Villette in Lizzie's House

After having read so many books whose plots I knew well from film adaptations, or from hearsay, or from being spoiled by academic articles, I decided to read something entirely unfamiliar: Charlotte Bronte's Villette. Wait, I tell a lie: Villette's ending was spoiled for me by Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Writing Beyond the Ending--a book you probably shouldn't read if you don't want to know what happens at the end of books--so I do know what happens at the end, and I think I suspect who the most significant love interest is. But as I found with The Woman in White, an out-of-context reference to something that happens in a novel is often meaningless to someone who hasn't read that novel, and the memory of this reference doesn't really start to surface or take on any meaning until the reader is pretty deep into the novel and familiar with its setting and characters. It's like getting a tiny chip of stone with a couple of runes on it in an unknown language, and then losing the stone; then, years later, having learned the language, you remember the stone, and you can suddenly understand it. And yet you're never sure you're remembering the runes correctly: perhaps it was the sign for "water" and not the sign for "death" after all. You didn't know the language when you saw the stone, so how good can your memory be? That's how I felt reading The Woman in White, and that's how I feel reading Villette. 

When I began reading Villette, I didn't know what to expect. Who or what was Villette, for example? The main character? Another character? A place? I knew the main character was named Lucy Snowe, and I knew she had something to do with teaching--maybe she was a governess? But maybe I was confusing her with Agnes Grey? It's hard to tell those Brontes apart. When I started reading the novel, I realized the narrator wasn't making much of an effort to give me a clearer idea about what was going on. We don't even find out the narrator's name until the second chapter.

I found out that Paul has never read Villette, and in order that he can read it with fresh eyes, I told him I wouldn't post my impressions of the novel until he'd finished it. But since most of my impressions of Villette have to do with obfuscation and confusion, I thought it might be safe to post some of them now, when I'm about halfway through the novel. If Paul--or any other reader--doesn't want to know anything about Villette, stop reading here (or maybe I should have warned you to stop reading before I told you what I new about the novel before I started reading!) But if you do read on, you won't learn much.

Some thoughts about Villette: 

• Everything is Obfuscated. It's like the opposite of that Jonathan Safran Foer book! Just kidding, I have never read that book. But seriously: we don't find out the narrator's name until chapter 2; we don't find out how old she is until much later than that; we don't get details about what she looks like until pretty late either (I should look up precisely when this happens.) Some crucial information is never revealed--or hasn't been revealed yet, at least. Crises occur in her life, crises crucial to the development of the plot, which are never explicitly described; instead, we get extended metaphors, like this one describing some tragedy (a death in the family? later clues suggest this, but they come much later):
  
  "I must somehow have fallen overboard, or that there must have been wreck at last. I too well remember a time--a long time--of cold, of danger, of contention."
  
  It's not unusual for a novelist to liken a personal or family tragedy to falling overboard, or to a shipwreck; but the metaphor is all we get; we only learn what happens to the ship or the sailors, never to Lucy and her family. Which brings us to
• Extended Metaphors! Maybe we should call them metaphysical conceits, because they are super-elaborate, and go on forever, until we feel completely detached from what's actually happening in the material world (see "Introspection/Solipsism" and also "Disquieting Muses.") The metaphors are often very beautiful and very scary--like this one, which I read to Paul last night & therefore which cannot ruin his experience of reading Villette more than it's already been ruined:
  
  "This longing, and all of a similar kind, it was necessary to knock on the head; which I did, figuratively, after the manner of Jael to Sisera, driving a nail through their temples. Unlike Sisera, they did not die: they were but transiently stunned, and at intervals would turn on the nail with a rebellious wrench: then did the temples bleed, and the brain thrill to its core."
  
  Take a minute to think about how crazy that is. Lucy is driving a nail through the temples of her own longings, which turn (grotesquely! graphically!) on the nail in an act that makes their temples--the longings' temples!--bleed, and their brains thrill to the core! Unless it's Lucy's brain, because there's no possessive pronoun there. Since the longings are presumably in her brain, or her soul (lots of weird Victorian mind/body stuff going on in this novel with nerves and physiognomy and so on) I guess her brain is thrilling to the core even as the longings' brains are. There is a lot of stuff going on in Lucy's brain, because this novel is full of . . .

• Introspection/Solipsism. All these observations are related, of course! An introspective novel--a novel more interested in the workings of the narrator's mind rather than the comings and goings of the outside world--is only interested in the outside world inasmuch as it affects the mind. So we don't always know what's going on out there. Although on the other hand we get tons of details about kind of unimportant stuff, like how everyone does their hair. Which you know I love! and which maybe makes sense, because how a girl does her hair is a physical detail that might matter to a weird, shy, confused female narrator; it might be something she wants to figure out, or show her contempt for, so she experiences it materially--she wonders how it's done--while the great dramatic upheavals of her life are mostly emotionally important to her. It's how it feels to her--like being in a storm, like being shipwrecked, like being a man overboard--that matters, rather than what happened. Maybe a hairstyle can't make you feel too much, so we just get the description of the hairstyle. Although! again! there are some great descriptions about the emotional effect objects can have on you. Oh man there is a great scene where she wakes up in an unfamiliar room filled with familiar furniture. It is crazy, you guys. Anyway, I find that I've been falling asleep a lot reading Villette, even though I believe it to be fascinating and crazy, because it's so often abstract, introspective, inside the narrator's consciousness, and I tend to like literature that is very concrete, materialistic, empirical? Filled with evidence of the outside world: dialogue, food, those scraps of written evidence that fill up those other novels I've read so far. Villette has great details, but often huge sections where you feel shipwrecked, like you have nothing in the Real World to hold on to. What is really happening? I recently explained that I don't care if I'm a Brain in a Vat, especially (as Paul pointed out) if I'm communicating with other brains. But I don't necessarily want to know I'm a brain in a vat. I want to believe there's something concrete to hold on to. 
• Disquieting Muses. Related to the extended metaphors & the solipsism: the narrator's habit of personifying all abstract concepts as female figures with whom she is sharing her body--and often with whom she's locked in some kind of weird struggle--contributes to the feeling that there's more going on inside her brain than outside it. The "longings" in the passage above are an example of this, although they aren't feminized; but Reason, Feeling, Despair, and a whole lot of other concepts/emotions are women who haunt the narrator as much as any ghost in a Gothic novel (and Villette is kind of a Gothic novel, and there's some haunting, which I will discuss in the next post, maybe?) Of course I love this, because my new obsession is with doubles and muses in women's writing. How wonderful to have kind of a crazy antagonistic relationship with your own Reason! My creeped-out delight in this was probably enhanced by the fact that, since I spent this morning at my friend Lizzie's apartment waiting for her carpet to be delivered, I read a Batman comic in her bedroom in which Bruce Wayne had an argument with a totally scary inhuman Batman apparition who proposed that they voluntarily split his psyche down the middle like Two Face's is. How interesting.
• French People Are Fat. The narrator of Villette is kind of mean in a lot of ways, the most conventional of which is a very Victorian (and very English in general) hatred of Europeans and Catholics. Like Trollope, Charlotte Bronte seems to think Catholics are all annoying proselytizers out to convert unwilling or unwitting Protestants back to the true Church. New flash, you guys: you are all basically Catholics! No, I guess it makes them extra nervous because Catholics are getting more and more freedom in England throughout the nineteenth century. I guess I should look up some of those dates!
  
  But also it's interesting for me personally: as an English-speaking white person, it's usually pretty easy for me to imagine that British literature is "my" literature, that when a Victorian writer is talking about "us" he's including me, that when Ruskin says "look around this English room of yours" he means my American room. The fact that I'm a woman ought to complicate this, but I'm particularly interested in the experiences of women readers, so I welcome those complications--and if I want to ignore them, I'm so well-trained in editing out my gender for texts with a presumed male reader (most women who read a lot can do this, I think) that I can. But when the Victorians start trashing Catholics I remember that I'm Catholic, and Irish, and American, and that none of those categories are included in the Victorian "us." This happens infrequently enough that when it does happen, it has a painful but salutary defamiliarizing effect. Like a little pinprick. It's a useful reminder. I wonder what relation my reaction to the Catholic stuff bears to the reaction nonwhite readers--particularly those from former British colonies--have to all the painful racist stuff in Victorian literature. I glide by that stuff with the same amused condescension I give to the sexist stuff--"oh, that's just what they do, those Victorians; aren't they cute?"--but of course the racist stuff is worse than the sexist stuff. Because you know the male English writer likes women--his mom is one, his wife is one--even if he thinks we're stupid or whatever. He still wants to hang out with us and sleep with us. But he might genuinely hate and fear the Chinese or Indian or African guy he's stereotyping in this story. He doesn't snuggle up with an African guy at night. Well, if he does, good for him, maybe.
  
  More interesting and maybe less troubling is Bronte's emphasis on the differences between French and English education, particularly education for women. We're still in an era when English girls are known all over Europe--and the world?--for being liberated, unchaperoned but trustworthy. Rousseau went on and on about this in his preface to Julie: English girls are trusted to do all kinds of things and go all kinds of places and meet all kinds of people, and to read novels etc., but when they're married they're expected not to cheat on their husbands, while French girls are kept under lock and key until they're married (there's tons of surveillance in Villette) at which point they are all shocking and having affairs left and right.
  
  Also Villette is hilariously interested in how fat French ladies are and how much bread and jam they like to eat. I guess Charlotte Bronte never read French Women Don't Get Fat.

The Way We Live Now: Quickie Follow-Up

I thought of a few quick things I want to think about further someday, maybe when I review my notes for The Way We Live Now:

• The times when people mention "the way we live now." It is amusing and thematic and something Trollope seems to like to do when he has one of these weird conversational titles: he definitely asks the reader point-blank "can you forgive her?" in Can You Forgive Her? What does "the way we live now" mean to Trollope? The changes in the way we live can be described as entirely negative--loose morals of all kinds!--but they also include religious tolerance and some degree of freedom for women which Trollope may tentatively endorse? But we always talk about how Trollope seems very sensitive to women's issues even though he was a big antifeminist. So who knows. Related to this question are all the foreign characters: the brash Americans and vulgar Europeans & Jews who invade London and change everything. But the native Londoners are pretty awful to begin with: is it the influence of the invaders? Or are the invaders infusing something that could maybe maybe be useful to these fops and fuddy-duddies? Also the "we," like the "you" in Can You Forgive Her? implicates the audience in an interesting way. Topicality!
• The times in general when Trollope makes his little comments. Including when he's like, "We don't have time for this now" or "I will only show you some of this letter" or "I will paraphrase this for you, it is boring." I'm so interested in these little tropes about the spatial/temporal limits of the novel, or the "physical" evidence that is or is not admissible within the narrative.
• The weird wrapping-up of the narrative at the end. Time gets really weird at the end, because he tries to wrap up each character's arc ("Marie Melmotte's Fate") in its own chapter, but the characters' lives and fates are so wrapped up in each other that he has to say stuff like "Well, and you remember that that was three weeks ago, but then this was another two months after what happened three chapters ago" and you wonder why he didn't just go chronologically, as he has been doing more or less for the rest of the book. But I guess you do want to know what happens to people. I must admit that this wrapping-up stuff, while satisfying in its way, also goes on forever and ever in these long, long novels and I tend to get bored and fall asleep on the couch, just like Sir Felix Carbury would do.
• The Salt Lake City-Vera Cruz railway! Does anyone in the novel actually think it's a good idea? Does Trollope think it's a good idea? I think he knows it's a stupid idea--at one point Melmotte is like, "Well, the NYC-SF railway prospered because people wanted to go from San Francisco to New York; does anyone want to go from Salt Lake City to Vera Cruz?" If Trollope thinks it's a stupid idea, it's a really inspired choice: something that you can imagine stupid Victorians getting excited about, and therefore that you can imagine Trollope getting excited about, so there's this element of uncertainty where you're like "maybe someone in this novel thinks this will work out"--but something that would never never never work. Also, was it based on a real plan? A real swindle? I should find out.

The Way We Live Now in Brooklyn

So, although I kept dozing off throughout the last 15% of The Way We Live Now (a couple of times at 8:30 or so this morning, on the couch, jet lag having once again turned me into what for me passes as a very early riser; a couple of times in a drowsy, sunny patch of grass this afternoon in Prospect Park, the individual blades casting lovable shadows on the text), I finished it tonight, while Dawn played Dragon Age and Paul watched Dawn play Dragon Age. Since this has taken so long to read, and since I haven't been blogging every day like I did with the other books I read, I'm worried I'll forget a lot of what interested me about this book, and yet I don't feel up to trying to remember every single thing that interested me. Maybe I'll do a follow-up entry based on my Kindle notes, but for now I'll throw out a few thoughts that are fresh in my mind.

One thing I'm worried about is that, because the novel is so long and chock-full of characters--more so even than Vanity Fair and David Copperfield, I think--I might forget the names of the characters, or confuse Croll with Cohenlupe or something like that. Trollope is also always pointing out little echoing relationships between characters: "how could she berate Ruby for running after Sir Felix when she herself was running after Paul Montague?" etc etc. So I think I will arrange all the characters in categories, mostly based on relationships:

• Characters Throwing Themselves at People Who Don't Love Them Back. This happens all over the place in The Way We Live Now. The big three are probably Roger Carbury, who keeps pursuing his cousin Hetta even though she refused his proposal of marriage and shows no interest in marrying him, and who irrationally feels betrayed when his [distant relative by marriage? and] friend Paul Montague reveals that he, Paul, loves Hetta, not having known when he first met her that Roger had secretly called dibs (Roger does technically call dibs before Paul does, but Paul thinks dibs don't count if the girl doesn't like you); Mrs Hurtle, the American "wild cat" who crosses the Atlantic to convince Paul that he should still marry her after he breaks off their engagement by letter, and who tries all manner of tricks to win him away from Hetta, from dressing with a chic simplicity she knows he will appreciate, to entertaining him with her mellifluous voice at dinner and a movie, to convincing her to take her on a beach vacation, to promising to horsewhip him using her particularly American horsewhipping skills; and Ruby Ruggles, the lower-class farm girl who runs away from her grandfather and her meal-and-pollard-selling fiance John Crumb in order to go on a series of music-hall dates with Felix. Of course, there's also Marie Melmotte, headstrong daughter of the spectacularly rich and fraudulent financier, who goes against her father's wishes and throws herself at the beautiful but completely useless Sir Felix Carbury, and goes so far as to orchestrate an elaborate elopement with him to New York, which he is too lazy and useless to execute (but she makes it as far as Liverpool before her dad catches her.) At least within the span of time covered by the novel, Marie and Ruby get some (extremely listless) encouragement from Felix--he's never going to marry Ruby, though--whereas Roger and Mrs Hurtle just rage and rage against Paul Montague ("leave Hetta alone!" "Marry me!") to not much effect. Also, I'm pretty sure there's a moment where Roger is criticizing Mrs Hurtle for running after Paul and realizes he's doing the same thing to Hetta, and where Mrs Hurtle criticizes Ruby for running after Felix and realizes she's doing the same thing to Paul. Nesting!
• Characters at Whom Other Characters Throw Themselves, & Who May or May Not Reject Those Advances. Hetta (pursued by Roger, loves Paul); Paul (pursued by Mrs Hurtle, loves Hetta); Felix (pursued by Marie and Ruby; wants Marie's money, wants to hang around with/sleep with Ruby, loves neither). The only one of these characters who has never given any encouragement to her pursuer is Hetta, which makes Roger Carbury kind of a weirdo for being so angry at Paul; but he also really loves her and is sad, so poor Roger. Paul totally pursued and got engaged to Mrs Hurtle before he freaked out about her former life and then fell in love with a different girl. Felix is a disaster. Interestingly, both of Felix's admirers are technically engaged to other men who meet with their families' approval: Marie to Lord Nidderdale (kind of a crumb), Ruby to John Crumb (not a crumb at all, according to Trollope.)
• Characters Looking to Make Mercenary Marriages. Felix Carbury, but most of his motivation comes from his mother, Lady Carbury, who also keeps trying to get Hetta to marry her cousin Roger long after it's appropriate to give that advice; Lord Nidderdale, whose father wants him to marry Marie for her money, and who is happy to oblige if the terms are lucrative enough ("the governors have this all worked out"); Georgiana Longstaffe, who has a fit when her family has to give up their London house because it will get in the way of her husband-shopping, & who grudgingly consents to go to stay with the Melmottes, at whose home she meets & gets engaged to wealthy Jewish financier Breghert. All of these characters are pretty nakedly honest about their mercenary motives--Felix vaguely reassures Marie that he loves her to her face, but after their failed elopement tells everyone he didn't care for her at all; Nidderdale is nice to Marie, but both of them agree their engagement is a financial transaction initiated by their fathers; Georgiana tries to negotiate with Breghert for a guaranteed house in London before they get married--and none of these marriages actually work out. I guess we can also add weirdo Fisker's pursuit of Marie, but at least they both have money (?).
• Characters Looking to Get Something Out of the Melmottes. Lady Carbury, Sir Felix, Lord Nidderdale, occasionally some Longestaffes all hope to get something out of a family member marrying Marie. Miles Grendall and his father Lord Alfred seem to be weird Melmotte hangers-on who get salaries (or maybe just Miles does? he's his secretary) and sit on the Board of the Railway. Mr Longestaffe seems to get money from Melmotte somehow, and has Melmotte visit the Longestaffe family estate at Caversham in order to get his advice about financial stuff, to the horror of the whole Longestaffe family; also the Melmottes rent the Longestaffe house in London and buy another Longestaffe property, Pickering (there's all this business about Dolly Longestaffe, the oldest son, having to sign off on the sale, which is maybe something you can do even with entailed property? which relates to all that stuff from Woman in White about robbing your children! and in the end Dolly's refusal to sign off on something about Pickering--like giving Melmotte the deed without him having to pay, crazy!--results in Melmotte totally committing forgery which is his downfall!) Also Fisker, Montague's American business partner, who shows up and proposes the railway idea to Melmotte. Fisker actually does seem to get quite a lot out of Melmotte! Also the Conservative Party, and whoever wants him to give a dinner to the Emperor of China, and also the Catholics for some reason.
• Vaguely European Characters Connected with Finance, Who May or May Not Be Jewish. Melmotte, of course! He is supposedly French, although it is suggested at the end that his dad might have been a crazy Irish-American forger from NYC named Melmudy or something hilarious. Melmotte's antecedents are the vaguest ever! I need to go back and check, but I think that when Melmotte was running for Parliament, and secretly giving money to both Catholics and Anglicans, and everyone was debating whether he himself was a Catholic or an Anglican, it was suggested that he had been born Jewish. But the Irish-American thing would suggest he WAS Catholic, isn't that interesting? So maybe everyone just assumes financiers are Jewish, because it is the nineteenth century. Or MAYBE the point is that no one knows where Melmotte came from, and that rumors are flying everywhere. Equally murky is the provenance of his wife Madame Melmotte and his daughter Marie, who is not Madame Melmotte's daughter (and whose mother was probably never married to Melmotte.) They both speak French to each other all the time.
  Also the following three German and/or Jewish and/or Eastern European guys: Cohenlupe, a rich crony of Melmotte who has been in Parliament for a while and seems pretty established, but who totally books it when Melmotte's finances are looking shaky; the aforementioned Breghert, a Jewish widow and father of grown-up kids who is a partner in a very wealthy financial firm, who reacts to Georgiana's family's (and Georgiana's) anti-Semitism with some sadness at their lack of social progress and also some contempt (very interesting to see the arguments both Georgiana and Breghert make about why it's okay to marry a Jew; Georgiana's are stupider, but point to a Lady Julia who ran off with a Goldscheiner (sp?) and now is accepted in society); and Croll, Melmotte's clerk, who speaks in a comical German accent ("vat," etc.) Croll and Breghert both find out about Melmotte's final forgery attempt and stop it, which leads to Melmotte's death, basically. But they are good guys, esp. Breghert. Croll ends up with Madame Melmotte, who (erroneously) thinks he can help her get money her husband settled on Marie, and seduces him with Curacao. Oh! ALSO. Vossner, the guy who procures food and drink and runs stuff for the Beargarden, and somehow cheats all the members and leaves town.
• Useless Fops at the Beargarden. Sir Felix (totally useless!); Dolly Longestaffe (even more useless!); Miles Grendall (has a job with Melmotte but is poor and cheats at cards); Lord Nidderdale (slightly less useless?); Lord Grasslough (kind of a jerk?); Paul Montague (too good for the Beargarden.) Beargarden morality is peculiar, but can be explained by extreme laziness & vague gentility: no one wants any trouble, and no one except Felix really cares whether anyone cheats at cards, or whether anyone pays their gambling debts. It's funny to see Felix get all morally indignant about this stuff because he happens to win at cards for a while and ends up with a bunch of useless IOUs from Miles Grendall.
• Boring Clergymen. There are all these different clergymen in the book and I can't keep them straight. One is the bishop of whatever area of Sussex Roger Carbury lives in (Carbury? some larger area?) He is a nice Anglican and doesn't care about doctrine, just about being nice. Victorian novelists, in my experience, love talking about how clergy don't care about doctrine. Sometimes they're being critical of the clergy  for not being religious enough (George Eliot? hard to tell. Elizabeth Gaskell in North and South? kind of hard to tell, since as a Unitarian she probably admires the dad for refusing to reassert those articles or whatever, but also she sees how annoying the practical consequences of his decision are), but I'm pretty sure Trollope thinks the bishop is agreeable and good, if hypocritical. Then there's the Catholic priest, Father Barham, who was raised a gentleman and went to Oxford and then converted to Catholicism, and Roger Carbury feels bad for him because it's sad for a gentleman to live in poverty and cut off from other gentlemen (as you surely are when you hang out with a bunch of horrible lousy old Catholics). But Father Barham is insufferable because he's really into Catholicism and feels duty-bound to convert everyone. Then there's the clergyman who goes to Germany with Felix--the Reverend Septimus Blake. He is described as "a brand snatched from the burning of Rome." I do not understand what this means. Was he a Catholic who turned Anglican?
• Literary Guys. At the beginning, Lady Carbury writes to three editors hoping they will say nice things about her amazing-sounding nonfiction work, Criminal Queens. The editors are Mr Alf, who edits the entertainingly nasty periodical The Evening Pulpit and who runs for Parliament against Melmotte; Mr Broune, who edits the more popular, mainstream, conciliatory, cautiously-pro-Melmotte Morning Breakfast-Table, and who falls in love with Lady Carbury (and therefore says nice things about her books in his paper); and Mr Booker, who believes in mutually-helpful puff pieces. Lady Carbury aspires to be literary and writes reviews and a novel (The Wheel of Fortune) in addition to Criminal Queens, but when she finally marries Mr Broune she realizes that being a literary wife is better than being a literary writer. This is infuriating, but also reminds me of the huge revelation I had when reading Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? a few years ago: we always think about how women had it rough "in the old days" because they couldn't have jobs of their own; but I hadn't really thought about how for women choosing a husband meant not only choosing a sexual partner and a life partner and a social class, but also basically choosing a profession. If you fall in love with a clergyman, you'd better love teaching Sunday school, or you'd better not marry the man you love. So stressful to add career as another criterion for choosing a partner: not only do you want your husband to be successful at his career, but you want it to be one you wouldn't mind kind of doing. I was talking to a friend about this, though, and realized that I think women do this today when choosing partners, probably more than men do: women may have internalized the idea that a husband's career defines him, her, and their lifestyle, and can possibly light up her life in a way she never expected. I don't know if a lot of men think that way: "Oh man she's a business lady, she will totally take me on sophisticated trips to Paris!" Thoughts?
• Characters Who Are Not Entirely Horrible. In order of least-horribleness: 1) Hetta? Not much bad stuff to say about her. Pretty devoted and nice; possibly too uncynically committed to true love? But Trollope seems to think that is fine. 2) Roger Carbury: it's annoying how mean he is to Paul about how Hetta belongs to him etc etc but he is a good guy. 3) John Crumb. He is a simple soul and Ruby should marry him because he is a decent guy and also can give her vittles and also they are in the same class. Also he thrashes Sir Felix, which everyone can get behind, even though this honest-lower-class-guy-thrashing-a-fop kind of makes me uncomfortable. Obvs Roger is the perfect kind of upper-class guy because he hangs out with the lower-class guys and is a traditional squire and makes hay, but of course is totally into the hierarchy with all the gentleman stuff. 4) Paul Montague? He is less idealistic and sympathetic in this book than in the miniseries but still a pretty well-meaning guy, who gets tangled up in a bad situation. 5) Mrs Hurtle. Despite the horsewhipping, she helps out Ruby and lets Mrs Pipkin's children have pudding, which leads Mrs P (and Trollope) to admit she is a nice lady. 6) Ruby? She's Ok. 7) Marie? She is pretty OK too. I think Trollope kind of admires her pluck.

THE END

The Way We Live Now in London & Paris

My orals reading progress--and thus my blogging--slowed down a lot over the past week, when I left the low-traveling-pressure environment of my mom's cozy apartment in Florence for the high-traveling-pressure-environment of a couple of hostels in London & a traveling companion eager to get the most out of the city. It's kind of ironic that I got a lot more Victorian-novel reading done in Florence than I did in the city where most of these novels are set--you'd think I would have been inspired to read about carriages in Hyde Park while actually lying around in Hyde Park myself, etc. etc.--and it's also ironic that my traveling companion was also a Victorianist--a more eminent and serious Victorianist than myself, even--as you would have thought we'd encourage each other to do some reading. But it was kind of rainy, so lying around in parks was hard, and there were a lot of scones to eat and museums to visit, including the Cult of Beauty exhibit at the V&A and the Freud Museum, which I'd never been to before. We also saw a production of The Cherry Orchard at the National Theatre, so now I can think about Russian literature a little, too--and I guess the themes of The Cherry Orchard, which explores the changes in the social and financial relationships between classes after the freeing of the serfs, as an aristocratic family loses control of their ancestral estate, are pretty similar to The Way We Live Now, even if The Cherry Orchard was written thirty years later. The Russians were always a little belated, as the characters in Chekhov would be the first to admit.

So I'm about two-thirds of the way through The Way We Live Now, and here's what I've been thinking so far:

• Have I read this before? I saw the miniseries a few years ago, and then sometime in 2007 I started reading the novel, but since I know at least the rudiments of the plot from the miniseries, it's hard to remember how far I got. I distinctly remember sitting on a city bus in Baltimore reading about how John Crumb was covered in flour, and I also remember reading the account of the dinner Roger Carbury holds for the bishop and the Catholic priest, but beyond that it's anyone's guess. So, since my goal for at least the first month or two of my orals reading is to read texts I've never read before, it was kind of frustrating reading The Way We Live Now this time: how much of this was I rereading? Everything seemed so familiar--had I actually read the whole novel? By the time I got about halfway through, I realized I didn't know exactly what was going to happen next, or even how all the characters were going to end up, so I think I've caught up with myself. Still, unnerving.
• Is this something Laura blogged about? I think that when Laura read the novel she wrote a post about the differences between the novel and the miniseries. I should look it up! One difference she noticed was that in the novel Paul Montague never seems to think the railway will actually be built--he seems much more morally ambiguous, and therefore more implicated in Melmotte's speculations. That seemed like a smart change: it might have been hard to cinematically portray Paul's complicated feelings about his money & the business & so on, whereas Trollope can kind of explain it to us in such a way that we sympathize with Paul & his difficulties. I think Laura also had something to say about Mrs Hurtle, which I can't remember and would like to look up. Or maybe I had a thought about Mrs Hurtle when I started reading the book? I seem to remember thinking Mrs Hurtle was less violent in the novel than she was in the miniseries--less of a threatening Wild West Annie Oakley type--but that doesn't actually seem to be the case. I personally sympathized with the letter she wrote in which she threatens to horsewhip Paul--"and believe me, I know how to choose such a weapon!"--not because I have ever wanted to horsewhip my Paul (I have not!) but because I  have definitely wanted to write e-mails like that to people, and have been prevented from sending them only by great feats of blessed self-restraint.
• How is this different from Vanity Fair? This is not a rhetorical question. It's very, very different--and yet it's in the tradition of Vanity Fair: a satirical, cynical novel meant to give us a kind of panoramic view of English society, with characters who are often supposed to be unsympathetic but with whom we kind of sympathize anyway, and plenty of authorial commentary. I guess I'd like to think about whether the "good" characters in TWWLN are more or less sympathetic and more or less realistic than the "good" characters in VF, and what the relationship might be between how realistic and how sympathetic they are. I also want to think about Trollope's use of point of view: sometimes we get free indirect discourse, sometimes moral commentary from an omniscient narrator. I think Thackeray does this, too, and probably it's just a classic Victorian narrative move: the true omniscient narrator can slip from consciousness to consciousness, and into a Godlike moral judgment of those consciousnesses, as swimmingly as a little Victorian fish. But since I haven't read much Thackeray, Dickens, or Trollope, I might not understand this mode as well as I should!

David Copperfield in Bed

I finished David Copperfield this morning as children ran up and down the stairs in the courtyard making horrible noises with a bubble-blowing gun--I think the noises were maybe supposed to sound like a space ray or something. I think they were American children. David Copperfield himself ends up with some children at the end, which we knew would happen because he had a daughter wearing a ring (see last post) and everything is wrapped up in a kind of tedious way. I am pretty down on poor David! But as I said, all this stuff that you kind of thought had been basically wrapped up already had to get wrapped again, as if it were going to be mailed to a faraway country, which I suppose it was. The Colonies pop up at the end: everyone is successful in Australia! That was fun. And there was one character, Mr Mell(s?), who had not been dealt with in the general double- and triple-wrapping up, and he was sort of wrapped up, thank goodness. That was a relief to me. The last sight we got of Uriah Heep was certainly a little bit chilling and a little bit funny, which is what you want out of Uriah Heep. The love plot was pretty boring and stupid, but was managed in such a way that it was at least somewhat emotionally plausible, for a Dickens novel. But I think that, while Our Mutual Friend didn't seem too long to me at all, David Copperfield did. That extra 15% or so may have come from Dickens not wanting to let go of his favorite character ever, but I found it as tiresome, if not more tiresome, than the end of Lord of the Rings.


Speaking of the detail about the daughter's ring: I forgot to mention in my last post that it reminds me a lot of this part of The Bell Jar that I've written about before (not on this blog)--Esther is describing the swag she got from her magazine internship, and she's like, "I got this sunglasses case with a green plastic starfish on it. The other day I cut off the starfish and gave it to the baby to play with." I think it's the only clue we get in the whole novel about what Esther's life is like after the bell jar lifts. It's interesting that it's a domestic, maternal detail--showing us that she's "normal" now and doesn't have to be embarrassed at the OB-GYN anymore, and presumably met some kind of normal husband-type to have sex with who isn't Irwin or whoever--but that we don't get any details about how she's now a famous novelist, like we do in David Copperfield. I actually think in The Bell Jar it's a pretty classy, subtle detail; the ring detail in DC is similar, but ultimately less subtle and less tantalizing because we eventually find out where the daughter comes from, and even find out the names of some daughters she could potentially be. So there's less of a sense that you're penetrating into some mysterious, alluring future, a future beyond the fourth wall, through a glass darkly, etc., a future that the narrative in general doesn't want you to know about. A forbidden peek! Or a clever sleight-of-hand to lend the account verisimilitude. 


So, what next? I fear I am already a little sick of Victorian novels (after only three of them!). Surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die! I guess that explains why I kept running into die-hard Victorianists in the hallways at school who, even though they were reading amusing and delightful novels, looked decidedly green about the gills if you mentioned George Eliot or Anthony Trollope. Perhaps I'll take another poetry break and look at The Princess (which might be intolerable!), or introduce a modernism break and read To the Lighthouse, which I think is about going on family vacations? and so might be appropriate for my last couple of days in Italy with my mom.

David Copperfield and Edward Cullen

Well, not really. But I did read a little bit of David Copperfield in Volterra, where Edward Cullen tried to commit vampire suicide by revealing his sparkly white chest to the world, and where my own brother reenacted that attempted suicide by revealing his matte white chest to the world. This is like David Copperfield because David Copperfield's little brother also dies of exposure. Not really. Sort of? Anyway.


My mom and I went on a two-day road trip to San Gimignano and Volterra that was, for some reason, an exact replica of a trip she'd made with my brother two weeks before, so I guess that was like David Copperfield because David is always revisiting scenes of former happiness or misery and thinking about them, and because the plot, as I observed in an earlier post, is very circular and circuitous and keeps gently bringing back characters and incidents that you may have forgotten but certainly have not forgotten as if they were currants you were gently folding into dough. This is different, as I may also have observed, from the way characters seem to cycle back in Our Mutual Friend, because in Our Mutual Friend Dickens is keeping like fifteen storylines with all millions of zany characters in them in play, and he wants to make sure you know what's going on with Jenny Wren before you forget she exists, but that he stops the Jenny Wren narrative right where it's getting interesting so you'll come back and buy the next issue of the magazine. This is a technique that is very common in our own contemporary fiction: it is practiced to lousy effect in The Da Vinci Code and to OK effect in the other novel I am reading right now, the famous Clash of Kings, or rather Game of Thrones (TM) 2 (TM copywright Laura.) But David Copperfield is weird because all the subplots have to be filtered through David's consciousness, which can sometimes make this device seem more natural ("Oh, well, David just happens to have met Mr Micawber again, interesting") and can sometimes make it seem super awkward ("Really? David meets Mr Micawber with the same regularity with which Arya chapters appear in Game of Thrones? OK.") Also it means that sometimes the narrative, which normally seems to be a pretty straightforward chronicle of David's life, is forced into weird temporal convolutions because it's time for a "what's up at Yarmouth" chapter, but we just had an exciting Mr Micawber chapter, so the Yarmouth chapter is like "Well, this part happened a week before I saw Mr Micawber. And this part happened about two days after Mr Micawber made the exciting announcement he made in the last chapter, and we were all filled with suspense." The result of this is that it's hard to reconcile the fact that the David Copperfield who is filled with suspense about Mr Micawber, and worried about his wife's illness, is the same David Copperfield who, in this chapter, seems entirely consumed by everyone's problems at Yarmouth. Not to harp on the idea of the picaresque, because I feel like ever since Paul read that Zak Smith article about D&D and the picaresque it's all we talk about, but: the effect is kind of picaresque! Or at least episodic, since David Copperfield is not a jaunty rogue. When you're reading a Künstlerroman you expect to be constantly aware of the development of the main character's consciousness, and you are, but--I don't know. It's not a smooth development, like Jane Eyre, or even a modernist jerky-but-clear progression like Portrait of the Artist or Mary Olivier. It's like a bunch of linked short stories, maybe? But they are extremely linked; just as in Our Mutual Friend it all comes together in the end, in David Copperfield everyone knows everyone else and significantly influences everyone's life.


Related, I suppose, are the pretty interesting narrative techniques Dickens uses to slow down & speed up time; now I sound like an exercise from the creative writing class I used to teach, but oh well. There are several chapters where he's like, "Nothing important happened here: I finished school" or "I worked at my job" or "I courted my girlfriend" or "I traveled." The effect is kind of like those sped-up clouds in movies, or the montages that show the same scene in winter and spring and summer and fall. Actually, a lot of the weird narrative moves Dickens makes in David Copperfield are pretty cinematic. I particularly enjoyed the extremely accurate description of the first time David gets super drunk: somebody's yelling something annoying, oh it turns out to be him, everything is very misty and wavery (like Kurtz), oh turns out he's in bed, interesting. Similar experiential descriptions indicate grief, love, etc. I'm also always interested in first-person narratives that are supposed to have been written from a specific point in the future (or the present, I guess); I'm especially interested in the clues that get dropped. In David Copperfield these are often kind of heavy-handed foreshadowing ("It would have been better for her to have died that day," etc.) but sometimes they're these kind of naturalistic, domestic details ("my daughter was wearing a similar ring the other day"). Are these examples of heavy-handed foreshadowing? Or do they make the narrative more believable as autobiography, as a text by a real person who knows what's going to happen and can't always keep that out of the story?


I stayed up late tonight trying to finish the novel, and failed--I have 7% left, but it's a long 7%, my friends! so I will close with some very brief observations:

• You guys, the last like 15% of the book really drags! A lot of exciting plot and character things are brought to an exciting crisis and you can basically see how they will be resolved, and then it takes FOREVER to resolve them, and there are a lot of boring speeches and extremely boring descriptions of things that I think are supposed to be exciting or moving, but turn out to be boring. It COULD BE that all the descriptions in the book are boring, except that the majority of the descriptions are of DELIGHTFUL DOMESTIC SITUATIONS which I love, and so I just got bored the two times there were descriptions of NATURE, which I abhor (being a vacuum, the feeling is mutual. HA HA I am kind of tired.) But still! It is going ON and ON. It does not help that a significant source of comedy in the novel is the fact that Mr Micawber always writes long, boring, wordy letters to everyone, so we all have to sit through these long, boring, wordy letters at which we are supposed to laugh and laugh.
• Said domestic situations are DELIGHTFUL and FASCINATING. The coziest and most delightful domestic situations in David Copperfield are the quirkiest and least conventional ones, like the house made of a boat or the dinner David & his friends get up when the dinner his housekeeper makes is bad: Mr Micawber makes punch, and everyone takes turns roasting slices of something on the fire, and it is very charming. Also charming is the chapter I just read about how one character, who has been engaged to his fiancee for about half the book, has finally gotten married and moved his fiancee and all eight of her sisters into the chambers he occupies as a lawyer, which consist of three rooms. The descriptions of DC's terrible domestic life with his terrible wife are also extremely charming, even though you are frustrated with the terrible wife. In all these scenes there are amazing details about weird Victorian housekeeping stuff, like cookery books and how you can wash teacups at the table and how you can have teaspoons made of Britannia metal. Also it was very hard to be a wife in those days because I think you had to know double-entry bookkeeping or whatever, and I do sympathize with the terrible wife because that seems hard. Also! very interesting part where DC tells his wife, "Our bad housekeeping doesn't just hurt us, it also hurts our servants by giving them opportunities to become dishonest people. It's like an infection!" (all quotes are paraphrases!!) Noblesse oblige, right? Trickling down from the dad to the mom to the servants. 
• But David is pretty good about saying "Neither of us know about housekeeping; we both need to learn how to do this." You get the sense that if he were married to a less ridiculous wife they would figure it out together and it would be very cozy. Because his wife is pretty useless a lot of their domestic scenes read kind of like those John Brooke/Meg scenes from Little Women, but slightly more from the Brooke perspective (although Alcott is super sympathetic to Brooke.) Imagine if you married a lady and she started crying every time you suggested she help out with the house! So DC doesn't want to be paternal about it, but then he has to be, and then he feels bad. Actually, this book has a lot of very sensitive, realistic portrayals of less-than-perfect marriages.
• SPOILER ALERT IN THIS BULLET POINT (NOT A COMPLETE SPOILER)
  David's marriage is so obviously terrible, and such a bad idea from pretty early on in their courtship, that you're praying for something bad to happen, and when it does happen, the pathos is really reduced by you being like, "Thank goodness!" But on the other hand he obviously loves his wife, and she's a good person, and you understand and believe that he loves her, so you're also like, "How is David Copperfield possibly going to get out of this and marry someone else and produce the daughter he saw wearing the ring?" Because it doesn't seem like the rules of honor and the sanctity of marriage would allow someone who was married to a pretty nice person, about whom he had the misgivings DC has, to get married to someone else.
  END SPOILER ALERT
• Fallen women! They are not allowed to talk after they have been saved. You can catch a glimpse of them but someone usually puts a handkerchief over their faces. I know it is because the last thing they would ever want would be more exposure and blame from the cruel world to which they were deluded into inappropriately exposing themselves or whatever, but it seems rough. I think I read somewhere that when you entered into one of those reformatories for fallen women--the Magdalen houses--you told your tale of woe to the board of directors or something and then you never spoke of it to any of the other women in the house. It is possible I read this in a fantasy novel or something and not in a book about Magdalen houses, but whatever. I was reminded of it when a fallen woman's male relative tells DC her story, almost verbatim, and DC is like "Now when I think of that story I feel like I was there, the memory is so vivid" and you're like, "Why is this story being told third-hand? Why can't she tell her own story?" And it is puzzling!
• Women in general, Charles Dickens. Young women. I don't know. They are not your greatest work. They are usually either pretty terrible and need a lot of male correction or they are these annoying saints. The older women can be great. Betsy Trotwood is the best! Oh man speaking of young women, Miss Dartle is crazy!
• Finally: what's with the Victorians thinking it is GREAT to trick people for their own good? I was extremely upset by an entire major plot point of Our Mutual Friend, which turned out to be an elaborate, well-meaning trick to improve or test or develop the morals of one of the characters. I was reminded of this, and pretty upset indeed, in The Woman in White when two of the characters trick a third character into thinking she's a good artist and that she's earning money for the family with her drawings. Granted, this last example was an attempt to slowly bring her back from a traumatized state into acting like her old self--a self who maybe could support herself through drawings, although it seems unlikely. It just seemed creepy. Why not give her something actually useful to do, like doing the laundry or something? Maybe that would have made her coarse. Anyway, people are constantly doing stuff like this in David Copperfield: pretending people are doing useful work when they're not; concealing crucial information from people for their own good; telling people that their relatives are sick when they're really dead (and bizarrely not waiting a day or two to reveal that the person is dead, but just going smoothly on one minute later from "sick" to "dead"); hiding newspapers from people who are going to Australia so they will NEVER KNOW a loved one is dead. SO WEIRD. Obviously all these concealments are well-meaning, and the Victorians obviously thought the shock of finding out certain things could be really damaging to your health, but I don't like it. Whenever anyone has put off telling me something to save my feelings, or to allow me to enjoy one last careless hurrah, I'm always super upset when I do find out, and the memory of the careless hurrah gets tainted anyway. I think. Who knows! What's more important: experiences or memories of those experiences? I think David Copperfield is interested in that question--as are most facsimiles of life writing, where the narrator often tries to separate an event from the associations it's accumulated over time, and can't. Count no man happy etc etc until she is in bed.

STEERFORTH

I don't trust that guy. I didn't trust him from the first, because I had Titus Groan on the brain and was thinking of Steerpike. Also because I pictured him looking like Flashman from the Tom Brown miniseries (which I think is probably accurate.) And then he was bad to that teacher. But I really don' like this business of him wandering around Yarmouth unsupervised while DC is with Peggotty. How bad is this gonna be? Pretty bad, sez several chapters of foreshadowing.