The Little Professor

The Hebrew's Daughter

We haven't had any religious poetry in a while, so let's turn to W. Henry Ludlow's The Hebrew's Daughter, A Fragment of a Jewish Tradition, in Five Cantos (comp. 1852; pub. 1854).  This appears to have been Ludlow's only foray into the world of any sort of verse--that he was willing to put before the public, at least.  As the poem's title suggests, it participates in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition of "fragment" verse, poems whose purportedly mangled forms echoed the contemporary fascination with ruins; certainly, ruin, in both its figurative and literal sense, turns out to be the poem's order of the day.  Ludlow tries some cautious experiments with rhyme and meter, writing primarily in iambic tetrameter couplets but sometimes veering from trimeter to pentameter (especially in the big storm scene) or breaking out into triplets, quatrains, and envelope rhymes.  Not surprisingly, the poem's formal technique is not thrilling.  But for those interested in Jewish subjects in Victorian poetry, this poem is interesting for two reasons: its reworking of the Shylock mythos and its subversion of the by-then conventional Jewish conversion narrative. 

First, the plot.  Elam has a daughter, Zillah, for whom he seeks a possible guardian after the death of her mother.  The mother in question was a secret Christian convert who tutored Zillah in the basics, and so, Zillah "was led more faith to place,/On Christian oaths, than do her race" (10).  This turns out to be a problem when Elam temporarily decamps.  Alas, Elam had refused a loan to a supposed Christian, Hun; in revenge, Hun seduces Zillah (words only, no action), then locks her up in prison until one of his followers finally decides that this is really not quite the thing.  Elam, who returns to find himself sans child, threatens Hun with a scary magic spell, then takes off for the Holy Land.  Zillah also takes off for the Holy Land.  And so does Hun, who is, dare we say, not feeling so great about himself.  Due to divine intervention beyond our control, Zillah and Hun are shipwrecked; Hun, continuing to not feel so great, rescues Zillah (who, understandably, runs away very fast once she sees his face).  After much stereotypical wandering and lamenting, Zillah finds her father on the brink of death, obtains his forgiveness, and--after he repents of cursing Hun--watches him die in peace.  Then...she goes insane, leaving us with Hun sadly watching over her, hoping "to see once more arise/The light of reason in her eyes!" (59)

As this plot outline suggests, Ludlow begins by using Shylock to structure his plot: Elam, who embodies the Law, is the money-lending father; Zillah, who embodies Love, is his Christian-tending daughter; Hun is the Christian in need of cash.  The legalistic Jewish father and the emotional Jewish daughter are par for the course in fictions about the Jews.  Most often, the former symbolically gives way to the latter, with the tyrannically masculine Law superseded by the rule of feminized Love.  In that sense, the Shylock plot and the conversion plot are always bound up in each other.  Ludlow further emphasizes that link with another familiar figure from conversion narratives, the secret Christian convert: the deceased mother (in the Shylock plot, she generally is) had "taught her, ere she died/The creed of Jesus crucified," with the proviso "not to let her Father see/Her to the Saviour bend the knee" (10).  Zillah thus exists in an ambiguous space, Jewish in public but Christian in private; further ambiguity arises from that allusion to "her Father," which immediately refers to Elam but, more problematically, also suggests God the Father, whose Son she does not openly avow.   As a result, the symbolic transition from Judaism to Christianity, from paternal Law to maternal Love, stumbles badly.    This deliberate narrative botch gets only worse once we consider Hun, about whom "nothing certain was there known" (9), and who enacts the Shylockian conversion romance only to lock Zillah up in a Gothic tower. Neither secretly-Christian mother nor nominally-Christian lover can conduct Zillah to Christian community.

Instead, Zillah's chunk of the plot takes her back to the father's Law.  Meeting him once again, she confesses her sins at his request, and is forgiven for her "disobedience" (52).  Yet here the abortive conversion plot rears its head again, for Zillah finds no rest in this paternal forgiveness.  Although Elam is allowed a "good death" once he retracts his curse against Hun, Zillah's agony over her sin leads to fantasize that all of nature condemns her as his "murderess" (55), and all that is left of her is "reason's wreck" (55).  What are we to make of this? Zillah's mental collapse resonates tellingly with the state of Judaism in the rest of the poem, and it is here that we see how the poem's fragmentary form embodies its attitude to post-Christian Jews.  Like so many others, Ludlow relies heavily on the complaint as the dominant mode of Jewish utterance: Elam, for example, sadly asks why Jerusalem's "children roam/In foreign lands as if they hated home?/Why did our God forsake our chosen land,/And let his temple fall by heathen band?" (48)  Similarly, the insane Zillah bursts out into a hymn that, even as it promises that the Jews shall one day be restored, nevertheless sobs along with "Judah's daughter's ever weeping" (58).  Even before the tragedy plays out, Zillah and Elam are already part of the band of Jews who "wander far,/Nor have they now a guiding star" (5), and this vision of eternal exile and dislocation recurs in Ludlow's repeated descriptions of both Zillah and Elam as physically and/or mentally "wandering."  As wanderers without guidance or goal, both Zillah and Elam seem eternally condemned to life without a fully-developed narrative arc.  Zillah's strange in-between state as disobedient Jew but not-quite Christian further underlines the incompleteness in which these characters live; it is no accident that their apparently cyclical return to the Holy Land is merely yet another reminder that they have been displaced, with no right to enter Jerusalem.  In that sense, Zillah's return to her father and the Law he represents is equally fragmented: she can neither re-enter her first spiritual "home" nor transition to the Christian community putatively associated with her mother.  Well before 1890s psychological theory, Ludlow makes "madness" the understandable outcome of such a shattered, "wandering" existence [1].

Despite the poem's title, Zillah winds up exiled from the conversion plot.  It is Hun, the villain, who dedicates his life to protecting the mad Zillah as what appears to be self-imposed penance.  And it is Hun who is on the receiving end of the poem's finger-wagging moral: "I pity all whose mental strife/Was such as gall'd Hun's later life;/Remorse of those who late repent,/Is heaviest of punishment" (59).  Yes, says the reader, but isn't he rather better off than Zillah? Elam, the staunch Jew who finally repents, is saved from pain at the last moment; Hun, the professed Christian turned real Christian, repents and spends the remainder of his life undergoing what we are to assume is divinely-ordained agony; Zillah, who abandoned her faith and tried to return, is left to a suffering she cannot possibly interpret.  The Christian may get the poem's last word, but "bad" Christians who abuse their faith also, by extension, bear the weight of the poem's moral condemnation. 

[1] On which see Carol Margaret Davison, Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 145-46.

 

The metablogging continues

Of the responses to a recent talk she delivered about blogging, Rohan Maitzen comments that "[m]aybe people were taking for granted that blogging could be beneficial in the ways I was describing and so didn’t need to ask about it, but the impression I got (perhaps unfairly) was that they couldn’t quite imagine those benefits trumping the low likelihood of professional rewards for the time spent."  Concrete "rewards" from blogging tend to be, at best, random: the CoHE buys one of your blog posts; somebody invites you to a conference; you're asked to review books; somebody takes one of your posts and quotes it in a book¹.  "Communication," as Rohan suggests, seems to be a better way of thinking about what academic bloggers do when they write about their scholarly work and lives.  Not simply the results of one's research, but also how that research interfaces with teaching, with family life--even, I suppose, with one's cat developing an aggravating taste for rare leatherbound Victorian periodicals.  I don't want to trot out the word "relatable," if only because legions of students will consign me to the Eighth Circle for hypocrisy, but perhaps "demystifying" will do.  Even if the demystification involves revealing that some academics spend an awful lot of time reading rather unreadable Victorian fiction, because sometimes, that's just what you have to do in order to responsibly achieve your scholarly goals...

A different question might be: is the communication heard or overheard, to borrow from John Stuart Mill? Much of my writing about Victorian religious fiction, for example, is primarily for my own benefit--in effect, I'm using the blog as a repository of notes to myself about particular texts, some of which I'll plunder later for more formal writing.  I'm dubious about the use of a blog as an alternative site for peer review (see "random," above), unless one has publicity mechanisms in place to ensure that the most useful readers show up; there's a reason that this little article, for which I wanted peer review (and not in the "jump-through-hoops" way), started out as a deleted blog post.  (Among other things, it's not at all in this blog's usual niche.)  That being said, I've found that blogging has been most valuable in reshaping my academic prose--more relaxed, less Englishese (although I have to discipline my habit of indulging in parentheticals like, er, this one).  I don't think that Book Two is about to rival Dan Brown or Stephen King in sales any time soon, assuming that its contract goes through (my apologies to the publisher...), but I also don't think you need to be a certified English professor in order to read it, either. 

¹ Which is why I finally broke down and listed TLP on my CV, under "other publications":  there's no point in continuing to erase the existence of a blog that's being cited in scholarly works! 

Got Lear?

We're at the end of the semester, which means that I have to submit my book orders for the fall.  (It...never ends, does it?)  I'm back to teaching intro to lit analysis, which falls into two halves: poetry and then a long Shakespeare unit, the latter  of which involves one Shakespeare play and several adaptations/appropriations thereof.  This half of the class strongly emphasizes authors responding to Shakespeare in wildly different historical and cultural contexts, so that we can get a sense of how a work "travels."  The past couple of rounds have been all Hamlet, all the time, but I've decided to resuscitate my previous standby, King Lear--albeit with mostly new works.  I generally show at least one film, but the shift to fifty-minute class sessions means that I have to recalculate the amount of time I need. 

Ergo:

• Source material from Monmouth and Holinshed
• King Lear
• Possibly some excerpts from Nahum Tate
• (I don't know if I have time to show an entire King Lear, although I frequently show large chunks of the Holm version; perhaps I'll switch to the newer McKellen staging this time)
• Honore de Balzac, Pere Goriot (knocking out Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres; I was also thinking about doing Zola's La Terre)
• Jacob Gordin, The Jewish King Lear Comes to America (because it's a comedy, among other things)
• Akira Kurosawa, Ran (which students  either really love or really loathe; we'll see how the coin toss goes)

 

 

The History of a Bible

The History of a Bible is a tract with an odd provenance.  Like most American Tract Society publications, it appeared anonymously.  However, the ATS itself appeared to be under the impression that it was written by J. W. Cunningham, well-known in England for another religious it-narrative, The Velvet Cushion.(Incidentally, somebody ought to do a joint edition of that and the response to it.) While the tract is sometimes cataloged with Cunningham as author, there doesn't seem to be any actual proof for this ascription; given that the tract appears to have been pretty successful, it appears decidedly odd that nobody on the other side of the pond mentions it as part of Cunningham's oeuvre.  So, hmm.  To make matters more complicated, the tract also exists in multiple versions.  In this 1820 printing, for example, the narrative ends after the Bible's dissolute second owner, George, departs this earth in a state of proper repentance; my own copy, part of an omnibus reprinting that dates from approximately 1848, sees the Bible continuing to live out its life in the kind of domesticity it lacked with its first two bachelor owners. 

Unlike the Bible it-narratives I've discussed here before, the Bible narrates The History of a Bible.  The Bible thus speaks as an organic "I," a unified "self" guaranteed by the authority of divine inspiration; there are no Biblical books here, just a Book.   And this Book appropriates a number of roles to itself: "close prisoner" in the bookshop and, later, William's library (3), would-be "companion" (3), and, most importantly, evangelist.   It is the ultimate text in the library, preceded in William's textual pilgrim's progress by Oriental tales, Don Quixote, The Man of Feeling, and historians--the latter of whom speak not as their titles, but as their authors (Hume, Robertson, Rollins).  The implied progress of William's reading suggests the possibility that fiction might be a gateway drug to more serious texts, but that once the reader finally encounters the Bible, no other text is worthy of attention.   In a way, the Bible is the object of William's and, later, George's romantic yearnings, desired yet regarded with shame, famous yet treated as a dangerous secret.  The two men repeatedly hide and ignore the poor thing, only to always return.  But although Leah Price argues that "it-narratives anthropomorphize the book at its moments of greatest vulnerability," this Bible undergoes little in the way of figurative mutilation or torment, aside from its occasional imprisonments.¹ Instead, it becomes most powerfully "human" at the moment of reading--so powerful, in fact, that it swamps the human subject altogether.  "My first salutation struck William" (5), the Bible informs us, swapping its own verbal address for William's act of reading (and implying near-physical shock into the bargain).  Their encounter is a "conversation" (5), and yet it is one in which the balance of power is being constantly negotiated.  The Bible may repeatedly "speak," erasing William's own role as the reader, but it is William who can quite literally "clos[e] my mouth" (5-6) or "allo[w] me to talk" (6).  The figurative violence of the Bible's "salutation" returns upon itself in the reader's domineering response, finally climaxing in a fight of sorts over the Law: William rejects it, the Bible warns him of damnation, and the result is a "sick and feverish" fit (7).  This is a classic moment in conversion narratives, the moment of terror in which the not-yet-believer finds himself convicted of sin, but yet without hope of salvation.  But it is also represented in terms of a conversation in which William actively participates, talking back to the Bible instead of merely being lectured.   In Price's turn of phrase, "the virtuous" recognize the Book's "subjectivity" (125), yet such recognition occurs in the context of rejection as well as assent.   George, too, will have a similar moment on his deathbed, when he finally opens himself up to the Bible's charges.   Debates over free will thus emerge in these moments of decision-making: do I read or not? Do I listen or not? Do I resist or not?

One of the odder things about this tract, though, is the way in which it erases its own circulation.  "I was sent for" (12), the Bible says, when it moves from the deceased William to George; "I became the inmate of a respectable family" (16-17), it goes on, as it makes its transit from George to the unnamed married couple.  Scenes of sale and gifting are usually played up, not down, in Bible it-narratives.  Here, the Bible simply moves, or is moved.  The sole exception is when George "made a present of me to some poor native" (15), resulting in a problematic missionary moment: the native (a slave?) cannot read the language.  In this mockery of evangelization, the Word goes forth to someone who cannot hear it.  Other slaves are luckier in their grasp of English, and enjoy the kind of conversational relationship with the Book that William and, eventually, George will have.  But in effect, these encounters suggest that human evangelical efforts are less relevant than the direct encounter with the Bible's own "good news" (16).  Like the conversational relationship between the bachelor sinner and his Bible, this account of good works amongst slaves suggests that although language may be difficult, its content, paradoxically enough, is not--the self-interpreting Bible once again made manifest.  Nobody needs to analyze this Book; one merely listens and responds to its edifying conversation, and Christianity is sure to follow.  (One can hear nineteenth-century High Churchmen grumbling somewhere, far off in the distance.)  

The Bible's "reward," as it were, is its final migration to the unnamed nuclear family, where it finds itself installed in a position of new domestic authority.  In the family, the Bible simultaneously remains dependent (it is "permitted to speak," "brought out" [17]) and authoritative ("I addressed, "commanded," "told," "bade" [17-18]).  The family subjects itself, in a sense, to its most potent object.  Unlike the bachelor associations of William and George, where religion appears to spread rather hesitantly through random male companions and oppressed "natives," the family provides the Bible with an opportunity to develop a sort of program.  Moreover, the family turns out to be a miniaturized version of the colony as a whole, Christianizing the colony through force of example.  Within the family, the Bible turns out to have yet another role--that of surrogate parent.   Companion, evangelist, parent, yet potentially always a prisoner once again, the Bible turns out to be both spiritual magician, converting those who cross its path, and weak, passive object, awaiting the reader who will release its force. 

¹  Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012), 128. 

Here or there

I've been writing some version of this blog for about a decade (it originated on Blogspot), and so Dr. Crazy's questions did strike a nerve.  It was always my intention to write an academic blog, and not a political blog, a personal-life blog, a travel blog, or anything else of the sort. In my case, that meant de-anonymizing fairly early on: it's very difficult to anonymously write about your research when the research in question occupies the nichiest niche that ever niched.  (Religion and literature: big business.  Nineteenth-century non-canonical religious fiction, with occasional visits by poetry: let me introduce you to all ten of us.  In the known world.  Quite possibly the galaxy.)  Moreover, when I started, I was a non-tenured sort of academic.  Then I mutated into a tenured sort of academic.  And now I'm at the point of thinking about applying for promotion to full professor.  Does this affect blogging?

Yes and no.  This school year has seen the blogging slow down considerably, thanks to the trials and travails of revising Book Two; I imagine it will pick up again once I can get my new project(s) under way.  But more than that, going up the academic ladder means...I've accrued commitments that are not a weblog.  Even though I hardly qualify as an academic "star"--more of an academic streetlight, maybe, or perhaps a nightlight--I'm at that point in my career where people ask me to do things, whether it be referreeing a manuscript, writing an article, or sitting on Committee #3921.  (As I recall, a previous chair's congratulations on my tenure application included the line, "And now, I have a committee I need you to be on.")   At the same time, there are also fewer subjects that I can write about, in large part because I'm not anonymous; some of the strangest/most frustrating/most aggravating experiences I've had as an instructor or graduate director just can't put in an appearance here, because there's no safe way to keep other parties nameless.  Too, some things I might have once posted here are now over on Facebook or Twitter.

Still, Twitter is hardly a substitute for a long-form blog post when it comes to writing up the latest Victorian novel about baptism.  Although it might be fun to live-tweet a religious novel, come to think of it...         

Sister Agatha: Or, "The New Catholic Teaching"

Of the many, many controversial novels I've discussed at this blog, the vast majority have involved Protestants and Catholics squaring off against each other, with occasional voyages into Jews and [insert Christian here] doing likewise.  William Henry Pinnock's Sister Agatha: Or,  "The New Catholic Teaching" (1876) is an interesting variant on the usual theme.  Not because the novel itself is remarkably well-executed, or because it has something to say that might come as a shock to the average reader (of this blog, at least), but because the controversy involved is really two modes of High Churchmanship squaring off against each other.  Instead of the relatively wide gap between, say, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, we have here two different claims to Catholicity and apostolicity, launched by someone who clearly fears that it is impossible to tell the difference between High Churchmanship (old style), Anglo-Catholicism (new style), and, of course, Roman Catholicism. 

Even though the novel's conflicts are set within the Church of England, the story itself takes place in France after the Commune.  At first glance, it's an odd choice of setting, underlined by the total lack of "fit" between the English characters and their environment: even though Mr. Stanhope, who carries part of the brief for traditional High Church positions, is a longtime resident, much of the novel's actual dialogue about France consists of complaints about the bureaucracy, the manners, and, of course, the Catholicism.  But this unease actually underlines the novel's point about the Church of England, which is that is a national institution in need of protection against incursions by the Catholic Other.  Even the title character is convinced that post-Communard France is intellectually, morally, and culturally degenerate, reduced to "'selfish brusquerie'" in the wake of calls for egalitarianism (107).  The novel's English are an enclave of Anglican good sense in a sea of French Catholic bad culture, bad ritual, bad theology, and bad art.  Railways treat passengers like "'beeves in a cattle truck'" (106), while the churches sport--or used to sport--statues of the Virgin Mary "with hideous features in jaundiced wax" and "eyes affected by strabismus" (53).  Pinnock paints France as somehow irredeemably ugly, despite all its associations (good food, good wine, good clothes...); it is what England could turn into, were the Catholic Church to take over.

In order to ward off this unfortunate event, the novel quickly devolves into its real purpose, which is to act as a manual for countering both Anglo- and Roman Catholic claims.   On the one hand, the novel supports Anglican sisterhoods; Mr. Perilyan, the Anglican clergyman who spouts most of the theological monologues, even has "'two daughters in two distinct Sisterhoods'" (164).  On the other hand, the book turns somersaults to distinguish the good Sisterhoods from the dangerous ones, those under the sway of the "'wide eirenic principle of Catholic union, charity, and large-heartedness'" (198).  Pinnock diagnoses a kind of slippery-slope problem in post-Puseyite theology, in which the Eirenicon's anti-Marian arguments have apparently vanished under the rolling rock of "Romanizing" sympathies.  Mr. Perilyan and the Stanhopes repeatedly accuse the sisterhood that Agatha is joining of being "'nothing less than a nursery of Roman Catholicism, under the guise of a Church of England sisterhood'" (137), warning readers in no uncertain terms that the "Anglo-Catholic" position actually constitutes a deceptive performance within the borders of Anglicanism.  All of the novel's tub-thumping is thus devoted to charting the precise boundaries separating Catholicity from Roman Catholicism, with a strong emphasis on eucharistic and sacramental doctrine.  (Sister Agatha's own High Churchmanship comes out most strongly in its attack on the right of private judgment.) 

The reason that nobody picks up on the distinctions, the novel argues, is lousy theological education.  In fact, our title character may qualify as one of the most inept fictional controversialists I've seen in some time.  No doubt the character's gender has something to do with it: she's unequipped with any of the languages she might need to study the relevant works.  But it gets worse, as they say.  Early on, she informs Mr. Stanhope that "'I must not venture upon argument: it is forbidden ground: and I dare not doubt the necessity of obedience to the injunctions of my spiritual superior'" (27), thereby wearisomely invoking every stereotype of intellectual self-abasement known to the reader of anti-Catholic polemic.  By no argument, of course, Agatha simply means no argument with her Mother Superior and confessor; she's perfectly happy to argue with Mr. Stanhope and Mr. Perilyan.  However, her contributions to the faux dialogues almost always fall into the forms of "But surely X did Y?" or "I heard somewhere that X."  Thus, on the question of whether or not Paul fasted before taking the Eucharist, she queries, "'But did not St. Paul in one of his journeys [...] adopt this very rule of fasting?'" (77)   One paragraph down, on the same topic, she does the same thing: "'But some ancient authority, I think, refers to this usage as prevailing immediately after the times of the Apostles'" (77).  And later, she tells Mr. Perilyan that she is "'almost certain'" that such fasting was practiced in the early Church (83).  Often relegated to one-sentence objections that are either heavily qualified or phrased as questions, Agatha consistently undermines both her voice and her authority to speak; she quite clearly has not mastered the "new Catholicity" (let alone the old one) that she wishes to preach to Stanhope and Co.  By the end of the novel, the new Catholicity has manifested itself as primarily an echoing theological void.

But the ending also does something unusual for a controversial novel: it declines to divert our heroine from her path.  When last we see her, she is off to "dissolve dear and loving family ties," preparatory to joining the convent she has been describing all along.  I've discussed paradoxically anti-controversialist controversial novels here before; this one too suggests the sheer uselessness of arguing theology with someone whose mind has already fixed on another position.   Despite the almost comically one-sided nature of the faux dialogues, Agatha's religious emptiness has not been filled by any solid Anglican knowledge.  It seems that force-feeding wandering Ritualists with a nourishing diet of old-fashioned High Churchmanship is not, after all, the way to go; those who have already proceeded well down the path to Roman Catholicism, the novel implies, probably cannot be reclaimed.   Only young women and men who have not yet fallen prey to stereotypically predatory priests in Anglican clothing can be saved from their fate...

ROTFL

I don't usually break out into uncontrollable laughter while teaching, but William Beckford drove me to it this afternoon.  We were looking at an excerpt from Beckford's satire Modern Novel Writing, and I called the students' attention to this--ah--remarkable paean to love:

And surely he well merited this faithful testimony at her hands, for it must be owned, that the arrows of true passion, when sharpened by the sceptre of disappointment, envelope the heart with a weight of woe, and forcibly obumbrate the finest feelings of the soul.

Never mind politely mixing your metaphors; this one has been stirred, shaken, violently blended, and then pureed.  It's "obumbrate," though, that really puts the whole thing over the top. 

(And then I laughed again when I realized that GoogleBooks has catalogued the novel's second volume only under Beckford's pseudonym, "Harriet Marlow," but that's another issue altogether.) 

 

A dancing card catalog (er, sort of)

For your delectation, some card catalogs at Yale University.  They sing! They dance! OK, the drawers move around in neat patterns.  But still!

 

How to celebrate sending the revised version of your book back to the publisher

(Bear in mind that it has to go through the second reading and the board, so this isn't the really, truly celebration...)

1.  Read freshman composition papers.

2.  Prep for Friday's class on Zofloya.

3.  Do MLA style checks on a couple of theses/advanced projects.

4.  Attend an MA oral defense.

5.  Finish reading two books I need to review.

6.  Start working on a graduate program-related request.

7.  Get back to work on annotated bibliography.

8.  Get back to work on editing Robert Elsmere. 

9.  Advise graduate students on Fall courses. 

I think I may be able to read a novel in here.  Somewhere.  Maybe. 

Chirp--er, tweet

Twitter and I have finally become acquainted (@MiriamEBurstein).