There's a noticeable trend in recent historical fiction that could be called the "mute inglorious Milton" plot. Nineteenth-century novelists enjoyed the missing heir plot: the poor, downtrodden man or woman at first seems unusually intelligent and virtuous for his or her class, but at the end s/he is providentially revealed to be a legitimate heir by birth. The character's talents and moral qualities thus become signs of natural gentility, not something to which the actual working class might aspire. By contrast, the mute inglorious Milton really is low-born. But, thanks to an unusual or even quasi-magical exposure to culture, the mute inglorious Milton reveals herself (she's often female) as somehow uniquely gifted. She may have a knack for aesthetics (Girl with a Pearl Earring), photography (Afterimage), nursing and medicine (The Dress Lodger, Year of Wonders), botany (The Linnet Bird), or, in a more metafictional mode, writing (The Observations, The Crimson Petal and the White). The novelist often juxtaposes the woman's newfound genius to overwhelming ugly, even Gothic social conditions, fraught with discrimination, hypocrisy, disease, filth, madness, and violence. In this extreme "historical" context, the mute inglorious Milton frequently--although not always--clears a path for some form of existence that is freer, unapologetically individualistic, perhaps counter-cultural.
Take Clare Clark's The Nature of Monsters, for example. Set in the eighteenth century, around the time of the South Sea Bubble, the novel combines first-person narrative and "documents" (their presence is explained at the end) to tell the story of Eliza Tally, the scrappy daughter of a rural cunning woman who is effectively sold to an apothecary. Eliza's mother engineers her daughter's folk marriage to a gentleman, only to discover that the man's father refuses to recognize the relationship; to make matters worse, Eliza is pregnant. Off Eliza goes to the London apothecary, Grayson Black, whose disfiguring strawberry mark has led him to study the material effects of the maternal imagination on unborn children. Much unpleasantness follows, including infanticide, drug addiction, psychological tortures of various sorts, insanity, and a dead monkey. After much angst of various sorts, Eliza seeks refuge in a proposed marriage to a Huguenot bookseller, only to find that the man turns out to be a petty tyrant. In the end, however, she finds redemption in two ways: her selfless love for Mary/Henrietta, a badly deformed "idiot" whose child she winds up raising, and her discovery of the power of language.
Healthy and "monstrous" forms of creativity permeate the novel. Grayson Black explicitly represents the female mind as itself monstrous and uncontrolled, a den of wayward emotions; he thinks of Eliza's son as "A male child perhaps but, born of woman, powerless against the violent of passions roused by the ardent nature of the female imagination & the failure of the weak & suggestible female body to resist the effects of such passions" (75). In effect, the child "conceived in perfection by the father" (75) turns ghastly under the wild mother's influence. Ideal male creativity would be entirely free of femininity. This somewhat Frankenstein-ian proposition itself generates a Frankenstein's monster of sorts, in the form of the horrific Mr. Black himself (who brutally experiments on Eliza, Eliza's son, and Mary). The irony, alas, proves heavyhanded. Over the course of the novel, Grayson Black's sanity collapses under the dual weight of his obsession and his drug addiction, while most of the other men (Black's apprentice Edgar, Mr. Honfleur the Huguenot) are themselves prey to monstrous fantasies: Edgar, a blackmailer-in-training, yearns for Black's death so as to marry Mrs. Black; Mr. Honfleur over-speculates on the stock market and loses everything when the Bubble pops. (The South Sea Bubble itself stands as a metaphor for imagination gone wild.)
By contrast, Eliza--barely literate when she arrives--spends the novel negotiating different ways of imaginative storytelling. She initially realizes the possibilities of fiction by telling stories to Mary, but these strories are really a closed circuit: "It was myself I sought to divert, to console" (135). Eliza's narratives turn into Cinderella stories, fairy tales about her perfect husband; they offer escape but not action. After the loss of her child, though, Eliza's anger leads her to discover the meaning of an audience--but the fictions she creates for an audience, inspired by a mountebank, are explicitly advertising for "Tally's Quickening Syrop" (194). This salesmanship may be other-directed, but it is also self-interested, directed as it is towards commercial gain and freedom from the Blacks; it's significant that her advertising fictions do not rescue her from her plight, any more than the fairy tales did.
What jolts Eliza into another linguistic realm is her exposure to Mr. Honfleur and his daughter, Annette, who embed literary quotations into their everyday speech--a practice which Eliza interprets as "borrow[ing] or "stealing the words" (212, 213). The Honfleurs are masters of appropriation, yoking "high" quotations to "low" meanings, tossing verses back and forth like a game, and incorporating the pleasures of culture into everyday life. For a time, the Honfleurs model an ideal relationship to language: their ongoing literary bricolage pays homage to the classics by incorporating them into the very fiber of the self. (Eliza imagines that Mr. Honfleur has "swallowed" the words [213].) Here, the reader too becomes "creative." And Mr. Honfleur inadvertently revitalizes Eliza's own creativity, by prompting her to turn her life at the apothecary's into "comic tales" (237). While Eliza finds that these tales "stripped them [her experiences] of their menace" (237), and thus act as the equivalent of the fairy tales, they serve a more significant purpose: they construct a bond between herself and her audience.
But this relationship, built as it is on a deliberately unrealistic foundation, also collapses. When Honfleur proposes marriage, Eliza fails to notice that he does so without taking her into account: "'We shall be married! [...] I shall take you as my wife. Such an arrangement would suit us both. We shall be married and live like kings on the proceeds of the Febrifuge!'" (277). In fact, after the proposal, Honfleur shows no regard for Eliza's wishes, forcibly educates her in high literary culture, and flaunts his relationship with her as a means of avenging himself on his now-married daughter. Eliza may have successfully entertained her audience, but "entertaining" and "understanding" are apparently not the same thing. Worst of all, when Eliza escapes from the apothecary's with a now-pregnant Mary in tow, Honfleur contemptuously derides her truthful account of their situation as "fantasies" and pointedly threatens to "silence" her (308). Where Grayson Black seeks to anatomize the threatening female imagination in order to control it through science, Honfleur tolerates the female imagination only so long as it pleases him, primarily by sticking to the trivial. And thus, the Honfleurs' use of quotation retrospectively becomes rather problematic: Honfleur remains content with his daughter so long as she speaks with the language of others, but cannot bear it when she speaks for herself; similarly, when he tries to introduce Eliza to poetry, it is to overwrite her own voice.
Eliza's final triumph over Mr. Black is, in effect, a triumph of voice. First, she successfully tricks him into believing that Mary has given birth to a monkey (a trick that takes in Mrs. Black as well); then, more importantly, she writes the novel we have just read. By the end, we can see why Clark incorporates Mr. Black's increasingly fragmentary "notes" into the narrative: as Eliza discovers how to tell stories, to explain to Mary's son how "he had held firm and come into the world in his own fine form, untouched by the perversions of a fiendish imagination, truly himself and truly loved, as completely as any boy in history or fable" (371), Mr. Black's voice trails off into often incoherent silence. His failed scientific experiments, the "perversions of a fiendish imagination," once again call to mind the result of male "creation" in Frankenstein. But, no longer mute, Eliza successfully contains Mr. Black's now-vanished threat within the urban Gothic of her narrative, as she once turned him into comedy for Mr. Honfleur. And, safely ensconced in a makeshift and unconventional happy family, located in a pointedly pastoral setting, with commercial success on the horizon, Eliza lives out the dream of the mute inglorious Milton plot: a life lived and narrated in a quasi-utopian space, where (for a moment, at least) society's monstrous corruptions do not quite reach.
A fascinating idea - it makes sense that there'd be a correlation between the literary and socio-economic zeitgeist that the author lives in.
What do you think might be the trend today, in the near future and possibly further on?
Posted by: Ben Elijah | December 13, 2007 at 05:14 PM