The Little Professor

Little Dorrit: V

In the final installment of Little Dorrit, scriptwriter Andrew Davies softens Dickens' characters to offer the audience a more upbeat and, in some ways, more conventionally romantic ending.  Thus, Arthur discovers the truth about his parentage, and in so doing belatedly experiences the maternal love he has always been denied.  (Like many canonical Victorian novels, Little Dorrit features a combination of dead and bad mothers.)  Mrs. Clennam dies almost at the same moment as her house collapses, instead of living another three years in a state of entire paralysis--a revision that heightens the symbolic (and literal, for that matter) implosion of her life, but also eliminates her equally symbolic imprisonment.  Astonishingly, Flintwinch turns out to have preserved the papers not to enjoy "knowing I had got the better of you, and that I held the power over you" (2.30), but instead out of moral compunction, a rather unwarranted redemption with no precedent in Dickens.  (Dickens' Flintwinch turns out to be a mini-Merdle of sorts, sponging off the Clennam accounts and then escaping from the fallen house to establish himself comfortably in Amsterdam.)  There is no mention of Mr. Meagles' ongoing distress over his daughter's marriage.  Meanwhile, those of us who were wondering how Davies was going to conclude Tattycoram's plot without landing himself in Unfortunate Implications got our answer: he simply skipped her self-abasing reconciliation with the Meagles.   

I did have a moment of serious anxiety when Arthur and Amy started kissing passionately in prison, because this is Davies and one tends to expect inappropriate heritage sex, but no sex ensued. 

But, speaking of Arthur and Amy, Davies' representation of their marriage also diverges subtly but significantly from Dickens'.  Here are the novel's last two paragraphs:

They all gave place when the signing was done, and Little Dorrit and her husband walked out of the church alone. They paused for a moment on the steps of the portico, lookmg at the fresh perspective of the street in the autumn morning sun's bright rays, and then went down.

Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness. Went down to give a mother's care, in the fulness of time, to Fanny's neglected children no less than to their own, and to leave that lady going into Society for ever and a day. Went down to give a tender nurse and friend to Tip for some few years, who was never vexed by the great exactions he made of her, in return for the riches he might have given her if he had ever had them, and who lovingly closed his eyes upon the Marshalsea and all its blighted fruits. They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed ; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar.

Arthur's and Amy's happiness makes no impact  on the wider world, which continues on in its "usual uproar"; indeed, Amy's goodness does not even improve her siblings' flaws so much as it compensates for them (after all, she takes care of her sister's children but cannot make her sister a good mother).  Moreover, once they leave the church, they are "alone," going forth together without the loving entourage of Meagles, Doyce, and company.   By contrast, the adaptation ends in an echo of the conclusion to Davies' Bleak House, with virtually all of the surviving protagonists (Flintwinch excepted) following the happy couple out of the church and into an otherwise depopulated walk.  This comic conclusion substitutes social harmony and the happily-ever-after for the novel's cooler vision of unrewarded private goodness and unwelcoming public chaos. 

Hit delete

I've spent part of this evening reworking an article for its second life as chapter one of Book Two.  Besides deleting a good chunk of the introduction (hey, look, the chapter just got shorter) and upgrading some of the primary sources (whoops, it just got longer again), I also took special pleasure in knocking out a paragraph that came to be solely because a reader demanded that I cite theorists X, Y, and Z. 

ME: But X, Y, and Z illuminate nothing in this article.  Zero! Zip! Zilch!   X even read a draft of this article and noted that my arguments and his did not cross paths!  Grumble, gripe, grouse.

RESULT: A paragraph citing X, Y, and Z, followed by the observation that the phenomena observed by X, Y, and Z did not manifest themselves in the novels under discussion.  End of references to X, Y, and Z. 

As I've mentioned before, theoretical work grounded in the canon does not necessarily translate well to, say, religious pop fiction.  My novelists do not always share agendas--intellectual or formal--with Dickens or Thackeray, let alone James or Pater.   It's possible that I may mention X or Z, if not Y, elsewhere in the chapter, but their work charts a historical path that doesn't intersect at all with what these non-canonical novelists are doing.  

This Week's Acquisitions

(Hey, it's our library's annual book sale.  Books for a quarter, anyone?)

• Charles J. Kickham, Knocknagow; Or, the Homes of Tipperary (James Duffy, n.d.).  One of the biggest bestsellers in Irish fiction during the nineteenth century, here reprinted in its 22nd edition.  More on Kickham here.  (eBay)
• Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (Andre Deutsch, 1987).  A historian reminisces on her deathbed.  (Library sale)
• A. N. Wilson, Daughters of Albion (Penguin, 1993).  The Lampitts deal with the 60s.  (Library sale)
• Henry Hitch and Baxter Hathaway, eds., Dramatic Essays of the Neoclassic Age (Benjamin Blom, 1965).  Anthology of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century critical essays, prefaces, satires, etc. on drama.  (Library sale)
• Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford, 1999).   Emergence of modern Irish literature as Irish literature.  (eBay)
• James Whisenant, A Fragile Unity: Anti-Ritualism and the Division of Anglican Evangelicalism in the Nineeenth Century (Paternoster, 2000).  Rise, fall, and collapse of the anti-Ritualist movement.  (Amazon)

Little Dorrit: IV

(Before I get to the episode, may I just say that Laura Linney's introductions would be more effective if delivered with less...melodrama? Better writing would help, not to mention more accurate writing [e.g., the mistaken i.d. of Flora Finching with Dickens' wife].  Also, a note to PBS: the preview included a massive plot spoiler for anyone who hasn't read the novel.  For crying out loud...)

This cluster of episodes drew out the thematic connections beween Merdle, Mr. Dorrit, and Mrs. Clennam, all of whom are trapped in figurative prisons of their own making.  Fittingly enough, while the viewer could still play "spot the prison bars" (fences, window panes), Dorrit and Merdle in particular repeatedly appeared as isolated figures in a hostile or unwelcoming crowd; each man suffers psychological battering from High Society's demands, whether it's Mr. Dorrit's growing paranoia about his genteel position (now manifesting itself in increasingly eccentric and even violent ways) or Mr. Merdle's glum and apparently inexplicable dismay at every reference to his success.  Both men, that is, squirm under the pressure of social fictions about their identity--except that in Mr.Dorrit's case, most of the fictions in question are in fact projections of his own psychological collapse.   As in the novel, though, Mr. Merdle remains a cipher; we overhear Mr. Dorrit's delusions, but have only incidental access to Mr. Merdle's (as when, for example, he asks if people are trying to take money out of the bank).  However, there is no sign of Mr. Merdle's famous self-handcuffing action.  (Incidentally, note the disapproving butler, whose performance comes just shy of outright disrespect.  The sniggering, class-conscious servant is a Dickensian motif.) 

It struck me that although many of the installments have involved consumption of some sort or another, it was most obvious this time around.  Amy disappoints her family because she is a terrible consumer: consistently attracted to some form of productive work, emotional or otherwise, she cannot accustom herself to the work involved in the "life of leisure," which is all about conspicuous consumption.  All of her pleasures relate to work or the memory of work; she can enjoy her uncle's music, a remnant of his professional career, but cannot master the conversational lingo of art appreciation (which, as it happens, has little to do with the art).  In effect, Amy flunks "accomplishments," those amateur feminine niceties that advertise her non-working--and thus genteel--status.  Unlike her sister, who advertises herself through loud makeup and equally loud clothing, Amy quietly refuses to turn herself into something to be devoured on the marriage market.  But consumption manifests itself in other ways as well, especially in the repeated dinner parties and, of course, the men whose lives appear to be sucked out of them once they enter Mr. Merdle's bank.  By the end of the episode, just about every man with cash has willingly thrown himself into Mr. Merdle's Sarlacc pit.

A historical novelist on working with sources, circa 1829

With that attention which is due to the Public, I have consulted a vast variety of books that are descriptive of the period, and most of the old chroniclers and black-letter volumes that treat on the subjects of my narrative.  In recurring to the suitable references, I found the most extraordinary discrepancies in many of their details.  However, as I was composing a romance, and not a history, I deemed it unnecessary to attempt to reconcile discordant accounts, conceiving that any one authority was a sufficient basis for the support of my relations.  Where I met with that, I was content to act upon its single evidence.¹

I've long since been disenchanted with attempts to fold historical fiction into historiography per se, but this is the most striking example of why that I've come across in quite some time. Miss Crumpe wants to cite her authorities and ignore them too: what matters is not the facts, but merely that some historical text recorded that such-and-such happened...whether or not it actually did.  Talk about the triumph of textuality! As it happens, Crumpe very much wants to produce a particular attitude to the past and its potential significance for the present, but she clearly thought that such a project required narrative probability, not accuracy.  The novelist's convenience trumps the historian's argumentation...        

¹ Miss [M. A. T.] Crumpe, Geraldine of Desmond, or Ireland in the Reign of Elizabeth.  An Historical Romance, 3 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1829), I:xxi.

This Week's Acquisitions

(Free books are always welcome...)

• James Howard Kunstler, World Made By Hand (Grove, 2009).  Apocalyptofic, upstate NY-style.  (Lift Bridge)
• Patrick White, Voss (Penguin, 2009).  Reprint of White's historical novel, tracking a nineteenth-century Australian explorer.  (Exam copy)
• Michael Sims, ed., The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime (Penguin, 2009).  A rather slim anthology of late-Victorian/20th-c. tales about crooks of all varieties.  (Exam copy)
• Barbara Hayley, Carleton's 'Traits and Stories' and the 19th-Century Anglo-Irish Tradition (Rowman & Littlefield, 1983).  Puts William Carleton's Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry into their literary-historical context.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Margaret Keller and James H. Murphy, eds., Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres (Irish Academic P, 1997).  Collection of essays in a number of disciplines, including history, history of religion, literary criticism, etc.  (Amazon [secondhand])

Friday periodicals + books + cat blogging

(Just fooling around with a new camera.)

First, a shelf with some Victorian religious periodicals:

Some of you may have been wondering what on earth a novel by Emily Sarah Holt looks like, anyway:

And, just to continue the theme, a cat in a bookcase:

Adventures in nonexistent authors (or, you thought I had it hard)

[Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt is working on a miniscule fragment from a book that no longer exists--and that also has what appears to be an impossible title.]

DAD: It's difficult to write about an author when you don't know who he was, or where he wrote, or when he lived...

ME: At least it rules out biographical criticism!

DAD: True.  It rules out most other forms of criticism, come to think of it. 

The Kill Call and The Birthday Present

After a steady diet of Victorian Catholic novelists, I felt a desperate need for...British mysteries.

1.  Stephen Booth, The Kill Call: This is the ninth novel in Booth's Cooper-Fry series, set in the imaginary town of Edendale in the real Peak District.  While not a historical mystery, the motivation for the novel's murders emerges from a death that takes place in 1968, and the novel moves back and forth between the present-day, third-person narrative and a fictional diary from 1968.  But the past impinges on the present in other ways as well, especially for our heroes: Ben Cooper still labors under the legacy of his father, a police officer murdered by thugs; Diane Fry suffers from the "flood of remembered sensations" (277) from her rape several years ago, not to mention her discovery that the case is being reopened.  In a sense, the ongoing conflict between Cooper and Fry itself derives from competing attitudes to England's history.  Cooper, the farm boy, enjoys what the novel represents as an almost instinctive, organic feeling for those English traditions rooted in the rural landscape.  Thus, he respects the cultural significance of fox hunting and has a long-standing fondness for Eyam (which also inspired this novel).  By contrast, the resolutely urban and figuratively homeless Fry (she spent her childhood knocking about in the foster care system) feels alienated, at best, from her rural surroundings.  If Fry's behavior appears to suggest that the city tramples the "authentic" Englishness of the country, though, this novel (and the others in the series) suggests that the country and the city are united, ironically enough, in their shared violence...and mutual incomprehension.

Although the novels occur in "real time," the characters don't age in tune with the years; thus, while The Kill Call's main action begins in 2009, only a couple of years have passed since the series began.  As a result, the series' character development makes snails look like they're breaking the sound barrier.  It doesn't help that every time Cooper and Fry near a rapprochement, Booth feels a sudden urge to inject new Tension and Existential Angst into the relationship.  This may frustrate some readers (do I sound frustrated?), especially because Booth unfortunately shares Reginald Hill's touch-and-go skill at establishing plots--and this novel's plotting is par for Booth's course.  Then again, the novel was a welcome break from Alice Sherwin. 

2.  Barbara Vine [a.k.a. Ruth Rendell], The Birthday Present: For me, Vine/Rendell (along with Minette Walters) has always epitomized what I call "British glum": dark, mostly pessimistic tales permeated with a grim sense of national decline. The Birthday Present offers "an account of a rise and a fall" (10)--specifically, the rise and fall of Ivor Tesham, an up-and-coming Conservative politician whose adulterous, kinky affair goes spectacularly haywire after Ivor's lover, Hebe, accidentally dies in a car crash during an erotic fake abduction.   We hear Ivor's tale through two first-person narrators: Ivor's uxorious brother-in-law Robin, extravagantly and unapologetically boring and bourgeois; and Hebe's alibi Jane Atherton, an unattractive, unemployed, and increasingly unhinged singleton.  For both characters, Ivor and his lifestyle exert a simultaneous attraction and repulsion, especially for the outwardly censorious Jane (who is nevertheless aroused by Hebe's fetish gear).  Significantly, this is not a crime novel, in the sense that Ivor commits a moral crime against Hebe's husband but no legal crime; instead, the entire plot hinges on Ivor's terror of that modern criminal court, the newspapers.  If the abduction itself would have merited a "snide little paragraph," the resulting disaster is worth "a front-page scandal story" (49)--and, of course, would bring about the likely end of Ivor's political career.  Moral judgement gives way to the society of (scandalous) spectacle.

In fact, this novel's "Conservatism" offers no alternative to liberalism or any sort of ism; it has no detectable moral content. Ivor's own career in politics doesn't appear to have anything to do with political convictions, and his public moral standing is, as Robin realizes, a projection for the media: "In those days of sleaze, with one Tory after another finding himself in trouble, his name sullied by sexual misbehavior, perjury, or other offenses, Ivor retained his pure image.  He was clean and manifestly seen to be clean" (189).  Moral "purity" exists solely as it can be captured by the cameras.  Robin  may seem like the moral counterweight to Ivor and his shenanigans--complete with his disdain for non-vanilla sex--until we register that Robin and his wife Iris never report Ivor to the police.  Far from being outside Ivor's plots, Robin and Iris are in them--and are from the beginning, since they let Ivor use their cottage for his illicit encounters with Hebe.  Jane Atherton is a far more stereotypical villain, her attempted (and thwarted) blackmail efforts partly the result of sexual jealousy, but her increasingly maniacal narrative voice obscures the fact that she is, in many ways, marginal to the main action, just as she is marginal in the rest of her life.    Even the most apparently "moral" characters, like the actor and crusader Aaron Hunter or Ivor's new girlfriend Juliet, swim in this decadent ocean; as another blogger remarks, this novel "is full of dull people all marked by the same breathless greed."  Like the characters in W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair, nobody exists "outside" the selfishness that Ivor exemplifies.

Rendell takes this theme further when Robin reflects on traditional notions of gentility and Ivor's predicament.  According to Robin, Ivor gets himself into trouble because he is "the quintessential English gentleman" and therefore "very afraid of ridicule" (145).  Given that Robin's list of the gentleman's qualities, including "an old-fashioned sense of honor" (145), does not exactly match up with Ivor's behavior (as Robin himself has to uneasily admit), it's difficult to know how to take this assessment: at best, it suggests that the gentlemanly ideal hardly offers an adequate solution to modern England's difficulties, especially given the lack of any other solutions on offer.   Again, Robin perceives that he too is part of the problem: "It's fear of being a prig, being seen to be a prig, that stops a lot of us taking a moral stand [...] Until well into the twentieth century men at least seemed to have no objection to telling a friend that he was a cad who infringed some unwritten code" (273).  If Ivor is a "gentleman," he is a gentleman in a world without the gentleman's necessary opposite, the "cad"--which suggests that without the apparently lost art of masculine self-policing, the gentleman and the cad may well pass for one and the same.  And the would-be moral agent quails at the thought of having his public image reduced to "prig."  Once more, we are in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, updated for the age of celebrity.  All questions of good and evil devolve into competing appearances; even a mediocrity like Robin, who keeps inserting Ivor into historical narratives about proper English behavior, cannot bring himself to risk public derision.  Without going into details, it's not at all surprising when Ivor finally takes the "traditional" gentleman's approach to dealing with his lost honor...only for it not to work.   

Little Dorrit (3)

The third cluster of Little Dorrit episodes hinged on the past's sheer inescapability: even as characters tried to forget, censor, or disown their disreputable past, they found that the past continually manifested itself in their very minds and bodies.  Mr. Dorrit, now wealthy--and thus possessed of a new lineage of sorts--disowns both Arthur Clennam and any mention of the  Marshalsea, but still interprets every action, every word through the Marshalsea prison; Mrs. Clennam, enjoined to "not forget," is all the more haunted by...whatever it is.  (Stay tuned!)  This return of the repressed past is even parodied in Rigaud's horrified encounter with Jeremiah Flintwinch (before Rigaud realizes, that is, that Jeremiah is Ephraim's identical twin).  Interestingly enough, once the Dorrits have left the Marshalsea and embarked on their "Grand Tour," they remain imprisoned by their surroundings, which often seem cramped even when outdoors--the Venetian canals, for example, or the ominously foggy forest (complete with weird zooming action).  We repeatedly see shots of Amy Dorrit looking not so much at her surroundings as up above them, perhaps contemplating the sky that she shares with her beloved Arthur.  Meanwhile, the prison bar motif continues, as when we glimpse Rigaud peering through windowpanes or, more significantly, Mr. Merdle through the bars of his parrot's cage. 

While Davies has, amazingly, managed to refrain (so far?) from his usual quota of heritage sex, the erotic hovers around the miniseries' periphery.  The most blatant example, of course, is Rigaud, who spends a lot of time invading the ladies' personal space; his stock villainy manifests itself in part as sexual threat.  But there are also more subtle examples, as when Amy encounters a handsome gondolier or when she briefly contemplates a bronze male nude...presumably missing its figleaf.  Amy's Grand Tour seems, in part, to be about sexual awakening.  While there's some obvious stereotyping going on here about French and Italian men, such sexual displays are exotic only because overt, as Mr. Clennam the elder's suspicious visits to the boarding-house suggest.