East Lynne & pizza

 We made our first pizza on our pizza stone this President's Day weekend! and I read Ellen Wood's East Lynne, and can't bring myself to write a real blog entry, so here are some scattered notes:

Published in 1861 (before Lady Audley's Secret--these are the first two sensation novels ever, I think.)

Apparently super popular for years & years in stage adaptations, which included the line "Gone! And never called me mother!" which isn't in the book (wikipedia!)

* hasty marriages
* middle class coming in, dissipated aristocracy coming out
- old earl vs. Archibald Carlyle; Levison vs Carlyle; Isabel vs Barbara; Barbara's family home being right between East Lynne & the village, like some kind of intermediary social class (but her dad, as a justice, might be older than the earldom, see Wives & Daughters). Lady Isabel being gradually replaced by Barbara, made socially subordinate to Barbara. Scenes where Barbara is staring through the curtains at a cozy romantic domestic scene between Mr Carlyle & Lady Isabel mirrored by later scenes when Isabel stares at the same scene (at the piano?) between Mr and Mrs Carlyle.
* omens & dreams: broken cross, Mrs Hare's dreams
* disguises & doubles: Isabel/Barbara (bad wife/good wife); Isabel/her daughter Isabel; William Vane the dead earl/William Vane Isabel's cousin or whatever; William Vane Carlyle her dead son; Thorn/Levison; fake Thorn/real Thorn; Richard/laborer; and of course Isabel/Madame Vine
* author's weird sarcastic commentary (Dickensian, kinda, and also Dickensian comic relief)
* strange refrain of Thorn's pushing his hair back, and his white hand, and the diamond--the way these words get repeated, and the bizarre fetishism of identifying someone by their diamond. Jewels in these novels--Lady Audley especially--as carrying this significant meaning as heirlooms and as evidence.
* Cinderella story of Isabel getting married vs. fallen woman story/kind of unrelated murder mystery that follows. Implication that Cinderella story is her doom: she's going to be forced by circumstances (father leaving her destitute, Mrs Vane slapping her, Levison denying that he wants to marry her, Carlyle being kind and offering up her old home) marry a man she doesn't love and then be more vulnerable to sin. But it doesn't really seem to work that way: what drives her away from her husband isn't necessarily that she loves Levison more (although that seems to be part of it) or that her life at East Lynne was too quiet and bourgeois compared to her aristocratic upbringing (which she didn't necessarily even like? the problems at East Lynne seemed more related to Aunt Corny/Miss Carlyle being overbearing and not letting her learn to be a housekeeper) but that she's jealous and thinks her husband loves someone else. The whole time she was getting engaged to Carlyle I was feeling horrible because I thought he was going to put her away, but although the jealousy plot is developed pretty plausibly, it doesn't seem to inexorably follow from the courtship plot--Mrs Wood tells us that "circumstances conspired against her" but they seem to be NEW circumstances that conspired against her after the old ones didn't cause too much trouble.
* which brings me to the strange redundancy of circumstances and evidence in this novel, which also bothered me in Lady Audley: part of this must be to make us feel this Clarissa-like withdrawal of support from the heroine (she manages to muster the moral courage to part with Levison in France and come home, but her husband brings Levison to East Lynne; she almost tells her husband her fears about Levison, but he hands her a dampening letter from Aunt Corny). But as I said, this doesn't actually seem to stack with the circumstances that pile up before her marriage, or the series of clues that Wood plants that we never do anything with (Isabel's plain gold chain after Levison crushes her cross seeming very similar to the reader to the plain gold chain Carlyle gives to Barbara--this felt like a very Phoebe-and-Lady-Audley-look-the-same moment to me.) And then there are so many redundant clues to other mysteries: Isabel learns two or three times and in two or three different ways that her husband loved her & not Barbara--from Levison himself, from Barbara herself, and I think from someone else. Similarly, we have all these different ways of figuring out that Thorn = Levison, and the evidence gets delivered two or three ways in various expository scenes and in the trial. Is this just reminding us of stuff? casualties of the serial form?
* Thinking about this relationship I've been trying to set up between the female domestic sphere & the male (public?) professional sphere, that invasion of the domestic sphere by the professional happens here, too: as a lawyer, Carlyle's professional life is actually all bound up with people's private domestic embarrassments and involves all kinds of people coming to his home for quasi-professional reasons: he buys East Lynne with income from his (& his father's) law practice, and develops a sort of professional friendship with both the dad & Isabel, as both customer & lawyer & friend; he has Levison there as a favor (he refuses to represent him, interestingly--there's also something going on with what risks he will take morally and professionally versus personally--the book explains this by referencing his faith in his wife, but what if Levison had been not only a seducer but a murderer? hey wait a second) but is kind of helping him broker a deal with Levison's uncle to pay off his debts; Isabel's jealousy comes from Barbara's repeated half-professional (her mom sent her to get Richard money) half-personal (they're family) visits, and Carlyle's reticence to his wife is both protecting attorney-client privilege, but also this kind of dismissive attitude towards her ability to understand his business.
* the domestic itself--East Lynne? the kids? lots of stuff implying people are possessions/furnishings of the house--Carlyle kind of buys Isabel along with the house, and then Barbara kind of buys himself and the house from him, and takes Isabel's place in it, and Isabel recognizes all the tea things except the new steamer or something that has been bought for the governess. Definitely some interesting stuff about the role of the governess: a lady who has her own sitting room, is treated as a gentlewoman, but also is subordinate. The temptation if she's pretty. Classic governess stuff. But also her weird parallel role to the mother: Barbara has that bizarre--and "quite right" according to EW and maybe to free-indirect-discourse Isabel--speech about how the mom has to be a good and holy example to the kids and must always speak to them with gentle persuasion, which you can't do if you're around kids all the time, so the nurse has to do that. And she imagines Isabel's relationship (maybe with Isabel's own kids, who since they don't belong to Barbara will get less of her moral teaching) will be the same.
* Moms! I can't tell if Barbara is supposed to be kind of a bad mom: she doesn't really like kids, she talks about how she loves her husband much more than her own kids (echoing Carlyle caring more about Isabel's fate than her baby's during her first childbirth scene) and she admits at the end to still being jealous of Isabel's kids (she didn't really care about William dying, although she was the first one to notice he was left out in the cold during the fake fire scare--maybe that's showing that she's starting to be able to care about these kids?) Novel doesn't seem certain about whether motherhood is an instinct you only feel towards your OWN kids (everyone is so weirded out that Isabel cries so much when she finds out William is going to die) or whether you can grow to love other people's children. Lots of classic stuff about how she is a bad mom because she abandoned her kids, and how she never should have come back to East Lynne. But obviously her devotion to her kids is powerful and admirable--although maybe you can only have such devotion to your lawful children, since she doesn't seem to care about the bastard baby she has with Levison at all, making me think of Aurora Leigh wondering if babies are consolations for sinning women, and if that should be allowed. For Isabel it's not allowed (and Marian in AL didn't sin, as we remember.) But then Isabel also gives that creepy speech to William about how she would have been better off if she died as a baby and maybe he will too, which made me think 1) it's not _just_ a blessing that the bastard baby died, but that all babies should die and 2) surely Jude the Obscure is some kind of pastiche of this kind of speech--it's absurd and cruel and sick to speak to a child this way, and to present a child's death as resigned and easy as EW presents William's death (God resigns children to their fate), and Jude the Obscure is just the reductio ad absurdum of this, right? But why say Father Time is a child specific to the new generation: wasn't he born in novels like this, and probably sentimental texts from earlier on? Or maybe the new generation is willing to follow out the absurd implications of the older generation's sentiment, because it is creepy and rational. I don't know.
Anyway, I was surprised how little of the children we got, certainly before Isabel left East Lynne but also afterwards, when she comes back as their governess. We get more of them, and we get the pathetic death scene, but mostly we get descriptions of her savage love of the children, rather than scenes where we see it being demonstrated. But as Barbara points out, mother love isn't necessarily an all-day active engagement between mother and child: it's a powerful influence exerted for like one hour per day, after dessert or whatever. Isabel's motherhood is presented more as a powerful force within her, a longing, maybe an animal, instinctual longing, a craving for her children (kind of how it works in Aurora Leigh) rather than a relationship with them as people.

It also brings with it a renewed, more authentic love of her ex-husband, which EW tells us is wrong (and Mormon!) but what can you do. I wrote a paper a couple of years ago about Augusta Webster's Mother and Daughter sonnets, arguing that Webster is trying to separate the role of mother from the role of wife, and dramatizing the conflict those roles create for the woman, and I wonder how much East Lynne does this. Certainly Barbara cares more about her husband than her kids; you could argue that Isabel cares more about her kids, since they're what draw her back, but that seems tied up in her love and longing for her husband.

* Also about domesticity: it occurs to me you get daily-life details about how a house is run only when your position within it has changed? Like when Isabel is a governess and not the lady of the house we see what's different, and what she's missing out on? but maybe not really.

* Also: what is up with the stupid murder plot. Why do we care. Is the main character really Levison, and the goal of the novel is to make us see what a villain he is? Or are we supposed to care more about Barbara and her family than we do? Levison is so clearly established as the villain, and Isabel as the heroine, that making the climax of the novel a revelation that Levison is even MORE of a villain seems very boring. I guess Levison and Isabel could be considered doubles of one another, both people who are hiding something, who bring their secrets into your home when you're not looking. I guess they fuse in Lady Audley, who is both a beautiful false woman and a secret sort-of murderer; Lady Audley is definitely more fun than either of them. She has her regrets about her abandoned kid, but she's pretty awful, whereas according to our morality and sort of according to Victorian morality Isabel is not that bad, and we wince when EW is like "Maybe you should have thought about that before, my lady!" Also something Dickens does in Bleak House, obviously. Lady Dedlock vs Lady Audley vs Lady Isabel? Lady Isabel is clearly the most nicest one. THE END