The Little Professor

Laws of academic calories, Halloween edition

1.  Unfortunately, any chocolate eaten while you wait for trick-or-treaters to arrive does contain calories.
2.  However, chocolate that you bring to class for your students contains zero calories. 
3.  Any leftover chocolate brought into the department after Halloween also contains zero calories.
4.  After serious deliberation, the Academic Noshing Committee has decreed that free donut holes in the campus cafeteria (distributed as a Halloween treat) contain zero calories. 

Eeeeek! Halloween Horrors, 2007 edition

This year, I'm providing links to some of my favorite stories about Things that Go Bump in the Night from the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries:

• E. F. Benson, "The Room in the Tower": vampires, nightmares, and magic portraits.
• Algernon Blackwood, "The Empty House" [PDF]: a man and his aunt go exploring.
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw: is the governess insane, or are there ghosts hanging about?
• M. R. James, "'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'": or, why you should bring a Latin grammar on all your vacations (hint: conjugate). 
• J. S. Le Fanu, "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street": it's not such a good idea to rent houses previously inhabited by hanging judges.
• ---, "Green Tea": and you thought tea was safer than coffee. 
• Mrs. J. H. [Charlotte] Riddell, "The Open Door" [PDF]: the narrator is entertainingly jejeune. 
• Sir Walter Scott, "Wandering Willie's Tale": famous inset narrative from Redgauntlet.
• R. L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: let those atavistic good times roll.
• Oscar Wilde, "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime": Wilde takes on fortune-tellers. 

Going Wilde

Via Andrew Sullivan, an article devoted to Michèle Mendelssohn's recent book on Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and plagiarism.  Mendelssohn's basic point that Wilde committed serial plagiarism will not come as news to any vaguely-alert Victorianist; the more interesting part of her argument derives from her contention that Wilde and James were "obsessed with each other."  Her account of The Picture of Dorian Gray suggests that she sees it less as a critical rewriting of Walter Pater and more of an engagement with James: "'The critic persuades him to go off and have what I think is a gay life with him. The critic's name is Lord Henry and a lot of the things he says are very similar to what Henry James is saying in his literary criticism. Later, Dorian is almost murdered by a character called James, so there's this Henry/James thing going on.'"  I've got some quibbles with this assertion: Lord Henry isn't "a critic," and while there's definitely some homoerotic intellectual seduction at work here--as one might guess from all those photographs Lord Henry later keeps around his house--I wouldn't quite read it as an invitation to a "gay life."  (There's no sign that Dorian responds to either Lord Henry's or Basil Hallward's passion for him, and he's actually fairly bemused when the latter confesses his initial fascination; the scene with Alan Campbell is the only time the novel explicitly suggests that Dorian might have taken time out from his usual habit of bedding every woman in sight.)  One of the most interesting things about The Picture of Dorian Gray, though, is just how ironic it is about the entire concept of "originality."    Lord Henry ventriloquizes Walter Pater/Henry James on the need for absolute originality; Dorian, who is as unoriginal as they come, spends the entire novel justifying himself by ventriloquizing Lord Henry ventriloquizing Walter Pater/Henry James.  And when Dorian does cautiously attempt to assert his "difference," by raising the possibility of confession and thus speaking as himself, Lord Henry doesn't believe that Dorian could possibly be a murderer. 

Victorians and the fragility of progress

Over at Butterflies and Wheels, there's a quotation from Roger Scruton that snagged my eyes: "While treating us to some agreeable ventures in the history of ideas, he recycles the Victorian notion that the West has progressed from oppressive superstition to enlightened liberty."  As I noted in the comments, that "Victorian" bit requires considerable qualification.  There is indeed a strand of Victorian thought that joyously celebrates the rapidly-spreading glories of modernity.  But that strand sits right alongside a very different attitude to progress, one that sees it as inherently fragile, vulnerable to corruption from within, and always on the brink of reversal.  One of the reasons I became interested in Victorian attitudes to the Reformation was precisely this attitude, which writers frequently articulated in terms of cultural amnesia: far from permeating Victorian culture, they argued, the Reformation was consistently erased--and usually erased in the name of religious tolerance.  Here's a random example of this rhetoric, from a children's history I read a couple of nights ago:

"The Story of the Reformation" is one which Protestant England cannot afford to forget. But, unfortunately, historical events, however well known to the mind, lose very much of their reality through lapse of time. And it is to be feared that the grievous state of things before the Reformation, the terrible scenes which were needful to bring about a change, as well as a right sense of the improvement effected, are fast fading away, as to their reality, from the minds of people of the present day. They happened too long ago to have the influence they ought to have. And as a consequence, it is all the easier for misguided persons to be led in a backward and Rome-ward direction, as is now so lamentably the case.

Selina A. Bower's language here clearly presupposes some notion of Protestantism-as-progress; after all, the "Rome-ward direction" is "backward."  Nevertheless, like many of her contemporaries, Bower sees Protestantism, which is grounded on a clearly-defined historical foundation, threatened by its historicity.  To remain authentically Protestant, the country must remember Protestantism's origin in "terrible scenes," but both the passage of time and Protestantism's own success efface those scenes from active memory.  Toleration, not to mention conversion, derives from this widespread act of forgetting; toleration would be impossible, writers like Bower imply, were Protestants to remember.  As is so often the case, these complaints about forgetful Protestants weren't new in the nineteenth century: early modernists have found Protestants grumbling in a similar vein (both in Britain and on the Continent) as early as the seventeenth century.  But it's the local significance of this rhetoric that interests me.   

(Un)published

I dispatched the sermons--again--after redoing everything in house style.  In this case, that meant stripping out all of the publishers' names, leaving only the publication date and place.  While this style is hardly uncommon, and certainly saves space (hey, I eliminated a full page from the bibliography that way...), I think it's counterproductive for academics who are trying to construct mental maps of their field.  If you're a budding Victorianist with an interest in religion, say, it helps to know that you will not be finding Low Church evangelicals publishing under Charles Dolman's imprint, nor Roman Catholics under John F. Shaw's. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs (Knopf, 2007).  Life and love in an increasingly decrepit small town.
• Elizabeth Ermarth, The English Novel In History 1840-95 (Routledge, 1996).  Survey with emphasis on classical realism.

That would be a bit long, even for me

GoogleBooks is now indexing doctoral dissertations held at its various contributing libraries.  I was a bit bemused to discover that my own dissertation supposedly has 750 pages.  Granted, I do tend to go on at great length, but "will write a Trollopean dissertation" was not one of my goals in graduate school.  (More to the point, I suspect that if I had turned in a 750-page dissertation, my committee would have engaged in some seriously Biblical smiting.) 

#1

Yes, it's another meme, chortling evilly as it replicates across the blogosphere.  Subject of choice: identify Google searches in which your very own blog comes up #1.

Mine:

Miriam Elizabeth Burstein
Victorian anti-Catholic fiction
Victorian anti-Catholic sermons
Victorian historical fiction
eternal British Literature II
this week's acquisitions
my friend Emily Sarah Holt

Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2007: Twentieth Annual Collection

It has taken me about three weeks instead of the usual one or two days to work through this year's installment of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and neither papers nor the usual budget of Victorian anti-Catholic fiction is to blame.  Jeff Vandermeer's assessment of the current state of fantasy short fiction--"It’s good–it’s just not great"--could just as well sum up my response to this anthology.  The literary craft on display didn't offend, but it rarely got up from the table and danced, either: only a few of the authors experimented with style, or tried to rethink genre conventions, or even attempted to be just plain outrageous.  (It's fantasy and horror, after all!)  Nor did it help that one of my courses this semester is heavy on the Victorian Gothic/horror; reading this anthology in conjunction with the earlier stories only intensified my sense that really, we've been here before.

This is not to say that there's nothing worth reading. Nicholas Royle's "The Churring," almost a mood piece, juxtaposes the death-in-life of the narrator's sexual imprisonment with the death that follows hearing the nightjar's song--other people's deaths, that is.  Ysabeau S. Wilce's "The Lineaments of Gratified Desire" takes the most risks with language.  Set during a hyped-up, Halloween-style celebration in an alternate world filled with ghastlies of various descriptions, the story tracks a hunky magician's quest for his temporarily-misplaced five-year-old wife and her stuffed pink pig (don't ask).  Wilce packs her sentences with adjectives and adverbs, parallelism and paradox; the words themselves chime with alliteration and assonance.  ("He's cool and cold and so angry that if he touched timber it would burst into flames, if he tipped tobacco it would explode cherry red" [393].)  While at times the experiment goes over the top, Wilce's language games nevertheless have a sharp bite. 

The anthology offers a number of lightly or darkly comical stories.  John Schoffstall's surreal "Fourteen Experiments in Postal Delivery," although sometimes too precious for its own good, still plays amusing games with the epistolary form.  Epistolary fiction emerges from absence; Schoffstall rings a number of changes on what it might mean to make oneself present to a beloved.  A young woman who has rejected her lover finds herself beset with an increasingly bizarre array of gifts--Spain, for example--until she is finally forced to look inside herself (quite literally).   Nik Houser's post-Whedon "First Kisses from Beyond the Grave" puts one adolescent into a high school located in Limbo and populated with vampires, zombies, and other forms of the undead, then takes off into a bizarre coming-of-age narrative.  Although I ultimately found the black humor too obvious and broad, the story is still  genuinely funny.  At the other end of the gore quotient, Ellen Klages' quirky "In the House of the Seven Librarians" is a delicate fairytale about the power of books, a passion for reading, and the sad necessity of growing up.  The same respect for childhood creativity permeates Paul Di Filippo's "Femaville 29," set in a relocation camp after a Katrinaesque disaster; as Di Filippo alerts us at the end, the story inverts "The Pied Piper of Hamlin," with the children leading the adults into a fantasyland far superior to anything the government has to offer. 

Although in past years neither this anthology nor its sister, the Year's Annual Best Science Fiction, has handled religious themes especially well, things were greatly improved this time.   Christopher Rowe's "Another Word for Map is Faith," set in an unspecified future, imagines a strange hybrid of fundamentalism, cartography, environmentalism, and wildly multiplying Christianities.  Brett Alexander Savory's "Messages" yokes together divinely-inspired authorship, interpretation, and the Rapture; while positing a world in which men are, apparently, passing messages from God on to the government, Savory's tale also meditates on the possibility that there is no way to understand God's purposes (if, after all, it is God speaking).  Geoff  Ryman's "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter" is a lyrical story about ghosts, ancestors, and redemption through memory.   And Glen Hirshberg's Jewish-themed ghost story "The Muldoon" itemizes the usual reason for ghosts to stick around before adding another: "Or was it just a peculiarly Jewish sort of ghost, clinging to every last vestige of life, no matter how painful or beset by betrayal, because only in life--this life--is there any possibility of pleasure or fulfillment or even release?" ( 452)

One of the oddest things about this anthology is that the horror stories are not especially...horrific.   The scariest, Christopher Harman's "The Last to be Found," finds a so-far disappointed haunted-house investigator in a house that, it seems, is given to slipping between our universe and one far more frightening.  In classic form, Harman accentuates the terror by giving us just the tiniest glimpses of what the protagonist sees in front of him.  Stephen Volk's "31/10" joins supernatural terrors with society's favorite bogeymen, all in the form of that familiar genre known as the reality show.   Finally, and like "The Last to be Found," Gene Wolfe's "Sob in the Silence" draws on another Gothic convention: the ghost story within the ghost story.  The tale's unnamed "horror writer" claims that his house is not haunted--perhaps because his own monstrosity, slowly-revealed, prevents him from hearing the voices.

Verschoyle

Verschoyle: A Roman Catholic Tale of the Nineteenth Century (Hatchard, 1837) is not, despite its subtitle, a pro-Catholic novel.  Instead, it participates in the post-Emancipation angst of many early Victorian evangelicals, who saw the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) as a direct strike against both the Reformation and divine providence.  The novel certainly suggests the rapidity with which anti-Catholic novelists became fixated on particular character types (the unhappy priest, the religiously-confused heiress) and plotlines (in this case, the threat of property transfer from Protestants to Catholics).  But its interest lies in its double critique of nominal Protestantism and fervent Roman Catholicism--a critique echoed later, from a much more conservative High Church position, by William Sewell [1].

The eponymous Kenelm Verschoyle holds the plot together.  Verschoyle is an Irishman and former Church of England clergyman who has converted (or, a Victorian would say, perverted) to Catholicism, emigrated to Italy, and become a Catholic priest.  Before we meet Verschoyle, though, we encounter Millicent Aylmer, a well-educated (she's fluent in Latin) but overly emotional young heiress, who has grown up in a very nominally Protestant household; as a result, she "almost wholly rejected its [Christianity's] holy truths" (9).  This is despite the repeated visits of the saintly Mr. Vernon, who, as the reader might guess from his name, is Verschoyle's opposite number and, eventually, spiritual rescuer.  Millicent winds up in Italy partly thanks to her aunt's decision to have her educated at a convent, a dangerous move frequently condemned in Anglo-American anti-Catholic texts.  There, Millicent is fascinated by Roman Catholic aesthetics, impressed by Roman Catholic religiosity, and exposed to the wiles of the wicked Sister Allegra.  Despite the warnings of a former friend who has been forced into a novitiate by her Catholic father, Millicent never manages to extricate herself from Sister Allegra.  Nor, more importantly, can she free herself from Verschoyle, who effects her conversion to Roman Catholicism--although this conversion results more from unrecognized erotic feeling ("...there was to her, as there has been to others similarly circumstanced, a satisfaction in being of the same religion as one whom, to say the least, she held in very great esteem" [140]) than authentic religious conviction.  Millicent returns home a convinced Catholic; while Vernon hopes that Millicent's guardian, Lady Ashton, will disinherit her in favor of a Protestant, Lady Ashton is too tolerant and does not act on his request.  To make matters worse, Millicent marries an extremely militant Catholic, and the two of them set about Catholicizing the previously Protestant parish.  Meanwhile, Verschoyle has a massive crisis of faith, and after seeing a letter sent to Millicent by Vernon, he strikes up a correspondence (under an assumed name) with him.  Eventually, Verschoyle returns to England, converted to Protestantism but suffering from the effects of a wound dealt to him by (oops) Millicent's husband [2].  Verschoyle has a patented Good Death scene, whereas poor Millicent, who apparently never returns to the Protestant fold, lives out a miserable existence. 

The novel's simultaneous critique of contemporary Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism pivots on the term "liberality," which both sides misuse.  As used here, "liberality" is less a clearly-defined political ideology or a coherent theological position than it is an ill-defined and intellectually incoherent attitude to religious toleration [3].  Lady Ashton, who believes in any religion in a storm, contributes money for a new Catholic chapel, and remarks to Mr. Vernon that she "would have at most expected from your liberality that you would have done the same" (15); by contrast, Vernon argues that "[t]he liberality of the present day is seeking to overturn everything..." (17).  Echoing Vernon, albeit from the opposite direction, Verschoyle sighs that "[t]he liberality of the present day has extended itself even into the bosom of our church, and there are not those wanting who will affirm that Protestants too may be saved; but they know little of the truths of our holy religion; they are heretics, and as such will suffer" (105).  Nominal Protestants like Lady Ashton identify liberality with an extreme tolerationist position, which holds that all visible differences are fundamentally adiaphora (things indifferent).  Catholics, by contrast, identify liberality with any claim that salvation is possible outside the Church.  In Verschoyle,  the former position destroys religious faith and attacks the foundations of the Reformation itself, while the latter position overstates the importance of the visible church.  By contrast, Vernon warns that while "there have been" and "there are" true Christians in the Catholic fold (19), it is no "real charity" (16) to refrain from proclaiming scriptural truths.  There can be no offense, in other words, in speaking against Roman Catholicism, precisely because the content of that speech derives from the Bible and not from personal opinion; the Protestant evangelist merely serves as a local vessel for the divine Word. 

Protestant liberality, in the bad sense, creates the cultural conditions within which a reinvigorated Catholicism can thrive.  As one minor character cheerfully observes of England, "[o]n a late visit, I lately saw not a few Catholic works read there, and even a Catholic historian greatly prized, and his authority quoted in opposition to Protestant writers" (161).  (The historian in question is most likely John Lingard.)  Catholic texts disrupt the fabric of Protestant discourse--even, in this instance, usurping Protestant intellectual and theological positions.  Worse still, from the novel's point of view, Catholics openly and literally repopulate the countryside.  At one point, Vernon sadly contemplates the chapel mentioned earlier, which "added greatly to the beauty of the landscape" (189); the narrator follows this acknowledgment of the chapel's aesthetic quality by warning the reader against "the broad inlet making for this flood of ignorance, in whose depths Britain was once so greatly sunk" (190).  Riding on the "flood" of Protestant liberality, Catholics reconquer the country in part by appealing to secularized norms of beauty.  Later, Millicent and Fitzgerald undertake a number of religious building projects, including schools, and import priests of varying degrees of unpleasantness.  The implication is clear: Catholic landed gentry actively work against the Protestant interest, undermining England's religious and political stability. 

As I said, most of the novel's stock figures themes and stock figures are not original.  Evil nuns and nasty Jesuits were a well-established staple by this point.  Similarly, the Catholic priest who dies after converting to Protestantism appears to have been pioneered by Grace Kennedy in Father Clement (1823); Frances Trollope used this topos again in Father Eustace (1847).   Like many anti-Catholic texts, the novel serves as a Protestant religious manual, offering Biblical prooftexts (and some Catholic documents) in support of various evangelical doctrinal positions.  (Vernon's epistles cover the Biblical canon, Bible reading, church authority, papal authority, the Council of Trent, saints, images, masses for the dead, and, above all, free grace.)  Still, there are some occasional twists on old ideas, usually through parallelism.  While Verschoyle is reconverted in part through exposure to a Protestant Bible, Millicent is initially attracted to Catholicism by an exquisitely-decorated antique, an Italian Bible from 1471.  Significantly, "on its broad margins notes by an abbe had been added, more distinguished for the exquisite beauty of the penmanship than for the luminous expositions of the sacred volume" (52).  Aside from the questionable nature of the text, from a Protestant point of view (it's a Vulgate Bible, in Niccolò Malermi's translation), the Bible itself has literally been overwritten by scholarship, guaranteed to appeal to the intellectual Millicent's interests.  Moreover, the "exquisite beauty of the penmanship," which echoes the book's complicated and expensive binding, potentially distracts the reader from the text's true worth.  Thus, while Millicent theoretically exposes herself to "religion," she is actually contemplating something that comes much closer to a secular object of high art.  The novel also innovates on the evangelical "good death" scene: Verschoyle converts after a dying Catholic parishioner urges him to discover true faith, but both he and the parishioner miss the point.  The dying man has discovered the need for a "change of heart" after hearing "the Bible read in our own dear Irish" (94)--the operative term being "the Bible." This old man's peace, in other words, derives from the Bible, not the Catholic Church, but both he and Verschoyle mistakenly reverse that formulation.  Verschoyle's own death scene, then, with its explicit Biblical allusions, exemplifies proper deathbed testimony.

[1] In Hawkstone.  For a recent account of Sewell's anti-tolerationist (and anti-Evangelical) position, see Elizabeth Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 69-78.

[2] The progress of their apparently lightning-fast courtship would be a little clearer if the person scanning the text had not skipped those couple of pages! (Ah, the joys of GoogleBooks.)  I'm going to have to get my hands on the missing pages at some point...

[2] Michael Wheeler discusses some rather more advanced debates about liberalism in The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 245-72.