The Little Professor

Unexpected correspondence (or: one learns something new, etc.)

During the 1850s, Harriet Martineau was carrying on a (brief?) correspondence with my old pal, the evangelical novelist Emily Sarah Holt.  Holt was in her late teens at the time, writing rather bad poetry in imitation of Felicia Hemans; I would guess that she's the one who instigated the exchange (fan mail?), unless they had some acquaintances in common.  Unfortunately, the VWPL doesn't have the letters in question.     *trots off to find the relevant letters*

Incidentally, here's a record of a conference paper on Holt--circa 1883. 

(Correspondence discovered while in the course of reading John Warren, "Harriet Martineau and Anti-Catholicism," Recusant History 29.2 (2008): 212.)

This Week's Acquisitions

• Joyce Carol Oates, My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike (Ecco, 2008).  Oates' ripped-from-the-old-headlines fictional take on the JonBenet Ramsay case.  (QPB)
• Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore, Blindspot; By a Lady in Disguise & A Gentleman in Exile (Spiegel & Grau, 2008).  Two historians try to write a historical novel set in colonial America.  (Cf. Simon Schama and Richard Rhodes.)  (BOMC)
• Barry Unsworth, Land of Marvels (Nan A. Talese, 2009).  WWI looms as archaeologists (and others) explore Mesopotamia.  (BOMC)
• Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2008).  Tracks the emergence of political economy and literature as genres. (Amazon [secondhand])

Just add zombies and stir

The LibraryThing Blog kindly--or unkindly, take your pick--points us in the direction of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a reworking of P&P with...yes...zombies.  (The write-up promises "the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action.")  I believe that zombification might be just what English departments need: a sure-fire strategy for revivifying (so to speak) the canon!  For example:

Oliver Twist.  This workhouse conceals a deadly secret: it turns innocent orphans into rampaging zombies.  When little Oliver arrives and asks for "more," he doesn't realize just what's in that gruel.  But the zombified Oliver remains irresistibly adorable--so much so that he manages to suck out everyone's brains before they can say "awwww." 

Jane Eyre.  We all know that if you get in Jane Eyre's way, you die.   However, this new take on an old classic reveals the awful truth: Lowood School incubates a virus that transforms young girls into the ravenous undead.  Although Jane Eyre thinks that Helen Burns died of consumption, Helen actually spends the novel magically attracted to Jane's vicinity.  Expressing her love for Jane in the only way she now can, Helen devours anyone who ever insults, assaults, or otherwise disses her one-time school chum.  Notably, the grand climax offers us a very different reason for Mr. Rochester's missing hand.

Middlemarch.  Young Dr. Lydgate arrives in Middlemarch after being alerted to a mysterious outbreak of the walking dead.  Unfortunately, he is too absorbed in his experiments to notice that his lovely new wife doesn't just appear brainless.  In the meantime, the Rev. Casaubon, worried about the progress of his scholarly work on mythology, concludes that a new infusion of brains might be just what he needs. 

He Knew He Was Right.  In this sensitive novel about obsession, a young man becomes convinced that his new wife is actually a zombie who desires nothing else than to rend him limb from limb.  His wife and family all try to convince him of his error, but to no avail.  Meanwhile, he fails to notice that his best friend's conversation has become suspiciously monotonous, turning as it does on the best method for preparing brains.  (Fricasseeing? Frying? Baking?)

Dracula.  Vampires meet zombies! It's a true gustatory treat when the Count comes face-to-face with a newly-zombified Mina Harker: he sucks her blood, she slurps his brains.  Needless to say, they wind up making beautiful music together...much to the consternation of Jonathan Harker. 

"My Last Duchess."  That portrait doesn't just "look" alive--it really is alive.  Sort of.   Not content with murdering his wife, the Duke issues "commands" to have her transformed into a mindless, undead hulk.  The purpose of displaying this zombie portrait? In order to prevent her from devouring him for lunch, the Duke brings her regular tributes.  Like the poor emissary in the poem, for example.

"Mariana."  This classic poem of romantic longing and increasing depression looks much, much different when the reader realizes why Mariana is trapped all alone in the moated grange.  Outside, zombies have overrun the idyllic English countryside, ransacking villages for human food while crying for brains in perfectly turned iambic pentameter.  Poor Mariana, perfectly aware that her beloved has succumbed to the curse, can only moon about while wishing for her own undeath...

Eh, can't be worse than the most recent WH adaptation

Cute Overload has a suggestion. 

Joe Baker; Or, the One Church

Joe Baker; Or, the One Church appeared anonymously in 1853 under the auspices of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul; the author was Mrs. Gertrude Parsons, a convert who wrote several other didactic Catholic novels.  At least one Protestant thought the book was part of a conspiracy to get Catholic literature into the hands of the poor, although the liberal Catholic magazine The Rambler seemed to be under the impression that elite artisans and middle-class Protestants were the real target.  The novel itself is told in the first person by Joe, whose story anticipates John Halifax, Gentleman in a number of ways: the orphaned Joe begins as a child laborer in a bakery before eventually taking over the business himself; the increasingly successful Joe seeks to marry the amazing Fanny Cowper, who turns him down because she could never marry a non-Catholic.  Joe makes what at first seems like a bad marriage to Ellen, whose family gives new meaning to the word "dysfunctional," but he and his wife turn out to work well together, and the business prospers.  Fanny, meanwhile, marries a farmer, the rather heavy-handedly named Fairfield.  Inspired by Fanny, Joe keeps thinking that he ought to convert to Catholicism, but somehow never gets around to it.  As his cashbox grows heavier, Joe insists on training his daughter to become a true gentlewoman, while secretly hoping that she will become Catholic herself.  This being a religious novel, however, things have to go spectacularly wrong, and so they do: the Fairfields lose their farm in a fire, although not before Joe heroically saves one of their children from the flames; and, to no reader's great surprise, Joe's daughter dies of a patented Mysterious Victorian Illness, but not before the Fairfields convert her.  Joe and Ellen, convinced by their witness, finally convert. 

This novel deploys the usual tropes associated with all conversion fictions, whether Protestant or Catholic.  Joe's education, such as it is, leaves him ignorant of all religion; the only religious language he knows "was from the language of cursing and swearing, with which I was perfectly familiar" (4).  Nevertheless, what religion he does encounter leaves him cold.  In particular, he is annoyed by facile Protestant assertions about "grace" (6), and cannot help noting that Protestants never find anything to "agree upon as being true" (8).  (While 19th-c. Catholic novelists make disagreements between denominations into proof that Protestantism cannot be true, Protestants do the same thing by playing the various Councils, etc. against each other.)  Needless to say, Joe doesn't feel much of anything in church.  Of course, when the working-class Catholic Fairfield makes an appearance, he easily makes doctrinal mincemeat out of poor Mr. Knight, an Anglo-Catholic clergyman, despite the latter's far superior education (which, apparently, did not include any tips about conducting an argument).  But given his name, it's not surprising that Mr. Knight eventually converts, thanks to the Catholic Penny Catechism he confiscates from Joe. 

And here is where the novel does something out of the ordinary: this is a Catholic conversion novel conspicuously lacking in priests.  All of the evangelism is lay evangelism.  Frequently, Catholic conversion novels represent lay evangelism as the first step towards conversion, but the final step involves an intense process of study under priestly guidance.  While this strategy obviously represents the centrality of the priest to Catholic spiritual life, it is also a deliberate riposte to evangelical conversion novels, which both grant center stage to lay evangelists and tend to deny that the convert needs to know anything besides the Bible.  Here, though, Mrs. Parsons invites both working-class and middle-class Protestants to contemplate the possibility that the example set by Joe's social equals might be sufficient to ensure his conversion; in fact, the novel incorporates some snarking on anti-Catholic propaganda near the end, as Joe discovers that his daughter's story has been transformed (in a game of Victorian anti-Catholic telephone) into yet another example of an evil priest's influence.  Quite pointedly, too, the elite Anglo-Catholic priest winds up converted by a publication aimed at the working class. 

Carded

I promised an update on kitschy greeting cards with rhymed, metrical verse.  And lo! I wanted an amusing icebreaker exercise for my two intro to lit analysis courses, but one that would have some connection to the courses' actual purpose.   To begin, we talked a bit about the difference between reading for entertainment and reading in an academic setting.  In the course, I suggested, they'd be developing a "toolkit" that would make literature and its effects strange--by which I meant not "weird," but "unfamiliar."   Making literary effects that seem like a given (that a horror novel should scare us, that a sentimental ending should elicit tears) unfamiliar is the first step down the road to realizing that, after all, these effects emerge from an author's craft. How does the poem, novel, play, or film work? Why does this poet play games with the rhyme scheme, and why does that novelist suddenly shift into passive voice at particular moments in the plot? By the same token, what "commonsense" assumptions do we hold about narrative, or figurative language, or about what literature "should" do? 

The greeting card exercise was a goofy way to get the students to begin pondering some of these issues.  After showing them the card and reading the poem out loud, I asked them to think up questions that would make this greeting card seem...unfamiliar.  After all, they all took greeting cards for granted, no? This quickly got them into issues of intended audience, symbolism, context, the medium, syllable counts, rhyme schemes, word choice, and the like.  Both classes thought the poem was silly (true), and so we talked about why that might be the case; in fact, both classes concluded (correctly, I think) that the romantic connotations of giving someone a poem were more important than the poem itself.  Which led to a brief discussion of how pop culture regarded poetry, and even to the question of how reading for a course--including the choice of reading material--was differently structured than reading for pleasure.  The point being, of course, that if it's possible for them to ask such questions about a simple (and really rather bad) bit of greeting-card verse, then what will they be able to ask about...oh...Shakespeare?

Wuthering Heights (Two)

My cautious optimism about this adaptation certainly underwent a thorough drubbing this evening.  Now, it looks like PBS has once again whacked the stuffing out of the UK original--a check at IMDB reveals that at least thirty minutes have gone missing somewhere--so I won't complain about the horrific choppiness of the final half, the way in which the plot suddenly accelerates to warp nine, or the klutzy transition from Cathy dying back to Linton and the second Catherine.  Or, rather, I am complaining about them, but I can't tell whether to blame the writer or the US editors.  Moreover, the rest of my complaints should be understood provisionally, as some of the problems may well be the fault of PBS instead of the script.  (Perhaps some UK viewers may wish to chime in.)  That being said...

If there's one image that sums up just how badly this adaptation went off the rails, it's the final shot of the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff...haunting Wuthering Heights.  Given that even this adaptation has associated their passions and desires with the moors, it makes no sense to effectively entrap the two of them behind a window, cheerfully watching Hareton and Cathy holding hands as they trek off to the Grange.  It doesn't help that this moment arguably harkens back to the novel: Lockwood spies on Cathy and Hareton through a window after Heathcliff's death.  (I'll give the director and writer credit for incorporating the novel's frequent use of windows--looking through them, trying to get out or in through them, etc.)  Lockwood, however, is alive at the time, and Bronte uses the moment for comic effect (once again, the famous Lockwood sex appeal hasn't had time to work).  In effect, the adaptation doesn't just ignore the novel; it also ignores itself. 

It also seems to me that the adaptation de-demonizes Heathcliff.  Quite literally: when Nelly Dean finds Heathcliff dead in the novel, she desperately tries to erase "'that frightful, life-like gaze of exultation before any one else beheld it. They would not shut: they seemed to sneer at my attempts; and his parted lips and sharp white teeth sneered too!'"  And Joseph joyously proclaims "'Th' devil's harried off his soul,' he cried, 'and he may hev' his carcass into t' bargain, for aught I care! Ech! what a wicked 'un he looks, girning at death!'"  The novel insinuates very strongly that Heathcliff may well be a sort of demon (and not of the figurative variety), and certainly that he is en route to damnation.  But in the adaptation, Heathcliff rests quite calmly on the pillow...having blown his brains out, instead of dying by thwarted obsession.  The script demands that Heathcliff do to himself what Hindley failed at.  Moreover, while Heathcliff remains an unpleasant human being, it's an oddly mundane sort of unpleasantness (attempting to bash Hindley's head in aside).  While we see him fighting with Cathy before he marries Isabella, their mutual tortures on her deathbed have gone (or have they? I'm wondering if the editor is at fault), and they certainly seem nice and cozy out during a rainstorm on the moor.  His marriage to Isabella appears to be generically unhappy--did I blink and miss the hanged dog?--and Isabella's confrontation with her brother made Edgar Linton seem as obnoxious as Heathcliff.  And Cathy #2 has surprisingly little trouble standing up to Heathcliff.  It's no surprise when he suddenly deflates at the end, simply because there's nothing supernatural to his evil at all. 

That's depressing information

WorldCat has a little doohickey that tells you how far away a given book is from your current location.  For example, the mysterious Montmorency: A Roman Catholic Tale (1848), by the equally mysterious A.M., currently resides at Cambridge University (needless to say, this is the only copy known to humankind).    Cambridge, WorldCat helpfully informs me, is 3400 miles away from Rochester NY.  Clearly, I should just grab a few things, jump on a plane, and...

Unexpected difficulties

While trawling through the greeting card aisles this afternoon, I discovered that something was missing: kitschy greeting cards with equally kitschy metrical, rhymed verse.  There were plenty of kitschy greeting cards with equally kitschy free verse, to be sure, but they weren't what I required.  Before, I had noted in passing that I wasn't seeing much metrical verse when I looked for cards, but this was the first time I specifically set out to find a card with something resembling ABAB and trochaic trimeter, or whatever.   I don't know if this is an accident of the store's stock--they didn't have Hallmark cards, probably because there's a Hallmark store a few doorways down--or if free verse has now entirely taken over the kitschy greeting card market.  In any event, I only managed to find one example of a card in metrical verse.  (There's a pedagogical purpose here; I'm not trying to inflict bad poetry, metrical or otherwise, on anyone in particular.  A report on the pedagogical purpose will follow tomorrow.) 

Show and tell

The semester is looming--as in, it starts on Monday--so I've been thinking about introductory exercises for the first day of class.  (Presuming, of course, that my students don't turn into icicles on the way there.  You know things are bad when your rock salt freezes over.  But I digress.)  For the Victorian course, this means lugging books in from my library so that students can see what a nineteenth-century reader might have seen, touched, and read.  We don't spend a lot of time on book history in this course, but I like to ask students to at least think about how we're encountering literary works, and how our encounters may differ from the Victorian variety.  (Or resemble them.)    In recent years, questions of copyright and piracy have certainly started to resonate more with my undergrads, for obvious reasons.   This time around, I think I'll bring the following:

1. A religious tract (a presentation copy?);
2. A cheap novel from the Religious Tract Society (ideally, something with a gift label or inscription);
3. An "unbound" novel (that is, still in its original cardboard covers);
4. A magazine with a serialized novel (I suppose I should put this recent influx of Christian World Magazines to good use--Emma Jane Worboise serialized both herself and several other novelists);
5. A novel in a relatively fancy binding (gold-stamped leather, marbled endpapers, etc.);
6. A pirated novel with an amusing--albeit probably calculated--goof (it's ascribed to the wrong, but more popular, author);
7. A pocket book (probably my tiny copy of Robert Pollok);
8. An early nineteenth-century book with Paper in Awesome Shape and a late-Victorian book with Paper of Doom (to illustrate the downside of cheap paper...). 

It's too bad that I don't own any triple deckers; I do have several multi-volume religious and historical works in my collection, but I refuse to bring eight volumes of Agnes Strickland to work.  (This is a matter of survival, not principle.)