This Week in My Classes

Here's what my students and I will be reading and talking about this week:

1. English 3032, 19th-Century Novel: We are finishing up Trollope's The Warden, with a special focus on Trollope's redefinition of heroism on a small scale and on his interest in the way public questions are always "a conglomeration of private interests." We'll also be looking at the role of his intrusive narrator, and at his parodies of Carlyle (as Dr. Pessimist Anticant) and Dickens (as Mr Popular Sentiment) as he works towards his own theory of fiction. "What story was ever written without a demon?" he asks in Chapter XV; "What novel, what history, what work of any sort, what world, would be perfect without existing principles both of good and evil?" As every reader of The Warden comes to see, this novel does not allow us to perceive the world as consisting of such extremes, despite John Bold's frustrated exclamation, "If there be a devil, a real devil here on earth, it is Dr. Grantly."

2. English 5465, Victorian Women Writers: This week it's Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography, which shifts us sharply away from last week's more abstract discussion of Victorian arguments over femininity and women's 'mission' into a life full of contradictions and compromises, struggle and suffering (economic and mental). While Oliphant's consideration of her own fiction, and her comparisons (often rueful or resentful) between her own hard-earned modest success and her more triumphant literary 'sisters' (especially George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte) will be of much interest to us, I am sure we will also talk about the form, mode, and tone of the Autobiography itself, with its long passages of heartbreaking lamentation for lost children interwoven with (often, seeming to slice apart) its record of ordinary domestic life and travels. Here's an excerpt from just after the death of Maggie, aged 10, after a sudden and very brief illness:

I ask myself why, why, and I cannot find any answer. I had but one woman-child and she was just beginning to sympathize with me, to comfort me, and at this dear moment, her little heart expanding, her little mind growing, her sweet life blossoming day by day, God has taken her away out of my arms and refuses to hear my cry and prayer. My heart feels dead. . . . Now I have to go limping and anxious through the world all the days of my life. . . . Oh God forgive me and help me. O God convey to me a sense of my darling's happiness, a feeling that she will not forget me and that I shall find her again, and have pity upon a poor heartbroken creature who does not know what she is saying. . . .Those curls I was so proud of were never more beautiful than when they were all rippling back with the gold string through them from her dear head as she lay ill, and when they lay all peaceful and still with her white wreath of hyacinths and snowdrops, she as as lovely as the angel she is. Oh my child, my child.

She would lose all of her children before her own death, "writing steadily," as she says, "all the time" to support the ne'er-do-well sons who survived into adulthood and the array of relatives who came to depend on her industry and charity. The poignant conclusion:

And now here I am all alone.
I cannot write anymore.