domestic as the feminine domain and public life as the realm of men – were regularly made.

The justifications of why women were not suited for public life or for professional and intellectual pursuits were varied: some were rooted in brain size and weight, others on phrenology, on the menstrual cycle, on the reproductive system, and so on. The conclusion, however, was always the same. Man was master and Woman his companion. This was a Biological Fact, and therefore it was useless to argue with it.

The Victorians clearly had a passion for stiff hierarchies that told everyone their place. Though race isn’t the focus of this book, Russett acknowledges that there were many parallels between the construction of femininity as a less evolved version of masculinity and the construction of the lesser, “savage races” who were supposedly ages behind white men in terms of evolution. Sexual Science is not only an analysis of this process, but also an analysis of the particular moment in history in which it took place. As Russett puts it,

The rise of sexual science needs, accordingly, to be seen both as part of an ongoing inquiry into the varieties of human existence and as a response to the particular historical moment in which women were asserting new claims to a life beyond the domestic hearth.

The fact that science was used to give a cloak of authority to the status-quo is not, of course, the result of a conspiracy by scientists to keep women behind locked doors: “Scientists never engaged in a conscious conspiracy against women, and they were by no means uniformly misogynist.” The reasons why this happened are far more complex than that, and have to do with the fact that we can never fully dissociate ourselves from the cultural climate in which our ideas come into being. To quote Emerson, who naturally put it better than I could, “[we] cannot wipe out of this work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew”.

The logical consequence of acknowledging the complexity of this process is that we’re force to pause to consider the ways in which this is very much still happening today. This is why Sexual Science reminded me so much of Delusions of Gender (which was where I first heard of it, in fact), even though well over one century separates the scientific claims each of them examines. But in Cordelia Fine’s always wise words, “If history tells us anything, it is to take a second, closer look at our society and our science.” This is as valid now as in the nineteenth-century.

Sexual Science is not, therefore, a book that invites us to laugh at the past while patting ourselves on the back for being oh-so-much-cleverer today. On the contrary: it invites us to examine the continuity of this process. It is also not a book that takes its deconstruction of the scientific process too far – Russett writes with complete respect for the scientific method and for these scientists’ commitment to making sense of the world around them as best as they could. I am leery of postmodern critiques of science that cross the line into well-nothing-is-real-anyway territory; or even worse (pet peeves of pet peeves) misread Heisenberg and then use him to attempt to distort the way the scientific method works. Sexual Science is fortunately not one of those books. It acknowledges that science is pretty awesome, but scientists are only too human.

Interesting bits:

The phenomenon of menstruation was alone fully sufficient to explain why women could never hope to stand on a level of social and professional equality with men. Whatever may have been the reality of the menstrual cycle in Victorian women’s lives (and it would be reasonable to suppose that burdensome clothing, scant exercise, physiological ignorance, and a culture that encouraged female invalidism increased their discomfort), scientists and medical men wrote of it more as a primal curse than a natural process. (…) [James McGrigor] Alan believed menstruation an insuperable obstacle to feminine aspirations in the intellectual realm: “Even if woman possessed a brain equal to man’s—if her intellectual powers were equal to his—the eternal distinction in the physical organisation of the sexes would make the average man in the long run, the mental superior of the average woman. In intellectual labour, man has surpassed, does now, and always will surpass woman, for the obvious reason that nature does not periodically interrupt his thought and application.”

Hardheaded Henry Maudsley sniffed, “Village Hampdens, mute inglorious Miltons, and bloodless Cromwells do not sleep in the graves of the rude forefathers of the hamlet.” As for gifted women, that potential legion of “Shakespeare’s sisters”, their case was the same. They “suffered no other hindrance to the exercise and evolution of their brains and their intellect than those that are derived from their constitution and their faculties of development”. No obstacles hindered, no customs entrapped them: “in poetry, music and painting, if not also in history, philosophy and science, the field has always been open to both.” Indeed, “women by tens of thousands have enjoyed better educational as well as better social advantages than a Burns, a Keats, or a Faraday; and yet we have neither heard their voices nor seen their work.”

(Hahaha. Oh Mr Maudsley.)

Lombroso was particularly struck by the propensity of criminals, like savages, to adorn themselves with tattoos, frequently of an indecent or lawless nature. (Some of Lombroso’s evidence as to the lewdness of criminal tattoos was admittedly inconclusive. Stephen Jay Gould cites one example: “Long live France and French fried potatoes.”)

(Have you posted about this book too? Leave me your link and I’ll be happy to include it.)

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Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.

Ghosts tells the story of Helen Alving, a widow who is about to open an orphanage dedicated to the memory of her deceased husband. But there’s a dark secret hiding behind this apparent loving homage. As Mrs Alving confesses to Father Manders, the reason why she decided to build the orphanage was so that nothing associated with her late husband would be inherited by their son Oswald – the son she sent away to school when he was seven so he wouldn’t grow up in a house of unhappiness and hypocrisy. Unfortunately, Oswald cannot get away from his father completely, and his inescapable inheritance goes beyond even his mother’s greatest fears.

Ibsen wrote Ghosts in 1882, just two years after A Doll’s House, and the reason why I decided to read it was because Rebecca told me in a comment that Ghosts could very easily be the story of what would happen to a woman like Nora if she had stayed in her unhappy marriage instead of walking away. Rebecca was absolutely right. As we discover shortly after the play’s opening, Helen Alving did in fact walk away from her husband one year into their marriage, only to eventually be convinced that she was the one in the wrong and should go back to him. This conversation between her and Father Manders is quite revealing:

Manders: Have you forgotten that after barely a year of married life you were standing at the very edge of a precipice?—that you forsook your house and home? that you ran away from your husband—yes, Mrs. Alving, ran away, ran away—and refused to return to him in spite of his requests and entreaties?
Mrs. Alving: Have you forgotten how unspeakably unhappy I was during that first year?
Manders: To crave for happiness in this world is simply to be possessed by a spirit of revolt. What right have we to happiness? No! we must do our duty, Mrs. Alving. And your duty was to cleave to the man you had chosen and to whom you were bound by a sacred bond.
Mrs. Alving: You know quite well what sort of a life my husband was living at that time—what excesses he was guilty of.
Manders: I know only too well what rumour used to say of him; and I should be the last person to approve of his conduct as a young man, supposing that rumour spoke the truth. But it is not a wife’s part to be her husband’s judge. You should have considered it your bounden duty humbly to have borne the cross that a higher will had laid upon you. But, instead of that, you rebelliously cast off your cross, you deserted the man whose stumbling footsteps you should have supported, you did what was bound to imperil your good name and reputation, and came very near to imperilling the reputation of others into the bargain.

Mrs Alving does do her “duty” in the end, and pays the price. What Ghosts does so well is illustrate the consequences of this blind adherence to duty in a completely unflinching way. As Mrs Alving despairingly puts it, “Oh, law and order! I often think it is that that is at the bottom of all the misery in the world.” Ghosts is a very dark play; much more so than A Doll’s House, which at least ends on a hopeful note. In Ghosts, the complete social unacceptability of divorce, which Nora braves but Mrs Alving shies away from, leads to a life of unhappiness, secrets and useless sacrifice, whose consequences are felt even by the next generation. Adherence to convention protects Mrs Alvin from ostracism and possible penury, but at a far too high cost.

As I’m sure you can imagine, Ghosts scandalised Victorian society. According to Wikipedia, contemporary reviews were overwhelmingly negative and accused it of “sordid impropriety” and of being “as foul and filthy a concoction as has ever been allowed to disgrace the boards of an English theatre.” This was a result of not only the play’s criticism of divorce laws and stifling social conventions, but also of its frank discussion of venereal diseases, particularly – spoiler ahoy – inherited syphilis. One of the consequences of the Victorian double standards of sexual morality was the fact that men could very easily bring diseases into the family and pass them on to their wives or children. Such a scenario is not unheard of with sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS even today, I know, but to make matters worse, at the time this was completely unspeakable. No respectable woman could even admit to knowledge of sexual matters, let alone seek help because of her husband’s indiscretions. If she did, the blame would likely be placed on her. (Of course, much of this still sounds very familiar; if not in all social contexts and parts of the world, then at least in some.)

I’m incredibly glad to have read Henrik Ibsen at last – A Doll’s House and Ghosts both put me in mind of Victorian Sensation writers I love, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon or Wilkie Collins. Ibsen’s tone is of course quite different and far more solemn, but they have in common a willingness to broach topics that were forbidden at the time, as well as to denounce the effects of unjust marriage laws. If you’re a fan of Ibsen’s, I’d love some suggestions of which of his plays to read next.

Other points of view: Rebecca Reads

(Have you posted about Ghosts too? Let me know and I’ll be glad to link to you.)

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Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword & Castle Waiting Vol. 2

Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword by Barry Deutsch is the story of 11-year-old Mirka Hirschberg, who lives in the Orthodox Jewish community of Hereville and dreams of being a dragon slayer. Mirka’s siblings are often embarrassed by her eccentricities, and they consider her new-fangled claims that she’s being attacked by a vindictive talking pig the last drop. But Mirka knows what’s happening to her, and she also knows that this just might be her chance to become a real heroine with a sword of her very own.

My favourite thing about Hereville is the rich cultural detail, as well as the fact that Mirka identifies so closely with her Orthodox Jewish background. Very often stories about girls struggling with limited gender roles find solutions that involve the wholesale rejection of a huge part of their identity, but not so with Mirka. She knows what she wants, and it involves both dragon-slaying and observing Shabbos. The book’s feminist elements unapologetically exist within an Orthodox Jewish context, which I found very interesting and refreshing.


The ending of Hereville gave me pause – I can see how it might be read as disappointing, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. Without giving everything away, I’ll say that it involves Mirka finding a new contentment in traditionally feminine occupations she has struggled with in the past. There’s a very fine line here between portraying her as finally behaving “properly” and doing what Young Ladies Should Do, or simply showing that she’s helping out at home and doing what her community expects her to do without giving up who she is. I think Deutsch does manage to get the latter across, but obviously this is up for debate. (Though apparently there will be a sequel, which indicates that Mirka’s adventures are far from over.)

I imagine that it’s difficult to end a story like this in a satisfactory manner, particularly without the aforementioned rejection of an entire culture/background that so many stories go for. And mind you, I’m not saying this kind of solution is a bad thing in itself – it might be necessary and even the only possible honest choice for some people’s lives, and therefore for some stories. Nobody is under any obligation to Embrace Their Background, Or Else. But I imagine it to be quite a painful process, so if you can find a way to balance where you come from and the person you want to be, all the better.


There’s also another danger stories of this kind often face: the danger that the heroine’s unconventional preferences will come hand in hand with an implicit derision of traditionally feminine occupations, thus turning them into Excepto-Girls. I really loved the fact that Hereville didn’t go down this road. Mirka herself is unconventional, but her stepmother, for example, is a model of tradition, and she’s still referred to as “the smartest person in town”. Most importantly of all, both Mirka and her stepmother are extremely capable, competent, and fully human characters (and incidentally, I absolutely loved their relationship).


As you can probably tell, Hereville gave me plenty to think about. It’s a story that can be enjoyed on many different levels, and that’s my favourite kind.

They read it too: The Boston Bibliophile, The Book Smugglers, Bart’s Bookshelf, 1330v, Book Nut

(Yours?)

Castle Waiting Vol. 2 by Linda Medley is, obviously enough, a sequel to the first Castle Waiting – and yes, they do have to be read in other. The concept behind both books is the same: in a Sleeping Beauty—type castle, a group of outcasts form a community. While the traditional fairy tale heroes are off having epic adventures, these character deal with everyday but no less interesting events. What Linda Medley does here is tell the ordinary, domestic stories of the inhabitants of a fairy tale world, and the results couldn’t be more charming.

Castle Waiting is not a neat story – there are subplots and side stories and loose threads that don’t really reach a conclusion – but I love it all the same because it’s so homely and character-driven. I love the characters Medley created, and I love how their stories are filled with constant warmth, humour and humanity.


I also loved all the fairy tale inside jokes, even the ones with a sad side to them. For example, one of the inhabitants of the castle was once married to a giant, but her husband was killed by one of those epic fairy tale adventurers who in Castle Waiting belong on the sidelines for once. When her son is telling the story of how he lost his father to a friend, he says the man who killed him called himself a giant-killer. To which his friend says disgustingly, “You mean like a hobby? Or a job description?!”

As is often the case with graphic novels, before being collected in a single book Castle Waiting was serialised in single issues. Because the story is somewhat episodic, there isn’t much of a dominant plot arch, and so at the end of this volume nothing much has been wrapped up. But unfortunately I found out recently over at Memory’s blog that this inconclusive ending is likely to be the ending, period. Creative differences between Linda Medley and the rest of the team behind this series mean that there no further issues of Castle Waiting are currently planned. If you need your stories to have a neat ending, be forewarned. But hopefully you’ll feel as I did, and find the time spent with these characters worth it all the same.

(I apologise for the clumsy photo, but I just had to share this panel, as it captures the spirit of Castle Waiting so well. This is exactly what Medley did, of course - she made her own legends.)

Other points of view: Stella Matutina

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Sex Changes: Transgender Politics by Patrick Califia

Sex Changes [takes] the radical position that diversity in gender identity, opposition to normative notions of social sex-roles, and even “anomalies” in genetic sex are natural and universal phenomena, a rich and valuable part of human physicality and society.

Patrick Califia’s Sex Changes: Transgender Politics is one of the most informative and eye-opening books about gender I have ever come across – I cannot thank Cass enough for recommending it to me. What Patrick Califia (who is himself a FTM transgender person) does here is attempt to write a history of transgenderism and its social and political implications. Sex Changes is not meant to be a history since the dawn of time; rather, it goes back to the moment when transgenderism first began to enter mainstream consciousness with the first medical ‘case studies’. This is followed by the first transgender biographies, the subsequent backlash, the more recent biographies that rewrite the narrative of the “pathologic” trans person in a far more positive light, and the eventual beginnings of the trans community as it exists today.

Sexual Changes raises a lot of questions, particularly about what exactly transgenderism is. The main answer I took away from this book is that it’s not a monolith – there is no universal trans experience, no single story, no one valid way of experiencing gender dysphoria. I also learned that certain authors, such as Kate Bornstein or Jan Morris, have wondered about the extent to which transgenderism is a product of our current rigid gender binary. In a more flexible world, would gender dysphoria exist at all? Or would people feel comfortable with their gender of birth if this was defined more flexibly? However, others writers, like Margaret Deidre O’Hartigan, have pointed out that these questions are in fact very dismissive of the overwhelming experience of alienation from her own body that preceded her sex change. She also problematises the term “transgender” as opposed to “transsexual” – like me, she sees gender as a social construct; therefore it isn’t really her gender but her sex that she changed.(“Transgender” is the term Califia most frequently uses, though, so I’ll continue to use it myself throughout this post.)

The existence of transgender people raises a lot of questions for which there are no easy or comfortable answers – which perhaps goes some way towards explaining the horrifying hostility and violence with which they have been and sadly continue to be treated. What does transgenderism mean in the context of our current definitions of gender? What do I mean when I say I’m not a gender essentialist? Reading Sex Changes enlarged my mental categories, and I can’t say how much appreciate that. It also caused me to clarify my ideas about questioning the gender binary and how to do so is not necessarily about erasing identities at all.

What I mean is that as much as I have struggled with gender throughout my life, feminine identity is a part of who I am. I just want to define it on my own terms, and I don’t want to have it be nearly as momentous in my life as the whole world seems to be convinced it needs to be. But that aside, yes, I am a woman. I have always felt myself to be a woman and I have always been comfortable with this fact. It isn’t femininity in itself that weighs me down – it’s the fact that so many different definitions of “woman” are imposed on me by outsiders. My lack of gender essentialism, then, is not so much about erasing the categories of “male” and “female” as it is about challenging the way we currently define them. It’s about making them far more flexible and less dominating, as well as not the only categories we recognise. In addition to being a continuum, gender doesn’t need to be the main thing that defines who we are. But none of this necessarily has to do with feeling that your body and your identity are mismatched, and nothing gives me the right to dismiss or attempt to explain away people who do feel that way. (Of course, I’m not saying that alienation from your body is the one feeling that defines transgenderism, which goes back to the whole point about there not being a single story or experience.)

Sex Changes is full of examples of appalling violence against trans people – stories like Brandon Teena’s or Tyra Hunter’s are relatively well-known, but there are countless others: sadly the numbers speak for themselves. One thing that surprised me, though, were the innumerable examples of transphobia among feminists and glb folks (perhaps this is naïve of me, I know). It was sad to see people who might make natural allies for trans people react to them with particular virulence. I’d had a glimpse of this in Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For, but Califia’s examples are worse than anything I could have imagined. Particularly upsetting was seeing feminists use arguments against trans people that seemed straight out of a Victorian treatise on gender. As Califia puts it,

The plight of transsexual lesbians highlights an ideological double-bind. Feminists cannot have it both ways. If we are going to claim that biology is not destiny and present a political analysis of gender as something that is socially constructed, we have to make room in our world view for women who were not born with XX chromosomes. To do otherwise is to subscribe to biological determinism, the regressive belief that our genetic structures determine our potential as human beings, and the notion that biological sex can be used as a justification for placing limits upon the freedom, intellectual abilities, and creative talent of women.

This is not meant a stab at feminism as a whole, of course. And if the feminist blogosphere is anything to go by (which I fully believe it is), things have certainly improved since the days of Janice Raymond’s horrifying The Transsexual Empire, especially among younger feminists. Nevertheless, this attitude does exist still, and Raymond herself has not changed her views on transgenderism.

When it comes to hostility among the glb community, Califia gives the example of academics appropriating trans historical figures by claiming these people were “really” only living under the opposite gender as a way to avoid homophobia. For all we know there might very well have been cases in which this was true, but the point is exactly that we can’t know. Therefore, there is no reason at all to use these stories to demean or explain away another identity, which unfortunately has often been the case.

Another thing I loved about Sex Changes was Califia’s sex-positive approach. He has a lot to say about the fact that the sexuality of transgender people has been downplayed to “lift it” above so-called paraphilias. Naturally this has consequences for the sexual and romantic lives of transgendered people, which is especially unfortunate because things really don’t have to be that way.

As Cass told me, anyone with an interest in gender or in glbtq issues should get a hold of this book. It’s informative, challenging and mind-expanding. I couldn’t ask for more.

More interesting passages:

The violence, discrimination and hatred heaped upon differently-gendered people is an enormous wrong. This bigotry will stop only when the rest of “us” are able to accept our own gender conflicts and pinpoint our own prejudices about biological sex and social sex-roles. This book was written with the hope that someday gender will be a voluntary system for self-expression, used chiefly to enhance the pleasure we take in one another’s unique realities.

In order to be a woman, you simply have to get yourself defined as “not-male”. Although there’s an enormous amount of effort involved in presenting a feminine image, that energy is not recognised as real work or as an indication of any sort of serious talent or intelligence. To be recognised as a man, you have to emphatically and publicly reject femininity, but you also have to strive for that recognition. We say “Be a man” in a way that we would never say “Be a woman”.

We need to question the so-called experts who are so quick to pathologize behaviour or self-concepts that are not inherently self-destructive and don’t necessarily interfere with people’s ability to love or pleasure one another. We can only do that if we jettison our own guilt and apply the same intellectual standards we would apply to a piece of research in the field of astronomy or physics.

Few of us are even aware of the pervasive rewards and punishments that shaped our gender identities—unless that process was not successful. I suspect that much of the hatred and fear of transsexuals is based on the discomfort that others experience when they are forced to recall the pain of involuntary gender conditioning. It is easier to believe we never had a choice about something so fundamental than to process and accept the fact that the choice was taken away from us and ruthlessly suppressed.

(Have you posted about this book? Let me know and I’ll be happy to link to you.)

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The Complete Essex County by Jeff Lemire

The Complete Essex County is a one-volume edition of three graphic novels set in Essex County, Ontario, which mostly deal with the lives of the members of a small rural community. The first book, “Tales From the Farm”, tells the story of young Lester Papineau, who goes to live on his uncle’s farm after his mother dies of cancer. Lester spends his days drawing his own comics and daydreaming of becoming a cartoonist. His life at the farm is very lonely – until he befriends a former hockey player, Jimmy, who works at the local gas station. Only there’s some history between Jimmy and Lester’s uncle, and for this reason the latter has some reservations about their developing friendship.

Volume two, “Ghost Stories”, opens with an elderly man reminiscing about his life, particularly his relationship with his brother. Mr Lou LeBeuf and his brother Vince were once inseparable. But after they moved to Toronto to play hockey, something happened that made it impossible for their relationship to ever be the same again. The third and final volume, “The Country Nurse”, focuses on Anne Byrne. As a nurse, she has access to many of the community’s secrets, and she sees people in more painful and vulnerable positions than they’d like to be seen. Volume three sees the three storylines come together beautifully, as secrets dating back to several generations are finally revealed.



I now understand why Essex County is so often mentioned in the same breath as Craig Thompson’s Blankets: both are quiet, understated and very human stories, told in sparse and subtle styles than are nonetheless full of emotion. Essex County is a book full of silences and wide spaces. It’s well worth taking time over, as very often a single details in Jeff Lemire’s illustrations is what makes an entire panel stand out.

My favourite thing about the trilogy was probably the depth of Lemire’s characterisation. Sometimes a single exchange, or even a single dialogue-free panel, is enough to reveal a character’s whole history, the entire dimension of their unspoken sorrow, and thus to fully humanise them in the reader’s eyes. The characters that people Essex County are often hurt, anguished people, but not in at all in a heroic or romanticised sort of way. They’re ordinary people doing their best to deal with loneliness, grief, family secrets, failed attempts to connect with others, losses and disappointments; all in everyday and very human ways.


Jeff Lemire is a writer of astonishing sensibility, and Essex County is often incredibly moving. I loved it.




Other points of view:
An Adventure in Reading
Monniblog
So Many Previous Books, So Little Time (one, two and three)
Lavender Lines
Buried in Print

(Have I missed yours?)

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The Brontë Myth by Lucasta Miller

Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth is, as the author herself puts it, a metabiography of the Brontë sisters: rather than retelling their lives for the nth time, Miller chose to trace and analyse the history of the Brontës’ hold on the popular imagination. How exactly have the sisters come to be at least as popular as their literary creations? This is certainly not something that can be said of most writers. And even more interestingly, why has it happened? What does this process tell us about our history and culture?

To quote from the introduction,

This book (…) is not so much a biography of the Brontës but a book about biography, a metabiography. Occasionally, when focusing on the sentimental excess of the Brontë cult, it may even read more like an antibiography. But while I share Henry James’ anxiety about over-emphasis on the Brontë story, this is not to say that I reject the biographical approach per se. The Brontës’ lives are legitimately fascinating, but their value lies less in the simple rehearsal of the story – however melodramatic it has been made to seem – than in the way in which, as writers, these women transformed experience into art.

Because the myths surrounding the Brontës are very Charlotte-centric, with Emily being second in popularity and Anne being mostly overlooked, The Brontë Myth follows this same pattern. It wouldn’t make sense to analyse the cultural resonance of the three sisters without taking this imbalance into account, of course. Setting out to correct it is not a part of Miller’s aims, so if you’re an Anne fan I’m sorry to say this is not the book that will make you feel vindicated.

I really liked the fact that Lucasta Miller’s tone was never really unsympathetic or superior. On the one hand, she clearly sets out to do a detailed work of demythologisation, as well as to denounce the dehumanising effects that transforming a human being into a myth can have. Reading The Brontë Myth certainly validated the vague sense of unease I experienced with I visited Haworth earlier this year. But on the other hand, she’s not immune to the fascination the Brontës exert, and she definitely doesn’t look down on those who fall under its spell. She’s occasionally impatient with the most extreme Brontëphiles, but then again, it’s difficult not to be in the face of so much absurd speculation (and I promise you, you will blink in disbelief when you read some of those claims that have been made about the sisters over time). But fortunately Miller is also very much aware that there’s something very human about the way people have related to the Brontës over the centuries; about how they have unconsciously read and appropriated their story in ways that resonate with their own experiences, circumstances, worldviews and beliefs.

I now fully understand what Jenny was saying about how fascinating the changes in how we perceived historical figures over time are. They’re certainly revealing of the dominant values and ideology of each moment in time, and it’s interesting to think how malleable something supposedly factual like history and biography can in fact prove to be. The evolution of the way Charlotte has been perceived is especially interesting from a feminist perspective: she has been turned from a scandalous, “vulgar” woman to an icon of proper Victorian womanhood (via Elizabeth Gaskell) to a contemporary proto-feminist symbol. A turning point in this history was the appearance of her letters to her former teacher Constantin Héger in 1993: these letters created discomfort due to their frank acknowledgement of female desire even in the 1990’s, so one can only imagine how they would have been received in Victorian times. It is certainly no coincidence that Gaskell's biography made no reference to Charlotte’s feelings for her former teacher at all.

Another interesting thing to consider is how so many Brontë biographies have overemphasised the sister’s isolation in an attempt to render them both pitiable and harmless. This trend began with Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, which according to Miller was written in an apologetic, justificatory tone and attempted to purify Charlotte through suffering and sacrifice. I own a copy of Gaskell’s biography, and it will be very interesting to read it with Miller’s comments in mind. Again, I should say that her tone isn’t really accusatory – she portrays Gaskell sympathetically, and acknowledges that what she was doing was simply trying to rescue her friend’s reputation and writing from her own ideological perspective, which is what most of tend to do anyway.

What most nineteenth century takes on the Brontës have in common is the fact that they used their lives to try to explain away and defang their writing. Of Harriet Martineau’s take on Charlotte, for example, Miller says:

Martineau – like Gaskell after her – could only explain Charlotte’s failure to conform by assuming she had been completely cut off from cultural norms. In reality, Charlotte had, from childhood, been an avid follower of contemporary politics and current affairs in the press. But Martineau described her has ‘living among the wild Yorkshire hills… in a place where newspapers were never seen (or where she never saw any)’. She erroneously claimed that Charlotte was too feeble to walk out on the moors and that she looked out of her window directly on to her sister’s graves (in fact Anne was buried in Scarborough and the other Brontës inside the church).

This is a fascinating process, especially because as time passed the very same facts (or embellishments of facts) were presented in ways that supported the opposite ideological points. So much for neutrality. And obviously many of these people were not consciously manipulating the truth – they looked at the Brontës’ lives, or at what they thought they knew about them, and sincerely saw something entirely different than what their predecessors had seen.

The Brontë Myth is an excellent read. I recommend it not only to those interested in the Brontës, but also to anyone with an interest in history and biography in general. By tracing the history of the Brontës’ written portrayals, Miller also traces the history of literary biography, as well as of the changes in what readers expect of it and in how they relate to the writers they idolise. The result couldn’t be more fascinating.

They read it too: Aneca’s World

(You?)

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The Sunday Salon – Reading: It’s Hard Work

As I’m sure some of you know, there was a minor clamour around the blogosphere recently when Jeff Lemire’s brilliant Essex County trilogy (which I’ll hopefully post about this coming week) was removed from Canada Reads on the first round on account of being a graphic novel. I’m not going to go into this in too much detail, as this excellent post at Irrelevant Comics does it far better than I ever could. But I thought this episode was a great point of departure for an analysis of common attitudes towards reading, which are unfortunately held even by people who hold crucial roles in reading promotion events (yes, yes, you may at this point sigh and think “here she goes again”).

As I was saying, I read Essex County recently and absolutely loved it. To quote judge Lorne Cardinal’s very eloquent words, it did indeed make me “think of things instead of things, you know, like iPods”. The idea that comics not only don’t further literacy but actually hinder it has thankfully long since been abandoned by the majority of people who work with books and reading professionally (dear YALSA annual lists of recommended GNs: I love you so). It seems unfortunate that this competition’s judges have yet to catch up. It might have been interesting to see them use a different and more sophisticated kind of argument for excluding Essex County: for example, that comics are a different artistic medium, one that is visual rather than exclusively text-based, and therefore should not compete alongside traditional novels. I’m not sure how I would have felt about it had this been their reasoning. On the one hand, I’ve been known to regularly get on my soapbox about how comics are a medium, not a genre. But on the other hand, I find their ties with traditional books close enough for their inclusion in reading competitions not to seem incongruous to me.

Of course, different is not the same as inferior, and I would certainly be interested in having a conversation about this if no value judgement was involved. Unfortunately, this seems difficult to avoid, as the comics medium’s use of images in addition to text is very often used against it, as if it proved its inherent inferiority. Arguments of this kind honestly baffle me: surely no one has ever suggested that silent films are not as artistic, thought-provoking or serious as films with dialogue because of their lack of words? Lemire’s Essex Country does of course have words, but apparently not in sufficient number, and therefore there are fears that this will make people unwilling or unable to read books that are exclusively text-based.

If you read the post at Irrelevant Comics, though, you’ll see that the main issue at stake wasn’t at all the fact that different types of media were being discussed. The thing that made these judges who are supposedly trying to encourage literacy so uncomfortable was the fact that the book was quick and easy to read. To me, this is the most interesting thing about the whole situation: the fact that the judges’ arguments rely on the idea that reading should be hard, that it should take work, that it should be a somewhat arduous process. And if isn’t, it can’t have Meaning or Relevance. It doesn’t make you think of “things other than things”.

Of course, I also don’t buy the opposite argument, which is that anything that isn’t easy must be worthless or pretentious. Dense texts are fine; I love many of them. But what they have to say, what about them encourages people to “think about things other than things”, is not necessarily determined by the difficulty of prose in itself. If you take an author of moderate difficulty – someone like, say, Virginia Woolf – you can argue that their experimentation with form can’t be separated from their content, and it’s a crucial part of what makes them so extraordinary. This is a fair enough point, but at the same time, I have trouble seeing form as a thing to be revered in itself, quite separately from any sort of meaning. What bothers me about the assumptions behind the Canada Reads judges’ arguments is the idea that complex ideas are defined by a complex form of delivery: that you cannot possibly communicate anything worthwhile or convey nuanced emotions using accessible language (or even - horror of horrors - pictures).

I sometimes notice that in these debates, people I essentially agree with use the following argument: there’s nothing wrong with having a diverse literary diet. You have your Serious Thoughtful Reading, which is your main course, and then you have your Easy, Brainless Entertainment as your dessert. This is as valid a way to think about reading as any other, but it’s actually quite different from what I’m trying to say. And what I’m trying to say is that there are incredibly accessible books that are just as thoughtful and nourishing as the most dense wall of text imaginable. Sometimes I suspect that my most serious literary crime, the thing that has done the most to discredit me in certain circles, is exactly my propensity to be unapologetic about my reading choices by refusing to file some of them under “easy and mindless entertainment”. I take comics and fantasy and YA and children’s literature (which you can say tend to be ‘easier’ and quicker reads - tend being the key word here. I don’t think anyone who has read John Crowley, M.T. Anderson, Catherynne M. Valente, Charles Burns or Alan Moore would even dream of suggesting this is always the case) every bit as seriously as Booker and Pulitzer winners or classic novels. And I can’t for the life of me figure out why I’d ever want to read them in any other way.

I’ll never be comfortable with the idea that there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ forms of reading or different scales of worth. You can either Do It Right and be a Serious Reader, or you can Do It Wrong and have people tut-tut at you. Which brings me to a passage from John Carey’s What Good Are The Arts:

Surely, you may protest, multiple-choice questions, of the kind I have been proposing, are not raised by all literary texts. Surely some texts are just simple. Yes, they are. But even simple texts require reader-creativity, and precisely because they are simple the reader may be unaware of what he or she is having to supply.

Unfortunately, the only thing the scales of worth mindset achieves is establishing an association between shame and guilt and the act of reading, which are not exactly emotions conductive to making people want to come back for more. Reluctant readers struggle with hard texts and feel ashamed; then they enjoy easier ones and feel guilty because these don’t count as proper and serious reading. Obviously I’m not saying they should forever give up on challenging texts. But there should be no sense of obligation about it, no performance anxiety, no feeling that your worth as a reader is all wrapped up in our success in conquering, I don’t know, Infinite Jest. By all means read it, but please do so at your own pace and in your own terms.

For the same reason, I’m hugely suspicious of evolutionary views of reading; of the whole idea that at some point the Ideal Reader will “move on” to harder texts. A lot of discussions about how to spread literacy rely on the assumption that there’s an ultimate reading stage where you read x, y but no longer read z; and that this is a stage everyone will eventually achieve. If people don’t, we sigh patronisingly and say, “Well, at least they're reading something…” To me, progressing as a reader is about widening your own personal literary sphere; about including more and more things in what you love, what you spontaneously seek out, what you feel at ease with. It’s not about leaving what you once loved behind so you can prove yourself as a Serious Adult Reader. Again, it’s not about shame or guilt or proving anything to anyone. Emphasising that will only scare people away.

Reading is not cod liver oil. You don’t have to swallow it as you wince because it’s good for you. Thank goodness for that.

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The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1901 novel The Making of a Marchioness was originally published in two parts: the first tells the fairy tale-like story of how our heroine, Emily Fox-Seton, became the Marchioness of Walderhurst. The second, originally titled The Methods of Lady Walderhurst, is a down-to-earth portrayal of the realities of Victorian marriage, with a bit of a Victorian sensation vibe to it. The two parts work very well as a single novel, though there is a marked shift in tone when we move from the first to the second.

It’s actually the second part that makes The Making of a Marchioness go further than classic love stories stories like Pride and Prejudice, which despite all its wonderfulness stops at the hero and heroine getting together. But even in part one, there are hints that Frances Hodgson Burnett very deliberately set out to write a very different sort of romance. Unlike what happens in Austen, in Framley Parsonage, and in several other classics, we don’t have a heroine in precarious financial circumstances who happens to fall in love with a man who will be able to provide for her while remaining appropriately horrified at the thought of marrying for money. We also don’t have a heroine like Jane Eyre, who is fortunately able to secure her own financial independence before getting married, and thus overcomes the whole thorny issue.

What Emily Fox-Seton is, then, is a kind of heroine I’d never come across before. What Burnett does so well here is show how in a society that forces women into complete dependence, love and money were not at all easily to tell apart. In Emily Fox-Seton’s mind, gratitude at having her future secured transforms into love. This doesn’t make her a mercenary, nor does it make her feelings any less real. It’s just the inevitable result of the situation she finds herself in. And to some extent, Emily is quite aware of this. I loved this conversation she has with her friend Agatha, for example:

“You are not like me,” she explained further. “I have had to work so hard and contrive so closely that everything will be a pleasure to me. Just to know that I never need starve to death or go into the workhouse is such a relief that—”
“Oh!” exclaimed Lady Agatha, quickly and involuntarily laying a hand on hers, startled by the fact that she spoke as if referring to a wholly matter-of-fact possibility.
Emily smiled, realising her feeling.
“Perhaps I ought not to have said that. I forgot. But such things are possible when one is too old to work and has nothing to depend on. You could scarcely understand. When one is very poor one is frightened, because occasionally one cannot help thinking of it”
“But now—now! Oh! how different!” exclaimed Agatha, with heartfelt earnestness.
“Yes. Now I need never be afraid. It makes me so grateful to—Lord Walderhurst.”

I also like this passage because it exemplifies Emily’s sensible practicality so well. She’s the kind of heroine I can imagine some readers disliking, a little like Alex from E.M. Delafield’s Consequences (another Persephone heroine). We’re told from the start that Emily is “not a clever woman”, but this is not of course the same as saying she’s stupid. In fact, she knows a lot more than she gives herself credit for. But she’s good-natured and trusting and in many ways an embodiment of Victorian stereotypes of womanhood. This is something of which Burnett was very clearly aware; she even has other characters in the novel refer to Emily as “a mid-Victorian”. The reason why I loved her, though, was because nothing about the way she’s portrayed implies that her behaviour is essentially feminine. She is who she is: not ideally virtuous, but rather a complying person others tend to take advantage of.

As customary in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s writing, The Making of a Marchioness is marked by the repeated exoticisation and othering of India and Indian people. But this particular story shows far more awareness of this than Burnett’s children’s books. I found the following bit of dialogue, where Emily and her maid Jane discuss their mutual suspicion of a guest’s Indian servant, both interesting and revealing. It put me in mind of what Jason was saying recently about how a book can simultaneously be racist and attempt to denounce racism:

“You must try to overcome it, Jane,” Lady Walderhurst said. “I'm afraid it’s because of her colour. I’ve felt a little silly and shy about her myself, but it isn’t nice of us. You ought to read ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin,’ and all about that poor religious Uncle Tom, and Legree, and Eliza crossing the river on the blocks of ice.”
“I have read it twice, your ladyship,” was Jane’s earnestly regretful response, “and most awful it is, and made me and mother cry beyond words. And I suppose it is the poor creature’s colour that’s against her, and I’m trying to be kind to her, but I must own that she makes me nervous. She asks me such a lot of questions in her queer way, and stares at me so quiet. She actually asked me quite sudden the other day if I loved the big Mem Sahib. I didn’t know what she could mean at first, but after a while I found out it was her Indian way of meaning your ladyship, and she didn’t intend disrespect, because she spoke of you most humble afterwards, and called his lordship the Heaven born.”

And this brings me of what I enjoy the most in Burnett’s books: it’s exactly exploring these cracks and contradictions in her writing; these forces pulling the story in opposite directions. In addition to the above example concerning race, we have, for example, Emily’s husband looking down on his kinsman Alex Osborn for his “vulgarity” and class ambition. And yet Emily’s story is itself an unapologetic rags-to-riches tale of social mobility. As I said when I reviewed A Little Princess last year, these contradictions reveal so much about the late Victorian/Edwardian period and the interaction between ideas, ideologies and ways of looking at the world that were happening then.

The Making of a Marchioness is a book with a lot of charm, but it’s also far darker than I’d imagined. As Isabel Raphael says in the introduction to the Persephone Classics edition, “it displays an ever-present awareness of the dark underside of women’s lives”. One of the themes part two deals with, for example, is domestic violence. I don’t want to give too much away, but I absolutely loved the ending. It doesn’t say much explicitly, but its implications are so chilling.

More interesting bits:

“It was so kind of her,” she used to say with heartfelt humbleness of spirit. “I never dreamed of her doing such a generous thing. I hadn’t a shadow of a claim upon her—not a shadow.”
It was her way to express her honest emotions with emphasis which italicised, as it were, her outpourings of pleasure or appreciation.

(I loved this one for the wonderful humour.)

She was a woman of good blood and of good education, as the education of such women goes. She had few relatives, and none of them had any intention of burdening themselves with her pennilessness. They were people of excellent family, but had quite enough to do to keep their sons in the army or navy and find husbands for their daughters. When Emily’s mother had died and her small annuity had died with her, none of them had wanted the care of a big raw-boned girl, and Emily had had the situation frankly explained to her. At eighteen she had begun to work as assistant teacher in a small school; the year following she had taken a place as nursery-governess; then she had been reading-companion to an unpleasant old woman in Northumberland.

She had not lived in a world where marriage was a thing of romance, and, for that matter, neither had Agatha. It was nice if a girl liked the man who married her, but if he was a well-behaved, agreeable person, of good means, it was natural that she would end by liking him sufficiently; and to be provided for comfortably or luxuriously for life, and not left upon one’s own hands or one’s parents’, was a thing to be thankful for in any case. It was such a relief to everybody to know that a girl was “settled,” and especially it was such a relief to the girl herself. Even novels and plays were no longer fairy-stories of entrancing young men and captivating young women who fell in love with each other in the first chapter, and after increasingly picturesque incidents were married in the last one in the absolute surety of being blissfully happy forevermore. Neither Lady Agatha nor Emily had been brought up on this order of literature, nor in an atmosphere in which it was accepted without reservation.

They read it too: If You Can Read This, A Few of My Favourite Books, The Captive Reader, A Book a Week, My Porch, The Literary Stew, Books and Chocolate

(Yours?)

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Bookish Miscellany

I’m afraid I’m getting awfully behind on reviews yet again, so it’s time for another one of these many-birds-with-one-stone posts. Sadly I can’t even claim a thematic similarity between the books this time around, so please bear with me!

First of all, I finally read William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies, and I did like it quite a lot. But I’m afraid that this is one of those cases in which a book’s cultural resonance made it have less of an impact on me as a reader: neither the story nor the themes felt new, as I’ve caught echoes of them in so many other stories over time. Of course, part of the fun of reading classics is exactly being able to trace these echoes back to their original sources.

I suppose there’s also the fact that it’s 2011 and not 1954, and the idea of well brought-up children doing horrible things no longer shocks or surprise us. They might, and we know that they might. But they also might not. If there was one thing that put me off, it was the inevitability of it all in the story. I don’t think violence is inevitable, and I find complete pessimism about human nature every bit as naïve as Rousseau-like idealism. I don’t think “human nature” is essentially anything by definition – it can go either way, really.

Though you could of course argue that Golding acknowledges this by having characters go both ways, and that his point is more about humanity as a collective than about any individual’s essential nature. Therefore, there will always be violence because there will always be some people going the Jack Merridew way. This is a fair enough point, though part of me wants to believe that we can do can do better, all of us. But that’s perhaps stepping into the opposite spectrum of idealism.

A passage I really liked:

They found a piglet caught in a curtain of creepers, throwing itself at the elastic traces in all the madness of extreme terror. Its voice was thin, needle-sharp and insistent; The three boys rushed forward and Jack drew his knife again with a flourish. He raised his arm in the air. There came a pause, a hiatus, the pig continued to scream and the creepers to jerk, and the blade continued to flash at the end of a bony arm. The pause was only long enough for them to understand what an enormity the downward stroke would be. Then the piglet tore loose from the creepers and scurried into the undergrowth. They were left looking at each other and the place of terror. Jack's face was white under the
freckles. He noticed that he still held the knife aloft and brought his arm down replacing the blade in the sheath. Then they all three laughed ashamedly and began to climb back to the track.
"I was choosing a place," said Jack. "I was just waiting for a moment to decide where to stab him."
"You should stick a pig," said Ralph fiercely. "They always talk about sticking a pig."
"You cut a pig's throat to let the blood out," said Jack, "otherwise you can't eat the meat."
"Why didn't you--?"
They knew very well why he hadn't: because of the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood.
"I was going to," said Jack. He was ahead of them, and they could not see his face. "I was choosing a place. Next time--!"
He snatched his knife out of the sheath and slammed it into a tree trunk. Next time there would be no mercy. He looked round fiercely, daring them to contradict. Then they broke out into the sunlight and for a while they were busy finding and devouring food as they moved down the scar toward the platform and the meeting.

And now for something completely different: Ghostopolis by Doug TenNapel is a graphic novel about a boy, Garth Hale, who is accidentally transported to the land of the dead. Garth actually suffers from a serious illness, but he knows that his time hasn’t come quite yet. Frank Gallows, the clumsy ghost hunter who accidentally sent Garth to the spirit world, is doing his best to save him. But in the meantime, Garth has time to find the grandfather he never met, who is now a ghost trying to make amends for his estrangement from his daughter.

I quite liked the humour in Ghostopolis, as well as the cartoonish art style that emphasises it, like you can see in the samples below. Best of all, neither of these nullify the story’s emotional weight – in some ways, it actually makes it stand out. Ghostopolis may not be about to be added to my list of all-time favourites, but it was a fun read, with lots of action and adventure as well as a stark look at life, death, family history, and the complexities of human relationships.



Doret read it too, so make sure you read her much better post.

Time for another classic: I finally got around to reading my first Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a fact for which Claire is entirely to blame. This is the first of many Muriel Sparks to come, as I loved her writing and her dark sense of humour. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a non-linear narrative set at an Edinburgh boarding school in the 1930’s. This might be the most unlikely literary comparison ever, but Sparks’ narrative style reminded me slightly of Kurt Vonnegut – possibly because he’s the only other authors I’ve seen use flash forward this effectively.

Miss Jean Brodie is a teacher at the school where the story is set, and the plot concerns itself with a group of girls known as the Brodie set, and with the events that lead to one of them betraying Miss Brodie. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a compact but very layered novel, and I imagine I will get even more out of it on a second read. What stood out to me this time around was Spark’s subtle commentary on the dark side of charisma, on sexuality, and on education and social mores.

I quite liked this description of Miss Broodie, which immediately made me think of Singled Out:

There were legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties, women from the age of thirty and upward, who crowded their war-bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas and energetic practices in art of social welfare, education or religion. The progressive spinsters of Edinburgh did not teach in schools, especially in schools of traditional character like Marcia Blaine's School for Girls. It was in this that Miss Brodie was, as the rest of the staff spinsterhood put it, a trifle out of place.

And here’s a good example of Spark’s wonderful sense of humour:

Outwardly she differed from the rest of the teaching staff in that she was still in a state of fluctuating development, whereas they had only too understandably not trusted themselves to change their minds, particularly on ethical questions, after the age of twenty.

Other points of view: Biblio File, Bookie Mee, Age 30+: A Lifetime of Books, Lost in a Good Story

The Importance of Music to Girls by Lavinia Greenlaw was more or less a random library find. I couldn’t resist the cover or title, but when I got home I found out it was actually on my Bookmooch wishlist already. Why does this happen more and more often these days? Anyway, the book is quite different than I initially expected. Instead of a sociological study about the role music plays in girls’ lives, or perhaps about the very clear gender imbalance in indie rock, it’s a memoir of growing up with music in 1970’s Britain. Which I’d be all over anyway, mind you – I just wonder if the sort of book I imagined does exist. And if not, who can I bribe to write it?

I should probably tell you that The Importance of Music to Girls can perhaps be best described as a stream-of-consciousness memoir. This took some getting used to on my part, but I ended up really enjoying it for the sheer power of Greenlaw’s writing. Examples:

What takes three minutes to play seemed to take ten minutes to listen to. It provoked emotions and suggested circumstances I couldn’t wait to experience – being trapped by regret or riveted by desire; trying to be offhand about passion or grown-up about loss; moving on or giving in. It was, for me, a rehearsal of feeling.
A woman who babysat for us remembered me at the age of eight, throwing myself back on a chaise-longue and declaring that what I wanted when I grew up was peace in my life. Listening to Nashville Skyline, I could be quiet at least: someone else as making my noise for me.

If I had not kissed anyone, or danced with anyone, or had a reason to cry, the music made me feel as if I had gone through all that anyway. Because the music was charged and we were no more singular than iron fillings, no less easily moved as the music attracted and repelled, organised and disturbed and then let us into the night, clusters of emotions ready to dissolve into sleep.

Often I was the only girl but I had yet to think that that had any implications. I knew there was those for whom music was soundtrack and those of us for whom it was, well, music, but I didn’t notice that most of those who took it seriously were boys. Sophie and Julia each had a few records but they didn’t get upset or excited about bands. I was thrilled by discovery, crushed by disappointment and mortified by any misplaced enthusiasm I had shown. I declared my allegiances, took a position, and always had a view, not noticing that girls were bemused and boys found me boring. Was a girl not supposed to feel so strongly, let alone want so much to possess and know something for her own sake?

How could I not love it?

Finally, there’s Wildthorn by Jane Eagland, which I picked up because I’d seen it described as a sort of YA Fingersmith. This description made me both excited and wary: on the one hand, yay, a book kind of like Fingersmith! But on the other hand, I don’t need other books to try to be Fingersmith when Fingersmith already is Fingersmith, if that makes sense.

Wildthorn is the story of a Victorian teenager, Louisa Cosgrove, who for reasons completely unknown to her has been shut in a mental asylum by the name of Wildthorn. The novel moves back and forth between the present day and the story of Louisa’s unconventional upbringing, which gives us hints of why she has been deemed mad and shut away – and by whom.

I can see why Wildthorn has been compared to Fingersmith — Victorian mental asylums, an analysis of gender and of madness as a tool of control, an unapologetic feminist stance, a lesbian love story, mistaken identities, you name it: it has it all. But I shall refrain from even attempting to compare Jane Eagland’s writing to Sarah Waters’, as I don’t think it would be fair at all.

Wildthorn is certainly a novel with its heart in the right place, but what disappointed me was the fact that it suffers from a very bad case of Lisa-needs-braces-dental-plan. Louisa, who readers are encouraged to think of as an intelligent young woman, repeatedly takes as long to put two and two together as Homer Simpson did in that episode. As this is a first person narration, I suppose it’s meant to ensure that things are absolutely clear to the reader, but I found it quite unnecessary. One example among many:

I lay still, aware of the warmth of her body beside me, of that strange, sweet feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had the oddest desire to put my arms round her and hold her close. I felt such a longing, a painful, lovely feeling that we might be like this always, that we might never be apart. And suddenly with a hot rush it came to me: I love Grace. I love her. In a confused way I knew I didn’t just love her as cousins do. This was different, this was… I felt… I felt about her in the way that she felt about Charles!
[In case you were wondering, yes, the emphasis and exclamation mark are in the original.]

I feel bad feeling so meh about it, as this is not only a novel dealing with some of my favourite topics, themes and settings, but also one clearly written with a sensibility that closely matches my own. Sadly, there’s nothing I can do. (And please don’t say “But it’s YA! Of course it’s going to be heavy-handed and obvious! Everbody knows YA is a dumbed down version of adult fiction! Surely you can’t expect teenagers to grasp subtlety or nuance?”, or else I’ll be obliged to actually type out my mental list of 443 YA novels that very successfully trust teens to do exactly this, and that would be time-consuming at the very least. )

Nevertheless, I’d recommend Wildthorn to teens – or adults – with a budding interest in feminism, the Victorian period, or (like me) the relationship between the two. It would make a good introduction to the topic, and for all its shortcomings it was quite a gripping read.

They read it too: Bookalicious, Steph Su Reads, Eclectic/Eccentric, Coffee Stained Pages

As always, if you have read any of these feel free to leave me your link.

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