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])

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. 

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...

This Week's Last Month's Acquisitions

(Some books were awaiting me at the office...)

• Robert Haynes Cave, In the Days of Good Queen Bess: The Narrative of Sir Adrian Trafford, Knight, of Trafford Place, in the County of Suffolk (Burns & Oates, 1897).  Historical novel about Elizabethan recusants; as you might gather, the title is on the ironic side.   Despite the Catholic publisher, the author (c. 1830-1900) was an Anglican clergyman.  (Alibris)
• [Gertrude Parsons], Thornberry Abbey, a Tale of the Times (1846; Edward Dunigan and Brother, n.d.).  Reprint of a UK novel.  A Catholic satire on the Church of England; sometimes printed with the subtitle "A Tale of the Established Church."   Mrs. Parsons wrote a number of other religious novels, as well as a biography of Ignatius Loyola. (eBay)
• Suzanne Berne, The Ghost at the Table (Shannon Ravenel, 2006).  Family feuding, new and old.  (Barnes & Noble)
• Claire Messud, When the World Was Steady (Vintage, 2007).  Reprint of Messud's first novel about mismatched sisters.  (Borders)
• Gaynor Arnold, Girl in a Blue Dress (Tindal Street, 2008).  Neo-Victorian novel about the neglected wife of a famous novelist who suspiciously resembles Charles Dickens. (Amazon)
• Ronald McKerrow, Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Oxford, 1964).  Classic work in the field.  (Gift from colleague)
• Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, 1972).  Another well-known introductory text.  (Gift from colleague)
• Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticisms (Columbia, 2007).  Study of neo-Victorian fiction, film, etc.  (eBay)
• Ellen Rosenman and Claudia Klaver, eds., Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal (Ohio, 2008).  Essay collection devoted to "other" forms of Victorian motherhood; I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)
• Sally Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer (Virginia, 2004).  A biography and critical study.  (eBay)
• The Christian World Magazine and Family Visitor (2 vols., 1877 and 1884).  Congregationalist magazine edited by novelist Emma Jane Worboise. (eBay)
• Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography (Cambridge, 2006).  How we came to think of Satan as the Number One Bad Guy.  (eBay)
• Peter Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell, 1994).  Publishing and selling Bibles in the US.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• John Wolffe, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (British Academy, 2001).  The religious and cultural functions of nationwide mourning.  (Amazon [secondhand])

Unexpected translations

I hadn't realized that Emma Jane Worboise translated Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi sposi (The Betrothed).  It's rather an odd fit, theologically speaking, although Worboise presumably thought that it was a great novel. (Or something that would increase sales, take your pick.)   Nevertheless, there it is, in one of the volumes of Worboise's Christian World Magazine that recently wandered* into my mailbox. (Mentioned in passing here, by a reviewer who also appears somewhat startled.) 

*--Purely by accident, you understand. 

Off the beaten (library) path: two nineteenth-century novels

1.  George W. M. Reynolds is the most famous of those Victorian novelists who specialized in true-blue, honest-to-goodness sensationalist schlock.  Wagner the Werewolf (a.k.a. Wagner the Wehr-wolf) is a brilliant example of commercial Gothic gone hilariously haywire.  Reynolds cobbles his eye-poppingly complicated plot together out of every Gothic trope you can name, so that in short order, we have the following:

• Hot-blooded Italians;
• A vengeful Greek;
• Bandits hanging out in caves;
• The Inquisition;
• Torture by rack in same;
• Vows;
• Adulterous sex/out-of-wedlock sex;
• Rape fantasies;
• A convent with beautiful young penitents flagellating themselves while in various advanced stages of undress;
• A beautiful and murderous deaf-mute (or is she?...);
• People with faux exotic names ("Nisida");
• Various dead people;
• Young lovers in distress;
• An uncharted desert island, primarily occupied by anacondas;
• An Orientalist fantasy about Suleiman the Magnificent's sister;
• Suleiman himself;
• A self-involved, ambitious young man converting to Islam;
• Slaves who go about assassinating people;
• Skeletons in the closet (figuratively and literally);
• Rosicrucians;
• Faust (!);
• Angels;
• The devoutly Catholic (!!!) werewolf of the title.

Oh, and Satan.

At its core, this globe-trotting, multiplot novel narrates Wagner's quest for redemption after his initial fall into werewolfhood.  Originally an impoverished old man, Wagner gives in to the temptations offered by a wandering John Faust and becomes brilliant, rich, and decidedly sexy.   Alas, he does turn into a wolf every month, but one can't have everything.   His hotness (when he isn't sporting a pelt)  catches the eye of Nisida, deaf-mute (so it appears) daughter of an Italian Count...and we're off.  Nisida turns out to have some rather bad habits, like murdering suspected rivals for Wagner's love, consigning her brother's girlfriend to a nasty convent, and the like; nevertheless, she too turns out to be on the fast track to redemption.  Wagner redeems himself thanks to some prophetic angelic visions, which wean him off of his lust for Nisida (consummated on the uncharted desert island, where they are "wedded [...] in the eyes of heaven" [228]) and turn him away from the blandishments of the BIg Evil One.   In effect, Wagner reverses the original Faust legend (with which the plot has more in common than Goethe's version).  Readers may be a bit startled by the cheerfulness with which the narrator pronounces Wagner and Nisida headed off to heaven at the end, given that both of them have offed multiple people--this is Christianity as Monopoly's "get out of jail free" card. 

Wagner isn't precisely a page turner, I think, but as it scrambles to hit every sensationalist trope it can, it acquires a certain amusement value. This is one of those times when the words "you've just got to go with the flow" seem appropriate.  The novel certainly provides a useful reminder that the Victorians, despite what you may have heard, got a real kick out of sex, violence, and half-naked women.  (If I had a dollar for every time various protuberant portions of the female anatomy started "heaving," I could buy myself several more bookcases.)  Historians might also note that Reynolds hits a topical note: a Jewish money-lender, who turns out to be arguably the nicest person in the plot, is persecuted on trumped-up charges of blood libel.

2.  Equally odd, but in a different way, is Confessions of a Methodist (1810), originally serialized in The Satirist and now, apparently, super-duper-rare.  It's a parody of William Huntingdon's (or Huntington's) bestselling Bank of Faith, and proceeds by stitching Huntingdon's language directly into the anonymous author's own narrative; at the end, the author takes matters even further by constructing a new Methodist hymn out of single lines taken from multiple real hymns.  (I've not found an identification for the author yet, but I wouldn't be shocked if it were Theodore Hook--the author takes the censorship of one of Hook's plays very, very personally.)  Rather like Wagner, the Confessions is one vast mash-up, combining Huntingdon's book with a proposal for a play, a fake hymn, excursions into the epistolary genre, commentary on Methodist preaching, and bad Scriptural exegesis.  The novel's biggest running joke is the Methodist's way of interpreting so-called special providences: e.g., he excuses his poaching by explaining that "[b]oth pheasants and hares have I found thus, when having faith that I should find them if I sought them in the right way, they have placed themselves opposite to my gun, as I have been firing" (36).  When our Methodist isn't poaching, he's sleeping with every woman in sight, soon concluding that it's best to commit adultery (as any children that might result will be laid at the husband's door).  On a considerably darker note, it's strongly implied that he murders several of his own children in order to save money.  In the end, his life of theft, illicit sex, possible murder, and general fraud finds its just reward...in his remarriage to a woman wealthier than his first wife. 

The author's (Hook's?) target here isn't just Huntingdon, but the evangelical emphasis on justification by faith alone.  While the novel clearly takes the Established Church as the norm, its satirical conclusions about the moral effects of this doctrine anticipate those of the Victorian Catholic novelists.  As one might expect, the satire is beyond unfair: the Methodist slips down the slope faster than you can say sola scriptura. 

Wuthering Heights (One)

I've mentioned before that while Jane Eyre has generated more TV and film adaptations than anyone would want to sit through, it is not really an adaptation-friendly novel: stripped away from Jane's voice, many of the events lose their force or, sometimes, become downright silly (the telepathy and the shattered tree being the two most notorious examples), and the novel's Gothic overtones call for something other than cinematic realism.  But Wuthering Heights takes these problems and multiplies them.  We have two unreliable narrators, only three settings (Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange, the moors), and some of the most unpleasant protagonists in all of Victorian literature.  To make things worse, pop culture has turned Cathy's and Heathcliff's relationship into an accumulation of romance tropes, and adaptations frequently engage with the romance-ified tradition about the novel--not the novel itself.  (When a couple of my students did oral presentations about WH adaptations, they were shocked to discover just how often film scripts translated the couple into the most cliched of romance conventions.) 

So far, this newest adaptation is making some interesting choices.  Peter Bowker, who wrote the script, faces the unreliable narrator problem head on: he eliminates Lockwood altogether and turns Nelly Dean into a relatively peripheral figure, but he uses the novel's unreliability to his own advantage by reworking Heathcliff.  (There's also a good moment in which a scene that causes eye-rolling among many of my students--Heathcliff digs up Cathy and discovers that she hasn't decomposed!--turns out to be Heathcliff's hallucination.  Of course, the sight of Heathcliff cuddling Cathy's skeleton may cause some viewers some dismay.)  The script dislocates the viewer by beginning in medias res, with Linton Heathcliff (rather older than he ought to be?) departing the Grange for the Heights--I wondered briefly if I had missed the first half.  This being the twenty-first century and sex, apparently, being a must, the novel's passing hints that Heathcliff is Mr. Earnshaw's illegitimate child become overt here, making it far more likely that Heathcliff's love for Cathy is incestuous.  Which does not help matters any when Heathcliff and Cathy, er, get it on while out on the moors.  (Incidentally, everyone is aged up in this adaptation, not just Linton H.--Cathy enters Thrushcross Grange for the first time as an adult.)   At the same time, it's clear that Heathcliff, to put none too fine a point on it, is...a horrifying excuse for a human being.  He gloats when Hindley's wife dies in childbirth, wanders around uttering dire imprecations against all and sundry, and, most importantly, rejects Cathy when she comes back from Thrushcross Grange; in the novel, Cathy's aversion to his dirtiness is the first sign that their relationship has altered.  Under the circumstances, Cathy's decision to marry Edgar Linton is less Tragic Bad Planning and more Basic Common Sense. Heathcliff spends this adaptation in a state of self-willed self-destruct, even though characters like Hindley treat him horribly.  Far from being a departure from the novel's themes, this take on Heathcliff's character addresses Bronte's interest in the question of nature vs. nurture.  So far, nature seems to be winning. 

This Week's Acquisitions

(More than one this time! Er, two.)

• Helmut Krausser, Eros, trans. Mike Mitchell (Europa, 2008).  Man reminisces about a peculiar fixation.  (Borders)
• Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (Penguin, 1993).  Reprint of Cahan's novel about a young Jewish immigrant working his way through early twentieth-century NYC.  (UC Irvine Bookstore)