Wuthering Heights and the New Apartment

I read Wuthering Heights for the first time about a year ago, when we were first moving in to our current place. I tried to reread it again in like 2 hours. This is what I discovered: 

• In the introduction to my edition (a 1961 Holt edition) Mark Schorer suggests that Bronte set out to persuade us of “the moral magnificence of such unmoral passion” (x) but that as she wrote the novel, she was compelled to see that this moral magnificence is only “a devastating spectacle of human waste: ashes.” Charlotte Bronte, in her 1850 preface, apologizes for the horror of her sister’s characters: “Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done . . . if it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night, and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis Bell would wonder what was meant, and suspect the complainant of affectation” (xxxiii). She also points out the moral characters of Nelly Dean and Edgar Linton (“some people will think these qualities do not shine so well incarnate in a man as they would do in a woman, but Ellis Bell could never be brought to comprehend this notion,” Charlotte says, which might be helpful for thinking about some of the gender differences in her own novels).
• But does Emily Bronte want us to come away from Wuthering Heights with a clear moral judgment of Heathcliff and Cathy’s passion? I find Heathcliff and Cathy pretty horrifying; I had nightmares when I first read Wuthering Heights that Heathcliff had trapped me in my house and was torturing me with loud noises from the street; but surely we’re supposed to sympathize with their passionate identification with each other! That’s what people like about this novel, right? I’ve been reading both Brontes this year with Twilight in mind, so maybe I’m biased—but I grew up with the understanding that it was a great love story, and was actually pretty horrified when I realized what really happened.
• The framing story: What are we supposed to think about Lockwood? He listens to the story of Heathcliff and Cathy mostly for his own amusement—which is what we’re doing, I guess, and what any listener does in any framing story, so why should we judge him? But he’s so callous in so many other ways that I think we are supposed to judge him, even as we identify with him as a reader/auditor of the story, but also as a more cosmopolitan, educated reader than the other characters in the novel. How much of a transformation does he really undergo, when he returns to the house to tell Heathcliff he’s leaving and kind of tries to help bring Cathy and Hareton together? When he comes back and learns about Heathcliff’s death? What are we supposed to make of his final comment: “I . . . wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth” (358)? It seems sentimental and patently untrue, given what we know about the sleepers.
• Disciplining the reader: Lockwood is one character who stands in for the reader in the novel, and who represents our inability to read Wuthering Heights accurately; Isabella Linton is another. When Isabella starts falling in love with the brooding Heathcliff, her sister-in-law Cathy tries to warn her that what you see is painfully what you get: “Pray, don’t imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior . . . I never say to him let this or that enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them, I say—‘Let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged’: and he’d crush you, like a sparrow’s egg, Isabella, if he found you a troublesome charge” (108). This seems like a message to the reader who might be making the same assumptions—who might, like other characters in the novel, think Heathcliff’s cruelty might be redeemed or softened by his love for Cathy, or his natural instincts, or his ability to make small talk. Characters are constantly underestimating how evil Heathcliff is: “you’re a cruel man, but not a fiend,” Cathy II says to him. And Nelly thinks to herself “Poor wretch! . . . you have a heart and nerves the same as your brother men! Why should you be anxious to conceal them?” (177). The reader is continually tempted to sympathize with Heathcliff and is continually jolted from that sympathy by his violence and cruelty. In the end, does Cathy II turn out to be right that Heathcliff’s not a fiend? She lives to see some evidence of him softening, but only after a lot of suffering and forced marriage and ear-boxing.
• Cathy’s ghost: One of the most upsetting and famous scenes in the novel is one where Lockwood is very much engaged—passionately, violently engaged—in the story of Heathcliff and Cathy: after reading Cathy’s diary-like notes in her old books, and seeing different versions of her name carved into the bed, he has a terrifying nightmare/vision of her return to Wuthering Heights. Catherine begs to be let in:
        As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes; still it wailed “Let me in!”

This is by far the most violent image we’ve encountered so far in Wuthering Heights, and it’s Lockwood who’s doing the violence, not Heathcliff. In a way this violence—and torture—might make Heathcliff’s violence and cruelty less surprising; Lockwood’s motive of “terror” isn’t the same as Heathcliff’s motive of revenge, but the violence he does is more arbitrary and strangely casual—terror maybe makes us desperate, but does it make us “cruel”? The intensity of this vision helps to explain Lockwood’s intense interest in the family story, but again, that interest feels strangely casual to me.

• other upsetting images:
• Heathcliff banging his head against a tree until it’s bloody on the night of Cathy’s death
• Heathcliff hanging Isabella’s dog in front of her
• Heathcliff beating Hindley almost to death after the knife folds back on Hindley’s wrist
• Heathcliff contemplating opening Cathy’s coffin
• Linton coughing up blood in agitation
• The nest Cathy and Heathcliff found as children “full of little skeletons” (130)
• Cathy’s writing: The scene before the nightmare, when Lockwood reads Cathy’s diary entries, and the different versions of her name, is also really interesting, of course. Cathy’s compulsive writing/carving of her name on the bed makes me think of Jane Eyre idly writing on her piece of scratch-paper; the different configurations, all of which become the name of some character in the novel, hint at the strange iterability of names and people in the novel. Too many Cathys, too many Heathcliffs, too many Lintons, too many Earnshaws; reflected also by Lockwood’s inability to understand the relationships between the characters at Wuthering Heights (is Cathy Heathcliff’s wife? Is Hareton his son?) Also Cathy’s own indecisiveness/identity crisis. And the compulsion to repeat behavior.
• Is Cathy a real ghost? There were a lot of clues in the bedroom before Lockwood went to sleep. But the “I’ve been a waif for twenty years” and the ghost calling herself Catherine Linton (“why did I think of Linton? I’d read Earnshaw twenty times for Linton”) suggest that she’s really there, and that Lockwood’s rational explanations for the event—and his suggestion that the graves must be quiet—are suspect.
• Heathcliff’s anguish. “Come in! come in!” sobs Heathcliff after Lockwood tells him the story of his dream. “Cathy, do come. Oh do—once more! Oh! my heart’s darling! Hear me this time—Catherine, at last!” Heart-rending moments like this make the reader want to think good of Heathcliff, just as they make Isabella and other characters sympathetic with them. But we and they get punished for it. But they’re still moving.
• Heathcliff’s sympathy with Hareton in particular. Heathcliff saves Hareton as a baby “by a natural impulse,” and then regrets it; later he likes him even though his goal is to make Hareton one instrument of his father’s destruction; at the end Hareton carries all this symbolic weight for Heathcliff: “Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed a personification of my youth, not a human being . . . [his] aspect was the ghost of my immortal love, of my wild endeavours to hold my right, my degradation, my pride, my happiness, my anguish—” (343). So there’s this sense both that Heathcliff has natural instincts that get betrayed by a more artificial, intellectualized desire for revenge; it’s also interesting that the characters Heathcliff ultimately feels some kind of sympathy and kindness towards are those we sympathize with as well—Hareton, young Cathy, and Nelly Dean. Well, I don’t sympathize with Cathy I much, and Charlotte Bronte apparently sympathized with Edgar Linton; but it’s interesting that Hareton, Cathy II, and Nelly are the characters whose underlying good nature Heathcliff can’t destroy or pervert—it’s as if he’s some kind of horrible, violent test of character.
• Cathy and Heathcliff as a unit. Both Cathy and Heathcliff explain over and over that their relationship isn’t merely (or even?) love, but total union and identification: as children they’re inseparable, and in Cathy’s diary entry she’s constantly using the pronoun “we”; she says “Nelly, I am Heathcliff” (86). Since I’ve been rereading Jane Eyre alongside Wuthering Heights I’m wondering to what degree Cathy and Heathcliff’s intense closeness mirrors Jane’s and Rochester’s, which by the end is symbiotic (and Jane’s love of Rochester, like Cathy’s description of Heathcliff as “an existence of [hers] beyond [her]”, verges on idolatry.) But of course Cathy and Heathcliff start out more closely united and are separated, while Jane and Rochester . . . well, that happens a little bit, too, but her total union with Rochester isn’t until the end. One scene in Wuthering Heights that echoes one in Jane Eyre, and that really gets at the difference between Jane’s solo hero’s journey and Cathy and Heathcliff’s doubled self, occurs when Cathy and Heathcliff spy on the Linton family through their lighted window. In Jane Eyre Jane has a similar experience looking in on the Rivers family; but while Jane is alone, friendless, and starving, Cathy and Heathcliff are smug and pleased with themselves—although the act of spying results in their separation. What does it mean to write a novel in which the hero and heroine almost don’t have single separate existences? It certainly does something strange to character; this novel can’t be a Bildungsroman, it can’t show us the life and development of a single consciousness. It is much stranger!
• Heathcliff overhearing Cathy: He hears “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff” but not “so he shall never know how I love him” (85). The fact that this last phrase would have genuinely ameliorated the first seems to get at something crucial in the Heathcliff/Cathy bond, which is certainly not about marriage; compare to Jane Eyre’s problematizing of marriage.
• More about Hareton and Cathy II: Heathcliff sympathizes with them, and they’re also the characters who remind him the most of Cathy—particularly Hareton, who is a more distant relation from Cathy than her daughter, and also a man. It could be just that Heathcliff hates Lintons, and also hates himself; but he also hated Hindley Earnshaw, Hareton’s father. What is it about Hareton? Is being native to Wuthering Heights Cathy’s main attribute? Is Hareton’s relationship to that sacred place more significant because his name is over the door, even if he can’t read it (at first)?
• Wuthering Heights itself is obviously very important.
• Heathcliff’s death. It’s hard not to read this as redemptive, even as it’s ghoulish. The wasting away, the rapturous smiles, transform Heathcliff, even as they’re unsettling. The sense that he fears Cathy—“By God! she’s relentless. Oh, damn it! It’s unutterably too much for flesh and blood to bear, even mine” (355)—makes it more unsettling still—do we read this as a kind of punishment for Heathcliff? Even for Heathcliff, haunting would be unsettling? 

Jane Eyre on New Jersey Transit

I thought Jane Eyre was one of the novels on my orals lists that I'd already read, but a quick attempt to skim it revealed that 1) I didn't remember reading ANY of it because 2) the last time I read it was ten years ago, and also I'd read the kid's abridged version so many times since I was seven that all I remembered was that and 3) it is a delightful novel! So I had the pleasure of reading it all over again, which may or may not have been a waste of time, but generated 85 pages of notes. The slightly-condensed-and-at-the-same-time-seriously-fleshed-out version:

• Brontë’s 1850 preface: defending the morality of Jane Eyre against critics (who must have thought it was immoral, or at least "coarse"), Bronte claims that the novel’s perceived immorality comes of its truthfulness; in saying the world “may hate him who dares to scrutinise and expose—to rase the gilding, and show base metal under it—to penetrate the sepulchre, and reveal charnel relics: but hate as it will, it is indebted to him” she’s making social/moral/documentary claims for Jane Eyre as if it were Oliver Twist or, more precisely, Vanity Fair:
   
  There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears . . . who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital—a mien as dauntless and as daring.  Is the satirist of “Vanity Fair” admired in high places? . . . I have alluded to him, Reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognised; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day—as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things.”
  
  
• I’m surprised to see Jane Eyre, which is a Bildungsroman focusing on one character’s experience, not on a riotous cast of colorful types, and told in the first person, compared to Vanity Fair, and associated with the ambition of “social regenerat[ion]” and “restor[ing] rectitude to the warped system of things.” If Jane Eyre is a tool for social regeneration, how is it working? What does it want to effect? School reform? The Lowood section is the most like Oliver Twist, but on the other hand the problems of the school seem to be more obviously specific: as soon as someone from the outside finds out the school is bad they fix it (but Helen Burns has to die first.) Divorce reform? The reform of rakes, or of the double standard? Bronte explains that the people who object to Jane Eyre are those “in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry—that parent of crime—an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth.” So she’s talking about bigotry—against married men? Against strange women? Certainly the novel has a feminist message, and there are these moments of what Geoffrey Bennington calls sententiousness, where Jane makes a clearly reformist gesture:

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. 

And certainly the horrors that Jane describes, to which critics of Jane Eyre presumably objected, are metaphors for or extreme cases of problems with education, marriage law, the double standard. I guess I’m so used to reading Bronte’s feminism through Gilbert and Gubar, or even through Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, as submerged and suffocated and only partially articulated, that I’m surprised to see she had political or social intentions. But on the other hand, maybe a feminism can be both intentional and imperfectly articulated; maybe that’s why I’m stalling at the suggestion that this is a social novel, and maybe that’s where Woolf’s claims of suffocation are coming from.

• I’m also struck by Bronte’s address of the Reader in her introduction: it’s identical to Jane’s (famous) address of the Reader in the novel, and breaks down the boundaries (masculine, or at least gender-neutral pseudonym; insistence on the novel as a tool of social regeneration)  Bronte seems to want to set up against reading Jane Eyre autobiographically. If Jane and Charlotte are one and the same, what does that do to the idea of reading Jane Eyre as a social novel? David Copperfield kind of invites a biographical reading, especially because David is an author at the end, but Dickens’s preface doesn’t encourage you to keep thinking in this way: he makes it clear that David & co are beloved friends that Dickens totally made up. There’s certainly a tendency to read women writers’ works as autobiographical/confessional or at least _personal_--one example I’m thinking of is Romney’s accusation in _Aurora Leigh_ that women are only interested in specifics—and I’m curious to what degree Bronte might have been participating in this kind of reading of Jane Eyre, or even using that kind of reading to suggest a different, more personal, less crusading kind of social novel? David Copperfield doesn’t feel as reformatory as Oliver Twist, but is it intended to be, just in a different way? Is Jane Eyre intended to be?  

• Jane’s sudden fits of rage as a child—compare to Oliver Twist. Are the causes different?
• “‘Unjust!—unjust!” said my reason, forced by the agonising stimulus into precocious though transitory power”—and her fantasies of resistance: “to achieve escape from insupportable oppression—as running away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die.”
• Her exultation when she resists Mrs Reed, followed by an accompanying dejection: Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt.  It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty . . . A child cannot quarrel with its elders, as I had done; cannot give its furious feelings uncontrolled play, as I had given mine, without experiencing afterwards the pang of remorse and the chill of reaction. 
•  
• The strange treatment of race/skin color in the novel: not only are Bertha and Mason dark (their mother was a Creole) but also Mr Rochester (I guess also a character with a colonial connection) and Mrs Reed. And Blanche Ingram! With her ironic name! Mr Rochester’s darkness makes it harder to read these other dark characters as necessarily bad, or bad because of race (although they are all bad.) Mr Rochester’s contempt for Blanche is definitely connected to his disgust with Bertha (he desires Jane as a “change.”) But is it also a disgust with himself? I can’t read it that way, but I also can’t read the way color is working in this novel clearly.
• Retrospect: it doesn’t seem to be as strongly marked here as it does in David Copperfield or Bleak House or even Villette. Maybe because Jane makes relatively few references to her current position: she tells us “I could not answer the ceaseless inward question—why I thus suffered; now, at the distance of—I will not say how many years, I see it clearly,” but for the most part we experience things as she experienced them—her breaks into the present tense make this feeling of immediacy, of a real-time narrative despite our knowledge that this is retrospect—stronger. The only really noticeable moment was when she refused to tell us what she had seen that had upset her; she says “Stay till he comes, reader; and, when I disclose my secret to him, you shall share the confidence.” This, too, seems less forced to me than, say, Esther Summerson refusing to tell me the contents of the letter, perhaps because Jane has been framing this story so theatrically (“A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader . . .”) that we accept her desire to make things more dramatically satisfying.
• When Mr Brocklehurst asks her how she will avoid going to hell, Jane says “I must keep in good health, and not die.” This always struck me as a really important line. In the end this becomes a moral choice that Jane has to make—between thinking about Heaven and going to India with St John or keeping in good health and not dying. And she chooses not dying. It’s a statement that’s both comically (and disastrously) blasphemous and intensely life-affirming, and despite Jane’s later religious thoughts (and the weird St John ending) the novel seems to be on the side of being a little bit blasphemous and life-affirming—or rather, it may suggest that God helps those who help themselves, and that we should focus on keeping in good health and not dying (physically, emotionally, psychologically) and the rest of this stuff will take care of itself?
• Jane’s negotiation of the terms of her freedom: “Grant me at least a new servitude!” She knows the “freedom” she longs for is unrealistic, but a new servitude isn’t. I’m reading Louisa May Alcott’s Work for another list, and I think the ways in which Jane is thinking about and negotiating freedom/a new servitude/a space for herself are similar to the way Christie is looking for ways in which to be useful and happy in Work (she becomes a servant, a governess, an actress, a companion, a florist . . . ) This restlessness of Jane’s forces her/allows her to exercise choice; even when the choices aren’t entirely voluntary, she seems to have some limited agency. All the images of Jane’s corded-up trunks support this sense.
• Also related to the “new servitude” passage: Jane’s conversations with herself, in which two sides of her nature debate some moral or practical question. The most literal and kind of hilarious moment is when Jane “order[s] [her] brain” to solve the practical problem of finding a job for her:

A kind fairy, in my absence, had surely dropped the required suggestion on my pillow; for as I lay down, it came quietly and naturally to my mind.—“Those who want situations advertise; you must advertise in the ---shire Herald.” “How?  I know nothing about advertising.” Replies rose smooth and prompt now:— “You must enclose the advertisement and the money to pay for it under a cover directed to the editor of the Herald; you must put it, the first opportunity you have, into the post at Lowton; answers must be addressed to J.E., at the post-office there; you can go and inquire in about a week after you send your letter, if any are come, and act accordingly.”

 Moments like this remind me a lot of Villette, where the brain, and parts of consciousness or conscience, are personified and anthropomorphized to the point that the drama becomes almost entirely interior. In Jane Eyre the drama is much more external; and at times these interior voices are exported to other characters (notably when Mr Rochester dresses up like a gypsy, but also in other moments of interrogation with Hannah the servant and St John.)

• Which brings us to Mr Rochester’s tricks: I never noticed before this reading how much he resembles not only a terrifying Gothic villain but also a Richardsonian rake: the gypsy move in particular made me think of Mr B dressing up like a woman servant to get in Pamela’s bed.
• Rochester as a Bad Boy: The cartoonist Kate Beaton makes fun of the Bronte sisters’ love for Byronic heroes, and I was struck by the contrast between a passage in Wuthering Heights, where Cathy I warns Isabella Linton against the very kind of allure Rochester seems to have for Jane in this passage:

that something, I, at intervals, beheld still; and with throbbing heart, but not with palsied nerves.  Instead of wishing to shun, I longed only to dare—to divine it; and I thought Miss Ingram happy, because one day she might look into the abyss at her leisure, explore its secrets and analyse their nature.

      “Watch out for the abyss!” you want to tell her. “There is a madwoman in it!” But!

• Jane and Rochester really get along. At the end of the novel Jane tells us what a perfect union they have:

To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company.  We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking.

She also says “no woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.”

• We can read this as the symbiotic (codependent?) relationship created when Rochester’s blindness and lameness makes Jane’s body a necessary supplement to his; this goes along with Elaine Showalter’s observation that the heroes in novels by Victorian women have to be blinded or maimed and therefore feminized
• We can also read it as a version of the closeness of Heathcliff/Cathy in Wuthering Heights: “I am Heathcliff!” In that case, Jane and Rochester’s romance is precisely this romance-novel fantasy of the passionate union with the reformed rake that Cathy warns Isabella against, and that readers of both novels (including Stephenie Meyer) have always found so appealing
• But I think there’s also something realistic and down-to-earth and everyday about Jane’s account of their constant conversation, something that suggests this is in fact a real marriage of two people who get along, and which is not fed by teeth-grinding and obstacles and trauma. Rochester is exciting because he’s mysterious, but he’s also someone Jane is immediately comfortable with—she says over and over how she isn’t put off by his gruff manner, his ugliness, but rather encouraged by them. She likes talking to him. When she doesn’t get along with St John Rivers, it’s not because he’s boring or uncomplicated, but because he’s just kind of uncomfortable to talk to. Well, he’s cold, and he doesn’t have an emotional life. But I still think there’s something to the fact that Jane can recognize people she can get along with—that includes Mrs Fairfax and the Rivers sisters—and that that’s important to her.
• Lying and teasing: When Rochester is wooing Jane, he plays a similar kind of bait-and-switch game with her that Jarndyce plays with Esther—“I didn’t mean Blanche Ingram, I meant YOU”—but sometimes he’s clearly just lying to her rather than coyly suggesting something. I wonder if this is a clue that he’s lying about other stuff (incidentally, I can’t imagine reading this novel without knowing about Bertha beforehand! At one point I must have had that experience, but it’s entirely lost); when Jane pulls the same trick with him at the end, suggesting she might marry St John, she does a much better and more playful job (and she’s doing it For His Own Good, however weird that is—trying to make him jealous so he won’t focus on his own melancholy and insecurity about his disabilities.)
• Jane the artist: I’m interested in her ability to render these interior states/solipsistic conversations material through drawing: the creepy dreamscapes, but also her use of portraiture as a kind of argument (trying to cure herself of her pretentions to Mr R’s love by drawing her own face and Blanche Ingram’s; tryig to draw out St John’s love for Miss Oliver with her portrait) and as a kind of invocation/companionship (drawing Mr Rochester’s portrait at the Reeds’.)
• Then there are the ways in which the drawings reveal Jane’s real identity to people: that she’s a lady with accomplishments (mostly to people associated with the Reed household); that she’s an interesting person and/or an elfin spirit (to Mr Rochester); and literally what her name is (to St John when he sees her name written on her piece of scratch paper, which is also blotted with all the colors she’s been using.) Throughout the novel people have difficulty recognizing or placing Jane (Mrs Reed on her deathbed; Rochester when he first meets her, and in his blindness; various characters who can’t reconcile her ladylike behavior with her poverty or her situation; the Rivers family because of her alias) and the pictures seem to be one of the truer indexes to her identity
• The hero narrative. In Writing Beyond the Ending Rachel Blau DuPlessis identifies two conflicting plots in nineteeth-century novels by and about women: the quest plot, in which the female protagonist is the hero, and the marriage plot, in which she is reduced to a mere heroine. The quest plot might sometimes be the same as the marriage plot, but in the end the quest plot—and the female hero—disappear, and the story dead-ends in the marriage and the establishment of the female hero as passive, married, loving heroine. Jane Eyre is a classic example, where all Jane’s restlessness and resistance and rebellion culminates in her as a contented wife and mother and helpmeet to her injured husband. This does happen, but for some reason I keep wanting to question classic feminist readings of Jane Eyre; in this case, I’m interested in thinking about how ambition is portrayed in the novel, as well as work and vocation and restlessness. Jane is depicted as restless, and St John claims she’s ambitious, while she claims she’s not; I wonder whether the negative light in which St John’s ambition appears means that Jane’s final lack of restlessness is less gendered than we might think? Again, there’s the argument that Rochester is feminized by his injuries; but Rochester has actually always been kind of a domestic figure for Jane, and if he’s been restless, he certainly hasn’t been ambitious. He’s sown his wild oats; maybe Jane’s restlessness is merely an argument (one she voices explicitly) that both sexes should be allowed to do this, in some way?
• The ending: Why does St John get the last word? I don’t know! To protect the novel from seeming blasphemous? To contrast his religious fervor with Jane and Rochester’s domestic contentment? To circle back to Helen Burns’s devotion? “even so come, Lord Jesus!”

Oliver in Charlottesville

Oliver Twist was our other road-trip book-on-tape. My mom and I started listening to this somewhere in Virginia, and when we picked my dad up in Charlottesville he started listening to it, too. I was right about it being a crowd-pleaser with a lot of hilarious voices and jokes: we all got really into it and were laughing a lot, and my dad was sad he was going to miss the end, and my mom was sad when she realized I accidentally kept the last CD in my laptop bag (I let her take the CDs back to RI with her, since once I was out of the car I could read the book.) But we were also confused: all the delightful stuff we remembered from the musical (in which I starred as the title character my sophomore year in high school, in the school play) had happened by the time we were about a third of the way through the CDs. "What else could possibly happen before the big climax?" we asked each other as we pulled into a Comfort Inn in Charlottesville (this time on our way home.) We found out that what could possibly happen was a bunch of what I suppose is early-Dickensian filler: after having introduced a variety of delightful characters, and having made us feel very bad for poor little unjustly-persecuted Oliver, and having set up a variety of conflicts (will Oliver escape from the criminals? Will Nancy betray Bill for Oliver's sake? Will Mr Brownlow keep his faith in Oliver's innate goodness even though Mr Grimsby seems to be right that Oliver is untrustworthy?), Dickens just adds a bunch of dumb extra scenes of the Artful Dodger and Master Bates (I snickered at his name through the entire trip, but only because some other kid I went to elementary school with had told me about how someone read her a story with a character named Master Bates in it, could I believe it) playing cards, and Mr Bumble's stupid courting of the stupid workhouse matron (well, they were OK), and then the horrible part where Oliver falls in with the family Bill tries to rob oh my God is that family boring and who cares about the possibly illegitimate niece and her stupid boring romance with a boring guy who shows up like two-thirds of the way through.


I guess this is only Dickens's second novel so I should cut him some slack. But this book was pretty stupid, you guys. Everyone told me I should read The Pickwick Papers instead, but apparently that only has a couple of good parts too. The beginning is delightful, and interesting because it's the part that makes Oliver Twist a social novel--the muckraking is very obvious and very convincing. We were all up in arms about the injustices to Oliver, and we laughed and laughed at all Dickens's funny sarcastic remarks about how unfortunate it was that the guy's horse died just when he had proved a horse could live on one straw a day, and had almost proved it could live on no straws, and how that was related to trying to get the paupers to live on more and more watered-down gruel (and one onion a week), and we felt indignant and proud of ourselves much as we feel when we watch The Daily Show, and probably that's exactly how these newly-created Victorians felt when they read those early installments of Oliver Twist. There was a "waif problem" in London, just as there was, or would be, a "woman problem." And an Irish problem! All those problems. Anyway obviously the workhouse stuff was great, and as was the case in David Copperfield, as well as in Jane Eyre, you're so relieved when anyone is nice to these pathetic little children because you've been so convinced that the world is void of compassion, but you need to believe there can be nice people (and maybe that you could be one of those nice, reasonable people someday). In all those books you're also super relieved when the poor urchin has a big fit and fights back, which Oliver does at the Sowerberrys'; I wonder how much that tendency is a revision of some kind of sentimental reform literature that might be contemporary with these texts? You know, where the kids might be long-suffering saints? Those kids exist in Dickens, right--I guess Dick, Oliver's friend from the parish, is an example.


It was also interesting to note the way in which the bad characters seem aware of the reform movements, and of built-in systems for regulation of public welfare institutions. Mr Bumble, for example, complains to Sowerberry about reformers, and the bad magistrate (Mr. Fang?) is in a bad mood when Oliver's case comes before him because of some muckraking journalist "adverting to some recent decision of his, and commending him, for the three hundred and fiftieth time, to the special and particular notice of the Secretary of State for the Home Department." I don't know why I'm surprised by this; I guess because when Dickens is complaining about Chancery, for example, it seems like it's him (and John Jarndyce) against the world--there isn't much of a sense in Bleak House that people are actively trying to reform Chancery, although there is that reference to people suggesting reform in Parliament and getting shot down with "What would happen to Mr Vholes?" I guess I'm interested in the difference between a text that either is or pretends to be raising awareness of a problem you haven't heard about, and a text that is explicitly engaging in a political debate, or even siding with the established institutions to enforce reform that individual bureaucrats and middle managers or whatever are ignoring. Like maybe Parliament in 1837 agrees with Dickens that orphans shouldn't get fed very thin gruel, but they're letting too many Mr Bumbles get away with it?


Among all Dickens's funny sarcasm is this passage about why we should admire the Dodger & Charlie Bates leaving Oliver in the lurch when he gets accused of pickpocketing: 

and forasmuch as the freedom of the subject and the liberty of the individual are among the first and proudest boasts of a true-hearted Englishman, so, I need hardly beg the reader to observe, that this action should tend to exalt them in the opinion of all public and patriotic men, in almost as great a degree as this strong proof of their anxiety for their own preservation and safety goes to corroborate and confirm the little code of laws which certain profound and sound-judging philosophers have laid down as the main-springs of all Nature's deeds and actions

I think it's interesting for its little jibes at both English patriotism and at pre-Darwinian theories of natural law; it's also interesting as a critique of both nature and culture, especially since I've been reading Hardy lately, an author who seems saddened by both nature and culture (and maybe the conflict between them) but doesn't seem to think there's anything to do about it. Dickens is making fun of the attitude that we can't do anything about it, that we might explain away bad behavior on the grounds of either nature and culture; as a reformer, he seems to imply that we can either go beyond nature and progress as a culture, or that such pat explanations of nature and culture are lazy excuses.

More hilarious sophistry includes this little piece of moral relativism: 

Thus, to do a great right, you may do a little wrong; and you may take any means which the end to be attained, will justify; the amount of the right, or the amount of the wrong, or indeed the distinction between the two, being left entirely to the philosopher concerned, to be settled and determined by his clear, comprehensive, and impartial view of his own particular case.




I'm also interested in Oliver as a kind of proto-David Copperfield, both because it's a novel with a boy's name for the title, which follows the life and (to some extent) development of the title character (I'd have to read Nicholas Nickleby to really figure this out, of course!), and because there are these weird little references to Oliver's developing literacy, and the possibility that he might be a writer one day (mostly just Mr Brownlow being like, "You'd like to write books some day, right?"). The Oliver-as-a-writer amounts to nothing, but it's possible that Dickens stuck it in just in case he did want to make Oliver into a little embryonic novelist; you never know with these crazy serials. Also, the focus on Oliver could have potentially created some of the problems I noticed in David Copperfield, where the field for Dickensian expansiveness and Dickensian/Game of Thrones-style seriality & simultenaiety was limited a little bit by the first-person POV. Because Oliver Twist is in the third person, that doesn't have to happen, but for the first (and best) third of the book the action pretty much follows Oliver along on his adventures; it isn't until we start doing the Mr Bumble sections and then lose track of Oliver for a while after the robbery that we start to follow the simultaneous adventures of a lot of different characters. It really does feel like Dickens is just beginning to feel out this many-wacky-characters technique that seems so effortless in Our Mutual Friend: when he introduces the first Mr Bumble digression, for example, he feels like he has to preface it with this long explanation of why sometimes it's a good idea to interrupt the story with some humor or whatever, while by the end he's just throwing new characters and scenes and situations at you, and suddenly realizing everyone is related and so on, and it's very awkward, and he kind of seems to forget about the Artful Dodger after his big courtroom scene (maybe he was transported? but there are very specific wrap-ups for all these other kind of minor characters), and the revelations are kind of muddy and confusing, while in the later novels I think you're better able to follow along with all the clever twists and turns the narrative takes. The fact that Monks shows up so late in the novel is a real problem, as is the fact that most of the end of the novel is about the stupid family with the stupid romance plot that shows up so late in the novel. Maybe Dickens was like, "Yikes, the only ingenue in this novel is an alcoholic fallen-woman/thief, maybe I'd better put in a young woman who is not destined to be murdered."

And what a murder! My mom listened to it on the CD and called me and was horrified. Bloody hair sizzling in the fire, pretty gross! Also, it's interesting to see how mad Bill is driven by his horrible crime, and how resistant Monks is to killing Oliver because murder will out, and then to read The Woman in White and hear the scary Italian guy being like, "that is all nonsense!" Well, the Italian guy gets punished in Woman in White, but only because he left his secret society.

Finally, Fagin! For some reason I did not expect the anti-semitism to be so palpable. He is so greasy and hateable and also they just call him "The Jew" all the time. Also, his getting caught is kind of an anticlimax (as I think a lot of the major plot points seem to be--why did they need Nancy to come to the bridge if they could just scoop all these people up as easy as pie?) and his death is just kind of weird. Dickens adds in a rabbi, whom Fagin refuses to see, to show that not every Jew is bad--Fagin just happens to be a nasty, evil, cowardly Jew. It's interesting to think about Fagin alongside that kind of mystic, saintly Jewish character in Our Mutual Friend, the one who gets along so well with Jenny Wren, and who gets exploited by that terrible guy who makes use of all those terrible Jewish stereotypes that Dickens uses himself in Oliver Twist.

I feel like I should say something about Nancy and women in this novel, but it's pretty classic saintly girls vs fallen girls, but the fallen girls aren't so bad, but also they can't really be redeemed. Right? I mean I don't think too much is getting subverted in Oliver Twist but who knows. It was pretty fun to listen to in the car.


PS: I'm reminded by the subtitle, A Parish Boy's Progress, to think about how much Oliver Twist has in common with Pilgrim's Progress or Hogarth's Rake's Progress. How much do you think? At the beginning it seems to be very much a progress, through a series of trials and tribulations; then it's like Oliver just sits in Celestial City and waits for God and Jesus to sort things out with various devils and worldly jerks for a super long time, and he's not really part of it anymore. Does that happen in Pilgrim's Progress? Someday I will have to read it.

Return of the Soldier to the New Jersey Turnpike

I was going on a really long road trip with my parents (see "Tess in the Blue Ridge Mountains") and since I was behind on my reading, and my mom likes books on tape, I bought a trial membership to audible.com and downloaded two books from my list--one, The Return of the Soldier, that my mom thought it sounded good, and one, Oliver Twist, that my mom didn't feel as sanguine about, but which was super long and was likely, in my opinion, to be full of funny voices that would entertain any number of family members. Incidentally, they're both books that one of my committee members suggested I add to my major list: Oliver Twist because he thought I had plenty of mid-career Dickens and needed to add some early Dickens, and Return of the Soldier because he thought I should have a WWI-era novel that wasn't modernist (although some people seem to consider it a modernist text, maybe on the basis of its historical context rather than on style.)
I didn't know anything about Return of the Soldier before listening to it, and I knew next to nothing about Rebecca West--my mom and I both associate her with Daphne DuMaurier for some reason. I figured she was a popular but respectable sardonic English novelist, maybe one of those writers that people who admire the Craft of Fiction also admire; Wikipedia says she was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century, which isn't inconsistent with my vague assumptions. She wrote essays and journalism and worked for women's suffrage, which is interesting--you don't necessarily get a clear sense of her politics or what kind of feminist she might be from Return of the Soldier, although she's talking about women's lives and writing about the war from a very female, domestic perspective.
I'm not sure that listening to a CD on the NJ Turnpike quite counts as reading a book, especially since I didn't take any notes or write any blog entries immediately after listening, so I'm pretty likely to read it for real, especially since it's 1) super good and 2) super short (it only takes about 2 hours to read it out loud.) But, two-and-a-half weeks later, here are some of the thoughts I (and my mom) had while listening to it in the car:

• Unreliable (and unlikeable) narrator! The Return of the Soldier is narrated by Jenny, the soldier’s cousin. It’s hard to tell initially what her relationship is to Chris (the soldier who’s gone to the front) and to his wife Kitty, with whom Jenny lives in the ancestral home (aside: here’s the classic Victorian* threesome, carried through into 1918. At a rest stop, over a fishwich and a diet coke, I told my mom about the Deceased Wife’s Sister Marriage Act!) There’s a nursery that Chris has insisted on keeping intact even though the baby has died, and Jenny doesn’t like to go in there but Kitty seems to have no problem with it—in the first scene she’s there drying her hair. Jenny’s initial portrait of their family’s life before the war is rosy—she and Kitty did everything they could to make Chris’s life beautiful and delightful—but the dead baby, combined with Jenny’s creepy fixation on Chris and a kind of lady-doth-protest-too-much overemphasis on their happiness, make you pretty suspicious of Jenny’s reliability. Also Jenny seems to be pretty awful—critical of Kitty (who turns out in the end to be pretty awful) and especially nasty in her snobby descriptions of Margaret, a middle-to-lower-class visitor who shows up with some bad news about Chris. Which brings us to . . .
• Hilariously nasty class issues. Jenny’s hilarious nastiness as a narrator includes repeated references to Margaret’s "creased skin," "cheap stays," and "pigskin handbag." Early on, when you’re not quite sure what to make of Jenny, and not quite sure how sympathetic she’s meant to be, you’re not quite sure whether West subscribes to this same snotty upper-class attitude. By the end of the novel you don’t think she does, and it’s clear she sympathizes with Margaret and thinks Jenny and Kitty are (to different degrees) stuck-up entitled overprotected weirdoes, but! It’s always interesting when you’re reading English people talking about class, because even if they think these class distinctions are unfortunate, they really seem to believe in them in a way American writers of the same era can’t quite achieve? Like even Edith Wharton. Could she really have been as nasty about class as Rebecca West is here? Certainly Dorothy Parker couldn’t. Mom and I kept commenting that Paul would enjoy all the class nastiness, it was so over-the-top.
• Modernist or not? I’m interested in thinking more about why my professor described this novel as outside of or separate from modernism. What counts as a modernist novel? Feeling bleak about WWI? Check. Interest in psychology? Check. Experimental style? I think most people would say that West’s prose style and narrative technique is much less experimental than Woolf’s or Joyce’s—it’s a novel that can be followed even when you’re listening to it in the car with your mom in New Jersey, which may not be the case with Ulysses or To the Lighthouse (but who knows?)—but the unreliable narrator, as well as some other narrative moves that I’d like to examine more carefully in the print edition of the book, including Chris’s recollections retold by the narrator and embedded in the middle of the novel & the narrator’s strange reverie when she’s lying in the woods or whatever, suggest that West is looking for new forms, that she thinks this is a story that can’t be told using conventional narrative methods—which is a pretty modernist position. But on the other hand every interesting novel is experimental in some way—is doing something differently from its predecessors. I guess one distinction people might try to make is whether the author’s trying to make a traditional form serve a new purpose, or whether he or she is trying to scrap all traditional forms and start from scratch (and which one, really, does Pound’s “make it new” refer to? Obviously no forms get totally scrapped, but it’s interesting to think about what the referent for that “it” is—does the “it” refer to an old form that Pound wants the writer to renovate or refurbish for the future? Or to a new thing being made from scratch before our eyes?) Anyway, West’s sentences are pretty conventional narrative sentences, which makes them different from some of Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness utterances and half-thoughts and associations. West’s prose style, incidentally, is pretty sweet.
• WWI from the Home Front. As I said earlier, this novel tells a story of the First World War from a very specific perspective: domestic, female, rural, upper-class. Jenny and Kitty are completely protected from the war, which means they’re pampered and sheltered, but which also means that Jenny suffers tremendously from her ignorance—she keeps having these nightmares about Chris running through the trenches or No Man’s land or something, blood and explosions everywhere. It’s not quite that lower-class women, or any women at all, would have had more information about what was happening to their husbands than Jenny and Kitty do, but there seems to be some correlation between their pampered and protected social position and their total ignorance and helplessness when it comes to Chris at the front and Chris as a wounded soldier. Kitty’s life is comfortable and nice, and so she’s not worried about Chris, and that also seems related to the fact that she doesn’t find out a long time that Chris has shellshock and is in a hospital. It turns out that she doesn’t know because Chris forgot to file an address with the War Office or something (I find this improbable—surely someone would have harassed him until he did, but maybe all those WWI bureaucrats were incompetent), but anyway, the women’s sheltered impotence seems important and interesting—especially given the fact that after the war, women had to take on a lot more responsibility in English life, not only because like half the men died, but because of this crazy emasculating shellshock phenomenon, which is What This Novel Is About.
• WWI in Real Time. Also super interesting is the fact that this novel was published in 1918, while the war was still going on. I’ve read a lot of novels about World War I written after the war, in retrospect, but it’s fascinating to read a novel that doesn’t have the benefit—or the dulling power?—of retrospect, a novel written when people were still waiting for many of these soldiers to come home, and when coming home sometimes meant only a brief respite before going back to the horrors of the front. It seems to me that WWI generated an unusual amount of real-time literature, actually—there’s this novel, and there’s all those war poets. Did other wars get this kind of up-to-the-minute literary coverage? Maybe during WW2 it was mostly movies. The Civil War had Walt Whitman. But maybe the horrors of WWI were so fresh and surprising that they kind of shocked these writers into needing to write about it immediately?
• Let's judge ladies by their maternal instinct! Here’s another novel where the most saintly, magical person you can be is a mom, and the most horrible person you can be is a mom who doesn’t care about her baby. Then there’s the loving spinster who is kind of a mom manquée—that’s a respectable kind of lady to be, too. Kitty really doesn’t seem fazed at all by her baby’s death, although she’s super upset that her husband doesn’t recognize her; anecdotal evidence that we still think this is the worst thing ever is the fact that Mom and I kept saying to each other, “Does she really not care about the baby? Maybe she’s just so deeply traumatized she can’t really talk about the baby? I hope it’s that she’s traumatized and not that she really really doesn’t care about the baby!” I kind of think that a lot of these authors who depict these monstrously bad moms aren’t necessarily criticizing the moms as much as they’re criticizing a society that creates these kind of helpless frivolous women who can’t be good moms or compassionate people (I’m thinking of Becky Sharp, who is terrible-but-amusing but also maybe doing what she thinks she needs to do to stay alive; David Copperfield’s first wife, who was pretty nice but was also incapable of being serious) but at the same time it seems kind of misogynist to write a character like Kitty: a baby-hating, husband-destroying, narcissistic, shallow, status-obsessed beauty. Like, are people really like that? And if they are like that, shouldn’t we have some sympathy for them beyond being like, “oh, society has made these terrible women whose helplessness has made them amoral”? Is pitting a good kind of woman against a bad kind of woman ever a legitimate feminist project?
• Fate! There seems to be some kind of conflict in the novel between people’s natural propensities/true selves/true destinies and the perversities of society and the war and whatever, which artificially alter these true destinies. I wonder if I can relate any of this to Hardy! I will think about it. Anyway, the worst part is where the two babies each only had half a life. They were supposed to be ONE BABY. What does it mean to have all this magic stuff in a book that also seems really interested in psychology? Maybe people who are interested in psychology are actually also very interested in magic?
• Psychology! This novel is chock full of Freudian theories about the unconscious and frustrated urges and stuff but they never mention Freud. I am curious about how much research West did about shellshock and psychoanalysis and stuff (and is the psychology she is drawing on entirely Freud? Or are there some weird other English versions of psychoanalysis floating around?) and how much of this is just fantasy. Like, when you get shellshocked can you really get a kind of amnesia that transports you to the precise year 1903? That seems bizarre. They can’t have known that much about shellshock in 1918, right? So maybe she’s just going for it. Also, hilarious that the psychologist is like, “Oh, I never thought of trying to make people happy! I just make them normal again.” Also, interesting that Margaret’s maternal/true-wifely intuition is smarter than scientific psychological training. Also, the psychologist’s explanation of Chris’s amnesia is extremely domestic and personal—he must not have been happy at home, because he forgot to register an address—and weirdly seems not to take into account the extreme trauma of the war. I guess the war trauma is the immediate cause, but he’s explaining the specific form Chris’s PTSD takes, or whatever. But it also points to the ways in which this novel is not really that much about the war, until the end, when we realize if Chris gets cured he’s going to have to go back to the front!
• PRETTY SERIOUS SPOILERS FROM HERE ON IN:
• The tricky title! You think it's because the soldier has come back from the war, but it's also that they are trying to get his personality to come back. And then at the end when he does it's the worst! and it makes him be a soldier again! It really gets you thinking about who and what a soldier is. Is it the man who goes off to war--the man his family loves, the man who's ready to make sacrifices for his country? Is it the role of soldier itself? Does that role change the man? And this novel not only raises the question of whether being a soldier changes the man you sent away to war--a question that becomes pretty common in literature about World War I--but also the question of whether we really know who these men are when they leave, and why. Like, Chris's shell-shock is presented as something that helps him escape the literal nightmare of being a British soldier--the trenches, the gas, the tanks--but also maybe the class expectations that are also tied up in being the kind of British subject who becomes a British officer, privileging money and family expectations over some kind of authentic self, a kind of natural self that seems to emerge in Chris's madness.
• What was the right thing to do? The novel makes a pretty good case for it being a good idea to leave Chris in the happy place he’s in, but then Margaret and Jenny both independently decide they have to bring him back (through showing him the kid’s shirt, or a stuffed tiger or something). It seems inevitable, because novels don’t usually end with people choosing blissful ignorance, but why is it inevitable? Jenny’s explanation seems to be that in the end Chris will be humiliated, made a figure of public mockery by his amnesia, especially as he ages. I need to read the ending again, but I think Margaret just kind of feels like it’s wrong to withhold the truth. The Wikipedia summary of the novel is like, “they have to decide whether to let him remain safe in his amnesia or make him recover and go back to the war”—the use of the word “safe” kind of implies that it’s a Matrix-y red-pill-vs-blue-pill choice, and keeping him in “safe” ignorance is ignoble and weak and easy, but on the other hand the “safe” amnesiac self is also very clearly presented as Chris’s authentic self, one that hasn’t been tortured into neurosis by social conventions and the war. I guess it’s one of those novels that affirms the social order while regretting the social order. It is mad depressing when Kitty is all triumphant that he’s come back, but also (as I have said before) I feel bad for Kitty getting portrayed as an evil proponent of Society because it is rough that this always happens to girls in novels.

*not that the lovers + confidant system originated with the Victorians. It totally happens in Julie, for example. French people! And is a staple of the epistolary novel in general, but usually in those the dude has a confidant too, and there is more sex. So by the 19^th century the extramarital sex dropped out, as well as the male confidant?

Jude by the Pool

Here are some notes about Jude the Obscure, which maybe someday I will clean up and make into a nice neat blog post! I went to a pool party when I was about halfway through Jude, so I read the most horrifying famously horrifying part while surrounded by people in swimsuits drinking Mike's Hard Limeade. Also beforehand we were in the pool and I was like, "What is wrong with Jude and Sue? Why can't they just be conventional and get married? It would solve everything" and they were like, "Hardy would not agree with you!" and also I was like, "this is so lame" and they were like, "It's going to get a lot, lot, lot worse" and they were right.

• history all ground up and redistributed, or completely ignored: Above all, the original church, hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood . . . The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses warranted to last five years. 
• What is a place? Christminster is neither its architecture, nor its itinerant population of students. Working people? Deep-earth history? "The floating population of students and teachers, who did know both in a way, were not Christminster in a local sense at all."
• fate and cursed families and prophecies. Jude, my child, don't you ever marry. 'Tisn't for the Fawleys to take that step any more.
• Heredity: Can you take a kid and raise it up differently? Sue on Father Time: "The beggarly question of parentage—what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care. That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people's, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom."
• And then: Arabella's child killing mine was a judgement—the right slaying the wrong.
• girls get you good if they marry em. and boys get you good if you can't get em to marry you. Under the hedge which divided the field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after fulfilling them in the church adjoining.
• Jude loves animals. The birds when he's feeding them; the pig. Arabella hatching that egg in her boobs: she's more in touch with the natural world than Sue, but she also is fine with killing the pig.
• Studying! Jude's initial idea that once you have a grammar you just learn some magic rules for turning everything into Latin; Christminster as a magical city; later disillusionment, but he's also into it and works hard. 
• Class location and fate. "He feared that his whole scheme had degenerated to, even though it might not have originated in, a social unrest which had no foundation in the nobler instincts; which was purely an artificial product of civilization." I kind of expect Hardy to have some kind of specific, prescriptive, progressive message, and when he doesn't I'm confused. But I'm especially confused about Jude and his scholarship: does Hardy think he was made to be a scholar, but he just didn't have the right opportunities? Or does he agree with that dean who told Jude to give up and do something more class-appropriate? I guess he's just showing us that sometimes you're made for something that isn't appropriate to the circumstances of your birth, and there's nothing you can do about it.
• On the artificiality of society, Sue says ""I have been thinking," she continued, still in the tone of one brimful of feeling, "that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies…"
• Jude on his own failure: whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed. But I don't admit that my failure proved my view to be a wrong one, or that my success would have made it a right one; though that's how we appraise such attempts nowadays—I mean, not by their essential soundness, but by their accidental outcomes.
• Nature and society. Are they in conflict or the same? Phillotson says “"Yes," said Phillotson, with biting sadness. "Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would!"”
• Kindness. Can you be kind? Not really! Phillotson tries to and is ruined. Can’t be kind to the pig, etc. Nature red in tooth and claw.
• Classical vs Christian scholarship. Kind of seems to be making the point that the whole system of education is weird--if you're meant to be a thinker, that doesn't mean you're meant to be a minister, necessarily. See Angel Clare in Tess as well. Also, Sue and her classical figures; Sue's comment that "intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The mediævalism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go."
• Jude as scholar and stonemason: "The numberless architectural pages around him he read, naturally, less as an artist-critic of their forms than as an artizan and comrade of the dead handicraftsmen whose muscles had actually executed those forms." He's a new kind of scholar, potentially. There's also this all-roundedness to Jude's scholarship, which is similar to his well-rounded skills as a country stonemason--he doesn't have to specialize.
• Jobs for women. You do a job where you can help your husband; compare to my thoughts about how you marry your husband for his job. Jude becoming a pig farmer because Arabella can help with that; Sue learning to help with the gravestones: " it was the only arrangement under which Sue, who particularly wished to be no burden on him, could render any assistance." Also the gingerbread-selling and the model of the cathedral they make together.
• Sue sounding like Matthew Arnold: "I fancy we have had enough of Jerusalem," she said, "considering we are not descended from the Jews. There was nothing first-rate about the place, or people, after all—as there was about Athens, Rome, Alexandria, and other old cities."
• Jude and Ruskin: "They were marked by precision, mathematical straightness, smoothness, exactitude: there in the old walls were the broken lines of the original idea; jagged curves, disdain of precision, irregularity, disarray"; Jude as out of touch: "He did not at that time see that mediævalism was as dead as a fern-leaf in a lump of coal; that other developments were shaping in the world around him, in which Gothic architecture and its associations had no place. The deadly animosity of contemporary logic and vision towards so much of what he held in reverence was not yet revealed to him." How serious is Hardy here? Morris would super disagree with him. Are the other developments some crappy modernism that Morris would hate? Does Hardy hate it? Darkling thrush!
• See doctor on modern children: “"No," said Jude. "It was in his nature to do it. The doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the last generation—the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.
• Sue is anti-medievalist: ""Cathedral? Yes. Though I think I'd rather sit in the railway station," she answered, a remnant of vexation still in her voice. "That's the centre of the town life now. The cathedral has had its day!" "How modern you are!""; "Wardour is Gothic ruins—and I hate Gothic!"
• Arabella as one of those bad sexy girls I'm sympathetic with. I think Hardy is a little bit sympathetic with the bad sexy girls, too--they're a product of their culture, and it's hard to negotiate your healthy sexual urges with Christian morality and a Victorian double standard, so they do what they can, but doing what you can ends up ruining ambitious young men like Jude! Hardy seems to prefer people who have some kind of code of honor, but since he's constantly showing us that it's impossible to have a consistent code of honor when you're living within contradictory systems, it seems like it's better to kind of compromise, like Arabella does! Also her weird adaptability to the modern world: the electro-plated bar, her knowledge of spirits. If Jude and Sue could be more like Arabella everything would be better for them, I say.
• The old lady: Matrimony have growed to be that serious in these days that one really do feel afeard to move in it at all. In my time we took it more careless; and I don't know that we was any the worse for it!
• The wrong grounds for marriage: "Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable." This sounds like Hardy, but Dickens and Patmore would agree about this, too. They just wouldn't agree about all the craziness that follows.
• Significant objects: the shocking statues Sue buys; her "women's clothes, sexless cloth and linen";the veil Jude buys for Sue; Sue’s “adulterous” nightgown she purchased to please Jude, which she replaces with a plainer one when she returns to Phillotson. Jude’s body like marble among the marble-dusted classical books in his room: there seemed to be a smile of some sort upon the marble features of Jude; while the old, superseded, Delphin editions of Virgil and Horace, and the dog-eared Greek Testament on the neighbouring shelf, and the few other volumes of the sort that he had not parted with, roughened with stone-dust where he had been in the habit of catching them up for a few minutes between his labours, seemed to pale to a sickly cast at the sounds.
•  
• Sue's sexual coldness as sexual scandal: "My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them—one or two of them particularly—almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel—to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man—no man short of a sensual savage—will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him." Her friend from Christminster surprised that she won't sleep with him (their relationship is very Dorothy Vane with her first lover in some respects, but not others: "He asked me to live with him, and I agreed to by letter. But when I joined him in London I found he meant a different thing from what I meant. ")
• Sue's sexuality (and sex, passion, and art): 
• "People say I must be cold-natured—sexless—on account of it. But I won't have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives." 
• Everyone saying Sue has no body, is more like a spirit. Sue trying to bring her “body into complete subjection” but old lady says she’s more like a sperrit. For Sue complete subjection is allowing people to have sex with her.
• women want to be desired, rather than experiencing straight-ahead desire (see Patmore?): But sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all." Also related to Sue marrying Jude because of her own sexual jealousy of Arabella, rather than an uncomplicated sexual desire of her own?
• Sue being able to "get over the sense of . . . sex," which Jude can't do. His desire for Sue is there, and Sue kind of wants to be in a friendly intellectual relationship without desire.
• Sue as a "phantasmal, bodiless creature" who can resist natural forces (according to Jude)
• Jude's intellectual ambitions often ruined by sex: "Strange that his first aspiration—towards academical proficiency—had been checked by a woman, and that his second aspiration—towards apostleship—had also been checked by a woman. "Is it," he said, "that the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and springs to noose and hold back those who want to progress?""
• Also Sue's "fastidiousness" and desire for sexual freedom: "What tortures me so much is the necessity of being responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is morally!—the dreadful contract to feel in a particular way in a matter whose essence is its voluntariness!"
• Sue as a kind of mentor for Jude but maybe only because this upper-class guy was a mentor for her. Women having more class mobility in a certain way, through sex?
• Sue’s exceptionality: That a woman-poet, a woman-seer, a woman whose soul shone like a diamond—whom all the wise of the world would have been proud of, if they could have known you—should degrade herself like this!
• The several marriages in the novel are like Four Weddings and a Funeral!
• Questions throughout Hardy of who is your true spouse: Is it sex, love, companionship, or legal marriage? "His passion for Sue troubled his soul; yet his lawful abandonment to the society of Arabella for twelve hours seemed instinctively a worse thing—even though she had not told him of her Sydney husband till afterwards." Then Sue on how sacred is confidentiality between husband and wife: "If a marriage ceremony is a religious thing, it is possibly wrong; but if it is only a sordid contract, based on material convenience in householding, rating, and taxing, and the inheritance of land and money by children, making it necessary that the male parent should be known—which it seems to be—why surely a person may say, even proclaim upon the housetops, that it hurts and grieves him or her?""
• "But surely we are man and wife, if ever two people were in this world? Nature's own marriage it is, unquestionably!" "But not Heaven's. Another was made for me there, and ratified eternally in the church at Melchester."
• "Yes I must—I am his already!" "Pshoo! You be t' other man's. If you didn't like to commit yourselves to the binding vow again, just at first, 'twas all the more credit to your consciences, considering your reasons, and you med ha' lived on, and made it all right at last. After all, it concerned nobody but your own two selves
• And what seems lawful can be unlawful, or from unlawful motives; Phillotson saying “He did not care to admit clearly that his taking Sue to him again had at bottom nothing to do with repentance of letting her go, but was, primarily, a human instinct flying in the face of custom and profession”; the idea that Sue doesn’t think the divorce was legit; Phillotson doesn’t think their marriage or reunion is legit. Legitimacy in this novel keeps switching back and forth.
• Proof of marriage being that you don’t get along: had doubted if they were married at all, especially as he had seen Arabella kiss Jude one evening when she had taken a little cordial; and he was about to give them notice to quit, till by chance overhearing her one night haranguing Jude in rattling terms, and ultimately flinging a shoe at his head, he recognized the note of genuine wedlock; and concluding that they must be respectable, said no more.
• Weird gaps in narrative, especially the one in which Jude and Sue may or may not have gotten married (and certainly have decided to live together as married and have kids, which they hadn’t decided on beforehand.) Our ignorance about their marriage I guess puts us in the place of their neighbors—but also kind of implies their own doubts about whether it’s a real marriage or not. If they feel married, maybe they are married? And maybe not!
• Sue’s explanation: Sue hesitated; and then impulsively told the woman that her husband and herself had each been unhappy in their first marriages, after which, terrified at the thought of a second irrevocable union, and lest the conditions of the contract should kill their love, yet wishing to be together, they had literally not found the courage to repeat it, though they had attempted it two or three times. Therefore, though in her own sense of the words she was a married woman, in the landlady's sense she was not.
• Sue and Jude switching places re: religious doctrine. Sort of happens in Tess, too, right?
• I have sometimes thought, since your marrying Phillotson because of a stupid scandal, that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know!"(oh the scandal was her staying out all night with Jude that one time)
• "And I am not so exceptional a woman as you think. Fewer women like marriage than you suppose, only they enter into it for the dignity it is assumed to confer, and the social advantages it gains them sometimes—a dignity and an advantage that I am quite willing to do without."
• One thing troubled him more than any other; that Sue and himself had mentally travelled in opposite directions since the tragedy: events which had enlarged his own views of life, laws, customs, and dogmas, had not operated in the same manner on Sue's.
• What I can't understand in you is your extraordinary blindness now to your old logic. Is it peculiar to you, or is it common to woman? Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
•  Progress.
• Hope for progress: "Everybody is getting to feel as we do. We are a little beforehand, that's all. In fifty, a hundred, years the descendants of these two will act and feel worse than we.
• Who’s to blame/feminism: "Still, Sue, it is no worse for the woman than for the man. That's what some women fail to see, and instead of protesting against the conditions they protest against the man, the other victim; just as a woman in a crowd will abuse the man who crushes against her, when he is only the helpless transmitter of the pressure put upon him."
• Anti-progress of Father Time.
• Perhaps the world is not illuminated enough for such experiments as ours! Who were we, to think we could act as pioneers!"
• Progress as something that people can’t effect. But change may come naturally or through some weird fate.
• But I felt I could do one thing if I had the opportunity. I could accumulate ideas, and impart them to others. I wonder if the founders had such as I in their minds—a fellow good for nothing else but that particular thing? … I hear that soon there is going to be a better chance for such helpless students as I was.
• As for Sue and me when we were at our own best, long ago—when our minds were clear, and our love of truth fearless—the time was not ripe for us! Our ideas were fifty years too soon to be any good to us. And so the resistance they met with brought reaction in her, and recklessness and ruin on me!
• The narrator: The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given. That the twain were happy—between their times of sadness—was indubitable. And when the unexpected apparition of Jude's child in the house had shown itself to be no such disturbing event as it had looked, but one that brought into their lives a new and tender interest of an ennobling and unselfish kind, it rather helped than injured their happiness.
• Horrible children stuff
• The terrible conversation with Father Time: "It would be better to be out o' the world than in it, wouldn't it?" "It would almost, dear." "'Tis because of us children, too, isn't it, that you can't get a good lodging?" "Well—people do object to children sometimes." "Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?" "Oh—because it is a law of nature." "But we don't ask to be born?" "No indeed." . . . "I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!"
• Hardy’s dry, restrained narrative: Half-paralyzed by the strange and consummate horror of the scene he let Sue lie, cut the cords with his pocket-knife and threw the three children on the bed; but the feel of their bodies in the momentary handling seemed to say that they were dead.
• Moreover a piece of paper was found upon the floor, on which was written, in the boy's hand, with the bit of lead pencil that he carried:   Done because we are too menny.
• Doctor’s crazy diagnosis of the children as a herald of a universal wish not to live. Science? Heredity? Fate? WHAT.
• Sue’s reasoning: It was that I wanted to be truthful. I couldn't bear deceiving him as to the facts of life. And yet I wasn't truthful, for with a false delicacy I told him too obscurely. Half-truths as a great danger—see Tess?

Angel in the House, in the Living Room (part 2)

• Here are some scattered other quotes from The Angel in the House that I'm interested in but too lazy to talk about, roughly grouped by theme:

• Other kinds of knowledge. Her life, all honour, observed, with awe    Which cross experience could not mar, The fiction of the Christian law    That all men honourable are;
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 72  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 09:49 AM
  
  weirdly pious and cynical at once. is she wrong? is the role of the angel to promote helpful inspiring fictions? all victorian lit more ok with helpful fiction, deceit
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 72  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 09:50 AM
  
  or does she know the law is fiction. or is the idea that its fiction that its just men
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 71  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 09:51 AM
  
  or is the fiction just that only men are honorable
• The positive feedback loop of flattery. On wings of love uplifted free,    And by her gentleness made great, I'll teach how noble man should be    To match with such a lovely mate; And then in her may move the more    The woman's wish to be desired, (By praise increased), till both shall soar,    With blissful emulations fired. And, as geranium, pink, or rose    Is thrice itself through power of art,
  
  Her charms, perceived to prosper first    In his beloved advertencies, When in her glass they are rehearsed,    Prove his most powerful allies.
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 684  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 03:30 PM
  
  this seems to be important. consciousness of their own beauty or of male gaze and admiration makes girls love guys more. how does this compare w other accounts.
  
  Why fly so fast? Her flatter'd breast    Thanks him who finds her fair and good; She loves her fears; veil'd joys arrest    The foolish terrors of her blood;
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 687  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 03:31 PM
  
  bella swan
  
  
  his praiseful words    The virtues they impute confer.
  
  Go on flattering, sir; A woman, like the Koh-i-noor,    Mounts to the price that's put on her.'
• related: weird mirror stuff
  At times, she cannot but confess Her other friends are somewhat blind;    Her parents' years excuse neglect, But all the rest are scarcely kind,    And brothers grossly want respect; And oft she views what he admires    Within her glass, and sight of this Makes all the sum of her desires    To be devotion unto his.
  
  III.—LAIS AND LUCRETIA. Did first his beauty wake her sighs?    That's Lais! Thus Lucretia's known: The beauty in her Lover's eyes    Was admiration of her own.
  
  Oh, how I wish I knew your fault,    For Love's tired gaze to rest upon! Your graces, which have made me great,    Will I so loftily admire, Yourself yourself shall emulate,    And be yourself your own desire. I'll nobly mirror you too fair,    And, when you're false to me your glass, What's wanting you'll by that repair,    So bring yourself through me to pass.
• Male friendship--a different doubling.
  Time was when either, in his friend,    His own deserts with joy admired; We took one side in school-debate,    Like hopes pursued with equal thirst, Were even-bracketed by Fate,    Twin-Wranglers, seventh from the First;
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 1210  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 07:41 PM
  
  doubling of male friends replaced w het mirroring. like het answer to in memoriam
• Separate spheres. That nuptial contrasts are the poles    On which the heavenly spheres revolve.
  The spheres are separate, but the whole world revolves around heterosexual marriage and domestic life! Whoa. The hand that rocks the cradle, man.
  Also, "The Comparison":
  Or, if his suit with Heaven prevails    To righteous life, his virtuous deeds Lack beauty, virtue's badge; she fails    More graciously than he succeeds.
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Highlight Loc. 274-75  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 12:09 PM
  
  He's never young nor ripe; she grows    More infantine, auroral, mild, And still the more she lives and knows    The lovelier she's express'd a child.
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Highlight Loc. 277-78  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 12:10 PM
  
  Or say she wants the patient brain    To track shy truth; her facile wit At that which he hunts down with pain    Flies straight, and does exactly hit.
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Highlight Loc. 280-81  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 12:10 PM
  
  For love is substance, truth the form;    Truth without love were less than nought; But blindest love is sweet and warm,    And full of truth not shaped by thought,
  
  His words, which still instruct, but so    That this applause seems still implied, 'How wise in all she ought to know,    How ignorant of all beside!'
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 828  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 06:18 PM
  
  gross
  
  What seems to say her rosy mouth?    'I'm not convinced by proofs but signs.'
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 953  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 06:35 PM
  
  seeming important. the subjective. are signs seeming. whereas proof is?
  
  There's nothing left of what she was;    Back to the babe the woman dies, And all the wisdom that she has    Is to love him for being wise.
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 1143  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 07:22 PM
  
  radical reformation of character. also innocence in marriage like freedom. kind of a paradox
  
  The indignity of taking gifts    Exhilarates her loving breast; A rapture of submission lifts    Her life into celestial rest;
  
  Perchance, when all her praise is said,    He tells the news, a battle won, On either side ten thousand dead.    'Alas!' she says; but, if 'twere known, She thinks, 'He's looking on my face!    I am his joy; whate'er I do, He sees such time-contenting grace    In that, he'd have me always so!'
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 1147  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 07:24 PM
  
  see prins and jackson and aurora leigh on women and the general vs particular
  
  Her secret (privilege of the Bard,    Whose fancy is of either sex), Is mine; but let the darkness guard    Myst'ries that light would more perplex!
  
  'Be man's hard virtues highly wrought,    But let my gentle Mistress be, In every look, word, deed, and thought,    Nothing but sweet and womanly!
• But not a double standard: Who is the happy husband? He    Who, scanning his unwedded life, Thanks Heaven, with a conscience free,    'Twas faithful to his future wife.
  ==========
   
• Subjectivity of love. He meets, by heavenly chance express,    The destined maid; seine hidden hand Unveils to him that loveliness    Which others cannot understand.
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 161  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 10:36 AM
  
  particular to this poem, victorians in general: the subjectivity & therefore the wide availability of love. we're not all competing for helen. there is a special girl for us all
  
  Say, how has thy Beloved surpass'd    So much all others?' 'She was mine.'
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 1101  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 07:13 PM
  
  subjectivity and possession. but not uniqueness.
  
  'Tis that which all right women are,    But which I'll know in none but her.
• Love as a Virtue. Strong passions mean weak will, and he    Who truly knows the strength and bliss Which are in love, will own with me    No passion but a virtue 'tis.
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 176  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 10:41 AM
  
  this is actually radical post c18. but wd any victorians disagree at this point.
• Honoria's cousin Frederick. The only real rival for Honoria's affections, but he's not much of a rival at all. She's pretty much not interested in him from the beginning. POV questions about this section:
  She was all mildness; yet 'twas writ    In all her grace, most legibly, 'He that's for heaven itself unfit,    Let him not hope to merit me.'
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 199  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 10:48 AM
  
  do these messages come from her. or are they superimpositions or misreadings
• Professions Vs Poets. Saw many, and vanquish'd all I saw Of her unnumber'd cousin-kind,    In Navy, Army, Church, and Law;
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 209  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 10:49 AM
  
  medieval knight dream. also poet vs the professions. who is the best husband
• Purity/Milton. And still with favour singled out,    Marr'd less than man by mortal fall,
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 216  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 10:52 AM
  
  interesting. milton would not agree, right? very anti tradition, unless marred less mean there was less to mar
  
  And all, by this their power to give,    Proving her right to take, proclaim Her beauty's clear prerogative    To profit so by Eden's blame.
• Fallen women: Behold the worst! Light from above    On the blank ruin writes 'Forbear! Her first crime was unguarded love,    And all the rest, perhaps, despair.'
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 608  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 03:13 PM
  
  classic victorian apology for sexual fall. are they more sympathetic than earlier periods bc theyve invented love. or is the sympathy a reaction to how harsh they are. probably just a symptom of sentimentality plus reform mindedness. woman question
  
  
  
     And doubt not but our God is just, Albeit unscathed thy traitor goes,    And thou art stricken to the dust. That penalty's the best to bear    Which follows soonest on the sin; And guilt's a game where losers fare    Better than those who seem to win.
• Tension between writing about humble human experience vs. not writing smut.
  How vilely 'twere to misdeserve    The poet's gift of perfect speech, In song to try, with trembling nerve,    The limit of its utmost reach, Only to sound the wretched praise    Of what to-morrow shall not be; So mocking with immortal bays    The cross-bones of mortality! I do not thus. My faith is fast    That all the loveliness I sing Is made to bear the mortal blast,    And blossom in a better Spring.
  
  How long shall men deny the flower    Because its roots are in the earth, And crave with tears from God the dower    They have, and have despised as dearth,
• Earthly vs heavenly love.
  That other doubt, which, like a ghost,    In the brain's darkness haunted me, Was thus resolved: Him loved I most,    But her I loved most sensibly.
  
  I saw three Cupids (so I dream'd),    Who made three kites, on which were drawn, In letters that like roses gleam'd,    'Plato,' 'Anacreon,' and 'Vaughan.' The
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 769  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 05:56 PM
  
  weird
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 773  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 06:02 PM
  
  vaughan is the perfect love poet. i guess this is a pretty typically victorian understanding of material vs ideal balance. they're materialists who think the material leads into or embodies the ideal. you can only achieve the ideal thru the material, the local, the specific? see mrs jellyby. but if you are interested in the material only for itself you are bad
  ==========
  
  heaven will still allow memory of marriage. importance of worldly things asserted;
  
  And, if the world's not built of lies,    Nor all a cheat the Gospel tells, If that which from the dead shall rise    Be I indeed, not something else, There's no position more secure    In reason or in faith than this, That those conditions must endure,    Which, wanting, I myself should miss.
  
  
• Clouds. lots of stuff about clouds. explaining and justifying womens irrational side?
•  The everyday/the trivial. She led me; and we laugh'd and talk'd,    And praised the Flower-show and the Ball; And Mildred's pinks had gain'd the Prize;    And, stepping like the light-foot fawn, She brought me 'Wiltshire Butterflies,'    The Prize-book; then we paced the lawn,
  
  Not in the crises of events,    Of compass'd hopes, or fears fulfill'd, Or acts of gravest consequence,    Are life's delight and depth reveal'd. The day of days was not the day;    That went before, or was postponed; The night Death took our lamp away    Was not the night on which we groan'd. I drew my bride, beneath the moon,    Across my threshold; happy hour! But, ah, the walk that afternoon    We saw the water-flags in flower!
  
  Is nature in thee too spiritless,    Ignoble, impotent, and dead, To prize her love and loveliness    The more for being thy daily bread? [also this is about marriage not courtship]
• The Petrarch he gives her. It's really valuable but he doesn't care.
• Guy's class location. And with the accustom'd compliment    Of talk, and beef, and frothing beer, I, my own steward, took my rent,    Three hundred pounds for half the year; Our witnesses the Cook and Groom,    We sign'd the lease for seven years more,
• Life-in-life. She sees, and yet she scarcely sees,    For, life-in-life not yet begun, Too many are its mysteries    For thought to fix on any one.
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 667  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 03:27 PM
  
  what is life in life. sex. motherhood
• Feminizing of male lover.
  Ah, grief that almost crushes life,    To lie upon his lonely bed, And fancy her another's wife!
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 699  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 03:35 PM
  
  lots of boys lying on beds feeling frustrated. ha ha
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Highlight Loc. 701-2  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 03:35 PM
  
  He wakes renew'd for all the smart.    His only Love, and she is wed! His fondness comes about his heart,    As milk comes, when the babe is dead.
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 702  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 03:37 PM
  
  whoa. so this feminizing of the male lover is explicit!! also he is like the mom of the girl bc he nurtures her, devlops her personality. crazy nursing boyfriend
• weird vulnerability of girl once she's accepted lover. Earlier he talked about her being fleeing prey; now when she's accepted him:
  My queen was crouching at my side,    By love unsceptred and brought low, Her awful garb of maiden pride    All melted into tears like snow;
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 728  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 03:42 PM
  
  abjection kinda
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Highlight Loc. 730-31  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 03:43 PM
  
  Her soul, which late I loved to invest    With pity for my poor desert, Buried its face within my breast,    Like a pet fawn by hunters hurt.
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 731  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 03:43 PM
  
  this section has some intense stuff. lovers consciousness of his power
• Marriage and property. Nay, could eternal life afford    That tyranny should thus deduct From this fair land, which call'd me lord,    A year of the sweet usufruct?
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 887  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 06:26 PM
  
  legal real estate terms. living off income of love. body. is it usufruct to marry someone
• Women's voices embedded in text. The sister's poems. Honoria's letters.
  'I found your note. How very kind    To leave it there! I cannot tell How pleased I was, or how you find    Words to express your thoughts so well. The Girls are going to the Ball    At Wilton. If you can, DO come; And any day this week you call    Papa and I shall be at home.
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 1082  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 07:09 PM
  
  girls letters are chattier. see amours de voyage
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Highlight Loc. 1088-90  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 07:10 PM
  
  Adieu! I am not well. Last night    My dreams were wild: I often woke, The summer-lightning was so bright;    And when it flash'd I thought you spoke.'
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  Angel in the House (Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore)
  - Note Loc. 1090  | Added on Monday, July 11, 2011, 07:11 PM
  
  but though chattier it's more vivid and so more poetical! remember versifying sister. think about women's writing embedded in text
• Cynicism in epigrams: 'I saw you take his kiss!' ''Tis true.'    'O, modesty!' ''Twas strictly kept: He thought me asleep; at least, I knew    He thought I thought he thought I slept.'