Guest Author: Archdeacon Grantly*

Dr. Maitzen’s fall classes begin tomorrow.

Good Heavens!

*Sadly, I’m not teaching The Warden (or any Trollope, for that matter) this term.

Yes, I’m teaching again. And hooray for that, I say: it puts a lot of energy back into my days, plus it gives me people to talk to as my colleagues head off on research trips or out to their cottages. I’m about a week into Women and Detective Fiction, an upper-level seminar I’m offering in our spring session–which means we are meeting 10 hours a week to get in a term’s worth of material in less than a month. Although the pace of these courses can be somewhat frenzied, I like the concentration they create: for once, all of your students’ attention is on your class, for one thing, and when you refer to the last book you read, they can usually remember it, because you just wrapped up discussion on it yesterday.

So after doing some early classics and some Miss Marple last week, yesterday we finished up with Gaudy Night. As I told them, it is a novel I expect to become more important and resonant to them as we get further along in our readings. For me, it’s plenty resonant already–indeed, it’s one of my top 10 novels, period. But it has never been a popular success when I’ve taught it. Its preoccupations–with the life of the mind, with the relationship of intellectual integrity to other kinds of honesty and commitment, and with the challenges of balancing head and heart, work and life–are perhaps too abstract for many students, or too remote (so far) from their own experiences of either love or education. I admire the unity of the novel, in which the detective plot and the romance plot turn (as Sayers said she meant them to) on the same point. Reacting against the puzzle mysteries of the era, Sayers remarked that “the reader gets tired after a time of a literature without bowels,” and in Gaudy Night she set out to humanize the genre and restore it to what she saw as the higher standards of its 19th-century forebears, such as the works of Wilkie Collins and Sheridan LeFanu (on whom, one of many nice metafictional touches, Harriet Vane is doing a research project while at Oxford). Harriet’s own detective fiction undergoes a similar transformation over the course of the novel, too. But most of all I enjoy the relationship between Peter and Harriet, which I read as one of the most successful fictional attempts I know of to imagine both the challenge and the realization of an equal partnership between two equally independent and intellectually demanding characters. What more satisfying proposal–thematically, politically, romantically–is there in a novel than Peter’s to Harriet at the end? OK, maybe I exaggerate. Maybe.

Tomorrow we move to P.D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, then Death in a Tenured Position, so we go from Oxford to Cambridge and then to Harvard. Then we’re into the feminist revisions of hard-boiled private eyes, with Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, and then Prime Suspect, and then we’re done, all by June 27. I have been meaning to add an example of lesbian detective fiction into the reading list, and I should probably work to bring it more up to date–Prime Suspect (the one we’re doing) is from 1992, so that doesn’t seem so current anymore. Even the first time I worked on it with a class, one of the students laughed at the “dated” hair and fashions. I couldn’t see what she meant at all! That made me feel old, alright. Ruth Rendell and Elizabeth George are two likely candidates, I suppose, though I don’t see anything that interesting in terms of genre in George’s novels (though I think highly of most of them). Who’s out there doing something new with the form? Suggestions always welcome, especially as I’m not actually an avid mystery reader –I tend to stick with the authors I know I like, and to get irritated by gimmicky special interest ones (crossword puzzles, catering companies, bed and breakfasts, home repairs, quilting…you know the type).

We’re almost done–not forgetting, of course, that after classes wrap up, we all move into our “papers and exams” frenzy–and then it’s May Administrative Madness.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction we go out on a depressing note, finishing up Knots and Crosses and then fitting in one more short story, Rankin’s “The Dean Curse.” When we get to exam review on Wednesday, I hope to have some general discussion of the issues I “led” with back when the course started and we read Thurber’s “The Macbeth Murder Mystery”: what, if any, are the essential differences between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction? And, equally important, if Thurber gets comic results by showing someone reading literature by the rules of genre fiction, what results did we get, reading genre fiction using the techniques of literary analysis? Of course, some of our readings had higher aspirations in the literary direction than others, but a course like this provides plenty of opportunities to wonder how and why those lines get drawn. I think I want to shake up the reading list for this course when I offer it again next year. One thing I’d especially like to do is add a Canadian novel, though at the moment I’m not sure which one to choose (suggestions welcome!). My criteria would be that it should be a novel that adds something distinctive to our consideration of the various genres of mystery fiction. I like reading Peter Robinson, for instance, but I’m not sure that I need him if I’m already doing P.D. James (and there, I think I might trade Unsuitable Job for a Woman, much as I like it, for A Taste for Death). Maybe Giles Blunt? I haven’t read his books yet but I’ve got a couple out from the library and they look promising.

In The Victorian ‘Woman Question’ we finish up with The Odd Women, a novel that sometimes seems designed to act as a concluding primer on the ‘woman question,’ as it features marriages (or courtships) that appeal to, subvert, explode, or reject all the Victorian models we’ve been considering in our other novels. I expect we’ll have some good discussion about Rhoda and Everard and their bizarre “romance.” Why does it end as it does? What’s against them that it is so difficult for them to know, or state, or claim, what they want? (What do they want?) And I’m sure Monica and Widdowson’s marriage will provoke comparisons to the Trevelyans’ in He Knew He Was Right. Speaking of He Knew He Was Right, will I use it again, the next time I offer this seminar? I may have to wait for the course evaluations for honest declarations of how the students felt about it; I really enjoyed our work on it, not just because of its contributions to the big thematic arcs of the course, but because of the conversations it inspired about why and how we value and criticize different kinds of novels.

Next week, when I don’t have classes to post about, I’ll post some thoughts about doing this series of posts on my teaching (yes, more metablogging).

I sure went on and on about last week’s classes! I guess in my own small way I’m trying to answer Martha Nussbaum’s call for critical writing “that talks of human lives and choices as if they matter to us all”… Plus it feels good to get some mileage out of some of that 19th-century criticism I spent so much time editing … But to compensate, here’s this week’s update in thumbnail form:

Mystery and Detective Fiction: Ian Rankin, Knots and Crosses. Grim, gothic, graphic.

The Victorian ‘Woman Question’: George Gissing, The Odd Women. Also grim. And graphic, in its own way. But not gothic.

We finished up Grafton’s ‘A’ is for Alibi in Mystery and Detective Fiction yesterday. Drawing on ideas from sources such as Peter Rabinowitz’s very smart essay “Reader, I Blew Him Away: Convention and Transgression in Sue Grafton,” I invited the class to consider Charlie Scorsone not just as a male Brigid O’Shaughnessy but also a version of the Byronic hero, who is tempting to our heroine in part because he is masterful and domineering. Although the novel emphasizes women’s desire and struggle for autonomy, especially in marriage, through Kinsey, Grafton clarifies that autonomy is valuable and (politically and personally) essential, but also exhausting. What a relief, perhaps, not to have to stand alone but to give yourself over to someone whose power, after all, may simply be greater! We puzzled over why the final chase sequence is so unheroic for Kinsey, who ends up partly undressed and hiding in a garbage can…leading me eventually to one of those classroom questions you can’t quite believe you’ve asked, but there you are anyway: “How is her sleeping with Charlie like her hiding from him in a trash can–besides that both situations involve taking her pants off?” Hmmm. Tomorrow we are working with a cluster of rather quirky stories, all by women authors: Amanda Cross’s “Arrie and Jasper,” Sue Grafton’s “A Little Missionary Work,” and Sarah Caudwell’s “An Acquaintance with Mr Collins”–the last of which, delightfully, proves the practicality of a degree in English and a specialization in the Victorian novel…if you want to commit murder. Hmmm again. Maybe this is not the way to make our departmental pitch for more of the university’s resources. On the other hand, if we sounded menacing enough…

In The Victorian ‘Woman Question’ we dealt with murder and sex as well, as we reached the end of Middlemarch. Especially as we read East Lynne earlier this term, it is interesting to consider the ‘sensational’ elements that permeate the final sections of this famous example of realism: while in He Knew He Was Right, Trollope relegates his sensational elements to the comic margins of his unfolding Shakespearian tragedy (Camilla and her carving knife–wonderful!), here with Will and Rosamond we have an adultery plot that is never realized–two, I suppose, if we consider Casaubon’s suspicions of Will and Dorothea. And the Raffles plot brings us close to an actual sensation case, except that here the suspicious death is ambiguous in every possible way. As for sex, well, I began our work on the novel with some consideration of the famous Bernini sculpture of the ecstasy of Saint Teresa, and of course we have paid attention throughout to Dorothea’s struggles to reconcile her spiritual yearnings with her other passions, beginning with the ‘jewel scene’ in Chapter I. Asserting your own will is important to finding the necessary balance between altruism and egotism (without a candle, after all, the scratches on the pier glass remain wholly random, rendering interpretation and thus action impossible). At the same time, willfully declaring your own desire seems necessary to embracing a fully human life: your ardour needs outlets both philosophical and physical. There’s never enough time to talk about everything, but I did bring up some of the critical objections that have been made to Will so that we could debate how suitable a partner he seems for Dorothea and what relation their marriage bears to the novel’s larger themes, especially regarding reform, vocation, and women’s roles in society. A couple of times this week we worried about Rosamond and Casaubon as possible limit cases for the narrator’s theory of sympathy. I’ve become increasingly worried about a line from The Mill on the Floss: “the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.” Both Dorothea’s and Lydgate’s marriages proceed to some extent according to this principle, and the moral beauty of Dorothea’s efforts to subdue her own needs in generous response to Casuabon–in the wonderful conclusion of Chapter 42, for instance–is certainly made apparent. At the same time, Lydgate’s submission to Rosamond is unquestionably shown as a tragedy, for him and perhaps for medicine, so even as we can’t wish him a more selfish or cruel person, one who could put his parasitic wife aside in pursuit of his own higher aims, we can hardly applaud the result. And Dorothea is rescued by the novelist from a similarly dismal fate: as my students pointed out, Casaubon’s death is altogether too convenient to be realistic, and we therefore have to consider its effects in other ways. Perhaps that near-death experience for Dorothea is meant to sharpen our own awareness, for instance, of the extraordinary risks of submission and renunciation–or of marriage, if undertaken on those terms.

Although we have talked a lot about fictional form in this seminar, I am starting to feel as if the other thing we are doing, indirectly, is a tutorial on men, women, courtship, relationships, marriage, domination, autonomy…. So many of the books we are reading are designed to provoke thought on just these issues, after all, and they adapt their forms in part as coaching strategies (the incessant shifting of point of view, or interruptions of chronology, in Middlemarch, for example, which force us to re-consider people and events from other perspectives, as parts of other stories). Some of my students have admitted that they are looking differently at their own relationships as a result of the stories we’ve been analyzing. Well, as far as that goes, they are only doing as the authors expected or hoped. Here’s Trollope on ‘Novel Reading,’ for instance:

There it is, unconcealed, whether for good or bad, patent to all and established, the recognised amusement of our lighter hours, too often our mainstay in literature, the former of our morals, the code by which we rule ourselves, the mirror in which we dress ourselves, the index expurgatorius of things held to be allowable in the ordinary affairs of life. No man actually turns to a novel for a definition of honour, nor a woman for that of modesty; but it is from the pages of novels that men and women obtain guidance both as to honour and modesty.

He goes on to consider particularly the potential value of the novel as a training ground for young lovers. “There used to be many,” he remarks, “who thought, and probably there are some who still think, that a girl should hear nothing of love till the time comes in which she is to be married.” But “While human nature talks of love so forcibly, it can hardly serve our turn to be silent on the subject,” and novels, for better or for worse, provide necessary as well as pleasant guidance:

We do not dare to say openly to those dear ones, but we confess it to ourselves, that the one thing of most importance to them is whether they shall love rightly or wrongly. . . . It suits us to speak of love as a soft, sweet, flowery pastime, with many roses and some thorns, in which youth is apt to disport itself; but there is no father, no mother, no daughter, and should be no son, blind to the fact that, of all matters concerning life, it is the most important. That Ovid’s Art of Love was nothing, much worse than nothing, we admit. But nevertheless the art is taught. Before the moment comes in which heart is given to heart, the imagination has been instructed as to what should accompany the gift, and what should be expected in accompaniment; in what way the gift should be made, and after what assurance; for how long a period silence should be held, and then how far speech should be unguarded.

By those who do not habitually read at all, the work is done somewhat roughly,–we will not say thoughtlessly, but with little of those precautions which education demands. With those who do read, all that literature gives them helps them somewhat in the operation of which we are speaking. History tells us much of love’s efficacy, and much of the evil that comes from the want of it. Biography is of course full of it. Philosophy deals with it. Poetry is hardly poetry without it. The drama is built on it almost as exclusively as are the novels. But it is from novels that the crowd of expectant and ready pupils obtain that constant flow of easy teaching which fills the mind of all readers with continual thoughts of love.

Though I would not want our class hours to be taken up with personal reflections, I can’t say I think it’s a bad thing if our readings are encouraging them to think more deliberately about their own lives! Marriage may be a very different institution today than it was in the 19th century (and we have certainly talked at length about the specific political, economic, and social contexts that made marriage such a momentous step for women especially), but even so, there may still be “something even awful in the nearness it brings.” One thing it seems to me we are all certain to take away from reading Middlemarch is precisely how demanding it is to live in close physical and mental proximity to someone who is not ourselves, for whom “the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.” In a world in which Wuthering Heights (Wuthering Height?!) has recently been voted the greatest love story of all time, it seems like a little corrective realism tinged with pessimism is called for. And to ward off despair, we can always think of Fred and Mary, whose “solid mutual happiness” starts to seem anything but middling after all we’ve been through.

Because this week in my life has been a bit complicated, I’m a bit late posting on this week in my classes. In fact, as I don’t teach Thursdays and Friday’s a holiday, for this week, my classes are now over! But it was a good week, an interesting week, I thought.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we wrapped up our discussions of P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman with some discussion of the novel as a kind of Bildungsroman, with Cordelia’s development as a detective coinciding with her moral and emotional development. For me, one sign that the novel is not “just” a mystery is simply that it is not over when the mystery is solved: in particular, it seems to be important that Cordelia be brought face to face with Dalgliesh, who has served as both mentor and antagonist throughout the novel. So we looked pretty closely at the interview they have and considered what is at stake, not just for her, but also for him–I think it’s interesting, for example, that he is shown to have learned from her to regret not having taken more care over Bernie’s fate. The other scene we focused on was the climactic encounter between Cordelia and Sir Ronald, in which his utilitarian (rational, scientific) outlook is explicitly pitted against her more ‘humane’ (sentimental, perhaps aesthetic) one: “what is the use of making the world more beautiful if the people who live in it can’t love one another?” Can you tell James sees herself as working in the tradition of the 19thC novelists?

Today (in the spirit of “and now for something completely different!”) we started on Sue Grafton’s ‘A’ is for Alibi. I played an excerpt from the interesting documentary “Women of Mystery,” which features interviews with Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, and Grafton. The clip I played puts women’s detective fiction in the context of sensation fiction; the other highly relevant context for this novel is clearly hard-boiled detective fiction, so I spent some time recapping some of the features of that subgenre with special attention to its gendered aspects. I also began some discussion of the relationship of these feminist PI novels to the feminist movement; both Grafton and Paretsky began their series novels in 1982, and the influence of first-wave feminism is pretty obvious (Grafton says her goal was to “play hardball with the boys”). In ‘A’ is for Alibi, the plot itself highlights changes in women’s roles: it features one marriage that begins, by my calculations, in the late 1950s, and another that begins in 1970. I put some general questions to the class to consider as we work our way through the novel, particularly about possible problems with women rewriting hard-boiled conventions–for one thing, many of them change a lot when you reverse the genders, as Sara Paretsky has pointed out, and for another, well, is it necessarily progress to show women too can be tough, rude, and emotionally detached? Grafton begins her novel with Kinsey’s discomfort at having just killed someone, so she is clearly problematizing the conventions even as she adopts and adapts them.

In The Victorian ‘Woman Question, it’s week 2 on Middlemarch. It does seem to be true that coming to it right after reading He Knew He Was Right makes some of its features really stand out. For instance, comparing the power struggles between Dorothea and Casaubon to those between Emily and Louis Trevelyan proves quite interesting, not least because I haven’t been in the habit of seeing Dorothea’s struggles as being quite about power–but what is his attempt to get her to promise total compliance even after his death but as extreme an attempt to usurp her moral (and economic, and intellectual, and sexual) agency as Louis’s persecution of his wife? The Garths stand out on this reading because of the healthy balance of respect and love so evident in their relationship–though it’s clear that Mrs Garth has a very traditional theory of marital hierarchy! I think the class is doing pretty well with it, though it comes at a hard time of term when they are swamped with work in all of their courses: the discussion has been not just lively but empathetic towards the characters in a way that does not always happen in my ‘lecture’ classes. Maybe my tendency to emphasize the novel’s formal properties and philosophical abstractions gets in the way of people responding emotionally to the story–next time I teach the novel in a lecture/discussion format instead of a seminar, I’ll keep this in mind, as GE herself was urgent that fiction should not ‘lapse from picture to diagram.’ I’m quite excited that the group doing the presentation is, among other things, working up some kind of class activity involving string that will get across the giant hairball effect of the novel’s structure…

First, a momet to vent. On Friday of last week I handed back homework assignments in Mystery and Detective Fiction and took up the entire class meeting on the topic “how to do better next time.” Although I usually address common problems when returning work, this time seemed different because of the relatively low level of problem–to give just one example, although for one part of the assignment students were clearly (and I mean clearly) instructed to write one coherent paragraph, large numbers of them wrote anywhere from two to six paragraphs, sometimes simply setting off each new sentence. It’s the kind of marking experience that leaves me wondering if somehow it’s my confusion: has the definition of ‘paragraph’ changed, maybe? As I hope I made clear to them, that instruction was not just an arbitrary limit on their creativity but a deliberate direction meant, among other things, to improve the odds that they would put forward a coherent idea supported through argumentation and evidence–rather than, say, a string of basically unconnected observations. So ignoring it had other consequences for the quality of both their thinking and their writing. Then there were the many, many students who just as cavalierly disregarded the word limits I had set for another part of the assignment, thus, again, undermining my effort to encourage pointed commentary rather than plot summary. As I demonstrated with examples drawn from this round of assignments, the task could certainly be done well within the set limits, but it’s true that editing is hard work, and I couldn’t help concluding that some of them had imagined they would be fine just tossing off their first thoughts and turning them in. The vast array of typos (ah, that well known detective Sherlock Homes!) was also discouraging. But as I told them, a flurry of red ink is really a compliment, as it indicates my conviction that they can in fact get it right if they take time and pay attention!

OK. So. Hoping to turn Friday’s negative energy into something more positive, today we did an editing worksheet giving them some hands-on practice at writing more concise, focused prose and then at developing observations about their reading into the kind of unifying interpretive idea called for in their paragraph assignment. For the latter we worked with Sara Paretsky‘s clever story “Dealer’s Choice,” in which she takes on the voice of Christopher Marlowe and offers up her own ‘take’ on the hard-boiled detective story. For our exercise we compared her ‘femme fatale,’ “Naomi Felstein” (a.k.a, Kathleen Akiko Moloney) to Brigid O’Shaughnessy, exploring how Paretsky uses now-familiar hard-boiled elements to do something rather different. Is the story an homage, a parody, a sincere re-visitation, or a subversion of the hard-boiled genre? I opened with some brief comments Paretsky has made about trying to do a straight gender role-reversal in this genre, and her conclusion that too much simply changes when you put a woman behind the desk. The issues she raises will become particularly relevant for us when we move on to Sue Grafton‘s ‘A’ is for Alibi in a couple of weeks. But first, starting Wednesday, we’re studying P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Sadly, the Smithsonian lecture I was hoping to play for them appears to be non-functioning!

In The Victorian ‘Woman Question,‘ it’s Middlemarch time (right in the middle of March, too, as they pointed out–clever, eh?). I wrote a fair amount about how I approach teaching Middlemarch when I worked on it in my 19th-century fiction class in the fall. This round will be different for at least a couple of reasons, though. First of all, as this is a seminar class, inevitably our discussions will take new and unexpected directions as we are guided by the students’ opening questions rather than my lesson plans. Second, we are coming at it after reading several novels focusing very prominently on marriage and (of course) the ‘woman question,’ and these are not actually the angles I play up the most in my lecture classes. To me (and, I hope, to the students who were also in my fall class) it will be interesting to see which aspects of the novel take on increased significance as a result. I’m expecting, for instance, that the Lydgate/Rosamond plot will be more prominent this time, and we may take more time on Fred and Mary than I usually manage. Having just finished He Knew He Was Right, the students may find Dorothea’s struggle to submit to Casaubon–her idealization of renunciation–more problematic than they otherwise would; in fact, I am quite interested in comparing Eliot’s emphasis on duty with Trollope’s interest in rights and principles. I will also be tempted to return us to the questions of literary merit we kicked around when we were studying East Lynne, and which came back in a more muted form with Trollope, whose readability (as Friday’s presenters emphasized) has as often cost him as earned him credibility. And, speaking of Friday’s presentation, our class activity was a mock tea party in which we were all assigned parts from the novel–fun, appropriate given how much we talked about the importance of characters and characterization in the novel, and also effective in stimulating informed contributions from pretty much every member of the seminar. I was assigned the part of Wallachia Petrie, proving, of course, that they were casting against type! (Ha.)

We’re back from our ‘break’ and, if this year is like years past, the time from now until the end of term will seem to go by in a crazy rush. Here’s what’s in the works for this week:

In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we’re finishing up The Maltese Falcon. Today we talked about Flitcraft, as mentioned here. Next time we’ll watch a clip from the film version, probably the concluding scene between Sam and Brigid as preparation for a class debate about the morality or other implications of Sam’s choice to turn her in. I must say I find this novel one of the most depressing I teach–not because its elements are, strictly speaking, sad in themselves. The Remains of the Day, for instance, is much sadder. But Ishiguro’s novel, while also showing the costs of life without love, shows us (indirectly, implicitly) the alternative, suggesting it is attainable, worth aiming for even if in the end you miss. Hammett emphasizes the costs as well (note Effie’s revulsion in the final chapter, and Sam’s shiver), but only Effie seems to strive for something better, warmer, more human, and we can tell that she persists in her kinder, gentler world view only by being (willfully?) oblivious to the realities of the world she lives in. Can love and hope be sustained only through ignorance? Sigh.

And in The Victorian ‘Woman Question’ we’re reaching the end of He Knew He Was Right. What a great read. Once you’re about 500 pages into it, surely you’re hooked. Before the break I took some time in class to inquire how the students were feeling about the novel. Admittedly, those who are hating it are not likely to ‘fess up to their professor–or perhaps they would, given an opening, since they seem a pretty candid bunch, and have expressed some blunt opinions before. Anyway, I was interested in how appreciative several of them seemed. One said that she turned to Trollope with relief after doing the reading for other classes, partly because of the directness of his narration and project, and partly because she felt she could care for so many of the characters. Several have praised the novel’s humour and are clearly taking pleasure in the twists and turns of the subplots; a few particularly emphasized the appeal of the ‘secondary’ characters, who strike them as lively and distinct. I’m feeling pleased about my gamble in assigning it (my brooding over which is recorded here and here especially). Mind you, there will be some culture shock when we move to Middlemarch next week: I think they will find it much slower going, though perhaps now they won’t be intimidated by its length!