The Little Professor

Why undergraduates should be kept away from Victorian religious fiction?

Here I am, reading The Irish Convert; or Popish Intolerance Illustrated (1839; expanded 1849), which is about as you'd expect, and I'm already a little bemused by the opening chapter, which spends an awful lot of time being quotations stitched together.  Already, my mind slowly wanders to the "F" I would likely hand the author if this were a freshman comp paper (which, thank goodness, it isn't).  Soon, though, I reach an epigraph.  At first, I think the author might have committed written it himself, which is always a bad plan (OK, unless you're George Eliot or Walter Scott):

The sull'n recluse, with crucifixes hung,

And spells, and rosaries, and wooden saints,

Said mass, and did most grievous penance vile;

And then retired that he might fabricate

All lying wonders, by the' untaught received

For revelations new.

(35)

But then, my curiosity kicks in, and I start Googling about.  Lo! Here it is.  Er, sort of:

Unprofitable seem'd, and unapproved,

That day, the sullen, self-vindictive life

Of the recluse: with crucifixes hung,

And spells, and rosaries, and wooden saints,

Like one of reason reft, he journey'd forth,

In show of miserable poverty,

And chose to beg, as if to live on sweat

Of other men, had promised great reward:

On his own flesh inflicted cruel wounds,

With naked foot embraced the ice, by the hour

Said mass, and did most grievous penance vile:

And then retired to drink the filthy cup

Of secret wickedness, and fabricate

All lying wonders, by the untaught received

For revelations new. Deluded wretch!

Did he not know, that the most Holy One

Required a cheerful life and holy heart?

Now, I could be wrong, but the epigraph seems not quite exact.  Moreover, it's from Robert Pollok's The Course of Time (1827), which has now fallen off the radar, but was then still an extremely popular and regularly-reprinted poem.   Lesson of the day: it's perfectly OK to mangle quotations beyond recognition, without ellipses dots, in service of your pet cause! Or something. 

Granted, that's not the lesson I'm supposed to be taking away from this novel...

Oakby and Number Twenty-Nine

In the past few days, this blog has featured Jews! Or Catholics! Today, for a change of pace, we have...Jews and Catholics!  Sophie Amelia Prosser's novellas Oakby, Showing How New Troubles Came into an English Parish and Number Twenty-Nine (1881), published as a single volume, would at first glance appear to have little in common: the former is a nearly-plotless tale in a pastoral setting, in which Ritualists briefly invade and destroy a previously idyllic Christian community; the latter is a semi-sensationalist narrative in an urban setting, in which evangelicals try to figure out the mystery of a Jewish prisoner (and of the other Jews who have suddenly appeared on the scene).  However, as my few longtime readers know by now, Jews and Catholics have a habit of overlapping in the Protestant imagination, and the overlap in question is on display here--both stories emphasize the danger of ritual and "tradition" to religious faith, as opposed to beliefs and practices derived solely from the Bible.  Moreover, although both stories celebrate Christian men and women, they strongly advocate for Christian men taking responsibility for religious renewal.

In terms of chronology, Oakby is a little odd, as its anti-RItualist hysteria does not really mesh with the pre-railway setting.  However, by eliminating railways, Prosser emphasizes Oakby's self-enclosure and virtual self-sufficiency, isolated as it is from urban modernity and rapid historical transformations.  The Anglican vicar, who is never named, is a model of Christian devotion and clerical activity; his niece, Mary, ceaselessly nurtures the parish.  Their figurative "paternal" and "maternal" roles ensure that the parish functions as an organic whole, held together by faith and love.  Meanwhile, the local doctor, a Scottish Presbyterian punningly named Kirke, dispenses practical as well as medical advice.   Here, though, is also where Christian masculinity comes into play.  The vicar has "'aesthetic'" (14) leanings, although his self-discipline keeps him from collapsing into full-blown Ritualism (and, thanks to the usual slippery slope, Roman Catholicism).  But when faced with evidence that his parishioners are being suborned, as it were, by a neighboring Ritualist, the vicar is "stupefied" (33) and incapable of really asserting himself; it is Kirke, the vehement Presbyterian, who carries the burdern of the novel's anti-Ritualist dialogue, expressing himself (hotly) about Romeward tendencies and eagerly confronting (hotly) the young woman who has succumbed to the attractions of confession &c.  For all that the vicar appears to be an ideal clergyman, his weakness for the aesthetic indexes a deeper moral and physical weakness: far from leading the crusade against Ritualist incursions, the vicar suddenly topples over from a stroke, and is soon replaced by a Ritualist clergyman from outside the village, "who looked as if much of asthma, or fever, or anything, would end his course" (79).  The dainty male physiques of the aesthetically-inclined cannot stand up to the rigors of Protestant self-defense.  It is up to Kirke to save the day against this explicitly foreign infection (the locals even call Catholic women "Romans"), ending the tale as Mary's new father figure.  WIth all interest in "aesthetics" ejected from the plot, a new, more muscular Protestant regime takes its place.

Kirke has little affection for Judaism, snapping that "'We are not Jews, and we don't want to be brought within a single fetter of the bondage either of Judaism or of Popery" (12).  The secret, corrupting book that KIrke and the vicar find in the church, which offers a dangerous alternative to pure Biblical knowledge, foreshadows the heavier weight of texts in Number Twenty-Nine: the "philosopher," Mr. Whiteheart (yet another significant name), is a serious Christian, but overly devoted to the books he collects, and "easily taken in with theories" (86); worse still is Rabbi Nathan's study, loaded with "[b]ooks and parchments," but symbolically smelling of "mould and damp" and lit only by a window "encrusted" with what appears to be years of dirt (263-64).  Whiteheart's theories lead him astray from Christian truths, while the Rabbi's study is a figurative tomb, shrouded from spiritual light and associated with rot and corruption.  The Bible, which at one point even gets lit by a providential ray of light, is the only proper corrective to such accumulations of obscurantist texts.  Like Oakby, Number Twenty-Nine has only contempt for Jewish learning, but it also features a philosemitic appreciation for Jews themselves.  As is frequently the case in evangelical philosemitic texts, Number Twenty-Nine roundly condemns all acts of antisemitic discrimination and name-calling, while insisting that the best way of showing respect for Jews is to convert them.  In this instance, two of the Jewish characters, Rachel and Simeon, enter the novel already converted; Reuben, their father's favorite child, is the eponymous Number Twenty-Nine, who has had himself imprisoned in order to atone for what he believes is "parricide" (184).  Reuben's belief that he can save himself though intense physical discipline, along with the obvious parallel between the prison cell and the monastic cell, again suggests how critiques of Catholicism easily translated into critiques of Judaism--the Jew, like the Catholic, seeks out suffering instead of acknowledging the saving act of Christ's Passion.   

Like many Jewish conversion narratives, Number Twenty-Nine also features a Shylock/Jessica dyad, in which the cruel father (masculinized Law) abuses the converted daughter (feminized Love).  Jacob, the father, is another moneylender, whose face becomes "anything but agreeable" when he discusses his career, but who also believes passionately in Judaism and Jewish destiny; significantly, he is part of an expanding Jewish community in Jerusalem, which the novel regards as one of the signs of Christ's imminent return.  Although Rachel plays a significant role in the novel, it is Jacob's potential conversion that involves the most drama, in line with the other novel's emphasis on masculine religious duty.  "Authority John," the nickname for lay evangelist John Knox Craig, is the man responsible for energizing an international Christian community around reading prophecy, especially prophecies related to the Jews, and thereby awakening Christians to their domestic and spiritual responsibilities.  The community in question is an ecumenical one, in which both Established and Dissenting members participate equally; all ecclesiastical differences collapse under the weight of Biblical truth. Several of the novel's male supporting characters awaken to their failures in enlightening their wives. But it is a tiny Swiss pastor who, after a devastating railway accident, manages to convince Jacob to rethink his oppostion to Christianity, by addressing Jacob as "father" and representing himself as Jacob's "son" (233).  The pastor's selfless love, which reimagines all of humanity as a single family, contrasts starkly with Jacob's rejection of his own children, his refusal to hear them name him as father; at the same time, the pastor also offers an interesting counterpoint to the brash Dr. Kirke and his take-no-comers approach to Protestantism.  Male action may be called for, but action may mean feeling as well as rough speech.  The pastor's love, which revitalizes Jacob's, reclaims the fractured Jewish family for Christianity--and, insofar as Jacob's entire family returns to Jerusalem, it implicitly continues the process of transforming the Jewish people within their homeland, in anticipation of the Messiah.

Some Chimes for the Times

We interrupt this run of novels by and about Jews for some poems by M. A. Chaplin's collection Chimes for the Times (1891; 2nd ed., 1907).  Chaplin was a (very) minor late-Victorian Protestant poet whose work continued to appear through WWI; I stumbled across her via the ever-useful James Britten (1846-1924), leading member of the Catholic Truth Society, whose critiques of nineteenth-century anti-Catholic propaganda (e.g., Protestant Fiction) remain useful bibliographical resources for folks like yours truly.   I'm currently working on a conference paper involving vampires, which is not altogether a non sequitur, given that Mrs. Chaplin's anti-Catholic poems demonstrate that even at the end of the nineteenth century, some tropes remained, shall we say, unstaked and un-garlicked.

The four poems collected under "Convent Chimes" are all, as you might expect, about the perils of Pauline nuns.  The first poem is in rhyming couplets, the next three all in ballad meter; unusually for controversial verse like this, Chaplin doesn't hold tight to iambic tetrameter or pentameter, loosening it up instead with a number of trochaic and anapestic substitutions.  Her (relative) metrical derring-do does not repeat itself, however, in the poems' contents.  The subjects are arranged in an outside-to inside-to outside order: the unheeded cries of a nun heard outside the convent ("Only a Nun"); warning a young girl who fantasizes about the convent ("What It Is to Be A Nun"); nuns speaking from within a convent ("Convent Bells"); and a mother attempting to find her daughter ("The Nun's Mother").  All four poems emphasize enclosure and alienation, not only from the family, but also from a government that ought to be protecting nuns against an implicitly foreign invader...but isn't.  In Chaplin's imagination, that is, to be a nun means occupying a kind of strange territory within England that is resolutely un-English in its governance and, to make matters worse, is systematically repressed within English discourse. (This will probably come as news to anyone who has studied Victorian anti-Catholicism!)  In "Only a Nun," the nuns wait in vain for "blunt John Bull" (l. 10) to acknowledge their cries, while the "giddy world" (l. 15) ignores them, the "public" (l. 26) expends its sympathies on anti-vivisectionism, and, the poem sternly concludes, "England says proudly, 'It's only a nun'" (l. 42).  Anguished nuns find that they can enter no I-It relation, as it were, let alone an I-Thou; their imprisonment extends to their exclusion from dialogue.  Only the evangelical campaigner, ready to "force the lock" (l. 18), acknowledges the nuns' full humanity.  This call to violate convent space recurs in "Convent Bells," which repeatedly invites male outsiders to "come in" and rescue nuns from their oppression by the false mothers and fathers who populate the religious hierarchy, and "The Nun's Mother," which climaxes with a call to Queen Victoria to "[t]urn every convent upside down/And show us what God knows" (ll. 47-48).  Building on decades of anti-convent campaign rhetoric, Chaplin insists that convent spaces are shot through with secret chambers and burial pits, prisons within prisons, that must be opened up to the inquiring Protestant gaze; just as Catholic "Mothers" and "Fathers" parody the nomenclature and structure of the family, so too do convents lay false claim to the privacy accorded to the home. 

"The Nun's Mother," the final poem in this sequence, inverts "Only a Nun"'s representation of unheard nuns: here, the lamenting mother is trapped outside the convent, forced to imagine the sufferings of a child whom she cannot see, let alone speak to.   Chaplin's first line is "Oh! Where is my beautiful girl to-night!" which hints at the poem's primary intertext: Robert Lowry's hymn "Where is My Boy Tonight?" (1877), in which the maternal speaker counterpoints her sweet memories of an angelic child with her present yearning for the lost prodigal son.  Unlike Lowry's wistful mother, though, Chaplin's speaker is all the more agonized because she knows exactly where her daughter is.  And unlike the sinning boy, the daughter figures as an angel victimized by mysterious and ominous forces.   Buffeted by the wintry elements, the nun's mother is tortured by Gothic fantasies, the "strange tales" (l. 25) that sound suspiciously like they've been taken from the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk.  In a moment oddly anticipatory of Dracula, the mother can only "stand and wail at the convent gate,/'Oh, give me back my child!'" (ll. 31-32).   Lowry's speaker urges her sympathetic audience to "search" for the long-lost son she still loves, despite all his "blight"; this mother, who refuses to imagine that those "strange tales" may mar her own daughter's body, shrieks into the wind.  Only another woman, Victoria, can actually  "utter the final word" (l. 45) that will finally shatter the convent's walls.  Here, then, is the sequence's final counterpoint to the ineffective cries and shrieks that have populated these four poems: Victoria, the nation's true Protestant mother, has both the power and the responsibility to speak the words that will finally silence the nuns' oppressors.  But as yet, Chaplin notes, she remains silent.   

Truth and Its Triumph; Or, the Story of the Jewish Twins

Today's entry in the transatlantic religious fiction sweepstakes is Sarah Schoonmaker Baker's  Truth and Its Triumph; Or, the Story of the Jewish Twins (1882), a relatively late novel by a prolific children's author from CT.    Truth and Its Triumphs, despite cheerfully taking most conventions of the Jewish conversion novel on board, does spend far more time than usual elaborating the genre's literacy tropes.

The story itself, invested heavily in figures of Judaism as incompletion and lack, unfolds predictably enough.  A good chunk of the novel takes place between two domestic spaces: the Jewish Myers home, owned by a traveling pedler and his wife Naomi, which doubles as a shop, and the Christian Fay home, owned by an impoverished widow.  Jacob Myers is a nominal Jew, with the usual stereotypical interests in making money, but he loves his wife Naomi and his three children, Muppim, Huppim (the eponymous twins), and Ard.  Of the twins, Muppim is the more "serious," although also somewhat cranky.  His journey to Christianity begins when his best buddy, Charlie Fay, blinds himself while playing with the percussion caps thoughtlessly given to the twins by Mr. Thayer (who turns out to be the plot's local deus ex machina later on).  Charlie's blinding--"[p]ieces of the percussion caps had entered his eyes" (20)--anticipates Muppim's sensations later on when he contemplates God during a deadly illness: "the words were fixed in Muppim's mind, like a nail driven home by a strong hand" (70).  Charlie's transformative blindness, which implicitly invokes John 9:25, and Muppim's figurative crucifixion in the midst of his suffering both serve as child-sized imitations of Christ's passion; in general, the novel makes such pain the primary impetus for conversion.  Charlie's full acceptance of his blindness models Christian fortitude for Muppim, Mr. Thayer, and even Charlie's mother, herself a committed Christian.  Given that the narrator emphasizes that, once converted, Muppim is a "Christian Jew" (81), retaining his Jewish identity despite the change of religion, it is possible that Charlie may be a shout-out to the truly exasperating* Charley from Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Judah's Lion (1852), a novel equally invested in the proposition that converted Jews were still Jews.  In any event, once Muppim finally admits to his parents that he has become a Christian, the usual disaster happens: he is rejected by both parents (convention 1), beaten by his father (convention 2), and then exiled from the family (convention 3).  Although Jacob Myers had inadvertently (if, on the novel's terms, providentially) enabled his son's conversion by making him literate in English, he otherwise models the stiffnecked Jew, invested in ritual and material goods; his Dombey and Son-style punishment, in which he loses his mind after his entire business goes up in flames, is a none-too-subtle warning about the fate of Jews in a "Christian country" where the inhabitants "had an opportunity to know all of the religion of Jesus" (61).  By contrast, Huppim, the other twin, eventually comes to embody a truly Christianized capitalist ethic, ultimately subsidizing Muppim's evangelical ministry to the Jews (126).  Their father, a "memento of their Jewish days" (124), becomes a living monument to Judaism's necessary failure in a Christian era--indeed, his conversion hinted at but still incomplete at his final apperance, Jacob isn't even mentioned in the final chapter, which mentions everyone else's steadfast Christian beliefs. 

As I said in the beginning, where this novel expands on conversion novel conventions is in its approach to literacy.  The ability to read and properly interpret the Bible is, of course, at the center of every Protestant conversion narrative, but The Truth and Its Triumph plays multiple modes of reading against each other:  the ability to read Hebrew; the ability to read English; Charlie's growing skill in reading raised letters.  From reading it is one step to interpretation and reinterpretation--specifically, the Jews learning to read their own religion typologically, as emblematized in the two "Passover" chapters (the Jewish holiday and its fulfillment in the communion).  Even the most impoverished Jews' fluency in Hebrew, along with their inseparability from the "Holy Book" (9), signifies the last remnant of continuity between the lost age of Jewish power and the present, diasporic age of Jewish oppression.  For Christians like Charlie, the mere sound of Hebrew, apart from its meaning, carries spiritual weight: "There was something delightful to Charlie in the idea of hearing even a few words of that ancient language spoken by Moses and the Prophets" (29).  Reading or speaking, the Jew brings the Biblical past into the present, testifying to a truth he only partly understands--what Stephen R. Haynes calls the "witness-people myth."  But Charlie's Christian pleasure is enabled by literacy in English, which the novel figures as the entry into both full civic participation and full Christian belief.  Jacob, a rather bad reader of the Tanakh, teaches the twins English on Sundays (42) to prepare them for careers in business, but in teaching them English, he inadvertently opens the way for Mr. Thayer's surreptitious gift of a Bible, "the best book printed in the English language, or any other" (64).  Naomi--who, unconventionally for the Jewish conversion novel, is the center of the family's spiritual life rather than a nominal believer flattened by patriarchy--is fully aware of the danger to her children, for English is a vehicle for "bad books" (42).  English poses the threat of apostasy and assimilation, even though the novel starkly isolates the Myers family from the other local Jews; Naomi's own insight fails to reveal that there is no Jewish "community" to exit from.  (When Muppim becomes ill, there are no Jews to share the burden of his care.)  Jacob's figurative blindness to the providential meaning of his choices stands in stark contrast to the blind Charlie's skill at reading God's plan, while Charlie's struggles in learning to read a different way mirror Muppim's slow and agonizing attempts to read the Tanakh in the light of the New Testament.  And the narrative itself primes its youthful readers to perceive the providential connections that its Jewish characters so obstinately miss--as when Muppim overhears Charlie singing a Christian hymn through the door left open for the Prophet Elijah.

 

* Charley has a habit of addressing the Jewish protagonist as "Mr. Jew," which we are apparently supposed to find charming.

This Week's Acquisitions

• James P. Blaylock, Homunculus (Titan, 2013).  Reprint of Blaylock's steampunk novel from 1986, one of a series featuring the dastardly Ignacio Narbondo vs. scientist-hero Langdon St. Ives; here, they square off over a mysterious alien lifeform orbiting the earth in an airship.  (Barnes & Noble)
• ---, Lord Kelvin's Machine (Titan, 2013). Narbondo vs. Ives again, this time over murder, resurrection, and rifts in the space-time continuum (OK, not quite).  (Barnes & Noble)
• William Boyd, An Ice-Cream War (Vintage, 1999).  Jealousy, personal entanglements, and family strife set against the background of WWI.  (Barnes & Noble)
• Caryl Ferey, Utu, trans. Howard Curtis (Europa, 2011).  Translation of Ferey's 2004 novel about the investigation of a suicide (or was it?) that leads to the Maori.  (Barnes & Noble)

Brief note: Star Trek: Into Darkness

At dinner, my mother asked me what I was going to say about the latest Star Trek film.  In my best oracular voice, I intoned, "I am thinking deep thoughts."  "How can you have deep thoughts," she inquired, "about something that shallow?"

...Which is, indeed, the problem, both with the film and, alas, this blog post.  After the first installment in this reboot, I wondered if the new series was going to have enough brains to handle the implications of a universe in which there was no Vulcan, given the centrality of that planet both to the universe's scientific advances and to its diplomatic record.  If film #2 is any indication, the answer to my question is--nope, it's not.  Oh, there's a quick mention of exploded Vulcan, and another cameo from Spock Prime, but that civilization's now near-total absence doesn't appear to affect anything.  Instead, we have a bizarre terrorist allegory, clearly inspired by the dangers of arming (or waking up) insurgents and hoping that they'll do your bidding afterwards.  But the terrorist in question has no particular reason to behave as he does; he's awake, he's got nothing better to do, so hey, might as well get ride of the "inferior" types?   Star Trek: Into Darkness wants to say something about terrorism and how we respond to it--don't be like the terrorists being the main takeaway there--but it runs quickly away from the "why" question and towards multiplying lens flares.  Lots of people die in the film, but they're collateral damage of the wowzer FX; the "big" death does earn some sniffles, I admit, but it's also cheapened because you know it's going to meet the great reset button in the sky.  (At least Spock's death in Wrath of Khan felt permanent at the time, because Nimoy did want out for a while.) 

Plotwise, the film is amazingly incoherent (io9 had this covered).  It attempts to hold things together with some Big Themes, like the Importance of Family, and the Power of Community (it takes an Enterprise to take out Khan, the raging individualist! And ooh, the big scary ship doesn't need lots of people to run it, hint hint!).  But mostly, the film is special effects strung along a weak thread of something which occasionally wakes up and remembers that it's supposed to be a plot, which unfortunately leaves the viewer plenty of time to wonder why Benedict Cumberbatch is playing a character named Khan Noonien Singh, and whether his fate is supposed to be a shout-out to Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The Young Champion: One Year in Grace Aguilar's Girlhood

1913 is a bit late for me, it's true, and the novel was published on the wrong side of the Atlantic.  Still, I couldn't but be intrigued by The Young Champion, a children's novel about Grace Aguilar. Abram Samuel Isaacs (1851-1920), the author, was a professor at NYU and rabbi who wrote a combination of monographs,  popular history poetry, and children's books, along with editing The Jewish Messenger for over two decades (see this biographical sketch [PDF] for more details).  As one might expect, the book's intent is didactic, but the author's representations of Jewish-Christian relations are of particular interest.

The novel is really almost plotless: the young Grace, on the cusp of adolescence, spends time playing with her friends, keeping her diary, hanging out with Mrs. S. C. Hall,  meeting Moses Montefiore, spotting Benjamin Disraeli, and, above all, listening to her parents tell stories about Jewish history.  The novel's real subject, that is, is the emergence of an explicitly Jewish writer's vocation.  For Isaacs, Jewish subjectivity emerges through shared story-telling experiences, whether Grace's parents' oral retellings of Biblical, rabbinical, and classical narratives or Grace's own aspirations to publish historical fiction and poetry.  Early on, Grace's mother reminds her that she regularly "speak[s] to you" on religious topics, while her father "reads to you" about Jewish heroes and history (14), emphasizing that an ideal Jewish education is always mediated through the parents' own language; when her father introduces stories from Josephus, he is quite open about not "follow[ing] him word for word" (158).  Jewish parents serve as narrators, editors, and gatekeepers, but also as guardians of Jewish tradition; by the same token, the Aguilars' educational practice binds up all knowledge with domestic affect, so that to think of Jewish history is also to think of parental care.  Within the family, the father handles Grace's historical education, while the mother is in charge of her religious instruction (pointedly, Isaacs makes Mr. Aguilar immediately defer to Mrs. Aguilar when there is a slight disagreement about what Grace ought to know about Judaism when).  Their pedagogy produces, in turn, a child whose understanding of authorship--which will itself meld "male" and "female" spheres, as modeled by her parents--is outwardly-directed: she wishes to write not for personal glory, but rather to enhance domestic feeling (107-8), erase the residual "ignorance" of Christians about Jews (108), and teach mutual toleration (108-9).  Grace's vocation is educational, but also community-building, part of a larger project to ensure that Jewish history culminates, as it were, in a comfortably pluralist England. 

Although Grace cites Biblical models of heroic women to authorize her public calling, the novel suggests that she truly models herself after Josephus.  The novel's title, "the young champion," initially affiliates Grace with the chivalric knights of medieval romance, but within the text, "champion" refers only to Josephus and to Grace: he "was enabled to become a champion of his people even in exile" (155), a "champion of Israel" when no longer a soldier (156), while Grace's mother speaks of her daughter's calling to "champion the cause of Israel and promote a kindly and noble humanity" (29-30) and Grace herself tells Mrs. Hall that "I want to champion my people and my religion" (71).  Why cast Grace as a second Josephus? For Isaacs, Josephus is an exemplary boundary-crosser, a figure who actively negotiates between antipathetic cultures; in speaking to his Roman captors, he instructs them and the world at large in "what the Jewish religion really was" (156).  This is, to say the least, a rather oversimplified explanation of what Josephus was doing, but what's key here is that Isaacs celebrates the Jew-as-translator, articulating the truths of Judaism to a previously unresponsive public.  (Not that they were exactly responsive afterwards.)  At the same time, we return to the quest-romance overtones of the title.  Josephus acts as "champion" both as a soldier and as an author; he becomes available for women's emulation once he transitions from physical violence to constructive authorship.  Pen, sword, mightier than. 

However, it is also significant that Isaacs wants to distingush sharply between Josephus-the-soldier and Josephus-the writer, because it speaks to his understanding of modern Jewish history.  He positions Grace, the new Josephus, in a space and time of remarkable Judaeo-Christian cooperation.  The Aguilars appear to have more Christian friends than Jewish ones, and Grace's mother speaks enthusiastically of "our English inheritance" (57); more importantly, despite Mr. Aguilar's tales of Jewish suffering under the Inquisition (the Aguilars are themselves descended from Sephardic exiles), he assures Grace that "[i]n happy England we have rest, and need not dwell too much on the ages of terror" (163).  This enthusiastic endorsement of early nineteenth-century England as a Jewish safe haven, echoed by Grace's belief that her calling is to support Jews in England instead of Palestine (77-78), rejects the persistent trope of the mourning Jew, eternally conscious of his or her exile and forever un-homed.  English antisemitism, in this reading, boils down to a kind of residual ignorance, of the sort chastized by one of Grace's friend's mothers: "There are many churches, but only one church.  And I think the good, the pure, the loving, belong all to one church or synagogue, by whatever name it might be called" (111).  Isaacs' ideal Christian is a universalist, but so is his ideal Jew; religious practices ought not to interfere with virtuous communities.  (Grace's birthday dinner, at which Jews and Christians dine together, emblematizes this vision of coexistence.)  Grace's career as a Jewish "champion" thus turns out to be less about mobilizing forces against persistent antisemitism, which the novel represents as almost entirely vanquished (despite noting injustices, such as Jews' inability to sit in Parliament), than about wiping out the final vestiges of mutual incomprehension in Jewish and Christian readers alike. 

An existential cry (or, excerpt from a work-in-progress)

"In my first effort for this venue, I compared writing a bibliographical essay about contemporary scholarship on historical fiction to herding cats.  The present subject is more akin to lassoing elephants with thread."

Flip It

I've stayed away from posting about MOOCs, in part because my ongoing reaction amounts to not much more than "Why are we being told to do things that are antithetical to everything we've learned about effective pedagogy?"  But I do have a few words about Claire Potter's suggestions for MOOC nuking.

1) Do archival work: This supposes that there are archives available.  For example, Brockport has a handful of archives, but we're not a research repository by any remote stretch of the imagination.  The University of Rochester has much more available, but the library is about twenty-five minutes away when it isn't snowing, making it fine for a one-stop introduction to archival work (one of my colleagues has used it for that purpose), but not fine as the site for a regular course (putting to one side the U of R's potential opinions about us scheduling a class in their archives!).  You should be able to do something interesting with online manuscript material/ephemera, although it isn't quite the same experience--and one has to bear in mind that many students still don't have access to high-speed internet connections at home.

2) Pop culture and history: ...What does "small fee" mean, exactly? Small fee to whom? Some of us are not at campuses rolling in dough, or even flour. (Bringing in a filmmaker might work as a university-wide thing, but you'd need university-level funding for it.) 

3) Axe those surveys: On the one hand, I'm sympathetic to the basic concept, not least because we've been discussing this possibility in my own department.  On the other hand, the instrumentalism of this proposal--"If we believe that the purpose of the liberal arts requirement is to teach everyone the rudiments of critical thinking, would it not be a good idea to ask students preparing for a professional career to take a topical course in, say, the  History of Medicine, the History of the Office, the History of Finance, The History of the Oil Industry — rather than what we currently offer: comprehensive histories of the United States sliced in half at 1865, Western Civilization surveys and whatnot?"--puzzles me.    Our surveys are mostly at the 100 and 200 level, at a point when many of our students have only declared an intent to major, and an equally large number have yet to concretize their career plans.  (In fact, they aren't even eligible for most of our professional programs at this stage.)  The English department equivalent of this proposal (Medical Humanities, say) might draw a bunch of students, but not necessarily because it had anything to do with their futures.

More bluntly, many of our students are working full or part-time, have families or lengthy commutes, etc., and tend to schedule themselves not by interest, but, out of necessity, by time slot.  ("I can take classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays this semester.")  Obviously, a "sexy" course will attract more attention than poor Western Civ (or, in our case, World Lit), but that doesn't necessarily mean that a student working 40 hours per week is going to drop everything to take it, either.

In other words: these suggestions are not really aimed at a school like mine, whose students in any event would often not be well-served by the more impersonal MOOC enviroment.  They require a different kind of student who enters with a different skill-set and different circumstances, and a different university (or university location) with a rather different cash flow. 

This Week's Acquisitions

(Grading is finished! I can blog again!)

• Ron Hansen, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (Scribner, 2011).  A noirish tale of lust and murder, featuring a sexy woman, her much-loathed husband, and her lover.  Based on a real 1927 murder case.  (Lift Bridge)
• John Harwood, The Asylum (Houghton Mifflin, 2013).  In late-Victorian England, a young woman tries to figure out why she committed herself to an insane asylum--and why she is now trapped there.  (Amazon)
• Janice Holmes, Religious Revivals in Britain and Ireland, 1859-1905 (Irish Academic Press, 2000).  Comparative study of Victorian revivalism and the responses thereto.  (Amazon [secondhand])

 

Textual and Material Culture in the Temple of Academe: A Proposal for the 520th Meeting of the MLA, 2413

PANEL OVERVIEW.  Archaeologists excavating a long-buried physical campus in upstate NY discovered an Office in what they termed a "miraculous" state of preservation.  They were particularly excited by the number of paper artifacts in the room, apparently in their original locations.  The Desk proved to be of especial interest:

This panel draws on cutting-edge methodology in supramodern materio-textual studies to analyze the possible ramifications of this find for our understanding of academic ritual in the Late Postmodern period (granting, of course, that in recent debates over periodization, scholars have proposed that this era should be called Presupramodern, or perhaps -Postmodern, as opposed to +Postmodern).  The panelists seek to undermine recent arguments that Offices were merely locations in which one could find academics, as opposed to sites of ritual contestation and spiritual identity formation.  We believe that this panel will raise important questions for the further study of Late Postmodern Academic culture as it relates to the production of new literary spatiotemporalities (see J. St. Joking, Thinking in the Box: "Writing" in the Age of Gravity). 

PAPER #1: "Piles upon Piles: Stacking Papers in Late Postmodern Offices" [R. U. Sure, West Moon Crater University]

I argue that Desks were uniquely productive spaces for Academic ritual subject-formation, involving as they did myriad opportunities for the creative disposition of materio-textual goods.  Drawing on the recent theoretical interventions of W. Ayout There (How to Do Things with Material Texts) and Paul Eesestop (The Paper Men), I demonstrate the links between paper arrangement and recently-discovered ritual incantations ("Do the assigned reading!" "Study for the exam!") that hint at the tensions between the liturgical aspects of Academic spiritual life and more spontaneous modes of self-expression.  In particular, I show that we must pay careful attention to this Desk's manipulation of vertical as well as horizontal space, especially the deliberate balancing of high and low stacks. 

PAPER #2: "'I'm so blue': Parsing Bluebook Culture" [Knott Reely, Intergalactic Jupiter University--Eye Branch]

This paper calls into question previous theories about the nature of Bluebooks, which have been found repeatedly in Academic Offices.  According to the Null-Belowzero Hypothesis, first adumbrated in How Blue Was My Valet and Other Academic Mysteries, Bluebooks were ritual offerings from Students to Academics, possibly sacrifices intended to facilitate good luck.  More recently, Goode Idea has argued that Bluebooks were Student intellectual autobiographies, collected by Academics as testimonials to the power of their teaching.  I, however, show that current advances in supramodern materio-textual studies conclusively demonstrate that the "writing" found in Bluebooks was an exercise in spiritual discipline required of Students by all Academics.  By "writing," Students dynamically reconstituted their frequently-oppositional subjectivities in the more complex, yet possibly more hegemonic literary structures associated with Academic thought-production, and therefore elevated themselves to a spiritual plane now commonly associated with Type Three energy beings.  Academics therefore kept such Bluebooks on hand as potent signifiers of Student transcendence. 

PAPER #3: Booking It: A New Theory of Assigned Reading [Lou Minous, graduate student, Halley's University]

Is there any concept so mysterious to the supramodern mind as "assigned reading"? In our post-pedagogical and post-textual era, the function of "assigned reading" seems beyond baffling.  Why would anyone undertake such an activity? What spiritual purpose might it serve? Building on the recent studies of the late O. H. Deere (e.g., Do It Or Else! Why the Ancient Ones Believe in Rules), I use the presence of Books on this Desk to investigate the performative aspects of ritual reading in Late Postmodern Academic culture, emphasizing the transformative potentialities of reading for both Student and Academic practitioners.  Paradoxically, archival research on newly-discovered caches of electronic communications suggests that "assigned reading" may have had its most powerful effect on Academic spiritual development when Students did not do it.  It is my contention that the various testimonials to unread "assigned reading" left by Academics, some of which achieve a remarkable rhetorical force and vitality unequalled in other fields of Academic prose, demonstrate that meditating on this phenomenon led Academics to formulate new modes of Being and, perhaps, Higher Thought. 

 

 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Gail Godwin, Flora (Bloomsbury, 2013).  Tensions between a child and her guardian in a suspiciously Gothic household, ca. WWII.  (BOMC)
• Adelene Buckland, Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago, 2013).  The nineteenth-century's most controversial science and its effect on literary temporality and spatiality.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Kentucky, 1999).  International networks (Anglo-American, Continental, etc.) and the shaping of feminist discourse.  (eBay)
• Sheridan Gilley, ed., Victorian Churches and Churchmen: Essays Presented to Vincent Alan McClelland (Boydell, 2005).  Festschrift for leading scholar of British Catholicism, primarily focusing on Catholic issues (not surprisingly) but also Methodism, Tractarianism, etc.  (Amazon [secondhand])

Finalizing

One of the more logical things to do while giving one final exam is to grade another final exam.  Efficiency, use of time, and all that.  This proceeding does, however, have certain dangers.  The instructor must refrain from shaking her fist at the heavens, grimacing, laughing, and/or any other overt expressions of disapproval.  It is also advisable to be what you could call professional.  During one final exam  of my innocent undergraduate years, I found myself watching the instructor while I briefly rested my overworked right hand.  A student had finished up early, so he took the exam, flipped it open, and started marking it.  After the first couple of pages, he stopped marking it, flipped all the way to the end to see if the student had finished, and then wrote a grade inside the bluebook cover.  (Bear in mind that I was still just resting my hand; he wasn't exactly devoting hours to the exercise, or even minutes.)  At that moment, it occurred to me that I could spend the rest of the exam expounding on Star Trek: The Next Generation instead of poetry, and still get a good grade.  I didn't, but it was tempting. 

Dodger

In an afterword, Terry Pratchett describes Dodger, his good-natured reworking of Oliver Twist and--despite the title--Great Expectations as "historical fantasy" (359), and certainly the avid Victorianists amongst my readers would be well-advised to relax any expectations they possess for historical accuracy.  There's no other way to explain how Dickens, Disraeli, Angela Burdett-Coutts, Joseph Bazalgette, Henry Mayhew, Sir Robert Peel, John Tenniel, Queen Victoria, and others I'm no doubt forgetting wind up rubbing shoulders in reasonably convivial fashion.  (Obviously, some of these people--e.g., Dickens and Burdett-Coutts--were well-acquainted; others, not so much, and not all at the same time.)  The anachronism extends to the literary references, which is why alert readers will spot references not only to Oliver! (as one might expect), but also Shakespeare and James Joyce's "The Dead" (as one might not).  Moreover, readers conditioned by, say, Louis Bayard (Mr. Timothy) or Peter Carey (Jack Maggs) to expect Dickens Revisited to be Dickens Darkened should also put their preconceptions aside: despite the requisite neo-Victorian visits to slums and sewers, this is by and large an upbeat concoction. 

Pratchett's "Dodger" (no Artful) is a tosher, someone who trawls the sewers looking for money, jewelry, and other goodies, whilst avoiding the less...pleasant...objects one might expect to find in a sewer.  Of course, as he admits, he has also been known to do the odd robbery from time to time, but that's just because "he was good at finding things" (15).  Despite predating Sherlock Holmes, he has a remarkably Sherlockian talent for reading people, and, although possessing a somewhat lax moral code, he instinctively protects the weak (women, children, the elderly) against the strong; he even works up sympathy for (a chronologically misplaced) Sweeney Todd, suffering from severe trauma, with whom he has a close, er, shave.  In other words, our Dodger is a bit of a diamond in the rough.  He rooms with the appropriately wise Solomon Cohen, Pratchett's answer to Fagin, a Swiss Army Knife of a Jewish character who speaks just about every language known to man (well, except Welsh--you can't expect too much), is a skilled metalworker and locksmith, has been known to hobnob with royalty, is up on the latest in culture and clothing, is a gifted financier, and has spent his entire life on the run from antisemitic persecution in one way or another.  Oh, and had a mysterious chum named Karl, wild hair, interested in the proletariat...   Whew.  Despite being an inverted Fagin, Solomon is actually a far more chipper rendition of Benjamin Disraeli's Sidonia, although Dizzy himself does not fare particularly well at Pratchett's hands.   Last but not least, there's the object of Dodger's growing devotion, a young lady known only as "Simplicity" (she changes her name later), a mysterious escapee from a terrifying marriage with an equally mysterious German nobleman.  Far from being a standard Dickensian angel, either in or out of the house, let alone a "damsel in distress" (87), Simplicity can hold her own in a fistfight and has a decided mind of her own. 

At one point, Simplicity comments that "I had thought I was in a fairy tale when I first met my husband" (162), and at first glance, the novel appears committed to undermining fairy-tale logic.  Simplicity, as I said, is hardly a passive Disney princess (or any other sort), and Pratchett doesn't stint on the more lurid sense of early-Victorian poverty and sexuality.  But, as the stereotypically plump cook jokes, it's a shock that Dodger hasn't been named "Lord Mayor" (79), like Dick Whittington, and his rags-to-sort-of-riches transformation combines Oliver Twist's (re)turn to genteel respectability (well, sort of) with a far less conflicted variant of Pip's transformation into a gentleman.  "Seem to be a hero, seem to be a clever young man, seem to be trustworthy" (194), Dodger thinks to himself, and this seeming eventually turns into being.   In that sense, Solomon is as much benevolent Magwitch as he is sanctified Fagin, his primary gift to Dodger being not money (although he certainly helps Dodger invest it) but the recognition that he might, after all, have a "soul" (42).  The quasi-magic of the orphaned and impoverished Dodger's upward rise, in which he can best any opponent, call up yet another of Solomon's astonishing tricks, and get the (wife of German royalty!) girl in the end, remains very much in the realm of fairy-tale heroics.  Which is to say that the novel does not, after all, disown Oliver Twist, although it certainly swaps out its annoying protagonist for someone considerably more engaging. (The novel's conclusion, though it lands Dodger in France, is perhaps more Kipling's Kim than it is anything by Dickens, though.)

Even though Pratchett doesn't hold back on the muck, as I've said, Dodger offers up a modest celebration of England and Englishness.  Solomon quips that "it seems to me that in the pinch most governments settle for shooting their people, but in England they have to ask permission first," and, more seriously, "people don't mind much what you're doing as long as you're not making too much noise" (118); Simplicity reminds Disraeli and Dickens that "My mother [...] said that in England everybody is free" (163).  Despite the potential irony in Simplicity's remark, the novel really does gently celebrate the idea of England as a safe haven for those endangered abroad, even though it also notes the prejudice, the brutality (Dodger's initial encounter with Solomon involved rescuing him from a beating), and the corruption.  Everyone's a Dodger, as Dodger notes more than once.   But they're Dodgers in a nation where, perhaps, a tosher can become a gentleman, and a gentleman with a soul, at that.  

 

For people who do enjoy using books for weight-lifting

The print version of Robert Elsmere will be out at the end of this month.  Only 670 pages!