The Little Professor

In which I do something I was sure I would never do

I'm about to inflict some Victorian religious fiction on undergraduates.

More specifically, one of my colleagues is teaching a "reinventing the Middle Ages" course, and asked me to drop by this Friday to discuss Victorian Lollards.  Fascination with the Lollards was very much an evangelical shibboleth, whether Anglican or Dissenter--traditional High Church Anglicans and Anglo-Catholics were far from being enamored--and so I'm giving the students a few chunks to read from Emily Sarah Holt's Mistress Margery, A. L. O. E.'s The Blacksmith of Boniface Lane, and Emma Leslie's Dearer than Life.  I went for selections that exemplified both evangelical priorities and the genre's Foxeite aspects, so there's a man moving towards a conviction of sin, an examination scene, and, of course, a martyr's "good death."  One of the frontispieces is clearly a knockoff from woodcuts in the Book of Martyrs, so I also supplied an illustration from Foxe.  (Thanks  to the magic of the nets, I'll also show them these two pictures by Ford Madox Brown.)  Needless to say, everything  has been prefaced with some discussion questions, so that the students feel like they're not lost in a maze of unfamiliar audience expectations.  Obviously, I''m going to have to preface the discussion with the Reader's Digest Condensed Version of why evangelicals suddenly got so interested in Wycliffe and the Lollards, and why it became possible (in the sense of access to source material) to write novels like these.  We'll see how this goes...

The Seance

In the classic Victorian ghost story, the cultured beliefs of middle- and upper-class gentlefolks (especially those trained in the sciences) crash headlong into working-class folklore.    Authoritative narratives about ghastly goings-on generally rest with the local servant population; any genteel types who wish to survive that axe-wielding, headless haunt had best start paying attention to what the maid or butler has to say.  John Harwood's neo-Victorian The Seance, however, evokes this clash of mentalities only to zero it out.  Instead of a modernized, tech-savvy (for the time) world suddenly disrupted by reminders of the inexplicable and uncontainable afterlife, Harwood conjures up a time in which the only supernatural is scientific whizzery (or flummery) in masquerade.  Far from being "[a]n electrifying Victorian ghost story," as the pull quote on the front cover excitedly attests, this is really a post-Holmesian amateur detective tale.

The Seance owns up to its roots in Victorian sensation fiction (and, for that matter, neo-Victorian sensation fiction) in both its structure and its plot lines.  It consists of multiple first-person narratives, one written in 1889 and two twenty years earlier--a narrative strategy reminiscent of both Wilkie Collins and, more recently, Sarah Waters' Affinity (another novel drawing on spiritualism).  One character, Eleanor, is explicitly and implicitly threatened with confinement to an asylum (shades of Lady Audley's Secret and Charles Reade); another deploys a disguise that references East Lynne.   The Wraxford clan is a decrepit family right out of any Gothic novel.   The horrors, such as they are, center on the thoroughly decayed Wraxford Hall, located where an abbey dissolved by Henry VIII once stood; weird, overgrown, and terminally creaky--"everything seemed to have bowed or sagged or cracked" (257)--it certainly looks like a haunted house, and its history of state-sanctioned intrusion and mysterious deaths makes it a good candidate for a deadly curse.   And then there's the matter of the murder of Magnus Wraxford, burnt to death in a suit of armor (er, long story), probably by his wife, Eleanor.  Did Eleanor then do away with herself and their daughter in the dank depths of Monks' Wood?

But instead of curses, we have generational echoes.  Eleanor, Phoebe Montague, and our frame narrator, Constance Langton, all look virtually identical.  Both Eleanor and Constance are very much the odd female child out: for reasons that are never really clear, Eleanor's mother loathes her, whereas Constance's mother simply prefers her dead daughter Alma to her living one.  (The initial seances all involve Constance pretending to be Alma.)  The novel's men are almost all a singularly unprepossessing lot, mostly because of sheer uselessness.  Eleanor's father dies early on; Constance's father abandons her, and her uncle Frederick, while decent enough, has no great emotional investment in her either; the lawyer John Montague is weak-willed and easily manipulated.   Eleanor's true love is a bit of a wastrel, while Constance's is just not particularly impressive. Authority figures like the police are easily deceived.   The villain, Magnus Wraxford (the name seems to be a shout-out to M. R. James' "Count Magnus"), is as disinterested in his and Eleanor's daughter Clara as the other fathers are in theirs.  Even the representative from the Society of Psychical Research, while he successfully decodes part of the mystery, remains entrapped by his prejudices.  (Interestingly enough, the Society only appears in its capacity as fraud detector, which seems par for the novel's course.)   Although there's almost no mention of "New Women," the novel winds up celebrating strong-minded women like Eleanor and Constance, who turn out to be the only ones capable of full-scale resistance.

Early on, Constance fancies that she "might have been a foundling" (7), and as she reads John Montague's and Eleanor's diaries, she begins to imagine a much different life for herself--one in which she is Eleanor's long-vanished daughter, Clara.  This fairy-tale narrative is considerably abetted by her sudden rise to heiress of Wraxford Hall.  In fact, the one fully supernatural element in this text, as it were, is the act of story-telling.   Magnus, a masterful speaker, mesmerist, and psychologist, has a "wonderfully persuasive" voice (66), and turns out to be the novel's best sensationalist; he is responsible for stitching together events at the Hall (whether by direct intervention or by narration) in such a way as to produce eminently Collinsesque or Braddonesque scenarios.  Eleanor turns out to be an equally sophisticated narrator, albeit for different purposes.  And one character turns out to have spent their life constructing an elaborate fantasy of personal and social success.  It's as if the novel winds up writing against its own genre: the true "curse" resides in sensationalist story-telling, and the only full escape, in the end, is a quick retreat to the comforts of domestic realism and a conventional marriage plot. 

This Week's Acquisitions

(More secondhand books from Cambridge, MA.  Also some review copies--I'm doing a big bibliographical review essay, so there will be free books wandering by from time to time.)

• Joanna Baillie, Six Gothic Dramas (Valancourt, 2007).  Anthology of Baillie's verse plays on various gruesome subjects.  (Amazon)
• Guy de Maupassant, Alien Hearts, tr. Richard Howard (NYRB, 2009).  Man seeks love with salonniere, fails.  (Harvard Square Bookstore)
• John Wyndham, The Chrysalids (NYRB, 2008).  Reprint of Wyndham's famous postapocalytofic; see this bibliography and brief overview for more information about the author.  (Harvard Square Bookstore)
• John William, Butcher's Crossing (NYRB, 2007).  In the late nineteenth century, men head out West for authentic experience, get rather more than they intended.  (Harvard Square Bookstore)
• William Attaway, Blood on the Forge (NYRB, 2005).  Reprint of the 1941 novel about three African-American men moving from South to North in search of work.  More about Attaway at Mississippi Writers & Musicians. (Harvard Square Bookstore)
• Gregor von Rezzori, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories (NYRB, 2007).  A man's reminiscences trace the slow implosion of his own culture.  (Harvard Square Bookstore)
• Richard Hughes, In Hazard (NYRB, 2008).  Ship encounters a very, very nasty storm.  (Harvard Square Bookstore)
• Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Religion after 9/11 (Continuum, 2010).  Short study of how Amis, McEwan, Pullman, and Rushdie engage with and articulate new atheism in their recent fiction.  (Review copy)
• Mark Knight, Introduction to Religion and Literature (Continuum, 2009).  What it says on the tin.  (Review copy)
• Adrian Grafe, ed., Ecstasy and Understanding: Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period (Continuum, 2008).  Essays on Hopkins, Eliot, Auden, Hill, etc.  (Review copy)
• Jonathan Roberts, Blake.  Wordsworth.  Religion (Continuum, 2010).  An experimental book which is not well-described by its Amazon write-up, that's for sure.  (Review copy)
• Richard Griffith, The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature, 1850-2000 (Continuum, 2010).  Catholic writing (mainly fiction) since the mid-century "Second Spring."  (Review copy)
• W. J. McCormack, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Blackwell, 2002).  Also what it says on the tin.  (Harvard Square Bookstore)
• Martin Postle, Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (Tate, 2005).  Written in conjunction with a Tate exhibition; more about Reynolds here and here.  (Harvard Square Bookstore)
• Colin Cruise, Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites (Merrell, 2005).  Study of the Anglo-Jewish painter.  This is the standard online resource.  (Harvard Square Bookstore)

Philosemitism, eighteenth-century French style

At his death, the short-lived fablist and dramatist Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian left behind an unpublished novella, purporting to be a translation from an old Hebrew poem, entitled Eliezer et Nephtali.  It appears to have been first published sometime around 1802, then was translated into English at least three times  over the course of the next couple of decades; there are, in addition, multiple Hebrew translations.  Although the tale is set in the decades following Joshua's victories, its frame narrative features an unnamed speaker (standing in for the author) who encounters a young Jewish couple while he's out for a walk; the frame turns out to justify and authorize the pastoral plot.

Our first glimpse of the Jewish couple invokes some very conventional tropes, but winds up deploying them in favor of toleration.  The wife "était grande, belle, et sa beauté devenait plus frappante par son caractère étranger"; a dark-eyed exotic, she is very much the stereotype of the Oriental Jewess.  Moreover, we catch the couple in a deeply sentimental moment of reading, as they sob sweetly over a text that turns out to be in Hebrew.   The figure of the weeping Jew, contrasting the horrors of modern exile with the lost heroic age, has been rather tough to shake, but here the speaker mistakenly analogizes this moment to Petrarch and Laura (225).  In fact, the speaker's lengthy contemplation of this picturesque moment, eavesdropping on a conversation he can't understand and climaxing with the incorrect (and rather inappropriate) compliment to the young woman, turns out to dramatize bad Christian readings of Jews more generally.   Consistently trying to locate Jewish suffering in a Christian providential context, the speaker soon gets swamped by the Jewish couple's resolute insistence on sticking to their own plot.  Indeed, the wife, appropriately named Esther, turns out to be not the passive recipient and auditor of a courtly love text, but a masterful speaker in her own right; although the speaker finds himself charmed by "[s]a beauté, son émotion" (228), he also winds up being crushed by her attack, weakly admitting that he doesn't actually get to demonstrate "qu'en tout temps nous avons été les plus justes et les meilleures gens du monde"  (230).  Quite literally, the Christian doesn't get to have the last word.  Notably, the speaker has learned to keep his mouth shut by the time Jonathas and Esther invite him home for dinner: he's contemptuous of the strange dinner preparations, but fears to speak up (231). By the end, the speaker winds up transmitting the poem Jonathas and Esther were reading--supposedly in Jonathas' translation from the Hebrew--to a wider French audience, thereby deferring to the Jew's traditional narrative of the past.

The pastoral novella that follows is slight, but its polemical bent lies in its explicit lack of violence.  According to the Christian speaker, Jewish history welters in its own blood ("sang") (226); by contrast, the novella focuses consistently on how its main characters avoid causing pain to others.  (Although the names are Biblical--there's a Sadoc [Zadok] the priest, Eliezer, Naphtali, and so on--they aren't identical to the actual Biblical figures.  This is Torah alternate history, as it were.)  In some ways, the narrative offers a loose, revisionist retelling of Jacob and Esau.  Brothers Eliezer and Naphtali, whose personalities roughly correspond to Jacob's and Esau's,  exist in a perfect union of personality, so close that heterosexual romance seems not just out of the question, but positively unnecessary.  But this closed circuit is abruptly ruptured when Naphtali rescues Rachel, a young woman on the verge of death by dehydration, at the risk of his own life; the two fall in love immediately.  Unfortunately, when Rachel comes to sacrifice at the Temple for Naphtali's life, Eliezer sees her and promptly falls in love himself.   The narrative thus establishes what could be a pretext for domestic tragedy: the two brothers, suddenly initiated into heterosexual desire (which the text clearly signals is the first phase of their true maturity), could fall out, could kill each other out of jealousy, could send their village into a downward spiral, &c.  But they don't.  Instead, Naphtali sacrifices his desire so that his brother can have Rachel; Rachel and Naphtali agree that their duty to Eliezer transcends their mutual love, and so Naphtali chooses to disappear forever; and, finally, Eliezer realizes the true state of affairs after the marriage, then stages his "death" so that Rachel and Naphtali will need to marry according to Jewish law.   The narrative pointedly lops off each potentially tragic node, then funnels the tale into an afterlife of reclusive pastoral virtue, with the little family retiring from society to memorialize the lost brother.  Once the secret has been revealed, Rachel, Naphtali, and little Eliezer enjoy a brief moment of communion with the dying Eliezer, who grants them his benediction: "soyez heureux sans m'oublier" (266).   Their sentimental tears both echo and produce those of Esther and Jonathas in the frame narrative;  as the ancient family remembers the lost Eliezer while looking to the future, so too do Esther and Jonathas project the possibility of future Jewish happiness while contemplating their historical losses.   The frame narrative's account of gory Jewish history thus finds its opposite number in an account of perfect fraternal love and self-sacrifice. 

É L I E Z E R

ET

N E P H T H A L I,

POEME
TRADUIT DE L'HÉBREU

This Week's (Slightly Belated) Acquisitions

(I returned yesterday from a conference in Boston, which also enabled me to spend some time wandering around Cambridge and getting a tour from one of the curators at the Houghton Library. While in Harvard's vicinity, I may have wandered into stores retailing...certain items, most of which are being shipped back to Brockport.)

• Margaret Elphinstone, Light (Canongate, 2007).  Novel about lighthouse keepers in the early nineteenth century.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Peter R. D'Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism (North Carolina, 2003).  Intersections of US and international Roman Catholic politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  (McIntyre & Moore)
• Ronald Corthell et al., eds., Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, 2007).  Essay collection covering such topics as architecture, vestments, women's roles, poetry, etc.  (McIntyre & Moore)
• Christopher J. Cocksworth, Evangelical Eucharistic Thought in the Church of England (Cambridge, 2002).  Covers the sixteenth century to the present.  (McIntyre & Moore)
• Judith M. Brown and Robert Eric Frykenberg, eds., Christians, Cultural Interactions, and India's Religious Traditions (Eerdmans, 2002).  Essay collection on topics like nineteenth-century reactions to missionary work, interplay between Christianity and Islam, etc.  (McIntyre & Moore)

A somewhat unique cause for celebration

You can't believe how excited I was to discover that one of the very worst novels in nineteenth-century fiction (religious or any other variety) has now been uploaded to the Internet Archive!  Now, when I need to double-check quotations, I won't have to fly to Texas (or Illinois) to do so. 

House the Sequel and Water: A Series of Questionable Cause-and-Effect Relationships

When I purchased House the Sequel, it had a heated above-ground pool.  I had no interest in a heated above-ground pool.  It would draw excess power.  It would sit there, glum and accusatory, when I failed to use it.  It would demand chemicals, when I could be spending money on books instead.  And so, I told the owner to take the pool with him.

I have come to the conclusion that House the Sequel feels bereft of its pool.  More to the point, House the Sequel is compensating for this deeply traumatic loss.  Evidence:

a) House the Sequel has hot water heating.  The boiler, which turned out to be older than represented, proceeded to implode in slow and agonizing ways.  In its final days, the noises it made while it attempted to get water through the pipes sounded like a Kraken rising from the deep; the sloshes, glugs, and gurgles were so loud that I expected to find an ark with pairs of animals wafting through my living room. 

In retrospect, this was the first sign that House the Sequel missed the pool.  Despite being an English profesor, I failed to decode the obvious symbolic import of the aforementioned sloshes, glugs, and gurgles.  And so, House the Sequel took more direct action.

b) While the boiler was on the fritz, the contractor installed my pretty hardwood flooring.  Hardwood flooring requires nails.  Three nails went right through...a heating pipe concealed underneath the step that camouflages the missing baseboard where the family room used to end.  Once I had a functional boiler, needless to say, I also had water pressure.  And so, I had water.  Coming in under a laminate floor.  Which now has to be replaced.  (For which I'm not paying, incidentally.)

This was clearly the second sign that House the Sequel was yearning (like a god in pain?) for its missing pool. Yet again, I obstinately refused to get the point. 

c) Wednesday night, I went into the basement to put away some stuff from House the Original.  Whereupon I noticed water.  Water, water, everywhere, when the water should only have been in water pipes.  One slightly hysterical phone call later, I acquired a plumber, who pointed out that my sump pump was now more of a stump pump.  (Or an unpump.) 

Did I mention that the previous owners had left carpeting down there?

At this point, I believe that the answer is all too clear.  The house deliberately sabotaged the sump pump so that it could welcome in all the water it so patently missed.  I admit it! I was remiss! I failed to take the house's feelings into account!

(Either that, or I'm just having a run of bad luck.) 

Bookshelves! Now with books!

I've just about finished shelving (what? It's taking how many weeks, you say?), so you can see what the (nearly) completed library looks like. 

You walk in the door, and immediately run into the nineteenth century.

Amazing! Room to leave space for more books!

The narrow end bookcases worked out quite nicely. 

View from the very back of the room.

AVALANCHE

Surely my living room is in here somewhere.

Not quite ecumenical

Next week, I'll be delivering a paper in Boston at a colloquium on problems in feminist historiography.  (Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt: "See, you're a historian."  Me: "I'M AN ENGLISH PROFESSOR.  GRAR.")  In any event, I'll be discussing one of my hobbyhorses, which is the danger of collapsing nineteenth-century Christian narratives about female "progress," empowerment, freedom, and so forth into feminist narratives about same.  Sometimes the two coincide, but frequently the linguistic and rhetorical similarities conceal major conceptual divides.  (Marianne Thormahlen's The Brontes and Religion addresses these problems in Jane Eyre in particular.)  Moreover, it's equally problematic to claim texts as feminist without noting their implications for women of the "wrong" religion (whatever it might be).   For example,  Rebecca Styler identifies the "feminist implications" of Emma Jane Worboise's "anti-clericalism"¹ in the anti-Ritualist Overdale,  while skipping  the novel's stereotypical reading of Anglo- and Roman Catholicism as anti-family, the confessional as a space of sexual perversion (a young maiden finds herself asked questions that "drove the blood from her heart, and coloured her cheeks with burning blushes"²), Catholic priests as dangerous infiltrators of the Church of England, nuns as doomed to eternal misery, and so forth.  The novel's point, after all, is that Ritualism is "sapping the very foundations not only of the Anglican Church, but of our national glory, and of our social and domestic joys and responsibility" (462).  Given that anti-Ritualist sentiment frequently spilled over into outright violence directed at church property, priests, and sometimes sisters themselves, Worboise's novel doesn't just offer positive feminist critique--it participates in and cheers on some especially ugly theological warfare.  Worboise's vision of feminine spiritual community cannot be separated from the rest of the message, and she herself explicitly links the one to the other.  Similarly, my old friend Emily Sarah Holt, who has some of the most progressive gender attitudes of any controversial novelist--she argues that women are men's spiritual and often intellectual equals, supports them making a living in various professions (including fine art and medicine), and pointedly notes that not all women are maternal--is also one of the most reactionary anti-Catholic novelists of the later Victorian period.  Again, her gender politics derive from her evangelical Protestantism, and are equally inseparable from her vituperations against both Ritualism and Roman Catholicism.  (If you're wondering, this also works the other way, with some Roman Catholic novelists arguing that Protestantism leads to demoralized and abused women.)  Both novelists are concerned about women, yes, but in what context? 

¹ Rebecca Styler, Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 35.

² Emma Jane Worboise, Overdale; Or, the Story of a Pervert (1869; London: James Clarke, n.d.), 352.