Workday Miscellany: Ph.D. Problems, Institutional Inertia, Graduate Teaching, and the Yoke of Marriage

I'm feeling a bit scattered this week. Here are some of the things buzzing around in my head.

1. It's hard not to want to say something about Louis Menand's much-linked-to post on "the PhD problem," but what? Readers of this blog will not be surprised that I nodded emphatically at this statement:

The non-academic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought, and had thereby acquired a little understanding of the issues that scare terms like “deconstruction” and “postmodernism” are attempts to deal with. And the academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction—and also if it had to deal with students who were not so neurotically invested in the academic intellectual status quo.

But I don't really know how to assess some of his larger claims, especially the more sociological or statistical ones; I can't even compare them to my own experience, really, because the information is exclusively about American institutions and I don't know how closely the patterns he describes are repeated here in Canada--despite having spent two years as coordinator of our graduate program. One of the reasons is that the concerns of that position were, of practical necessity, extremely local: it's a two-year stint by departmental policy, with an incessant stream of relatively small bureaucratic and advising tasks and intervals of intense labour around major fellowship deadlines and, of course, admissions. In the first year of the position the learning curve was steep and my dependence on our (exemplary!) office staff nearly total; the second year was slightly better but the end was already in sight. New initiatives? Policy development? Research into large-scale professional questions and how they might impact or play out in our tiny program? Not a chance: there was just no time, and frankly no incentive, to explore broader issues.

2. In a related vein, I was struck by Menand's passing suggestion that "If every graduate student were required to publish a single peer-reviewed article instead of writing a thesis, the net result would probably be a plus for scholarship," but this seems to me another of those ideas about changing "the system" (not unlike the MLA's call to "decenter the monograph" as the gold standard for evaluating tenure and promotion files) that can never be addressed on a local level and so may never be addressed at all. Which department wants to be the first to say that they will award a Ph.D. without requiring a thesis? For that matter, which department could make such a change in policy without losing their accreditation or funding? Which department could independently assert its ability to evaluate the work of its members without the sacred stamp of "peer reviewed publications," or at least giving equal weight to less conventional modes of knowledge dissemination? (How far, as the MLA report suggested, has "peer review" become an excuse for farming out the job of scholarly evaluation to editors?) Anecdotally, conversationally, there's plenty of dissatisfaction with the professional status quo and interest in making various features of it more flexible and more responsive to changing conditions in, say, publishing or employment. But this week, in a couple of different contexts, I was reminded again of how rigidly current practices are enforced by administrative structures that assume certain models for estimating academic productivity and value (for instance, fellowship competitions in which quantity of publications is taken as the only 'objective' measure of excellence, or research models that promote applications for large grants as if more expensive projects are both necessary and desirable). People grumbled about the implicit principles but the atittude appears to be "that's the way things are now, and we'd better stay in the game."

3. I was also struck by Menand's remark that "Inquiry in the humanities has become quite eclectic without becoming contentious. This makes it a challenge for entering scholars to know where to make their mark." This certainly echoes my strong feeling for the last several years that English, for one, has become a field so inchoate that it is unable to declare and defend itself in any compelling way that all of its members can agree on--at least, not without resorting to unbelievably bland formulations (all the world's a text!). How can we sustain a sense of ourselves as a functioning discipline under these circumstances? Though I don't want to fall into conservative lamentation about the good old days when everybody knew what books were valuable and why (when were those days, exactly, and how long did they last?), anyone who has worked on curriculum reform (and probably everyone working in an English department anywhere has done so at least once) knows that the lack of an identifiable core is a practical as well as an intellectual problem. It's a problem for us, as we try to define priorities in hiring as well as teaching, and it's a problem for students, whose programs include so much variety it is possible to meet a 4th-year honours student and be more struck, somehow, by what they don't know or haven't read than by what they do and have, and certainly impossible to predict what experience or knowledge they bring to your class (in my 4th-year seminar on Victorian sensation fiction, I have students who have never studied 19th-century novels before--they have a lot of catching up to do, to participate effectively in some aspects of our discussions). But what, if anything, to do about that? Too often, I think, we resort to a rhetoric of skills (critical thinking!) that (as Menant points out with his remark about the dubious efficiency of studying Joyce to achieve more general ends) rather strips away the point of working through literature to achieve such general, marketable ends.

4. All of this mental muddle is particularly distracting because one of the things I'm trying to get done is course planning for next term, and particularly the plans for my upcoming graduate seminar on George Eliot. When I first taught such a class (in 1997-98), I thought it was pretty obvious what I should do: graduate courses are training for professional work in the field of literary criticism, right? That shouldn't have seemed so obvious to me then (I didn't take into account, for instance, that Dalhousie's program includes a 'terminal' M.A. and thus serves a student population that is not necessarily headed down an academic path), and it certainly does not seem so obvious to me now. But what difference does, or should, it make that there seem to me to be a number of uncertainties about the purpose of their degrees more generally, our seminar in particular, and even literary criticism itself? Is a (real or mock) conference paper a reasonable goal, or a paper suitable to be revised and submitted to a peer-reviewed journal? Should I diversify the requirements to suit a wider range of possible applications of scholarly expertise--say, a resource-rich website, an experimental hyper-text edition of a chapter, a paper aimed at a general audience, a portfolio of book reviews, a class wiki? Is it possible to accommodate such a range and still to ensure equal workloads and fair evaluation? I've been reading and rereading a swathe of critical articles in preparation for the usual "secondary readings" requirements but if I can't even be sure myself what we need to accomplish in the class, how can I choose what they should read? Probably I'll just do what I usually do, which is pick some articles that seem particularly useful or interesting, or that stand for some reason as key or classic pieces; require a couple of short response papers, a seminar presentation, and a term paper (of the usual academic variety). It's tempting to reinvent the course--but it's part of a whole system of requirements and expectations, and so there I am again, reluctant to deviate from local norms, to point out that most of them will never need to do academic criticism (or get a permanent job in which it is required of them for tenure) and so we should really find something else to do about what we read.

In the meantime, my classes seem to be going fine. I was particularly pleased with the lively discussion in the Sensation Fiction seminar the last couple of meetings; I think we have some real momentum now, having bulldozed through four major novels in preparation for the next phase of the course, which involves a series of workshops and then a series of student presentations. In the other class, assignments just went back and between the inevitable angst and resentment that generates, I think most of them are behind on their Middlemarch readings. But I'm doing my best to keep the energy up and to give them ideas about how to make the most of the reading as they work their way along. We talked about Lydgate and Rosamond, and the "ideal not the real yoke of marriage" (a phrase actually used about Dorothea and Casaubon, but widely applicable in this novel). For a happily "married" woman, George Eliot could sure put her finger on just how and why marital relations can turn from bliss to pain. To my knowledge there are only two married people in the class; they seem to be the ones doing most of the nodding as I explain the process of disillusionment and then adaptation to reality the novel describes.

The Wit and Wisdom of George Eliot (II)

I just figured out that I've turned around approximately 150 student assignments already this term. No wonder my own wit and wisdom feel a bit strained and it's so refreshing to spend time with someone whose fund of both seems inexhaustible. And so, without further ado, some more treats from this year's reading of Middlemarch.

Wit

Another candidate for high honours in this category is Uncle Featherstone, though he's another who furnishes us with amusement without altogether intending to do so. One of the best such occasions, I think, is Chapter 34, in which we get our own chuckle out of his perversely gleeful anticipation of his own funeral:

We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire [there's a nice little bit of wisdom tossed in for good measure]; and poor old Featherstone, who laughed much at the way in which others cajoled themselves, did not escape the fellowship of illusion. In writing the programme for his burial he certainly did not make clear to himself that his pleasure in the little drama of which it formed a part was confined to anticipation. In chuckling over the vexations he could inflict by the rigid clutch of his dead hand, he inevitably mingled his consciousnss with that livid stagnant presence, and so far as he was preoccupied with a future life, it was with one of gratification inside his coffin. Thus old Featherstone was imaginative, after his fashion.

His whole family is actually a barrel of laughs and provides many opportunities for the narrator's sly wit. Here they are heading in to hear his will read (and to discover that his 'dead hand' does indeed distribute unexpected 'vexations'):

When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied species made much private remark on each other, and were tempted to think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the rations. (I fear the part played by the vultures on that occasion would be too painful for art to represent, those birds being disadvantageously naked about the gullet, and apparently without rites and ceremonies.)

The same sort of temptation befell the Christian Carnivora who formed Peter Featherstone's funeral procession; most of them having their minds bent on a limited store which each would have liked to get the most of. (Ch. 35)

That's a good point about the vultures, just btw.

Wisdom and Tenderness

One of the ways in which I think George Eliot is wisest is in her insight about the moral consequences of the kind of sympathetic understanding her novels all (and Middlemarch most particularly) both model and inspire. The famous pier glass passage from Chapter 27 cautions us that our egocentric perceptions of the world are just 'flattering illusions,' but reaching the crucial insight that everyone else has an "equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference" brings us not into a condition of liberated enlightenment but into a much more complicated realm of duty and obligation. Through the first half of the novel, Dorothea moves from the youthful and idealistic, but still self-centred, illusion that Mr. Casaubon has arrived on the scene to fulfill her own dream of leading "a grand life here--now--in England," through the inevitable process of disillusionment that is the essence, in many ways, of George Eliot's realism. On their honeymoon, poor thing, she discovers that "the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither" (Ch. 20). The crucial question is, will she be able to move from this more realistic perspective to sympathy, following, for instance, the narrator's pressure to consider

what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labours; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within ihim; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause? (Ch. 10)

Will she be capable of her own "but why always Dorothea?" moment? By Chapter 42 (which is about where I've tried to bring my class up to this week), we can't be sure, but we do see signs that she is struggling to turn her own hard-won wisdom into tenderness. For instance, here she is in Chapter 37, listening to Will take another careless "pinch at the moth-wings of poor Mr. Casaubon's glory":

But Dorothea was strangely quiet--not immediately indignant, as she had been on a like occasion in Rome. And the cause lay deep. She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their highest perception; and now when she looked steadily at her husband's failure, still more at his possible consciousness of failure, she seemed to be looking along the one track where duty became tenderness.

Still, Mr. Casaubon (albeit unintentionally) does what he can to turn her aside from that track, as when he rebuffs her offered comfort after his interview with Lydgate in Chapter 42. To Dorothea, there is "something horrible" in his "unresponsive hardness," and in the throes of a "rebellious anger stronger than any she had felt since her marriage," she retreats to her boudoir and struggles with her feelings of rejection and resentment. "In such a crisis as this," the narrator points out, "some women begin to hate," but she thinks hard about his feelings, convinced "that he had been asking about the possible arrest of all his work"--"the answer must have wrong his heart." Thus "the resolved submission did come," and she goes out once more to meet him as he comes upstairs from the library. Her tenderness here is a kind of wisdom, and does finally elicit a sympathetic connection, beautiful in its understated simplicity:

'Dorothea!' he said, with a gentle surprise in his tone. 'Were you waiting for me?'

'Yes, I did not like to disturb you.'

'Come, my dear, come. You are young, and need not to extend your life by watching.'

When the kind quiet melancholy of that speech fell on Dorothea's ears, she felt something like the thankfulness tha tmight well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature. She put her hand into her husband's, and they went along the broad corridor together.

This Week in My Classes (November 3, 2009)

In Nineteenth-Century Fiction this week, we get to look at two of my favorite chapters in Middlemarch. Our general theme is the importance of looking at things from different perspectives--a simply idea but one that gets refracted in a number of different ways in the novel. On Monday I brought up the problem of achieving solidity in narrative. As Carlyle pointed out, "narrative is linear, but action is solid": in life, many things happen at once, and what happens means different things to everyone involved because each 'event' is in fact part of many different stories, all overlapping but which you can only coherently narrate one at a time. What's a novelist to do? One of Eliot's techniques is to revisit moments in time, presenting them and then circling around to come at them again and make us consider them as part of a different story than we were following the first time. A good example occurs, for the first time, at the very end of Chapter 27--appropriately enough, as this is the chapter that opens with the famous pier glass parable, making explicit that the 'scratches' (events) take on their meaning depending on where we place our 'candle' to cast its light. The story we are with in this chapter is the developing relationship between Lydgate and Rosamond (the latter, of course, believes it is a developing romance). Lydgate's practice is picking up, and one day, "when he had happened to overtake Rosamond on the Lowick road," he is

stopped by a servant on horseback with a message calling him in to a house of some importance where Peacock [his predecessor in the practice] had never attended; and it was the second instance of this kind. The servant was Sir James Chettam's, and the house was Lowick Manor [Mr Casaubon's home, and aptly named].

In the Oxford edition, this is on page 256. The next chapter begins immediately, but earlier in time and with another story, that of Dorothea and Casaubon's return to Lowick from their honeymoon. We follow them until we learn why Casaubon needed medical attention,on page 267, when "Mr Lydgate was sent for and he came wonderfully soon, for the messenger, who was Sir James Chettam's man and knew Mr Lydgate, met him leading his horse along the Lowick road and giving his arm to Miss Vincy." It's a nice exercise to work out what the fetching of Lydgate by Sir James's servant means for a range of different characters involved, especially Rosamond and Lydgate (both of whom take it as evidence that Lydgate will prosper professionally), Dorothea (who is coming to realize that Casaubon's demands on her, or his need for her, will not be of the kind she imagined before their wedding), and of course Casaubon himself, whose confrontation with his own mortality sets him up for Chapter 42, which may be the greatest in the book--next to Chapters 19-21, maybe, which we also looked at (here, we tried comparing the order of events as plotted in the novel to the order of events in the story, or chronologically)--or maybe Chapters 80-81...

Tomorrow I want to look first at another pattern of revisiting, this time not circling around in time but coming back to a familiar setting with new information. For this, I'll focus on Dorothea's blue-green boudoir, which changes dramatically (but, of course, not really at all) from when she first sees it and thinks it needs no alteration to her return from Rome, when "the very furniture in the room seemed to have shrunk since she saw it before." Later still, "the bare room had gathered within it those memories of an inward life which fill the air as with a cloud of good or bad angels" and the portrait of Casaubon's Aunt Julia has become yet more interesting because of its association with Will Ladislaw. If we have time, we'll start looking at examples of people who look different as your experience changes, which will bring us to Dorothea's mighty struggle with her lesser self at the end of Chapter 42. This is the culmination, or nearly so, of the struggle that begins in Rome and reaches a new stage in Chapter 28, when she "was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception." This movement, of course, is the essential one towards realism, but the next great step must be towards sympathy. Can she take it? What will be the consequences? As the narrator says in Chapter 42, when Dorothea's picture of Casaubon becomes nearly (but not yet quite) as clear as ours, "In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate."

In Victorian Sensations, we're still working our way through East Lynne. The sheer improbability of the plot is such a delight in this half of the book that despite the mounting pathos of the plot, it's hard not to find it comic. On Monday I had the students work in groups on some key passages looking at Lady Isabel's condition after the train wreck that literalizes her symbolic death to the world (the price of her moral fall)--but then doesn't, since she doesn't actually die but returns like the ghost of her former self, unrecognizable because, well, here's how she looks now:

Look at the governess, reader, and see whether you know her. You will say "No." But you do, for it is Lady Isabel Vane. But how strangely she is altered! Yes, the railway accident did that for her, and what the accident left undone, grief and remorse accomplished. She limps as she walks, and slightly stoops, taken from her former height. A scar extends from her chin above her mouth, completely changing the character of the lower part of her face; some of her teeth are missing, so that she speaks with a lisp, and the sober bands of her gray hair--it is nearly silver--are confined under a large and close cap. She herself tries to make the change greater, so that all chance of being recognized may be at an end, and for that reason she wears disfiguring spectacles, and a broad band of gray velvet, coming down low upon her forehead. Her dress, too, is equally disfiguring. Never is she seen in one that fits her person, but in those frightful "loose jackets," which must surely have been invented by somebody envious of a pretty shape. As to her bonnet, it would put to shame those masquerade things tilted on to the back of the head, for it actually shaded her face; and she was never seen out without a thick veil. She was pretty easy upon the score of being recognized now; for Mrs. Ducie and her daughters had been sojourning at Stalkenberg, and they did not know her in the least. Who could know her? What resemblance was there between that gray, broken-down woman, with her disfiguring marks, and the once loved Lady Isabel, with her bright color, her beauty, her dark flowing curls, and her agile figure? Mr. Carlyle himself could not have told her. But she was good-looking still, in spite of it all, gentle and interesting; and people wondered to see that gray hair in one yet young. (Ch. 39)

The brilliant part is that she goes back to her former home to serve as governess to the children she abandoned when she ran away with her lover (sorry for the spoilers, but really, none of you were ever going to read this novel, right?)--and nobody recognizes her as long as she has on those spectacles. I am fascinated by the comment that she is "good-looking still." We discussed this for a while in class, and the students who very able worked up this passage made the point that it suggests beauty is a matter of character as well as appearance. It also seems to be a gesture towards keeping our sympathy for her alive: she's not so hideous we look away. Tomorrow we're going to try to figure out how the election that figures, quite suddenly, in the late part of the novel makes any sense--how is it connected, or how does it enhance, the other themes or conflicts we've been considering? My opening gambit is that it directs our attention away from the duelling female protagonists, Isabel and Barbara, and does something with our thinking about the male antagonists, Carlyle and Francis Levison. But what exactly? I think the students will enjoy the ducking scene.

The Wit--or Wisdom--of Ellen Wood

I'm pretty sure that this bit of East Lynne is meant as wisdom, though I find it amusing:

'Let the offices properly belonging to a nurse, be performed by the nurse--of course taking care that she is thoroughly to be depended on. Let her have the trouble of the children, their noise, their romping; in short, let the nursery be her place and the children's place. But I hope I shall never fail to gather my children round me daily, at stated periods, for higher purposes: to instil into them Christian and moral duties; to strive to teach them how best to fulfil life's obligations. This is a mother's task--as I understand the question; let her do this work well, and the nurse can attend to the rest. A child should never hear aught from its mother's lips but winning gentleness; and this becomes impossible, if she is very much with her children.'

I appreciate the juxtaposition of high-minded spiritual (and maternal) pretension with the offhand confession that too much time with one's children makes "winning gentleness" impossible.

The Wit and Wisdom of George Eliot (I)

In 1871 an enthusiastic young reader named Alexander Main received George Eliot's permission to publish a collection of inspirational excerpts from her works; the volume was put out in 1872 by her usual publisher, John Blackwood (who nicknamed Main "the Gusher"), under the title Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings of George Eliot. As I make my way through Middlemarch yet again, I sympathize with his project: I am, as always, struck repeatedly by the sheer pleasure the novel affords, precisely because it is so wise, witty, and tender. It's endlessly tempting to grab anyone who happens to be nearby and say, "just listen to this bit!" Alas, too often there's nobody nearby, or at least nobody with time and attention to spare. But on the internet, there's always somebody around--or at least so I can fondly imagine. So, as a self-indulgent supplement to my teaching posts, I'm going to do a little series of favorite "wise, witty, and tender" excerpts as I go along. I hope that they will give you, too, some pleasure, whether by reminding you of your own experience of reading Middlemarch or by introducing you to some more of the reasons why so many people love this novel. The challenge will be choosing just one or two excerpts for each category!

Wisdom

I'm overwhelmed by choices here, from the epigrammatic to the philosophical and reflective. For now, here are passages representing each of those extremes:

Mr Bulstrode had also a deferential bending attitude in listening, and an apparent fixed attentiveness in his eyes which made those persons who thought themselves worth hearing infer that he was seeking the utmost improvement from their discourse. Others, who expected to make no great figure, disliked this kind of moral lantern turned on them. If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light and look judicial. Such joys are reserved for conscious merit. (Ch. XIII)

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's "makdom and her fairnesse," never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of " makdom and fairnesse " which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires? In the story of this passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours. For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman's glance. (Ch. XV)

Wit

One of the great delights of reading Middlemarch aloud is that for some reason doing so really brings out the humour of the novel, which ranges from laugh-out-loud funny to wryly acerbic, from rueful to pointedly cruel. First honours in this category has to go to Mrs Cadwallader, who has the privilege of delivering most of the novel's best one-liners. Here she is, with her straight man, Sir James Chettam, on the Reverend Mr Casaubon (whose 'family quarterings,' she earlier proposes, must be 'three cuttle-fish sable and a commentator rampant'):

'He has got no good red blood in his body,' said Sir James.

'No. somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses,' said Mrs Cadwallader.

'Why does he not bring out his book, instead of marrying?' said Sir James, with a disgust which he held warranted by the sound feeling of an English layman.

'Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains. They say, when he was a little boy, he made an abstract of "Hop o' My Thumb," and he has been making abstracts ever since.' (Ch. VIII)

Mr Brooke runs her a close second, though his comedy is largely inadvertant and thus puts us in a more Austen-like attitude of knowing superiority (which, of course, is entirely compatible with warm affection). Who could resist the picture of his talking theology with the erudite Mr Casaubon, telling him 'that the Reformation either meant something or it did not, that he himself was a Protestant to the core, but that Catholicism was a fact; and as to refusing an acre of your ground for a Romanist chapel, all men needed the bridle of religion, which, properly speaking, was the dread of a Hereafter'? The narrator is relentless about Mr Brooke's vagaries, but never harsh. After all, aren't we all foolish and inconsistent in our own ways? Here is her commentary, for instance, on Mr Brooke's cheerful anticipation that Casaubon is likely to be made a bishop:

And here I must vindicate a claim to philosophical reflectiveness, by remarking that Mr. Brooke on this occasion little thought of the Radical speech which, at a later period, he was led to make on the incomes of the bishops. What elegant historian would neglect a striking opportunity for pointing out that his heroes did not foresee the history of the world, or even their own actions? -- For example, that Henry of Navarre, when a Protestant baby, little thought of being a Catholic monarch; or that Alfred the Great, when he measured his laborious nights with burning candles, had no idea of future gentlemen measuring their idle days with watches. Here is a mine of truth, which, however vigorously it may be worked, is likely to outlast our coal.

But of Mr. Brooke I make a further remark perhaps less warranted by precedent -- namely, that if he had foreknown his speech, it might not have made any great difference. To think with pleasure of his niece's husband having a large ecclesiastical income was one thing -- to make a Liberal speech was another thing; and it is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

Finally, I have to make a little room for Celia, who has cracked me up several times already, on her own or with the narrator's help. Here's Celia discovering that even Mr Casaubon has his human side (she's contemplating the miniatures of Mr Casaubon's mother and Aunt Julia):

'The sister is pretty,' said Celia, implying that she thought less favourably of Mr Casaubon's mother. It was a new opening to Celia's imagination, that he came of a family who had all been young in their time--the ladies wearing necklaces. (Ch. IX)

Doesn't that capture perfectly the solipsistic attitude of the young towards their elders? I remember my grandmother once saying, quite tartly, that what young people don't realize when they look at 'some old man' on the bus is that he has already done everything they are doing, or are dreaming of doing--'sex and everything!' (Whether Mr Casaubon has sex is a topic for another post.)

Tenderness

Though Middlemarch is full of tenderness towards its people, one feature of George Eliot's writing for which she was justly beloved in her own time was her evocation of the English landscape. Her descriptions of the countryside are suffused with the affection her characters, too, feel for the places that are bound up with our most precious memories, "dear," as she says here, "to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood":

The ride to Stone Court, which Fred and Rosamond took the next morning, lay through a pretty bit of midland landscape, almost all meadows and pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty and to spread out coral fruit for the birds. Little details gave each field a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood: the pool in the corner where the grasses were dank and trees leaned whisperingly; the great oak shadowing a bare place in mid-pasture; the high bank where the ash-trees grew; the sudden slope of the old marl-pit making a red background for the burdock; the huddled roofs and ricks of the homestead without a traceable way of approach; the gray gate and fences against the depths of the bordering wood; and the stray hovel, its old, old thatch full of mossy hills and valleys with wondrous modulations of light and shadow such as we travel far to see in later life, and see larger, but not more beautiful. These are the things that make the gamut of joy in landscape to midland-bred souls -- the things they toddled among, or perhaps learned by heart standing between their father's knees while he drove leisurely. (Ch. XII)

This Week in My Classes (October 26, 2009)

In Nineteenth-Century Fiction it's (finally) time for Middlemarch. I've posted pretty often about teaching Middlemarch (see, for instance, here, here, and here), and you can hear me talk (fast) about it here, too, in an interview with fellow blogger and bibliophile Nigel Beale. For something just a bit different this time, I thought I'd post the PowerPoint slides I used for my introductory lecture today. The file conversion seems to have affected the layout and font color for the worse, but the slides illustrate my initial approach, which is to woo students into being interested in the novel by way of, as I say, "The Interesting Life of Mary Ann Evans." In the spirit of one of her contemporaries, who regretted the way her husband John Cross's biography took the "salt and spice" out of her "entirely unconventional life," I show them just what a remarkable (and spicy) person she was--so that they will read the novel with more appreciation for the ways in which it, too, is "entirely unconventional."

GE Slides

In Victorian Sensations, we're starting up with Ellen Wood's East Lynne, the last in the sequence of four primary texts for our course before we turn our attention to critical work (both 19th-century and current) and then to Fingersmith. When I've taught East Lynne before, I've found myself preoccupied with questions of literary evaluation (see here, for instance). For whatever reason--perhaps because I've just been over similar ground in working my way through Aurora Floyd--I'm less interested in that question at this point than I am in just thinking about the book on its own terms. What is it interested in? What is it up to? (I realize that it can sound odd to attribute agency to a novel, so another way of asking these questions would be by way of the novel's implied author.' I think the result is the same, though: you are trying to figure out how literary strategies and devices, from plot and character through setting, imagery, metaphor, theme, and so on, are being used to achieve effects or communicate ideas--aesthetic, political, or other.)

On this reading so far, East Lynne strikes me forcibly for its interest in money. It is almost as specific as a Jane Austen novel about the financial situation of its characters, especially the spendthrift earl who has somehow managed to burn through enough capital to have underwritten an income of L60,000 / year--at a time when, as the footnotes to our edition tell us, a middle-class family needed something like L300 / year for a comfortable life. Even accounting for inflation, that makes Mr Darcy look shabby, and yet Lord Mount Severn has not only spent it all, but left absolutely nothing for his angelically beautiful, sweet-eyed, if brunette, daughter Isabel. So pinched for cash is Isabel that after his sudden death she doesn't even have enough to move to her new home, where she will be living on the charity of the new earl and his wife. The smitten lawyer Archibald Carlyle tries to help by dropping a crumpled L100 note on her lap as she drives away. The ambiguity of this gesture (is it romantic? chivalric? forward, even vaguely compromising?) nicely represents the complex interrelationships in the novel between emotions and economics. When he eventually proposes, it's as much to save her from physical as well as financial vulnerability as anything, and in fact what he offers her, explicitly, is the chance to return to her former home as its mistress--that is, he offers her security, as well as his love (which we are led to believe is really a kind of infatuation--"Beware your senses, Mr. Carlyle," the narrator warns). She admits she does not love him (she too is infatuated, with the handsome ne'er-do-well Francis Levison, who fortunately, or not, is not the marrying kind, as he is quick to warn her--we know he would feel differently, of course, if she still had her fortune). So she trades her self for his money, a transaction that in some contexts, in some novels, is shown up as little better than prostitution. We might even think of Austen's Charlotte Lucas in this way (how much money would you consider reasonable in return for sleeping with Mr Collins?)--but both Austen and Wood are clearly pragmatists, refusing the most stringent moral judgment because they, and their novels, are so aware that their women simply can't afford (literally) to be squeamish.

"The True Genius of Her Writing"

Putting together some introductory notes for next week's Middlemarch lectures, I was reminded (by Rosemary Ashton's excellent biography) that Marian Evans's 1855 essay "Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming" was the piece that convinced her 'husband,' George Henry Lewes, "of the true genius of her writing." Ashton suggests the essay "has one of the most arresting openings in all periodical literature--though she acknowledges it lacks the devastating brevity of Francis Jeffrey's "This will never do" (about Wordsworth's The Excursion). What it lacks in "succinctness" it makes up in venom:

Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity.

The essay's conclusion does little, if anything, to soften the sting of her analysis, though it does return us to something more like the meliorative tone we expect from the novelist who would later anatomize the troubled conscience of the evangelical Mr. Bulstrode so much more compassionately, if no less stringently:

Before taking leave of Dr. Cumming, let us express a hope that we have in no case exaggerated the unfavourable character of the inferences to be drawn from his pages. His creed often obliges him to hope the worst of men, and to exert himself in proving that the worst is true; but thus far we are happier than he. We have no theory which requires us to attribute unworthy motives to Dr. Cumming, no opinions, religious or irreligious, which can make it a gratification to us to detect him in delinquencies. On the contrary, the better we are able to think of him as a man, while we are obliged to disapprove of him as a theologian, the stronger will be the evidence for our conviction, that the tendency towards good in human nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which ensures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic perversions.

Much as I enjoy the pungency of her rhetoric, I like even better the idea of a romance nourished on such intellectual substance. I'm not the only one (though perhaps I am rare in appreciating it without irony?)--from Cynthia Ozick's "Puttermesser Paired," we get this picture of modern lovers inspired by "the two Georges":

They read until they were dried up. They read until their eyes skittered and swelled. The strangeness in it did not elude them: where George Eliot and George Lewes in their nighttime coziness had taken up Scott, Trollope, Balzac, Turgenev, Daudet, Sainte-Beuve, Madame d'Agoult (Lewes recorded all this in his diary), she and Rupert read only the two Georges. Puttermesser discussed what this might mean. It wasn't for "inspiration," she pointed out--she certainly wasn't mixing herself up with a famous dead Victorian. She was conscious of her Lilliputian measur: a worn-out city lawyer, stunted as to real experience, a woman lately secluded, eaten up with loneliness, melancholia ground into the striations of her face. The object was not inspiration but something sterner. The object was just what it had been for the two Georges: study. What Puttermesser and Rupert were studying was a pair of heroic boon companions. Boon companions! It was fellowship they were studying; it was nearness.