We’re back from our February break and now nothing stands between us and the end of term except everything we have to get done before then!
In the short term, that means pressing on with East Lynne in “Victorian Sensations.” The portion we are reading this week could be subtitled “Crime and Punishment”: Lady Isabel, having, in a fit of jealous pique, abandoned her kind but somewhat distracted husband for a handsome cad, has been living abroad, miserable and repentant, for a year. Things only get worse after she gives birth to the sad little baby who could have been legitimate if only her lover weren’t such a complete jerk. How much of a jerk is he? Well, after initially hiding from her the news that her divorce is final so that she can’t insist he marry her, he then tells her that he can’t lower himself to marry a divorced women–even though her husband’s grounds of her divorce is her affair with him! Double standards ftw.
On the bright side, by that time she wants nothing more to do with him–even though her only other options are poverty, despair, and death. Then [spoiler alert] a train wreck (a bit conveniently, we thought) kills the poor baby and everyone thinks it has also killed Isabel, so she is free (if that’s the right word) to roam the world like a miserable, repentant ghost…an opportunity she uses to go back to the home and children she abandoned, where thanks to the literally defacing effects of the accident and her “grief and remorse,” she is able to serve, unrecognized, as her own children’s governess under the management of her husband’s new wife.
Although I am more and more convinced that East Lynne is overall a pretty bad novel, it is certainly a provoking one, and our discussions have been much livelier than Isabel herself ever is. Our previous two novels have offered significant critiques of the many constraints on Victorian women’s lives–economic, social, political, and sexual. The most transgressive women don’t necessarily fare well–Marian Halcombe, for instance, may outwit her enemies and climb around on rooftops in the first half of The Woman in White but she loses her gumption in the second half and ends up happy just to be an honorary aunt, while Lady Audley is “buried alive” (metaphorically! but still…) for her sins. Still, it’s impossible to read either of those novels and not appreciate these subversive characters as contrasts to the tedious passivity of their more angelic counterparts. Isabel’s grievances, on the other hand, are mostly in her mind, and while we can see that things would have gone better for her if she’d been differently raised and more self-sufficient, it’s hard to conclude that she’s anything more than a cautionary tale. “Oh reader, believe me!” exclaims our narrator:
Lady–wife–mother! should you ever be tempted to abandon your home, so will you waken! Whatever trials may be the lot of your married life, though they may magnify themselves to your crushed spirit as beyond the endurance of woman to bear, resolve to bear them; fall down upon your knees and pray to bear them: pray for patience; pray for strength to resist the demon that would urge you to escape; bear unto death, rather than forfeit your fair name and your good conscience; for be assured that the alternative, if you rush on to it, will be found far worse than death!
Lady Isabel certainly thinks so: she is not so unladylike as to pray for her own death, the narrator reassures us, “but she did wish that death might come to her,” which seems rather a hair-splitting distinction to me. I think my students would be glad if she used her undercover job as a chance to strike back at the woman who has taken her place, as Lady Audley surely would in such a situation–but alas! From here to the end of the book things are only going to get more miserable, for her and thus for us.
Lady Audley has a closer cousin in Brigid O’Shaughnessy, whose acquaintaince we are just making in Pulp Fiction. Like Lady Audley, she’s a dame making her way in a man’s world, using her beauty as a resource, playing the damsel in distress (the noir version of the angel in the house!) when it suits her purposes and showing her more demonic side when she can’t win any other way. Sam is a better match for her than Robert Audley is (at first) for Lady Audley, though, because he is never under any illusions: he’s always suspicious, of everyone, and so never beguiled by her beauty. Or is he? One of the subtler mysteries of The Maltese Falcon is whether he does in fact love her–a question which in its turn provokes more questions about what exactly we mean by “love.” “If they hang you, I’ll always remember you” may not sound very romantic to us, but coming from Sam it’s a lot, I’d say. And yet of these two novels I think it is The Maltese Falcon that–if only implicitly–puts the higher value on idealism and tender feelings. By the end of Lady Audley’s Secret it’s pretty clear that to be a hero Robert has to toughen up and fulfill his role and duties as a real man. Sam lives up to a similarly hardhearted standard in The Maltese Falcon, but I always find Effie’s “broken” request that he keep his distance–“You’re right. But don’t touch me–not now”–suggestive of the price he has paid, as is the fate he faces with his own shiver of distaste: “Iva is here.” Braddon’s novel concludes, as she blithely declares, with “all the good people happy and at peace.” There’s little peace and even less happiness for Sam.
Not only is February a short month already but it includes two of the winter term’s time-outs (times-out?): Munro Day and Reading Week. Because February is often one of our most difficult months weather-wise, it’s usually a big relief to have the pressure ease up at work a bit, even if there’s always still plenty to do. This year, the February weather actually hasn’t been that bad, but the change of pace is welcome just the same.
I haven’t started a new book since I finished Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, though I did reread Georgette Heyer’s Devil’s Cub last week after recommending it to a Twitter friend looking for a Valentine’s Day present for his wife. I hope she liked it! Sometimes I reread just the final third but this time I started from the beginning. It does take a little while for all the pieces of Heyer’s plot to get lined up, but once they’re in place it’s comedy gold, I think, and also pretty romantic–though YMMV depending on your tolerance for bad boy heroes. (But Mary is so having none of his self-indulgent nonsense!) It’s also good preparation for teaching Lord of Scoundrels, which will be up in Pulp Fiction in just a few weeks!
As I did with Spy, I read Tinker, Tailor with mostly passive fascination, not trying to get ahead of Smiley to the truth about the mole known as “Gerald”–which is not to say I didn’t have my guesses, but the novel is not written to satisfy fair play conventions, and we only get information as it is doled out, by Le Carré as he chooses whose story to tell next and by Smiley, whose tactical reticence is its own form of genius. Smiley is of course the greatest of the characters here, but they are all–from gruff Jim Prideaux and his “watcher,” little Bill “Jumbo” Roach, to the four members of the Circus who give the novel its name–rendered with memorable specificity. Le Carré creates not just a world but multiple worlds, too, the best of them the damp, grubby, second-hand London in which Smiley conducts his backwards investigation. As he carries out his inquiries, we make excursions to other times and places, some louder and more lively, some even darker and more fraught with menace. But we always come back with Smiley to the Hotel Islay in Sussex Gardens, where he stays still while moving, in his mind, without cease:
What’s particularly brilliant, though, is the way that in its very final chapters–once the mole’s identity is confirmed and thus the puzzle that is supposedly central to the novel has been solved–Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy turns on itself. After all that time and work, there is no satisfaction, no triumph, for Smiley, in his own success. Instead, abruptly, what was almost an abstract research exercise becomes all too real, its consequences all too human:
Anyway, hype aside (and as I was once reminded, it’s not as if publicists are going to put nuanced commentary on the cover instead of high praise or pitch it to readers with modest claims such as “a good traditional novel by one of the top 30 American writers of our time”) Manhattan Beach is an excellent traditional historical novel. By “traditional” I mean it is deeply researched and refreshingly (to me) laden with the results of that work. I like exposition, I like artfully displayed period detail, I like neepery–and Manhattan Beach has plenty of all three. Since Goon Squad was my only previous experience with Egan’s fiction, I didn’t know what to expect of her as a historical novelist, or even really as a prose stylist (at least not at any length). I was glad she did not opt for the currently fashionable minimalism. She does not go into Dunnett-like detail, but both the criminal underworld–what gangster Dexter Styles thinks of as the “shadow world”–and the bustling, hi-tech world of the navy yard where Anna Kerrigan works are evoked with great specificity. It is a very atmospheric novel: Egan moves us repeatedly through several different environments, from the upper-crust world of the city’s elite to the rowdy bars where gangsters and dock workers mingle, from the grime and clamor of life aboard ship to the murkily dreamlike underwater world accessible only to divers like (eventually) Anna:
Though there’s some mystery around Eddie Kerrigan’s fate, Manhattan Beach isn’t really built as a mystery novel; its gangster elements add suspense and occasionally give it twists like a thriller’s, but I thought it was really a novel of character, or rather of characters–tangled, most of them, in circumstances they are trying (with very mixed success) to change. The ruthlessness of the gangster story line is tinged with unexpected pathos, and Anna’s pursuit of work below the surface of the sea she has always loved to watch is both a professional and a personal quest that connects (in ways she eventually learns) to her father’s story, as if she has been unconsciously drawn all her life to the one place she might find answers.
When I visited my parents in Vancouver last May, one of the many nice things we did was watch the recent adaptation of Doctor Thorne. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Trollope (like Austen) adapts very well–much better, in my opinion, than Dickens or George Eliot, the brilliance of whose fiction lies so much in the narrator’s voice and in the other very written qualities of their novels that (for me) adaptations almost always seem inadequate.
The very qualities that make Trollope such a pleasure to read, though, also make him a bit challenging to teach. The thing about people just “going about their daily business” is that often not much is really happening–there’s not much action, or at least not much dramatic action. To put it another way, the action and the drama in Trollope are often internal, and usually subtle: the characters puzzle through personal and moral problems in infinite shades of grey, rather than the more “glaring colours” of a writer like Dickens (that’s Trollope’s own characterization of Dickens’s method, from the parody of him as “Mr. Popular Sentiment” in The Warden). Given that Trollope’s novels are mostly also quite long, there’s a significant risk that students’ reaction will be boredom: pressed for time as they are, and unaccustomed to fiction that rolls out quite so slowly, they can struggle to find pleasure or interest in the process.
That, at least, has been my experience with Barchester Towers, which I have tried in my standard 19th-century fiction class a couple of times. I’ve had somewhat better reactions to 
It was the longing to get away from just those humming distractions that sent me back to Doctor Thorne last week: not just my own to-do list, but the overwhelming clatter and clutter of the rest of the world. Especially on the news and on social media, what a constant clamor of catastrophes there is, big and small, near and far away, with everything from Can Lit to the CDC in crisis, all demanding attention, all generating takes and counter-takes in an unceasing cascade of anger, fear, and weaponized self-righteousness–much of it wholly justified, but all of it eventually exhausting. It’s all very well to advise simply “unplugging,” but even setting aside the obligation we might have to be informed citizens of both our personal and our political worlds, for me there’s a lot of good mixed in with the bad–a lot of people and issues I don’t want to lose contact with or miss insight into.
Both of my classes are focusing a lot on masculinity right now, particularly on representations of or challenges to ideas of masculine heroism.
Once he faces injustice, though, and especially once he’s felt the full force of Tanner’s malicious bullying, he becomes the unrelenting agent of retribution he needs to be. In that sense he’s an interesting parallel to Robert Audley, whom we are currently discussing in Victorian Sensations. When his novel begins, he just wants to laze around Fig Tree Court and read French novels and not be bothered; like Valdez, he’s forced out of his relative placidity by an injustice he can’t leave unaddressed. The morality of Robert’s mission is murkier, though: what exactly the stakes are in his pursuit of the truth about Lady Audley is something we’re discussing a lot at the moment. It’s true he believes she has murdered his best friend, but he often seems more concerned about the pain her presumed duplicity will cause his uncle than anything else.
What did “I myself particularly like” in Autumn? I liked the meticulous descriptions of the landscape as it changes with the season:
I liked all of these parts and more about the novel, and yet while I could find a lot more examples to quote with pleasure or admiration, I don’t know quite how to talk about or conceptualize the novel as a whole, and that leaves me somewhat frustrated with it overall. I trusted Smith’s bricolage more than that of some other more fragmented novels I’ve read in recent years (Jenny Offil’s Department of Speculation, for instance, or Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, neither of which I actually enjoyed much at all). I think that’s because there’s a stronger narrative thread running through Autumn, and it gives a deeper grounding in its central characters while still (especially in Daniel’s case) leaving them somewhat opaque or enigmatic. There was enough in Autumn for a reader like me to enjoy in my usual way, though Smith clearly wants to do something more, or something other, than that.
