“Not Fitted to Stand Alone”: Deborah Weisgall, The World Before Her

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weisgallI had a deeply and perhaps irrationally ambivalent response to Debora Weisgall’s The World Before Her. I think that on its own terms, it’s quite a good novel. It’s atmospheric, interesting, and thought-provoking, especially about the pressure marriage puts on identity: like so many characters in Middlemarch, Weisgall’s protagonists are struggling in relationships with partners who don’t want them to be themselves — and of whom they too had what turns out to be imperfect knowledge and thus wrong expectations. How much do you owe such a partner? How far should you bend, contort, or submit in order to make the marriage a “success”? How do you balance duty to yourself against duty to others, or to promises, or to principles you revere in theory even as, in practice, they exact a price you can hardly bear to pay? These are central questions of Middlemarch.

The comparison to Middlemarch is not just apt but crucial, because one of Weisgall’s protagonists is George Eliot herself: the novel opens in Venice during her honeymoon with John Cross. I should really say that one of her characters is “Marian Evans,” or “Mrs. John Cross,” because Weisgall focuses on the inner life and personal feelings of the woman, not on the mind, ideas, or literary accomplishments of the writer. Not that this bifurcation is absolute, or even intelligible, of course: Marian Evans was George Eliot, and Weisgall actually does a good job weaving in references to her writing life as well as allusions to her novels. By setting the novel at the end of Eliot’s career, though, she has put that writing life in the background. The novel moves often, through flashbacks, out of 1880 into memories of Eliot’s earlier life, but these are primarily personal episodes, from her “Holy War” to her failed romance with Herbert Spencer and then her liaison with George Henry Lewes.

The World Before Her makes the relationship with Lewes the central feature of Eliot’s life, and this is where my ambivalence came in. Weisgall effectively summons up both the risks and the joys of their elopement: the fulfillment, both intellectual and sexual, that it brought Marian, the anxiety of their return to England, the struggle of their early isolation, the loving support that prompted and then protected her as she became a novelist. Against this is juxtaposed her marriage to Johnnie, who shows her reverential tenderness but suffers again and again by comparison to George’s bright, beloved presence. Marian’s mourning suffuses the novel as well as her second marriage, and Weisgall emphasizes the internal conflict for Marian as she struggles to reconcile her desires (again, both intellectual and sexual) with the reality of the man she’s now with. Johnnie, in his turn, is only too aware that in ways he can only partially comprehend, he is a disappointment to the woman he idealizes — and yet he can do no more than apologize for his failures. He isn’t interested in the fossils or the art, and he isn’t interested in her, either. On Weisgall’s telling, his jump into the canal is his attempt to free her: “Marian, I did this for you.” He married her to bring her comfort and peace, only to find her full of “dangerous energy”:

He had imagined her ardor would be spiritual, quiet, a concentrated stillness, but instead she had displayed a physical eagerness and appetite that troubled him and left him confused and even frightened. She was, as she said, indefatigable.

Weisgall gives us a Johnnie who is not (just) unresponsive to his wife’s ardor but more generally lacking in sexual drive. The physical incompatibility, however, is not played up pruriently but is part of a more complete mismatch between them: her “eagerness” is for art, knowledge, music, debate — for a life of the mind complemented by love of the body. She and George achieved this ideal, but with kind, pragmatic,conventional,  boyish Johnnie she realizes she will have to dissemble in order to be the woman he thought he married. Though Weisgall does not overtly play this card, it’s tempting to see Marian’s death so soon after their return to the life and house Johnnie prepares for her (“she felt imposed upon; an edifice was being constructed around her”) as her own jump towards a desired liberation, but of course, as she says peevishly to Johnnie, “My life — any life — is not a plot.”

The telling of these stories is smart and often affecting; though (and does this really need saying?) Weisgall does not write with the historical or philosophical richness of her subject, there’s art in the construction and grace in the style of The World Before. The counterpoint of Eliot’s story with the contemporary one is also thought-provoking (though you’ll notice I’m not engaged enough in the other plot to discuss it in any detail). So what is there to be ambivalent about, I hear you asking?

Well, here it is, and I’m sure you’ll tell me if you think I’m being unreasonable: I didn’t like the Marian Evans I met here. The problem may be that I wanted George Eliot instead: this woman — grief-stricken, irascible, compromising — may be true to the letters and journals, true, as far as we can infer, to the biography — but she isn’t true to the novels. She has no wit, no spark. She reminded me of the Virginia Woolf of The Hours: so melancholic you wonder how such a woman could have written with such verve, such iridiscent irony. Presumably these qualities too are sacrificed to Weisgall’s decision to focus on this final stage of Eliot’s life: she was in mourning, she was aging and tiring, she was struggling with a new role — that of “married woman.” But there are other decisions here too, including the emphasis on personal feelings, on the motif that Marian is “not fitted to stand alone” (reinforced here by Marian’s own manifest emotional neediness), and on the artistically enabling power of love: “she had had great good luck in love. It had permitted her to look outward — and see her stories.”

Maybe what I’m reacting negatively to, in other words, is simply the difference between Marian Evans and the voice she created in her novels. As a matter of principle, of course, I always insist on the gap between author and speaker, but in her case the narrative persona has such presence and personality it confuses this theoretical rule. It has always been the novels that I love: though I have read a number of biographies, I have never been as interested in the minutiae of Eliot’s actual life as I have been in her writing; I have never been drawn to any kind of biographical project (an impediment as I try to imagine my own version of a “cross-over” book); it’s her intellectual fearlessness and, again, her novels that inspire me — I’ve never been “fannish” about her (though it was moving to stand outside her house on Cheyne Walk). Maybe what I don’t like is that this novel imagined a way into her head, while the head I’ve aspired to get inside has always been her narrator’s. I think, though, that I also don’t like the emphasis on her weakness rather than her strength, or on the costs of her ambitions rather than their triumphant realization. Though The World Before Her is nowhere near as belittling as Brenda Maddox’s horrifying biography, it isn’t as different as I would wish, especially in its preoccupation with Marian’s (lack of) beauty. That said, I appreciated Weisgall’s (fictional) encounters between Marian and Whistler, who is struck by her combination of ugliness and grace when he sees her from a distance in Venice. The sketch he makes of her becomes a symbol of her paradoxical character. Johnny finds it improperly “intimate,” and, finding it among Marian’s papers after her death, crumples it up and burns it. The unifying thread in the novel — not just in the Eliot parts but in the modern story too — is the difference between an artist’s eye and everyone else’s. I only wish Weisgall had written a novel that made the most of George Eliot as an artist, rather than showing her to us as a woman barely able to go on, and certainly unable to write — even if that is the truth of her final days.

The May Marks Meeting: That’s What It’s All About

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Today we held one of our department’s most cherished and loathed rituals: the “May Marks Meeting.” It’s called that because one of its key elements is the annual review of students’ marks in aid of awarding our departmental scholarships and prizes, and also because we go over the standing of all of our current graduate students. Other fun features include receiving year-end reports from all the department committees.

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In the old days, this meeting used to run all day and leave everyone bitter and exhausted. One reason was that before so much of the university’s business was computerized, things like calculating credit hours and grades often had to be done manually, while many other questions could be settled only by phone calls to the Registrar’s Office. Many of the awards we administer also have very particular terms set by well-intentioned but ill-advised donors that leave too much open to interpretation (word to the wise: if you want to leave a bequest to set up an academic award, please confer with some academics about wording): does “woman student who leads her class in English” mean “woman student majoring in English who has the highest grades”? or, our long-time favorite, what exactly is “an inquiring and original mind”? Oh, the hours, quite literally, that sometimes went into impassioned debate, or frantic recalculations, or reassignment of prize money on the discovery that for some reason the chosen candidate was ineligible!

Over the years we have refined our processes, and not just because we can now call up student records instantly online: wherever possible, we have clarified or set precedents for vague award terms, and we have essentially banned nominations from the floor and shifted the burden of decision making from the department as a whole to our undergraduate committee. Today, only about half an hour was spent on this business. In so many ways, this is a huge improvement — not just because it’s more efficient but because the results are less arbitrary. I would not want any of my colleagues who happened to read this post to imagine that I am in any way nostalgic for the old days! (Well, OK, sometimes I miss the old department lounge, which was a friendlier place to spend a day.)

What I have been thinking since today’s meeting ended, though, is that the half hour we spent talking about the nominees and recipients of our prizes and scholarships was by far the best half hour of the meeting (which, today, actually ran less than 5 hours, including our lunch break). Almost everything else on the table, you see, was bad news: budget woes, declining enrollments, graduate recruiting challenges, disappointing graduate fellowship results. So much of this seems beyond our control (as one colleague finally exclaimed, “Look, I don’t know how to change the Zeitgeist!”), and so much of it seems to reflect not just a broad cultural disengagement from the humanities but the failure of our more immediate leaders to stand up and fight for us — even though, as another colleague pointed out, we teach a lot of students and we do it, on the whole, very cheaply compared to other faculties. When you go to a VP’s office seeking support for something of national significance and get turned down coldly even as all around you are the signs of administrative expansion (not to mention office renovations) … when you’re aware that there is always money for something but that we are constantly told we need to cut and cut  … well, over time it’s pretty demoralizing, and as I’ve written about here before, our work turns nearly as much on our energy and creativity as it does on our expertise and professional training.

Despite the atmosphere of generalized gloom in which we have all been working for some time, though, most of us still find ourselves excited about and renewed by our classroom time and our students. And finally, during that last half hour, that’s what we got to focus on. Listening to people speak with such obvious delight about their students’ merits and successes — from admission to Oxford to clever revisions of 18th-century poems — did a lot to counterbalance the cynicism and pessimism brought on by the earlier items on our agenda. Our collective appreciation of our students as interesting, promising individuals also confirmed (as if I needed it) how much more our teaching is about than “content delivery.” It’s not, ultimately, the marks the students earn that matter the most, after all: it’s the mark they will make in the world. Our role in making that future possible may be difficult to measure, but it’s still important to remember, and to value.

Binge Reading vs. Close Reading

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

dickfrancisI’ve undertaken to write an essay on Dick Francis this summer, in preparation for which I am reading through all of his 40+ novels. His first, Dead Cert, was published in 1962, and he basically published one a year until his death in 2010 (the last few in partnership with his son Felix, who has now taken over the franchise). That’s a lot! I’ve been reading them off and on at least since the 1980s; I own about a dozen (which used to seem like quite a few, until I really took stock) and when things are busy at work I often pick a favorite to reread, as they are both brisk and smart enough to be a nice diversion without requiring a lot of attention.

It’s always interesting approaching as critical projects books or authors I have previously taken for granted or read “just” for pleasure. When I started teaching the Mystery & Detective Fiction course, I went through that with P. D. James, Ian Rankin, Sue Grafton, and Sara Paretsky (many of the other authors on the reading list are not ones I had read before, including Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett, so the effort there was always more academic). But what’s really different about this particular project is that I don’t typically read in bulk this way. Sure, when I find an author I like, I tend to follow up, but outside of genre fiction authors with 40 or more titles to their credit are rare, and I usually get restless after reading a few books in a genre series in a row. A good example would be Mary Balogh: when I discovered I could enjoy her books, I got a whole bunch from the library, but after racing through several, I just really wanted to read something different, and now I think of her as I had Francis, that is, as a safe option when I need some filler in my reading life. (A notable exception would be the Martin Beck novels: once I got hooked on them, I pretty much just kept reading. But there are only 10 of them anyway!)

What strikes me about binge reading is the different kind of attention it requires compared to the intense close reading I’ve done for most of my recent writing — any of my George Eliot essays, for instance, or for reviews including my most recent one of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life — or, for that matter, the reading I do for my teaching. For all of these purposes, poring over details is the essence. It’s not that I’m not reading each of these novels  carefully and trying to hang on to the key details that differentiate one from another. There are plenty of these, and they matter, often substantially. But the novels do have a lot in common, and inevitably they blur together or form, in my mind, one larger whole. Since the essay I’m working on is intended as a kind of overview (though with a particular angle on women and gender roles), that’s appropriate: I’m reading all of them at once because I want to be able to generalize about them, to discuss patterns, or themes and variations, connecting threads, tropes, motifs, whatever. The individual novel is less important than the collection of novels. The more I read, the more each one I pick up reads like part of that collection, if that makes sense: the deeper into the catalog I go, the more rapidly I subordinate the particular to the general. My major challenge is not so much interpreting as keeping track: this is the first time I’ve ever used a spreadsheet as a writing tool!

And yet every novel is different. (I joked on Twitter that so far my lede is “The novels of Dick Francis are both alike and different” –ah, the bane of the undergraduate compare-and-contrast essay!) You could say that this oscillation between similarity and difference is the essence of genre fiction: its predictability is as much the appeal as the ability of a talented practitioner to surprise. I’m reminded of Josephine Tey’s sly, self-reflexive jab at formula fiction in The Daughter of Time:

Even in that, you knew what to expect on the next page. Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then? Was everyone nowadays thirled to a formula? Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about “a new Silas Weekly” or “a new Lavinia Finch” exactly as they talked about “a new brick” or “a new hairbrush.” They never said “a new book by” whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.

I do notice that interchangeable widget quality as I read these books in relentless succession — and yet I always welcomed the appearance of “a new Dick Francis” precisely because I knew what it would be like but also knew that he was smart enough to mix it up, to really make it new.

New Reviews and “Right” Reviewers

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

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Launch day never comes but what I am surprised at what we’ve pulled off, thanks to the talent, perseverance, and generosity of our contributors and the diligence, enthusiasm, and contributions of our editors! Our May issue seems to me to exemplify what we want Open Letters to be. It covers a wide range of material — I think there’s greater variety in the titles we cover than in most other literary magazines, online or otherwise — and in a range of voices. Have you ever looked at our “About” page? Here’s what the wise heads that set up Open Letters in the first place came up with as our “mission statement”:

We’ve all had the experience of reading a review that sparkled—one that combined an informed, accessible examination of its quarry with gamesome, intelligent, and even funny commentary. These are the pieces we tell our friends about and then vigorously debate.

That’s the kind of writing you’ll find in this month’s issue, so hop on over and take a look! Among its goodies you’ll find a thoughtful exploration of Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge by friend-of-Novel-Readings Colleen Shea (a.k.a. the esteemed proprietress of Jam and Idleness); an exuberantly insightful commentary on a new edition of Birds of America by the inimitable Steve Donoghue; a provocative critique of Tea Obreht’s critically-acclaimed The Tiger’s Wife; and much more.

atkinson1My own contribution this month is a review of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, which has also been receiving  a fair share of critical acclaim. You’ll have to read my review to find out if I’m joining in the chorus. I will say that the book is extremely readable, and that writing the review was good mental exercise, especially once I decided on how I wanted to structure it.

While I was working on it, a conversation broke out on Twitter about the question of what makes someone a good fit to review a particular book. OK, I started it — well, technically Mark Sarvas started it by noting he thought a particular reviewer was a “terrible choice” for a particular assignment. Happily, I pretty much “assign” my own books to review, but I puzzle over how to make good choices for myself, so I asked what he thought the parameters were. He proposed avoiding cases of “outright conflict,” cases where there’s a specific “axe to grind.” I proposed someone who could be expected to have a good conversation with the book . Gregory Cowles of the NYTBR chimed in (Twitter is fun that way) to suggest “open engagement” as the key.

As I said in that exchange, I seek out books to review that I expect to like, by which I mean books by writers I have some reason to trust, and/or on topics and/or in genres that are within my usual range of interests. This is not to say that my default plan is a good review (in fact, I try not to think in terms of “good” or “bad” reviews). I just figure that way I have the best shot of appreciating what the book does well but also recognizing what, according to my reading experience, it doesn’t do well. To keep going with the conversational metaphor, there’s no point trying to have a lengthy discussion with someone whose language you don’t speak at all. If I were a full-time professional book reviewer, such discrimination would presumably be a luxury. Sometimes when I’m paging through catalogs not finding any “likely candidates” for my next review, I hope I’m not being some kind of prima donna, or  (worse?) that I’m not being intellectually unadventurous. But who would want to read my attempt to review something like Revenge? Or, to go even further outside my normal literary habitat, Richard Hell’s autobiography, reviewed with great panache in this issue by Steve Danziger? Much better to leave these books to readers who get them.

Besides, in a way all contemporary fiction is an adventure for me, since my official expertise is entirely elsewhere. I’ve certainly found plenty to grapple with in the recent books I have reviewed, from The Marriage Plot to Two-Part Inventions. (Whether I’ve acquired expertise, or at least relevant experience, by writing about contemporary fiction on my blog is another question, not entirely unrelated, I suppose!) Mark’s question was timely in part because I was wondering if I was a good choice to review Life After Life. Reviews were coming out all around me as I worked (I managed not to actually read any of them until I had a complete, committed draft of my own!) — Francine Prose’s came out in the New York Times just this past weekend, too. Clearly someone there thought she was a good fit, and I can see why. Every reviewer who acts in “good faith,” though (to call on another of Mark’s Twitter comments) brings something fresh to the conversation. It’s possible, too, especially reading the major literary reviews, to feel as if there’s all too much insider trading (have you heard the joke about the New York Review of Books — that its real name is The New York Review of Each Other’s Books?). I think my review stands up well to Prose’s. (Mind you, she, poor woman, was probably given a word limit.)

What do you think makes someone a good fit for a particular review? Proximity or distance? Expertise or an unexpected angle? Or will you take any of these provided the conversation itself is good enough? These questions are relevant to me not just as a writer but as an editor, after all.

Also, in case you wondered, the next book I’m reviewing is Deirdre David’s biography of Olivia Manning. I think I’m a good fit: I know David’s work as a Victorianist, of course, and I’ve read both trilogies in Manning’s The Fortunes of War, and I know a lot more about early 20th-century women writers than I used to because of my reading in the ‘Somerville’ set. So far it’s entirely fascinating.

The Butterfly Effect: Penelope Lively, How It All Began

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I’m a long-time fan of Penelope Lively’s Booker-winning 1987 novel Moon Tiger.  In my first year teaching at Dalhousie, it was one of the novels I assigned in a seminar on women and historical writing (IIRC, I also assigned Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic — these details date me as much as the seminar!). I’ve read a number of Lively’s novels since then (including Cleopatra’s Sister) but none has made the kind of impression on me that Moon Tiger did. I wonder if that’s at least partly because she seems to return frequently to similar themes. In my post on Cleopatra’s Sister, for instance, I note that like Moon Tiger, it explores the ways “moments are collected into histories, which give retrospective meaning because, in hindsight, we can see the steps that made a difference, that turned things in one direction or another” — as well as in “the paradoxical relationship of unimportant individuals to the larger narratives of history.”

livelyI could say very much the same things about How It All Began, which begins with a random event — here, the street mugging of retired English teacher Charlotte Rainsford — and then traces out the effects of this one moment in the lives of an array of interconnected characters. There’s a logic, or at least an intelligibility, to the way things unfold, but that is not the same as their being destined or fated, though at times the characters are tempted to interpret their experiences this way. Lively sets up the novel with a quotation about the “Butterfly Effect” from James Gleick’s Chaos, so we know that she is deliberately playing with the possibilities of this idea. The mugger (an unsavory butterfly!) couldn’t possibly have foreseen the personal and professional consequences of his own thoughtless action: “beyond him, unknown and of no interest, he had left Charlotte on her crutches, the embattled Daltons, Henry in his humiliation, Marion, Rose, Anton . . . ”

It’s Lively’s gift, though, to make each of these people of genuine interest to us. There are no cataclysms, no dramatic show-downs, no epiphanies in How It All Began, but by the end of the novel very little is quite the same in anyone’s life, all because of the sequence of disruptions begun with the mugging. Charlotte’s injury causes Rose to stay away from work for a while, so her employer, historian Sir Henry Peters, calls on his daughter Marion, thus precipitating a last-minute text message to Marion’s married lover Jeremy, which is intercepted by Jeremy’s wife Stella — and thus “the Daltons’ marriage broke up because Charlotte Rainsford was mugged.” Marion, unaccustomed to tending to Sir Henry’s business, forgets his notes when they head to an event at the University of Manchester; as a result, his speech is a disaster, which leads Henry into various machinations designed to revivify his moribund career and recover some wished-for celebrity. In Manchester, Marion meets a man she hopes will help turn around her struggling interior design business; though her involvement with him doesn’t lead to financial prosperity (little does, in this age of recession and belt-tightening), it turns out nonetheless to be a fortuitous encounter.

Charlotte, in the meantime, who has moved into Rose’s home for her convalescence, misses having a purposeful way to pass the time. So she arranges to tutor one of the students from her adult literacy class, Anton, “a soft-spoken man, central European of some kind.” Rose, married to the underwhelming Gerry, offers to take Anton shopping for clothes for his mother back home. Rose and Anton begin meeting regularly to walk and talk, and their friendship and, eventually, their deeper feelings bring them to a difficult decision:

You live twenty years in a London suburb. Husband, children, house, cat — go to the supermarket. Then — something happens. A person happens, that’s all. Him.

You do not mess up everything that has been important to you for most of your life because you are in love with an Eastern European immigrant you have known for ten weeks. You do not do that to Gerry. To Lucy and James [their children].

Do you?

During their reading lessons, Charlotte has an idea: for the dreary literacy primers, she substitutes children’s books so that Anton will be drawn on by story. It works: he learns faster because, as he realizes, “I must know what will happen.” “Powerful things, stories,” says Charlotte. How It All Began is about that power as much as it is about chaos theory: Charlotte reflects often on her own reading, and Lively too is self-conscious (perhaps a little too self-conscious, too overt) about the appeal of what she’s doing for us. “So that was the story,” she sums it up near the end:

These have been the stories: of Charlotte, of Rose and Gerry, of Anton, of Jeremy and Stella, of Marion, of Henry, Mark, all of them. The stories so capriciously triggered because something happened to Charlotte in the street one day. But of course this is not the end of the story, the stories. An ending is an artificial device . . . but time does not end, and stories march in step with time. Equally, chaos theory does not assume an ending; the ripple effect goes on, and on. These stories do not end, but they spin away from one another, each on its own course.

Still, she is no more able to omit at least a sketch of all their endings than Eliot is with her panoply of characters in the Finale to Middlemarch. For all its interest in chaos theory, it’s not a formally experimental novel, just an artful, intelligent, sometimes quietly touching look at pretty ordinary people. Lively is particularly sharp (here as, again, in Moon Tiger) about aging. “Old age is not for wimps,” thinks Charlotte;

Ah, old age. The twilight years — that delicate phrase. Twilight my foot — roaring dawn of a new life, more like, the one you didn’t know about. We all avert our eyes, and then — wham! you’re in there too, wondering how the hell this can have happened, and maybe it is an early circle of hell and here come the gleeful devils with their pitchforks, stabbing and prodding.

Sir Henry’s pomposity and preening egotism make his lapses of memory more comical, but he too earns a certain pathos as he declines from self-important bluster to “reading and rereading in a desultory way, and eventually ceased to do even that.”

Though there’s nothing strikingly memorable or original about How It All Began, what it does, it does very nicely: it seems true, both to its characters and to what we know or feel about the tragicomedy and uncertainty of our lives.

My First Romance? L. M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle

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Once upon a time I had never read a “romance novel” — or so the story went. There’s a way in which that was absolutely true: I had never read anything marketed or labeled explicitly as a “romance novel” (a Harlequin, say). As with all literary labels, though, “romance” isn’t really that precise:all around the territory of the card-carrying Harlequin-style “romance novel” there’s a vast borderland populated by everything from chick-lit to Victorian marriage-plot novels, all of which have at least some key elements in common with romances, even if it’s only a structural similarity. I had certainly read a lot of books from that more nebulous territory before I ventured into the heartland, but (partly because I didn’t know, or think, much about what made something a “romance novel” instead of some other kind of novel, and partly because I hadn’t read any self-identified “romance novels”) I hadn’t recognized any of them as romances.

I just reread Lucy Maud Montgomery’s The Blue Castle, which is why I’ve been thinking about how (and, a bit, why) we make these distinctions. I haven’t read The Blue Castle in over 30 years; though it was a favorite of mine long ago, our family collection of L. M. Montgomery didn’t move east with me, and the only ones I’ve restocked are the first two in the Anne series. I happened across The Blue Castle at the Women for Music book sale last weekend and grabbed it right up. And as I reread it, what I kept thinking is how similar it is to so many of the romances I’ve read in the last couple of years, particularly Mary Balogh’s: I can totally imagine the entire plot transplanted to one of her Regency settings. In fact, aren’t there one or two that are very similar? But asked about my recollections of it, I would never have said it was a romance: though I remembered the falling-in-love plot, it’s the heroine’s journey of self-discovery that has stayed with me all these years. (Of course the two things frequently go together, as they do here and in many of the romances I’ve read.)

The funny thing was that this time, though the whole of The Blue Castle was intensely familiar to me, and I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting all of its familiar scenes (it’s almost eerie, isn’t it, how you can reread something you used to know well and not even know how much you remember about it, but then at each moment find yourself thinking “oh yes, this is what happens”?), it also struck me as familiar in a different way: as exemplary of a particular formula. “Formulaic,” of course, is the derogatory term other people (who me? never! OK, sometimes…) use for genre fiction. Being formulaic is perhaps the defining quality of “genre fiction,” the way that we know it isn’t “literary fiction.” (Getting past the use of “formulaic” as a judgment is actually one of the key things I work on in my mystery fiction class. First of all, another word for “formula” is “convention,” and all literary works rely to some degree on conventions. And second, once there’s a formula, you can mess with it in interesting ways, and that’s its own kind of challenge, especially because readers get very savvy about formulas — which makes them hard to surprise and impress.) The Blue Castle read like a romance this time — which is not a criticism, but just a recognition that my reading has always been more promiscuous than I thought — or that labels are less useful. It also looked like a romance this time: look at that cover! The one I grew up with is below — quite a contrast.

bluecastle2The Blue Castle is a great example of a book written for the tortoise market, which is probably why I loved it when I was around 13 and moping about being undesirable the same way as Valancy does through the first half of the book. (Count me among those who have no nostalgia for their teen years.) Much older and somewhat less self-critical now, I still enjoyed her Cinderella-style transformation into someone joyful and confident in her own beauty and sure of her own values — and yet what I liked best about it is that unlike Cinderella, Valancy is the agent of her own transformation. I also liked the lyrical nature writing in the novel, which is linked in the plot to the books of Valancy’s favorite author and [spoiler redacted!], so that the descriptions, which are usually filtered through Valancy’s emotions, draw all the elements of the novel together. I’ve never been to the Muskoka region of Ontario, but Montgomery made me wistful for it in a dreamy kind of way, as a place I’ve never seen and yet somehow know intimately:

The stars smouldered in the horizon mists through the old oriel. The haunting, persistent croon of the pine-trees filled the air. The little waves began to make soft, sobbing splashes on the rocks below them in the rising winds . . .

October — with a gorgeous pageant of colour around Mistawis into which Valancy plunged her soul. Never had she imagined anything so splendid. A great tinted peace. Blue, wind-winnowed skies. Sunlight sleeping in the glads of that fairyland. Long dreamy purple days paddling idly in their canoe along shores and up the rivers of crimson and gold. A sleep, red hunter’s moon. Enchanted tempests that stripped the leaves from the trees and heaped them along the shores. flying shadows of clouds. What had all the smug. opulent lands out front to compare with this?

Catching Up and Looking Ahead

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

Flowers

Friday afternoon I filed the last of my final grades for 2012-13. Compared to the arduous work to be done at the end of last term, wrapping up this term hasn’t been as difficult, but it also hasn’t been quite as interesting.

My last post dwelt on the perplexities of ‘coercive pedagogy.’ Marking exams last week I saw both good and bad results. Mostly, students’ performance is quite consistent with their work throughout the rest of the term; a couple of them clearly put in a lot of time studying and made a better showing than usual — and while in some ways this is a good thing, still, the very last three hours of time on a course is not the optimal time to rise to the occasion if learning, rather than scoring, is the real goal. So next year I’m going to focus on raising expectations for class time. I’ll re-institute reading quizzes in the 19th-century fiction class, and I’m going to take Yonina’s idea and introduce ‘calling cards’ of some kind in my section of Intro. One of my students told me this year that I made class worthwhile even for students who weren’t keeping up with the reading. While she meant this (I think) as a compliment, and while it reflects the effort I put into making sure our class time is informative and stimulating, I think it also gives me a hint about the problem: if students know that I’ll keep things going, then I become not the ‘value-added’ that I should be but the whole package. I think that’s fine sometimes. I’m not anti-lecture: lectures are an efficient way to get some kinds of work done, and they can be more than information delivery (when I do more formal lecturing, for instance, I often structure my comments in order to model something like building an argument from close reading). But if I’m too ready to answer my own questions in class, too willing to fill in when it should be their turn, I’m enabling their passivity as well as potentially preempting discussion that might emerge if I held back more, or made more deliberate efforts to bring in students’ voices. It has to work both ways (they have to be ready and willing to talk) — so I’ll work the problem from both sides. It’s not that these are new goals for me, to be clear. It’s just that this year more than other years my usual strategies seem not to have worked that well. (Individual classes have their own mysterious chemistry, also, so it may be that I’m overreacting to two groups that just happened to be on the quiet side.)

I’ll do a bit more housekeeping when I get back into my office tomorrow:  recycling and filing and shelving books and so on. I’ll even bring in a collection of supplies and do some literal cleaning! And then it will be time for the next phase to begin. April and May are key times for administrative work — I’ve had a number of meetings already and have more booked for next week. It’s also an important time for our M.A. students, who have to present the first stages of their thesis work at our colloquium in a couple of weeks. I’m supervising one M.A. student this summer. I’m on two Ph.D. committees too, one as a reader and the other as supervisor. Both seem likely to require quite a bit of work over the summer — in fact, one of my big tasks over the last two or three weeks has been reading through an entire draft of one thesis that might be going forward to defense before too long.

Then there are my own summer projects. It might look from the absence of book posts on this blog as if I haven’t been doing much reading, but that’s actually not true. It’s just that I’ve been reading (and rereading) in preparation for pieces to run elsewhere and I don’t want to steal my own thunder! I’m working on a review of Kate Aktinson’s Life After Life for the May issue of Open Letters Monthly, just a bit behind the big flurry of press attention it has already gotten (including reviews in major papers by not one but two of my OLM colleagues) but not so late, I hope, that nobody’s interested. As soon as that’s a wrap, I need to get serious about reviewing Deirdre David’s new biography of Olivia Manning, also for OLM.  And I’ve started a big project of rereading all 40+ novels by Dick Francis for an essay I’ve proposed for the Los Angeles Review of Books. This may be the only literary piece I’ve worked on so far for which I need to enter my notes in a spreadsheet. There’s just no other way I can think of for me to keep good track of the details across so many books. Now that my days won’t be (entirely) taken up with teaching and administrative work, and my nights also will be freed up from reading for class, I should also be able to return to reading more of the books that currently sit in tempting piles around my desk and nightstand and coffee tables, and writing posts about them too.

I have some longer-term summer plans as well. At the top of the list is completing a ‘beta’ version of the ‘Middlemarch for Book Clubs’ site that I began building last year. I think it’s in decent shape but it’s still skeletal. Once I’ve filled in preliminary versions of most of the pages I’ll make it public and solicit feedback. It’s just a one-person show at this point, but if it seems to people like a good thing, I may eventually make a pitch for some funding and support for it. And the final, most ambitious but at this point most amorphous plan is to think about where I’m going with the various George Eliot essays I’ve written over the past few years: do they, could they, add up to something larger, perhaps some kind of cross-over book project? If Rebecca Mead can do it, so can I, right? (Well, OK, wrong, since she’s a known quantity in the larger literary world — “A connected author, regularly featured at the New Yorker Festival, who is a natural for promotion,” as the site says. But a writer’s reach must exceed her grasp etc.) As part of that effort I will probably also get started on essays about the books I haven’t written anything about yet, probably starting with Adam Bede, but the most important work will be conceptual: what kind of book could it be? what do I specifically have to offer?

And on that note, suddenly I feel very busy — but in a good way! I’m hoping that having a rich list of projects I’m really interested in will help me avoid the summer slump I often fall into. I’m also going to experiment with working in different locations, to see if that makes a difference. My home office is in our basement, and long hours spent below ground at any time but especially when it’s finally pretty outside get disheartening. My office on campus, on the other hand, has a nice big window that unfortunately faces west, and as my floor is not air-conditioned, the room is basically uninhabitable in the afternoons once the temperatures rise. I may try working there in the mornings and then moving into the library in the afternoon. Even though I usually like it quiet when I’m writing, I’ve also wondered if, paradoxically, I might find it energizing to work in busier locations — a coffee shop, for instance — where the noise might blur because it would be impersonal, unrelated to me, and so (maybe) not psychologically distracting the way that, say, household commotion distracts me when I’m working at home.

This Week In My Classes: Coercive Pedagogy

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

keepcalmstudyMonday was my last day of class meetings, and now I’ve moved into the exams-and-essays phase of the term. I have mixed feelings about both final exams and final essays, but for different reasons. Final essays can be triumphant culminations of a term’s work, the products of significant reflection and practice.  But they can also be perfunctory hoop-jumping or last-minute rush jobs, and because they are final, there’s no hope that you can turn them into learning opportunities. I still comment pretty thoroughly on them, but I bet we all have that disheartening file of uncollected papers stashed away in our offices: for some students, the recorded grade (which we often see as the least important part of our evaluations) is all that matters. (One of my favorite things about electronic submissions is that I can email them the marked papers, which at least puts the ball back in their courts — and doesn’t increase my clutter.) I often rethink how I approach or build up to a final essay assignment, but I never rethink including a final essay, or essay option, in my courses: organizing ideas about literature into well-supported analysis is just too fundamental to my goals for the courses, and indeed to my ideas about the discipline of literary studies.

I do often rethink holding final exams, however. Again the results for individual students can be triumphant or passable or disastrous, but though they can produce flashes (occasionally even pages!) of brilliance, and though I try to make them meaningful reflections of the course objectives, I don’t really believe in the exam as a form that’s intrinsically worthwhile. Yet especially in recent years I hold exams in every class except 4th-year seminars. Why? Because knowing that there will be a final exam turns out to be highly motivating for a lot of students in ways that benefit them, and the course, over the rest of the term. It encourages attendance, note-taking, and (most important) doing the readings, which means it reinforces the things students need to do to be actively rather than passively present (and by actively present I don’t necessarily mean participating vocally in discussion, but just being ready and able to follow and mentally engage with what’s going on). Even for students who are highly motivated intrinsically, there are a lot of competing demands on their time and effort, and it’s rational (if sometimes regrettable) that they make choices about how to invest them based on the immediate consequences of not doing so. If mine is the only class in which the consequences are not conspicuous and quantifiable, then it may lose out in the inevitable triage. Exams, then, are one of my strategies for literalizing and enforcing my expectation that they do the work for my class too. And it does help: one sure way to focus the attention in the room is to point out that whatever we are doing — whether it’s sorting out some details of literary history or analyzing a passage from a novel — is the kind of thing that they will also be expected to do on the exam.

But final exams seem pretty far away for most of the term, and students can count on having time to catch up on notes or readings after classes end. So like most teachers, I require students to do a lot of other things that have both pedagogical and coercive aspects — depending on the class, these might include reading quizzes, in-class writing starts, online discussion threads, question sets, or reading responses, for example. The primary purpose of these smaller assignments (as opposed to the weightier ones like essays or seminar presentations, which have loftier aims) is simply to encourage students to keep up with the reading — so, they are pedagogical tools because in an English class, the readings are the main focus of all of our class time, but they are coercive because, oddly enough, students often don’t seem motivated to do the reading if there aren’t marks immediately tied to it.

I kind of hate the whole circular logic of that, though. If I tie marks to doing the reading, I am tacitly agreeing that you should be rewarded for doing what I actually believe you should just do because after all, if you don’t, what’s the point? Aren’t you in class in the first place because you want to learn about the books on the reading list — not just to read them but to grapple with them, question them, argue about them, make sense of them, see how they work? If you decide you’re fine with just showing up and letting everyone else have the fun of actually knowing what we’re talking about, isn’t that your problem, anyway, not mine? But then I go around the question again and think how often we all need to be prodded into doing things that, afterwards, we realize the benefit of. And I think how much better the class meeting is when a critical mass of students can contribute in an informed way. And I remember the arms race we’re all in: if their chem prof, or their stats prof, or their Spanish prof outbids me in the quest for their time and attention, then nobody wins! We’ve all seen attendance drop off in our intro classes around midterm time, right? And how many of us have had students tell us blithely that they missed class for a chem lab or a math midterm, or something else they felt they couldn’t fudge? I want to at least be in the game.

letter_paper_and_pen_vector_275746In my 19th-century novels class this term I tried what I hoped would be a more flexible and intrinsically valuable approach than the reading quiz: I required students to keep an online reading journal, using the journals tool in Blackboard. (I don’t like Blackboard in general, but this particular feature seemed unusually streamlined and user-friendly, so I took a chance on it.) The requirements were simple: three posts per novel minimum (no more than one per day for credit), at least 150 words and in full sentences. This way I figured they could keep track of their reading at their own pace, get regular small-scale practice writing (with the chance of regular quick feedback from me), and end up with a useful record of ideas and observations. After the first round, though, I realized that I had not been coercive enough: easily 75% of students did all three of their journals on the last three possible days, and often their posts suggested that they were way behind on the reading. What I hadn’t done, you see, is explicitly tie credit for the journals to the portions of the novels assigned for each class meeting, or insist that they stagger their work so that they were writing and thinking throughout our time on each novel. Silly  me: I thought they would just be doing that anyway, and that self-interest and forethought would motivate them to do a journal here, a journal there — rather than piling them all on at the end. But apparently all that many of them wanted (and therefore got) out of the exercise was the credit for having done it. There were certainly some students who approached the whole exercise in exactly the spirit I hoped for, and kudos to them. My strong suspicion (and in some cases, my past experience) is that these are the students who don’t need coercion anyway: they’re just into it, and more power to them. But they are a minority.

So my question heading into the next iteration of this course is just how much more coercive I should be: is it really up to me to micromanage when students write and what they write on in order to make them get the wider benefits from the exercise if I possibly can? It’s exhausting, after a while, providing all the incentives and policing all the rules. But it is also exhausting asking provocative questions about Tess of the d’Urbervilles and getting mostly blank stares in response (and shocked gasps when I “reveal” how the novel ends!). Must I make it worth their while in some tangible way to show up ready for that conversation? I’d really rather just expect them to and not be disappointed. I’m thinking, though, that next time I try this I won’t make it three posts per novel but one, or maybe two, posts per week, and I’ll tighten the requirements for getting full credit so that their posts must reflect specific knowledge of the reading installments assigned for that week. At the very least that will distribute their work (and thus mine) better across the term.

Do you fret about how to get your students to do the reading for your classes? A colleague of mine recently expressed concern and frustration that often her students are showing up without even bringing their course packs to class — not having the text in hand even if you’ve read it (and I think she believes they are also not doing the readings) is also a real problem for class discussion. But are we just perpetuating the wrong idea about why to do things (to get a gold star!) if we give marks for something as fundamental as that? Or (to go around the circle once more) are we pragmatically using whatever tools work to make sure everyone gets the most value out of the course experience? And is it their problem if they aren’t doing the reading, or ours — or both?

“Because she’s a woman”: Carol Shields, Unless

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unlessI’ve just wrapped up a couple of weeks of reading and discussing Carol Shields’s Unless with the students in my Intro class. I assigned it a bit on impulse: I wanted a reasonably contemporary Canadian novel on the syllabus, and I was also looking for a novel to pair with Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own — something that I thought could be in an interesting conversation with it, the way I thought Wiesel’s Night and McCarthy’s The Road would be thought-provking read side by side (which they were). When I started preparing Unless attentively for class, I was amazed at how many connections I found to Woolf, from questions about literary significance and merit (“This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room”) to a riff in Unless on the importance of female friendships in fiction (“Chloe liked Olivia”). From a purely pedagogical standpoint, I felt I had struck gold!

As this post from 2007 shows, my previous reactions to Unless have been mixed, but (as is often the case) I found myself appreciating the novel more the more I worked at figuring out what (and how) it meant. (One specific change is that reading it today, I am less “distanced” by the features that struck me then as overly didactic or diagrammatic.) I also read other material about it, and about Shields, including this Salon review, this review in the Guardian, this review in Quill & Quire, and, best of all, this thoughtful and spirited blog post from Kerry Clare about Unless as a contender in Canada Reads in 2011. The coductive process of comparing my reading to other people’s always challenges and enriches my own first responses.

Unless

A recent talk with a good friend sent me back to my bookshelf to revisit Carol Shields’s Unless, which I remembered having found not wholly convincing. My reaction on this re-reading was the same, though the novelistic intelligence evident throughout engaged me more fully this time. My problem here is the opposite of my complaint about ‘chick lit’ (absence of ideas): Shields’s novel is too conspicuously driven by an idea, specifically an idea about the way women are rendered trivial, condemned (as the narrator Reta says in one of her interspersed letters) to a “solitary state of non-belonging.” The novel does not have a feminist sub-text: it is, both artfully and overtly, a feminist novel. Reta confronts her “smarmy” New York editor about her next novel featuring her characters Roman and Alicia–bound, on her initial conception, for marriage, but now redirected by her epiphanic realization that Alicia must be granted her singleness:

“I am talking about Roman being the moral centre of this book, and Alicia, for all her charms, is not capable of that role, surely you can see that. She writes fashion articles. She talks to her cat. She does yoga. She makes rice casseroles.”

“It’s because she’s a woman.”

“That’s not an issue at all. Surely you–”

“But it is the issue.”

“. . . A reader, the serious reader that I have in mind, would never accept her as the decisive fulcrum of a serious work of art that acts as a critique of our society while, at the same time, unrolling itself like a carpet of inevitability, narrativistically speaking.”

“Because she’s a woman.”

“Not at all, not at all.”

“Because she’s a woman.”

The reflexivity of this moment is palpable: can we take Reta herself–who calms herself through housekeeping, who cooks lasagna, who mothers her children–seriously as a moral fulcrum? Can her story offer a social critique that reaches beyond the personal? Or, perhaps, should we want it to, as the novel, even as it chafes against cliches about women novelists being “miniaturists of feeling” (from another of Reta’s letters), refuses to reach out and claim its larger issues in larger ways? Doesn’t Shields, in avoiding bolder confrontation with the global and ideological issues that lurk around the edges of her plot (admittedly, as they typically lurk around the edges of our lives), allow her novel to settle into something like comfortable domestic realism? The woman in a burka who sets herself alight and thus precipitates Norah’s (and, in turn, Reta’s) crisis: surely in a post-9/11 novel to choose such an incident to stand for women’s desperation is no accident, but no more is made of her than that, a symbol–and an occasion for Norah’s and Reta’s meditations on goodness, rather a reductive and objectifying gesture, and one that conflates Reta’s rather abstruse complaints (women writers and thinkers are undervalued in the history of literature and philosophy!) with the truly devastating limitations on personal freedom, individualism, and well-being we can imagine might motivate a woman to actual self-immolation.

And yet at the same time as I felt Shields allowed some of the (potential) substance of the novel to become insubstantial, I felt irritated at the novel’s didacticism on its main theme, and inclined to quarrel with its insistence that despite apparent gains, women continue to exist on the margins of power and discourse. “Not so,” I kept wanting to interject, and especially when the tone and art of the novel seemed to suffer from Shields’s polemical intent. “I need to speak further about this problem of women,” Reta begins one chapter, “how they are dismissed and excluded from the most primary of entitlements.” Is my resistance to these persistent iterations the result of a generational difference? Wishful thinking, or ignorance? Whatever its cause, it distanced me from the novel.

And yet (again), there are moments and expressions in the novel that sparked poignant recognition in me, that made me reach for my notebook to jot them down for later reference. (“This is why I read novels,” Reta reflects: “so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.”) And Norah’s story, though ostensibly the occasion for Reta’s narrative rather than a “fulcrum” in its own right, strikes me as a creative and appropriate working out of George Eliot’s line about the “roar on the other side of silence” that Shields takes as her epigraph. If the novel irritated and frustrated me at times, I think it was because I wanted a different kind of book, one that gave me these people and their stories in more Eliot-like depth, with more picture and less diagram. But I’m aware, too, because the novel is also about novels and what we want from them and how we theorize and criticize them, that Shields is resisting that kind of book and offering this one instead, and I respect and appreciate her invitation to her readers to think as well as to feel.

(Original post July 9, 2007)

Diana Athill, Stet: On Angela Thirkell, Virginia Woolf, and the Embarrassment of Caste

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

StetThis month’s reading for the Slaves of Golconda group was Diana Athill’s briskly evocative memoir Stet, about her decades-long career in publishing. Other folks have been putting up their smart and detailed posts, and you should hop on over and read them if you haven’t visited already. Partly because I’m tired and busy, and partly because I can’t think of anything substantial to add to their observations, for my contribution I’m just going to quote a passage I particularly enjoyed. It comes almost at the very end, in Athill’s Postscript to the memoir, and it stood out for me because it touches on a number of issues about publishing and taste and literary merit and canonicity that have been coming up a lot in my classes this year — particularly the Somerville Novelists seminar (and as you’ll see, chronologically her remarks are spot on for that one) but also, more recently, in my intro class, where we’ve been talking about feminism and the role of taste-makers and gatekeepers in establishing and policing the literary hierarchy. The ‘crisis in publishing’ and the ‘death of reading’ are also, of course, endlessly reiterated themes in the literary world. I found Athill’s frankness and lack of pretension refreshing, her pragmatism admirable, and her examples thought-provoking.

Having seen Andre Deutsch Limited fade out, why am I not sadder than I am?

I suppose it is because, although I have often shaken my head over symptoms of change in British publishing such as lower standards of copy-preparation and proof-reading, I cannot feel that they are crucial. It is, of course, true that reading is going the same way as eating, the greatest demand being for the quick and easy, and for the simple, instantly recognizable flavours such as sugar and vinegar, or their mental equivalents; but that is not the terminal tragedy which it sometimes seems to the disgruntled old. It is not, after all, a new development: quick and easy has always been what the majority wants. The difference between my early days in publishing and the present is not that this common desire has come into being, but that it is now catered for more lavishly than it used to be. And that is probably because the grip on our trade of a particular caste has begun to relax.

Of that caste I am a member: one of the mostly London-dwelling, university, university-educated, upper-middle-class English people who took over publishing towards the end of the nineteenth century from the booksellers who used to run it. Most of us loved books and genuinely tried to understand the differences between good and bad writing; but I suspect that if we were examined from a god’s-eye viewpoint it would be seen that quite often our ‘good’ was good only according to the notions of the caste. Straining for that god’s-eye view, I sometimes think that not a few of the books I once took pleasure in publishing were pretty futile, and that the same was true of other houses. Two quintessentially ‘caste’ writers, one from the less pretentious end of the scale, the other from its highest reaches, were Angela Thirkell and Virginia Woolf. Thirkell is embarrassing — I always knew that, but would have published her, given the chance, because she was so obviously a seller. And Woolf, whom I revered in my youth, now seems almost more embarrassing because the claims made for her were so high. Not only did she belong to the caste, but she was unable to see beyond its boundaries — and that self-consciously ‘beautiful’ writing, all those adjectives — oh dear! Caste standards — it ought not to need saying — have no right to be considered sacrosanct.

Keeping that in mind is a useful specific against melancholy; and even better is the fact that there are plenty of people about who are making a stand against too much quick-and-easy. The speed with which the corners of supermarkets devoted to organic produce are growing into long shelves is remarkable; and there are still publishers — not many, but some — who are more single-mindedly determined to support serious writing than we ever were.

She’s right about organic produce (around here, anyway), and though I bet a lot of us would like to have it out with her about Woolf, and maybe also Thirkell, there seems a lot right too in her wry admission that there is no incontrovertible standard, and that  it’s all too easy to mystify one’s own preferences.