Weekend Miscellany & Recent Reading

Weekend Miscellany: some things that have caught my eye in recent Internet ramblings:

Joseph Epstein reviews Gertrude Himmelfarb's new book, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (via). I agree with Open Letters's Sam Sacks that Epstein's generalizations about the Victorians are tired ("The Victorians had a comprehensive and confident view of human nature"... ), though I think Epstein may to be trying to convey what the Bloomsbury-ites thought of them, rather than what he himself takes to be the case, as he moves on to praise the progress we have made from such Bloomsbury-inspired stereotypes. Sacks suggests that "when Epstein moves on to discussing George Eliot, he does fine"; I'd say there too, though, Epstein could do better. It's tedious, for one thing, that he leads with a discussion of her appearance, complete with Henry James's infamous insults (imagine a sentence along the lines of "A short, homely man with bulbous eyes, Charles Dickens nonetheless charmed audiences with his impassioned readings..."--why do so many people feel it necessry and appropriate to lead off with comments on her looks?). What can he mean by his remark, after noting that George Eliot was not a supporter of female suffrage (she was not much of a supporter of universal male suffrage either, it's worth keeping in mind), that "George Eliot's feminism was of a superior kind"? Superior to what? It sounds as if he might mean she wasn't one of those shrill political types. He refers to Eliot as a "Zionist," but as the work of Nancy Henry and others shows, it is tricky to use that term as if it applied in her moment as it came to later on.

George Eliot goes on Oprah: I've often thought Oprah should take on Middlemarchfor her Book Club, but its emphasis on failed ambition and entangled idealism would rather undermine her show's relentless emphasis on overcoming obstacles and triumphing over "this petty medium." As I always figure that the more people who read it the better, I'll be interested (in sort of a "bystander at an accident" way) to see if this producer and those who read along find the expeience rewarding.

At ReadySteadyBlog, Mark Thwaite asks his readers to name "academics who manage to retain their rigour, but speak beyond the academy, if only to a quite self-selecting and small audience." As he asks, "who is doing it for you?" I think in principle any academic could "speak beyond the academy" if you follow Mark's lead in looking to academic books for insights on literary figures or topics of special interest; academics who write deliberately for a non-academic audience would be a much smaller group.

Reviews are piling up of Sarah Waters's new novel, TheLittle Stranger. I don't need to read any of them to know I want to read the novel, but this piece by Waters herself on the novel's background and relationship to Josephine Tey's classic The Franchise Affair really whetted my appetite for it. (via)

N+1 takes a couple more shots at bloggers ("Bloggers on the whole write carelessly, their ideas are commonplace, they curry favor with readers and one another, and their popularity is no index of their worthiness.") even while admitting that there can be a "special eloquence" in the "speech-like qualities" of on-line writing (though that eloquence doesn't really count, it turns out, as "the same discovery is made by bloggers and texters and chatters in a minor and disposable way all the time"). With 76 million blogs ongoing (or whatever the current estimate is), any claims about what they are like "on the whole" must be a difficult thing to ascertain. I wonder how many blogs the author read to come up with this generalization.

Recent Reading

Two of the books I finished recently are so dissimilar in tone and style--indeed, in almost every way--that it comes as a surprise to me to discover, on reflection, that I think they are pursuing a very similar idea. The books are Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero, first published in 1973, and Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac, which won the Booker prize in 1984. El Saadawi's novel is the fictional equivalent of repeated slaps in the face, if such startling, painful moments could also somehow be imagined as poetic. Brookner's novel, in contrast, is subtle, patiently nuanced, and faintly sardonic. How can I say that the blunt first-person narrative of an Egyptian prostitute on death row for murder and a cool first-person account of a British romance novelist vacationing in Switzerland after leaving her fiance at the altar have anything in common? Perhaps the connection is a tenuous one, but both books seem to be fundamentally about the relationship a woman has with herself, and how that relationship is compromised and challenged by the sexual politics--the distribution of power, including physical and economic but also social and cultural power--of her world. Both bring these compromises and challenges into focus by emphasizing their protagonists' struggles to discover their own identities and maintain their integrity, even when (especially when) that means disregarding how they are looked at by others.

El Sadaawi's protagonist, Firdaus, fails: her courageous attempts to reinvent herself, to believe in herself and the possibility of her own economic, moral, and sexual freedom, are repeatedly--relentlessly, shatteringly--defeated. The cyclical structure of the novel, in which the same language (assuming the translation is accurate) is repeated for different incidents as if to prove no real progress has been made, that the core crisis remains literally identical, gives a formal pattern to this defeat. It would be an understatement to call this an angry book: to borrow from Matthew Arnold, it is full of "hunger, rebellion, and rage." It is an activist book, a book designed to smack you out of your complacency. It is interesting to compare it, as I inevitably did, with Ahdaf Souef's novels, which seem to speak from another world entirely. The timing makes some difference, though I wonder how much: is Firdaus's experience impossible two decades, three decades, later? Today? How much of the difference between Soueif's confident, ambitious women and El Sadaawi's Firdaus is economic or class-based? The novel has been described as fable-like; it may also be that it is meant to transcend its time and place, to speak very fundamentally to the subjection of women, or of the roots and effects of all oppression.

Brookner's protagonist ends her novel with no triumphant resolution but with a questing sense of possibilities. She has rejected two relationships that promise her social security, protection from the slights and indignities she faces daily and fears will overtake her as she ages: now she must discover what it is like to live on her own terms. To be sure, her situation is dramatically more secure than Firdaus's, though in both cases money is seen to be key to both security and autonomy ("money is what you make when you grow up," she tells a less independent companion). She faces no physical violence, no overt discrimination--but nonetheless she has difficulty imagining happiness for herself without love.

Hotel du Lac is the first Brookner novel I've read. I enjoyed the language a lot: it was descriptive but restrained. It opens with shades of grey that become thematically apt too, for the repressions that limit its protagonist's expressiveness. I liked the "vast grey lake, spreading like an anaesthetic towards the invisible further shore"--that image of anaesthetic is proleptic of the life Edith might have. The novel surprised me repeatedly, not with big shocks or twists, but just by not being or saying quite what I expected. It felt like an Edwardian novel; I kept picturing its characters dressed like those in The Enchanted April (they use words like "smocks"--do people say that anymore?). But then someone said something about deconstruction and signifiers and I was reminded of its more contemporary moment. I wonder if the historical ambiguity created by its tone was deliberate, or if I just missed some basic clue as to when exactly its action takes place.

I've also recently read Emma Darwin's The Mathematics of Love, a novel which weaves together a historical with a modern plot. I thought both parts of the novel were individually well done, though the more contemporary (late 70s, so not really contemporary) part was more compelling. The 19th-century part was written in a more formal style, but that seems like an unnecessary artifice. Perhaps one reason Sarah Waters's neo-Victorian novels read so well is that although she seeks out 19th-century slang and provides plenty of allusions and contextual details, she does not try to sound "Victorian" (which to so many seems to mean "stuffy"). I didn't think Darwin brought the two stories together effectively: the interest of her 20th-century protagonist, Anna, in her 19th-century protagonist, Stephen, was never well-motivated. I liked the way she used photography as a device for evoking the strangely palimpsestic character of historical sites and stories, caught in time, leaving impressions that may be sharp or blurred, suggestive or specific, visible or even tangible to successive generations of viewers. The battlefield reminiscences are vivid, and the aftershocks of war provide another common element between the two plots, as do the various love stories that ask us to consider why we love who we do, what love is, and how we suffer for love. Just because I also read it recently, Emma Donoghue's The Sealed Letter is the inevitable comparison for this book: with Donoghue's novel, I couldn't see what it was about beyond the story it told, while with Darwin's, I felt it was about a number of things but not integrating them in a fully satisfying way. But I liked it enough that I might try her second novel, A Secret Alchemy--also because it has been a long time since I read any Richard III-related novels.

Catching Up

Somehow I always forget how busy May is! There's a lull after winter term grading is finished and then administrative tasks need doing--year-end committee reports and so on--and then the current crop of MA students heads into their thesis-writing phase, meaning draft chapters start coming in for comments. Last week we also had two Ph.D. students doing their comprehensive exams; I was involved in one as the student's supervisor, so there was the exam itself to write and then the written portions to read, followed by the three hour oral exam; as Graduate Coordinator, I also chaired the second exam. Graduate admissions is an ongoing process, too, still involving an assortment of calls and emails and paperwork. In between these tasks I've been working on my paper for ACCUTE. Then there's family life, too: a highlight last week was going to the Neptune Theatre's production of High School Musical with my daughter--that was a lot of fun (Maddie was especially excited that the cast hung around in the lobby after the show to sign autographs). Last but not least, we've been watching the third season of Deadwood, which of course is "just for fun," but I defy anyone to make it to Episode 6 or 7 without feeling a pretty strong compulsion to see how it all turns out. (It's an extraordinary show, though I think I still rate The Wire higher.)

Anyway, no wonder I haven't felt I could afford time for blogging, though I have been keeping an eye on my blogroll and in particular on this discussion at The Valve because one of my ACCUTE events is a lunch-hour session on academic blogging. (It strikes me that hopes or expectations for the potential of this form to shake things up in academic publishing have declined since The Valve was launched with this post--the premises and arguments of which I still find important and convincing.)

I've done a little reading, too (you always need something on the go to read with your morning tea, waiting for appointments, and so on!). One regrettable choice was Kate Jacobs's The Friday Night Knitting Club. I wanted to like this one--just as I want to like the Elm Creek quilting series, and just as I do like leafing through quilting magazines, especially the kind featuring profiles of shops and the women who gather there. It's some kind of fantasy of community and creativity, I think, of working all day with friends and having something beautiful to show for it. I do a little inexpert quilting, and have tried my hands at knitting too, and there is a simple satisfaction for me in the tangibility of the work; perhaps that's part of the appeal too, as a contrast to the vagaries of academic and intellectual work. In any case, The Friday Night Knitting Club will teach me never again to buy a book with an endorsement from Glamour ("The book's great--worth reading now!"). The best word I can think of for the writing is "cheap." The plot pulls every predictable ploy: someone gets cancer, someone gets pregnant (guess which two major events are poignantly juxtaposed...), someone visits a wise old Scottish grandmother--who doesn't talk anything like a wise old Scottish grandmother, unless unbelievably platitudinous advice is somehow authentic Scots wisdom:

'You'll have lots of questions to answer as you get older. Who you are. Who you want to be. What you think about things. Like politics. And romances. And whether you'll speak out or keep your mouth shut. It's always a challenge to work out the best way to live your life, and as much as everyone tells you what to do, ultimately how you do things is up to you.'

Offset short sentences bearing nuggets of painfully obvious insight or laboriously heavy-handed emotion are the author's trademark:

It was only when the job was almost done that it hit her: a person didn't return home to the Upper East Side from a building site in Park Slope, Brooklyn, via the West Side.

James must have made a special trip.

Just to see her.

Phew. That stinks.* I actually find this kind of book obliquely insulting to women (to whom, of course, it is exclusively marketed, I'm sure). And yet, apparently it was a New York Times bestseller, so I suppose I can only lament the laziness of taste and discrimination that makes something like this a success.

Now I'm reading Emma Donoghue's The Sealed Letter. I wasn't wild about Slammerkin, but the premise of this novel is a good one and the reviews (including this one in the Globe and Mail) made it sound both intelligent and entertaining. So far, it's just OK. One problem for a Victorianist is that much of what is provided as context in the novel (a bit woodenly, at times) is pretty familiar stuff, from the members and activities of the Langham Place group to the peculiarities and injustices of Victorian divorce law. Donoghue also does not seem to be using her historical materials to any strong thematic purpose: the novel is about the Codrington case, but what else is it about? As a chronicle of a broken marriage, The Sealed Letter is a pale shadow of Trollope's He Knew He Was Right (see, for instance, here, here, or here), in which the breakdown of the Trevelyans' marriage becomes part of a complex commentary on Victorian gender relations and marriage in the context of larger problems of distribution of power and authority. Also, who needs Crocker when they have Bozzle? As for neo-Victorian predecessors, well, (so far, again) Donoghue does not seem to have the gift of either Michel Faber or Sarah Waters for evoking the period in a profoundly contemporary but yet deeply convincing way. The greatest specific weakness I feel in the book is the friendship between Emily "Fido" Faithfull and Helen Codrington: they seem wholly dissimilar, and their interactions have a forced intensity that I find unmotivated by what we know about them (so far). Still, it is an interesting and fairly well-written book.

Next on my TBR pile: Emma Darwin's The Mathematics of Love. But in the meantime, I'll be grappling with the details of In the Eye of the Sun as I put the last parts of my argument into (I hope) coherent form for the conference. Note to me: there's no shame in writing about short books...

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*Does this count as the kind of "evaluative criticism" Nigel would like us to do more of? :-)

Ricardian Fiction: A (Reading) Trip Down Memory Lane

I've been reading Steve Donoghue's series on Tudor fiction at Open Letters with pleasure and nostalgia. I haven't read a lot of historical fiction in recent years, but there was a time when I read and reread everything by Jean Plaidy, especially the Tudor and Mary, Queen of Scots ones, as well as everything by Margaret Campbell Barnes. I purged most of these books from my collection at some point in my evolution into a professional critic--no doubt in a fit of pseudo-sophistication. I have often regretted it since, a little because I have occasionally thought of rereading them, and a lot because much of the history they represent is actually my own. Imagine my surprise and delight when I found out recently that some of their titles are back in print--in fact, my very favourite, My Lady of Cleves, is just coming out this September. I'd guess that Philippa Gregory's success with similar material must be part of the impetus for these reissues. If nothing else, my youthful devotion to these books made me quite an expert on the British royal succession (very useful, it turns out, when explaining the back story for a novel such as Waverley.)

Anyway, reading about all this Tudor fiction also brought to mind my collection of novels about Richard III, most of which I have kept. These too are historical not just in their subjects but as objects, relics of my personal history, which involves a stint as a member of the Richard III Society of Canada (they still exist and they have a website!). Yes, it started because I read Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time; I was in 6th grade. It ended up launching my career as a teacher, as my Richard III obsession got me an invitation to do a guest lecture in my older sister's History 12 class a few years later (she must have loved that). Some years after that, I won a prize at UBC for the best first-year history essay with an analysis of Richard III's reign from a Machiavellian perspective. Also, I still choose Richard III whenever I have an opportunity to teach a Shakespeare play. That way all the time I spent studying that genealogy (in which nearly everyone is named Edward or Henry) doesn't go to waste. The reproduction of his portrait that my grandmother had framed for me long ago now hangs in my office. Anyone who has seen it there and thought "what on earth?" now has an explanation, if not an excuse.

Here's the list of other Ricardian fiction I've got, only lightly annotated because it has been, well, decades since I read most of these.

Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (1951). Of course. In case anyone who is still reading at this point doesn't know about this novel, it's a mystery novel of sorts: Tey's detective, hospitalized and bored, is presented with a selection of portraits of famous criminals, including Richard III. Convinced that the face does not match the story, he begins a research project that leads him to the conclusion that Richard has been misunderstood and misrepresented. Obviously, in 6th grade I found it thoroughly compelling. My judgment was not singular; right there on the cover, the New York Times is quoted calling it "one of the best mysteries of all time."

Barbara Willard, The Sprig of Broom (1971). This is what today would be called a Young Adult book, part of Willard's great Mantlemass series that begins with The Lark and the Laurel.

Marian Palmer, The White Boar (1968). I remember finding this novel, which focuses on two of Richard's men, Philip and Francis Lovell, wholly engrossing and believable. I think it would bear up well in a rereading because it avoids some of the pitfalls of the genre, namely excessive sentimentality and intrusively artificial archaic language. In about 1983, during a brief fling with journalism, I was taking a night school course on interviewing and in need of a subject. Noticing that the author bio on the book jacket said that Marian Palmer lived in "Vancouver, Canada" (the phrasing proves the book was published in the U.S.), I tracked her down and interviewed her. She was extremely gracious and seemed genuinely pleased that I liked her novel so much.

Rosemary Hawley Jarman, We Speak No Treason (1971). Another great favourite during my youthful obsession. This novel would, I'm sure, have been one of my earliest experiences with multiple narrators: the maiden, the fool, the man of keen sight. Each of its parts has an epigraph from a contemporary ballad--I still like that touch. Like much historical fiction today, its closest cousin is the romance novel, not the realist novel, which differentiates it from its major 19th-century predecessors. I don't think there's anything in Scott like this, for instance:

Next to the Earl of Warwick he stood, but apart from him. He was solitary, young, and slender, of less than medium stature. His face had the fragile pallor of one who has fought sickness for a long time, yet in its high fine bones there was strength , and in the thin lips, resolution. His hair was dark, which made him paler still. He was alone with his thoughts. Ceaselessly he toyed with the hilt of his dagger, or twisted the ring on one finger as if he wearied of indolence and longed for action. Then he turned; I saw his eyes. Dark depths of eyes, which in one moment of changing light carried the gleam of something dangerous, and in the next, utter melancholy. And kindness too . . . compassion. They were like no other eyes in the world. Like stone I stood, and loved.

It's interesting how Jarman, like Tey, starts with a close reading of the portrait, trying to motivate its details.
Rhoda Edwards, Fortune's Wheel and The Broken Sword. The first one I never thought that much of, but I was very fond of The Broken Sword and excited when I found a copy at a library discard sale (obviously it wasn't popular with many besides me). It's another multiple narrator one, but this time it presumes to go right inside the experience of the central historical personages; much of it is from the perspective of Richard's queen, Anne Neville.

Sharon Kay Penman, The Sunne in Splendour (1982). Penman has gone on from this blockbuster success (one of the few on my list that is still in print) to write a number of other historical novels, also apparently very popular, but I never cherished this as much as some of my others. The "Sunne" in the title is indicative of a much more laboured style that tries too hard to feel or sound like the olden days, especially in the dialogue: "'Well, you're bedraggled enough, in truth! But be you hurt?'" Well, even the greats falter when trying to capture the idiom of a previous time--though George Eliot's worst moments in Romola (in many ways a marvellous novel) are also the result of trying to translate Italian idiom into English.

Juliet Dymoke, The Sun in Splendour (1980); Valerie Annand, Crown of Roses (1989). The thing about collecting things is you can't be choosy. But neither of these seems worth special remark, at least in my recollection of them. I also used to have Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, Dynasty I: The Founding but I can't seem to find it. And finally, I have one more mystery, Elizabeth Peters's The Murders of Richard III (1974).

Now, that might seem like quite enough, but the fascinating thing about historical fiction is that those of us who read it apparently don't tire of variations on a theme. (Surely this illustrates the historiographical principle that the 'facts' don't really tell us anything until shaped into a narrative, and there is never just one narrative to be told. Readers of genre fiction never needed Hayden White to point this out to them.) Peering around on Amazon I see that my collection is missing at least these more recent contributions (and no doubt more that have already lapsed into oblivion): Anne Easter Smith, A Rose for the Crown (2006) and Sandra Worth, The Rose of York (2003, just one in a whole War of the Roses trilogy). Do you know of others I have missed? If I read them, I promise to write them up! All I really need is an excuse and I can reread the whole batch. Is there an article in here somewhere?

Weekend Miscellany

At the Guardian, Jane Smiley writes about Trollope's The Kellys and the O'Kelly's:

The Kellys and the O'Kellys was not a commercial success. It was published - perhaps unluckily - in the same year as Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Dickens's Dombey and Son and Gaskell's Mary Barton, all addressing the issue of what was wrong with life. The Kellys and the O'Kellys evoked much that was right. It must have seemed bland. It failed, selling 140 copies and earning Trollope no money. Although it was written in a wholly different tone from his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, its author gained no points for exhibiting his versatility. Both novels, scholars now feel, suffered commercially from being about Ireland - the famine was raging, and the English reading public did not want to think about it. It was destined to be a sleeper - a thoughtful, subtle novel published in an anxious year.

But one of England's greatest novelists had laid out his tools for all to see - the grace of his writing, the worldliness of his vision, the variety of his characters and scenes, the expansiveness of his geography. The story itself is the important thing, not the satiric tone, as in Thackeray, the social criticism, as in Gaskell, or the stylistic exuberance, as in Dickens. He delivered the whole package, but it was a modestly wrapped package and got lost. (read the rest here)

I have written before about how well I think Smiley talks about Trollope.

At the TLS, critic and novelist David Lodge writes with both pathos and humour about his hearing loss:

You might think that of all the professions a novelist is least affected by hearing loss and, up to a point, that is true. We compose books in silence, consumed in silence by solitary readers.

However, deafness restricts and thins out the supply of new ideas and experience on which the novelist depends to create his fictions. That former nun’s life story might have been priceless “material” and I regret its loss. I miss opportunities to eavesdrop on humanly revealing conversations on buses and in shops and to keep up with new idioms, coinages and catch-phrases that give flavour and authenticity to dialogue in a novel of contemporary life. (read the rest here)

Hmm: "it’s a cast-iron excuse for declining to serve on committees"? That might offset a lot of the disadvantages...

In the Globe and Mail's book section, Cynthia MacDonald reviews Emma Donoghue's latest, a neo-Victorian novel focusing on the 1864 Codrington divorce case:

It's amazing to think that 150 years ago, the British Empire was ruled by an actual married woman. As Emma Donoghue reminds us in her marvellous new novel, wives in the Victorian era were usually classed with "criminals, lunatics and children": devoid of legal identity, stripped of property, limited in their opportunities for paid work.

By way of illustration, she has chosen a thoroughly riveting courtroom drama. The Sealed Letter is a fictionalized version of the Codrington divorce case, which had le tout London squirming in its pantaloons over several months in 1864. Juicy, vicious, elegant and thoughtful, the book is a valuable addition to Donoghue's growing corpus of fine historical novels (including Life Mask and Slammerkin). (read the rest here)

I wasn't that taken with Slammerkin when I read it about a year ago (as George Eliot remarked a long time ago, historical fiction is a particularly demanding genre, though the risks are often underestimated). But I'll probably give this one a try, just to keep up-to-date on my neo-Victorian options.

Finally, the little comment-spat I've been involved in at The Reading Experience has led me back to this earlier post by Dan Green:

After eighty years of experimenting with the study of literature as an academic subject, those carrying it out (myself included) have made a complete hash of it. Literature itself is held in contempt not just by the majority of ordinary people but by those professing to teach it. "Literature Professor" has become a near-synonym of "lunatic." That literary study would come to such an end was probably inevitable, since the primary imperative of academe--to create "new" knowledge--is finally inimical to something so difficult to dress up in fashionable critical clothes as serious works of fiction or poetry. Once it was perceived that "aesthetic complexity" was a spent force (at least as the means for producing new monographs and journal articles), approaches to literature that essentially abandoned its consideration as an art form were practically certain to follow.

Nearly three years later, a conversation touching on many similar points is unfolding in a comments thread at The Valve even as Ronan MacDonald is announcing the death of the critic. Well, give us credit, at least, for not going gentle into that good night! Indeed, critics appear to have co-opted the story of their impending demise as yet another subcategory of metacriticism.

Rehabilitating Rhett Butler?

The New York Times Sunday Book Review includes this review by Stephen L. Carter of Rhett Butler's People, a recent novel by Donald McCaig. I'm not sure the review inspires me to read McCaig's novel, but it does increase my desire to re-read Gone with the Wind, a book I read more than two dozen times in my youth but have not returned to since I turned professional. Even in my earliest readings, I think I knew enough, as an avid reader and history buff (and daughter of a civil rights activist) to recognize that idealizing the Old South was unacceptable, but my recollection is that I always felt it was the movie that played the nostalgia card, not the book. The opening text of the movie, for instance, none of which (except the phrase 'gone with the wind' itself, of course) is taken from the novel, reads,

There was a land of Cavaliers and cotton fields called the Old South...Here in this patrician world the Age of Chivalry took its last bow...Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave...Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind...

I copied out that text from the movie once so that I could use it when I teach Scott's Waverley; part of what I argue (drawing, of course, on a number of critics including the wise man who taught me to appreciate Scott, Harry E. Shaw) is that Scott avoids such idealization of the past, attaching that kind of naivete to Waverley himself before "the romance of his life has ended and its real history [has] begun." My memory of the novel has always been that it is not sentimental in this way, and that while it is about people fighting for "the Cause," it does not, itself, embrace that Cause as obviously worth their blood and tears. For one thing, the most loyal characters (Melanie, for instance) are the weakest and least able to survive; the momentum towards the future is powerful, with Scarlett's selfish pragmatism outpacing any other ideological commitments (though she operates unthinkingly with the racist assumptions of her upbringing, slavery is primarily a means to an end for her, readily replaced with white convict labour as times change--her readiness to use people of all kinds to achieve her goals is her moral trademark, as is true of her closest Victorian counterpart, Becky Sharp). But here is Carter's summary of the novel's attitude:

“Gone With the Wind” was published in 1936, and despite heroic efforts over the last seven decades to transform it into something else, the novel stands as an apologia for the Old South — the South of gallant white plantation owners and darkies too foolish for anything but slavery, a civilization ruined by a vengeful North that subsequently flooded that idyllic world with rapacious Union soldiers, greedy carpetbaggers and the despotic power of the Freedmen’s Bureau. That Mitchell was able to defend this vision in a novel of such power, beauty and depth is a tribute to her literary genius. But the vision is no less terrifying for having been brilliantly presented.

These generalizations seem (again, in my recollection of the novel) open to a number of counter-examples (there actually aren't many "gallant plantation owners," for instance, except the Wilkeses, with the other county families of varying degrees of wealth and pretty mixed manners [and the whole community carefully historicized], and Mitchell apparently found quite comic the way Tara was transformed from her idea of a prosperous farmer's home into a pillared mansion--and while I remember black characters who conform to the negative stereotype Carter invokes, I also remember characters like Dilcey, and I wonder if Mammy's role is so simply degraded and degrading).

I think part of what we might return to is a question I raised earlier in thinking about the film Far from Heaven, which was also, as I look back, a point at which I thought about Gone with the Wind as it might look to me today. The main character in "Far from Heaven" suffers socially for her liberal views on both race and, as it turns out, homosexuality, which are shown as highly atypical in her community and social circle;

I found myself wondering if it would be impossible to do a sympathetic story in which a character who is not tolerant of such divergence from the norms was the protagonist: Kathleen's best friend, for instance, who feels sorry for her having a gay husband (but has no liberal views on homosexuality), and whose sympathy seems to dry up when Kathleen admits her feelings for a black man. Of course we do not accept or want to sympathize with those attitudes, but does her (historically typical) mindset put her outside the pale? Is this why Gone with the Wind is not an entirely respectable novel today--because, among other things, its main characters are almost all quite satisfied with racial discrimination and slavery? But isn't that realistic, in terms of majority opinion in the antebellum south? Can you depict that society as it was historically, depict its Weltanschauung without a layer of overt critique, and not appear to be (or really be) endorsing past values which we have learned to reject as immoral?

(It occurs to me that the best example I know of a novel that knowingly makes us intimate with a wrong-headed protagonist is Ishiguro's brilliant The Remains of the Day, though even there, it's not Lord Darlington we are brought to sympathize with.) At any rate, Carter's view that "the filmmakers were in fact trying to sanitize Mitchell’s novel" does not seem obviously true to me in terms of its overall attitude--though he is right to point to the indirection introduced about "the Klan" as an example of easing our relationship to one of the novel's most dramatic but also problematic incidents. It's interesting that Carter acknowledges "power, beauty, and depth" in the novel while also rejecting it ethically and politically; this seems like a good case for the kind of analysis Wayne Booth experiments with in The Company We Keep, in terms of how far we can separate ethical and aesthetic judgments.

A further question Carter's review raised for me--or, really, the whole project of the novel he's reviewing raised--is what does it mean to "rehabilitate" someone who never actually existed?

The Klan question, the woman he dishonored, the rumors of a bastard in New Orleans, the money supposedly pilfered from the Confederate treasury — all of this McCaig explains away while keeping the story moving at a nice clip, faster even than the original....

McCaig pierces the mystery in which Mitchell shrouded Rhett Butler. He gives Rhett a life. We begin to understand where he came from, and why he was the way he was and did the things he did. McCaig discards Ripley’s cumbersome tale and invents fresh lives even for the characters necessarily common to both sequels. The new story has its own integrity. It makes sense.

It's not as if what he has provided is the real backstory of the character (any more than Jean Rhys provided the true story of Mr Rochester's first marriage when she wrote Wide Sargasso Sea--an oddly common perception among students, which suggests that they are getting it from their teachers...). To what extent does, or should, this new story infiltrate our interpretation of the original? Carter concludes his review by suggesting that "after finishing Rhett Butler’s People, it may be impossible to read Gone With the Wind in quite the same way." I can't test that theory unless I read McCaig's novel, but once the pressure of the term lets up, maybe I can at least read Gone with the Wind again for myself.

Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love

For about the first half of this novel, I was tremendously impressed and moved by it. Whatever it takes to communicate what feels like an authentic, rather than contrived, sense of history (see previous posts on historical fiction), Soueif has; she makes both Lady Anna's past experience and the experience and perspective of Isabel and Amal in the (more or less) present seem alive, real. Isabel's exploration, while running a nice parallel to Anna's, turns out to be less important than Amal's; while Isabel is in her own way experiencing the exotic world of others, Amal is taking another look at her own world, in the illumination provided by her experience of Westerners, from her husband to Isabel and Anna. Soueif seemed especially good, to me, at showing the complexities of identity, the impossibility of pointing in any one direction and saying, "look, there, that is (or he or she is) truly Egyptian." But at the same time I felt the novel yearned for an idea of Eygpt, an idea of an Egyptian identity, that could endure the cataclysms as well as the slower erosions of history, cross-cultural conflict and change, and just time. Like Scott, Soueif avoids nostalgia, but in her landscapes especially there was a hint of something like it.

The two historical stories are interwoven artfully in ways that keep the reader thinking about relationships and continuities. Is Isabel looking for the same thing that Anna is? Anna looks for something like redemption, for her nation's sins including those committed, however unhappily, by her first husband; she looks for freedom from rules about who she can be; she looks (of course, this being a novel) for love. Isabel starts with love, with Omar, but how are we to read her being struck so fast with feeling for him? She goes to Egypt in part to understand "where he's coming from," as the saying goes, but in this case, literally, as if knowing his homeland will tell her his character--which, it seems, it does, because his sympathies and loyalties, his politics, are the result of his history and the history of the Middle East. One of Soueif's goals is clearly to educate her Western readers about international politics from a non-Western point of view, especially about the effects of colonialism in the early story, and the conflict over Palestine in the contemporary one. In the way novelists are often credited with, she puts human faces on what too easily become abstractions, such as redrawn borders. She also to some extent allows for the humanity on more than one side of controversies, showing up the inadequacy of single-minded advocacy on any one side.

By the end of the novel, though, I didn't think she was able to sustain the weight of the political and historical detail she included: the story began to suffer as conversations or descriptions of gatherings required long lists of names and allegiances, factions and parties (always unnatural, as in ordinary conversation we don't have to explain who everyone is). Sections seemed more like textbooks, and the momentum of the plot suffered. I also thought she did not use Anna well enough. Here she gave us an Englishwoman unconventional enough to ride across the Sinai dressed as an Arab man, whose very feistiness is part of what draws Sharif to her. But once she's married, she accepts entirely the life of an Egyptian wife, including a degree of segregation and dependence that would surely have galled even a more conservative Englishwoman of the early 1900s. Her one 'rebellion' is by mistake, when she withdraws her own money from the bank only to learn she has thereby shamed Sharif by implying he does not provide for her. Rather than resisting this implication as a misrepresentation of the facts, she apologizes abjectly. How much more interesting if she had continued to defy expectations and tested the compatibility of her "English" values with the tolerance of her new Egyptian family, especially as the intolerance of the English community for her is shown to be complete. Would her new kin have loved her so easily if she had not adopted their values and customs? It's true that Soueif is at pains to depict life in the haramlek as having its own kind of freedom, dignity, and beauty, and that Anna and Sharif become collaborators in the reports they send back to England. But Anna's rapid embrace of all things Egyptian seemed like a lost opportunity to me, and her story became fairly boring, until the melodrama of Sharif's violent death (leaving the killer's identity ambiguous was a nice touch that allowed, again, for the multiple complexities of politics and allegiances). Amal's struggle to negotiate the violent realities of contemporary Egypt held more dramatic interest and was movingly rendered. What are we to assume has happened to Omar at the end?

Emma Donoghue, Slammerkin

Why are writers of historical fiction so drawn to prostitutes? Or is it some strange selection process of my own? Because I can think of four at least in my own recent reading: Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet, The Linnet Bird, and now Slammerkin. I knew from the book blurb, of course, what this protagonist's career path was going to be, but somehow it wasn't until the first few descriptions of her 'at work' that I felt strongly that I had already read all this--or near enough--and that for all that it sounded so promising (especially because I have heard such interesting things about Donoghue, though admittedly in the context of her other works), this novel was not going to surprise me by offering a new idea about it all, or even an especially gripping account. Mary Saunders never became a fully realized character for me; she seemed inconsistent, and once in a while said or did things that seemed like deliberate efforts to make the book more serious and thematically rich--but when you are struck with something as an effort, of course the implication is that the effort is not successful, or the whole would be better integrated, more compelling. It still seems like a very good idea to put a story like this together "from the headlines," as it were, and I thought the fabric / clothing motif had great potential, but again, it was brought up intermittently in a way that seemed effortful rather than inevitable. Mary's fate would have made first-person narration a bit problematic, perhaps ("as told to"?), but as the novel stands it suffers from uneven handling of point of view. Most of it, including the entire first section, is from Mary's, but in the second part, for no apparent reason we begin to get different perspectives. The result is a diffusion of our sympathy and attention--not that Abi, for instance, doesn't (again) have a lot of potential as a character, but why in this novel? Just because it's interesting to get in some material about black people in 18th-century England? One final comment is that the great novel about a woman on the make in 18th C England has surely already been written (Moll Flanders): I didn't see any evidence that Donoghue had looked to this obvious predecessor for the spirit or flavour of her own, markedly humourless version.

Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

I've been eagerly waiting for the paperback edition of this novel, as I am a big fan of Fingersmith (such a smart novel, artistically and intellectually) and was thoroughly entertained by Tipping the Velvet. The Night Watch too was easily readable, deceptively so, I've ended up thinking, as I moved through it smoothly only to arrive at the end feeling quite dissatisfied with how I had read it. The backwards chronological structure, for instance, seemed an artificial device, until on a bit of reflection and then with some help from some of the novel's reviewers, I began to think more about ways it suits the kind of character development Waters seems to be engaged in: it's a kind of up-ended Bildungsroman in which rather than seeing people growing into themselves, we peel back the layers of their past experience to see what lies beneath the people they have become. Now I wonder if there isn't a way in which Waters's approach has, perversely almost, a strong forward momentum for the characters, as we realize how complex and contingent their 'current' identities are and how much they (or their situations) have changed over time: instead of seeing them as having arrived, we see them as poised just ahead of their next transformation: their next relationship, their next disappointment or tragedy, their next moment of hope. At the same time, the glimpses of beauty and hope (such as Helen's face at the end/beginning) are so overlayed with our knowledge of change and (usually) destruction that the overall effect seems more disheartening than otherwise: it's too bad, I kept thinking, that this moment here had to turn out the way I already know it did. One reviewer commented that the novel needed to be read twice, and I certainly expect it will seem quite different on a second reading, as the characters' experiences that are presented so elliptically in the first section will feel much more concrete. I like the simplicity of Waters's prose--also deceptive, as the novel is clearly the result of much research and is effortlessly laden (if that's not oxymoronic) with period details. But I would also appreciate some exposition, a thicker layer of narrative commentary, even some philosophizing! Waters's touch is so light that I find it hard to be sure what she thinks is important about the moment she has chosen, or why she develops the kinds of characters and linkages she does. Why write about the 1940s now, for instance? 'Showing' is all very well, but (and perhaps this is just the Victorianist in me) I like the author to collaborate more actively with me on these questions; otherwise I have the sensation of having seen or felt a series of images and moments, but I have not grasped a strong idea. For this, a little 'telling' would be in order.

I'll just add that as historical fiction, The Night Watch struck me as wholly convincing.

Historical Fiction (Again)

I'm still thinking about what makes some historical novels so much more convincing than others, and about my annoyance that the protagonist of The Linnet Bird was so predictably progressive in her attitudes. The problem can't be as simple-minded as not finding it believable that a 19th-century woman would be anti-imperialist; of course, on such issues there were contrary opinions in the 19th century, just as there were men and women who advocated women's rights and the abolition of slavery. These were attitudes that went against mainstream assumptions in many ways, and that is part of what gives them drama as fictional positions, as the characters who fight for such enlightened views get to be rebels for our causes: they are fighting for what we widely accept as right. But does this mean that it is impossible for historical fiction to appeal to modern audiences if its protagonists accept the mainstream attitudes of their time? This week I watched an interesting period drama called Far From Heaven, in which the main character is a "perfect" 1950s wife and mother with liberal views on race who gets into a sympathetic relationship and then a romance with her black gardener. It becomes clear to them that what they want is so far out of step with the norms of their community that they cannot persist: his daughter's safety is threatened, for instance, and both of their sets of friends condemn their attempt to cross the racial line. At the same time, the film explores the struggles of her "perfect" businessman husband with his homosexuality. The film makes very clear that both his love and hers are forms of impossible desire because of the historical moment in which they arise. I thought all of this was movingly presented; the highly stylized character of the film prevented it from being maudlin or cliched, as did the absence of heroism or simplistic happy endings. In the context of the thinking I've been doing about historical fiction, though, I found myself wondering if it would be impossible to do a sympathetic story in which a character who is not tolerant of such divergence from the norms was the protagonist: Kathleen's best friend, for instance, who feels sorry for her having a gay husband (but has no liberal views on homosexuality), and whose sympathy seems to dry up when Kathleen admits her feelings for a black man. Of course we do not accept or want to sympathize with those attitudes, but does her (historically typical) mindset put her outside the pale? Is this why Gone with the Wind is not an entirely respectable novel today--because, among other things, its main characters are almost all quite satisfied with racial discrimination and slavery? But isn't that realistic, in terms of majority opinion in the antebellum south? Can you depict that society as it was historically, depict its Weltanschauung without a layer of overt critique, and not appear to be (or really be) endorsing past values which we have learned to reject as immoral? Perhaps it's time I put aside the Lymond Chronicles for a while and took another look at GWTW.

Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings and Queen's Play

Reviewing these first two books in the Lymond Chronicles, I have confirmed both that they are exceptionally convincing and vivid historical novels and that it is nearly impossible for me to approach them with anything like critical detachment. Part of the reason is just how well-known they are to me after all these years; another part is how almost wholly concerned they are with historical context, plot, and character. If there are broad "themes," they arise from these fairly concrete elements, I think, rather than from abstractions or philosophies. One idea they explore through the protagonist is what I might call the burden of excellence, the expectations and responsibilities that arise for the possessor of extraordinary gifts, such as those with which Lymond himself is endowed. In their own quite different styles, Dorothy Sayers's Peter Wimsey novels and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda also investigate the challenges faced by people of outstanding abilities who sometimes resent the leadership or guidance others want from them. In this age of Forrest Gump and books "for dummies," we seem much more at ease withweakness and stupidity than with brilliance, but these protagonists show there is plenty of drama (and perhaps even more significance) in intelligence and strength.

The Lymond books do also engage with other 'issues' that are somewhat less personal or less tied to the main character, though he is the agent for their examination. Nationalism, for instance--the costs and benefits, beauties and absurdities--of love for country is a major problem in The Game of Kings and also, through the Irish connections, in Queen's Play, which also picks up questions about aesthetics and morality. But though I have not done a patient analysis, I would not consider any of these ideas central to the 'aboutness' of the novels. They seem more part of the cultural context of the characters, which is a world in which these ideas are being given new urgency (as borders and allegiances shift) and new forms. That is, it seems to me at this point that the characters debate because they need to, to be themselves at their time in history, not because Dunnett has a larger agenda about Scottish identity or the role of art in life.

But it's the charisma of the novels themselves that overwhelms me: they are remarkably wide-ranging, as daring as any of Scott's in their insistence on informing us about history and politics, and allusive beyond any other novels I've read--and yet all of this never oppresses or overwhelms. It also transforms plots that are improbable, melodramatic, and grandiose into narratives that (to me, anyway) never feel that way. It's remarkable, actually, how tawdry the novels can sound even in some of the blurbs that are meant to market them. Here's the cover copy from my old Popular Library edition of Checkmate:

Against the splendor and squalor of the dissolute court of France...amid the crosscurrents of political intrigues and passionate liaisons...through a labyrinth of danger and deceit...a bastard nobleman searching for his heritage, and the beautiful virgin bride he married but could not bed, move toward the climax that will mean greatmess and fulfillment, or else disgrace, destruction and damnation...

Any reader of Checkmate knows that in a way, that's an accurate description, but it is entirely unfaithful to the tone and quality of the novel, which is not at all the kind of bodice-ripping pathos-soaked costume drama evoked. I suspect that the publishers figured nobody would buy the book if it were described more accurately!

Follow-Up: Historical Fiction

Since I don't currently own a copy of The Eagle and the Raven, I've been looking around at other historical novels which I have found compelling over the years. As historical fiction was one of my earliest passions (according to my mother, I took my copy of Jean Plaidy's The Young Mary Queen of Scots to class with me in first grade) I have a number of sentimental favourites still in my collection. Yesterday I browsed through about half of Child of the Morning, the other Pauline Gedge novel that used to enthrall me. It certainly looks a lot better than The Linnet Bird, and one reason is that Gedge seems to have tried hard to make her people not just act but think like Ancient Egyptians (I think that was actually the draft title of the Bangles song...). Hatshepsut really considers herself the daughter of the god, and this belief drives her actions and shapes her character, including what in a different telling might have been a false pseudo-feminist assertion of her right to the power usually accorded only to men. The novel teeters on the brink of romantic cliches in the central love story (some might think it falls over that edge) and it does not strike me as terribly literary or at all innovative in its form, but OK, for the most part, I was willing to say yes to it (see previous post).

But the real touchstone in 20th-century examples has to be Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond chronicles, and I don't know that I'll be able to resist turning this inquiry into why some historical novels work and others don't into an excuse to reread the whole set--something I have not done for too many years. I took my old copy of The Game of Kings down this morning and realized it is more than 25 years since I first read it (I know because it is inscribed to me on my birthday in 1979). I had not realized until recently that my enthusiasm for these novels is actually part of a much wider phenomenon. I have still never met anyone else who has read them. Here's a testimony from Scottish novelist Linda Gillard (you'll notice I have learned how to use the 'insert link' function):

The Chronicles are my literary Forth Bridge. I re-read the cycle perpetually and when I come to the end of Checkmate, the final volume in the series, I always feel a need to return to the beginning again. With every re-reading I admire Dunnett’s achievements more, marvel at how she dared to write books that could not be appreciated fully in one reading or even two. She didn’t care if you couldn’t immediately grasp a point of plot or motivation. She refused to simplify. She expected you to work hard and knew that many readers enjoy working hard

Just starting The Game of Kings has quickened my reader's pulse, but also I realize that these novels are among those that I'm reluctant to approach in a critical or technical way. Still, that's how many of my students feel about Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre and I always assure them that such an approach won't spoil the fun.

Linda Holeman, The Linnet Bird

I managed to finish The Linnet Bird, but frankly it was a struggle. The author has clearly done a lot of homework on historical and cultural details, but then I don't really want to feel while reading a novel that the author has done a lot of homework--this, of course, has been the frequent objection to Romola, though for me anyway, George Eliot's homework is always worth our while to contemplate, as it is never at the level of 'talking points about the English in India', which is about where Holeman's seems to stay. I have been working with Henry James's essay "The Art of Fiction." At one point, discussing a novel he has recently read that attempts to trace "the development of the moral consciousness of the child," he sums up his judgment of the attempt as follows:

For myself (since it comes back in the last resort, as I say, to the preference of the individual), the picture of the child’s experience has the advantage that I can at successive steps ... say Yes or No, as it may be, to what the artist puts before me. I have been a child ... and it is a simple accident that with M. de Groncourt I should have for the most part to say No. With George Eliot, when she painted that country, I always said Yes.

I can sum up my reaction to Holeman's novel in a similar way: for the most part, I said no to it. Besides the lack of historical sense that I commented on in a previous post (particularly in the characterization of Linny Gow herself), I found the predictably PC plot incredibly tiresome. The English in India are all stupid, shallow imperialists--except Linny herself, who has a remarkably 21st century perception of their stupidity and insensitivity, and does not struggle at all to reconcile that perception with her shock at witnessing suttee. And surprise: she falls in love (well, sort of--she discovers 'desire,' as she tells us) with a Pashtun horse whisperer and finds in his primitive camp in Kashmir the sense of community and acceptance she has never found in uptight, pretentious, British society, where she was never allowed to be fully herself....

I really wanted to like this novel, partly out of an odd sense of loyalty to a Canadian author, but on finishing it, my overpowering feeling was relief that I had waited to read it before picking up Holeman's second novel, prominent on new release shelves everywhere. I think I'll reread A Passage to India: maybe what Holeman did not do as homework was study her literary predecessors. I'm also curious to take another look at another historical novel by a Canadian author, Pauline Gedge's The Eagle and the Raven, which years ago was such a favourite of mine that my copy fell completely apart. Would I say yes to this novel, after all this time, and if so, why? (Why, too, are other novels set in the 19th-century so much more persuasive, including Sarah Waters's brilliant Fingersmith and Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White?)

Sir Walter Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor

This novel, like Wuthering Heights, is on my list of "alternates" to consider for my 19th-century fiction course--it would replace Waverley, which I have persisted in teaching for over a decade, despite its inevitable status as least-popular-book-on-the-reading-list. I thought I'd review Bride in particular because not only is it relatively short (OK, by 19thC standards) but its tragic plot and gloomy drama seem likely to have more crowd appeal. I did, mostly, enjoy reading through it this time: it's relatively fast moving (again, by 19thC standards) and there's plenty of thematically interesting material to work with, especially about fate vs. individual choice or agency, women and power, aesthetics, and also some of the same historical and historiographcial problems explored by Waverley. But--though this may be because I have not worked with Bride carefully at this point--Waverley just seems much more useful for demonstrating what Scott means to the history of the novel...plus (though I usually have trouble convincing all but a few students of this) Waverley is a very funny novel, and except for the tedious Caleb, Bride is pretty slim on humour.

Thinking about Scott while also beginning Linda Holeman's The Linnet Bird has helped me clarify a bit what I mean when I say I find a book "thin." Holeman's novel, while entertaining so far, does not give a rich sense of why, historically, its people are as they are: what are the social, economic, intellectual, and other structures that shape (if not necessarily determine) the options they have and the ways they understand them? Both Scott and George Eliot are particularly good at presenting their stories of past times so that you understand that a plot just like this particular one would not unfold in the same way, not just with different characters, but at a different historical moment. Other Victorian novelists have been described as writing 'histories of the present,' because they perceive their own time with a similar commitment to understanding its complexity and contingency. My dissatisfaction with Quindlen's Black and Blue can be traced to a deficiency in its historical sense as well, I think: though unlike The Linnet Bird it is not deliberately a historical novel, it might have done much more to explore violence against women as a phenomenon manifested in a particular way at a particular time. What are the forces and systems that enable a husband's violence, a wife's shame and submission, in that place at that time, so that at some other point along the way things would have developed differently? What are the ideas of masculinity or femininity that are at stake? Many more specific questions would fill in this list (for instance, questions about the significance of Fran's job). Quindlen focuses much more on the psychological, individual factors--on personalities--than on these broader issues, but her novel thus stands more as a case study than a social analysis, taken from a late 20th-century context it does not attempt to understand. In that sense it is written for its own time (contemporary readers will fill in that context based on their own sense of how things work today) rather than to offer insights (rather than snapshots) for later generations of readers. Is it fear of exposition (of the dreaded 'telling,' instead of 'showing') that limits how much explanation authors writing for a general readership are willing to include? In Waverley, Scott apologizes for his lengthy accounts of history and politics but protests in his defense that his story will not be intelligible without them. In the deeper sense--that is, beyond the simple action of the plot--every story relies on that kind of context, and I appreciate novelists able to integrate it in some engaging way, thus offering the reader a fuller picture of what the world looks like from their perspective. (I'd say this is one of McEwan's accomplishments in Saturday.)