The Little Professor

Little Dorrit (I)

Unlike Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit does not suffer from a surfeit of adaptations; the last one, a self-consciously "authentic" six-hour film with a badly miscast Derek Jacobi, appeared two decades ago.  This newest adaptation, which first aired last year in the UK, runs even longer (eight hours), although the US broadcast does not follow the original UK division into half-hour chunks.  Writer Andrew Davies, whose very name strikes terror deep into the hearts of some Victorianists, so far appears to be respecting the novel's major plots and conflicts, although I balked at the transformation of Miss Wade into something verging grimly on lesbian stereotype.  Moreover, modern readers usually balk--violently--at the conclusion of Tattycoram's subplot, in which her experiences with Miss Wade teach her to control her own resentments: " I have had Miss Wade before me all this time, as if it was my own self grown ripe—turning everything the wrong way, and twisting all good into evil. I have had her before me all this time, finding no pleasure in anything but in keeping me as miserable, suspicious, and tormenting as herself" (bk. II ch. 33).   Now that she has seen the error of her ways, Tattycoram returns to her situation with the Meagles as a chastened, dutiful servant, right down to the insulting nickname--thereby aggravating legions of post-Victorian readers, who tend to think that the Meagles have not behaved as well as the novel thinks they have.  (Meagles at least grants that "Tattycoram" was perhaps not such a good idea.)  But casting Tattycoram with an Afro-Caribbean actress complicates the character's trajectory no end, because the family's condescension (and Tattycoram's occasional explosions of effusive gratitude) now has a racist dynamic.  It will be interesting to see if Davies manages to write himself out of this problem.

The most striking thing about the adaptation is the camera work.  The director, Dearbhla Walsh, loves shooting characters from directly overhead, thereby squashing them into the floor.  In addition, Walsh frequently positions characters right at the edge of the frame or partly outside it, instead of at the center; this either marginalizes major characters within their own scenes or fragments them entirely (an effect heightened by tight closeups).   The camera frequently "drifts" slowly across a scene, rather than maintain its original focus, or rotates on its axis so that the scene slides into a diagonal.  These techniques, combined with the dirty, dusty settings, suggest an off-kilter world in which all the characters equally struggle under a burden of Gothic oppression.   Nobody is at ease; nobody is "whole."   Not surprisingly, we frequently see the characters through ironwork or the spindles on a banister, suggesting (as the novel does) that the Marshalsea prison extends to all of London.  

Perspective

This puts my missing copy of The Transit of Venus into its rightful place...so to speak.  I've seen the British Library stacks, thanks to a reader of this humble blog, and can just imagine what would happen if you misshelved something.  (Via.)

This Week's Acquisitions

(Did I mention that I went to Powell's when I was in Chicago? Ssshh! Don't tell my parents.)

• William Clarke, Three Courses and a Dessert (Nonsuch, 2005).  Reprint of an 1830 collection of short stories, illustrated by George Cruikshank.  It's now better known for the illustrations than the stories.  (Powell's)
• Robert S. Surtees, Ask Mamma: Or the Richest Commoner in England (Nonsuch, 2005).  Reprint of Surtees' social satire, set among the rural hunting crowd.  Illustrated by John Leech.  (Powell's)
• Francine Prose, Judah the Pious (Macmillan, 1986).  Prose's first novel--a neo-Rabbinical tale of sorts.  (Powell's)
• Cynthia Ozick, Trust (Mariner, 2004).  Reprint of Ozick's first novel, featuring a young woman in search of her long-lost father.  (Powell's)
• Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (Walker, 2006).  Hefty study of eighteenth-century satirical culture, including artists like James Gillray.  (Powell's)
• Maureen N. McLane, Romanticism and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, 2006).  Literature and the "new" sciences of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, including the study of populations (Malthus, etc.).  (Powell's)
• Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Knowing Dickens (Cornell, 2007).  Dickensian epistemology, as it were.  (Powell's)
• Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Continuum, 2003).  Essays in book history.  (Powell's)
• Lucy Bending, The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Oxford, 2000).  Hellfire, vivisection, etc.  (Powell's)
• Hughes Oliphant Old, The Age of the Reformation (Eerdmans, 2002).  One volume of Olds' history of preaching.  (eBay)

That's a little gorier than usual

From a historical novel* about the Huguenots, set in the seventeenth century:

Joyfully she ascended the steps, quickly opening the glass door to show all her newly acquired treasures, when she stumbled over the bloody head of her father, the body from which it was severed lay at a little distance. As she raised her eyes from the dreadful spectacle, her mother's gashed dead body met her gaze. A little further on lay the murdered remains of her brother, with the legs and arms severed from the trunk. Her cherished and only sister lay also before her, divided into two parts.

This appears to be a story aimed at older children or teens, in case you're wondering. 

*--Mrs. John Cooke, Philippe: A Tale, Founded on Historical Facts (Dublin: George Herbert, 1872), 7.

Missing data

This most recent salvo in the professorial politics wars seems to be missing something: students.  (The first comment makes some valuable points about doing "[a]n ethnographic study of classroom practices.") I don't doubt the percentages of self-reporting faculty, nor do I think the faculty are lying or exaggerating.  But I also don't believe that most of us, even the most self-reflexive of us, possess full self-awareness about our performance in the classroom.  At the risk of making us all sound like the speakers in a dramatic monologue, our tics, crotchets, hobby-horses, and what-have-you all have a bad habit of manifesting themselves when we least expect it--and, often enough, without us knowing.  I'm skeptical about Stanley Fish's neo-Arnoldian vision of the classroom--a utopia of disinterestedness--precisely because we may unwittingly betray ourselves every time we step in front of the class to lecture.  Even the most controlled professor is still liable to slip now and then.  Self-reporting tells us what faculty think they're doing, or what they think they ought to be doing, or what they think the interviewer thinks they ought to be doing.  It does not, however, always tell us very much about what happens.

Ergo, students.  But students aren't a straightforward resource, either.  They may have partial information (e.g., their own grades, not necessarily anyone else's) or they may confuse a novel idea with a politically biased idea.   For that matter, they will have their own political, cultural, and religious biases, all of which will affect how they recognize and interpret their instructors' biases.   (And, of course, some of them may not really be going to class...) In fact, the inequality built into the faculty-student relationship may cloak some biases, even as it renders others visible; a freshman may not recognize a skewed syllabus, for example.  Nevertheless, a broad representative sampling should allow an interviewer to control for most of these variables.

To complicate matters further, though, I think students need to be asked about politics in the classroom at least twice: once while they're students, and once several years down the road.  Looking back at my undergraduate years, for example, I can think of two occasions when, at the time, I definitely thought that Someone Was Out to Indoctrinate Me.  In retrospect, I still think that was true in one instance--an absolutely infuriating assignment that couldn't be completed satisfactorily unless you bought the politics involved, no matter if you had empirical evidence to the contrary--but not in the other, which was a case of my confusing new information with biased information. (Obviously, whatever else concerned me as an undergrad, political bias was low on my list--like most of my fellow undergrads, my complaints usually focused on professional lapses that had zilch to do with politics.) 

Brief observation: Kisses of the Enemy

When I reached the end of Rodney Hall's dystopic Kisses of the Enemy, it occurred to me that I had read one too many metafictional variations on the power of narrative...because, despite my assumptions about where Kisses of the Enemy was heading, it was not heading towards a celebration of narrative power per se.  Hall sets his dystopia in a future republican Australia, headed by a real estate agent plucked out of virtually nowhere to become an all-powerful dictator.  Behind the new dictator, Bernard Buchanan, lies the shadowy (not to mention shady) American company IFID, which funds campaigns, arranges secret deals, and skims off all the profits. 

Hall spends much of the novel establishing what looks like a conventional binary opposition between a singular, "official" voice of authority and multiple, community-centered voices of resistance.  In his victory speech, Buchanan "was inventing, chanting, singing a whole history to come, his voice inducing a trance capable of shaking a nation" (131): this two-hour speech, which promises to reinvent Australia as an entirely new and utopian space, turns out to initiate eight years of techniques for silencing the opposition.  For Hall, these techniques logically extend earlier acts of silencing and historical erasure--in particular, the erasure of Aboriginal history.  Bernard temporarily succeeds as president because he so effectively presents himself as the voice of the nation; his official history of Australia even manages to overwrite his own sense of the past, leading him to confuse "what had been true before and which facts were his improvements" (369).  But Bernard's vulnerability to his own voice highlights the fictionality of this "singular" speaker: the state-sanctioned official voice requires multiple collaborators to function, ranging from censors to propagandists to blackmailers to volunteer spies to IFID itself.  In fact, the novel suggests, many of the oppressed collude in silencing alternative voices, either actively or through sheer inattention.   The narrative voice--which, when it calls attention to itself, turns out to be a collective "we" instead of an "I," in contrast to Buchanan--admits that "when we come to review this period, we find a montage of cut-and-paste images, a flash of action slipped in between monumental chunks of ceremonial architecture, an isolated gesture frozen to enigmatic completeness, a word shot in the chest or some fugitive trying to leap craters of cowardice" (143).  The all-controlling state creates a paradoxically fractured archive, filled with a multiplicity of fragmentary texts, images, and actions that of themselves form no coherent narrative at all.   Such breakdowns are echoed in the momentary lapses of Bernard's own subjective borders, in which he dreams the experiences of other people.  Who, then, reconstructs this novel's plots, and how?

If the official voice isn't singular, then it's not clear that multiplicity per se will fix much of anything.  Almost all of the characters who oppose Buchanan come from the ranks of the marginal: anyone who isn't Caucasian (all of them cooped up in a forced labor camp), homosexuals, prostitutes, the poor, artists.  Their work against Buchanan includes street theatre, painting, and, of course, storytelling.  The "Friends of Privilege" imprisoned in the labor camp, for example, create and distribute cereal packets printed with autobiographical narratives, wisdom literature, morality tales, parables, and so on--a riot of narratives drawn from multiple cultural traditions.  Similarly, near the end of the novel, a crowd of arrested women burst into "singing, acting, talking, dancing" (581), transforming masculine state action into a scene of feminized, carnivalesque play.  And, most importantly of all, Buchanan's wife Dorina testifies against him in a televised divorce case, turning the power of the media back on her husband and asserting the right to speak truth to power, as it were.  But none of this changes the political situation.  Our satisfaction in the novel's climax promptly deflates once we realize that IFID has plotted it all in advance.  The narrative folds just about every act of verbal or artistic resistance back into the system; only physical resistance potentially offers a way out of IFID's net, whether by blowing up a tanker or massing together quietly to protest a murder.  Yet again, one suspects that such acts have already been accounted for by IFID's apparently omniscient strategists.  "To keep our own country, we're going to be forced to fight for it" (620), realizes Buchanan's son Rory--whose voice breaks off in mid-sentence, leaving us with an open-ended narrative that literally lacks the final punctuation mark.  One wonders about that "we"...is it the collective voice of a truly independent state, or the collective voice of a state that merely believes it has escaped oppression? 

This Week's Acquisitions

• A. L. O. E., The Blacksmith of Boniface Lane (Thomas Nelson, 1895).  Reprint of Charlotte Maria Tucker's novel about the Lollards.  (Biblio)
• Philip Hensher, The Mulberry Empire (Knopf, 2002).  In 1839, British troops try to unseat an emir in Afghanistan.  Bad idea.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• William H. Gass, The Tunnel (Dalkey Archive, 2007).  Reprint of Gass' novel about a historian of the Holocaust who encounters serious writer's block while working on an introduction.  Hence the tunnel... (eBay)
• Christine Schutt, Florida (TriQuarterly, 2004).  Neglected adolescent reads stories.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Daphne du Maurier, Don't Look Now (NYRB, 2008).  New anthology of du Maurier's Gothic and horror tales, including "The Birds."  (57th Street Books)
• Shusaku Endo, Silence, trans. William Johnston (Taplinger, 1980).  Sixteenth-century Jesuits try to deal with persecution in Japan.  (57th Street Books)
• Francine Prose, Goldengrove (Harper, 2008).  Young woman deals with her family and the memory of a dead sister.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Harper, 2009).  An elderly Nazi reminisces...for well over 900 pages.  (BOMC)
• Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2006).  New edition of an extremely influential history.  (eBay)

Chicago Trek: Day Two

• The promised thunderstorms did not materialize.  Hooray!
• Needless to say, the book I most wanted to read has vanished into the ether, or at least into the murky, unfathomable depths of the Regenstein stacks.  (Insert various unprintable words here.)
• Nevertheless, I did read two Irish novels, George Brittaine's Irishmen and Irishwomen (2nd ed., 1831) and Cecilia Mary Caddell's Nellie Netterville (1867). Caddell's novel has the least manifest theological content of any novel I've read so far, even though the subject--the Cromwellian Settlement and the transplantation of landowners--involves considerable sectarian violence.  The novel proves conciliatory to Protestants: while it links Puritanism with the worst form of fanaticism, particularly in a long set-piece featuring Puritan soldiers torching a secret church with the congregation still inside, it also features virtuous and heroic Protestants who renounce extremism.  Nor does Caddell give any sign that these Protestants need to convert in order to be redeemed.  While the novel clearly links the settlement to contemporary Irish unrest, it also implies that Protestants and Catholics might be able to achieve some sort of harmony...at a future date.  Brittaine's novel addresses the Rockite rebellion (negatively), "New Light" Presbyterianism (positively),  the implosion of Protestant-Catholic relations (confusedly), Protestant Sunday Schools (positively again), and conversion to Protestantism (very positively).  This was all a bit too much for one 200+ page novel, especially because Brittaine pushes a strong anti-Catholic line while almost grudgingly admitting that Protestants and Catholics had been co-existing perfectly well before the "New Light" movement got going.  (Eyre Evans Crowe's novella Old Light and New Light harshly indicts the New Light movement for sparking sectarian conflict.)  That being said, I can't think of any other novel in which the evangelical heroine escapes assassination because some teenage scamp dumps a bucket of mud over her.
• I also came across this novel (first published in the 1850s) and its sequel.  They both look delightfully awful.
• There's another take on the Mystery of Edwin Drood just out?

Just what is your name, anyway?

C-18 L is in the midst of a discussion of Unfortunate Scholarly Editions and Inherited Errors, which juxtaposes nicely with the great E.C.A. problem.  E. C. A. wrote Geraldine, the subject of my previous post.  And there's no agreement on what her first name is, even though she came from a relatively prominent family.   So far, I've seen her identified as Eleanor C. Agnew; Emily C. Agnew; and, as of this morning, Elizabeth Constantia Agnew  (also).    To make matters worse, "Eleanor C. Agnew" is a Victorian i.d., not a twentieth-century guess.  

If Elizabeth Constantia Agnew is the correct name, then her name after taking vows was Sister Mary Clare Agnew.  She and the Sisters of Mercy did not altogether agree, it seems. 

Brief note: Geraldine: A Tale of Conscience

Midterm exams finally provided me with the opportunity to finish Emily (or Eleanor, depending on whom you ask) C. Agnew's Geraldine: A Tale of Conscience (1837-39), which is quite possibly the most famous Victorian Catholic novel of which you've never heard.  (Here's a young, anonymous John Henry Newman politely shellacking it.)  Geraldine was to Catholic controversial novels what Grace Kennedy's Father Clement was to anti-Catholic controversial novels: a breakout text, discussed in mainstream literary journals when its equivalents were pointedly ignored.  My own copy, from the 1880s, is the 14th edition, and there were multiple American printings (piratings) as well as translations into French and German.    Not that this makes Geraldine an especially entertaining read, given that it spends three volumes (or 612 pages in miniscule print) burying its just-barely visible plot under formidable heaps of Catholic Theology 101; as Margaret Maison once wearily complained, "depression and exhaustion from overdoses of theology are not confined to the heroes and heroines of these novels: the reader often suffers too, particularly the modern reader" [1].  It doesn't help that Agnew seems to have originally conceived the novel as a double-decker before she added on its final volume in 1839; the second volume's conclusion, in which our heroine's apparently anti-Catholic father admits that he's really a closet Catholic, wraps things up dramatically enough.  (General Carrington's "closet" status, an attempt to assimilate to the Protestant mainstream, turns out to be much more interesting than our saintly heroine's conversion experience; predictably, once Geraldine resolves not to conceal her own conversion, Agnew abandons the topic altogether.) 

Nevertheless, Agnew does attempt to do something original with at least one plot element: the symbolic marriage.  Geraldine's friend Mr. Everard, who believes that interfaith marriages "do the cause of true religion great service, by inducing constant concession and forebearance, and by compelling an acquaintance with each other's faith" (182), wants to marry the Protestant Geraldine off to the Catholic Eustace [2] de Grey and the Catholic Geraldine off to the evangelical Lord Hervey.  For Everard, such marriages are both instrumental (for furthering his pet project, the reunion of the churches) and symbolic (of the true unity of the Christian faith).   The outcome of such marriages, in other words, will be comic--a grand "marriage" of the faiths. Geraldine, too, finds the prospect of marrying Lord Hervey tempting, but the novel explicitly represents this temptation as temptation: she finds it hard to resist the allure of the "flattering suggestion" that such a marriage would broadcast the "purity" of her conversion, which gossip might otherwise ascribe to the attractions of Lord de Grey (242).  From the novel's point of view, both attitudes to interfaith marriage derive from Everard's and Geraldine's respective failures to submit themselves entirely to the guidance of the Roman Catholic Church; the two characters inadvertently elevate self-interest and worldly concerns over Church authority and, for that matter, even divine providence.  When Geraldine realizes her commitment to Catholicism, however, she finds herself beset with "scruples" about such marriages (268), effectively rewriting interfaith marriage as a symbol of schism rather than greater unity. 

Agnew soon pushes matters even further, questioning the comic potential of earthly marriage itself.  Instead of Lord Hervey, Geraldine marries the devout Eustace de Grey (who, incidentally, seems to entirely lose his sense of humor as a result).  But the result is not a long-lasting marriage with children.  Far from resolving Geraldine's spiritual journey (and the plot), Geraldine's hallowed relationship with de Grey turns into a time of probation and testing: after four years, Geraldine finally admits to Eustace that "I can love you only in God!" (459), only for Eustace to bluntly inform her that "in the instances [...] of the early saints, the consent of both parties was necessary, and I do not give mine" (460).  The year that follows, in which Geraldine learns to give herself up entirely to her husband's authority, does not bring with it greater marital harmony; in fact, even as Geraldine relinquishes self-will, she grows increasingly alienated from her husband, until he finally acquiesces to her desire for a celibate marriage.  Unfortunately, he does so in the prophetic belief that she is about to die--unfortunately, that  is, because he promptly falls into a river and drowns, executed by the exigencies of the plot.  Eustace's unwillingness to relinquish Geraldine turns out to be necessary discipline, stripping her of almost all the final vestiges of ego and preparing her for a life of total obedience.  But his bad (not to mention fatal) misreading of his own presentiments suggests that God nevertheless punishes him for his temerity.  In his (remarkably convenient) death, Eustace clears the way for the novel's truly comic vision of marriage: the mystical marriage joining the nun and Christ.  

[1] Margaret Maison, The Victorian Vision: Studies in the Religious Novel (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961), 148.  Also known as Search Your Soul, Eustace. 
[2] Nineteenth-centry religious fiction positively swarms with gentlemen named Eustace.