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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For me, at least, and I hope for my students, this is a fun week of reading in both of my winter term classes.

Mystery and Detective Fiction: We’ve begun our discussions of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, a novel that I enjoy more every time I teach it. My main focus for the first couple of classes is on the way the novel sets us up to worry about problems of interpretation and misinterpretation. With its series of first-person narrators, the novel is self-consciously set up to mimic the testimony of a series of eye-witnesses, but right from the Prologue we know that seeing something with your own eyes is not always enough to tell you just what it is that you have seen: you require an interpretive framework, and the first-person narrators also serve to remind us that these frameworks reflect the presuppositions and prejudices of each individual witness. The prologue also introduces the idea of “moral evidence,” as opposed to legal or circumstantial evidence, which relies among other things on understanding of people’s characters (not something an “objective” outsider like Sergeant Cuff can bring to a case). And it sets supernatural or otherwise unscientific theories and interpretations against reason and common sense. By setting the theft of the diamond from Rachel’s Indian cabinet against the story of its other thefts across history, the novel complicates questions of legitimacy and ownership; by emphasizing the bloody aggression of the English against the Indians, it also undermines the fantasy of the main characters that their home represents order, tranquility, and justice that is disrupted only by the invasion of the “devilish Indian diamond.” “Good heavens, mamma!” Rachel exclaims in Chapter XI; “Are there thieves in the house?”–to which the answer is of course, yes, on one interpretation they are all thieves, even before the diamond goes missing. Today we get to talk about Sergeant Cuff and how far his outsider perspective can move the inquiry forward. If we have time, we might do a bit with Rosanna and her friend Limping Lucy, too, one of the many clues we get that the novel as a whole is not entirely (if at all) behind the values so cherished by our first narrator, Betteredge: “Ha, Mr Betteredge, the day is not far off,” she warns him, “when the poor will rise against the rich.” So much fun, and always we’ll be thinking about how Collins is using the form of his novel–the first-person narrations so similar in effect to dramatic monologues, and the juxtaposition of so many of them as if to model one possible way of overcoming their limitations. (In classes when I teach both The Moonstone and Middlemarch, it’s always interesting to compare his strategy here to George Eliot’s use of her omniscient narrator and manipulations of point of view.)

The Victorian ‘Woman Question’: Here we’re moving into The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, another novel that foregrounds issues of narrative construction through its nested narratives and chronological doubling-back. Again, we get a telling introductory piece with the letter from our main narrator, Gilbert Markham, to his buddy Halford; the letter, apologizing for a failure of confidence and making amends by offering up the story of Gilbert’s own marriage plot, raises all kinds of questions about masculinity and friendship, and also, by beginning where Gilbert’s story actually ends up–for instance, after his process of maturation and development–helps us understand what the novel will be about. When the story ‘begins’ we go back to his younger self and realize how far he has to develop before he will be capable of such a letter. Then, of course, when we reach Helen’s diary, we see that she too, so strong and independent in Gilbert’s narrative, has evolved significantly through her own experiences. Today’s reading is the first instalment of her diary, taking her from her first meetings with Huntingdon to their marriage. It brings to life central issues in the debate over the ‘woman question’; one aspect I find particularly interesting is its emphasis on Helen’s desire to be Huntingdon’s saviour–just as she has been taught to see her ‘mission’–but of course, as the novel goes on to dramatize in compelling detail, the female influence she so looks forward to wielding means absolutely nothing in the absence of actual power or leverage, social or economic. I think Bronte handles her first-person narrations really artfully as well; though her characters are nowhere near as diverse (or comic) as Collins’s, they do reveal themselves by their language as well as by their self-reporting.

Last week was the first full week of classes for this term and, as usual, it was chaotic despite my pretty thorough efforts to be ready. You just get out of practice at juggling all the parts, at having everything ready to go when you need it, at keeping track of the requests and complications and paperwork. Also, you realize when you get back in the classroom that two weeks nattering at your kids all day and catching up on past seasons of House at night actually diminishes your ability to speak in complete (never mind polite) sentences. However, it’s all underway now and, also as usual, it feels good. The first few class meetings for me are all about trying to get everyone on the same page by giving them some historical and critical frameworks for considering our particular readings. I find there’s often very little common ground among students in terms of preparation, especially since in our department there is no historical survey required before upper-level classes; you’re lucky if very many of them know that Virginia Woolf did not actually know Shakespeare’s sister or that the Romantics preceded the Victorians. And a lower-level survey class in a popular genre, such as the Mystery and Detective Fiction class I’m teaching this term, attracts a lot of non-majors. So here’s how we warmed up:

English 2040, Mystery and Detective Fiction: We led off with a discussion of differences (real and perceived) between “genre” and “literary” fiction, focusing on the different reading strategies and expectations we typically bring to each kind. To get us started on these questions, we read aloud James Thurber’s brilliant little story “The Macbeth Murder Mystery,” in which an “American lady” accidentally finds herself curled up in bed with Shakespeare instead of the murder mystery she was expecting. Her interpretive misadventures are both comic and revealing, perfect for my purposes. It doesn’t hurt, either, in the tender early days of a professor’s relationship with a class, to get some laughs. The next couple of meetings were spent on some background about detective fiction as a genre, a kind of genealogy taking us from Newgate and gothic fiction, through early practitioners like Poe and related forms such as ‘sensation’ fiction, through the Golden Age and the hard-boiled Americans to feminist revisionists (Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton, for instance) to contemporary figures such as Ian Rankin. We’ve also spent some time on the history of policing, and on the characteristic features of the charismatic amateur detective so compellingly inaugurated with Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. Next week, we’re done with generalizations and moving into detailed analysis of our first major reading, The Moonstone. Cursed diamonds, eerie quicksand, stained nightgowns, and multiple narrators: who could ask for anything more?

English 4604, The Victorian ‘Woman Question: Here too my opening tactic is laying out some generalizations, this time about the social, political, and historical context of the debate over the ‘woman question.’ Once we get going on our particular literary texts, we will want to spend plenty of time on their formal and aesthetic properties, but we will also be considering how they contribute to this debate by dramatizing or thematizing some of its elements. And most of our readings simply require us to understand some specific issues about the circumstances of Victorian women, particularly in marriage. We begin Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall on Monday, for example, an ingeniously constructed, piercingly intelligent and emotionally gripping novel that turns in part on some key 19th-century ideas about femininity and masculinity as well as on the economic and other constraints of a Victorian wife. But this past week our major reading was Mill’s The Subjection of Women–also, of course, piercingly intelligent, and eminently rational and persuasive. We looked at it along with France Power Cobbe’s powerful piece “Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors,” which gave us some opportunities to compare the different rhetorical strategies of two writers approaching this highly contentious material from somewhat different positions.

It’s early yet, but I like what I’ve seen of both groups so far. Here’s hoping we can all keep up the momentum!

Today was the last meeting of my 19th-Century Novels class–a depressing inquiry into the meaning of the tragedies of the final volume of Jude the Obscure. One effect of the children’s deaths is to drive us to interpretation. After all, if they ‘mean’ nothing, then their horror is unredeemable. Here our activity as readers becomes entangled with the efforts of the characters to make sense of their experience. In particular, Sue is driven to religious explanations, in part for the (meager) comfort they offer, and in part because if she interprets her suffering as punishment for her ‘sins’ against God, then she can seek atonement by turning back to His laws. So religion is shown as answering human needs, rather than as offering truths. Jude’s explanations are more consistent with what we’ve seen in the novel (“it is only … man, and senseless circumstance”)–but what response can we muster to that? Jude’s response, of course, is to lie down and await death. Then there’s Arabella’s survival, scariest of all, perhaps, if we ordinary folks create the environment in which it is only Arabella who can flourish–just as in Middlemarch, “we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know” (Finale). I usually point my final lecture for this class towards the responsibilities of readers, pointed to so often by both the content and the forms of our readings. As Janice Carlisle argues persuasively in her smart book The Sense of an Audience, the goal of many Victorian novelists was “an ‘ennobling interchange of action’ [Wordsworth’s phrase] that would elicit the best qualities of both the reader and the narrative persona of the novelist” (11).

And in a truly Victorian spirit of optimism, I also always end this course by recommending other 19th-century novels my students might enjoy now that they’ve got a taste for them. So here’s this year’s list of Recommended Further Reading:

1. If you particularly enjoyed The Warden: Scenes of Clerical Life, Barchester Towers, or any other Trollope novel
2. If you loved Great Expectations: David Copperfield, Bleak House, Mary Barton, North and South
3. If your favourite was Lady Audley’s Secret: The Woman in White, Aurora Floyd, Fingersmith
4. If Middlemarch inspired you: The Mill on the Floss, Wives and Daughters
5. If Jude the Obscure was your favourite: go on vacation, preferably somewhere sunny

And that’s a wrap.

This week in my classes we are all very tired, because it’s almost the end of term. We’re finishing Jude the Obscure in the 19th-century novels class, and Wednesday in my graduate seminar was our second session on Hester and the last meeting for the course overall. I think I’m finally tired of ending up with Jude: “nobody did come, because nobody does” (and variations, such as “‘Throat–water–Sue–darling–drop of water–please–O please!’ No water came…”) is just not the best note to go out on. Speaking of conclusions, though, the ending of Hester proved very provocative, as it should, given the way it flouts the conventions of the marriage plot novel and also frustrates readings of Hester’s story as any kind of Bildungsroman. Now we move into exams and papers, and perhaps in between grading and managing fellowship applications and admissions, I can also get the last tasks done on the anthology that I hope to submit to Broadview in January!