The Little Professor

The Painted Veil

John Curran's and Ron Nyswaner's adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil (2006) is, if you have read the novel, a decidedly bizarre beast.  At a very superficial level, the film remains faithful to most of the novel's plot points, down to recycling some of the dialog.  But taken as a whole, this overtly postcolonial film determinedly resists Maugham's colonial original.  The Painted Veil (1925), narrated in the third person but entirely from Kitty Fane's POV, is a rather uneasy novel: the closest thing to "romance" proves to be a sham; there is no reconciliation between Kitty and her husband; and Kitty's quasi-feminist feelings at the end have to be projected into an uncertain future.  China, meanwhile, remains quite Other, a possible source of exotic enlightenment that is quite explicitly rejected in the novel's conclusion.  Curran's and Nyswaner's version, however, yokes a conventional tragic romance to an attack on British imperialism.  The end result undermines Maugham's social satire and historicizes the novel--leaving us, as I said, with much of the surface plot but little of its actual workings.

In the novel, Maugham tacks Kitty's psychological development to her awareness of Walter's sensibilities.  What he does not do, however, is suggest that the two can overcome their intellectual and emotional differences.  On his deathbed, Walter does not answer Kitty's pleas for forgiveness; his dying words, the final line from Oliver Goldsmith's "An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog," recast her adultery, his response, and the ultimate result as low comedy (191).  Moreover, after Walter's death, Kitty has to admit to herself that her mourning is a matter of keeping up appearances, because "after all she didn't love him, she had never loved him" (208).   In fact, Kitty's existence throughout remains entirely loveless, whether with Walter, the nuns, Charlie Townsend, her mother, or her father (whose love she wants to earn at the end).  Her social world runs on politics, not passion. By contrast, in the film, Kitty and Walter slowly find common ground after she begins working in the convent, developing a "true" marriage based in mutual respect and recognition.  After a semi-jocular discussion of why the relationship has failed in the first place (repurposing dialog that features in the novel to an entirely different end) the two spend a semi-debauched evening that ends with a glimpse of their friend Waddington in bed with his Chinese mistress.  That moment of unashamed desire, which rewrites Walter's clandestine discovery that his wife is in bed with Charlie Townsend, sets off Walter's and Kitty's reconciliation.  He even manages to accept the fact that her impending child is quite possibly not his (a subject about which the novel's Walter was nowhere near so sanguine).   Alas, after many shots of the happy couple, Walter dies of cholera, he begging forgiveness of her and vice-versa.  Maugham's pessimistic vision of a mismatched marriage thus gives way to the filmmaker's optimism: love will out, if only it can find a way! Indeed, the film's ending, with Kitty living happily at home with her father, devoted to her little Walter, sentimentalizes the novel's considerably more ambivalent vision of Kitty's likely future.  Philip French's complaint that "for no good reason, Kitty's child has been changed from a daughter to a son," aside from making a factual error (there is only an imagined daughter), misses the point: in the novel, which jettisons romance, Kitty wants to raise a daughter who will not need to marry; in the film, which endorses it, Kitty celebrates her marriage through her son. 

In place of the novel's quasi-feminist social satire, the film offers a critique of empire.  Near the beginning, Charlie Townsend pretends to translate a Chinese opera for Kitty, the better to seduce her; as Charlie cheerfully admits when Kitty calls him on it, he doesn't know a single word of Chinese.  Some time later, the film reverses this scene during Walter's first encounter with Colonel Yu: believing that the Colonel cannot speak English, Walter fumbles along, managing ultimately to get out a few mangled words of Chinese, before the Colonel coolly reveals that he speaks English fluently, thank you very much.  Charlie's ignorance derives from the arrogance of power, but the Colonel's power play reveals that such arrogance masks a far more dangerous weakness.  (Kitty and Walter spend much of the film muddling along, unable to make even the most basic conversation with the Chinese townspeople.)  As it turns out, Walter experiences a political awakening on top of the emotional one he shares with Kitty.  Arguing with the Colonel, Walter exclaims that he has come with a "microscope," not with a gun--to which the Colonel quietly responds that, nevertheless, there are British guns behind him.  The film condemns not Walter's necessary medical interventions, which save lives, but the tainted circumstances under which those interventions occur.  But the film also genders political awareness as masculine: when Walter tells Kitty that the convent doesn't just take in orphans, but actually bribes parents in order to increase the potential supply of converts, she refuses to believe that it makes any difference. 

For all that the film wears its postcolonial politics on its sleeve,  there are some uncomfortable moments.  To begin with, Waddington's mistress, who in the novel appears to embody some kind of ancient, mysterious wisdom (stereotype #1), here becomes the essence of guiltless sex (stereotype #2).   And there's a chase sequence that verges on the imperial rape trope:  Kitty is chased and cornered by a group of outraged young men, then finally saved not by Walter, but by the Chinese soldier assigned to protect her.   All of this seems to be in keeping with, once again, the film's much more conventional understanding of how women function in something that ought to be a romance narrative. 

Epic fail

I'm not at all sure how I feel about this story (ht:CoHE).  On the one hand, administrators should not be pressuring faculty to pass students who are not doing acceptable work.  It's quite possible that the campus is admitting students so unprepared as to be unable to do even the most basic calculations.    On the other hand, "seven classes in which 83 to 95 percent of his students got a D or F" rings all sorts of alarm bells.  I take it as a matter of course that some of my students will get Ds or Fs--although Fs are usually the students who stop coming to class without officially dropping it--but if 95% of them flunked an exam, let alone a class, I'd be asking myself what I did wrong.     Of course, commas and calculations are not quite the same thing. 

Winterwood

The historical novel owes much to the Gothic, and frequently shades into it--as is the case with Patrick McCabe's terse and, quite frankly, often repulsive Winterwood.  (Although there's almost nothing graphic in the novel--the nastiest stuff all occurs off-page--the narrator is nasty enough that some readers may wish to spend their time in different company.) Covering approximately a quarter-century of modern Irish history, Winterwood uses its Gothic trappings to turn the relationship between past and present into a singularly claustrophobic nightmare of insane nostalgia, misogyny, perversion, and all-around general ugliness.

Winterwood's first-person narrator, Redmond Hatch (among other names), is an even less pleasant version of Patrick McGrath's shattered speakers.    The very unreliable Redmond narrates in fits and starts, frequently trying to repress the signs of his own physical and linguistic violence; sometimes he intentionally or unintentionally fills in the gaps, while at other times the reader is left to draw  her own conclusions.  Redmond, we learn, comes from a long line of deeply-inbred "mountainers," who lived near a small town called Slievenagheeha.  His mental collapse begins after he returns there for the first time, where he encounters a fiddler and raconteur named Ned Strange--who, it transpires, claims to know a great deal about Redmond's late father, his late Uncle Florian, and Redmond itself.  Redmond's mother died mysteriously, either in church (official version) or beaten to death by Redmond's father (Ned's version); as we eventually discover, Redmond was shipped off to a convent orphanage, where the nuns, enchanted by Uncle Florian's fiddle-playing, fail (or refuse) to realize that Florian is a sexual predator.  While Redmond's celebratory write-ups of Ned Strange make him into a local celebrity, they also give him more access to children.  Unfortunately, Ned is also a sexual predator, who eventually commits suicide in prison after raping and murdering a small boy.  And Redmond, who has his own serious problems with women, finds himself haunted by Ned Strange...

As McCabe structures his narrative, "old" Ireland is effectively undead.  Ned Strange grows popular with the locals precisely because they think of him as an anachronistic curiosity, a remnant of an idealized, lost tradition: "I interviewed a few of the mothers and they told me that as far as they were concerned having characters like Ned in the community was a great way for their children to find out about an Ireland that was fast disappearing--if not, indeed, practically vanished already" (12).  By turning the often-vicious Ned into a "character," whose oddities are just the pleasurable eccentricities of a pre-modern age, the Slievenagheeha community mistake ahistorical depravity for historical difference.   As we learn much later, this confidence trick  repeats that of Redmond's Uncle Florian, who manages to take his young nephew away for "dance" sessions under the enchanted nuns' very noses.  Florian in fact represents his and Redmond's encounters as folk training of sorts (190).  Enthralled by the spectre of "authentic" Irishness, mothers and mother-figures don't just allow their children to be victimized, but inadvertently encourage it.   It's not history per se that's the trap, but a particular fantasy of history, associated with music, nostalgia, pleasure, and, above all, the "traditional," all purportedly bound up in rural, pre-modern men.

As you might guess from the above, both Redmond and the other male characters have problems with women generally and female sexuality specifically.  Although Redmond denies it when it's brought to his attention, all of the men subscribe, consciously or otherwise, to the age-old virgin vs. whore dichotomy: Redmond idealizes his two wives as (figurative) virgins until they reveal themselves as whores by committing adultery, which twice repeats Ned Strange's even more extreme relationship to his lost beloved, Annemarie, who may or may not have committed adultery with a wealthy man returned from America, John Olson.  Both Redmond's and Ned's rhetoric of passionate, all-consuming adoration--Redmond's "flawless union" with Catherine, for example (20)--echo and reinforce Slievenagheeha's similarly pathological fantasies about Ned and Florian.  And the result of such fantasies, once again, is brutal violence, this time meted out against the women themselves.  While Ned's story about punishing Annemarie proves fluid, encompassing everything from drowning to nothing at all, Redmond first tries to replace his adored Catherine with another "C," Casey, then winds up murdering both Catherine and his equally adored daughter, Imogen.  This murder repeats and renders certain the murder/death by natural causes of his own mother and the maybe-murder of Annemarie.  Redmond murders in order to truly possess the women he loves and desires, making them permanent virgins, so to speak; burying them in "Winterwood," so named by Imogen, is his way of freezing time.  (There's something rather "Porphyria's Lover"-esque about this.)

If nearly all of the women find themselves shoehorned into one stereotype or the other, the men are even more interchangeable.  Ned Strange shares his fiddle-playing and sexual perversions with Florian, his smoking and drinking habits with Redmond's father, and his attitude to women with Redmond.   Moreover, all four men actually look alike:  "I swear I was the image of Uncle Florian and Ned.  And, of course, of my own deceased father.  You wouldn't have been able to tell us apart" (195).  Gothic usually  depends on doubling and repetition, but Winterwood extends its doubles to triples and quadruples.   In fact, Ned Strange points out to Redmond that "Hatch" derives from ait, meaning both "place" and, more worrisomely, "strange" (129).  Redmond, determinedly out of place as he wanders from one urban area to another, is permanently estranged--but not so estranged as to be able to escape his destiny, which is merely to repeat, yet again, the deadly sexual dynamics of the mountain.  In an ironic twist, it may be a blessing that Redmond, like Ned, never manages to sire his hoped-for son.

The cumulative effect of such repetitions is to call historical change into question.  On the one hand, because the novel so resolutely associates a certain idea of "Irishness" with Gothic decay, it becomes impossible to endorse the only past on view.  There is no actual transition between "traditionalism and modernism" (to quote the dj), because the few remnants of traditionalism, like the ceilidh, have been modernized.  On the other hand, the novel represents modernity in terms of a mainly American cultural imperialism, albeit one that--Bill Clinton aside--resides in the silliest of pop culture forms: My Little Pony (!), Sweet Valley High, Care Bears, and, of course (?), Dallas.  Even though Redmond, musing on both George W. Bush and the end of "the war in the North of Ireland," concludes (not very insightfully) that "the world is in a state of flux" (139), it is never quite clear where anything resembling an Irish national identity might fit into the mix.  Redmond's documentary, which is simultaneously the crowning glory of his journalistic career and the cause of his final breakdown, embodies this problem: he juxtaposes the "vibrant new valley," overloaded with new, internationally-based businesses and residential areas, to the "evanescent, primordial Eden" of the lost valley, which nevertheless also contains the "tumble-down stone cottage" in which Florian molested Redmond (207).  Modernization, which renders Ireland's landscape simultaneously unrecognizable and cosmopolitan, also makes that same landscape "vibrant," while the lost paradise turns out to contain a particularly ugly snake.

Is there a canonical text in this book?

Dr. Crazy comments on "the necessity of framing one's work as a scholar in ways that will be marketable and in ways that fit into the demands of the economy of the academy":

Sometimes that necessity is at odds with our politics (for example: while it is a valuable feminist project to write on less canonical women authors, most departments aren't looking to hire a specialist in Esoteric Woman Writer, nor are most journals looking to publish articles on her) or at odds with our beliefs about what "scholarship" should be (that it should somehow be "pure" and outside of what is often an oppressive market-driven structure). The trick, I think, is finding a way to negotiate the competing demands of our personal passions and interests and of the market that determines the material resources that we have to pursue those passions and interests. And that is a really difficult set of competing demands to negotiate. And there's no one-size-fits-all model for doing it.

One of the difficulties of working on a project involving Super-Duper-Ultra-Non-Canonical texts is attempting to explain why we should know something about them specifically.  For example, a helpful older article about the font of W. M. Thackeray's History of Henry Esmond, James C. Simmons' "Thackeray's Esmond and Anne Manning's 'Spurious Antiques,'" uses Manning and the reception of her work to explain why Thackeray might have wanted to use an older typeface for his first edition [1].  But while this method indicates that Manning (along with Hannah Rathbone) first collaborated with her publisher to utilize antiquarian typefaces for historical fiction, it eventually displaces her in favor of Thackeray.  That is, Manning's fiction turns into Esmond's historical context; it does not exist as an object of interest or investigation in its own right.  Three decades later, Simmons' article would still be  more publishable in many scholarly niches than, say, a single-author article on E. C. Agnew, who wrote one of the most famous Catholic novels of the nineteenth century. 

This problem multiplies once you enter book territory.  Like Dr. Crazy, I have canonical authors in my dissertation & Book One (in fact, Book One has an additional canonical author) because they made it easier to market both my work and myself to hiring committees, editors, and readers--even though the project's real focus was on the non-canonical work.  Book Two is much more, ah, exciting in this respect, because while the Victorians as a whole were passionately obsessed with the Reformation, and fictionalized it endlessly (sigh...), canonical Victorian novelists quietly avoided it altogether.  Sir Walter Scott wrote a couple of novels set during the Scottish Reformation (yay!), but he isn't a Victorian novelist (boo!).  George Eliot wrote a novel featuring Savonarola (yay?), who, by Victorian standards, qualifies as at least proto-Protestant (yay!), but as of yet, Romola doesn't interface well with any chapters I've planned (boo!).  Perhaps Scott will go in the introduction and Eliot in the conclusion...

[1]  James C. Simmons, "Thackeray's Esmond and Anne Manning's 'Spurious Antiques,'" Victorian Newsletter 42 (1973): 22-24. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (Vintage, 1993).  First volume in McCarthy's Border trilogy.  (Lift Bridge)
• Andrew Foster Altschul, Lady Lazarus (Harcourt, 2008).  Trials and travails of a biographer in search of his subject.  (eBay)
• Jennifer Devere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Duke, 1998).  Constituting "the Victorian" through race and gender.  (eBay; this & the next two books were part of a cheap bulk lot of Duke paperbacks)
• Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke, 1995).  Monstrous bodies in fiction and film.  (eBay)
• Bruce W. Robbins, The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (Duke, 1993).  The narrative functions of servants.  (eBay)
• The Home and Synagogue of the Modern Jew.  Sketches of Modern Jewish Life and Ceremonies (RTS, n.d.).  19th-c. European Judaism from an evangelical Christian perspective. 
• Crawford Gribben and Timothy C. F. Stunt, eds., Prisoners of Hope?: Aspects of Evangelical Millennialism in Britain and Ireland, 1800-1880 (Wipf & Stock/Paternoster, 2007).  Essay collection on the fortunes of various forms of millennialist thinking.  (Amazon)

University of Chicago Grad Students Organize

When I was at the University of Chicago in the early-to-mid 90s, many grad students were more puzzled than anything else by the suggestion that we unionize.  (At the time, most of us were complaining about the lack of teaching opportunities, not the exploitation of TAs.)    Now, however, Graduate Students United (which, apparently, is not quite a union) is campaigning for better teaching stipends and other benefits.  As I've said before, $1500/quarter isn't much more than I earned as a TA in the mid-90s!

I declare a moratorium

Another Jane Eyre?!

Things that cause anxiety, #291

Am I the only academic who becomes anxious when she never sees proof on an article/encyclopedia entry before it goes to press? I understand why some editors choose not to send proofs on to their potentially tardy authors, but still, I'd like to see what's been done to my prose.  (With reason, having had a "Please tell me I didn't write that"--*checks original text*--"I really didn't write that" moment a few years back.) 

They'd None of 'em Be Missed

As most Victorianists and/or Gilbert & Sullivan fans are aware, since very early on in The Mikado's career, the Lord High Executioner's "As Someday It May Happen" (the "little list" song) has not been performed as originally written.  Richard Suart and A. H. Smyth have now edited an entire anthology devoted to the song's many mutations.   On YT, courtesy of the English National Opera, Suart demonstrates some alternate versions  (1 2) and offers some hints about how to revise the song (3); you can also see a D'Oyly Carte version (1992).  (Via Talkin' Broadway.)

Biographers Behaving Badly

Oops. 

I'm trying to think of similar gaffes, although I can't come up with anything precisely identical.  There are plenty of other unfortunate errors that come to mind, like the infamous Oscar Wilde photo-that-wasn't, but they're a different order of problem. 

Stacks

Responding to a review forum devoted to her book, Between Women, Sharon Marcus comments:

...Rather than generalize about Victorian society using fiction alone or only a few kinds of historical documents, in Between Women I draw on prescriptive and descriptive sources, polemic and policy, image and text, fiction and reportage...The sources I use included biographies, memoirs, diaries, letters, popular magazines, children's books, pornographic literature, fashion imagery, debates in the periodical press about marriage and single life for women, anthropological treatises about the history of kinship, and novels by major and minor Victorian writers.  I hope that one effect of my book will be to encourage us to use a wider variety of sources when teaching and thinking about gender and sexuality in both the past and the present.  We continue to rely disproportionately on one or two sources, such as William Acton's essay on prostitution or W. R. Greg's on single women.  Those who cast a wider net still usually focus on only a few types of discourse, such as medical writing and advice literature, which inaccurately suggest that all Victorians considered women asexual, hysterical, or redundant unless married.  By placing prescriptive documents alongside visual and verbal sources designed both to prompt fantasy and register mundane reality, we can develop a more complex picture of women's lives.  [1]

A historian, I suspect, would be startled to discover that this is a different approach to "Victorian society" and "women's lives," although we English professors probably still need such reminders.  Nevertheless, from the point of view of a literary historian who works on Super-Duper-Ultra-Non-Canonical texts, Marcus' comment is worth highlighting, albeit from an alternate angle.  One  of the difficulties of working on SDUNC texts is that the literary field appears, for lack of a better term, "flat."  That is, beyond the distant borders tenanted by, say, G. P. R. James and W. H. Ainsworth, we have a surfeit of novels produced by a wide variety of publishers in multiple forms (newspaper serial, magazine serial, single-volume, triple-decker, etc.), which may or may not have been successful.   These novels may or may not have been noticed in newspaper or magazine reviews--more often not, especially as we travel further beyond those borders.  The usual reference points--the reviews, sometimes the interviews, allusions in other texts--do not necessarily exist.  In my line of work, a novel like Father Clement sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb because it was widely noticed outside the niche of specifically Christian journals and deployed as a cultural referent in what are now canonical texts (e.g., Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life). 

Hence the need, which even other academics occasionally don't understand, to read vast quantities of material before charting the field.   We cannot argue for what's "different" (in terms of language, narrative structures, subject matter, etc.) until we know what's "normal," and vice-versa.  In fact, it's very tempting to simply make Big Generalizations after reading just a few books, on the (dangerous) assumption that ephemeral texts are effectively interchangeable.  A Victorianist raised on a diet of the first- , second- , and even third-ranked novelists may not realize what preconceptions she has about how Victorian fiction works until she approaches entirely non-canonical texts (which, of course, far outnumber their canonical and demi-canonical cousins).  Random example: the literary histories of masculinity undertaken by James Eli Adams and Christopher Lane do not align at all (and I do mean at all) with ideas about masculinity circulating in religious fiction, even at the end of the century.  Non-canonical/demi-canonical works have a rude habit of shoving back at theoretical projects explicitly based on canonical works. 

[1] Sharon Marcus, "Book Review Forum: Response," Victorian Studies 50.1 (Autumn 2007): 51-52. 

How does your garden grow?

I've always felt like a bit of a fraud when teaching Romantic nature poetry, because Nature and I do not have what I would call a cordial relationship.  Owning a house means taking care of the garden and lawn, of course, but my mother is responsible for more of the current garden than I am.  It's not like I want to pave Nature over, or anything, but Spring's arrival always triggers a raft of puzzling discoveries:

1.  Are you there, lawn? It's me, Miriam.  My house's previous occupant worked for the park service,  and he had a thing for trees.  What he didn't have a thing for, it seems, was landscaping.  Ergo, my front and back yard are clotted with Random Trees, which in turn interfere with that one thing necessary for the lawn--namely, sun.  Needless to say, I don't have shade-friendly grass--in fact, in several spots I have no grass, period--and my occasional gardener (by which I mean the one who does this for a living, not Mom the Retired School Administrator) feels skeptical about reseeding under the current landscape conditions. But I can't axe the rare American Chestnuts, and the other trees are so large that I can afford to remove them only one at a time.  To make matters worse, while mowing my weeds lawn a couple of days ago, I discovered Mysterious Ground Cover, which is currently in the process of, ah, covering the ground.   (I'm having the much-sunnier front yard reseeded sometime this summer, though.)

2.  Tiptoe through the tulips.   Last year, I had leaves, but no tulips.  This year, many tulips.  I see that there was also some tulip-related Gardening by Squirrel, although not bizarrely so--e.g., no tulips growing out of the middle of my lawn. 

3.  Death comes for the azaleas.  Going into last winter, I had five living azaleas; now I have one.  "But, officer, I didn't do anything different!" I cried.  Then again, I haven't done in the rhubarb (which I could live without, honestly--I always let one of my neighbors abscond with it), and the holly bushes I planted last summer are, amazingly enough, looking pretty cheerful.  I probably can't take credit for the survival of the hostas, given that, as a friend of mine pointed out, killing hostas is more of a problem than keeping them alive.

4.  Blowing a raspberry.  I've tried to eradicate a badly-located raspberry bush twice now, and the darn thing keeps coming back.  In fact, not only is the bush practically a phoenix, it has mysteriously spread to the back property line, possibly as a result of Gardening by Squirrel, Bird, or Rabbit. 

5.  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Ground Cover.  When the front yard was regraded a few years ago, the new topsoil apparently contained the seeds of some Mysterious Ground Cover (not, incidentally, related to the Mysterious Ground Cover currently threatening my back yard).  This MGC appears to be completely invincible.  Pulling it doesn't work.  Digging it up doesn't work.  Brush killer doesn't work.  With my luck, it's going to demand to have a go at me one of these days.