This Week In My Classes: So Much To Do! Also, a New OLM!

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It’s the time of term when I really just have to focus on doing one thing at a time: if I contemplate the big picture, it’s overwhelming. The truth is, everything does not in fact need to get done in a hurry or come due at once, but the constant appearance of more items on the ‘to do’ list creates that impression–and thus generates panic–if I’m not careful. Requests for reference letters are streaming in, for instance, and just fielding the inquiries and receiving and collating the documents and forms is a lot of virtual paper-pushing, but the deadlines are in fact spread out between now and January or later, so I have to be careful not to put these nice finite tasks ahead of more amorphous ones that are actually more urgent, if less defined. I do have one extraordinary event coming up next week, a Ph.D. defense (I’m the supervisor): it is not optimum to do these in the middle of term, but that’s how it’s happened, so by next Friday I need to review a 450-page thesis. Given just how important an event this is for the student and our graduate program, more routine business may have to get set aside–marking, for example. Nobody will suffer anything worse than a little suspense if the papers and responses currently awaiting my evaluation take a bit longer than usual to come back.

Routine business goes on, though, in all three of my courses. In Introduction to Literature, we’ve started our short fiction unit, which wraps up the basic ‘introduction to genres’ I’ve been focusing on this term. Next term we revisit all the genres but, as I said to my class today, from a position of strength! We won’t be beginners any more, so we will read longer texts as well as texts in thematic clusters that provoke different kinds of conversations than the ones we’ve been having. My expectations will go up, and they will have a larger role in presenting and analyzing the readings, including, I think, more collaborative group work. I’m really pleased with the good will and hard work I’m seeing from the students in this class so far. I know that they are feeling a lot of pressure at this point in the term too, but they’re hanging in there, and, I hope, feeling that at least in my class they are clear about what the expectations are and supported in meeting them.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we’re reading The Terrorists. It really is a superbly interesting and provocative book. Today’s focus was on the plural form of the title, and how the presentation of the different acts of violence and coercion in the novel challenge us to think about innocence and guilt, about motives and justifications, about not “whodunit” but about why. The two convicted murderers in the novel are both people for whom we feel a great deal of sympathy, while their victims hardly seem to deserve the protection of the state. Next class, when everyone has finished the whole book, we’re going to discuss our standard questions about the conclusion — is justice served? on whose terms? what does the novel present to us as a ‘just’ outcome, and how closely does that track what the law declares to be right or wrong? — and then I’m going to open up the discussion further to look back across our earlier readings and start trying to do some more comparative and synthesizing analysis, because whether they write the final exam or do the optional paper, they are going to have to reach a bit more than we’ve been doing on our assignments so far.

In The Somerville Novelists we are moving into the controlled chaos zone of planning the collaborative wiki project. It is a delicate balancing act for me. I need to avoid dictating exactly what I think will work and how I think they should do it (something I know some of them would prefer) but at the same time provide enough guidance and insight that they can make the best use of their time and resources. They’ve been doing some planning on their own, but we met as a class today and I think that it was just in time in some ways, because I realized that there was a risk of their thinking being a bit too narrow, a bit too zoomed in on the particular texts they’re working on, so that the larger framing issues the course aims to address were not part of the conversations they were having and thus not part of the plans they were making–issues like canonicity, for instance, or relationships between gender and genre. I had a chance to make this point today, I hope in a constructive way, and we will return to the discussion and to the planning process on Wednesday. I need to step back soon and let them build their wiki sections, but it’s really important that they not rush to formalizing the structure of their projects before we’ve worked out the conceptual issues better. In order to maintain the momentum of today’s conversation, I’m postponing Wednesday’s planned session on “Pecha Kucha,” which is actually a bit of a relief: I have been working industriously on my sample presentation and would have been ready for Wednesday, but I’ll be better rehearsed on Friday.

In other news, in case you missed the Twitter and Facebook announcements, there’s a beautiful new issue of Open Letters Monthly up, including what will almost certainly be my final OLM contribution for 2012: my review of Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s new novel Two-Part Inventions. I was so sorry not to be more enthusiastic about it, as her novel Disturbances in the Field is one of my all-time favorites. I wrote about it briefly here, and I wrote at length here also about my great admiration for Leaving Brooklyn. During the editing process, one of my co-editors asked if my review was an implicit response to the recent brou-ha-ha about critics being “too nice.” It certainly was not–at any rate, I did not set out to be not nice, and I hope the review does not come across as anything but what I believe it to be, which is honest and thoughtful. In his “Critic’s Manifesto,” Daniel Mendelsohn proposed that “The intelligent negative review … does its own kind of honor to artists: serious artists, in my experience, want only to be reviewed intelligently, rather than showered with vacuous raves—not least, because serious artists learn from serious reviews.” I agree that taking a work seriously is a way of honoring it and its author, and in this case (as with my review of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot) I tried to write an “intelligent negative review.” It’s not the kind of reviewing that gets a lot of attention: it’s no good at all as link-bait, compared to the outrageous pan or the “vacuous rave”–but it’s hard work and I think does more service to readers and writers than either of the more extreme alternatives.

Margaret Kennedy, The Outlaws on Parnassus

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Preparing for reading The Constant Nymph in my Somerville Novelists seminar, I was intrigued to learn that in her Times obituary Margaret Kennedy was accorded little significance as a novelist while her book on the novel, The Outlaws on Parnassus, was considered her greatest literary contribution. I promptly ordered it from interlibrary loan, and it arrived just in time for me to take a look at it before we wrap up our discussions on Friday.

First published in 1958, The Outlaws on Parnassus harks back to works like E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel rather than anticipating the more theoretical wave of criticism to come. It’s an idiosyncratic book, including  taxonomies of forms and styles along with reflections on the role of the novel and of the critic. Kennedy begins from the point that the novel is a “late arrival” and thus does not have a clear, established place among the other older arts. The relatively low and ill-defined status of the novel is one factor, she proposes, for the dearth of serious criticism of the novel; the other is the perceived redundancy of such criticism given the apparent ease of both reading and writing novels: “The other arts strike the average man as being much more mysterious and as making more strenuous demands upon him.” Novelists, too, she thinks, are uneasy about where they fit and what their work is worth.

I enjoyed her analysis of the fundamental problem confronting the would-be critic:

It is a great misfortune for any human activity if the Greeks, as was seldom the case, had no word for it. The chances are that it will stagger through the ages shackled by ambiguities, since it never got itself thoroughly defined at the start. The most useful words in which to discuss it are missing, and there is no original debate to which any dispute can be referred.

In a discussion of the drama, for instance, it is always possible to ask what Aristotle meant by irony, pathos, the unities, and the protagonists. Since he never deliberated upon the novel we do not know what meaning he would have attached to a plot or a story save in relation to tragic drama. If he did not define these things, who can? Who should?

Who should, indeed? The Outlaws of Parnassus is, of course, Kennedy’s own contribution to defining “these things” plot, story, narrative voice all get some attention, with examples drawn from Homer to Austen to Scott to Tolstoy to Joyce. Kennedy’s approach is pluralistic: she focuses on what different strategies enable, or on when and why various trends emerged, rather than declaring any of them preferable. A sample from her chapter “The Language of Thought”:

Scott, when he wrote this passage [from Waverley], would not have maintained that it was an accurate transcription of thought. He had taken some trouble to convey the state of mind. The soliloquy is addressed to the victim, which is obviously right. We are told that the dying man’s whisper rang continually, like a knell: “Ah, Squire! Why did you leave us?” The paternal fields have been identified as a boyhood memory for both of them, and a picture conjured up of a cottage and bereaved friends: “old Job Houghton and his dame” to whom the penitent has promised to be kind if he ever gets home. In 1814 no novelist would have thought it necessary or possible to do more. Few would have done as much.

By 1914 it was felt to be necessary, and possibilities were therefore explored. Writers using an orchestra of minds to tell their story for them were obliged to consider, not only the exact language of the mind, but the variety of language, as used by different minds. A technical device developed which has sometimes been called “interior monologue.” It is a soliloquy purporting to be bounded entirely by the thinker’s character, idiom, vocabulary and range of expression.

As a device it bristles with problems. . . .

After discussion of, among other things, Molly Bloom’s “reverie at the end of Ulysses,” Kennedy returns to Scott to note that when most fully possessed with a character, as she thinks he was with Jeanie Deans, exceeds “the conventions of his age” and “indicates those small, subtle changes of style and vocabulary,dictated by mood, which are the essence of the whole business; he indicates them with a certainty for which many a writer in this century, grinding out interior monologue, might envy him.” That’s the kind of moment that made The Outlaws on Parnassus winning for me–it’s not that Scott is good only insofar as he anticipates later fictional priorities, but that he’s not to be underestimated because these were not routinely his priorities.

Kennedy gets kind of snarky when she gets to the more self-conscious era of the modern novel, especially when talking about novelists who focused making the novel “professional” or “serious.” About James, Moore, and Conrad, she notes,

All three were tremendously interested in the theory of the novel; they believed that a writer ought to be able to determine in advance what a good novel should be, instead of writing one, as their forbears had done, in the hope that it would turn out to be good.

Things only got worse as novelists decided that their watchword, their measure of good, serious art, should be “integrity”: “The fact that bad artists can have it too was not so generally recognized.” She‘s impatient with attempts to distinguish on this basis between potboilers and real novels, or between art and non-art, an effort she sees as a diversion from the critic’s real task, which is “to distinguish between bad art and good art, and, above all, to help us to understand why good art is good.” Attempts to delimit the field of art a priori, on the basis of intentions, are fundamentally mistaken; as she says with admirable understatement, “It is not by a yard-stick of intentions that we can measure the distance between East Lynne and Middlemarch.”

However, the twentieth century saw the rise of “dogma” about “the only possible and permissible way” of writing novels. She looks at “naturalism,” for instance, which she sees as having given novelists new tools and ways “to say some things which had not been said before” (a good thing) but which, taken as dogma, could also lead novelists into error: “at length it became clear that there is no intrinsic magic in the formula . . . a formula can beget nothing on the imagination.” The alternative to the dogma of naturalism or realism is what she calls “the novel of egocentric perception.” Here her touchstone text is Woolf’s essay “Modern Fiction,” which she quotes at length, including the “gig lamps symmetrically arranged” bit. Rather than insisting on scrupulous fidelity to external details, the novelist wedded to this dogma “bases all on the writer’s own feeling . . . [and] shuns the external.” This too is an enabling dogma in the right hands (“by its first advocates [the Bloomsbury Group] it was regarded as a formula for the rare, the gifted, the chosen few”). But as with realism, egocentrism — however excellent in theory –could be only as good  in practice as the individual novelist:

Amongst novelists the good news spread that they need no longer provide plot, comedy, tragedy, love interest, nor catastrophe in order to get top marks. Many adopted the new method who had never got nearer to Bloomsbury than Clapham Junction. They did not see why they should not be as rare and gifted and chosen as anybody else.

The failures of “writers who should never have attempted the method” incited a backlash and “the dogma collapsed so suddenly that those who had put their shirts on it had no resource save to declare furiously that the whole art of the novel must be, in such cases, defunct.” Yet Kennedy believes that “frontier land between the novel and poetry” which “the novel of egocentric perception” had explored was worth the risks and rejoices that such experimentation had made it possible for novelists such as Elizabeth Bowen and Eudora Welty to have “a large public.” Pluralistic, as I said, a point that is reinforced by her chapter “The Choice” which surveys formal options available to novelists (with examples from Richardson, Fielding, Homer, Bennett, and Bowen) and concludes:

In making a possible list for the attic these questions can be put: Why was the form chosen? Did it suit the material? Did the author appear to understand it? Had he the gifts required by those who use it? Is any departure from it deliberate, an experiment, or merely an indication that he did not perceive its limitations? Upon the answers will depend the sheer readability of the book in thirty years’ time. Whether, even it is readable, it will be read, is another matter. That depends upon content. He need not sign his own death-warrant in advance. If he does so sign it, however striking the content, to the attic he will go.

One way this commentary seems relevant to the reading I’ve been doing for my Somerville seminar is precisely that point about choosing the form to suit the material: one of the most useful critical pieces I’ve read is an essay on Winifred Holtby and Woolf (previously discussed here) that points out that by the time Holtby wrote her novels, there were clear stylistic and formal alternatives to the social realism she chose.

There’s much more of interest in this little volume, including a chapter on didacticism in fiction (charmingly titled, “Anyway, I think so!”), another on ethics, another  on “Faking” (including a bit on famous writers who produce a “Reputational Novel,” one written only “because he thinks that his reputation demands another addition to literature”). But I’ll take my last excerpts here from her concluding chapter on “The Goosefeather Bed,” in which Kennedy takes up arms against “the appearance of a new critical term: the serious novelist.” In this chapter she laments the tendency of critics to set aside “the labour of identifying and defining the good” in favour of guaranteeing a writer’s seriousness, defined largely in opposition to his commercialism. “Seriousness” used to be a meaningful term, she says, but now is little more than a good conduct prize, indicating “a miserable decline in critical standards.” In fact, Kennedy argues, there ought to be no such distinction between types of novels, all of whom “share the great goosefeather bed of General Fiction.” What seems to bother her most, again, seems to be the idea that you can or should discriminate between kinds of novels or novelists, rather than between good and bad novels. She urges as broadminded a concept of fiction as possible, on the grounds that it is ultimately the freedom from rules, constraints, and categories that

enabled novelists in the past to write as they pleased, under a label which might be inadequate but which never quenched those who had no mind to be quenched. It never fettered or silenced the giants who won for the novel a whom on Parnassus, and to whom it owes liberty and dignity.

‘The Secret Fortresses of Her Mind’: Winifred Holtby, The Land of Green Ginger

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

Once again, I’ve finished a book from my Somerville cluster feeling, paradoxically, both engaged and adrift: it’s as if these novels have their own idiolect, their own set of terms and meanings and tropes that are related to the ones I know from my other reading, or from the general ideas I’ve picked up from reading literary history, but are somehow not quite of them. This one, The Land of Green Ginger, is Holtby’s third novel, published in 1927, after Anderby Wold (1923) and The Crowded Street (1924). It centers on Joanna Burton, a young woman full of a kind of coltish ungainly enthusiasm and romantic dreams of foreign lands and fairy tales. She’s an unlikely heroine: she’s foolish, impulsive, naive, socially awkward. But she’s also loving, with an unquenchable thirst for life and hope for better things. It takes all the dreary events of the novel (and they do rather pile up) to crush her spirit.

Joanna’s fantasies of travel and adventure come to nothing when she falls for Teddy Leigh, a handsome young man who seems as fanciful as she. Teddy comes back from the trenches of the First World War flattened by tuberculosis, a medical history he had suppressed well enough to pass as fit and be accepted into the army but which now returns with a vengeance. He and Joanna take up farming but are spectacularly unsuccessful: the work is relentless, the money is poor, and Teddy’s health gets worse and worse. They have two children, one of whom is sickly. Joanna can barely manage: she was never particularly competent before, and now all she has going for her is dogged persistence.

Like Anderby Wold and South Riding, The Land of Green Ginger offers no pastoral idyll: it shows us country life full of grime, blood, and sweat. Joanna tries to compensate for her real life by sustaining her fantasy life, but I think the novel shows this as ultimately disabling: until she faces up to the life she’s actually living, she can never be in control of it. Her tendency to live in her own head also makes her oblivious to the interpretations of her life that are made by those around her, a problem that becomes a crisis when rumours begin to circulate that she is having an affair with a Hungarian laborer, a dispossessed nobleman named Paul Szermai, who rooms with the Leighs. It’s true that she sees him as the embodiment of one of her fairy tales: in her eyes he’s “Young Tam Lin,” and he brings not only welcome help and money to the household but a different and disruptive energy. She feels only kindness for him, though, and it’s her interference with his mental life that causes a crisis between them: her sympathy inspires him to tell her the story of his suffering and loss at the hands of the Bolsheviks, culminating in the death of his fiancée. Paul becomes obsessed with Joanna, despite (as he tells her with painful bluntness) her lack of beauty, grace, or wit: in his mind, she has come between him and his beloved, and he feels that only by possessing Joanna can he recover that lost intimacy. In the meantime, Teddy is miserably aware of his own decrepitude: his doctor has ordered him to avoid exertion or excitement, so he and Joanna are no longer sleeping together, and he’s sure she and Paul are lovers.

Of course things come to a crisis, but the oddity of the novel seems to me to be Joanna’s role in all of this. She is not attracted by Paul, not tempted to infidelity, annoyingly tolerant and forgiving of Teddy’s bellicosity and paranoia. She’s too awkward and confused herself to drive the plot forward, even though she’s at its center: for her, what that means is being beset on all sides by demands and expectations. After Paul tells her his horrific tale, she can’t even lose herself in dreams any more:

Always she saw that horror. Whenever she dared to dream and to seek her kingdom, she found Paul Szermai waiting there, bearing with him his unbearable memories.

They pressed about her. They besieged her, the miseries of these men, they entered with their incessant demands the secret fortresses of her mind. She had no place of refuge from their clamorous sorrows.

‘Oh, must I bear it all for you? I have made your beds and cooked your meals for you. I have born your children and nursed your bodies in sickness. Is there no end, no end? Must you take my dreams? Will you leave me nothing, not even the untouched privacy of my imagination?’

If there is a common thread among the Holtby novels I’ve read, I think it’s visible here in that plea by a woman for room to create her own story, especially without deference to, or even reference to, the imperatives of men. For most of the novel, Joanna is hardly conscious of this longing, or at least can hardly articulate it. She seems to be blundering around, intellectually and ideologically, wanting to experience something good and beautiful more than she wants to achieve anything in particular or stand up for anything at all. She just keeps trying to do the right thing–and, as she finally realizes, she just keeps failing, over and over, at least by any external measures.

Towards the end of the novel she finally realizes that her life is in complete chaos. The precipitating events are closely connected: Teddy, enraged beyond reason by his suspicions and his hatred of his own weakness, rapes her, and she can only protest but not fight back, afraid “of his treacherous heart.” For her this is a moment of belated revelation: “She had thought her mind free to create its own enchanting world. . . . And all the time reality had imprisoned her.” She cannot escape the life of the flesh for the life of the mind. But even as she comes at last to “face the facts” of her captivity, Teddy dies of a hemorrhage brought on by his violent exertion.

Freed of Teddy, Joanna still cannot create a good life for herself: pregnant from the rape, she learns that everyone in the village assumes the child is Paul’s, and that because of her reputation nobody will work for her in the house or on the farm. At this point the distinction between reality and fantasy is irrelevant, she thinks: “It was not the truth but people’s idea of the truth which made it possible for one to live in society.” Having faced up to the real world with innocent courage, she finds that it offers her “no safety”:

She had lost hold on its essential code of manners. She did not know how to behave. She did not feel that she was the right person to be live here. . . . She had known pain before, the enriching pain of love, the futile pain of anxiety, the dragging pain of impotence before the suffering of others. But this knowledge of desolation which made her feel that the ground upon which she trod was hollow, that the world she saw was only a phantasm, that she was lost in an alien place where neither her courage nor her love could guide her, this brought the horror of defeat.

Bereft of fantasy, defeated by reality, Joanna somehow finds the strength to start all over, taking the children and returning to South Africa, where she was born but has never lived. The novel ends with her on the voyage, poised on the brink of a future that just might be better than the past. It seems a fragile, lonely hope, but there’s something unexpectedly inspiring about it. “It is true, you know,” she says to her daughter about their dreams of their new life. “If nothing nice ever happens again, this is true”–that is, as I read it, truth lies, paradoxically, in that unrealized moment of expectation.It lies in the moment of discovering a street named “The Land of Green Ginger” when you’re looking for “Commercial Lane,” as little Joanna does early in the novel when out walking with her aunts in prosaic Kingsport. The aunts won’t turn down that street, but in that moment, at least you can be sure it’s there, and who knows where it might lead: “to Heaven, to Fairy Land, to anywhere, anywhere, even to South Africa.”

This Week In My Classes: More Margaret Kennedy

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We had another session on The Constant Nymph today, and I think it’s safe to say we are getting more comfortable with it–which is not to say we have worked out our interpretations of it, but that we have a sharpening sense of what is interesting about it, of what critical conversation to have about it.

Today, for instance, we focused a lot on art, or more specifically, music, in the novel. Kennedy said herself that she meant the novel to focus on the conflict between “art” and “culture.” In the middle section we’re reading, we see this conflict embodied in the characters of Lewis Dodd, a composer, and his wife Florence. Florence fell for Lewis in part because she knows and admires Lewis’s “Symphony in Three Keys.” But she doesn’t know Lewis as we know Lewis from the first part of the novel, when we seem him to be single-minded and cruel, and also in love (in a slightly creepy, slightly idealized and otherworldly way) with the eponymous “nymph,” 14-year-old Tessa. Lewis represents, or at least stands for, art as an end in itself. In a revealing exchange with Florence, who is trying to use her social connections to further his career, she challenges his “arrogant” attitude:

“Your attitude is completely wrong. You put the wrong things first. Music, all art . . . what is it for? What is its justification? After all . . . “

“It’s not for anything. It has no justification. It . . . “

“It’s only part of the supreme art, the business of living beautifully. You can’t put it on a pedestal above decency and humanity and civilization . . .”

“You want to use it like electric light,” Lewis scoffs. He abhors the very idea of music that is commercial, consumable, even pleasurable. “Why do you write music?” asks Florence; “Don’t you want to give pleasure to people?” “No,” is Lewis’s blunt response.

Florence, as this dialogue shows, stands up for what it seems Kennedy means by “culture” (“My father’s cultured,” Lewis says scornfully). She wants her art, and her husband, domesticated: a major part of this installment focuses on the suburban home she establishes for them, which means nothing to Lewis (who literally can’t find his way around the rooms and is unable to describe it to his friends) and everything to her.

It’s easy to imagine a novel in which Florence’s belief that art can and should be commodified and incorporated into a suburban lifestyle of concert-going and outreach efforts at “bringing music to the people” would be ridiculed as tediously bourgeois, and there is something off-putting in the conventionality of her ideas. But Kennedy hasn’t set us up for quite such an easy call. The first part of the novel takes place in the chaotic home of Albert Sanger, Tessa’s father, an eccentric musical genius who lives with his family not only outside of England but conspicuously outside anything like ordinary English (or just ordinary!) morality. It’s not a pretty sight! Though the entire family has an unwavering devotion to music, which “was a sacred thing; perhaps the only sacred thing,” it’s hard to see this as very much in their favor when they are otherwise undisciplined, amoral, and just plain mean.

We had quite an animated discussion about this particular dialogue and how its terms help us think about the other parts of the novel. We also considered it as potentially reflecting on the novel itself: apparently Kennedy was quite self-conscious about the status of her own novel, which was initially received as high art (compared to Forster, for instance) but downgraded critically as it became a commercial success, so it’s odd that her characters almost anticipate the conflict between different ways of valuing art. And we talked about Tessa and tried to figure out where, if anywhere, she fits into this particular conflict in the novel. One of my students plausibly suggested that she’s a muse figure to Lewis, and I think we mostly agreed that she is at the center of the storm but not herself a part of it. She starts to get “civilized” by her time in England, which bothers Lewis in ways that reminded us of his dislike of having music packaged for a conventional audience: he likes her hair loose and wild, not plaited, and doesn’t like the way she starts to seem “sturdier.”

My favourite scene from today’s assigned reading is one in which Tessa, given a little money by her uncle and told to buy herself “something pretty,” comes back with a bowl. This too offends Lewis. “Tessa doesn’t want a bowl,” he states; “she oughtn’t to want one.”

“Why on earth not?” Florence was indignant. “It’s really an exquisite thing.”

“She has no house,” explained Lewis, taking the bowl and balancing it on one hand. “People with no houses ought to know when they are well off.”

“Take care! You’ll break it!”

“Bowls lead to houses. Houses are mainly to keep bowls in. If Tessa had a house she could buy as many bowls as she liked. She’d be done for. As it is, she should beware.”

And then, of course, he drops the bowl: “the lovely, brittle treasure lay in shivers on the floor.” Florence is more upset than Tessa.

This Week In My Classes: Meetings, Deadlines, Poems, Mysteries, and Nymphs

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

This past week was very busy, which is why I didn’t manage to post this during the week. For one thing, one of the committees that I’m on had to do a series of consultations, which involves both the actual meeting times and a fair amount of correspondence and negotiation getting things set up. Another committee I’m on got an announcement that had extremely worrying implications for our department’s MA program, and until the details got sorted out and corrected, that generated a fair amount of worried conversation and debate. These are important things, even if sometimes they seem, or turn out to really be, tempests in tea pots: one of the things most academics value highly about their work environment is self-governance, and that takes both time and concern to do well.

Then, it’s getting to be reference letter season, for grad school applications and for academic jobs, and I came up on my first few deadlines this week. Just as one example, it took me about two hours to complete a satisfactory draft of one of these letters and then print, scan, and email it according to the directions. Because every single place has a different process , some of them including forms to be downloaded and/or filled in, others requiring hard copies, and still others scanned versions, it’s very hard to create efficiencies: ten letters for the same candidate may all need to be done differently. Also, students have started taking me up on my urging to come and see me in my office to talk about their assignments. I believe very strongly in the value of such one-on-one meetings, but it’s a good thing that so far only about 10% of my 140 students this term have set them up, only because I couldn’t possibly take care of my routine class prep, not to mention my marking, if they all did. I also did some graduate advising work, responding to a revised thesis chapter while also thinking hard about and then trying to address appropriately some really important questions my student is struggling with about her degree program. These are not the kinds of things people outside the academy think about, in my experience, when they talk about our workload: everyone focuses on hours spent in the classroom, and specifically the undergraduate classroom. But taking care of our students (at all levels) involves a lot more than just showing up for class.

Last but not least, I have been working on a review for the November issue of Open Letters Monthly, and although editors get a little leeway in our usual submission deadlines, I really wanted to get it to my colleagues before the end of the week so that I would be sure to have time for revisions. I sent it off late Wednesday night: hooray! And I already have their thoughtful comments back and can tidy it up easily enough in time for the new issue. It’s mostly because I was using all my spare time to do that reading and writing project that there hasn’t been any blogging going on: for the last couple of weeks I really haven’t read anything of substance besides the book for the review (Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s newest, Two-Part Inventions) and the books for my classes. What did I think of Two-Part Inventions? You’ll have to wait for November 1 to find out!

And speaking of the books for my classes, what were they, you ask? In my first-year class we’re moving through our ‘introduction to poetry’ unit, gearing up for the first essay assignment. We read ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ and ‘God’s Grandeur’ for Monday, which gave me some reference points for a later discussion of how to develop a comparative thesis for a close reading poetry essay. For Wednesday, we read Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Fish.’ I’m not sure I’d read that poem before this year! I really enjoyed it, both as a poem to read and as a poem to work on in class; there are a lot of striking word choices that were good for provoking discussion–one of my major ‘talking points’ for them so far is “Don’t take the words on the page for granted,” and that’s just easier to do when the words are really unexpected ones! And then on Friday we worked explicitly on how to write essays about poetry. I’m trying to demystify the critical process by focusing on straightforward tasks like note-taking and pre-writing strategies. I have ended up talking a few times about my own writing strategies, including the things I find difficult and some of the ways I try to get past them. As I had a deadline of my own to meet, how to get the writing done was very much on my mind! I hope it’s useful to them to realize that writing is something I do, and struggle with, too.

In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we’ve just finished The Maltese Falcon and started An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. I really have nothing new to report about these books or the experience of teaching them, except that I think that this time I’m finally done with The Maltese Falcon, at least for a while. I’m starting to tune out when re-reading it for class, which is not good.

In the Somerville seminar, we’ve finished with South Riding, which generated lots of very lively and interesting discussion right to the end. I’ve been so encouraged by the response to it, and also so engaged by the novel myself, that I’m feeling frustrated that I can’t quite think of another course in which I could reasonably assign it. We used to offer a year-long class called ‘The Novel to 1900,’ which was fun, if challenging to those of us not altogether at home in the 18th century, but even if that was still on the books, which I don’t think it is, 1936 is even more of a stretch than 1908, the date of A Room with a View, which was the novel I used to close the course with. We now have a class called ‘Fiction of the Earlier 20th-Century,’ but it’s not specific to British fiction, and a class called ‘British Literature of the Earlier 20th-Century’ which is, obviously, not just novels. Both of these would be a real stretch for me! And also they are usually offered by the people in our department who do specialize more or less in these fields…though technically I think we do not currently have anyone whose research area is ‘earlier’ 20th-century British literature. The easiest thing to do with anomalous interests such as mine in this cluster of ‘Somerville’ texts is to offer a special topics seminar at the upper level, which is what I’m doing now: to some extent that relieves you from the burden of really wide or deep knowledge. Maybe I’ll put in for one of the more general courses one day, though, just to shake things up.

After South Riding, we started Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph. It doesn’t seem quite as odd to me this time as it did when I first read it, which I hope is a consequence, at least in part, of the work I’ve been doing for this class. But even in the context of my seminar, it’s an anomalous book, not obviously related in theme, style, or structure to our other readings. We have come up with some ideas about ways it relates to them, including its interest in women’s roles and women’s education, and also its attention to the potentially destructive force of sexuality. Each of our other novels, though, at least arrives in front of us with some obvious critical frameworks; each of them belongs to a critical conversation that’s more or less familiar, even if our specific examples are not the most canonical ones. The Constant Nymph does not. Scrounging around for explicit commentary on the novel, I have come up with a few ideas: there’s a lengthy discussion of it in one book on literature of the 1920s as a “sex novel,” for instance, meaning (in the context that book establishes) a novel focusing on a young female protagonist and on female sexuality. That does fit with our general impression that the book is a bit like Lolita–the “nymph” of the title is fourteen when the novel begins and the love interest of a much older man, though he doesn’t exactly act on, or even quite acknowledge, his feelings for her at first. Kennedy herself said the book was meant to explore the conflict between “art” and “culture,” so we’ve been kicking that around a bit. It is unnerving in some ways not to know where I want our discussions to go, what patterns or priorities to pursue. But the class is full of smart, curious people and I think we are doing well trying out ideas and seeing where they take us.

One thing we talked about right away is how obscure this novel is now compared to how famous and popular it was in its early days. One sign of its popularity is that there were three different movie adaptations of it, including one in 1943 starring Joan Fontaine. I was amazed that the trailer for this version turned up on YouTube. Watch it and see if you don’t suddenly want to read The Constant Nymph for yourself! Except that you might end up surprised at just how little the book resembles what you get here.

I hope to get some good extracurricular reading done in the next week or two. I have to, in fact, as both of my reading groups have meetings coming up! For Slaves of Golconda we are reading Rose Macaulay’s Crewe Train (remember, you can join in if you want!) while for my F2F group we are reading Wide Sargasso Sea, which is one I really should have read before now. I also have to read a PhD thesis for a defense on November 16, and keep up with the books for my classes … should be another couple of busy weeks.

South Riding: They like it! They really, really like it!

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

I’ve just finished rereading South Riding, ready for our final discussion of the novel in the Somerville seminar tomorrow. I was caught up in it both intellectually and emotionally, more than I was when I first read it last spring. Rereading made the subtleties of the novel’s construction more apparent: the sophisticated way Holtby weaves together the stories of her vast array of characters, the tensions between their disparate visions for their own lives and the life of their community, the ironies of unintended consequences, the conflicts between political commitments and personal affections, the books each named for a council committee. More apparent also this time was the role of the communal events (concerts, festivals)  in returning us over and over to the intermingling of these lives and values. Though there are strong personalities that dominate the novel, it is, ultimately, a social novel, and our realization that even the strongest individuals cannot really shape their own destiny–cannot control either the forces of history or the forces of their own nature–is shared, in the end, by Sarah Burton, who in a different novel would be the heroine but here learns to subordinate her ego to a communal story.

I think she also learns to accept that there are currents in life outside her control. I wrote before of my dissatisfaction with Sarah’s discovery of her love for Carne. I still find it melodramatic in its presentation, but on this reading I had more ideas about how it belonged, thematically, to this novel. Sarah arrives in South Riding keen to bring reason to bear in the service of progress and reform. In a pivotal exchange with Mrs. Beddows, she asserts,

I think we have to play our own Providence – for ourselves and for future generations. If the growth of civilisation means anything, it means the gradual reduction of the areas ruled by chance – Providence, if you like.

Mrs. Beddows feels “sorry for the wilful unbroken girl before her.” South Riding is partly the story of how Sarah’s will is broken, and I’ve been thinking that her love for Carne is one of the ways that happens. Love – passion – desire – is not reasonable; it cannot be brought neatly under our control. It is, I think, shown as part of the natural world, in which raw forces like sex and death wreak havoc on well-laid plans. Many of the novel’s subplots, in fact, show people’s lives similarly wrought upon by their intractably physical elements: people get sick, they get pregnant, they inherit ‘tainted blood,’ they die. Sarah knows that Carne represents, politically, everything she opposes, and yet she loves him. Her feelings are characterized, in one of Holtby’s characteristically dry chapter titles, as a form of temporary insanity. In her conversation with Sarah after Carne’s death, Mrs. Beddows helps her to see that love carried her past their ideological differences: it was a response to Carne’s full presence and complexity as a human being. “He was everything I dislike most,” exclaims Sarah, ” – reactionary, unimaginative, selfish, arrogant, prejudiced.” “He may have been all that you say he was,” responds Mrs. Beddows,

but he was much more. He was courageous and kind and honest. He was, in dealing with people, the gentlest man I ever knew. He knew all about loving. . . . He never ran away from failure; he never whined, never deceived himself, never blamed other people when things went wrong. In the end – it’s not politics nor opinions – it’s those fundamental things that count – the things of the spirit.

Without suggesting that specific policies don’t matter, Holtby advocates the primacy of humanity over ideology. That’s an ideal, she suggests, for how we live our individual lives, but it’s also the model she endorses for civic government, because, in the novel’s simplest and most compelling idea of all, we’re all in it together. Thus Sarah’s conclusion:

She was one with the people around her, who had suffered shame, illness, bereavement, grief and fear. She belonged to them. Those things which were done for them – that battle against poverty, madness, sickness and old age – was fought for her as well. She was not outside it.

We end not with Sarah’s love for Carne, but with her love for the South Riding.

South Riding has been a hit with the class. Frankly, I’ve been both pleased and a little bit puzzled by their outspoken enthusiasm. It’s buoying, for sure, not just for me, but especially for them, given that before long they are going to be deep into their independent reading projects, and I think their expectations are now higher about what they might find as they explore other books that they hadn’t heard of before. The things they like about the book include its range of characters, its political and social engagement, and its dry humor. I was worried that they would find the novel too diffuse, but they’ve talked a lot, with enthusiasm, about the frequent changes in perspective and how Holtby keeps shifting and complicating how we see people and situations. We can’t ever rest in simple judgments, seems to be the message they are taking away from that. The introduction of the love plot provoked a lot of discussion, but mostly they had accepted Sarah’s declaration less skeptically than I had. To be fair, it’s prepared for by a broad hint on the back cover blurb, as one student pointed out with justifiable annoyance. But they liked the frankness of Sarah’s confrontation with her feelings and the way her love contradicts her political principles. I’m curious to find out how they react when they see how things turn out! It is certainly not a conventional romance plot.

It’s great that they like it and are really energized to talk about it. I know I won’t have to carry the discussion tomorrow! But at the same time, I am reminded why I usually try to set the terms of my classes to rule out a lot of talk about ‘liking’ or ‘not liking.’ I have allowed, even encouraged, them to explain why they like South Riding, partly because it’s so clear that they do and it’s interesting to know why. And their positive response to the book is clearly motivating them to think about it and ask questions about it and make connections and generally be good readers of it. Yet there’s also a temptation for them to use the book they do like as a stick to beat the books they didn’t like as much or didn’t find as easy to appreciate–that is, both of the other books we’ve read for the course.* There’s a risk in setting up South Riding as a standard for success, as if other books that have very different aims and methods are not as good in some absolute way: for our purposes, that’s not a very productive way to proceed. It encourages complacency about their own preferences and interpretations and reading habits, which is just the kind of thing I’m guarding against when I worry that I’m not challenging my own reading of Gaudy Night. I’m certainly not sorry that so many of them seem so fired up about South Riding. I’m just going to do my best to channel the resulting energy back into ideas about why Holtby’s form and style serves her ideas so well, while Brittain and Sayers are doing other kinds of things.

*I can’t help but reflect that this is how I sometimes use Middlemarch. Ahem. But my purposes here are not the same as my purposes in the classroom. If I were teaching Madame Bovary I would save the possibility of a comparative critique of that kind for the very last day. The rest of the time would be all about appreciating Flaubert for being Flaubert. Honest!

This Week In My Classes: Love Poems and Social Novels

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

In English 1000, we’ve started our first poetry unit. We’ll be doing more poetry after Christmas, organized into what I hope will be provocative thematic clusters, but for now we’re just working through the basics of reading and analyzing poetry — meter and scansion, figurative language, poetic forms and modes. We haven’t really talked much about specific poems yet, since I’ve been using the assigned ones mostly to teach vocabulary for poetic devices, but on Wednesday we’re reading a little group of love poems and I hope to open things up a bit more than I have been doing so far. I haven’t quite decided how, though. The poems are Anne Bradstreet’s “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” EBB’s “How do I love thee,” and Shakespeare’s “Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds.” I guess some talk about sonnet form is probably appropriate, and about EBB’s appropriation of the conventions of love sonnets for a woman’s voice. Maybe we’ll get a bit silly and play Poetry Survivor: set up some standards for a great love poem and then vote one off the island out of the anthology as the weakest of the three. All this talk about metrical variation and synecdoche has probably made them afraid to react viscerally to a poem! The challenge, an exercise like that might show them, is to channel that gut reaction into an energetic analysis of the actual poetry.

In English 2040, it’s hard-boiled detective fiction time. Every year I swear I’ll dump The Maltese Falcon for The Big Sleep and I never do. But the thing is, first of all, that I really do think The Maltese Falcon is brilliant, and it teaches so well, by which I mean it brings up so many of the themes we’re interested in across all of our readings. Also, and this is not incidental, I have been working with it for a while and feel pretty confident talking about it. Even just considering how convoluted the plots of these novels are, that’s no small thing! Still, I’m sure The Big Sleep is just as brilliant in its own style. Maybe next year, since it looks like I’ll be teaching this class yet again…which is fine, as I really do enjoy it. I just find it kind of funny that the class I have offered most often in the last decade is this one, because it gets bums in seats (83 bums this year, to be precise).

Most fun this week is working on South Riding in the Somerville seminar. The students are very engaged, especially now that we’re past the initially disorienting ‘getting to know all the characters’ phase. We had a lively discussion today about the variable points of view in the novel and how they affect our understanding of the community and also our sympathies. One idea we considered is that the constantly shifting perspective makes it hard for us to arrive at moral judgments about the characters: just when we think we condemn their choices or actions, we are brought to see them in a different context. And yet there seem to be exceptions to this, people whose points of view show off their faults or limits. Alderman Snaith attracted the most attention. He seems clearly set up to be the bad guy, but it was pointed out that he isn’t really after anything so different from what everyone else wants (money, power, success)–he’s just smarmier about it. Also, he is indifferent to suffering caused by his pursuit of his own interests. Holtby has given him a back story that seems calculated to awaken our sympathy: it seems that he was abused or raped as a child by “evil men” and he’s been left “a psychological cripple for life,”  feeling only horror at “all thoughts of mating and procreation.” We haven’t really worked out how this particular trauma fits into the larger themes of the novel, or even into the overall portrayal of his character, but we were noticing other scenes or intimations of sexual violence and the destructive potential of sexual desire, from the death of Mrs. Holly in childbirth to the suggestion that Robert Carne raped his wife (the word he uses is “forced”). It’s a novel full of the rhythms and forces of the natural world, but it’s hardly a pastoral idyll: perhaps this is a way of showing that human life, despite the best efforts of civilization, is driven by the same powerful urges. One implication would be that reform (social, political, educational) is both urgently needed and inevitably futile. Sarah Burton’s idealism can make us want to stand up and cheer. “We’ve got to have courage, to take our future into our own hands,” she declaims to Mrs. Beddows. “If the law is oppressive, we must change the law. If tradition is obstructive, we must break tradition. If the system is unjust, we must reform the system.” But Mrs. Beddowss has “seen compassion impotent and effort wasted”; she reflects on the parade of miseries she has seen, on illness and suffering and injustice all brought on “by circumstances which neither courage nor intelligence could have altered.” Sarah dreams of “the gradual reduction of the areas ruled by chance,” but so far the novel has not filled its readers with optimism that such transformation is possible. Perhaps the novel is a lesson in lowering expectations. As Alderman Astell, the once-idealistic socialist, remarks to Sarah, “You begin by thinking in terms of world-revolution and end by learning to be pleased with a sewage farm.”

This Week in My Classes: Am I Making Excuses for Gaudy Night?

Rohan Maitzen15 Comments

I’ve confessed here before that I can have trouble staying “objective and professorial” during discussions of Gaudy Night because I love the novel so much.  I have loved it pretty much since the first time I read it, which is a long time ago: my personal copy is from a 1978 edition, and though I can’t see any sign on it of when it was actually printed, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was close to that date, which would mean I’ve been rereading it since I was 12 or 13. (Here’s a possible clue: I have the matching edition of Busman’s Honeymoon, and it’s inscribed to me on my 13th birthday, in 1980.)

I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing for me to let on that I love a particular novel. I make no secret of my strong feelings about Middlemarch, after all, but I am also clear that it’s not my job or my purpose to get students to love it, or even like it: I’m trying to help them understand it, and teach them to appreciate it. I also teach novels I don’t particularly like, though I don’t typically make a big deal about that; again, my job (and theirs) is about something else.  What’s important is that I encourage, respect, and support students as they develop their own interpretations: my feelings about the novel should not come into this, only my knowledge of the novel and my experience thinking about how its different elements are related, and what they mean.

But are these aspects — my feelings, and what I’ll call my ‘expertise’ — really so unrelated? Don’t I love the novel because of how I interpret it, and don’t I interpret it as I do because of the time and thought I’ve put into reading and rereading it? Or is it that I read and reread it because I love it, and thus I interpret it as I do because of how I feel about it? What does it mean to “love” a novel anyway? And since this particular novel focuses on precisely the challenge of integrating head and heart, can’t I just stop worrying about which came first, the love or the understanding, and be happy that here I find the perfect fusion of the two?

I could, of course, and yet it wouldn’t be intellectually honest not to think carefully about the problems my students routinely raise on their first reading of the novel, and intellectual honesty is the fundamental principle of Gaudy Night. So here are some of them, and some preliminary responses. I think they are intellectual responses, responses based on my ‘objective and professorial’ understanding of the novel. But I worry that they are excuses, ways of getting around problems with the novel, that are motivated by my loving desire to protect it. Maybe — probably — they are some of both! What do you think?

1. The novel is elitist, and/or Harriet is elitist, about education.

I actually think that this is true, but for me it’s not a telling criticism of either Harriet or the novel. Both idealize a certain kind of education, and a set of values, according to which a university education is not for everyone the way we like to think (or talk as if) a university education is for everyone here and now. I thought this objection might be tempered in my Somerville seminar because we’ve already spent quite a bit of time thinking about Oxford as an idealized space as well as a place with very particular social and historical significance for women at this period. Up to this point the university had never been a democratic institution or even, really, a meritocratic one, but women’s access to it mattered and the dream of Oxford as a means for women to transform their lives was very powerful. Gaudy Night explores both this dream and its limits. I also think that it is self-conscious about this as a dream, including for both Harriet and Peter, neither of whom ever really imagines giving up the rest of their lives to embrace an academic vocation. And academic life is shown very much as a vocation, not a profession. It isn’t right for everyone. It isn’t even, as I’ve said, right for Harriet. Oxford itself, too, is shown to be much more (or is it much less?) than that ideal. But to Harriet, and, I think, in the novel overall, the life of the mind that Oxford symbolically represents is something special, something worth aspiring to and cherishing above other options. If that’s elitist, sign me up, I guess.

A key episode that always provokes intense reactions is Harriet’s conversation with her former classmate Catherine Freemantle, now Mrs Bendick, who has become a farmer’s wife. “What damned waste!” Harriet thinks; “All that brilliance, all that trained intelligence, harnessed to a load that any uneducated country girl could have drawn far better.” Is Harriet just being a snob? She asks Mrs Bendick about the “compensations” of her work and Mrs Bendick asserts that it is “a finer thing than spinning words on paper,” but she goes on to admit that she misses “things” and feels resentful of what she has given up. “It seems queer to me now,” she says, “to think that once I was a scholar.” If Sayers had wanted us to see working the land as a genuinely valuable alternative, couldn’t she have made Mrs Bendick happy and confident in her choice instead? Is she, therefore, dismissing farming as lowly labor, unworthy of a certain better class of woman, or is she regretting that a highly educated woman (still a rarity, in 1936) has lost, or given up, the opportunity to use her education?

There’s also Miss Cattermole, the current student who’s getting in all sorts of scrapes and hates that her parents have insisted she go to Oxford when what she wants is to be a nurse or a cook. “We haven’t got room for women who aren’t and never will be scholars,” rages Harriet after their conversation. Cattermole’s mother is of the generation that fought “to get things open to women,” and now Cattermole feels herself a victim of her mother’s feminist ideology. When Harriet demands, “Why do they send these people here?” is she, once again, being elitist, asserting that not everyone is fit to go to university? Or is she upset that a rare space at a women’s college is being wasted on someone who would be perfectly happy without this particular kind of specialized education? Who’s at fault here, anyway? Oxford, for not being right for Cattermole, or Cattermole’s mother, for mistaking her daughter’s opportunity for her daughter’s obligation?

2. The charge of elitism extends also to a more general complaint about class prejudice, and the identity of the perpetrator adds to the sense that the novel overall is kind of snooty.

I think this is partly true, but that it oversimplifies. Harriet herself is not upper class or aristocratic, and the difference in class and wealth between her and Peter is a major stumbling block in their relationship. Her education has changed her social position in some respects, and Oxford itself is a symbolically leveling environment for their relationship (their academic gowns are the same size, even). The privilege represented by the university is not exactly a matter of class, though, and the prejudices most on display in the novel are against the uneducated, or the enemies of (women’s) education. Annie’s own position at the college is a bit of a red herring, as far as class goes: yes, she’s working as a servant, but if things had gone differently she’d be a faculty wife. She’s dangerous and vilified because of her Nazi-affiliated views on women’s proper place, not because the novel (despite being set in a hierarchical, class-conscious world and full of people who take that structure for granted, Harriet included) is anti-working-class. I usually suggest that the central crime in a mystery novel can be read symptomatically. In Gaudy Night, the most dangerous force is a regressive sexism directed against women who have gone, or seek to go beyond, their historically limited roles through education. Such reactionary misogyny is, tragically, not a fiction in today’s world, where as we’ve just seen, it can take a tragically violent turn. Early Oxford women obviously did not face the same literal level of threat, but Annie embodies a version of the kinds of hostilities they really did incite.

3. Peter swoops in and solves the case, reducing Harriet to the status of a sidekick.

BalliolIt’s true that Peter is the ‘closer’ on this case. It’s also true that he withholds information and delays identifying his chief suspect, nominally on the grounds that he does not have sufficient proof and does not want to drive the suspect into hiding. But he also does so explicitly on the grounds that he thinks Harriet can figure things out for herself. He plays very nearly the ‘Great Detective’ role, including a classic reveal scene in which he lays out the facts of the case as he has sorted them out. Harriet’s role in the dénouement is closer to that of victim than that of heroine or detective: in classic Gothic style, she goes wandering down a dark hallway and nearly gets herself killed. But Peter makes clear that he solved the case only with the help of Harriet’s dossier, and Harriet  is taking risks in dark hallways because Peter has joined her on the case but not excluded her from it. Worried for her safety, he nonetheless accepts her right to take risks and encounter danger. Early in the novel he is injured because of a close encounter with a bad guy; now it’s her turn. It might be neater, if equality is the standard, for them to have worked literally together at each stage of the investigation, but their work until this point has been complementary yet not without conflict, and it’s not until after the case has been resolved that their relationship finally achieves mutuality (and they can finally kiss!). Disappointment that Harriet doesn’t triumphantly solve the case on her own ignores the novel’s dual purpose: it’s both a detective novel and a novel about the complicated relationship between Harriet and Peter. It is set up from the beginning so that both of these aspects need resolution. Harriet needs to figure out how she can retain her autonomy and love Peter. Feminism doesn’t have to mean doing everything without anyone else’s help. And love doesn’t have to mean capitulation. Harriet herself at one point imagines how much easier it would be to be “ridden over roughshod,” because hammering out an equitable alternative is exhausting in a world that sets up obstacles rather than providing models. Peter is not the man for that job, however–and a good thing, too, or she’d have to do a full-out Jane Eyre on him before they could marry with no threat to her self-respect.

4. Peter buys Harriet a dog collar to wear. He even wants to put his name on it! Clearly that’s a sign that their relationship is about her submission and his control.

 When I brought this up on Twitter, other readers promptly chimed in to say that, like me, they had never been perturbed by this–one noted that the dog collar is a handy solution to a pragmatic problem (what else could she wear as protection against strangulation?), while another remarked that her sense of the Harriet-Peter relationship was already strong enough at that point that there didn’t seem to be a problem. All three of us are resisting reading the dog collar symbolically, or at least as a symbol of ownership or control. In any other book, I don’t think I would resist this reading. Am I being disingenuous in arguing that I think it’s crucial to put the incident and the gift in context? Peter spends most of the novel explicitly not controlling Harriet: that’s not what he wants from their relationship, and the dog collar is proposed, in fact, as a means to her ends — with its protection, she can continue to take whatever risks she wants and live to fight (or write) another day. He doesn’t force it on her: she accepts it and later chooses to wear it. I’ve always felt that its symbolic role lies in that acceptance, which ties back to the problem of balancing independence with love. She has held Peter at bay because she believes she’s only safe (only retains her dignity and autonomy) if she takes nothing from anybody, or at any rate takes nothing from him. Gaudy Night is about her evolution away from that premise. What she finds at Oxford, and through her work on this case, is enough confidence in herself not to fear his generosity. The admittedly weird but fundamentally pragmatic gift of the dog collar opens the way to the gift of the chess set, which is an apt marker of the changing balance in their relationship. (There was another interpretation bandied about on Twitter, something to do with dog collars and their, er, erotic potential. Can we just rule out of order any attempt to turn this into 50 Shades of Sayers? As your whimsy takes you, indeed…)

5. In Busman’s Honeymoon Harriet is marginalized even further from the detective plot; this just completes the downward trajectory of Gaudy Night.

It is definitely true that in Busman’s Honeymoon Harriet is no longer on the case, and if the true measure of equality in their marriage was co-detecting happily ever after, then I concede the failure. But Harriet is a writer, not a detective! In Gaudy Night, that’s the strength she brings to the case and also the real quest she’s on (transforming the two-dimensional plot of her own detective novel into something more layered and complex)–well, that and learning to love again. I love Busman’s Honeymoon too, but the murder case in it always annoys me because I’m reading it for the romance. Gaudy Night is special because all of these aspects converge so splendidly.

Oh dear. Although I believe everything I’ve said here with all my head and my heart, and also believe these interpretations are entirely, dispassionately, defensible, there is an air of special pleading, isn’t there? And a disconcerting tendency to talk about Harriet and Peter as if they are really truly real … Please feel free to pitch in with your thoughts on the novel, and particularly on Objections 1-5. Clearly, I can use all the help I can get. Luckily for me, and perhaps also for them, tomorrow we begin discussions of South Riding, which I don’t know nearly well enough to love.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

It’s Canadian Thanksgiving today. We cooked and ate our traditional dinner yesterday, which means today we can relax, catch up on some work, and enjoy leftovers for dinner. Despite a threatening forecast, it’s a bright sunny day so far; yesterday was gorgeous too. The foliage isn’t as bright as it sometimes is at this time of year, but it was still lovely on our traditional family walk in Point Pleasant Park yesterday:

 

 

And here’s our traditional Thanksgiving dinner: roast pork, mashed sweet potatoes, boiled new potatoes, sauteed carrots and mushrooms, green beans, and homemade cranberry sauce:

Dessert is apple crumble with vanilla ice cream. Delicious!

A Year in the Life of a New Romance Reader

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

While I was sick last weekend I downloaded a few light reads from the library to help cheer me up and pass the time. All of them were romance novels — which (as I emerged from my Neo-Citran haze) struck me as noteworthy and led me to the realization that it has been about a year since I posted “Confessions of a (Former) Non-Romance Reader.”

In that post I admitted that I’d always been casually dismissive of romance novels because I assumed they were “so formulaic as to be essentially interchangeable and so numerous they are clearly also disposable.” The mind-opening discovery (one that, as I said, would not have been such a revelation to me “if I’d been taking the whole genre more seriously from the start”) was that romance is not so much a formula as a form, a genre which, like mystery or science fiction, “can contain multitudes.” The challenge, once I had belatedly grasped this point, was to pick out ones I would enjoy from the overwhelming array of available titles. A year later, this is still the biggest challenge! I’m aware, now, that there are many subgenres of romance, and both within and across them there’s a whole array of ‘tropes’ which can be tweaked, revised, and subverted in unlimited permutations. And then, of course, there are the more individual factors like an author’s voice and style and pet interests (literal as well as metaphorical). Sometimes it seems you should be able to enter your preferences into some kind of recommendation generator and walk away with exactly the book of your dreams. Wanted: one paranormal romance set in 13th-century Spain, told in first person, featuring an alpha male, a prostitute with a sad back story and a heart of gold, a marriage of convenience, and an English bulldog! And in fact you probably could come pretty close to this mix-and-match perfection, if you were really clear on what you wanted and had enough sources to suggest titles.

As a relative newcomer to the world of romance fiction, I have been discovering my own preferences through trial and error. I’ve tried not to think too hard about what they might reveal about me (as a person or a reader), but I still feel that there’s something more intimate about romance fiction than about mystery fiction because “few of us (happily) have personal experience of murder, but most of us (happily or not) have been through our own experiences of relationships”: I still suspect that “the things we find unrealistic, sentimental, naive, or foolish are as potentially revealing as the things we find admirable, desirable, dreamy, or delightful.” I have also still found the romance novels I’ve read to be mostly slight or insubstantial: though I see no reason why they should be considered a guilty pleasure, for me they are definitely diversions, books I don’t feel obliged to read with great care or without interruption or, in general, to take very seriously. I’ve been reading them for fun. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But it does mean, for instance, that I shrug off bad writing (and bad grammar! get some editors, you supposed professionals, and learn the difference between ‘lay’ and ‘lie’!) and clichés and stereotypes and other signs of intellectual laziness more casually than I do in books for which I have higher expectations. I’m also still not aware of any books explicitly and deliberately within the genre of romance that ‘transcend the genre’ (that problematic phrase!) and take us into the literary realm the way something like The Maltese Falcon has been seen as doing for crime fiction. Maybe when a novel about relationships goes really literary it simply shades into the ‘marriage plot’ novel and thus loses its identification with genre fiction. (An interesting potential case study: Mark Helprin’s new novel In Sunlight and In Shadow sounds pretty romantic in this review, while in this one the same novel is condemned as a bad imitation of Danielle Steele and Nora Roberts, “a bad romance novel, driven by a preposterous, melodramatic plot and filled with some truly cringe-making prose.” The genre affiliation, that is, comes up only as a condemnation–though Kakutani does seem, by implication, to be allowing that there is such a thing as a good romance novel.)

So what do I like in my romance novels, you may be wondering? Well, as it was Jennifer Crusie’s Anyone But You that turned me around the first time, it’s probably no surprise that my favorites are in that vein: sprightly “contemporaries” with mature characters (mature enough, that is, to be established in some kind of self-respecting career and otherwise doing something interesting with their lives besides falling in love) and a sense of humor to leaven the sentimentality of the love plot. I suspect my preference for novels that closely approximate the film genre of romantic comedy comes from my own resistance to taking the whole idea of instant attraction, mutual adoration, and living happily every after very seriously. I didn’t know this before, but apparently I am both a romantic and a cynic, and so the cheerful lack of realism in this particular approach works well. I’ve read a lot of Crusie’s novels, and of them, Anyone But You (which I reread last weekend) remains my favorite (I find the heroine’s inhibitions about her aging body tedious, but that’s really my only grumble), followed by Bet Me, Welcome to Temptation, Faking It, and (to my own surprise) The Cinderella Deal. These are all ones I’ll happily reread, sick or not. I also really enjoyed Maybe This Time, which is a sly rewriting of The Turn of the Screw.  Second best so far (though with reservations) is Julie James: Practice Makes Perfect is fun and, again, sprightly, and the ones I’ve read in James’s FBI / US Attorney series mostly entertained me without annoying me,  though I find her men a bit too predictably ‘tall, dark, and smoldering’ and her women too physically perfect and too prone to need rescuing at the end. I liked A Lot Like Love best of these ones because I enjoyed all the details about wine: I realize this may be the wrong place to focus in a romance novel, but hey, it’s my fun that this is all about, right? And this turns out to be a trend: I enjoyed Ruthie Knox’s Ride with Me as much for the biking and the scenery as for the witty repartee and the sexual tension, and though I found Nora Roberts’s Bride Quartet too saccharine for my taste overall, I was intrigued by the inside look at the lives of a florist, a baker, and a photographer. While I like the ‘she humanizes him’ trope of The Cinderella Deal, it’s the painting that really engaged me. I like the emphasis to be more on the emotional and intellectual relationship then on the physical — if the relationship or the novel is mostly about sex, rather than about the people having sex, then it’s not for me. I was raised, after all, on Elizabeth and Mr Darcy:  it’s all about the deferred gratification! Victoria Dahl and Jill Shalvis would be more popular with me if it didn’t seem that they invert these priorities too often; Knox’s About Last Night was not a favorite, for the same reason.

I have yet to read a “historical” that I really like or would promptly download to read again. Mostly they seem to take themselves too seriously and thus run up against my cynical streak. I liked the concept and, mostly, the execution of Judith Ivory’s The Proposition, and after I read my first Mary Balogh (The Ideal Wife) I thought I was on to something and borrowed a bunch more, but I got kind of tired of them. The only Heyer I’ve read is Sylvester and I didn’t love it: no doubt something’s wrong with me, given how beloved she is. I haven’t even tried “paranormal” romances, and though I think Julie James’s novels probably border on this category, I also haven’t focused on “romantic suspense” as I’m reading for fun, not anxiety. I’ve downloaded or sampled a lot of other titles from the library, but just taking what’s available turns out (predictably) to be the worst way of finding something that actually suits me or fits my mood. I’ve realized that this is another way in which my romance reading is not like my other reading: I don’t put down a ‘literary’ book because it’s not exactly what I already want (imagine how far I’d have made it in the Patrick Melrose novels with that attitude!). Also, most of the time I figure the onus is on me to read to the end before making up my mind about a book, but I’ve been happily trying but “DNF”-ing all kinds of romances. Not much really seems to be at stake, and that’s only partly because so many that I’ve read (or started to read) have been borrowed from the library.

And that’s where I find myself a year later: not necessarily wiser but more experienced and less judgmental, both of the books and of myself. Now, as then, I’m open to suggestions. Wanted: sassy, literate contemporary featuring mature independent heroine with interesting job, tall, dark, but not necessarily smoldering and definitely not domineering hero (preferably, neither of them will be stinking rich), plenty of witty banter and sexual tension, sophisticated urban setting preferred but not required, cats (for a change) rather than dogs.*

*Update: It sounds like In Bed with the Opposition is a good bet for me! As it happens, too, I’m rewatching The West Wing when I get the chance (so much more relaxing than watching the actual U.S. election coverage, which tends to give me indigestion).