The Little Professor

Scattered Musings

• On the academic freedom front, this and this do not appear to be compatible with this. 
• After reading John Scalzi's post on copy-editing, I felt a moment of nostalgia for my job at Modern Philology (which, incidentally, inspired one of my earliest posts here).  I must say that electronic proofs have been one of the publishing industry's great innovations.  Back in the good old days (the 1990s) when all copyeditors fought their way through snow and ice to get to work (at least, if they were working for the University of Chicago Press), a menace of unimaginable proportions stalked the earth.  That menace, my friends, was called ink.  If an author dared to use pen instead of pencil on the manuscript/proof, the U of C Press' typesetters would refuse to work with the result.  Needless to say, we stamped every outgoing MS with DO NOT USE INK in bold red lettering; needless to say, some people interpreted DO NOT USE INK as DO NOT USE INK IF YOU ARE AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR or DO NOT USE INK IF YOU ARE NOT AN ENDOWED CHAIR or some such thing.  For such creative interpreters, whiteout (and grumbling) usually sufficed.  Alas, whiteout could do nothing for the Man with the Red Pen.  The Man with the Red Pen did not like our corrections; in fact, he loathed them.  And so he returned his manuscript covered in STETs and scribbles, in such a way as to obscure chunks of the original text--in red ink.  Once I recovered from my very Victorian swoon, I passed the bloodied manuscript to one of the senior editors, who proceeded to eject the Man with the Red Pen from that quarter's issue.
• Fame! Fortune! Bestsellerdom! (Translation: my book has finally made it into 100 libraries in WorldCat.  Just flying off the shelves, eh? Then again, it does cost $84.95.) 
• In an episode of Law & Order from last season, Joe Fontana earned the love and admiration of English professors everywhere when he accompanied an arrest with a grammar lesson ("'Who'? Whom!")  Of course, those same English professors can now point out that he doesn't know what begging the question means.  (Being a pedantic academic can interfere with your enjoyment of pop culture in the most bizarre ways.) 
• 3200+ books and counting at Library Thing.
• I could be wrong, but Scott seems to find Lacan somehow...what's the word...unimpressive.
• New Kid on the Hallway  has stumbled across a fine typo. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Emma Leslie, Margarethe: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (Phillips & Hunt; Hitchcock & Walden, 1879).  A Reformation tale; one of Leslie's rarest novels. (Of course, in the world of Victorian popular religious fiction, "rare" doesn't equal "valuable"--which is why I picked up this copy for $6.99...)
• Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West (Vintage, 1992).  Seeking Indian scalps in the 1850s, with considerable blood involved.
• Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (Knopf, 2005).  Man finds cash from a botched drug deal, runs.
• Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black: A Novel (Henry Holt, 2005).  Novel set in the milieu of contemporary spiritualism. 

Sunday School

[We're discussing William Blake's "The Lamb."]

ME: Blake's poem offers a series of questions and answers.  In fact, there's a technical term for what the child is doing...

[The students remain silent]

...some of you probably did this in Sunday School...

[The students look puzzled]

...c'mon, folks, this is a Jew up here asking you this question! There's got to be a Christian in the room somewhere.

[The students crack up]

[Yours truly, writing on the board] C-A-T-E-C-H-I-S-M.

["Ohhs" of recognition from the students]

The prostitute's progress

Prostitutes and female criminals abound in the last few years' crop of neo-Victorian novels, including such popular successes as Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, Sheri Holman's The Dress Lodger, and Sarah Waters' Fingersmith.  But the figure of the upwardly mobile courtesan or crook--the sex worker as prudent entrepreneur--owes much more to Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders or Roxana than to any Victorian text.  Certainly, the sheer gumption of most neo-Victorian prostitutes has little to do with the demoralized Victorian literary variety [1].  Despite the rather breathless testimonials in the back matter ("masterpiece"), Linda Holeman's The Linnet Bird does not constitute a brilliant addition to this batch of neo-Victorian novels: the plot dawdles in the middle and goes into hyperdrive at the end; the protagonist, Linnet Gow, veers suspiciously towards the Mary-Sueish; and, no matter their age, sex, education, or social standing, every character "speaks" in the same, slightly stilted turns of (often cliched) phrase.  From an academic's point of view, however, The Linnet Bird offers an unintentional window onto the current state of "popular" thought about nineteenth-century culture--in particular, as women experienced it.

Strictly speaking, most of the novel takes place from the late 1820s to the mid-1830s, although contemporary historical events do not impinge on the younger Linny Gow's consciousness.  Indeed, Linny's childhood and adolescence set some sort of new record for imaginary awfulness.  Her mother dies when Linny is just a child, leaving her in the brutal care of her stepfather, Ram Munt.  (Luckily, before she departs this earth, mom sees to it that Linny learns to read.)  Ram, in need of cash, begins selling the prepubescent Linny's favors to any male customer within reach (cue W. T. Stead on the white slave trade)--until, one night, he sends her to an elderly man in the last throes of syphillis (cue Victorian veneral disease).  After a struggle in which she manages to kill him before he kills her, she is dumped in a river--along with a dead male prostitute--and left to die.  Obviously, as there's still a few hundred pages worth of novel left, she doesn't.  Instead, horribly scarred, Linny goes to work as a full-time prostitute (cue Victorian prostitution), hoping--in good, business-like form--to make enough money to emigrate to America.  This plan doesn't succeed.  Instead, Linny finds herself taken in by a doctor's "genteel" son and his insanely devout mother, and they set her on the path to a new life as a "proper" woman.  But, when Linny ships out to India with another young woman, things don't quite go as planned...

For the professional Victorianist, this novel reads like a malformed melange of contemporary scholarship on nineteenth-century Britain (and British India) and historical romance conventions.  On the one hand, Linny's narrative apparently--I use that word advisedly--offers a crude feminist critique of nineteenth-century culture.  All of the novel's Englishwomen stifle under the weight of social etiquette; the few who dare to resist are eventually broken by marital strife, racial prejudice, or sheer boredom.  Meanwhile, just about every man unthinkingly rejoices in his financial, physical, professional, and (of course) sexual power.  (I'll discuss the exceptions to this rule in just a moment.)  On the other hand, Linny offers an equally crude interpretation of British imperialism.  Herself oppressed on account of her sex and past, Linny achieves cross-class and cross-racial solidarity with the Indians and Pashtuns--with, one must say, surprisingly little effort.  She learns Hindi, befriends her ayah and the cook, attempts to save a Pashtun chief from a rape charge, and is nurtured by an Indian midwife. 

In an odd twist of psychological development, the novel somehow translates Linny's years of sexual abuse into moral "liberation."  There's something rather disquieting about this incarnation of standpoint theory: our protagonist (who, mind you, is in her teens for most of this novel) survives the loss of her mother, rape, attempted murder, a miscarriage, and a violently abusive husband--but, at least, she comes out of these experiences with remarkably modern attitudes to middle-class mores and racial politics.   Understandably, she lacks much in the way of sexual response, but even that psychological scar furthers her literal and figurative mobility--until, that is, she runs into the wrong man.

It would be nice to write off the novel's attitude to male sexuality as the product of Linny's POV, but there's no internal evidence that would allow us to do so.  Holeman almost always represents English male sexuality as predatory, diseased, and violent.  She lays things on especially thick when it comes to Linny's husband, Somers Ingram: he's a homosexual (gasp!) who preys on teenage boys, beats Linny repeatedly, brutalizes her in their only act of sexual intercourse, and eventually subsides into a hulking, malaria-ridden wreck.  (Somers would be more gothic if less grotesque.)  We eventually discover that Somers was himself a badly abused child, yet there is no indication that the reader is meant to sympathize with him; at "best," he becomes the extreme product of a patriarchal system based on the exploitation of the weak.  Significantly, the two sympathetic Englishmen, Shaker and Charles Snow, are themselves marginal figures: Shaker's nickname derives from a nervous palsy that wrecks both his financial and his professional standing, while Snow loses his social position once his superiors discover that he is actually half-Indian.  When Linny has sex with Shaker, she deflowers him. 

Not surprisingly, the Indian and Pashtun characters are idealized foils to the novel's wrecked Englishmen and -women.  Like most novels on Anglo-Indian themes, The Linnet Bird makes much of both India's "color" and its poverty, but the Indian characters exist in order to admire Linny's free-thinking attitudes to race.  Malti, her ayah and, in Linny's mind, equal--"And so we lay in the darkness, a small Indian flower and a small British bird" (243)--adores Linny passionately; the cook allows her to help him prepare food; the servants speak English to her (a skill, we're told, they normally conceal) and help her learn Hindi; and so on.  While Linny is perfectly self-conscious about her social performances, both she and the novel seem unaware that her new-and-improved morality is itself presented as a matter for subaltern applause. 

There's something unintentionally comical, then, about Linny's salvation, which comes in the shape of a handsome Pashtun chieftain (really) on a magnificent stallion (no, really).  In one of the novel's few attempts to engage with a key trope of Raj fiction--namely, the rape accusation--Linny tries to exonerate the chieftain in question, Daoud, from charges brought by a young woman trying to cover up evidence of her own sexual shenanigans. [2]   (In some ways, it's even worse than that, since the soldiers pick Daoud almost at random.)  In the pastoral elysium temporarily occupied by Daoud and some of his tribesmen, as well as some herders, Linny finds temporary relief from the shackles of her past: "Here, in this Kashmir camp, I could be who I actually was.  Nobody cared what had been done to me, and what I had done, least of all Daoud.  I felt myself opening, unlocking, the hinges rusted and giving way with a tearing sound like wings of birds as they startle into flight" (333).  In other words, Kashmir offers Linny her first taste of authenticity--and, along with it, sexual desire.  Not surprisingly, the exotic Daoud not only becomes Linny's true love, but also fathers her child, making this ultimately truncated relationship both figuratively and literally fruitful. 

Linny may be redeemed, but some readers may feel that she has an odd way of showing it, since, in the novel's inversion of a Victorian trope--false accusations of madness--she murders her husband in order to escape being consigned to an insane asylum.  This, apparently, shows her pluck.   After buying off the doctor (apparently, English doctors, unlike Indian midwives, have no ethics), Linny returns to England and forms a non-traditional extended family with her son, Shaker, and Shaker's wife.  Not only does this family challenge Victorian social norms, but also it promises to somehow "heal" English culture through Indian medicine (Shaker becomes a homeopath; Linny publishes a book on plants) and, of course, Linny's son. 

Some readers may accuse me of sounding rather grumpy, and they're right: I finished this novel feeling distinctly disgruntled.  The novel repeatedly accuses the English of lacking basic human sympathies for the "Other," whether poor or Indian, but itself lacks anything resembling nuance or, indeed, sympathy.  Indian women are Good, as are most Indian men.   Nearly all English men are Bad, unless they are New Men, in which case they are Good.  Englishwomen should be Good, but English society turns them Bad (or pathetic, in which case they become Good--albeit dead or addicted to drugs).  Holeman does make some attempt to reinvent some familiar Raj or Victorian tropes, but--for this reader at least--the novel collapses under the weight of Linny's self-congratulation. 

 

[1]  For a twist on this theme,  see Wilkie Collins' The New Magdalen, which tracks a "reclaimed" woman's attempt to find a place for herself in British society; ultimately, she marries, but she and her enlightened husband must emigrate.  Cf. Dickens' David Copperfield: the prostitute is "allowed" to get married, but only after she emigrates to Australia (and well away from the other colonists, it seems). 

[ 2] Given the novel's chronology, it only marginally qualifies as Raj fiction.  In the Raj literary tradition, the most famous ruminations on the false rape charge are  E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and Paul Scott's brilliant The Raj Quartet; see also Jenny Sharpe and Nancy Paxton.
 

Banned Books

Ralph Luker wonders how many books we've read on the "100 most frequently challenged" list.  Thirty-one, in my case.  I've put my answers in bold. 

In which one is brought up short

I took a break from listing away at Library Thing, only to discover that Dr. What Now? has been called on the carpet for reading the wrong sort of book.  (I'm not sure that Newman would be entirely pleased.)   Dr. WN?'s trouble began with a receipt, but just think of all the fun our heresy-hunters--secular and religious--could have with LT's public libraries! It lends a new horror to Googling.  I can just imagine the Ivan Tribbles of academia perusing a junior faculty member's library, sniffing out all the naughty bits--anything from a bad edition of a classic novel to a good edition of a "scandalous" one (however we define that).  Ugh.  In the meantime, let's send our best wishes to Dr. WN? and her colleagues.   

Fiat lux; or, mysterious student phenomenon, #492

Over the past several years, I have become slowly accustomed to finding my undergraduates sitting patiently in the dark, the light switches carefully untouched.  Accustomed, but still baffled.  Is there some unwritten rule requiring faculty to turn on the lights? Perhaps this behavior is an unspoken request for, ah, enlightenment. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Clare Dudman, One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead (Viking, 2004).  Historical novel that draws on the life of Albert Wegener and his theory of continental drift. 
• ---. 98 Reasons for Being (Viking, 2005).  Historical novel set in a nineteenth-century insane asylum.
• Janice Holmes and Diane Urquhart, eds., Coming into the Light: The Work, Politics, and Religion of Women in Ulster, 1840-1940 (Dufour, 1995).  Collection of essays on Ulster women's history.
• W. E. Sellon, An Essay on Sisterhoods in the English Church (Joseph Masters, 1849).  A favorable account.  (Despite the topic, Sellon doesn't seem to be related to Priscilla Lydia Sellon.)
• "Britannicus," A Series of Letters, Addressed to a Friend, Upon the Roman Catholic Question (F. C. and J. Rivington, 1820).  Critique of the Whig position on toleration and Catholicism.

Out and about

One of Dan Green's recent posts points to some of the terminological slippages involved in discussing "context."  We might as well begin by talking about "about," which may be one of the world's most dangerous prepositions.  Most novels, poems, or plays are not, strictly speaking, "about" any one thing in particular; even relatively formulaic examples of genre television, like Law and Order or Cold Case, often have storylines that resist being reduced to a simple "about." (Was L&O's season premiere about a kidnapping? Ethics? Ongoing relationships between various characters?) If reducing a work's form and content to an "about" is dangerous enough, then making that work be "about" some historical event is even more so.  Even works that truly aspire to the status of "political allegory," as Green puts it, have qualities that escape any critic's attempt to turn the work into an exercise in one-to-one correspondences; Mrs. Jane West's The Loyalists (Puritans = Jacobins) or Anna Eliza Bray's The Protestant (sixteenth century Catholics = nineteenth century Catholics), for example, still make perfectly logical sense outside of their original context.  Nevertheless, it is also the case that neither book can be said to have much interest beyond its participation in contemporary political debates--early nineteenth century radicalism, on the one hand, and the "Catholic Question," on the other. 

At the same time, we need to be careful about throwing terms like "allegory" around.  It's rather difficult, to say the least, for an author to avoid invoking the events, attitudes, and antagonisms of his or her own time, whether or not s/he takes contemporary culture as explicit subject matter.  But allegory has its own workings, and those workings rarely describe texts that incorporate the author's cultural environment or personal beliefs.  (If The Lord of the Rings is an allegory, as some people desperately want to believe, it's an utterly dreadful one.  Tolkien knew better.)  More seriously, the turn to "allegory" often suggests that the critic or teacher wants to flatten the work into a sort of interpretive pancake: characteristic X means event Y.  And that takes us back to the trouble with "about."

UPDATE: Last paragraph deleted--looking back at it, I felt like I was splitting hairs (or, at the very least, not conveying my meaning very clearly).  I'll return to this topic in a bit, though. 

Further notes on Library Thing

1.  1600 books down! Only, er, 3400+ more to go.
2.  The ISBN search, while annoying from a typist's perspective, is nevertheless far more efficient than the title/name searches.  This is especially the case when entering older editions of Penguin Classics or Oxford World's Classics.
3.  Somewhat oddly, I'm finding Amazon's catalogue to be marginally more useful than LOC; it's much more likely to have that random book in Everyman's Library. 
4.  There are some strange returns in the searches, including mismatched titles, authors, and ISBNs (e.g., Robert Peters and Peter Allan Dale "authoring" each other's books).