The Little Professor

Further adventures in Victorian Protestant poetry: "The Living Dead"

Before we begin, let's get one thing clear: despite the title, "The Living Dead" is not about zombies.  (Given current marketing trends in pop fiction, you never know what innocent readers might think.)  However, the deliberately Gothic title invokes the sensational associations commonplace in Victorian anti-Catholic texts, of which this is an example.  It appeared in  The Bulwark; or, Reformation Journal on April 1, 1865--the same issue that reported that the indefatigable anti-Catholic campaigner Charles Newdigate Newdegate (a.k.a. the Victorian politician most likely to have his name misspelled) was attempting to advance a bill on his pet project, an "inquiry into the state and working of conventual institutions" (253).¹  Although this may have been a coincidence, the poem's very traditional subject matter--the agonies of a young nun imprisoned in her convent--play directly into contemporary anxieties about women purportedly trapped in convents, isolated from their families, perhaps buried alive...

Like most of the poems that appeared in The Bulwark, "The Living Dead" eschews formal experimentation: it's in iambic pentameter ABAB quatrains. rarely varying its meter with anything except the occasional opening trochaic substitution.  Nevertheless, the opening quatrain jars the ear with slant rhymes (cry/ear/humanity/there), appropriate to the poem's discordant tone.  This quatrain opens with a rather Wordsworthian "HUSH!" (1), enjoining us to listen to "that moaning, stifled cry/That comes through the dark grating, on the ear" (1-2).    This momentarily disembodied, apparently inarticulate "cry" issues from some eerie alternate space; at this moment in the poem, it has no gender or meaning other than suffering.  "Is it the wail of crushed humanity?" (3) asks the speaker, inviting our assent.  The precise nature of this suffering, however, only emerges once we "[l]ook through those gloomy bars" (4), obviously suggesting a prison, and connect the voice to a body.  Even then, that body remains ungendered for a moment:

Why is that sunken cheek so drenched in tears?

And why those faded eyes with weeping red?

And the shrunk form so bowed?—but not with years,—

The stern result of piteous grief and dread.  (5-8)

This body appears to be slipping into erasure, what with its "sunken cheek," "faded eyes," and "shrunk form."  This rapidly fading body is appropriate to the wordless cry: in both cases, "humanity" slowly degrades under the weight of some immense agony.  Moreover, withholding the body's gender invokes one of anti-Catholic literature's favorite tropes--namely, celibacy's demolition of "proper" gendered and erotic identities.  But we should remember that in its original context, a journal addressed to a profoundly anti-Catholic readership, this poem's opening "mysteries" are no mystery at all.  Instead, the speaker--or our tour guide, take your pick--embodies anti-Catholic wisdom at work.   S/he calls an apparently naive companion to the site, utters a series of rhetorical (and sentimentalized) questions, and then proceeds to not only interpret the body, but offer up an exemplary narrative about the dangerous temptations of Catholic rhetoric.  The imagined audience, in other words, is being turned into an informed witness.

The end of the second quatrain puts our poor body's predicament into its gendered and class context.  This body is not merely weakened, but apparently writhing in "wild abandonment" (9), a sight that conjoins profound agony with something that looks suspiciously sexual.  And finally, two lines later, the speaker identifies the body as female: "Can it be she who, not long years before,/Flitted along, the gayest of the gay?" (11-12)  This appalling "abandonment" parodies the young woman's earlier worldliness, while it also contrasts her original, butterfly-like social mobility to her current prison trap.  The giddy young woman has simply run from one extreme to the other.  Once thoughtless in her "summer bower" (13), the nun was reduced to her current inarticulate state by a "specious tongue that told/Of holy raptures in convent drear" (17-18).  This speaker implicitly juxtaposes this "tongue" with his or her own; it's not clear, in fact, to whom the adjective "drear" belongs (the specious tongue? Our speaker?).  In any event, here's another anti-Catholic trope: the dangers of Catholic language, which embraces heightened figures of speech--not to mention lying.  What the specious tongue promises, one notes, is another form of pleasure, designed to substitute a sanctified form of gaiety for the worldly version.  Even though there is no sex here--that is, in fact, part of the problem--our nun has effectively been seduced.

In this up-ended seduction narrative, the dangerously sociable young woman finds herself enchanted into a life in which there is no love at all.  Trapped in a "living grave" (23), she is denied maternal "sympathy" (26) (which is linked to close physical contact), paternal "praises" (27), and fraternal "pride" (28).  The home was the happy scene of both verbal and physical intimacy; tellingly, the father's "tongue" (27) stands apart from the seductive "specious tongue."  Now, she is reduced to being overheard by passers-by, who do nothing to assuage her pain.  Despite the appropriately Gothic "horrid walls" (29) of her convent prison, though, her true tortures are self-inflicted.  The "within" to which the speaker juxtaposes the "bright world" outside (30) is not just the convent, but the mind itself.  For the nun, it turns out, does not reject the narratives that animate her new life, despite her miseries: she interprets her longings for home as "sin" (32).  Thus, her trap is as much theological as it is physical.  Unlike the narrator and the audience, the nun continues to choose the "specious tongue" over the father's (possibly, in an implied and relatively common anti-Catholic pun, of the Catholic Father's over the father's).  Concluding on one more anti-Catholic trope, the speaker leaves the nun embroiled in her spiritual horrors, discovering only "[l]oathing for calm delight--despair for peace!" (36)    

¹ The best account of Newdegate is Walter Arnstein, Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1982).   

Perhaps somewhat grouchy historicist observation of the day

Without evidence to the contrary, shouldn't we assume that an author will be ignorant of Phenomenon X, instead of that s/he will must have known about it? (By existing?)  There are times when it's not even clear that the author knows anything about the subject of his or her own work, after all...

This Week's Acquisitions

• William Boyd, Ordinary Thunderstorms (Harper, 2010).  Guy in wrong place at wrong time has big problems.  (Borders)
• William Trevor, Three Early Novels (Penguin, 2000).  Revived infighting among aged schoolboys; a boarding house with unusual criteria for residency; help for those unlucky in love.  (Lift Bridge)
• Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford, 2010).  Several centuries of English anti-Semitisms.  (Amazon)

Creative theories of authorial inspiration, #291

A reviewer for the Christian Remembrancer, writing about Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, suggests that Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is...not really about human beings:

If the respectable bull-dog Keeper could have been endowed with the ambition and the power to describe graphically the passions of his race—if you could put a pen in his hand and tell him to delineate the springs and impulses which prompt the displays of dog nature, with the outer workings of which we are alone familiar—if he could tell us the secret causes of every yelp, bark, and snarl, and spring, and bite, which we know now only in their effects—he would write precisely such a book as ' Wuthering Heights;' and as ' Life in the Kennel,' it would be a very striking and clever performance. Just such instinctive, soulless, savage creatures as compose a pack of hounds, form the dramatis personae of this unique story. A vicious dog, if he were endowed with human organs, would no doubt swear as well as growl, and shoot and stab as well as bite, if he understood the use of weapons. And because they are called men and women, and are invested with human attributes, these accomplishments are added in the story to their canine powers of offence and annoyance. But the disguise of humanity is, after all, but feebly assumed, and constantly disappears altogether; the whole company drop on all fours as the authoress warms with her subject.

--"Life of Charlotte Bronte," The Christian Remembrancer: A Quarterly Review 34 (July 1857): 128.

Companionate

Of the various genres and subgenres of academic prose, the "companion" entry is one of the oddest to write (if not to read).  Companions are normally introductions, gateways to a particular field, and they therefore tend to emphasize the current scholarly consensus about Person or Event X.  Even when "current scholarly consensus" isn't part of the charge, the topics appropriate for an introductory text usually default, of necessity, to well-trodden areas.  On the one hand, this state of affairs usually reduces the amount of time it takes to write the entry; on the other, it also lends itself to the threat of disappearing into an ocean of other scholars' voices, choking and flailing.    In my case, I'm typing away at an entry on a subject that has been very, very, very extensively studied (anthologized, even), and my own reading in the primary sources lends itself to "yup, that's true," not "despite what So-and-So argues..."  Still, thanks to the magic of GoogleBooks, I can at least provide some evidence from less-familiar periodicals, not to mention two books that were considered major contributions at the time, but which nobody reads now.  (Then again, that last seems to be the story of my professional life.) 

Linking about: Alfred Concanen

Alfred Concanen (1835-1886) was one of the leading lithographers of the Victorian period, best remembered for his illustrated sheet music covers.  He's discussed at some length in Nicholas Daly's Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (which inspired this post). 

• Concanen prints in the Victoria & Albert Museum.
• The British Library has a series of images devoted to "The Dark Girl Dress'd in Blue."
• "Les Pompiers de France" (scroll to the bottom).
• "The Pirates of Penzance Lancers" (about midway down).
• "Riviere's Quadrilles: Babil and Bajou" (about midway down; from the Calthrop Boucicault Collection).
• "Modern Advertising: A Railway Station," along with "A Railway Porter" and "The Railway Guard."
• "Croquet: Tempo Schottische" (scroll down).
  
• "Hops! Hops! Galop."
• "Torpedo Galop."
• "Awfully Clever."
• "The Parcels Post" (scroll down).
• A gentleman and a lady outside a music hall, plus other lithographs from the City of London.

This (Last Two) Week's Acquisitions

(Too dazed by the end of finals, I guess.) 

• Michael Newton, ed., The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (Penguin, 2010).  Anthology of classic nineteenth and early twentieth-century ghost stories.  (Review copy)
• David Malouf, The Great World: A Novel (Vintage, 1993).  WWII prisoners of war in Thailand.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Dara Horn, All Other Nights: A Novel (Norton, 2010).  Jewish Union soldier during the Civil War finds himself at odds with Southern relatives, undertakes romantic espionage.  (eBay)
• Jane Smiley, Private Life (Knopf, 2010).  Relationship unfolds among many hardships from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.  (BOMC)
• Rick Ostrander, The Life of Prayer in a World of Science: Protestants, Prayer, and American Culture, 1870-1930 (Oxford, 2000).  Prayer and changes in the postbellum USA.  (eBay)

The Yellow(back) Book

Via librarian David Faulds on VICTORIA: Emory University has been digitizing its extensive collection of Victorian yellowback books.  To access the volumes in PDF form, search for "yellowbacks" on the main page. 

A sea of red ink

1.  I'm currently asking myself why I had my students turn in all these papers at the end of the semester, which is another way of saying "I'm grading."  Ergo, my poor blog is currently without posts.  But I hope to be back soon with an essay on Harriet Mozley.

2.  On a totally unrelated note, I wonder if the lag time (twelve hours or more) between airing a show on broadcast TV and releasing it to iTunes, Hulu, etc.   actually decreases the online viewership.  After all, the lag gives audiences the chance to read reviews; if you're not particularly invested in, say, House,  you can keep up with the storyline on Television Without Pity until an episode (re)ignites your interest. 

New technological solutions for vertically-challenged hooders

Anyone in possession of full academic regalia knows full well what spluttering rage can be inspired by the hood.  It never stays attached to the appropriate button.  When accidentally sat on, it avenges the slight by strangling the wearer.  It slips jauntily off one shoulder.  It turns inside out.   It's completely useless as an actual hood.  In sum, there is no more infuriating item of academic garb.¹

However, as anyone who instructs graduate students can tell you, the hood becomes even more infernal when you have to put it over someone's head.  (Especially when that head has a mortarboard on it.)  The problem only worsens when the hooder in question is a faculty member who is, perhaps, somewhat less than tall.  Or even somewhat less than medium height.  Quite short, in fact. 

I propose that there is a market for handling the problems associated with diminutive hooders. 

1.  Lightweight telescoping stepladders.  These ladders, which expand at the touch of a button, are small enough to be concealed beneath an academic robe, yet sturdy enough to withstand several minutes of hooding. 

2.  Portable kneelers.  Made out of mahogany and leather (embossed university insignia optional), the kneelers can be kept near the podium and wheeled out when necessary.  Instead of awkwardly bending or crouching, students can maintain their dignity while lowering themselves to the appropriate height.

3.  Robotic arms.  Instead of using their own hands, hooders can manipulate a mechanical "claw"--like the ones you see in the stuffed animal machines at the arcades--to lower a hood over the graduate's head.

4.  Platform lifts.  Hooders can elevate themselves--or lower the students--by working a convenient lever.

5.  Velcro hoods.  Instead of going over the graduate's head, the hood can be draped around the shoulders, then attached at the front using a velcro closure. 

6.  Hooding heels.  These gender-neutral shoes, which go well with any doctoral robe, add approximately six inches to any hooder's height.

7.  Hood parachutes.  At the press of a button, a parachute-equipped hood drops from the ceiling and gracefully floats over the student's head. 

8.  Pneumatic hoods.  The hooder stuffs a hood into a high-pressure tube, aims the tube at the ceiling, and then blows out the hood (which, again, gracefully floats over the student's head).

¹  The mortarboard runs a close second.  Luckily, the University of Chicago uses berets instead.