Author: Rohan Maitzen

This Week in My Classes (February 12, 2008)

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We wrapped up The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in Mystery and Detective Fiction yesterday. I enjoy going over the details of the text to demonstrate just how ingeniously Christie (by way of her narrator, of course) uses language to play the game in it, stating the truth but keeping, as Poirot points out, ‘becomingly reticent’ about Sheppard’s precise role in events. Of its kind, Ackroyd is no doubt close to perfect. If in the end I judge it an inferior book, which I do, that judgment rests on my sense that its kind is inferior: clever, amusing, entertaining, but also superficial, trivial–worst, trivializing, including of its central subject, murder. These are hardly new criticisms; they are made derisively and at length of the genre overall by Edmund Wilson in “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd,” and more constructively by Raymond Chandler in “The Simple Art of Murder.” I think Chandler is right that the degree of realism introduced into mystery fiction by, for instance, Dashiell Hammett (and there already, though Chandler does not say as much, in earlier examples such as The Moonstone) is necessary to make the genre substantially meaningful as well as literary. The scene in which various members of Ackroyd’s household carry on a perfectly cool and collected conversation in the presence of his corpse, complete with dagger sticking out of his neck, is entirely ludicrous and morally objectionable except that emotional detachment (by both characters and readers) is a prerequisite of this type of detective story. Harmless enough for diversion, I suppose, but perhaps Carlyle’s comments on Scott’s achievement have some application here:

But after all, in the loudest blaring and trumpeting of popularity, it is ever to be held in mind, as a truth remaining true forever, that Literature has other aims than that of harmlessly amusing indolent languid men: or if Literature have them not, then Literature is a very poor affair; and something else must have them, and must accomplish them, with thanks or without thanks; the thankful or thankless world were not long a world otherwise!

Once we admit that literature (including mystery fiction) can be much more than a harmless amusement, I think the ‘cozy’ necessarily sinks to a low rung on the merit ladder. Mind you, I have related reservations about hard-boiled fiction, with what one critic has called its ‘poetics of violence’; that’s where we’re headed next this week, with one of Hammett’s “Continental Op” stories and Chandler’s “No Crime in the Mountains.” It’s P.D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (of the novels on our reading list) that really takes up the ethical challenge of literary treatments of detection where the Victorians left off, in my opinion, and that’s no surprise given that James points to Trollope and George Eliot as her influences rather than her predecessors in detection. More on that when the time comes!

In The Victorian ‘Woman Question,’ we’ve had our first session on He Knew He Was Right and I’m feeling good so far about the synergy between it and our previous novels. The thematic and plot links are obvious, but the structure of Trollope’s multiplot monster is also of interest; like its other loose baggy cousins, HKHWR works as a kind of theme and variations, so the juxtaposition of the various stories, especially those of unmarried women in different contexts confronting their options, or their lack of options, cumulatively creates a rich sense of the complexities of social and political life for women. While Helen’s disastrous marriage to Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall comes to seem exemplary, if in an extreme way, of the novel’s whole concept of the relations between the sexes, here every case has its clear individual features even as the laws and rules of propriety are fairly fixed structures within which everyone has to find a way forward. My students were also intrigued at, and pleased by, what they felt was his complex presentation of the male characters, particularly Louis but also Colonel Osborne. No simple polarization of right and wrong here–and so we were able also to give some time to critical views of Trollope as a practitioner of a form of ‘virtue ethics,’ developing morality through practice and particulars, rather than precepts and prescriptions. I took the unusual step (for me) of leading off also with a clip from the BBC adaptation. My thinking was that it’s a very long book that relies heavily on our forming relationships with the characters: Trollope writes about people more than themes, abstractions, or anything else (our next book is Middlemarch, which I think will make a fascinating comparison in this respect). Given all the things competing for my students’ attention, I thought it would help to bring the people to life dramatically, even at the risk of substituting Andrew Davies’s ideas of them for Trollope’s. As always, showing an adaptation also helps us see some things about how the material is managed in the original. In this case, for example, the adaptation seemed more melodramatic, the action more sensational–and, as one of my students pointed out, it seemed to make Emily more clearly sympathetic. So I think we managed to use our clip to further our thinking about the novel. We’ll be working on the book for almost a month, so we need to build up enough momentum that finishing it does not become a chore. I’m optimistic! But of course I am, or I would never have assigned it in the first place…

Publish or Perish or Shut Up

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Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s newish blog Brainstorm, Gina Barreca chides whiny academics for complaining about the pressure to publish:

OK, so you not only have to show up and teach, you also have to publish. But in our line of work, that’s how you tell a professional from an amateur. The professional is somebody who does it all the time, does it publicly, does it well enough to be recognized by peers as a formidable presence, and who does it in such a way that other people can make use of and follow her example. (read the rest here)

While I take Barreca’s point that getting stuff into print is an “initiation rite” that proves we belong in the “gang” of professional critics, I’m disturbed by her suggestion that it’s pure self-indulgence to want to wait until you have something worthwhile to say.

Imagine, if you will, a nasal voice contorted into a faux-Brit accent passionately reciting the following lament: “I do research for my own particular and personal purposes. Why should I, I who have been the top student in my class since my mother took Lamaze, be pressured into publishing before my ultimate opus is up to it?”

Why?

Because a commitment to work is what is expected whenyou are a professional. Look, I brush my teeth twice a day but that doesn’t make me a dentist. I cook dinner five nights a week but that doesn’t make me a chef. Just because you read novels, you wouldn’t call yourself a novelist, would you? Because you read the paper everyday, you wouldn’t call yourself a journalist, right?

So why is it that after you’ve read a stack of critical volumes, you feel free to call yourself a critic?

Journals and bookshelves are overflowing with the results of the current insistence on publishing more and more sooner and sooner. To argue that scholars should just shut up and put out because that’s the game they’ve agreed to play is realistic, no doubt, but shouldn’t we at least pretend to believe that we publish when we think we are ready to make a genuine contribution to scholarship? Shouldn’t we also worry about whether scholars publishing for the sake of doing so produce anything like the best work they are capable of? Further, it’s a long way from writing to publishing; those academics I know who protest the pressure to publish are not objecting to the requirement that they develop their research into articles or books but to the way professional survival now hinges on a hugely competitive, often arbitrary, and supremely slow-moving process in which you have no recourse against even the most patently inept editorial decisions (as the MLA itself has remarked in recent years, tenure decisions have effectively been handed over to publishers). Certainly no one without tenure could afford the luxury of refusing to publish; it’s disingenuous at best to describe resentment at these pressures as no better than prima donna posturing. And given what it takes to achieve tenure these days, isn’t it perhaps a good thing if scholars take the opportunity afforded them by their hard-won security to think hard about their research and writing priorities and to take more time, if they want to and need to, to change directions, learn new things, and produce work they are proud of?

The TLS Weighs in on Wood’s Latest

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The TLS has its review of How Fiction Works up:

As Wood moves between his approved texts, I was reminded of Henry James’s short story “The Great Good Place”. This satirical tale conceives heaven as a “sort of kindergarten”; nothing provides a challenge (and hills resemble gigantic bosoms). There is something of this in Wood’s writing about the books he owns. It is, like Mrs Wix, “safe”. This is why I found myself wishing away his occasional grace notes. “What a piece of writing that is!” he exclaims about Henry James. “How fine that is”, he adds after quoting a sentence by Marilynne Robinson. It is sometimes hard to distinguish a gasp of admiration for another’s skill from the contented sigh when the books in one’s study satisfy one’s own theories. James Wood is best, it seems, when interrogating how fiction works, rather than exclaiming over it. In any case, one thing that novels teach you is that you have to feel things for yourself. (read the rest here)

I agree that those do sound like some throwaway lines there, and also that any wide-ranging claims based on the books on your own shelves are bound to reflect and reinforce your own prepossessions (though as a professional reviewer, Wood does presumably own a lot of books that exceed the limits of his personal taste). Still, I must get my hands on this book–unfortunately it is not yet released in Canada, and, sadly, it’s out of stock at the Book Depository (I’m still dazzled by my first experience with their low prices and free overseas shipping). Well, I suppose I have enough to read, what with starting He Knew He Was Right next week with my seminar and all.

This Week in My Classes (February 5, 2008)

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In Mystery and Detective Fiction, it’s Agatha Christie time. Our major reading is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I like to take this opportunity to talk a bit about canonization and literary value, highlighting the timing of the novel (1926) and considering some of the reasons we treat it differently from some of its near-contemporaries, such as Ulysses (1922) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Of its kind, Ackroyd seems to me nearly perfect, so the question has to be how we evaluate different kinds of things. We talk about the valorization of difficulty at this time, for instance, something I have often talked about with my colleague Leonard Diepeveen. I point out that Agatha Christie is apparently the most successful (English language) novelist of all time (2 billion copies sold!). Doesn’t that in itself provide sufficient reason to take her seriously? This question typically sparks some good debate. I also read some excerpts from Edmund Wilson’s provocative essay “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” And we talk about the ethics of puzzle fiction. Next class we’ll look, for example, at the scene in which the characters assemble in the room with Ackroyd’s body and carry on a long and completely collected conversation about his death, and then think about Poirot’s cool demeanor as he plunks himself down in the very chair that held the body, and the way the murder weapon (still dripping blood, presumably) is an object of great but, again, entirely cool and collected observation. We won’t get to the novel’s conclusion until next week, so I’ll hold off on any comments on whodunnit.

In The Victorian ‘Woman Question,’ it’s still East Lynne until Friday. I tried my handout with the excerpts from Vanity Fair and Adam Bede yesterday; interestingly, there were some who found Wood’s overt didacticism effective and engaging, and others who preferred Thackeray for leaving them some room to draw their own conclusions. We had some productive discussion about things like the way Isabel’s zombie-like presence in what was once her own household brings into focus class and gender anxieties that run throughout the novel, and about the way the election plot displaces the class and sexual rivalries between Carlyle and Levison–but why? How far does Levison’s humiliation in the dunking scene help in the restoration of our sympathies for Isabel, assuming we weren’t already on her side after the whole train wreck catastrophe? And we’ve begun considering the issue of the excessive pathos that dominates the last part of the novel; there will be more to say about this when we’ve read to the end, complete with the two wrenching deathbed scenes.

Weekend Miscellany II

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It’s Sunday afternoon again after a weekend filled with bits of this and that: grocery shopping, taking my son to the optometrist, taking my daughter to a birthday party, and so on. In and amongst household errands, I’m reading about six different things, some for classes (East Lynne and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), some for fun or personal interest (Death Comes for the Fat Man, Soldier’s Heart), some as a gesture in the direction of research (Orientalism, Dangerous Knowledge). And when all of these are out of reach, I’ve flagged a number of essays and posts online that I take a look at when family activities allow:

In Prospect Magazine, William Skidelsky’s essay “Critical Condition”. Here’s an excerpt that raises some questions I’m interested in:

There is a third, perhaps less obvious reason for the diminishing importance of book reviews: the declining authority of academic criticism. This is a subject that Rónán McDonald—an English lecturer at Reading University—explores in his satisfyingly chewy new book The Death of the Critic (Continuum). In the past, McDonald points out, although by no means all successful critics were academics, there was a fruitful interplay between literary journalism and scholarship—something that has dwindled in recent years. There are exceptions: journals such as the London Review of Books and the TLS; the book sections of the Independent and, to an extent, the Guardian. But on the whole, journalists increasingly dominate the literary review pages of newspapers—and since an increasing number of books are written by journalists too, this results in a kind of circularity (which bloggers, quite reasonably, often moan about). But if literary journalism is increasingly feeding off itself, then, McDonald contends, that is largely because academic criticism has withdrawn from the field. In the last two decades, English literature has both tangled itself up in arcane and inaccessible debates about theory and emasculated itself by allowing itself to become a handmaiden to other disciplines, through its embrace of historicism and cultural studies. McDonald traces this retreat to a paradox that has always bedevilled the study of literature: the more Eng lit tries to prove that it is “rigorous,” the more it cuts itself off from aesthetics—the original source of its attraction. The discipline has, in effect, worried itself into irrelevance.

Dan Green and his readers have been discussing this piece already, though with a primary emphasis on Skidelsky’s dismissive remarks about bloggers–given which it does seem a bit ironic that directly under the essay’s headers is an invitation to discuss it at the magazine’s own blog. I hope to have another go at writing up some considered thoughts on the state of criticism (and/or the role of academic critics) after I get my hands on the Ronan McDonald book mentioned in Skidelsky’s essay.

Also of interest, here’s an excellent piece by James Wood at the Guardian on characters in literature–and by excellent I mean thoughtful, wide-ranging, thought-provoking, well-written, the kind of piece that makes me want to sit down and talk to him (not a typical reaction from me when I read criticism). That’s not to say I don’t disagree with him at various points (for instance, I’m not sure he gives Scott’s Waverley enough credit–come on, you have to love a ‘hero’ who can’t go 20 pages with tripping or passing out!). Further to this, and also sparked by his new book How Fiction Works, there’s an interview with Wood at the Financial Times. A&L Daily tipped me off to both of these pieces initially. As previously noted, I’m looking forward to seeing what Wood does in How Fiction Works.

Perhaps as a result of the jumble of things coming in and out of focus for me this weekend, I also keep thinking about two (quite different) connections, perhaps parallels, that raise questions for me. First, I’ve been mentally connecting the various struggles to know how best to speak of or think about the late chess genius Bobby Fischer, given the nasty ideas he came to espouse, and the disgust expressed on some blogs not long ago at the revelation (to the bloggers concerned) that in his day, Dickens had expressed some pretty repulsive racist (even, some would say, genocidal) sentiments. I defended Dickens the writer on the grounds (basically) that his books have a life independent of Dickens the man. I’m not as comfortable putting Fischer the man to the side, but I’m not sure why. I suppose his achievement in chess has as much right to be considered apart from his personal failings as Dickens’s accomplishment in literature–doesn’t it?

And, quite unrelated to this little question, we’ve just finished watching the first three seasons of House on DVD (finally, we’re all caught up!) and I’m trying to decide what I think about Dr. Cuddy as a representation of a woman in authority. Initially I was hugely irritated by her tight, revealing clothing–no successful professional woman would actually dress so provocatively except to provide ammunition for the endless succession of sexist jokes House makes at her expense, or so I thought. But I’ve been reading some of the stories about Hillary Clinton’s anxieties about appearing too feminine (and thus unelectable, presumably) and I’m rethinking my first position. After all, she stands up to those “jokes” and maintains her authority (except, arguably, over House himself), getting taken seriously by everyone else in the hospital. OK, I still doubt the wisdom of some of the outfits, but perhaps there’s something to be said for letting her actually be ‘womanly’ in her job without implying that it costs her all of her power. That said, I still think C. J. Cregg in The West Wing is the best attempt so far to depict a strong, smart, sexy, professional woman (though there are some weak moments in this depiction, especially early in the series). Allison Janney is amazing, of course, which helps.

Miscellaneous, as I said.

This Week in My Classes (January 31, 2008)

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This week I’ve been preoccupied with graduate admissions–about which, for obvious reasons, I won’t say more here, except that it is a process that prompts much reflection on the state of the profession and the discipline and on the best way forward for a department such as ours. But of course the rest of business goes on, including my two classes, and this in spite of the best efforts of an evil maritime winter storm Sunday night and into Monday that put a modest 5 cm. or so of snow on the ground but then followed up with equal amounts of ice pellets and then a day of freezing rain…it was an awful mess.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we got to Sherlock Holmes at last. Our sample was “The Blue Carbuncle,” particularly delightful for its infamous close reading of a hat:

"Then, what clue could you have as to his identity?"
"Only as much as we can deduce."
"From his hat?"
"Precisely."
"But you are joking. What can you gather from this old battered
felt?"
"Here is my lens. You know my methods. What can you gather yourself as to
the individuality of the man who has worn this article?"
(curious? read the rest here)

My main interest was in placing Holmes into the larger history of detective fiction that I have been laying out, as well as examining the story as exemplary of some important characteristics of a ‘Great Detective’ mystery. We talked, for instance, about the appeal of a ‘reasoning, thinking machine’ such as Holmes in the particular historical and social context in which he was created, as well as the continuing appeal of characters who promise to interpret even the most unyielding of data and render it amenable to human solutions (I brought up House M.D., for example, in many respects, especially in its earlier episodes, a kind of revisiting of or homage to the Holmes mystique). We also talked about the relative lightheartedness with which the crime is treated (necessary, perhaps, for us to enjoy the process of detection as a process, even a game), and about the limits the form of such a story places on characterization, a problem that will become more acute as we move to Agatha Christie next week. The appeal of the detective series clearly emerges at least in part from the opportunity it provides to get to know at least one person very well, to watch that character change and develop over time and perhaps also in response to the crimes that he or she solves. One small cool thing that I was also able to do, thanks to the amazing resource that is the internet, is play an audio clip of Arthur Conan Doyle himself explaining the origins of his great character (you can listen too, if you go here and click on the link provided).

In the seminar on the Victorian ‘woman question,’ we have begun working our way through East Lynne. Each time I have taught this book so far I become preoccupied with the problem of literary evaluation. Is the book as badly written and constructed as I think? How far are the standards and comparisons I would invoke to defend this judgment defensible in any general way? How far is my own reading affected by knowing at the outset that East Lynne has no standing as great literature? Do I forgive trite or awkward or dull moments in other books for no good reason? I’ve tried to get some discussion going about this here before; I’d still be interested in anyone’s comments, especially about the sample excerpts I posted. I certainly have never regretted assigning the novel, because teaching literature has many purposes and goals, one of which is (or at least can be) gaining some understanding of literary history, including the books that were bestsellers at a particular time–an exercise which for students as well can helpfully spark questions about literary merit. (If all they ever read is the really good stuff, they won’t necessarily grasp why it is considered the really good stuff, after all, or have concrete examples of alternatives to challenge the idea of “really good stuff” for themselves.)

This Week in My Classes (January 25, 2008)

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We wrapped up our discussion of The Moonstone today in Mystery and Detective Fiction. This is a novel that provokes thought (as well as pleasure) on many levels. Today I felt inclined to emphasize some of the neat formal and thematic balancing Collins provides with his conclusions. (I say ‘conclusions’ because we get both the English ending, wrapping up the ‘marriage plot,’ and the Indian ending, with the restoration of the diamond to its rightful place–or is it?) For instance, the Prologue gives us a kind of murder mystery with the figure of John Herncastle poised with the bloody dagger over the body of the dying Indian (surely he’s guilty, but we draw this conclusion from insufficient–moral, not legal–evidence); then at the end we get the body of the English thief (see, no spoilers!) and draw the conclusion that he has been murdered by the Indians in pursuit of their stolen treasure, but here too (even the phrasing is the same) we have moral rather than legal evidence. The English characters continue to believe the diamond really belongs to Rachel, exposing the limitations of their own notions of justice and guilt, but the Indians have killed without remorse to steal it back. English religiosity has been exposed as hypocritical, vicious, and intrusive; how far is the representation of the Indians as pursuing spiritual goals at the expense of fortune, caste, and security supposed to be a good alternative? Also, how far can we trust the story we think we know by the end, given the doubts Collins’s narrative technique has so effectively raised about first-person testimony? Do his multiple narrators cumulatively overcome the presumption of unreliability? Lots of questions, lots of answers, lots of fun. Monday we’re on to Sherlock Holmes.

In The Victorian ‘Woman Question’ we had our last classes on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Today was student presentation day, and the group put on a good show, with lots of relevant information about literary and critical contexts, and a fun activity too, because I always ask presenters to find some way to get everyone involved. Today we had a “Choose Your Own Adventure” version of Tenant, prompting us to examine Helen’s (and Bronte’s) choices, including how far they really were choices, given some of the social and economic constraints on Helen’s situation. My rule for this part of the presentation is that the activity can be nearly anything–a debate, a group discussion, a game, a dramatic sketch–provided it engages us in some substantive way with our class readings. I’ve played “Who Wants to be a Pre-Raphaelite?” (when in doubt, you can “Phone Dr. Maitzen,” check your notes, or ask a classmate), adjudicated a “Worst Mothers in Victorian Literature” contest, seen fallen women (dressed for the part) debate their respectable counterparts, tried to decide who else could die in The Mill on the Floss without losing the novel’s main ideas (this was a good one, as it convinced me of the necessity of an ending that can seem gratuitous or uncalled for–which is not to say that we couldn’t think of people we would rather see die, but it’s remarkable how different the book quickly becomes if you try to get rid of them)….I’m always impressed at my students’ ingenuity, and I think the classes always appreciate the change of pace and the opportunity for some fun.

Coming Soon: James Wood, How Fiction Works

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Mark Sarvas links us to this write-up of James Wood’s new book, How Fiction Works:

To the business of criticism, Wood brings his personal baggage as a self-confessed Presbyterian Calvinist. He is a seeker of truth and enlightenment, reading being a sublime form of communication, an act almost of religious application, which requires serious study if its rewards are to be properly mined. What he is always on the lookout for are phoneys, bum notes, intrusive authorial voices, obviousness, lazy thinking, the denial of art, the fear of experiment. Iconoclastic he may be, but he is also respectful, sensitive and challenging. As he sees it, he has a moral imperative to investigate hype and hypocrisy, showing readers less well-read than him in every sense what is actually going on in a novel. (read the rest here)

I’ve already identified myself as an admirer of Wood, though I can’t claim to have read more than a small fraction of his extensive output. The references here to his ‘religious application’ or outlook are especially interesting in the context of his earlier book The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (brief excerpt here). I’ll certainly want to read How Fiction Works as part of my inquiry into ‘books about books‘ written for non-specialist or non-academic readers. It sounds very much in the tradition of David Lodge’s excellent The Art of Fiction, which remains my favourite in this genre.

Silly Novels about Silly Women; or, Reflections on Jane Austen, Sex and the City, and Winning at Scrabble

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Well you see, it was a busy week, and sometimes it’s nice to have something light to pick up and read over breakfast or whatever….but Confessions of a Shopaholic sure is lame. In a general way, I don’t have much to add to what I said before about “chick lit.” I’m glad I got this book from the library and didn’t pay a cent for it, because I want to get rid of it as soon as possible. I don’t necessarily object to a little mindless diversion. But–what really irked me with this one was actually the same thing that irks me about Bridget Jones’s Diary, although that novel is much more clever and entertaining: what’s supposed to be the charm of foolish, incompetent women? Is it really so hard to imagine smart, committed, capable women in romantic contexts? The answer of course is no, because the supposed “mother of chick lit,” Jane Austen, does precisely that. Elizabeth Bennett does not win Mr. Darcy’s heart by being cute but trivial; she earns his respect and charms his socks off. Anne Elliot doesn’t deserve happiness because she happens into an insight or two after a whole book of being silly and irresponsible: we know all along that Wentworth will be the foolish one if he falls for anyone without her integrity and capacity for intelligent action. None of Austen’s protagonists discovers, conveniently, that having no real interests beyond clothes, shopping, and sex, no professional competence, no ideas of any substance, is actually the way to true love. “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story,” Anne Elliot famously protests when confronted with literary ‘ evidence’ of women’s character. “Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.” Yet with the pen in their hands, some women peddle this kind of “sell-yourself-short” fantasy to women–and it sells! Is the appeal of this variety of “chick lit” that it reassures women that not only do they not have to be smart and successful to be attractive but that their failures (blue soup!) will make them more appealing to smart and successful men? Or is it just easier to put that kind of story together than to confront, as Austen does, just what kind of challenge a strong woman poses to conventional ideas of romance, femininity, and narrative? (There’s a kind of equivalent for men in Forrest Gump, I think: better to be mentally deficient but good-hearted, and somehow, by accident, you will win every race.) Once upon a time my (very shrewd and professionally successful) grandmother cautioned me not to beat my then-boyfriend at Scrabble. The message was that brainy women are off-putting, that competence is incompatible with charm. (This theory was wholly undermined by her own life, though she persisted in calling herself “Whistler’s mother,” a label nobody who knew her could ever accept.) Though she was a huge fan of her granddaughters’ successes, I think she was not altogether wrong–not in principle, but in practice. Sex and the City, which looks in many ways like it belongs in the “chick lit” genre, is very smart sometimes about the difficulties independent, successful women face in negotiating romantic norms and expectations (remember the episode in which Carrie buys Berger a Prada shirt? or the one in which Miranda wants to take Steve to an office party?). Sex and the City presents fantasies of other kinds, to be sure, but overall I think it refuses to make its women silly and often this is precisely where their romantic problems begin. In this respect anyway, perhaps the series is more in Austen’s tradition than I would have thought, and certainly more so than even Bridget Jones. In any case, I say go on and win at Scrabble if you can! Your self-respect depends on it.

Fun with Miss Clack (with a nod to the ‘value’ of the humanities)

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My Mystery and Detective Fiction class was great fun this morning–and educational, too! We focused on Miss Clack, one of Collins’s narrators in The Moonstone, first as an example of first-person narration, reading some excerpts closely to see how her voice reveals her character, in the manner of a dramatic monologue (allusions to Browning are inevitable, and often helpful, as students are not always accustomed to paying the same kind of minute attention to fictional speakers as they are to poetic ones). As I collected students’ insights and observations about the particular words, phrases, and intonations that give the game away for her, we found many connections between her individual quirks and flaws (so tremendously comic, as rendered by Collins) and themes of the novel–from the limitations of eye-witness testimony to the disruptive potential of sexual desire. Here are two of the excerpts we examined:

1. I find my insignificant existence suddenly remembered by Mr. Franklin Blake. My wealthy relative — would that I could add my spiritually-wealthy relative! — writes, without even an attempt at disguising that he wants something of me. The whim has seized him to stir up the deplorable scandal of the Moonstone: and I am to help him by writing the account of what I myself witnessed while visiting at Aunt Verinder’s house in London. Pecuniary remuneration is offered to me — with the want of feeling peculiar to the rich. I am to re-open wounds that Time has barely closed; I am to recall the most intensely painful remembrances — and this done, I am to feel myself compensated by a new laceration, in the shape of Mr. Blake’s cheque. My nature is weak. It cost me a hard struggle, before Christian humility conquered sinful pride, and self-denial accepted the cheque.

2. When I answered for a loving reception of him at the Mothers’ Small-Clothes, the grateful heart of our Christian Hero overflowed. He pressed my hands alternately to his lips. Overwhelmed by the exquisite triumph of having got him back among us, I let him do what he liked with my hands. I closed my eyes. I felt my head, in an ecstasy of spiritual self-forgetfulness, sinking on his shoulder. In a moment more I should certainly have swooned away in his arms, but for an interruption from the outer world, which brought me to myself again.

Who wouldn’t want to “gloss” these passages? This session was a good reminder to me that if you are pretty well prepared, you don’t need to script everything in order to generate both interest and substance for your students. The issue of relying on lecture notes has been discussed a couple of times recently at RYS (scanning the posts over there is a kind of guilty pleasure for me–the folks over there say some of the things I’m sure we all think at times but bite back because, well, we’re polite). “Winging it” is risky, though (I certainly didn’t come with just my book and a prayer): you have to have some idea of where you hope the discussion will go, and you also need the cooperation of your students. This group is great, especially for a class its size (about 70): plenty of bright, curious, smart people willing to raise their hand and add something. Mind you, Miss Clack makes our work easy by being so thoroughly despicable and yet so entertaining. Now, what exactly is our Christian Hero doing with her hands?

2 hours later: I had nearly as much fun with a good discussion of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in my ‘woman question’ seminar, where formal issues about point of view fed into analyses of the way Helen and Huntingdon’s marriage exposes the critical gaps between the ideal and the reality. Without actual power, influence is no better than nagging; without accountability, power mutates rapidly into abuse. As well as dramatizing moral crises, the novel is formally organized to both teach and model moral development. Mornings like these invigorate me, intellectually but also emotionally. With all these heavy discussions going around about the “value” of the humanities and why we do what we do and dare to love it, it’s a relief to be in a context where that value at least feels palpable, even if it is difficult to articulate it.