This Week In My Classes

This Week in My Classes (December 3, 2009)

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

There’s less than one week of classes left in the term–amazing, because it seems like just a moment ago that I was printing off my introductory handouts, getting familiar with the A/V setups in new classrooms, and luring my students through our first readings. I think it’s the relentless need to keep looking towards the next thing (you walk out of your last lecture on North and South, say, and your mind is already buzzing with preparations for your first class on Great Expectations) that makes teaching terms go by so fast. It has felt like a fairly busy term, which is a bit nerve-wracking when I consider that I’m only teaching two classes, both of which are repeats and so I have quite a lot of notes and handouts I can reuse–but next term I have three classes, including one brand new one covering all kinds of material I have never taught before and one graduate seminar for which the expectations and demands are different and harder than u/g lecture courses. Pause for deep breaths . . . but before I get there, there’s still work to be done for this term.

In 19th-Century Fiction we’re working our dreary way through Jude the Obscure. For some reason I’m feeling more kindly towards Hardy’s prose this time. Usually I find him a fairly clunky stylists, blunt in his statements and awkward in his development of both plot and character. But this time I am appreciating the pithiness of his declarations, which gives the novel a polemical cast quite different from our other readings (even though, at heart, most of them have also been polemical, or at least didactic). Here he is describing Jude’s marriage to Arabella, for instance:

And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till deathtook them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.

Of course, this intrusive commentary ensures that we have the opportunity to be surprised, to look at what is more typically treated as a culminating romantic moment (“I do!”) as a misguided attempt to fix in rigid form something that, as the novel will repeatedly emphasize, is naturally wayward–and to make compulsory feelings, and expressions of feeling, that ought to be (as Sue will later argue) wholly voluntary. That marriage itself is (at least potentially) immoral, rather than a solution to, or a guard against, immorality is one of the radical proposals of this novel. Thus, for instance, Jude’s reunion with Arabella near the end of Part Third has the feeling of an adulterous liaison, even though she is his legal wife; thus, too, Sue’s declaration to Phillotson, her legal spouse, that for her to live with him on “intimate terms” given her feelings for Jude “is adultery, in any circumstances, however legal.” It’s an argumentative book, pressuring us intellectually into emotional reactions that run contrary to a number of both literary and social conventions. Hardy’s language, if not especially elegant and only rarely poetic (in descriptions of landscape, for instance), is effective for that purpose. “Yet he perceived with despondency that, taken all round, he was a man of too many passions to make a good clergyman; the utmost he could hope for was that in a life of constant internal warfare between flesh and spirit the former might not always be victorious”–even if we read this as Jude’s language, it’s stilted, almost pedantic, and yet it makes perfectly clear that a central problem, for Jude and for the novel, is that ‘warfare between flesh and spirit,’ and there’s something to be said for clarity.

Yesterday we spent some time on stones and buildings. I came at this topic by way of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice and the idea that architecture can be “read” as expressing the spirit or values of an age (I tried an analogy also to Carlyle’s “Clothes Philosophy,” though I ended up feeling that trying to explain what he means by that makes things more, rather than less, confusing). This is not a subtle aspect of Jude (as I’ve already suggested, this is not a particularly subtle book in any respect): arriving in Christminster, which Jude has long dreamed of as an “ecclesiastical romance in stone,” he reads the “numberless architectural pages around him.” His work as a stone mason repairing the “rottenness of the stones” is at once practical and symbolic; we considered some of the ways it represents his attempts to realize his dreams even as he learns that the walls around him are keeping him out. We also considered the ways walls and stones and buildings come to represent the burdensome weight of the past, and I proposed some comparisons to the concept of history in Middlemarch, where success seems to lie more in acknowledging, understanding, and developing from the past, rather than rejecting it. Indeed, Eliot’s strongly organic view of history and society make the idea of escaping from the past not just illogical but dangerous (those who ignore their roots are bound to trip over them), whereas in Hardy, the wish seems to be to emerge somehow free from the coercive pressures of the overhanging ages. Mind you, Hardy too does not suggest that such an escape is possible–but for him, I think that’s a tragic impossibility.

In Victorian Sensations we’ve wrapped up our discussions of Fingersmith (such a smart book, as well as a thoroughly gripping read, even after multiple times through it). It really does provide an excellent conclusion to a course in which we have considered not just a series of primary texts in sensation fiction (the ‘inspiration’ or generic genealogy for Fingersmith) but a series of literary historical and critical questions about the genre, its subversive potential or ideological limits, its revisions (or not) of gender identities and class boundaries, its fears, threats, and promises, and its implications for questions of canonicity and literary merit. Waters seems clearly to have considered most of these things too, and to have written many of them into her own book. I don’t think it’s just a pastiche or a period piece, though: one of the reasons sensation fiction has become such a hot area of critical inquiry in recent years is surely that its issues remain ours, and Waters is also engaging in a very contemporary way with problems about writing, gender, and authority, about sexual identities, about eroticism and pornography and exploitation, and about distinctions between genre and ‘literary’ fiction. Every one of her novels has given me that satisfying sense of reading something that has ideas at its heart. I can’t wait to read The Little Stranger–it’s at the top of my Christmas wish list!

In Victorian Sensations Wednesday’s and Friday’s classes this week are devoted to student presentations. I’m using an assignment sequence I’ve used once before with (I thought) great success. I have some reservations about how it is going this year, and I can’t really put my finger on why it has seemed so much more difficult. I thought, in fact, that I had prepared for it better and provided clearer instructions this time around, and yet . . . But Wednesday’s presentations certainly included a lot of good material, and evidence of good thinking and research; I hope Friday’s will too.

This Week in My Classes (November 25, 2009)

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

In Nineteenth-Century Fiction it’s time for Jude the Obscure. It always strikes me as a fairly gloomy way to wrap up the term, but there’s not much I can do in a course that’s supposed to cover “Dickens to Hardy”! Maybe because of the time I’ve been spending this week thinking about the “impact of the humanities,” I have more sympathy for Jude on this re-read than I sometimes do: the folly (Fawley!) and the collapse of his dream of scholarship and learning has poignancy precisely because (despite his later conclusions) there is value in that ideal, however imperfectly it is realized within the walls of the colleges that shut Jude out so pitilessly. Where would be the tragedy, after all, if it were otherwise? In the context of our readings this term, Jude fits easily into a long line of foolish dreamers, especially Pip (though his dream of becoming a “gentleman” is as foolish but less ennobling) and Dorothea. But he seems also to have something in common with both Casaubon and Lydgate, whose failures are touched with pathos because they, like Jude, can perceive the worth of what lies outside their grasp. This is my first time through the novel since actually being in Oxford this summer; not least because of the novel’s own attentiveness to the physicality of the city–its stones and walls and cobbles and spires and arches–I appreciate being able to picture it more fully in my own mind as I read. Jude is a novel that would lend itself well to a hypertext edition that would somehow activate both its literary and its visual references.

We’re discussing Fingersmith in Victorian Sensations. It really is the perfect book for this course, not only because its details hum with significance thanks to all the reading we’ve done in and about sensation fiction, but because Waters plays with the tropes and conventions of her Victorian predecessors in ways that involve us also with questions about how we (and our own critical and reading predecessors) have worked with that material. For instance, the biggest twist in the novel works–surprises us–partly because up until that moment we have seen just what we expected to see (notice how carefully I’m avoiding spoiling just what that twist is!). In fact, several features of the novel strike me as deliberately using our expectations of Victorian fiction as well as of Victorian characters against us. The most obvious thing Waters does is break apart the line between proper and improper fiction–a line already blurred or crossed, as we’ve discussed all term, by the sensation novels we’ve read, but trampled in her version. Not only does she include Victorian pornography (and the active trade in it) as a plot element, which could (but doesn’t) read as an almost patronizing move to expose the repressed other side of Victorianism, but she studies the (often unexpected, always disruptive) effects of desire on her characters in ways that make you reflect on the more oblique representations of similarly disruptive forces in mainstream Victorian novels. Desire is everywhere in Victorian novels: why is it so easy to mistake and condemn these novels as somehow repressed, and what advantage do we imagine is gained by being more explicit–particularly for women? Maud envies Sue her illiteracy; through her reading, she has become, perversely, disembodied, unsexed. The challenge, of course, is to write desire differently, and thus Fingersmith itself ultimately stands as a kind of counter-example to, say, The Lustful Turk and the rest of Mr. Lilly’s collection.

This Week in My Classes (November 17, 2009)

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

This is the point in the term when I look up from my daily class prep and the endless line-up of papers to mark and realize that (holy cow!) the end is in sight. Though there is always a bit of relief in the mix, the chief emotion this elicits is panic: so much left to do, so little time! And if I feel this way, imagine how the poor students feel, as they contemplate the term papers and exams they have to begin planning for even as we continue to expect them to show up keen and well-prepared for class. No wonder they look a bit worn. But we all have to press on: we are in books stepped in so far that to return (if we even could) would be, not just tedious, but regrettable…

In 19th-Century Fiction, we’ve pretty much run out of time for Middlemarch: I have one more lecture, in which I have all kinds of work to do concluding the particular web of connections I’ve been following–leaving all kinds of other tempting relevancies untouched. Having worked up a lecture on politics in the novel, now I’m regretting not having addressed religion directly, especially because a bright, curious student was in my office talking to me about plans for her assignment and returned to this a couple of times as something she’d like to spend more time on. It is certainly something I consider important in the novel, and I’ve written a bit about how I think the novel works to move us towards Eliot’s commitment to a secular morality (e.g. here and here). Next time perhaps I’ll spend less time on narrative strategies (but they are so interesting!) and conflicts between egotism and altruism (but they are so important!) and use a class to consider, not just the general idea that religion can be understood as a wholly human phenomenon, but also the specific examples of different religious attitudes we get, by way of Tyke, Farebrother, and Bulstrode, for instance. I also, as usual, feel that in focusing primarily on Dorothea and Casaubon, and Lydgate and Rosamond, I neglected Fred and Mary–especially Mary. By way of compensation, here’s a bit of the narrator’s description of her from Chapter 12:

Only a few children in Middlemarch looked blond by the side of Rosamond, and the slim figure displayed by her riding-habit had delicate undulations. In fact, most men in Middlemarch, eexcept her brothers, held that Miss Vincy was the best girl in the world, and some called her an angel. Mary Garth, on the contrary, had the aspect of an ordinary sinner: she was brown; her curly dark hair was rough and stubborn; her stature was low; and it would not be true to declare, in satisfactory antithesis, that she had all the virtues. Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty; it is apt either to feign amiability, or, not feigning it, to show all the repulsiveness of discontent: at any rate, to be called an ugly thing in contrast with that lovely creature your companion, is apt to produce some effect beyond a sense of fine veracity and fitness in the phrase. At the age of two-and-twenty Mary had certainly not attained that perfect good sense and good principle which are usually recommended to the less fortunate girl, as if they were to be obtained in quantities ready mixed, with a flavor of resignation as required. Her shrewdness had a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and never carried utterly out of sight, except by a-strong current of gratitude towards those who, instead of telling her that she ought to be contented, did something to make-her so. Advancing womanhood had tempered her plainness, which was of a good human sort, such as the mothers of our race have very commonly worn in all latitudes under a more or less becoming headgear. Rembrandt would have painted her with pleasure, and would have made her broad features look out of the canvas with intelligent honesty. For honesty, truth-telling fairness, was Mary’s reigning virtue: she neither tried to create illusions, nor indulged in them for her own behoof, and when she was in a good mood she had humor enough in her to laugh at herself.

It’s a characteristically rich passage, bringing out not just Mary’s gift for looking realistically at herself and the world (a great moral advantage), but the portentous contrast between her and Rosamond, whose ability to indulge in illusions sets up one of the novel’s saddest failures. In the “intelligent honesty” with which Mary looks out of her canvas, we might see a truer reflection of George Eliot than in the well-known identification the novelist made of herself with the tiresomely pedantic Mr Casaubon.

In Victorian Sensations, we have begun our series of workshops intended to build on our experience of reading four key examples of sensation fiction by putting them into some specific contexts. On Friday we considered questions of genre and canonicity by grappling with comparisons between our novels and some specific novels more firmly situated in the list of ‘great books’ but which were in their day, and might still be now, seen as more alike than distinct from sensation fiction. In particular, I asked the students to think about Jane Eyre and Great Expectations and about the technique of intrusive narration (which, we have speculated a couple of times this term, is used by our sensation novelists with the aim of elevating their work by adding philosophical perspective). I was interested in how far we were prepared to say that there is, indeed, something different about the novels that carry the ‘sensation’ label. As might be expected, we didn’t settle the question, but I think it is valuable to consider why people care(d) about drawing distinctions of this kind. We did (partly at my prompting) spend time on the idea of literary merit as well. Yesterday we moved on to a selection of 19th-century critical responses; tomorrow and Friday we will be discussing a range of contemporary critical articles and books. The discussion yesterday seemed pretty stilted to me, and perhaps it was my fault for not structuring it more carefully or for allowing (even encouraging) it to range over a fairly wide range of issues. My feeling was that the students were not really accustomed to metacritical questions, such as what assumptions underly a particular approach to fiction or particular judgments. I think some things will come into better focus, though, as we compare what critics do today with what the Victorian reviewers did. A key distinction that always strikes me is how closely the 19th-century critics assume we are affected, personally, by what we read–no academic critic today is worried (at least, not overtly) about whether readers will be corrupted or learn bad moral lessons from sympathizing too closely with Fosco or Isabel Vane. As we began to discuss yesterday, there are some moralizing assumptions in some contemporary criticism when the focus is on class relations, for example, or gender politics, but I don’t think anyone is debating whether Lady Audley is a subversive or a misogynistic characterization because they think it will make a difference to how we actually live. Historical distance is part of this, but so too is an assumption about our relationship to the book–although, as we also touched on, perhaps audience matters a lot here. Academics aren’t worried on behalf of other academics, as there is a tacit assumption of our independence in the face of a novel’s blandishments or appeals to our senses or prejudices. There’s a bit of a different attitude, I think, when it comes to the ‘mass reading audience’–today, as in the 19th-century, there is an implicit (occasionally, perhaps, even today, an explicit one) that there are good readers and bad readers, and the bad readers are the ones vulnerable to false consciousness, bad ideology, etc. (I have noticed this attitude in relation to women’s reading especially, as if women will simply fall for the worst possible invitations to materialism or fairy-tale fantasies of romance etc. I’ve been thinking about this and related issues because of the recent Guardian post in defense of “chick-lit” and the subsequent thread at Bookninja…but more about that later, I hope, in a separate post.)

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

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week in My Classes (November 3, 2009)

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week in My Classes (October 26, 2009)

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

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

GE Slides http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=21651620&access_key=key-gwli9tgqyramszy7oh5&page=1&version=1&viewMode=slideshow

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

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

This Week in My Classes (October 20, 2009): Secrets and Lies

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

It’s another week of sensation fiction, with the last two class meetings on Lady Audley’s Secret in 19th-C Ficton and on Aurora Floyd in Victorian Sensations. I’m still puzzling my way through this round of Aurora Floyd. I wrote a bit about it at The Valve: my conclusion is, rather inconclusively, that the novel is both bad and good, depending on how or why you read it.

Outside of the classroom, I’m busy marking a set of papers, with another (but thankfully smaller) set coming in on Friday–and then another next Wednesday, all of which will get terribly in the way of my reading of Wolf Hall. For pedagogical reasons, I’m a fan of frequent shorter assignments; I think it benefits class discussion and attendance, too, when everyone is writing something on every book we read. The result, though, is that I have papers in pretty constantly throughout the term. Luckily I seem to have done pretty well staggering the dates in my two classes for once. I’m experimenting this term with doing all of my marking electronically, mostly to save paper. I like it better than I thought I would: I’m so accustomed to working on a computer ow that it actually feels easier, and also somehow less demoralizing, to have the papers in a virtual folder on my virtual desktop rather than a paper one on my actual desktop. I can comment in more detail because typing is fast and space (and legibility) is not an issue; I get less physically tired, too. The only clunky part is downloading the files from Blackboard and then uploading them again, one at a time, once I’ve put my comments on. It seems as if you should be able to open the document in a window inside Blackboard, mark it up, and then just close it again. But if the students just paste the text in to the box in the Assignments section, there appears to be no way for them to format it properly (which does matter, if you are trying to teach conventions for quoting and citing) or for me to mess with the submission. Maybe I’m just not seeing how to do this: I should ask the fine folks at ProfHacker for tips!

This Week in My Classes (October 16, 2009): Aurora Floyd

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

It’s all Mary Elizabeth Braddon all the time, this week. Having just finished discussions of Lady Audley’s Secret in my upper-year seminar on Sensation Fiction, we’ve begun our work on it in my ‘regular’ 19th-century fiction course. In the meantime, in the Sensation Fiction seminar, we’ve moved on to Braddon’s second blockbuster success, Aurora Floyd. Judging from the students questions coming in for their letter assignment in the novels class, LAS is as popular as always: there’s a reason, or two or three, that it was a bestseller in its own day, after all, and perhaps readers haven’t changed that much in the intervening century and a half.

I’ve written before in this series about Lady Audley’s Secret, including as recently as last week, so I’ll focus on Aurora Floyd for this instalment. It’s a novel I don’t know nearly as well myself as LAS, having read it only a couple of times all through and taught it only once before. It’s an odd book, uneven, even somehow ungainly. It seems to want to be something more than it is: where LAS rushes ahead with a sort of gleeful pleasure in its own tawdry excesses, Aurora Floyd manifestly aspires to something more than straight sensation, and even its sensational elements are conceptually more complex and thus more interesting than those in its famous predecessor.

What I mean by that is that while LAS makes the most of the shocking inconsistency between Lucy Audley’s angelic appearance and her fearful capacity for deceit and violence, the most surprising thing about Aurora Floyd is that she is depicted as strong-willed, passionate, even sexual, and yet not villainous. Her youthful error of running off with her father’s handsome groom (“wonderfully and perfectly handsome–the very perfection of physical beauty, faultless in proportion, as if each line in his face and form had been measured by the sculptor’s rule, and carved by the sculptor’s chisel. . . yet it is rather a sensual type of beauty”) does not disqualify her from marriage to an excellent husband (of course, it should have, seeing as how the result is bigamy and all, but my point is that other than that small technical problem–which, to be perfectly fair, is accidental, as Aurora believes her first husband to be dead–Aurora is a good wife for John Mellish). Sure, she loves riding horses, and even betting on them, more than is strictly proper, but again, this aberration from conventional feminine propriety does not signal her incompatibility for the role of “heroine” of the novel. To some extent, she is tamed and chastened by the disasters that follow from her early indiscretion, but she is only “a shade less defiantly bright” at the end. So while in LAS Braddon panders to, or at least takes advantage of, fears of powerful women who pursue their own desires rather than subduing them, in AF she tries, I think, to complicate questions of feminine nature and identity by creating a protagonist who is neither angel nor demon, but something more complexly human.

That said, there are many irritating features of the novel, though I have had a hard time deciding why I don’t tolerate , from this author or in this book, literary strategies I don’t object to in others. For instance, I find Braddon’s narrative intrusions too intrusive in Aurora Floyd; they strike what seem like false notes, creating awkward shifts in register. Is there something inept about them, or is my response conditioned by my expectations for ‘sensation’ novels–e.g. that they should not even try to be realist or philosophical novels? Braddon is not an exceptionally gifted stylist in any case: there’s nothing distinctive about her prose, though as I remarked last week about LAS, it can be very effective in creating certain kinds of moods or pictures. She can’t resist heavy-handed foreshadowing (“That home so soon to be desolate! — with such ruin brooding above it as in his darkest doubts, his wildest fears, he had never shadowed forth!”). Still, it’s a perpetually interesting book, not just at the level of plot (it develops into a murder mystery) but in terms of its manipulations of literary and social conventions and tropes.

This Week in My Classes (October 5, 2009): It’s Sensational!

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

In 19th-Century British Fiction, we’re wrapping up our discussions of Great Expectations this week. I’ve written before about teaching this novel. Here’s a bit from that post, in which I focus on Pip’s moving speech to Estella after he learns Magwitch is his true benefactor and Estella, though she “cannot choose but remain part of [his] character, part of the little good in [him], part of the evil,” is not destined for him after all:

Contemporary novelists are often described as “Dickensian,” usually for writing long, diffuse novels with lots of plots and characters and a bit more emotional exhibitionism than is the norm in ‘serious’ fiction. I rarely think they deserve the label, because to me it’s moments such as this one, combining dense symbolic allusiveness, rhythmic and evocative language, high sentiment, and urgent moral appeal–all bordering on the excessive, even ridiculous, but, at their best, not collapsing into it–that distinguish Dickens from other novelists. I’m not sure any modern novelist takes such risks.

I’ve been thinking even more this time about the “risks” Dickens takes, his excesses of both language and imagination. They press us so far beyond the realistic, in almost any sense of that elusive term. Take Miss Havisham, for instance. There’s really no excuse for Miss Havisham: to be confronted with her is to be challenged to forget plausibility–to abandon, not just suspend, disbelief. Less a woman than a grotesque embodied symbol of life without love, a kind of moral and emotional zombie, she is also a key agent of the plot, with completely commonplace control over money and property. What kind of undead figure has its own lawyer? So she exists in a strange liminal zone between human and inhuman, until woken to her own tragedy, and the tragedy she has spawned in Estella (“I am what you have made me!”) by witnessing Pip’s suffering:

‘What have I done! What have I done!’ She wrong her hands, and crushed her white hair, and returned to this cry over and over again. ‘What have I done!’

I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride, found vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will reverse that reverse the appointed order of their Maker; I knew equallywell. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?

Miss Havisham cannot survive this ordeal by moral revelation, which, in truly Dickensian fashion, leads to a literal conflagration of the “rottenness” and “ugly things” that made up her perverted identity. Pip’s ability to feel compassion for this creature who has captured and ruined his own best hopes and feelings is one of the signs that he is on his way to being, not the Pip who turned his back on Joe, but the Pip who has the ethical sensibility to narrate Great Expectations.

In Victorian Sensations, we’ve finished with The Woman in White and are nearly done with Lady Audley’s Secret. When I wrote about this novel before (in the context of a different course), I remarked, “It is always a bit discouraging to me how popular this novel is with my students, full as it is of cheap tricks and thoughtless language.” My feelings are a bit more complicated this time. Lady Audley’s Secret is certainly in the category of ‘novels I teach largely for reasons other than their overt literary merit’: even acknowledging the difficulty of defining that quality with any specificity, I do chafe at the excesses of Braddon’s writing–they aren’t the imaginative or linguistic excesses of Dickens but the novelistic equivalent of using a lot of exclamation points or TYPING IN ALL CAPS in an email. “We get it!” I want to say (no doubt, of course, many readers feel the same about Dickens). Here’s a sample, for instance, from a conversation between Our Hero, Robert Audley, and his BFF George Talboys. Robert has recently convinced George to come and visit Audley Court to meet his uncle, Sir Michael Audley, and his pretty, young, golden-haired new wife. George has been feeling melancholy since learning that his pretty golden-haired wife died (hmmmm) just before his return from three years in Australia.

‘I’m not a romantic man, Bob,’ he would say sometimes, ‘and I never read a line of poetry in my life that was any more to me than so many words and so much jingle; but a feeling has come over me since my wife’s death, that I am like a man standing upon a long low shore, with hideous cliffs frowning down upon him from behind, and the rising tide crawling slowly but surely about his feet. It seems to grow nearer and nearer every day, that black, pitiless tide; not rushing upon with with a great noise and a might impetus, but crawling, creeping, stealing, gliding towards me, ready to close in above my head when I am least prepared for the end.’

As Miley Cyrus might say, d’ya think something bad might lie in his future? And is it just me, or is it hard to maintain literary decorum with a hero named ‘Bob,’ as in this immortal line, “‘I trust in your noble heart, Bob'”?!

And yet there are sections of this novel that are as good as most others I’ve read. In particular, this time through, I was struck by how effectively Braddon evokes the psychological restlessness, even instability, of Lady Audley as she waits for what she hopes (or possible, just a little, fears) is the news of Robert’s death. Spoiler alert: she has double-locked his door at the inn and then set the place on fire, and we get this striking image as she leaves the scene of the crime:

Sir Michael’s wife walked towards the house in which her husband slept, with the red blaze lighting up the skies behind her, and with nothing but the blackness of the night before.

It’s a nice touch to identify her by the status she has risked so much to achieve, but also to hint, with the “blackness” ahead of her, that despite the devastation she has now wrought, her future contains nothing “but the blackness of the night.” Then follows a long chapter of waiting, a damp listless day with no outlet for Lady Audley’s energies by “to wander up and down [the] monotonous pathway” in the courtyard of her luxurious home. The day ekes itself out:

Sir Michael’s wife [again, nice] still lingered in the quadrangle; still waited for those tidings which were so long coming.

It was nearly dark. The blue mists of evening had slowly risen from the ground. The flat meadows were filled with a grey vapour, and a stranger might have fancied Audley Court a castle on the margin of a sea. [This image ominously echoes Robert Audley’s earlier dream of Audley Court ‘rooted up . . . standing bare and unprotected . . . threatened by the rapid rising of a boisterous sea, whose waves seemed gathering upward to descend and crush the house he loved.’] Under the archway the shadows of fast-coming night lurked darkly; like traitors waiting for an opportunity to glide stealthily into the quadrangle. [Again, this image harkens back to an earlier one, in which the history of Audley Court is associated with secrets and conspiracies. Traitors to what, we might ask at this point?] Through the archway a patch of cold blue sky glimmered faintly, streaked by one line of lurid crimson, and lighted by the dim glitter of one wintry-looking star. [In Robert’s dream, the only stars are those in the eyes of ‘my lady, transformed into a mermaid, beckoning his uncle to destruction. See how completely this very suspenseful moment builds on images and ideas from earlier in the novel?] Not a creature was stirring in the qudrangle but the restless woman, who paced up and down the straight pathways [ones she has, metaphorically, strayed from quite a bit by this point!], listening for a footstep, whose coming was to strike terror to her soul. She heard it at last!–a footstep in the avenue upon the other side of the archway. But was it the footstep?

To find out whose footstep it was, you’ll have to read the book yourself! My point here is that this seems to me very effective writing–effective, that is, as a means to its end, which is suspense, to be sure (and if we are too easily dismissive of plot when we make up the terms for ‘literary merit,’ what, if any, room do we make for suspense?) but also the elaboration of a range of images, symbols, and ideas–that Lady Audley’s very presence on those “straight pathways,” for instance, represents a catastrophe for the ‘house’ of Audley. This section also effectively complicates the previously two-dimensional morality of the novel: the anxious activity of Lady Audley shows her to be more than “just” a villain, no matter how resolutely Robert seeks to contain her in that role. An actress, an infiltrator, a subversively ambitious woman who will not stop at anything to keep the gains she has made–but still capable of feeling “terror” in her soul as she awaits confirmation of her crime. Shortly, she will also give an account of her life and motives that forces the reader (if not necessarily her audience within ‘story space’) to entertain the possibility that she acts in self defense, or at least, like Becky Sharp (an obvious progenitor), she is simply using the limited means available to her, as a woman in a profoundly patriarchal world, to get–and stay–ahead. It’s provocative stuff, and entertaining, and if it’s inconsistently crafted (and, as I tend to think, inconclusively ‘argued’), it succeeds at what it seems to set out to do. I suppose that’s one definition of ‘well-written.’ Indeed, that’s George Henry Lewes’s definition: he describes Jane Austen as the “greatest artist that has ever written, using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her end.”

And that idea of “mastery over the means to her end” brings me to something I hope to write more specifically about soon, namely, how fast I think we (should) move, when the question of “literary merit” comes up, from the aesthetic to the ethical. Even supposing we could arrive at some resilient definition of good writing, it would have to (I think) make something like Lewes’s dodge here from the suggestion of universality implied in “mastery” to the issue of writing suited to a particular “means.” That’s why we can call both Dickens and Ian McEwan “good” (accomplished, skilfull, successful) writers. But at some point in that discussion, the question surely arises: how do we judge the ends? As Orwell famously said, “the first thing we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up”:

If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, “This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman [well, OK, that makes me uncomfortable, though he does go on to suggest this book burning may be a mental, rather than a literal, result]. Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.

This Week in My Classes: September 28, 2009

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

My recent venture into list-making brought something into focus for me about my reading habits: left to myself, I incline towards the kind of fiction defended by Wilkie Collins in one of his Prefaces to The Woman in White:

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible, in novel-writing, to present characters successfully without telling a story ; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters : their existence, as recognisable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers, is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reason that they are men and women themselves. (see here for the rest)

Of course I recognize that there are, in fact, other ideas of fiction that have produced great results, many of which I have enjoyed. And of course I would not want my larger conception of (or my work in) literature to be framed or limited by this admittedly quite conventional theory…though I suppose it’s worth pointing out that telling a story can be done in many different ways, as can presenting characters, and even the idea of characters as ‘recognisable realities’ is surely amenable to the kind of recognition we get from, say, a character in Dickens whose outrageous exaggerations nonetheless strike us as somehow fundamentally truthful about how people live in the world. Even the ways in which we can be interested ‘about men and women’ are manifold. So it’s not, I think, as narrow an idea of the novel as it might initially seem. But its commitment to some kind of human interest at the heart of the novel is one I share, and I falter and sometimes stall reading novels that don’t offer the forward momentum of a well-constructed plot. Of course in the best of all possible worlds, and the best of all possible books, plot and character are used in support of deeply considered philosophies and the whole is composed in well-crafted prose (though just try defining that in a way that makes room for both Dickens and McEwan, Austen and Rushdie!). But if I had to choose, I’d take the novel with story and heart over the novel with beautiful words or experimental form. If I wanted to pause a lot and think, “how deft and original!” or “what a striking image!”–well, I’d be reading poetry.

Now, again, this is what I do left to myself; this is what I like best, which is really a reflection of who I am as a person as much as who I am as a critic or a scholar or a teacher. At the same time, this reading personality of mine inevitably affects these aspects of my life and work, though cause and effect may be hard to distinguish. Am I a Victorianist because these are my reading preferences, or have my reading preferences been shaped by many years of rereading a certain group of Victorian novels and working out how best to explain them so as to engage the attention, the interest, and finally (I always hope) the hearts of undergraduates?

In any case, for someone like me, this is a good week, because I’ve been reading The Woman in White with one class and I’m heading into Great Expectations with another. Now, there are passages of great expressiveness and even beauty in Great Expectations: Dickens is a writer who knows how to turn a phrase, who can go from blunt force to arresting image without slowing down. The Woman in White, too, has some marvellous description: the moonlit quiet of Hartright’s Hampstead walk, for instance, on which he has his first thrilling encounter with the mysterious woman in white. But in neither case is it really appropriate, or even possible, to linger over these aesthetic effects. These guys are masters of plotting, and their people! Once you’ve read them, they become part of your mental life–Fosco and Marian and Pesca, and even tediously insipid Laura, and Jaggers and Joe and Wemmick, who teaches us all the invaluable lesson not to grow up to be a mailbox. And though both novels deal, at bottom, with serious questions about values, social relations, power, prejudice, love, hate, and death (!), they also both communicate a great sense of fun. Pleasure in reading can come from many things, many effects and styles and devices and voices. For sheer imaginative exuberance, these novels would have to rank right up near the top.