The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

• Cecilia Mary Caddell, Wild Times: A Tale of the Days of Queen Elizabeth (Burns and Oates, n.d.).  Late-Victorian Catholic historical novel; features Richard Topcliffe as a villain.
• Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (NYRB, 2005).  The perils of faux archaeology.
• Jean Louis de Lolme, The Constitution of England (Liberty Fund, 2007).  Reprints the fourth edition of de Lolme's work of political theory; part of Liberty Fund's Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics series.
• Christopher Burdon, The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unraveling, 1700-1834 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997).  Study of English apocalyptics. 

Ongoing agonized relationship to Google Books

Love? Hate? Joy? Fury? At one moment, I'm massively frustrated by the frequent sloppiness of the entire Google Books project: no quality control, botched bibliographical data, irrelevant snippet views, missing pages (or volumes...), blurred scans, fingers in scans, oddball editions.  Then, five seconds later, I'm positively *squeeing* in excitement--no doubt scaring the freshmen in the hallway--because something absolutely, incredibly awesome has just popped up.  Like all three volumes of The Romance of Jewish History by the Moss sisters.  OK, granted, only a specialist in nineteenth-century religious fiction is likely to be especially thrilled by this discovery. But it's an extremely rare book (the nearest copy to me is a microform at SUNY Buffalo), it's impossible to get via ILL, and it's one of the very few examples out there of Victorian Anglo-Jewish fiction.  So cool.  (Hmm.  That's probably not what observers would call a refined, intellectual response.) 

Perks

At a regional comprehensive, Average Academic X is hardly likely to find research assistants willing to write large chunks of her work.  Which, all in all, strikes me as a perk one could well do without.  I understand the necessity of having assistants to collect and manage data for large projects, and I certainly understand the appeal of having assistants to do minor administrative tasks or even run the darned photocopier.   But I had been under the impression that the purpose of a research project is to learn something about the topic--not just to synthesize your assistants' work.  How does a scholar continue to improve without getting down in the metaphorical trenches? It's not as though you ever fully master research and writing, in the sense of achieving some final state of being Practically Perfect.  New projects entail new challenges, new methods, new archives, and sometimes new writing techniques.  The author brings up academic integrity--"Yet if the undergraduates doing this research attempted the same outsourcing of written work in their term papers, they’d face disciplinary proceedings, and several student researchers told me they felt uneasy about this cognitive dissonance between expectations for their own work and that of their professor"--but one of the reasons we crack down on plagiarism is that it short-circuits the learning process.  Faculty do not cease to be "students" just because they have alphabet soup after their name.   

A suggestion for a future cultural studies project

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, why did the music in all movie trailers and TV promos climax with a mighty "whOOOOOOOOOSSSH!"? Was this mighty "whOOOOOOOOOSSSH!" a sign of American cultural decadence? A secret Hollywood code, intended to communicate esoteric knowledge within an elite circle of producers? A deconstructive moment in the post-John Williams history of film music? A subtle allusion to the history of cinematic sound design?  An unintended revelation of creative bankruptcy in the film and television industries?

There must be a three-volume doctoral dissertation here, at least. 

The pedagogical use-value of minor household disasters

[Discussing Ian McEwan's Atonement, and starting to bring up some of the novel's metafictional elements:]

"The character doesn't notice symbolism or foreshadowing, because...she's a character.  But we do, because we're trained to read novels in a certain way.  Think about it...my roof started leaking, and on Thanksgiving! [students laugh] Well, if this was a novel, we'd be thinking, 'that leak symbolizes something going terribly wrong in her life, and on Thanksgiving...that's clearly ironic,' etc.  But this isn't a novel, so all I'm thinking about is, 'nobody will fix my roof on Thanksgiving.'" 

The Sisters of Soleure

There's no better way to mark the end of a long holiday weekend than by reading some religious historical fiction, courtesy of the Victorians.*    And, as this is Thanksgiving weekend, I thought it might be a good idea to go the transatlantic route.  Caroline Snowden Whitmarsh Guild's The Sisters of Soleure  (1857; rpt. in UK the same year) is set in late-sixteenth century Switzerland.  Although it is a Reformation tale, the novel stages nearly all of the period's major events either offstage or in retrospect.  Instead, Sisters uses the Reformation as a pretext for anatomizing mid-nineteenth century American sectarianism, although the novel's critique would probably have resonated with its British readers as well. 

Guild's title is deliberately ambiguous, as there are two sets of sisters: first, Marie and Emmeline, who are orphaned during an especially brutal anti-Protestant raid; second, Marie's daughters, Marie and Beatrice.  Both Maries remain staunch Protestants, but the elder marries a Catholic, the soldier Count Julien, who nevertheless allows her free rein in the education and religious training of their children.  Although this interfaith marriage is, we are told, a sin (39), the elder Marie felt that it was the only way to save herself from the persecutions of the evil Alfric, a "stern and bigoted Romanist" (36); unable to have his way with Marie, Alfric seduces and betrays Emmeline, who bears him a son and flees to a convent.  He then murders Marie's and Emmeline's father during the aforementioned anti-Protestant raid.   Alfric--who, as you may have gathered by now, is Not a Nice Man--arranges for infanticide, but the woman he hires instead takes the boy to Alfric's sister, Sybilla.  And Sybilla, unbeknownst to Alfric, raises him as her own son.  (Everyone with me so far?) At the beginning of the novel, the elder Marie dies, and Count Julien sends both Marie and Beatrice off to the excitement of court life in Turin.  While there, they run into Alfric, who (it figures) is now a Cardinal.  Alfric sets his sights on converting the weaker Beatrice to Catholicism; to that end, he calls on Francisco, a Handsome Young Jesuit.  Francisco inadvertently reenacts Alfric's relationship with Emmeline by romancing Beatrice, ultimately tricking her into conversion by promising her marriage.  He succeeds, but when the trick is revealed, she becomes badly ill and he, in anguish, commits suicide.  Somewhat inconveniently for all concerned, Francisco turns out to be (as I'm sure you've already guessed) Alfric's supposedly dead son, now really quite dead.   Thanks to a stroke of Providence, both Beatrice and Sybilla wind up in Emmeline's convent, where they eventually experience an authentically Protestant spiritual rebirth.  Alfric dies (unpleasantly), Sybilla dies (saved) during an attack on the convent, Marie (still Protestant) marries a converted priest, and Beatrice (reborn) spends the rest of her life unmarried and atoning for her sins.

During all these goings-on, the novel advances two positions simultaneously: on the one hand, a thoroughgoing attack on Roman Catholicism as a persecuting religion; on the other, a thoroughgoing attack on anti-Catholicism.  Guild's position on the former is hardly unique; she warns the reader that "[o]ne great difference there is, which should ever be strongly marked, between Rome and all other classes of religionists : Rome persecutes in obedience to the dogmas of her faith; all other sects persecute in direct disobedience to the Book which they profess to take for their guide" (90-91).  For Guild, the impulse to persecute results from the Fall, but only Roman Catholicism effectively enshrines man's worst impulses in "dogma."  Thus, at first blush, the novel seems to equate Catholic and Protestant sectarianism by criticizing Protestant intolerance and bluntly warning against the evils of much evangelical anti-Catholic rhetoric: "Loving, truthful words may do good; but bitter, angry words must do harm" (89).  But Alfric is the extreme signifier of Roman Catholicism's violent signified, whereas the novel's various misguided Protestants merely signify postlapsarian man's natural depravity.  For example, while Sisters denies the righteousness of Protestant military action, using Zwingli as an example (dramatized at much greater length in Annie Lucas' The City and the Castle [1876]), such action deviates from Protestantism; it does not define it.   Protestants may persecute, but the novel holds that there is no essentially Protestant persecution. 

Moreover, in the figures of Alfric, Francisco, and a couple of incompetent priests, Sisters deploys all the tropes of anti-Catholic propaganda and denies that such rhetoric can be used against the Catholic laity.  In effect, the novel endorses anti-clericalism, as opposed to a generic anti-Catholicism.    This makes sense if you remember the proposition that the Roman Catholic Church sacralizes persecution.  In the novel's logic, Cardinals, priests, and the like represent those dogmas in action; it is possible to be a Catholic layperson and a Christian, but not a "good" Catholic priest and a Christian.  To become a priest, let alone a bishop or cardinal, requires that the self be overwritten by anti-Scriptural dogma.  Priests and nuns may become Christians, but only by abandoning the Church's teachings, whether through conversion or just quiet rebellion. 

But the novel further insists, along with J. A. Froude and Thomas Carlyle, that anti-Catholicism is pointless because Roman Catholicism is, in fact, disappearing.  In this triumphalist historical narrative, Catholicism melts away beneath the bright light of Protestant truth; Catholic violence partly embodies the Church's unwilling recognition of its impending doom.  Sisters puts this position squarely on the table after the attack on Emmeline's convent--itself a direct allusion not to Reformation persecutions, but to the burning of the Ursuline Convent at Charlestown, MA in 1834.  (As a small child, Guild experienced the riot firsthand.)  Unlike the evil Alfric and his minions, the men who attack Emmeline's convent are uneducated, superstitious simpletons, "loose characters" (248) easily reined in once their pastor arrives on the scene; far from exemplifying evangelical virtues, these men use their faith as an excuse for "the indulgence of lawless and predatory habits" (248).  Violent anti-Catholic persecution thus becomes the province of social deviants of all sorts, rather than the logical corollary of Protestant belief.  If these men had been proper believers, according to the Pastor, they would have understood that the convent "was just dying a natural death," thanks to Protestantism's growing strength in the region (260).  Protestants, in other words, can afford to be tolerant of the convents in their midst, precisely because such apparently dangerous spaces have already toppled over into anachronism. 

*--OK, OK, your mileage may vary.  But I've got a book chapter to write and a conference paper to deliver in April.

This Week's Acquisitions

• Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica (NYRB, 1999).  Reprint of Hughes' 1929 novel about children, piracy, and assorted other matters on the high seas.
• Maryse Conde, Windward Heights (Soho, 2000).  Rewrite of Wuthering Heights, set in Guadeloupe.
• Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle (1832).  Bound volume of the London Missionary Society's journal (another volume arrived last week). 

I have succumbed

Long ago, I swore a solemn oath that I would never allow one of these to cross my threshold. 

Today, that oath was broken.  Goodness knows what the punishment will be...

"The Televisioun Lyne Up of Galfridus Chaucer, Clerke of the Kinges Werkes"

Are you traumatized by the prospect of No New TV? Never fear--Geoffrey Chaucer has several new shows ready to go.  (I'm particularly fond of "Sectes in the Borough.")

Branwell

The Bronte industry has churned out so many biographies, biopics, biofictions, film adaptations, plays, and tsotchkes that it has itself become an object of study.  Douglas A. Martin's Branwell: A Novel of the Bronte Brother fits awkwardly with the Bronte mythology, however; indeed, this brief novel is as much a targeted strike against the Bronte industry and the neo-Victorian novel  as it is a contribution to "Bronteana." 

I must admit upfront to struggling with the book, in large part because Branwell, like John Polidori (who has unaccountably managed to spawn two novels), is not particularly charming company.  He drinks; he takes drugs; he accomplishes virtually nothing; he seduces the Robinson family's young son (in Martin's version, that is).  In other words, Branwell manages to simultaneously disappoint his family and the reader.  At one level, of course, Martin's Branwell simply reiterates the now-mythologized Branwell's abject position within the Bronte household: the coddled son who disintegrated amongst a family of female geniuses.  He is one of the legendary disappointments of British literary history. But in taking Branwell as his subject, Martin develops an anti-Künstlerroman, charting the disintegration of the would-be artist under the weight of his own fantasies of brilliance.  (Even the poems Branwell manages to publish are pointedly dispersed among multiple newspapers; he cannot pull himself together, even in volume form.)

One of the most striking things about the novel is its style.  Or, to be more precise, its refusal to engage in the kind of pastiche that frequently characterizes the neo-Victorian novel.  Martin instead writes stark, minimalist prose, often relying on simple sentences.  (A random example: "The color leaves our cheeks towards morning.  But why.  Why must it" [85].)  He eschews the leisurely periods of Victorian prose style, along with the apparently endless paragraphs.  Martin goes to the opposite extreme by keeping his paragraphs short, sometimes as short as a single sentence or sentence fragment.   Offhand, I cannot remember a single colon or  semi-colon, although Martin does use the occasional dash.  There is virtually no dialogue; what little dialogue appears is abrupt, sometimes fragmentary, and often rendered in FID.  The occasional bursts of speech frequently sit by themselves on the page, as though the characters talk into silence instead of to each other.

Martin's unwillingness to indulge the reader in neo-Victorian lushness reappears in his unwillingness to indulge the reader in Brontean color, whether geographical or historical.  The narrator garbs characters in only the sketchiest of physical details; there's no attention to clothing, "manners," or much of anything else in the way of either literal or figurative costume.   Significant historical figures, like Charles Darwin, are mentioned in passing, but they do not register on the novel's mental landscape.  Nor does Martin spend much time luxuriating in descriptions of the famed moors.  Like J. M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg, Branwell's priorities lie with the artist's--or, here, failed artist's--subjectivity, not with the thick description that provides so much of the traditional historical novel's pleasure.

While Branwell treads well-established neo-Victorian ground in its sexual revisionism--Branwell transgresses by being homosexual, not by committing adultery with Mrs. Robinson--the novel maintains a coy reserve in these matters.  Indulging in one of the novel's very occasional references to Jane  Eyre, the narrator temporarily breaks the frame: "Dear Reader, you want to be told now that you've understood.  That he might be doing just what you think he might be, and in just what way.  You want to be sure" (129).  Instead of the assurance and certainty offered by Jane's famous addresses to the reader, though, this moment forces the "Dear Reader" away from Branwell, to contemplate instead his or her own motives for wanting the nuts-and-bolts (or, er, whatever) of erotic prose.  Martin cocks a hook at both Victorian codes of erotic expression and neo-Victorian erotic openness; Branwell's attraction to men, while an open secret between the narrator and the reader, cannot be put into language so long as Branwell himself cannot put it into language.   Unlike, say, Irving Stone's biographical epics, Branwell  pointedly does not claim to offer a more "organic" understanding of a historical personality by filling in gaps or erasures in the historical record. 

Branwell's relationship to language and storytelling throughout is, not surprisingly, problematic.  From one point of view, he is nothing more than a subject waiting to happen.  The narrator repeatedly calls attention to Charlotte's attempts to micromanage her family's afterlife, whether by editing or burning; after Branwell's writings from Thorp Green go missing, the narrator comments that "Language has been given to us to make our meaning perfectly clear, their sister Charlotte believes, and she doesn't understand why anyone would ever need to wrap their meaning in dishonest doubt" (222).  Martin's officious, pedantic, and somewhat needy Charlotte is not an original characterization; Mardi McConnachie' Bronte-esque Coldwater takes a similarly acerbic view.  In Martin's hands, though, Charlotte's attempt to erase Branwell's misbehavior simply amplifies the whole clan's efforts to "tame contrary emotions around him, to get him down safely into the pages that would become their books, each in her own way filling in the gaps in her knowledge with her imagination.  Their portraits distort, as they wrestle with the  sides of Branwell's increasingly jagged existence, the collapsing personality" (158).  This account of the Brontes' fiction raises the spectre of autobiographical interpretation, only to collapse it along with Branwell's personality: whatever "Branwell" emerges in the act of writing will not be the living Branwell, whose secret vices and rapid mutations alike frustrate the sisters' need for a unified subject. 

Branwell's most successful fiction is not himself (as one might expect from such a narrative), but his affair with Mrs. Robinson: "Branwell needs John Brown to believe he'd offered up not only his youth to this woman, with her position and all her money, but all his talents.  Everyone he tells her husband is dying, and how he'd seen him treating her horribly" (160).    One of the core elements of the Branwell Bronte mythos, this famous historical "fact" here turns into a brilliant novelistic detour from the unspoken "truth" (both sets of scare quotes are well-advised) about Branwell's affair with the son.   The affair with Mrs. Robinson, after all, is itself assembled from coincidence and hearsay; Martin's fiction calls our attention to the problematic nature of the authentic historical explanation.  But the novel's irony, of course, is that Branwell--that great failure--manages, ever so briefly, to successfully create himself as the kind of Byronesque sexual adventurer he has fantasized about all along.