Wow, these novels on my domestic list are frustrating! They're frustrating partly because they're not necessarily very good--they're potboiler novels written by working women writers to make money, mostly, and they're full of the elements that give nineteenth-century novels--and particularly women's novels, probably--a bad name: sentiment and sensation to begin with, and comic relief that isn't quite so comic, and renunciation, or punishment for non-renunciation, and picturesque landscapes, and bonnet-strings, and all the things Joyce Carol Oates inaccurately objects to in Jane Austen. But that's why I'm interested in them, right? I'm interested in vindicating writing that's about women's worlds and women's concerns, and yet reading these books sometimes makes you realize why people don't like to read these books and why women's concerns are boring (and I can give you a lot of reasons why that isn't true, but these books don't necessarily make that case as well as they could) and also anything interesting that can be said on that subject probably gets said in Elaine Showalter's A Literature of their Own, which I might try to read [excerpts from??] tomorrow.
Rhoda Broughton's 1883 novel Belinda frustrated me in a lot of ways, but also is pretty interesting. I didn't know anything about it when I started reading it; there's very little information on the internet, and I chose it for this list because it was one of a few novels my examiner mentioned when I asked her for typical domestic novels I should look at. I may have even specifically asked for a Rhoda Broughton novel, since I read Cometh Up as a Flower in a class in college (I think I was reading it the week Paul and I started dating, over spring break; I have a memory of reading it aloud from one of those course packets to Paul and Laura on the sofa at their house, although I remember nothing of the plot. Interestingly--but maybe not coincidentally--the (post-doc?) who taught that class did her dissertation with my examiner for this list! But I only got an A- in that class, which is kind of pathetic in retrospect. Anyway!) I included Belinda, The Daisy Chain, and Miss Marjoribanks along with David Copperfield and The Angel in the House in a section of my list I called "The Angel in the House: Home and Courtship," because I expected those texts to be the most conventionally-domestic of the texts on my list. And in many ways they are--but about half of them contain examples of disastrous courtship, that either doesn't end in marriage or ends in a terrible marriage, and two of them--Daisy Chain and Miss Marjoribanks--weren't really about marriage plots as much as they were about family life.
Belinda starts off with a very conventional courtship plot--so conventional, in fact, that I all but skimmed the first quarter of the novel. It's slightly unconventional, I suppose, because it takes place in Dresden among traveling Brits, so the love scenes take place on group excursions to public gardens and during parades where there are sort of contemptible German royalty floating around, and bouquets being tossed to everyone, and concerns about chaperones. The local color about the Germans and the daffodils and the Schloss I found about as boring as the lovemaking, which helped with the skimming. But of course a continental town overrun by vacationing Brits is a totally acceptable place to meet your husband; there is the concern, of course, that class and wealth and family get a little flattened out abroad, where everyone rubs shoulders with everyone else who can speak English--Belinda's sister Sarah teases her that her admirer's father could make artificial manure for a living--but Belinda seems to have a pretty good head on her shoulders and falls in love with a young man just finishing up at Oxbridge (Broughton calls it Oxbridge throughout the whole book, which is kind of stupid and annoying--is she really worried that some Oxford don is going to sue her for libel? maybe she just doesn't want to go check up on the architecture of Balliol, or put one of those notes in that Dorothy L Sayers puts in Gaudy Night where she's like, "uh, sorry, I got rid of a cricket-field to make my fake college." Also, Girton exists in this universe, which is confusing) whose father is an "iron-master," which I think means he runs an iron factory like Mr Rouncewell in Bleak House (or like Mr Rouncewell's kid maybe because now it is 1883 and presumably this is an even better job) and whose mother is totally a Lady somebody.
Belinda and her admirer, David Rivers, have a hard time coming to an understanding because Belinda always says something weird and cold in response to compliments, out of an easily-misinterpreted awkwardness and shyness. Her sister Sarah doesn't have this problem: she's always engaging herself to random strangers, and at the beginning of the novel she's sort of inadvertently engaged herself to a gross old annoying Oxbridge professor of Etruscan, Professor Forth, and she's trying to get Belinda to get her out of it. Apparently this is something she does all the time, and Belinda's like, "this time you need to get yourself out of it." Meanwhile the time of their visit is running out--their youthful and morally-lax grandma is only planning to stay through June--so Sarah tries to get Belinda to turn on the heat with Rivers so he'll propose. And Rivers almost does, going so far as to rub his lips on the palm of Belinda's hand (steamy!) before they're interrupted by local terrible nosy expat Englishwoman Miss Watson (who has a red neck and a "grizzled fringe"). Then Rivers doesn't show up at an assignation he arranged with Belinda in a public garden, and it turns out he was called home because his father committed suicide after iron prices fell and he was ruined; B & S find this out in the newspaper, but also eventually get a note from Rivers asking B to forgive him for missing their assignation. Meanwhile S gets rid of Professor Forth, but not before B sort of accidentally prepares the way by eagerly taking some dictation from him and asking him about how to make Greek letters and showing him that S isn't really interested in his scholarly life, and we the readers are like OH DEAR please don't marry Mr Casaubon I mean Professor Forth, and Belinda is like "whoa, I would not want to be married to that guy" and we are like "phew."
So then B & S go home to London & B waits 18 months and doesn't hear anything from Rivers and assumes he doesn't like her anymore. It's pretty obvious to we the readers that he is probably financially ruined and doesn't feel like he can ask a young lady to marry him anymore, but if B realizes this she doesn't let it keep her from becoming dead inside and immune to the charming antics of the family's three hilarious dogs (important characters throughout the novel) & her high-spirited sister and catty grandma. B runs into old Professor Forth at some kind of poetry reading and they talk about Browning and B is inexplicably like "maybe I could drown my sorrows in scholarship" and convinces Professor Forth to teach her Greek and Euclid and stuff and it's pretty obvious that she doesn't like it but that it can distract her in a kind of uncomfortable numbing way from her broken heart. And then she is going to marry Professor F even though he is gross-looking and old and has a demented old mother at home, and she's like "listen, this is a business arrangement, Professor Forth. I don't love you but I can be your secretary and take care of your mom and you can teach me Latin or whatever and maybe I will grow to like it" and he's like, "I guess, but maybe stop calling it a business arrangement" and she's like "no" and he's like "fine." The sister is horrified, but the grandma is like, "Great, this means Sarah & I can go to Monaco and not pay for Belinda"--actually the grandma's desire to go on vacay w/o Belinda may have precipitated the engagement--and the sister is like "come on, just wait a month to see if Rivers calls you, just think how miserable you will be if you're married to that old guy and he shows up" but of course it's one of those weird self-immolating suicidal girls thing where Belinda just wants to get the marriage over with, so they get married and go on a horrible honeymoon to Folkestone where it rains, and it turns out her husband is just awful, like not just boring and intellectual but cheap and wanting to keep their own supply of bacon in their hotel room and insisting on wearing carpet slippers everywhere and not having a fire, and during one miserable nor'easter she gets a letter from--you guessed it!--Rivers, saying "we didn't have any money and I was doing hard labor because I can't stand office work but now we have some money and I can marry you darling darling darling, don't those three darlings look so pretty, I know some women wouldn't have waited but surely you have waited" and she is so happy about the darling darling darling but then remembers she's married and is so sad and she goes out in the snowstorm to send him the notice of her marriage to a guy they'd both ridiculed on their vacation in Dresden, and when she gets home she collapses in a faint.
Then it's like a year later or something and she's living in the suburbs of Oxbridge with him and his demented mom and life isn't so bad because when you're young and healthy life is enjoyable, but life with the husband specifically is terrible: he overworks her as his secretary, and he's peevish and old. Sarah comes to visit with her dog and he doesn't really let belinda entertain Sarah, but at some mandatory event with a duke at it they all run into Rivers, who's back to finish his degree, and you can imagine. Sarah can tell Belinda is still into Rivers and warns Belinda not to go to the devil with him, but Sarah also has her own responsibilities as a coquette to think about, and there are all these river parties with all the undergraduates Sarah has seduced, and Rivers and Belinda get to hang out during those, and during one of them Rivers is like, "what if I came to visit every weekend during the long vacation when your husband's gone" and Belinda is like "uh maybe not every weekend" and Sarah figures this out and tries to stay with Belinda during the long vacation, but Belinda says no, and then Belinda feels guilty and tries to get Prof Forth to take her to Switzerland but he, Casaubon-like, thinks it's too much trouble to change his plans, and so Belinda has a delightful long vacation where the house is her own, and she gets to enjoy living on her own. This part is interesting because it's very clear that Belinda wouldn't enjoy living on her own without the prospect of her lover coming to visit--and that part is very cognitive-dissonant, with Belinda constantly making sure she hasn't technically done anything wrong, and doing little projects for her husband that she doesn't need to do, like making a catalogue of his papers for when he comes back (this reminds me a lot of me cleaning the bathroom before going out to secretly drink 40s with my high-school friends)--but also it's a reminder of the pleasures of having a home of your own, and having some control over it, a pleasure that maybe you don't get unless you're a widow or a woman whose husband is on vacation, right? Or maybe you don't get it if you're a member of a certain class. Her life is hanging out with her dogs, gardening, taking walks, working on projects, visiting her demented mother-in-law when the nurse takes a break, and having bi-weekly dates with her long-distance boyfriend where they just sit on a bench and talk to each other. It's not exactly my life when I was 24, because I didn't have dogs or a garden or a mother-in-law, and my boyfriend and I were allowed to kiss each other, but it's close. It's what it's like to be a single lady now. I guess her sister has exactly that same life but with a catty but fun grandma instead of a demented mother-in-law in the attic.
It's also interesting that in so many of these novels you can be kind of a morally-terrible lady and have a perfectly fine life--it's only the ladies with consciences who get into these bad situations. Like, Belinda is way more constant and serious and loving and prudish and well-behaved than Sarah, and that's why she's so devastated by Rivers falling out of touch, and that's why she married a crumb, and now she's in serious trouble, while Sarah is doing fine just hanging out with grandma. And in East Lynne & Jude the Obscure there are these trashy insouciant trollops who totally don't get punished no matter how many lovers they have, while these noble serious ladies overthink everything and fall into disgrace and/or die tragically. I guess the trulls are going to hell, so that's not so great. Maybe in Hardy they're not going to hell. You know I don't understand that guy.
Anyway Miss Watson reappears and once again interferes with Rivers & Belinda being together by detaining Belinda at her house when she's supposed to go meet Rivers, and saying she ran into Rivers and he must be in Oxbridge for a louche intrigue, and Belinda finally gets to run to meet Rivers and it's like their positions are reversed--this time he's waiting for her, maybe you get more authority as a married lady--and he asks her to run away with him and they kiss and then she's like, "what are we doing, you'd better go!" Renunciation! and when her husband comes back he works her so hard, and she works herself so hard, that she has a total breakdown (intellectual labor/writing is so bad for you guys, but also I am not even making fun becasue my left hand is totally cramping up right now just like Belinda's) and they have to go to the Lake District for her to recover & hang out with Sarah & grandma. And guess what Rivers shows up there by accident! and there's a lot more of this cognitive dissonance stuff and then some hanging out and then the husband wants to go to a cheaper colder hotel for his own health and so she goes with him and has another work breakdown and goes for a walk and wants to die on the heath but--as she's learned many times--it's not so easy to die of a broken heart as it is for like Lady Isabel in East Lynne, and she runs into Rivers (he followed her) and he's like "All or nothing" and she's like "All!" and he instantly loses respect for her but goes off to make arrangements for their love nest in Yorkshire, and she's really extra toilet-cleaning humble and does lots of work for her husband and writes him a note to say she's leaving him, but when she's almost at the train station to run away with Rivers she remembers her sister on her wedding day saying "it's not too late, it's not too late" and realizes that it wasn't too late then, she could have gotten out of this crummy marriage, and NOW it's not too late to disgrace herself, so she turns the carriage around and runs up to her room and no one has seen her note! hooray! and as penance she's going to show it to her husband herself (what!?) but when she goes in her room he's in a curious attitude at his desk--"he was not occupied" but rather kind of slumped with his head down, very much like Casaubon--and of course like Casaubon he is DEAD! and you guys that is the end of the novel!!! we never know what she did next!!! It's just like, "the professorship of Etruscan at Oxbridge was vacant." Also "I told you he was sick."
This ending was of course super frustrating and annoying. Does she live on as a chaste & chastened widow? Does she marry her sweetheart having lost his respect? Or is everything OK? I think the implication is that everything is not OK, right? but I also think Broughton may be leaving it open on purpose, or even out of a refusal to clean this up neatly: she really wants to resist having something obviously tragic and punishing happen to Belinda, both because she seems to be interested in realism--it's actually pretty hard to die just from being sad, she keeps telling us--but also maybe because Belinda doesn't really deserve to be punished? The novel's tone is so comic so much of the time that it's hard to read this as a morality tale, and yet the narration about Belinda and her sadness and her losing her honor and the hell it is for a woman to lose her honor at the end is pretty East Lynne-ish. I think Broughton is going for affectionate and observant satire, maybe: look at this admirable character, look at the mistakes she makes, look at how those mistakes but also a neglectful and inattentive and poorly-matched husband lead to the warping of her principles, also let us feel fear and pity, also let us laugh at the funny dogs. I mean definitely her purpose here is to entertain a novel-reading audience and give them a kind of unusual story with funny parts and exciting parts and pathetic parts, and what feels like an attempt at a surprise ending. It also feels a little like Hardy's "An Imaginative Woman," which is also kind of about narrative trickery + foolish but sympathetic women + crummy husbands.
I'm also interested in what's going on with the obvious Middlemarch rewrite here. In many ways it just seems like Broughton has lifted the Casaubon/Dorothea marriage as an interesting story to center her own novel around. But what's different? One thing that's different is that Professor Forth is less sympathetic, and less tragic, than Casaubon, possibly becasue we don't get to see things from his perspective, and we don't get the pathos of knowing that his work is doomed and fruitless; also Belinda is less saintly than Dorothea, and also less serious: Dorothea really wants to give herself up to a cause, and she really admires intellectual labor, even if that's not what she ends up being really interested in. With Belinda, it's a weird fad--maybe just a plot device to get her into this Middlemarch situation? I'll have to think more about this.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
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
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
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Further Thoughts on the Daisy Chain
What do I want to remember about The Daisy Chain for my exam? Well, since I read this as part of my domestic list, I need to start thinking about what "the domestic" means--which is rough, because I've become less interested in what the domestic means! but anyway, my comments are going to gravitate toward that question, I guess.
So what does "home" mean in The Daisy Chain? One thing it might mean is renunciation. At the end of the novel, Ethel is thinking about her past and her future:
Norman Ogilivie's marriage seemed to her to have fixed her lot in life, and what was that lot? Home and Cocksmoor had been her choice, and they were before her. Home! but her eyes had been opened to see that earthly homes may not endure, nor fill the heart. Her dear father might, indeed, claim her full-hearted devotion, but, to him, she was only one of many . . . she had begun to understand that the unmarried woman must not seek undivided return of affection, and must not set her love, with exclusive eagerness, on aught below . . .
So here home is what Ethel has given up everything else for--romantic love, "undivided return of affection," as well as the possibility of a literary career--but within that renunciation is more renunciation. She can't just rest on the knowledge that she's done a good thing in devoting herself to her family; she knows she's going to actively suffer from loneliness and rejection by making this choice. But of course there's the final object of a heavenly home, which unlike good things "below" is OK to look forward to--and yet Ethel doesn't say heavenly home, or think of heaven as a telos, but in fact imagines grace as a continual progress: God will direct her path.
And then other people in the novel--specifically Norman and Flora--renounce the comfort and peace of "home" to do work in the larger world: Norman because he can do more good as a missionary than as a country clergyman, Flora because she already messed up and got involved in national politics and now she has to stay there. In a sense, these exiles are both weirdly punishments--Flora wanted a London life for the wrong reasons, and her only penance is to suffer through it and try to do good, while Norman came up with this missionary idea partly to forestall the recurrence of religious doubt caused by too much self-contemplation and maybe too much mixing with Oxford intellectuals. But also in this novel punishments are not really punishments, but necessary curbs on individual natures--that's maybe why Ethel has to stay home and be an angel in the house, because in a wider world she'd be impulsive and "harum-scarum" and so on? Or else it's just important that whatever you do, you're making some kind of sacrifice--even Meta giving up her maid for a couple of weeks was a valuable sacrifice, and one that prepared her later on to make the much larger sacrifice of becoming a missionary with Norman.
All of this has to do with the gendered concept of separate spheres AND with class location. Meta feels bad that she can't sacrifice as much as the poorer Mays, and they convince her that any sacrifices she can make APPROPRIATE TO HER STATION are good enough (although they can never be quite as satisfying as giving up your last penny to feed a poor child.) So the novel is able to celebrate Christian renunciation and sacrifice and make lower-middle-class readers feel good about themselves while also completely upholding the class system in England--something it also does by making all the actually poor people kind of repellent and childlike, creatures who require constant spiritual guidance from ladies and gentlemen. Flora's baby nurse meant well, but her class has a tendency toward deceit and Flora was kind of a bad mom what with going to so many balls etc, so the baby dies of an opium addiction; all the pupils and their mothers at Cocksmoor are kind of gross and grasping and are a real trial to Ethel as students, but it's worth teaching them because sometimes they have spectacular Little-Eva-like death scenes and also they eventually appreciate the church. On one hand, this is realistic: most poor people aren't tragically beautiful and innocent Little Match Girl victims, and learning to deal with them must be hard for well-bred Christian teenagers. On the other hand, it's uncomfortable, and it makes you realize how unusual Elizabeth Gaskell's treatment of the workers in Milton is in North and South (but those are factory workers, not miners like these grubby guys.) And of course there's the comparison between the English working classes and the "heathens" in British colonies overseas, something that comes up in both British and American novels of this period: the abolitionists, of course, are always talking about how we should pay attention to the horrible abuses and ignorance in our own country (preach to the slaveowners, not the Maori), and there's Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House sending all her money to Africa while her own house is in shambles. The Daisy Chain doesn't really clearly come down on this issue: Norman says he can do more good in New Zealand than in a comfortable parish at home, but at the same time Cocksmoor, where Richard ends up becoming the curate, is obviously _not_ a comfortable parish. We do get a sense of racism towards the colonial subjects, mostly from Tom, which gets put down by Norman and by Harry, who won't hear anything bad against his converted islander prince friend David, but that's about as deep as the novel gets into this debate.
As for separate spheres: the colonies play into this interestingly, I think. In most Victorian novels, the British empire is this enormous unseen backdrop, somewhere where characters disappear to and sometimes return from, a source of income and gorgeous fabrics and cursed gems and unexpected legacies, a mechanic that allows plot developments like mistaken identity and bigamy to be at least sort of plausible. The word "domestic" in the context of the British empire is, of course, Britain itself, and most of these novels are highly domestic both in the sense that we never leave England, and that we're concerned with the "feminine" sphere of family relationships and the home, and trying to end each novel with the establishment of the cozy Victorian nuclear family. In this sense, the novel usually follows the characters who stay at home, and all the crazy adventurous dangerous colonial travel happens offscreen. In The Daisy Chain this certainly happens, both on the national/international and home/public life level: Alan and Harry go off to the South Seas, and we don't hear about their adventures until Harry gets back, but we also often stay home with the women and children of the house while the father or brothers go off to try to accomplish some goal--to convince the town directors to choose a new rector, to get a scholarship for Oxford. What is kind of interesting about those moments is that, while we sometimes get some of the suspense and anxiety of the people who have to stay home, we sometimes don't; sometimes Yonge is like, "the dad went out, and everyone wondered what would happen! then he came home and told them." The effect of this is to make you realize how much important stuff happens out in the world, outside the realm of women and children or (on the global level) the English population, and how little these people have to do with it.
And yet the novel certainly messes with separate spheres in interesting ways. Just as the self-contained island of Britain is always implicated in the larger workings of empire, the seemingly closed, feminine, private domestic sphere is always permeable to and reaching out into the wider, more public world. In many ways this translates to "the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world," of course. Margaret, whose paralysis renders her a literalized version of the home-bound woman, is deeply involved with the Cocksmoor project, even though she's never seen it: her brothers make her models of the church, she sends kind words and messages out to the poor people that touch them more than anything anyone else can say (of course in this sense Margaret is a figure for the sainted-dead-mother figure who is already present in this novel, the figure who watches over you after she dies and asks you to emulate her sainted example; and since the "daisy chain" is figured as a kind of chain of being, being lifted up into heaven by the dead mother herself, Margaret, who lives upstairs and is half-dead already, is definitely half-angel, half-human); at the end of the novel she hears the churchbells from Cocksmoor in her own room and is able to die. I'm really interested in the ways in which public life and male professional work penetrate the domestic space through sound in a lot of the novels I'm reading--the doctor's bell in Miss Marjoribanks, the horrible cries of the vivisected animal in The Beth Book. Then of course there's the Cocksmoor project in general: Ethel chooses "home AND Cocksmoor," suggesting that taking care of your own home is only valuable if you take care of someone else's as well. And there's Richard, who is better at making tea than Ethel is, while Ethel is better at teaching the children than he is--there are different skills that make up "domestic" labor, and those skills may not be differentiated along obviously gendered lines. And there are the ways in which Flora and Meta's marriages take them outside the domestic sphere--in Flora's case, she forces her marriage to take her out, I guess, since she manipulates her husband into having a political career--and both of them are examples of my obsession with how the wife almost always has her husband's job.
I'm getting tired of talking about this but I have by no means thought this stuff through enough! I'll end with the obvious remark that Victorian novels domesticate both men and women, so we shouldn't feel so extra bad that Ethel has to give up her literary ambitions because so does Norman! but Norman is at least allowed to be a genius, and to have manic episodes of extra creative genius, and to get married, and everyone's like, "ha ha Ethel a girl could never REALLY write Latin poetry" and also who is even writing Latin poetry in 1856? Come on guys, get with the vernacular already. Milton I can excuse, and even he went over to English. Also I guess Ethel's crazy last meditation is pretty brave, especially when you compare this novel to Little Women (which I keep doing--I wonder if the Alcotts read Yonge? surely they read novels like this.) Jo has the same thoughts about spinsterhood, although I suppose she's comforted by her work (but so is Ethel, it's just an EVEN MORE self-effacing work than Jo's, as all good work is in this novel--personal satisfaction in a job well done is not okay), but then she's rescued by a total deus-ex-machina fake marriage, and Ethel isn't; she's rescued by her dad, which is KIND OF like Jo being rescued by Bhaer, but at least Yonge isn't pretending that hanging out with your dad is exactly the same kind of satisfying as marrying Laurie.
So what does "home" mean in The Daisy Chain? One thing it might mean is renunciation. At the end of the novel, Ethel is thinking about her past and her future:
Norman Ogilivie's marriage seemed to her to have fixed her lot in life, and what was that lot? Home and Cocksmoor had been her choice, and they were before her. Home! but her eyes had been opened to see that earthly homes may not endure, nor fill the heart. Her dear father might, indeed, claim her full-hearted devotion, but, to him, she was only one of many . . . she had begun to understand that the unmarried woman must not seek undivided return of affection, and must not set her love, with exclusive eagerness, on aught below . . .
So here home is what Ethel has given up everything else for--romantic love, "undivided return of affection," as well as the possibility of a literary career--but within that renunciation is more renunciation. She can't just rest on the knowledge that she's done a good thing in devoting herself to her family; she knows she's going to actively suffer from loneliness and rejection by making this choice. But of course there's the final object of a heavenly home, which unlike good things "below" is OK to look forward to--and yet Ethel doesn't say heavenly home, or think of heaven as a telos, but in fact imagines grace as a continual progress: God will direct her path.
And then other people in the novel--specifically Norman and Flora--renounce the comfort and peace of "home" to do work in the larger world: Norman because he can do more good as a missionary than as a country clergyman, Flora because she already messed up and got involved in national politics and now she has to stay there. In a sense, these exiles are both weirdly punishments--Flora wanted a London life for the wrong reasons, and her only penance is to suffer through it and try to do good, while Norman came up with this missionary idea partly to forestall the recurrence of religious doubt caused by too much self-contemplation and maybe too much mixing with Oxford intellectuals. But also in this novel punishments are not really punishments, but necessary curbs on individual natures--that's maybe why Ethel has to stay home and be an angel in the house, because in a wider world she'd be impulsive and "harum-scarum" and so on? Or else it's just important that whatever you do, you're making some kind of sacrifice--even Meta giving up her maid for a couple of weeks was a valuable sacrifice, and one that prepared her later on to make the much larger sacrifice of becoming a missionary with Norman.
All of this has to do with the gendered concept of separate spheres AND with class location. Meta feels bad that she can't sacrifice as much as the poorer Mays, and they convince her that any sacrifices she can make APPROPRIATE TO HER STATION are good enough (although they can never be quite as satisfying as giving up your last penny to feed a poor child.) So the novel is able to celebrate Christian renunciation and sacrifice and make lower-middle-class readers feel good about themselves while also completely upholding the class system in England--something it also does by making all the actually poor people kind of repellent and childlike, creatures who require constant spiritual guidance from ladies and gentlemen. Flora's baby nurse meant well, but her class has a tendency toward deceit and Flora was kind of a bad mom what with going to so many balls etc, so the baby dies of an opium addiction; all the pupils and their mothers at Cocksmoor are kind of gross and grasping and are a real trial to Ethel as students, but it's worth teaching them because sometimes they have spectacular Little-Eva-like death scenes and also they eventually appreciate the church. On one hand, this is realistic: most poor people aren't tragically beautiful and innocent Little Match Girl victims, and learning to deal with them must be hard for well-bred Christian teenagers. On the other hand, it's uncomfortable, and it makes you realize how unusual Elizabeth Gaskell's treatment of the workers in Milton is in North and South (but those are factory workers, not miners like these grubby guys.) And of course there's the comparison between the English working classes and the "heathens" in British colonies overseas, something that comes up in both British and American novels of this period: the abolitionists, of course, are always talking about how we should pay attention to the horrible abuses and ignorance in our own country (preach to the slaveowners, not the Maori), and there's Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House sending all her money to Africa while her own house is in shambles. The Daisy Chain doesn't really clearly come down on this issue: Norman says he can do more good in New Zealand than in a comfortable parish at home, but at the same time Cocksmoor, where Richard ends up becoming the curate, is obviously _not_ a comfortable parish. We do get a sense of racism towards the colonial subjects, mostly from Tom, which gets put down by Norman and by Harry, who won't hear anything bad against his converted islander prince friend David, but that's about as deep as the novel gets into this debate.
As for separate spheres: the colonies play into this interestingly, I think. In most Victorian novels, the British empire is this enormous unseen backdrop, somewhere where characters disappear to and sometimes return from, a source of income and gorgeous fabrics and cursed gems and unexpected legacies, a mechanic that allows plot developments like mistaken identity and bigamy to be at least sort of plausible. The word "domestic" in the context of the British empire is, of course, Britain itself, and most of these novels are highly domestic both in the sense that we never leave England, and that we're concerned with the "feminine" sphere of family relationships and the home, and trying to end each novel with the establishment of the cozy Victorian nuclear family. In this sense, the novel usually follows the characters who stay at home, and all the crazy adventurous dangerous colonial travel happens offscreen. In The Daisy Chain this certainly happens, both on the national/international and home/public life level: Alan and Harry go off to the South Seas, and we don't hear about their adventures until Harry gets back, but we also often stay home with the women and children of the house while the father or brothers go off to try to accomplish some goal--to convince the town directors to choose a new rector, to get a scholarship for Oxford. What is kind of interesting about those moments is that, while we sometimes get some of the suspense and anxiety of the people who have to stay home, we sometimes don't; sometimes Yonge is like, "the dad went out, and everyone wondered what would happen! then he came home and told them." The effect of this is to make you realize how much important stuff happens out in the world, outside the realm of women and children or (on the global level) the English population, and how little these people have to do with it.
And yet the novel certainly messes with separate spheres in interesting ways. Just as the self-contained island of Britain is always implicated in the larger workings of empire, the seemingly closed, feminine, private domestic sphere is always permeable to and reaching out into the wider, more public world. In many ways this translates to "the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world," of course. Margaret, whose paralysis renders her a literalized version of the home-bound woman, is deeply involved with the Cocksmoor project, even though she's never seen it: her brothers make her models of the church, she sends kind words and messages out to the poor people that touch them more than anything anyone else can say (of course in this sense Margaret is a figure for the sainted-dead-mother figure who is already present in this novel, the figure who watches over you after she dies and asks you to emulate her sainted example; and since the "daisy chain" is figured as a kind of chain of being, being lifted up into heaven by the dead mother herself, Margaret, who lives upstairs and is half-dead already, is definitely half-angel, half-human); at the end of the novel she hears the churchbells from Cocksmoor in her own room and is able to die. I'm really interested in the ways in which public life and male professional work penetrate the domestic space through sound in a lot of the novels I'm reading--the doctor's bell in Miss Marjoribanks, the horrible cries of the vivisected animal in The Beth Book. Then of course there's the Cocksmoor project in general: Ethel chooses "home AND Cocksmoor," suggesting that taking care of your own home is only valuable if you take care of someone else's as well. And there's Richard, who is better at making tea than Ethel is, while Ethel is better at teaching the children than he is--there are different skills that make up "domestic" labor, and those skills may not be differentiated along obviously gendered lines. And there are the ways in which Flora and Meta's marriages take them outside the domestic sphere--in Flora's case, she forces her marriage to take her out, I guess, since she manipulates her husband into having a political career--and both of them are examples of my obsession with how the wife almost always has her husband's job.
I'm getting tired of talking about this but I have by no means thought this stuff through enough! I'll end with the obvious remark that Victorian novels domesticate both men and women, so we shouldn't feel so extra bad that Ethel has to give up her literary ambitions because so does Norman! but Norman is at least allowed to be a genius, and to have manic episodes of extra creative genius, and to get married, and everyone's like, "ha ha Ethel a girl could never REALLY write Latin poetry" and also who is even writing Latin poetry in 1856? Come on guys, get with the vernacular already. Milton I can excuse, and even he went over to English. Also I guess Ethel's crazy last meditation is pretty brave, especially when you compare this novel to Little Women (which I keep doing--I wonder if the Alcotts read Yonge? surely they read novels like this.) Jo has the same thoughts about spinsterhood, although I suppose she's comforted by her work (but so is Ethel, it's just an EVEN MORE self-effacing work than Jo's, as all good work is in this novel--personal satisfaction in a job well done is not okay), but then she's rescued by a total deus-ex-machina fake marriage, and Ethel isn't; she's rescued by her dad, which is KIND OF like Jo being rescued by Bhaer, but at least Yonge isn't pretending that hanging out with your dad is exactly the same kind of satisfying as marrying Laurie.
The Daisy Chain All Week
I meant to read Charlotte Yonge's 1856 domestic novel The Daisy Chain in two days (Monday and Tuesday of this week) and here it is 12:43 AM on Sunday morning & I'm just finishing it, waiting for my Kindle to highlight some annoying speech of Flora's about how she mistook her hypocrisy for "quietness of conscience." OK, and now it's 12:50 and I've finished it. PRETTY DEPRESSING and also kind of boring! but that's what I signed up for by doing a domestic literature list, I guess. The Daisy Chain is about a family with eleven children growing up in a small town that may or may not be in Wales--or on the Welsh border?--and it's basically a case study of Victorian values of self-denial and living for others or (even better) for God and how great it is to be a nuclear family and how sentimental we feel about our dead mothers and also there is a lot of guilt. Since I've been so terrible about blogging lately, and since I realize that I really do need to write down my thoughts about what I've read every day because it's VERY EASY to forget what happens in these books, I'm just going to quickly sketch out the plot for myself, and then (in another entry, because this one got VERY LONG) some quick thoughts about themes & who knows what else.
So, the plot (stop reading if you ever think you're going to read this book, which you probably shouldn't do because it's very long and not very good)
*************
We meet the 11 May children + dad Dr Dick + mom Margaret + confusing houseguest Alan Ernescliffe. The only kids we care about so far are oldest daughter Margaret (pretty, nice), seeming protagonist Ethel (fifteen, gawky, intellectual, keeping up with her brother's classical studies even though she doesn't go to school), Norman, the classical brother, & Flora, the pretty, prim, well-behaved daughter. In Little Women terms they're Meg, Jo, Laurie, Amy. The mom & Margaret have a weird conversation about how when you get married you find someone in whose heart you are first, which is different from being a parent because you know you will be supplanted in your kids' hearts by their spouses, and the mom weirdly shivers imagining herself being supplanted in her husband's heart, and we the readers are like, "oh no is the dad having an affair" but it turns out this shiver is meaningless? maybe? A bunch of the kids go on a walk to a terribly-named & extremely bleak poor-person village called Cocksmoor to bring some food to one of their father's poor patients; Ethel is shocked by the spiritual (& I guess material) poverty at Cocksmoor and decides she will fix everything by building a church there, and makes a solemn vow to do so as she walks home with her family. At home, though, we find out that Mom, Dad, & Margaret have been in a carriage accident--the dad was always a reckless driver--and the mom has been killed, while Margaret has been paralyzed. Weeks pass with Margaret and the dad in dead swoons and Ethel and Flora having to grow up a little, and also the oldest son Richard coming home from Oxford where he has recently failed his exams, and proving that even though he is not intellectual he is very practical and nice, and becoming important to the dad. While he's home Richard decides to help Ethel with her Cocksmoor plan, but he makes her wait and be prudent about it, which is something Ethel is not that good at. Also he teaches her to make tea and keep her dress from trailing in the mud, because Richard is much more domestic than Ethel. The dad gets better, with a lingering arm injury and lots of guilt about killing the mom, and life goes on, with Ethel trying to work for the church while learning to control her headstrong desires to do everything right away, and Norman struggling to do well in school but not for the glory of doing well in school (a huge theme is how it is terrible to want any kind of fame and glory, even for people in your family, because the only glory is heavenly; and also waiting for providence to tell you to do stuff.) Ethel & Richard start off by setting up a little one-day-a-week school in Cocksmoor, funded by their dad, and it is slow-going because poor people are so dirty and ignorant and only care about money and not about their souls. Norman develops a nervous illness because he witnessed the carriage accident, and also because he is doing too much Latin, and also he has crazy visionary moments when he is REALLY good at Latin, and due to this he becomes head of the school at a shockingly young age, but then he is really on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and the dad notices and he's like "Norman it would be better for you to do bad in school than to die or to become Mr Casaubon" but of course Mr Casaubon doesn't exist yet. So the dad forbids Norman to read and instead makes him drive the dad around to various patients, and in this way Norman & Dr May become friends with this sickly old banker and his beautiful perfect beautiful daughter Meta (!) (short for Margaret--oh, another thing about this book is that it's full of Margarets, which is why it's The Daisy Chain, but also because all the kids are daisies being pulled one by one into heaven by the dead mom yikes.) Meanwhile the third son, Harry, who is a little scamp, wants to go to sea, but he can't until he confesses to the dad that he went shooting with some bad boys from the school, and the dad is like "you are a noble boy for telling me" and the thing about the dad is sometimes he gets unnecessarily mad but sometimes he's nice so Harry is surprised by the niceness. Harry goes to sea with Alan Ernescliffe, who is a lieutenant, but not before 1) Norman + Ethel + Harry all get confirmed, which is a big deal esp since the dad almost prevents Harry from getting confirmed for some stupid reason, because the dad is the big religious authority in the family, and 2) Alan & Margaret get pre-engaged (pearl engagement ring=daisy chain, of course). Also going on at the same time is some upsetting school nonsense where Norman is a conscientious head boy (or "dux," which term I'd never heard before--lots of ducks & geese puns, though!) and shuts down some old guy who is selling the boys gin and beats up his own little brother Tom (brother #4; horrible, deceitful, "dusty") only to get implicated in some scandal where the boys make a bonfire and do some kind of crazy vandalism, and the terrible Anderson boys (the ones who got Harry to go shooting) somehow manage to blame it all on Norman and so he loses his Oxford scholarship and it goes to the older Anderson boy and the dad is like "I will fix this" and Norman is like "no, if I am reinstated under those circumstances there could be no order in the school." But that all gets resolved by Norman getting a different scholarship directly from Balliol--in competition with public-school boys, no less, wow!--and therefore there's money to get terrible little Tom away from those bad boys & sent to Eton, and then Tom reveals how terrible the younger Anderson boy is in some other scandal about drinking and the dad does interfere that time and gets Anderson junior expelled but then Norman intercedes for Anderson junior and wow the May family is so virtuous. And Tom goes to Eton and stops being quite so awful although he becomes a coxcomb (which Alan E.'s little brother Hector points out is a natural consequence of having been a slob, except he doesn't say slob, he says sloven I think.) Then everyone has fun having a picnic near some Roman campground and Harry tricks everyone by planting a Wellington medal and making them think it's a Roman coin, and then everyone plays a story game kind of like that part in Little Women, and Meta learns that although she is so beautiful and rich she shouldn't feel bad because her job is to be like a hummingbird. (Meta has already learned earlier that even though she's rich she can still make sacrifices like letting her maid go visit her sick mom, even though it means Meta's hair looks bad for a week. There is a lot of Little Women-type stuff about poor people being luckier than rich people because it's easier for them to make sacrifices and therefore their little homemade penwipers are better than all the expensive presents Meta can afford to buy for poor people.)
Then Harry & Alan go off to sea, and there's a break of three years just like in Little Women, and everyone's old enough to get married, practically. Flora has gotten all involved in Ethel's Cocksmoor project and has gotten the loathsome ladies' committee in town to set up a charity bazaar, which to Ethel just seems like Vanity Fair (why pay money for penwipers rather than just giving money directly to the cause, she wonders, which I've also always wondered about charity events.) Flora just wants to do everything the way she wants to do it, and she resents how domestic Ethel has become (even though Ethel isn't very domestic) and how close she is to the dad. Other changes are that Margaret doesn't seem to be getting better as had been predicted; the indistinguishable little children are starting to get personalities--Mary is kind of bland and innocent and likes Harry a lot, Blanche is a little flirt, Aubrey is being taught Latin and math by Ethel so that's his thing, and Gertrude/Daisy is not a baby anymore but still doesn't have a personality. Meta's drawling mustachioed brother George comes to the bazaar and flirts with all the little girls and ends up falling in love with Flora & proposing, and no one in the family thinks she will accept, but she does because she is totally mercenary. So she marries him and has a fabulous honeymoon in Europe & comes back with gorgeous clothes and presents for everyone. Meanwhile, uh, Margaret knows she's getting worse and shouldn't marry Alan but Richard convinces her not to break it off by letter but in person when the ship comes back to England. Norman has won a prize for Latin versifying at Oxford with a poem sort of inspired by stuff Ethel said when they were 15, but Ethel, who used to think she could make money by writing, realizes she is no good at writing and just admires Norman. Flora & George take Meta & Ethel on a super fun vacation to Oxford to see Norman read his poem, and Ethel totally falls in love with their Scotch cousin Norman (!) Ogilvie, but realizes she needs to consecrate herself to her dad (a different vow she took at some point) and decides she's going to go home right after the recitation, which it turns out she has to do anyway because they get news that maybe Alan and Harry's ship is lost at sea! so she goes home and it's like maybe the ship is lost at sea!! and then it turns out it was! or rather the ship caught fire and Alan & Harry's boat was lost. Everyone is devastated but Margaret is relieved she never broke it off with Alan AND now she never will. Alan's brother has to live with Alan's mean old captain and he's sad about that. But then like 20 pages later Harry shows up at the house, totally not dead, and it turns out they all escaped to some South Sea island but Alan died there of the fever, and there's a will endowing 20 thousand pounds to build a church at Cocksmoor, whoa!, and also Harry got really friendly with some Christian natives and met up with the family's Aunt Flora who lives in New Zealand. Norman has been thinking of becoming a missionary because he loves Meta and he doesn't think that's going to work out, but also because he has been having all these religious doubts (blame the Andersons again--the elder one, who got Norman's original scholarship, has become a Rationalist! and fighting against him all the time has tired Norman out and given him doubts) and he thinks maybe it's becasue he thinks about himself all the time and also he's worried if he went into Parliament or something he would think too well of himself so he has to be a missionary and it turns out they need them down there, according to Harry. But first Harry & Norman go visit Flora & Meta in London (oh, Meta's dad died, that was another tragic period we had to live through) and have fun dancing with rich people, and Harry's like, "are you going to marry Meta after all, Norman?" and Norman's like "she's too good for me" and Harry tells Meta that Norman says she is a fine lady now, which upsets Meta, who is being courted by some baronet (oh! it's the baronet who owns the land the church is being built on! and I forgot a major plot point, which is that we get the land because an old doctor friend of Dr May's shows up at some point, and he's like "Sir Walsinghame? I know that guy! I met him in the caves of Thebes when he had a fever" so Dr Spenser totally wrangles this church land thing, and also becomes a weird uncle to the May children and eventually architect of the church.) Then a HORRIBLE PART where Flora, who seemed to actually have made a pretty good choice in marrying George because they totally love each other, and also she gets to use George as a puppet in order to have a political career, is revealed to have made a terrible choice in everything, because her baby is getting sicker and sicker in London, and she doesn't want to take the baby home to the country because she wants Meta to marry Sir W and not Norman, whom Meta might run into more in the country, and then the baby is so sick that they call in the dad, and the dad is like "this baby is addicted to OPIUM" and it turns out the nurse has been giving the baby opium because it missed the mom and was fretful, and the baby DIES and it's all the mom's fault for not being around enough and therefore inspiring the nurse to DRUG HER BABY and Flora is like "well, my baby is in heaven but I am going to hell because unlike the rest of you I am totally materialistic and never was pious at all" and it's totally this calvinist thing where she's always been different and that's why she made these bad choices and that's why her baby is dead and she can't go to heaven. and the dad is like, "wait, I know how you feel because I killed your mom," and Flora's like, "no, you are pious and I am the worst" and the author seems to agree. Then they're laying the foundation for the church and Norman and Meta run into each other in the woods and Meta is like "I want to work hard not be a fine lady" and Norman is like, "seriously? will you be my Jane Eyre missionary bride?" and Meta is like "WILL I" and everyone thinks that's a great idea. And then the aunt comes from New Zealand and the church gets built and Margaret hears the bells and dies and then Flora has another baby and Meta almost doesn't go but she goes, and Ogilvie marries someone else but Ethel doesn't care because she has completely given up her self. And Flora is finally moved to want to give up her hectic London life for the sake of her new baby, but Ethel and Richard are like, "you've made your bed, now your punishment is to lie in it" because basically you need to do things that suck if you want to go to heaven. And at the end Ethel is in the church she built at Cocksmoor and is like, "will I ever be first in anyone's heart? Nope, unmarried women never are! but that's OK, I won't be totally alone until I'm pretty old, and here comes my old dad" and the dad is like "I am psyched to hear Richard preach in this church he is the curate of" and it is the end of THE DAISY CHAIN.
So, the plot (stop reading if you ever think you're going to read this book, which you probably shouldn't do because it's very long and not very good)
*************
We meet the 11 May children + dad Dr Dick + mom Margaret + confusing houseguest Alan Ernescliffe. The only kids we care about so far are oldest daughter Margaret (pretty, nice), seeming protagonist Ethel (fifteen, gawky, intellectual, keeping up with her brother's classical studies even though she doesn't go to school), Norman, the classical brother, & Flora, the pretty, prim, well-behaved daughter. In Little Women terms they're Meg, Jo, Laurie, Amy. The mom & Margaret have a weird conversation about how when you get married you find someone in whose heart you are first, which is different from being a parent because you know you will be supplanted in your kids' hearts by their spouses, and the mom weirdly shivers imagining herself being supplanted in her husband's heart, and we the readers are like, "oh no is the dad having an affair" but it turns out this shiver is meaningless? maybe? A bunch of the kids go on a walk to a terribly-named & extremely bleak poor-person village called Cocksmoor to bring some food to one of their father's poor patients; Ethel is shocked by the spiritual (& I guess material) poverty at Cocksmoor and decides she will fix everything by building a church there, and makes a solemn vow to do so as she walks home with her family. At home, though, we find out that Mom, Dad, & Margaret have been in a carriage accident--the dad was always a reckless driver--and the mom has been killed, while Margaret has been paralyzed. Weeks pass with Margaret and the dad in dead swoons and Ethel and Flora having to grow up a little, and also the oldest son Richard coming home from Oxford where he has recently failed his exams, and proving that even though he is not intellectual he is very practical and nice, and becoming important to the dad. While he's home Richard decides to help Ethel with her Cocksmoor plan, but he makes her wait and be prudent about it, which is something Ethel is not that good at. Also he teaches her to make tea and keep her dress from trailing in the mud, because Richard is much more domestic than Ethel. The dad gets better, with a lingering arm injury and lots of guilt about killing the mom, and life goes on, with Ethel trying to work for the church while learning to control her headstrong desires to do everything right away, and Norman struggling to do well in school but not for the glory of doing well in school (a huge theme is how it is terrible to want any kind of fame and glory, even for people in your family, because the only glory is heavenly; and also waiting for providence to tell you to do stuff.) Ethel & Richard start off by setting up a little one-day-a-week school in Cocksmoor, funded by their dad, and it is slow-going because poor people are so dirty and ignorant and only care about money and not about their souls. Norman develops a nervous illness because he witnessed the carriage accident, and also because he is doing too much Latin, and also he has crazy visionary moments when he is REALLY good at Latin, and due to this he becomes head of the school at a shockingly young age, but then he is really on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and the dad notices and he's like "Norman it would be better for you to do bad in school than to die or to become Mr Casaubon" but of course Mr Casaubon doesn't exist yet. So the dad forbids Norman to read and instead makes him drive the dad around to various patients, and in this way Norman & Dr May become friends with this sickly old banker and his beautiful perfect beautiful daughter Meta (!) (short for Margaret--oh, another thing about this book is that it's full of Margarets, which is why it's The Daisy Chain, but also because all the kids are daisies being pulled one by one into heaven by the dead mom yikes.) Meanwhile the third son, Harry, who is a little scamp, wants to go to sea, but he can't until he confesses to the dad that he went shooting with some bad boys from the school, and the dad is like "you are a noble boy for telling me" and the thing about the dad is sometimes he gets unnecessarily mad but sometimes he's nice so Harry is surprised by the niceness. Harry goes to sea with Alan Ernescliffe, who is a lieutenant, but not before 1) Norman + Ethel + Harry all get confirmed, which is a big deal esp since the dad almost prevents Harry from getting confirmed for some stupid reason, because the dad is the big religious authority in the family, and 2) Alan & Margaret get pre-engaged (pearl engagement ring=daisy chain, of course). Also going on at the same time is some upsetting school nonsense where Norman is a conscientious head boy (or "dux," which term I'd never heard before--lots of ducks & geese puns, though!) and shuts down some old guy who is selling the boys gin and beats up his own little brother Tom (brother #4; horrible, deceitful, "dusty") only to get implicated in some scandal where the boys make a bonfire and do some kind of crazy vandalism, and the terrible Anderson boys (the ones who got Harry to go shooting) somehow manage to blame it all on Norman and so he loses his Oxford scholarship and it goes to the older Anderson boy and the dad is like "I will fix this" and Norman is like "no, if I am reinstated under those circumstances there could be no order in the school." But that all gets resolved by Norman getting a different scholarship directly from Balliol--in competition with public-school boys, no less, wow!--and therefore there's money to get terrible little Tom away from those bad boys & sent to Eton, and then Tom reveals how terrible the younger Anderson boy is in some other scandal about drinking and the dad does interfere that time and gets Anderson junior expelled but then Norman intercedes for Anderson junior and wow the May family is so virtuous. And Tom goes to Eton and stops being quite so awful although he becomes a coxcomb (which Alan E.'s little brother Hector points out is a natural consequence of having been a slob, except he doesn't say slob, he says sloven I think.) Then everyone has fun having a picnic near some Roman campground and Harry tricks everyone by planting a Wellington medal and making them think it's a Roman coin, and then everyone plays a story game kind of like that part in Little Women, and Meta learns that although she is so beautiful and rich she shouldn't feel bad because her job is to be like a hummingbird. (Meta has already learned earlier that even though she's rich she can still make sacrifices like letting her maid go visit her sick mom, even though it means Meta's hair looks bad for a week. There is a lot of Little Women-type stuff about poor people being luckier than rich people because it's easier for them to make sacrifices and therefore their little homemade penwipers are better than all the expensive presents Meta can afford to buy for poor people.)
Then Harry & Alan go off to sea, and there's a break of three years just like in Little Women, and everyone's old enough to get married, practically. Flora has gotten all involved in Ethel's Cocksmoor project and has gotten the loathsome ladies' committee in town to set up a charity bazaar, which to Ethel just seems like Vanity Fair (why pay money for penwipers rather than just giving money directly to the cause, she wonders, which I've also always wondered about charity events.) Flora just wants to do everything the way she wants to do it, and she resents how domestic Ethel has become (even though Ethel isn't very domestic) and how close she is to the dad. Other changes are that Margaret doesn't seem to be getting better as had been predicted; the indistinguishable little children are starting to get personalities--Mary is kind of bland and innocent and likes Harry a lot, Blanche is a little flirt, Aubrey is being taught Latin and math by Ethel so that's his thing, and Gertrude/Daisy is not a baby anymore but still doesn't have a personality. Meta's drawling mustachioed brother George comes to the bazaar and flirts with all the little girls and ends up falling in love with Flora & proposing, and no one in the family thinks she will accept, but she does because she is totally mercenary. So she marries him and has a fabulous honeymoon in Europe & comes back with gorgeous clothes and presents for everyone. Meanwhile, uh, Margaret knows she's getting worse and shouldn't marry Alan but Richard convinces her not to break it off by letter but in person when the ship comes back to England. Norman has won a prize for Latin versifying at Oxford with a poem sort of inspired by stuff Ethel said when they were 15, but Ethel, who used to think she could make money by writing, realizes she is no good at writing and just admires Norman. Flora & George take Meta & Ethel on a super fun vacation to Oxford to see Norman read his poem, and Ethel totally falls in love with their Scotch cousin Norman (!) Ogilvie, but realizes she needs to consecrate herself to her dad (a different vow she took at some point) and decides she's going to go home right after the recitation, which it turns out she has to do anyway because they get news that maybe Alan and Harry's ship is lost at sea! so she goes home and it's like maybe the ship is lost at sea!! and then it turns out it was! or rather the ship caught fire and Alan & Harry's boat was lost. Everyone is devastated but Margaret is relieved she never broke it off with Alan AND now she never will. Alan's brother has to live with Alan's mean old captain and he's sad about that. But then like 20 pages later Harry shows up at the house, totally not dead, and it turns out they all escaped to some South Sea island but Alan died there of the fever, and there's a will endowing 20 thousand pounds to build a church at Cocksmoor, whoa!, and also Harry got really friendly with some Christian natives and met up with the family's Aunt Flora who lives in New Zealand. Norman has been thinking of becoming a missionary because he loves Meta and he doesn't think that's going to work out, but also because he has been having all these religious doubts (blame the Andersons again--the elder one, who got Norman's original scholarship, has become a Rationalist! and fighting against him all the time has tired Norman out and given him doubts) and he thinks maybe it's becasue he thinks about himself all the time and also he's worried if he went into Parliament or something he would think too well of himself so he has to be a missionary and it turns out they need them down there, according to Harry. But first Harry & Norman go visit Flora & Meta in London (oh, Meta's dad died, that was another tragic period we had to live through) and have fun dancing with rich people, and Harry's like, "are you going to marry Meta after all, Norman?" and Norman's like "she's too good for me" and Harry tells Meta that Norman says she is a fine lady now, which upsets Meta, who is being courted by some baronet (oh! it's the baronet who owns the land the church is being built on! and I forgot a major plot point, which is that we get the land because an old doctor friend of Dr May's shows up at some point, and he's like "Sir Walsinghame? I know that guy! I met him in the caves of Thebes when he had a fever" so Dr Spenser totally wrangles this church land thing, and also becomes a weird uncle to the May children and eventually architect of the church.) Then a HORRIBLE PART where Flora, who seemed to actually have made a pretty good choice in marrying George because they totally love each other, and also she gets to use George as a puppet in order to have a political career, is revealed to have made a terrible choice in everything, because her baby is getting sicker and sicker in London, and she doesn't want to take the baby home to the country because she wants Meta to marry Sir W and not Norman, whom Meta might run into more in the country, and then the baby is so sick that they call in the dad, and the dad is like "this baby is addicted to OPIUM" and it turns out the nurse has been giving the baby opium because it missed the mom and was fretful, and the baby DIES and it's all the mom's fault for not being around enough and therefore inspiring the nurse to DRUG HER BABY and Flora is like "well, my baby is in heaven but I am going to hell because unlike the rest of you I am totally materialistic and never was pious at all" and it's totally this calvinist thing where she's always been different and that's why she made these bad choices and that's why her baby is dead and she can't go to heaven. and the dad is like, "wait, I know how you feel because I killed your mom," and Flora's like, "no, you are pious and I am the worst" and the author seems to agree. Then they're laying the foundation for the church and Norman and Meta run into each other in the woods and Meta is like "I want to work hard not be a fine lady" and Norman is like, "seriously? will you be my Jane Eyre missionary bride?" and Meta is like "WILL I" and everyone thinks that's a great idea. And then the aunt comes from New Zealand and the church gets built and Margaret hears the bells and dies and then Flora has another baby and Meta almost doesn't go but she goes, and Ogilvie marries someone else but Ethel doesn't care because she has completely given up her self. And Flora is finally moved to want to give up her hectic London life for the sake of her new baby, but Ethel and Richard are like, "you've made your bed, now your punishment is to lie in it" because basically you need to do things that suck if you want to go to heaven. And at the end Ethel is in the church she built at Cocksmoor and is like, "will I ever be first in anyone's heart? Nope, unmarried women never are! but that's OK, I won't be totally alone until I'm pretty old, and here comes my old dad" and the dad is like "I am psyched to hear Richard preach in this church he is the curate of" and it is the end of THE DAISY CHAIN.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Middlemarch in January
Oh my dears it has been a long time since I've written an entry for this blog! but I have been reading and reading nevertheless, but without quite as much leisure time to blog about it as I had in the summer. But this was a mistake, because now I have terrible sprawling notes consisting of passages I highlighted on my Kindle, and little notes I typed like "wha!" and "ha ha" and "good one dodo" instead of the wise synthetic readings I recorded with my angel wings in this blog.
And the truth is that I don't have much time to write about Middlemarch, which I just reread in a desperate flurry over the past two days because I have an orals meeting on Wednesday & didn't realize how little I remembered about this novel, because I also think I might have forgotten what happened in Daniel Deronda. Also, do I think anything new about Middlemarch, that I didn't think in 2004 or whenever I read it last, and that has not become commonplace in my brain? Rereading a book like this is the opposite of Spoilers Ahead: what possible freshness can I bring to this story? I still feel sympathy for Casaubon & Rosamond, although I feel less than I did before, maybe; possibly Lydgate seems more like Casaubon to me than he did before, in the expectations he has of his wife; maybe I'm curious about thinking about the structural similarities between Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda with the male & female protagonists who can be friends but not lovers? Except the role of saint has switched genders by DD, and DD seems like more of a saint than Dorothea, because Dorothea is this weird frustrated Saint Teresa who ultimately does none of the great things she aspired to do? And maybe I want to think more about structure in general: how is this sprawling novel about the interconnectedness of human lives different from Dickens's sprawling novels about the interconnectedness of human lives? There's still the same emphasis on type, and also on coincidence (Raffles!) but all of that seems muted by Eliot's more serious, scientific realism. It took the appearance of Raffles and his revelations about Ladislaw to make me realize that coincidence was an important part of the plot--there's Ladislaw & Dorothea meeting in Rome, but also all the little ties between all the characters, which makes coincidence seem less a plot device than a truth of human life that the plot enacts? because in a small town everyone is all mixed up together, whereas in London this kind of interconnectedness seems more spectacular and showy and implausible and shocking. Eliot, like Lydgate, is trying to show the connectedness of systems (discover a primitive tissue? a key to all mythologies?) because otherwise how could she show people as they really are. This will be interesting to see in Deronda too: the titles suggest that in Middlemarch Eliot really is interested in a system, a group of interconnected lives, whereas in Deronda she wants to explore the journey of one person; but are the novels actually so different? Daniel + Gwendolen vs Lydgate + Dorothea + also Fred + the Garths + Bulstrode, right? I guess Middlemarch is more ambitious, moving, as Lydgate says, from systole to diastole. Also worth thinking about: science! and animals. Everyone is described as dumb animals in different and interesting ways. I love Casaubon being described as honest as a ruminant.
And the truth is that I don't have much time to write about Middlemarch, which I just reread in a desperate flurry over the past two days because I have an orals meeting on Wednesday & didn't realize how little I remembered about this novel, because I also think I might have forgotten what happened in Daniel Deronda. Also, do I think anything new about Middlemarch, that I didn't think in 2004 or whenever I read it last, and that has not become commonplace in my brain? Rereading a book like this is the opposite of Spoilers Ahead: what possible freshness can I bring to this story? I still feel sympathy for Casaubon & Rosamond, although I feel less than I did before, maybe; possibly Lydgate seems more like Casaubon to me than he did before, in the expectations he has of his wife; maybe I'm curious about thinking about the structural similarities between Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda with the male & female protagonists who can be friends but not lovers? Except the role of saint has switched genders by DD, and DD seems like more of a saint than Dorothea, because Dorothea is this weird frustrated Saint Teresa who ultimately does none of the great things she aspired to do? And maybe I want to think more about structure in general: how is this sprawling novel about the interconnectedness of human lives different from Dickens's sprawling novels about the interconnectedness of human lives? There's still the same emphasis on type, and also on coincidence (Raffles!) but all of that seems muted by Eliot's more serious, scientific realism. It took the appearance of Raffles and his revelations about Ladislaw to make me realize that coincidence was an important part of the plot--there's Ladislaw & Dorothea meeting in Rome, but also all the little ties between all the characters, which makes coincidence seem less a plot device than a truth of human life that the plot enacts? because in a small town everyone is all mixed up together, whereas in London this kind of interconnectedness seems more spectacular and showy and implausible and shocking. Eliot, like Lydgate, is trying to show the connectedness of systems (discover a primitive tissue? a key to all mythologies?) because otherwise how could she show people as they really are. This will be interesting to see in Deronda too: the titles suggest that in Middlemarch Eliot really is interested in a system, a group of interconnected lives, whereas in Deronda she wants to explore the journey of one person; but are the novels actually so different? Daniel + Gwendolen vs Lydgate + Dorothea + also Fred + the Garths + Bulstrode, right? I guess Middlemarch is more ambitious, moving, as Lydgate says, from systole to diastole. Also worth thinking about: science! and animals. Everyone is described as dumb animals in different and interesting ways. I love Casaubon being described as honest as a ruminant.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
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
- 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
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
- 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
- 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)?
- 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
- 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.
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
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
- We can also read it as a version of the closeness of Heathcliff/Cathy in
- 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.
- Lying and teasing: When
- 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
- The ending: Why does
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