Author: Rohan Maitzen

Recent Reading

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I’ve fallen behind in writing up my recent reading, but I have in fact read a few things besides the books for my classes this term. Here are at least some brief comments on them–so that I can tidy them back onto my bookshelves.

1. K. M. Peyton, the Pennington series. These are old, old favourites of mine; the copies I have are battered old Vancouver Public Library discards, and as the series does not appear to be in print any longer, I’ll continue to cherish these. I picked them off my shelf again when I was thinking about the issues touched on in my post about ‘just right’ books for children. Although these books are written for young readers, they seem to me to assume fairly adult interests; Pennington’s Heir, for instance, turns to a large extent on the drama and demands of Penn’s learning to play Liszt’s B-minor sonata. The vocabulary also aims high: one short paragraph, for instance, includes both ‘assuage’ and ‘punctilious,’ words I’m sure I didn’t know when I first read the books. Now, as then, it’s the characters–driven, complicated, impulsive, trying to find their way–that draw me into the story.

2. Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I hadn’t read this in years but, perhaps for the same reasons that I was drawn back to the Pennington books, I couldn’t resist it when I came across it in a second-hand bookstore recently. The style seemed remarkably blunt to me when I began reading; with the exception of the central motif of the tree, it’s almost wholly non-‘literary,’ just moving along from one person and even to the next. Yet the cumulative effect is powerfully evocative of a time and place. I didn’t find Francie altogether believable or compelling, especially towards the end. Perhaps it’s a sign of how my own position in life has changed that it was her parents whose story moved me the most!

3. Anne Tyler, Digging to America. Anne Tyler has written some of my favourite novels, including Ladder of Years, Back When We Were Grown-Ups, The Patchwork Planet, and The Accidental Tourist. I have always agreed with Wayne Booth’s remark (about Back When We Were Grown-Ups) that with her, you always feel she is giving you the best she has got. (I believe the comparison he is drawing is to Peter Benchley’s Jaws, which Booth does not consider very flattering to its implied audience.) Tyler’s prose is spare but deft; her lightness of touch often conceals, or eases us into, more difficult feelings of regret, poignancy, and loss. But typically her protagonists, who often begin their novels as wistful or wry misfits in the lives they are living, come through their process of exploration only to find themselves happy, after all, with what they have made or found. Somewhere recently I came across a comment about her realism being of a “conservative” type. I’m not sure if it is because of the form and style she uses (there’s nothing metafictional or postmodern about it) or because of this tendency to teach her characters to appreciate what they already have. (I’ve written a bit about this before when comparing the fate or attitude of Tyler’s heroines to those of Joanna Trollope’s and George Eliot’s.) Tyler’s novels also typically operate on quite a small scale: marriages, families, with only implicit engagement with the larger social systems that shape them. The Amateur Marriage moved that domesticity into a larger historical frame; to me, the novel seemed (perhaps as a result?) to be moving too fast for itself, so the kinds of intensely evocative tiny moments, and the nuances, of the novels I like best were diffused. Digging to America also takes on more, and in this case I found that the lightness of handling I usually appreciate seemed inappropriate to the topics it touches on, including the tensions of post-9/11 America. But at the same time, I appreciate what I take to be Tyler’s ideas, that big political conflicts are experienced very personally, and that national, ethnic, or religious stereotypes lose their potency when we focus on the individual–on what, in her other books, we also see as the “quirkiness” of people seen up close. This may be a novel that grows on me.

4. Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach. This is a book that has been written on plenty recently by all kinds of terribly serious book types; I find I don’t have much to say about it myself. I admired Saturday enormously. This novel seemed to think too much of itself and its subject. I was struck, page after page, by the technical control McEwan shows: every word seemed solid, judicious, effective. But I just didn’t care for the purpose he was using them for. On Friday I showed my class the excellent documentary included with the DVD of Middlemarch. It includes interviews with David Lodge, Terry Eagleton, A. S. Byatt, Kate Flint, and Claire Tomalin, all, of course, supremely articulate. At one point Tomalin remarks (I forget a propos of just what question) that “George Eliot writes about sex perfectly: she never mentions it, and of course that’s the best way to write about it. Who needs the penis and the pubic hair? That’s not sex. Sex is the feeling” (that might not be the exact quotation–but close enough to get the point). Perhaps the distinction might be that you don’t need the explicit elements of sex to achieve eroticism; is there a more erotically charged scene in ‘proper’ Victorian literature than the moment in which Stephen Guest kisses the inside of Maggie Tulliver’s arm in The Mill on the Floss? McEwan writes like a clinician; even the feelings his couple have are dissected, presented for our analysis and judgment. It seemed a tired cliche to me (despite his careful historicization of their attitudes) that he is keen and she is uninterested, even frigid. It also struck me as unfair that at the end, it becomes his novel. For most of the book, their perspectives are balanced, one against the other. Somewhere there’s a paper to be written (no doubt, being written) on McEwan’s late fiction and “Dover Beach”…

5. Jane Smiley, Moo. I picked this up soon after reading Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel, which I wrote about, mostly admiringly, before. This one, I’m sorry to say, I haven’t finished yet, though I began it months ago. It turns out it is arch. I don’t enjoy arch, at least not in long stretches.

6. Elizabeth von Armin, The Enchanted April. This was delightful. In many ways, it was exactly what I expected, light but touching, warm but poignant. Without extended explicit social commentary, it shows its women realizing, emotionally more than intellectually, how the constraints of their usual world confine them, but also how they contribute to their own diminishment. More than the movie version, the novel maintains some skepticism about the rapprochement of the women and their husbands (for instance, we always know, though Lotty doesn’t, that Mellersh is well-behaved mostly because he hopes to gain clients, and we also know the comedy of errors that nearly erupted because Frederick comes to see the wrong woman). But what I wasn’t expecting was the marvellously tactile quality of von Armin’s prose:

The cherry-trees and peach-trees were in blossom–lovely showers of white and deep rose-colour among the trembling delicacy of the olives; the fig-leaves were just big enough to smell of figs, the vine-buds were only beginning to show. And beneath these trees were groups of blue and purple irises, and bushes of lavendar, and grey, sharp cactuses, and the grass was thick with dandelions and daisies, and right down at the bottom was the sea. Colour seemed flung down anyhow, anywhere; every sort of colour, piled up in heaps, pouring along in rivers…

The obvious comparison is with A Room with a View (and I learned from the afterword in my edition that Forster tutored von Arnim’s children for a time). But this novel is about adults coming to terms with their lives and loves, and so it has more wistfulness, and more lurking pathos, than Forster’s. I loved Mrs Fisher’s gradual emergence from what Lotty calls her “cocoon” (even if it is, like Lucy’s awakening in A Room with a View, basically at the expense of the Victorians): “Her great dead friends [Ruskin, Arnold, Tennyson…] did not seem worth reading that night. . . . No doubt they were greater than any one was now, but they had this immense disadvantage, that they were dead. Nothing further was to be expected of them; while of the living, what might one not still expect?” The afterword remarks, rather unexpectedly, “The novel is the lightest of omelettes, in the making of which the least possible number of eggs gets broken. Only an incorrigible pedant would try to judge it at a deeper level.” Well, call me incorrigible, and a pedant (I’ve been called worse, goodness knows), but I enjoyed the novel so much it lit a little spark of scholar’s curiosity in me and made me curious to look up a former M.A. student of mine I haven’t heard from in a while whom I recall had proposed a Ph.D. project on von Arnim. It also (especially in combination with our first snow of the season) made me dream of going back to Italy!

Next up? I picked up A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell on my last expedition to Doull’s (Haligonians know all about Doull’s and its temptations). But I’ve also got Suite Francaise and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in my ‘to read next’ pile–and first priority is Margaret Oliphant’s Hester to begin again for my graduate seminar.

Rehabilitating Rhett Butler?

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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.

It’s Application Season Again…

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…so here’s what you’ve all been waiting for: “the template that a nation of anxious undergrads [and MA students!] has been looking for”:

This project was deeply influenced by your thinking and I am very grateful for that will you please advise my Ph.D. dissertation.

Oh!!!! And Your Institution also has that Awesome Institute/Center/Program-Thing! Which I know absolutely nothing about but am totally totally prepared to praise to the skies because I just know it will be crucial to my research!!! (read the whole thing here).

It’s easily adaptable to SSHRC applications, too, so no need for anyone to bring by any more for me to vet! Thanks to Footnoted for the link.

Resistance to Theory, Middlemarch Style

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Dorothea: “And then I should know what to do, when I get older: I should see how it was possible to lead a grand life here–now–in England. I don’t feel sure about doing good in any way now: everything seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don’t know.”

J. Hillis Miller: “The discontinuity of a repetition blasts a detached monad, crystallized into immobility, out of the homogeneous course of history, in order to take possession of of it in a present which is no present. It is the cessation of happening in a metaleptic assumption of the past, preserving and annulling it at the same time. This repetition disarticulates the backbone of logic and frees both history and fiction, for the moment, before the spider-web is re-woven, from the illusory continuities of origin leading to aim leading to end.”

Dorothea: “What could be sadder than so much ardent labour all in vain?”

J. Hillis Miller: “The set of assumptions common to both Western ideas of history and Western ideas of fiction are not–it is a point of importance–a collection of diverse attributes, the distinctive features which happen to be there. They are on the contrary a true system, in the sense that each implies all the others.”

Dorothea (putting out her hand entreatingly): “Please not to call it by any name. You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life.”

J. Hillis Miller: “Nevertheless, for those who have eyes to see it, Middlemarch is an example of a work of fiction which not only exposes the metaphysical system of history but also proposes an alternative consonant with those of Nietzsche and Benjamin.”

Narrator: “There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.”

J. Hillis Miller: “!”

Seriously, though, although Hillis Miller’s essay* (which I acknowledge is very smart, taken on its own terms) is more than 30 years old now, I think it illustrates a tendency that continues in some professional criticism to set aside the overt and often pressing social, ethical, political, or aesthetic interests of the text itself in favour of fairly esoteric theoretical and metacritical questions, or questions that seek out a text’s ‘unconscious’ effects or meanings. Without insisting that these questions are unworthy ones for inquiry and scholarship, I would suggest that in some respects they serve the majority of readers (and texts) less well than critical approaches that engage us with what the text actually takes itself to be about (in Denis Donoghue‘s terms, we don’t allow the text to have its theme–though in this case, Middlemarch works well for Hillis Miller’s purposes because it is “always already” self-conscious about and thematizing his themes of history, narrative, and (mis)interpretation).** For one thing, the results are likely to preserve the differences between texts more than approaches like Hillis Miller’s (any novel that becomes grist for his argument here would end up sounding pretty much the same, deconstructing the oppositions, undoing metaphysics, etc.). In his essay “What We Talk About When We Talk About Ethics,” in this collection, Lawrence Buell notes the “longstanding reluctance on the part of many if not most literary scholars to allow the central disciplinary referent or value to be located in anything but language.” I think there’s some truth in that generalization, and that this reluctance leads us into conversations of the sort I’ve pasted together above, a “missing of each others’ mental tracks,” as George Eliot says about Rosamond and Lydgate’s marriage, because we talk past, or about, rather than with, our primary sources.

But mostly I just wanted to have a little fun…

*”Narrative and History,” ELH 41:3 (Autumn 1974), 455-73.

**I realize that it remains an open and controversial question whether or how professional / academic critics should have the interests of non-specialist readers in mind. Over at Crooked Timber recently there was a long thread in the comments about professional philosophers which seemed to touch on some of the same issues that come up when literary critics think about this. In both cases, of course it’s not an either/or question–specialist and non-specialist discourses can and do coexist.

This Week in My Classes (November 5, 2007)

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Despite the best efforts of Tropical Storm Noel, it looks like our regularly scheduled programming can go ahead this week. So it’s Middlemarch again, and after working hard the last two weeks on sympathy, morality, and point of view at a more or less personal level, I think this week we’ll shift our focus to politics. My undergraduates (unless this group is wildly atypical) will have at best only a dim idea of the novel’s historical context, so it’s time for a walk-through of some basic information about the 1832 Reform Bill. Then we can consider Mr Brooke as a ‘progressive’ candidate. We’ll take another look at the party in Chapter 10, in which Brooke invites a “rather more miscellaneous” crowd than Mrs Cadwallader quite likes. Then we’ll look closely at the visit to Dagley’s farm in Chapter 39, a section which ties class and political perception to aesthetics and point of view:

Mr. Brooke got down at a farmyard-gate, and Dorothea drove on. It is wonderful how much uglier things will look when we only suspect that we are blamed for them. Even our own persons in the glass are apt to change their aspect for us after we have heard some frank remark on their less admirable points; and on the other hand it is astonishing how pleasantly conscience takes our encroachments on those who never complain or have nobody to complain for them. Dagley’s homestead never before looked so dismal to Mr. Brooke as it did today, with his mind thus sore about the fault-finding of the ” Trumpet,” echoed by Sir James.

It is true that an observer, under that softening influence of the fine arts which makes other people’s hardships picturesque, might have been delighted with this homestead called Freeman’s End: the old house had dormer-windows in the dark red roof, two of the chimneys were choked with ivy, the large porch was blocked up with bundles of sticks, and half the windows were closed with gray worm-eaten shutters about which the jasmine-boughs grew in wild luxuriance; the mouldering garden wall with hollyhocks peeping over it was a perfect study of highly mingled subdued color, and there was an aged goat (kept doubtless on interesting superstitious grounds) lying against the open back-kitchen door. The mossy thatch of the cow-shed, the broken gray barn-doors, the pauper laborers in ragged breeches who had nearly finished unloading a wagon of corn into the barn ready for early thrashing; the scanty dairy of cows being tethered for milking and leaving one half of the shed in brown emptiness; the very pigs and white ducks seeming to wander about the uneven neglected yard as if in low spirits from feeding on a too meagre quality of rinsings, — all these objects under the quiet light of a sky marbled with high clouds would have made a sort of picture which we have all paused over as a ” charming bit,” touching other sensibilities than those which are stirred by the depression of the agricultural interest, with the sad lack of farming capital, as seen constantly in the newspapers of that time. But these troublesome associations were just now strongly present to Mr. Brooke, and spoiled the scene for him.

I find it useful to bring students’ casual assumption that universal suffrage is an obvious good up against Dagley, which of course is just what George Eliot wants to do as well. To give them a fuller sense of the intellectual context for ‘progressive’ intellectual opposition to the rapid expansion of suffrage, I usually bring in bits of Carlyle, such as the “Democracy” section of Past and Present, which juxtaposes impassioned lamentation for “the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers” (“Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days? The times, if we will consider them, are really unexampled.”) with an equally impassioned refusal to accept democratic solutions:

Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out the right path, and to walk thereon…. You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over precipices; you violate his liberty, you that are wise; and keep him, were it in strait-waistcoasts, away from the precipices! … Liberty requires new definitions.

I might bring in some of Mill’s cautions about the tendency of democracy towards mediocrity: “No government by a democracy or a numerous aristocracy, either in its political acts or in the opinions, qualities, and tone of mind which it fosters, ever did or could rise above mediocrity, except in so far as the sovereign Many have let themselves be guided … by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few” (On Liberty). And there’s always Culture and Anarchy, too, for some choice tidbits about the pros and cons of the Englishman’s fetishization of his “right to do what he likes.” (“And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it,” as George Eliot points out.) These examples prepare students for what they often, initially, find the oddity of George Eliot’s cautious approach to democracy, which I usually illustrate with examples from Felix Holt and the later “Address to Working Men (by Felix Holt)”:

“And while public opinion is what it is—while men have no better beliefs about public duty—while corruption is not felt to be a damning disgrace—while men are not ashamed in Parliament and out of it to make public questions which concern the welfare of millions a mere screen for their own petty private ends,—I say, no fresh scheme of voting will much mend our condition. For, take us working men of all sorts. Suppose out of every hundred who had a vote there were thirty who had some soberness, some sense to choose with, some good feeling to make them wish the right thing for all. And suppose there were seventy out of the hundred who were, half of them, not sober, who had no sense to choose one thing in politics more than another, and who had so little good feeling in them that they wasted on their own drinking the money that should have helped to feed and clothe their wives and children; and another half of them who, if they didn’t drink, were too ignorant or mean or stupid to see any good for themselves better than pocketing a five-shilling piece when it was offered them. Where would be the political power of the thirty sober men? The power would lie with the seventy drunken and stupid votes; and I’ll tell you what sort of men would get the power—what sort of men would end by returning whom they pleased to Parliament.” (Felix Holt–the Radical?)

Now, the danger hanging over change is great, just in proportion as it tends to produce such disorder by giving any large number of ignorant men, whos notions of what is good are of a low and brutal sort, the belief that they have got power into their hands, and may do pretty much as they like. (Address to Working Men)

“Would you want Dagley to vote?” is a crudely reductive version of the questions George Eliot is raising–but at the same time, it rather goes to the heart of the problems she identifies for us, and I think it will generate some useful discussion. In turn, our consideration of the novel’s class politics (if that’s the right way to label these issues) prepares us to consider its gender politics once we’ve read to the end.

Update: More on Academic Blogging

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Renewed discussion is breaking out about academic blogging among those who have been doing it for a while; here are some additions, then, to my earlier list of links.

  1. “A Skeptic’s Take on Academic Blogs” (Adam Kotsko, Inside Higher Ed, November 1, 2007)
  2. “An Enthusiast’s View on Academic Blogs” (Scott Eric Kaufman, Inside Higher Ed, November 1, 2007)
  3. “Academic Blogging Revisited” (Joseph Kugelmass, The Valve, November 1, 2007)

There are many points of interest in all of these pieces. In light of my own meandering reflections on generating “dialogue and exchange” through blogs, I was struck by Adam Kotsko’s remark that “having a productive conversation in an online format is very hard work, which is why it happens so rarely.” I think, too, from my own experience and from conversations with non-blogging (but often blog-reading) friends and colleagues, that a lot of academics are so accustomed to working in relative isolation and communicating about their research or scholarly practices exclusively with other specialists, if at all, that there is a kind of culture of secrecy (some might call it privacy) in the academy–aggravated by our defensiveness about how we are perceived by non-academics–that makes many academics anxious about expressing themselves publicly. There’s also a fear of exposure: you’ll say something careless and expose your ignorance, or you’ll expose your views to those who disagree with you and have to answer for them, or you’ll expose yourself to ill-conceived and ill-tempered attacks from those who don’t understand the nature of academic scholarship, or to cranks (academic or not) who read without charity, take you out of context, etc. These factors discourage academics (many of whom are reclusive bookworms at heart, after all) from engaging in online conversations when the benefits (professional or other) are uncertain or elusive. I know I take a deep breath before clicking “post,” either on my own blog or as a commenter on someone else’s (the latter is more stressful for me by far). But I think Joseph Kugelmass points towards where things might go when he mentions the widening acceptance of social sites such as Facebook as an example of people coming on board with something that initially seemed fringe or irrelevant. There was a time that some of us can remember when e-mail was a strange new medium and listservs seemed like cutting-edge ways to reach across distances and form academic communities. But I wonder if any active academic today is not linked electronically in some way to others. Some form of blogging may well be equally ‘normal’ and common in the near future. As far as benefits go, one possibility is that such a development would work against the excessive specialization and resulting fragmentation typical of today’s humanities departments; one of the commenters at Inside Higher Ed makes the point that “often, we’re not even interested in what our colleagues are doing,” something with which surely many of us would ruefully agree. And if it brought differences of view and style out into the open, would that be such a bad thing? Affinities and serendipitous connections might emerge as well. The string of closed office doors in my hallway up here does not make this place look much like an intellectual community. Blogs at least open windows. More “interfacing” between academics and a wider public seems to me like a good thing as well, if only to counteract the bizarrely excessive hostility some people show towards us. (Maybe we fear that if they knew us better, they would not like us any better? Are we so bad at explaining ourselves that we feel safest not even trying?)

In the Midst of Middlemarch

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I haven’t had the time or mental energy to detach from the press of teaching and other ‘real’ work to post here for a few days, not least because I’m immersed in Middlemarch, which I’m studying with two different classes. So here, in lieu of my own words, is some of Chapter 42 for you. Lydgate has just broken to Mr Casaubon the news that his heart condition may lead to his sudden death.

Lydgate, certain that his patient wished to be alone, soon left him; and the black figure with hands behind and head bent forward continued to pace the walk where the dark yew-trees gave him a mute companionship in melancholy, and the little shadows of bird or leaf that fleeted across the isles of sunlight, stole along in silence as in the presence of a sorrow. Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death — who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace “We must all die ” transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness “I must die — and soon,” then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first. To Mr. Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons. In such an hour the mind does not change its lifelong bias, but carries it onward in imagination to the other side of death, gazing backward — perhaps with the divine calm of beneficence, perhaps with the petty anxieties of self-assertion.

Dorothea approaches, hoping to offer comfort, or at least companionship. “But she hesitated, fearing to offend him by obtruding herself; for her ardour, continually repulsed, served, with her intense memory, to heighten her dread, as thwarted energy subsides into a shudder.” As she fears, he rebuffs her: “There was something horrible to Dorothea in the sensation which this unresponsive hardness inflicted on her.” He retreats to his library, she to her boudoir, where he (presumably) wrestles with his mortality, and she struggles with her anger and sorrow. “In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate.”

Dorothea sat almost motionless in her meditative struggle, while the evening slowly deepened into night. But the struggle changed continually, as that of a man who begins with a movement towards striking and ends with conquering his desire to strike. The energy that would animate a crime is not more than is wanted to inspire a resolved, submission, when the noble habit of the soul reasserts itself. That thought with which Dorothea had gone out to meet her husband — her conviction that he had been asking about the possible arrest of all his work, and that the answer must have wrung his heart, could not be long without rising beside the image of him, like a shadowy monitor looking at her anger with sad remonstrance. It cost her a litany of pictured sorrows and of silent cries that she might be the mercy for those sorrows — but the resolved submission did come; and when the house was still, and she knew that it was near the time when Mr. Casaubon habitually went to rest, she opened her door gently and stood outside in the darkness waiting for his coming up-stairs with a light in his hand. If he did not come soon she thought that she would go down and even risk incurring another pang. She would never again expect anything else. But she did hear the library door open, and slowly the light advanced up the staircase without noise from the footsteps on the carpet. When her husband stood opposite to her, she saw that his face was more haggard. He started slightly on seeing her, and she looked up at him beseechingly, without speaking.

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

“Yes, I did not like to disturb you.”

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

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

This Week in My Classes (October 29, 2007)

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It’s all Middlemarch, all the time this week (and next week, and the week after that). And even so, I know I will end up worrying about all the things we didn’t talk about. In my undergraduate lecture class, we’ll focus today on the novel’s structure and how it reinforces important ideas and themes. In particular, we will examine the complex chronology of some key sections, looking at the way the narrative goes back in time in order to bring us to an event from a different perspective. One of my favourite examples is at the end of Chapter 27 (the chapter which, appropriately, begins with the famous pier glass passage). It’s a chapter mostly chronicling the developing relationship between Lydgate and Rosamond; it concludes with Sir James Chettam’s servant stopping Lydgate as he walks with Rosamond, to take him to Lowick. As we learn, he is needed there because Casaubon has had some kind of heart attack. In Chapter 27, the incident is important, not as part of Casaubon’s story, but as part of Rosamond’s (more evidence for her satisfied theory that Lydgate is a cut above her other Middlemarch suitors) and part of Lydgate’s (a sign that his practice is beginning to flourish, despite his having alienated some of Peacock’s former patients by his innovative methods). The incident (we figure out later) takes place in March. But Chapter 28 begins in January, taking us back to Dorothea and Casaubon’s return from their dismal honeymoon and then following the stories of her growing disillusionment, his creeping jealousy about Will Ladislaw, and his diminishing health–bringing us up to the attack in Chapter 29. “But why always Dorothea?” asks the narrator as Chapter 29 opens–and of course the novel models the morally necessary movement of our attention and sympathy among different points of view. I often invite the class to come up with some kind of graphic representation of many people arriving at the same event (our class meeting, say), but coming from many different perspectives and all having slightly different experiences. The results, usefully, tend to look either like a tangled web or a giant hairball (the latter once they realize the advantages of working in 3-D for showing simultaneous but different strands). How can a narrative recreate these effects? I usually end up quoting Carlyle’s remark that “narrative is linear, but action is solid.” The formal challenge for the novelist is substantial, as are the mental demands on the reader. Later (probably next week) we will look at another pattern of repetition in which a place (such as Dorothea’s blue-green boudoir) or an event (such as the first time Dorothea sees Will and Rosamond together) is revisited in light of new information. In these cases we have internal or mental movement working to the same ends as the chronological and other disruptions in today’s examples.

In my graduate seminar, the discussion will be less choreographed, which means I can look forward to some surprises–always refreshing with a novel you teach often. I know we will begin with a presentation on Dorothea and women’s education, which is a promising lead in to many key issues in the novel. Our secondary readings for this week are primarily contextual: George Levine on George Eliot’s determinism, and Bernard Paris on her ‘religion of humanity.’ We are certainly getting a third distinct model of authorship: we have worked with Charlotte Bronte, who (at least as quoted in Gaskell’s biography) emphatically demanded freedom for her imagination and refused to write except as the spirit moved her; then with Elizabeth Gaskell, whose strongest motivation is social reform and reconciliation; and now with a writer whose vision of fiction is highly philosophical. In her commitment to the novel’s capacity to cause change, even improvement, GE is closer to Gaskell than to Bronte. Levine argues that to GE “a belief in the possibility of some kind of occurence not usually produced by the normal workings of the laws of nature became to her one of the positive signs of moral weakness. . . . [she] believed it morally reprehensible to rely on the unlikely or unusual, even if there is a remote chance that it might happen” (272). I don’t recall any specific comments from GE herself about this aspect of Jane Eyre, including Bronte’s own defence of the mysterious communication between Jane and Rochester (about which Gaskell quotes Bronte saying, “But it is a true thing; it really happened”). (In an 1848 letter, young Mary Ann, having just read Jane Eyre, sounds a critical note: “I have read Jane Eyre, mon ami, and shall be glad to know what you admire in it. All self-sacrifice is good–but one would like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man soul and body to a putrefying carcase.” We might want to discuss how far her concept of the nobility of self-sacrifice has shifted by the time she gives us Dorothea’s “submission” to Casaubon’s needs, characterized in Chapter 43 as the reassertion of a “noble habit of the soul.”) The Levine and Paris articles are both from the early 1960s: given my recent fretting about the pressure to turn our critical attention to ourselves, or to a text’s unconscious aspects (the things it says without knowing or meaning to) rather than to the conversation it is overtly trying to have with us, these are interesting examples of rather different priorities. I certainly think that they are more broadly valuable than some of the more esoteric readings of Middlemarch: any responsible reader of the novel needs, or would benefit from, some grasp of its philosophical underpinnings. But we’ll be looking at some samples of other readings that work against the grain as well, including another “classic” with J. Hillis Miller’s “Narrative and History,” and we’ll ‘go meta’ ourselves when we consider the vexed status of the novel among feminist critics.

George Eliot and Prayer

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Further to my earlier post on George Eliot as the ‘friendly face of unbelief,’ here’s a passage that stood out to me as I was rereading Middlemarch this weekend for my classes:

Lydgate rose, and Dorothea mechanically rose at the same time, unclasping her cloak and throwing it off as if it stifled her. He was bowing and quitting her, when an impulse which if she had been alone would have turned into a prayer, made her say with a sob in her voice —

“Oh, you are a wise man, are you not? You know all about life and death. Advise me. Think what I can do. He has been laboring all his life and looking forward. He minds about nothing else. — And I mind about nothing else — ”

For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal — this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully illuminated life. (Chapter 30)

It’s a charged moment in the novel for several reasons, not least because it sets us (and Lydgate) up for the painful contrast between Dorothea’s desire to do something if at all possible, and Rosamond’s later indifference to her role in Lydgate’s financial crises (“What can I do, Tertius?”). But it also nicely, and subtly, illustrates George Eliot’s appreciation for religion (as distinct from theology, we might say) as a yearning to have and receive help and guidance in our “fitfully illuminated” lives–and her commitment to redefining it in secular terms. Dorothea is deeply religious, and George Eliot never belittles her for seeking understanding and connection beyond what she can readily see in the world around her. But, as this example implies, prayer (appealing to supernatural forces) is the resort of those who are “alone,” or who fail to understand the primacy of the human connections and resources available in their “embroiled medium.” Her impulse to prayer is rightly channeled here into an appeal to a “kindred nature,” one with the secular wisdom to advise her, at least in this medical crisis. The “cry from soul to soul” repeatedly proves more valuable in the novel than any appeal to doctrine or to supernatural authority: Rosamond, for instance, is famously brought to a sort of ‘confession’ and even ‘salvation’ (though limited in scope) by Dorothea’s climactic visit in Chapter 81:

Her voice had sunk very low: there was a dread upon her of presuming too far, and of speaking as if she herself were perfection addressing error. She was too much preoccupied with her own anxiety, to be aware that Rosamond was trembling too; and filled with the need to express pitying fellowship rather than rebuke, she put her hands on Rosamond’s, and said with more agitated rapidity, — ” I know, I know that the feeling may be very dear — it has taken hold of us unawares — it is so hard, it may seem like death to part with it — and we are weak — I am weak — ”

The waves of her own sorrow, from out of which she was struggling to save another, rushed over Dorothea with conquering force. She stopped in speechless agitation. not crying, but feeling as if she were being inwardly grappled. Her face had become of a deathlier paleness, her lips trembled, and she pressed her hands helplessly on the hands that lay under them.

Rosamond, taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own — hurried along in a new movement which gave all things some new, awful, undefined aspect — could find no words, but involuntarily she put her lips to Dorothea’s forehead which was very near her, and then for a minute the two women clasped each other as if they had been in a shipwreck.

“You are thinking what is not true,” said Rosamond, in an eager half-whisper, while she was still feeling Dorothea’s arms round her…

To do better–to act morally–they need each other, a sufficiently strong sense of human fellowship and need, and a sufficiently strong sense of responsibility for the outcome of their actions. There’s no need in this scenario for the supernatural. In fact, as George Eliot argues in several essays and reviews (and implicitly in all of her novels) religious doctrines such as belief in an afterlife actively work against “genuine feelings of justice and benevolence.” To go back to my first example, the impulse to prayer is simply the form taken by a natural longing for help and connection, validated and given form by historical tradition but, as our society and our moral philosophy matures, properly redirected to each other.