The Little Professor

A Protestant Converted to Catholicity by Her Bible and Prayer-Book

Back to actual Victorians.  Fanny Maria Pittar's A Protestant Converted to Catholicity by Her Bible and Prayer-Book (c. 1846-47) was a popular nineteenth-century conversion narrative, reprinted fairly regularly on both sides of the Atlantic and (in translation) on the Continent until 1911.  As the preface to the 1904 edition explains, the narrative details events that took place in the early 1840s, ending in 1842 with her stepfather's/father-in-law¹ refusing either to accept her back into the household and or to allow her contact with her own children (xii).  (Eventually, she would up absconding with the children to France.²)  The major Protestant magazines appear to have pretty much ignored the book entirely, although it did spark one furious and spluttering review--complete with sexual innuendo--from The Bristol Protestant. 

Structurally, the book is a real mess: Mrs. Pittar was apparently unable to decide whether she was straightforwardly expounding Catholic theology, exhorting Protestants to convert, or narrating her own conversion.  It's possible, of course, to do all of these things at the same time, but in practice, we have a lot of the straightforward expounding, climaxing with the exhorting, accompanied by only intermittent narrating. (There are also  some rather odd moments that apparently went unmentioned for several decades, like the time she accuses Henry VIII of executing Anne of Cleves [117].) Nevertheless, what's interesting about the book is its marketing technique, as it were.  As Brownson's Quarterly Review pointed out, the book "bears a false title": "[...] all the Bible and prayer-book had to do with her conversion was simply, that, after her eyes were opened to Catholic truth by other means, she was able to perceive it in the Bible, and some vestiges of it in the Book of Common Prayer."  Although the reviewer's objection is accurate, it misses the book's rhetorical strategy.  Near the end, Mrs. Pittar tells her readers that

My Bible is now a treasure beyond all price, and that respect I blindly rendered it as a Protestant, I can now consistently and with the homage of the head as well as the heart offer it. It led me to Catholicity; and to the Catholic Church alone am I or any one indebted for it ; for as a Catholic only can I render it the honour due to it. To me it is henceforth infallible, because I have it through an infallible interpretation. (186)

The book's very title had already announced its (to a Protestant) shocking conclusion: that "searching the Scriptures," along with the Book of Common Prayer, would yield not the "obvious" conclusion--namely, that Protestantism was the way to go--but that the Scriptures themselves adequately demonstrated that the Roman Catholic Church was the one true church.  That is, sola scriptura, far from returning the reader to a primitive faith that looks suspiciously like modern Protestantism, instead converts the anxious inquirer to Catholicism.  The book's self-advertisement suggests that Protestant methods, taken to their logical extreme, necessarily lead to Catholic conclusions about Bibical "interpretation."  As the Brownson's reviewer rightly points out, however, Pittar actually cannot make Catholic sense of the Bible until other Catholics map out the right way of approaching it--the interpretive framework precedes the act of reading, as opposed to the act of reading leading to the interpretive framework.  

Nevertheless, Mrs. Pittar's polemical overstatement lines up with contemporary Catholic conversion novels, especially in her turn to prooftexts.  By downplaying the role of Catholic instruction while emphasizing her apparently private encounter with the Scriptures, Mrs. Pittar deliberately duplicates Protestant conversion narratives, fictional and otherwise, in which the Bible alone effects the reader's conversion.  As it happens, in the 1904 edition, Protestant Converted offers about forty straight pages of prooftexts (intermingled with explication), all intended to demonstrate that the Bible supports every position that Protestants deny.  (Needless to say, this is before Mrs. Pittar tackles the Book of Common Prayer.)  Under the circumstances, the narrative hints strongly, Protestants can only refrain from conversion by either extreme denial or willful misreading.   

¹ Mrs. Pittar married her stepbrother.  

² This author appears to have a date wrong somewhere, since Mrs. Pittar's son Joseph is said to have been born in 1856--even though Mrs. Pittar's only husband had died over a decade earlier...

Sherlock Holmes

After glimpsing the trailer for Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, many Victorianists trembled in their shoes and reached for the smelling salts.  Having now seen the film, I can certainly confirm that none of us will be assigning it for its historical details, let alone for its fidelity to the canon: it takes place at some undisclosed and unrecognizable moment in the late nineteenth century (shortly after the Civil War, apparently), involves mass hysteria brought on by supposed acts of black magic (Doyle always made sure to keep his conspiracies behind the scenes), and defies any attempts to relate it to the stories' chronology (Holmes has never met Mary Morstan, even though she was his client in The Sign of Four; Watson hasn't begun writing yet; Holmes and Irene Adler have had a long...er...relationship; etc.).  So what can we make of it, either as an action film or, dare we say, as a Sherlock Holmes adaptation?

Although stories like The Hound of the Baskervilles at first seem to involve other-worldly situations, Holmes always brings them back down to empirical reality.  In that sense, the stories descend directly from Radcliffean Gothic, with its manmade horrors.  Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes blows up this rationalized Gothic mode into broad parody.  The super-evil Lord Blackwood, whom we meet at a Black Mass, is hanged for five murders.   And then, after he offers Holmes a pre-execution apocalyptic prophecy, Blackwood...rises again.  Good heavens, it's Christ! Or the Antichrist! Or, er, somebody.  It turns out that Blackwood is the illegitimate son of the leader of a mystical secret society, which, when its members aren't having hot sex under the guise of Ritual, apparently Controls the Government.  (Somebody has been reading a little too much Dan Brown.)  Meanwhile, accompanied by his trusty familiar, a crow, Blackwood offs daddy, then an impudent Yank named Standish, and finally plots to murder all of Parliament.  Needless to say, this is bad.  Complicating matters further, Holmes' old nemesis/flame Irene Adler returns, in the pay of someone who turns out to be a sequel hook.   Last but not least, Holmes' investigation is mildly hampered by his bromantic sulks over Watson's imminent marriage.

To the extent that the film shows any sign of a functional brain, it lies in its heavy-handedly ironic take on imperialism.  Lord Blackwood plots not only to subjugate a degenerate British government, apparently populated by legions of old men, but also a "corrupt," "weakened" United States; ultimately, he plans a new, "immortal" world order, united in its fear of his deadly magical abilities. (J. Hoberman calls this the film's "near-subliminal references to terrorism.") For backup, Blackwood has his steampunkish WMD.  However, his fantasies of empire take place in a rotting capital, dominated by rust and filth, and decorated in a color palette that runs from grey to black.  (And occupied by people with terrible teeth.)  Several of the film's set pieces involve various examples of Victorian manufacturing prowess falling over, falling in, or blowing up.  In other words, it's not as though the empire is in good shape at home.  Blackwood's reign by superstitious terror meets its match, though, in Holmes' powers of empirical observation, in a moment that luxuriantly parodies the standard Summation.  The forms of power involved all boil down to the Great Man, whether he's swaying thousands by sleight-of-hand (which, after all, is what this mysterious "order" basically is) or untangling deception to get at the truth.  Just add reason, and the bad guy is left *cough* hanging.

Of course, when Holmes isn't reasoning, he's beating people up.  This is not all that far out of line from Doyle's originals, although Ritchie's Watson is, somewhat oddly, a bad shot.  (Decades ago, an article in The Baker Street Journal pointed out that if you wanted something dead, you'd best have Watson aim the gun.)  Unfortunately, the action scenes all outlive their welcome (like the film, come to think of it); to make matters worse, they're edited in Ritchie's signature style, which renders the fight choreography almost totally incoherent.  The violence itself quickly becomes cartoonish--often ludicrously so--not least because Holmes and Watson appear to be impervious to injury.  When Watson gets blown up, for crying out loud, he winds up with a few minor cuts and an arm sling, instead of massive scarring (and, well, death).  As Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt pointed out, there's definitely a B-movie feel to all the slapping, punching, exploding, shooting, and kicking, and some of the set pieces appear to have come straight out of the serials.

The somewhat homoerotic B-plot itself has been anticipated by several Sherlock Holmes pastiches (e.g., most explicitly, Sherlock Holmes and the Mysterious Friend of Oscar Wilde), and, to a lesser extent, the Jeremy Brett adaptations.  (By this point, all Sherlock Holmes adaptations feel a bit belated.)  But Holmes' prankish attempts at derailing Watson's marriage are a dead ringer for recent events in another Holmes knockoff: House M.D.  Think House's various machinations to split up Wilson and Amber, and you've got this film's dynamic exactly.  The conclusion, in which Holmes buys Mary Morstan the engagement ring--a suitably over-the-top diamond--seems to keep his part in this triangle alive (not least because Watson describes the ring as Holmes' gift to "us," suggesting a rather different view of who is marrying whom...).  Of course, while Watson is heading off to domestic peace (at least, until Holmes grabs him again), Holmes finds himself unable to get it on with his One True Love, Irene Adler: alas, the only woman for Holmes turns out to be too amoral for Romance, and in a nod to The Maltese Falcon, he abandons her to justice.  (Or not, depending on Irene's skills.)  True Love would make Holmes much too bourgeois.

Irene Adler poses another problem, which is that actress Rachel McAdams has little presence and even less romantic chemistry with her Holmes, Robert Downey, Jr.  Downey looks wrong for Holmes, especially for anyone who has had heavy doses of Brett and Rathbone, but his offhand, lightly rueful delivery actually works rather well; moreover, he has the requisite chemistry with Jude Law, who comes across as warmer than his general wont.  Refreshingly, both men are the right age, for once, and Law also matches the Paget illustrations.  It's nice to see another  intelligent Watson, following on the revisionist Watsons (in the sense of revising the Nigel Bruce Watson) of David Burke, Edward Hardwicke, and, most recently, Ian Hart.  Nobody else, the villain included, makes much of an impact, although character-actor spotters will notice James Fox and Eddie Marsan.  

Overall, in the interests of avoiding any wailing and gnashing of teeth, it might be best to regard this film as a Sherlock Holmes send-up.¹  There are the expected shout-outs to the stories themselves, from quotations (the pocket watch episode, game being afoot, etc.) to more subtle allusions (Gladstone the bulldog clearly refers to Watson's mysterious and much-explicated "bull pup" in A Study in Scarlet).  At this point in the history of Holmes pastiches, such allusions are a wink at audience expectations; the characters come burdened under the weight of hundreds of adaptations.  But the plot is so ludicrous, the violence so corny, the solution so hammy, that the whole affair eventually turns into fond, if ultimately wearisome, self-mockery.  

¹ Andrew L. Urban and Louise Keller also note the elements of "parody" coming into play (albeit, they suggest, not always intentionally).   

Profession 2009: Fishing

Profession 2009 includes, among other things, a cluster of essays from a panel devoted to Stanley Fish's Saving the World on Your Own Time, complete with Fish's rebuttal.¹  Not surprisingly, the essays focus on the possibility of a classroom free from political advocacy--the possibility, that is, of "maintain[ing] an analytic distance from the materials you are studying," as Fish puts it (103).  Fish insists that this process is, in fact, "entirely possible" (103) for anyone who puts his or her mind to it.   The panel was not quite so sure. 

Of Fish's four interlocutors, only Andrew Hoberek comes across as particularly sympathetic: noting that his "own experience as a college English teacher since the mid-nineties has been that students are bored by easy political readings but perk up when they think they're actually learning something about how fiction, poetry, or some other genre works," Hoberek suggests that students are most engaged by "techniques for doing something with something" (82).  By contrast, Jonathan Culler argues, contra Fish, that "in education all effects are contingent" (i.e., students may well not learn the instructor's political ideals--but, then again, they may not learn the difference between an iamb and a trochee, either), so that "[i]t is also possible that if we think that the values we would like to spread are based on a just assessment of the past and present, they will be more effectively transmitted if we present the evidence, shape the questions, and allow the students to reach their own conclusions" (87).  By and large, however, Culler interprets Fish as a bit of a ham, a "provocateur" (87), whose pedagogy is exemplary for...nobody, really.  (Which makes Fish excessive, but also completely marginal.)  More bluntly, Judith Butler and Patricia Bizzell both insist that Fish's model is either impossible or undesirable.  According to Butler, Fish offers an "overconfident distinction between the form of such arguments [about "justice and equality"] and their content" (91): analyzing the form and history of an argument is all very well, she says, but "what would it mean to say that under no conditions should we ask students to have and debate a point of view on what a just society is and to give reasons that support that point of view?" (92)  Similarly, Bizzell argues in favor of incorporating contemporary social issues into the rhet-comp classroom.  On the one hand, by recognizing that "[o]ur increasingly diverse student populations brought valuable discursive resources to the academy from their home communities," we have "enable[d] the academy to do intellectual work that could not be done with only traditional discursive resources" (95).  On the other, Bizzell argues that since we can never achieve "purity," she "may inevitably" bring her political positions into the classroom (98).  We have at least three votes against Fish, whether because of eccentricity or sheer improbability.

Fish proceeds to whack everyone around like shuttlecocks:

• Bizzell's model, he argues, does little to help students "understan[d] what sentences are and how they work"; the right way to go about teaching students the nature of sentences, then, is to open with "questions and problems that trade on no particular socioeconomic presuppositions," which will take care of any "'differentials'" that might arise (100).  Moreover, Fish denies any relationship between identity and scholarship.  Citing himself as an example--a Jew who specializes in "nondramatic Christian poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries"--he notes that "achieving that expertise was my job; being or becoming a Christian wasn't" (101).  As for values, "not all the values I hold are relevant to every situation I find myself in" (101).
• As for Culler, Fish notes that while you may well bore your listeners out of their minds, they still might learn something, whereas "you have no chance at all (I contend) of turning students into admirable persons or workers for justice" (102).  
• This gets Fish to Butler, of whom he is most dismissive.  In a "course on ethics," the instructor and students are "studying ideas about ethical behavior, not modeling it" (102); by the same token, Butler's belief that you cannot take a position in a philosophy course only stands, Fish argues, "if you believe that it is either impossible or unworthy to maintain an analytic distance from the materials you are studying" (103).  

What interests me about this debate are the shared assumptions about pedagogy and classroom performance.

Both sides assume that their approaches are pedagogically effective, whether by "effective" we mean that students learn critical thinking, sentence structure, grammar, argumentation, or something else entirely.  It's not clear to me, however, that either side actually knows this.  Fish, for example, doesn't demonstrate that students come out of his classroom knowing how to write sentences, as opposed to understand how sentences work; the two things are not, in fact, the same.  By the same token, Bizzell's arguments for the success of her culturally- and politically-engaged method don't actually point to anything that might demonstrate it, other than new approaches to professional scholarship.  (Which is hardly the same thing as student success.)  Because writing instruction requires frequent reinforcement in every course at every level, not just in a course cordoned off as "the writing class," it may be the case that we can't really demonstrate over the long term that one pedagogical approach in one course does much of anything for the student.  (I've seen outcomes assessed for a single course,  outcomes assessed within a major, and outcomes assessed for entire student bodies, but to test a particular pedagogical approach in a particular skills-based course, wouldn't you need to follow one instructor's students across the entirety of their academic careers? Or, rather, multiple instructors using the same approach, to control for different levels of teaching ability.  And even then, it seems to me, there would be formidable variables--not least of them, demands that students "unlearn" what they learned in comp.  Feel free to correct me.)  

I'm also fascinated, though, by the extent to which these arguments presume self-consciousness during the act of teaching.  Fish takes by far the most extreme position: he seems absolutely certain about what he is and is not doing in the classroom. "If you start" with this, then that "will" happen (100); we have "no chance" (102) of doing this other thing; "I don't" do this, as opposed to that (102); "I have done it for years" (103); and so forth.  Bizzell and Culler both acknowledge the role of "contingency," in different ways, but still argue that it is possible to do intentionally what one might otherwise do accidentally.  Butler doesn't directly address the issue at all, but describes the aims of engaged teaching as something relatively straightforward: "There is a substantial difference between saying that a point of view ought not to be imposed and saying that there ought to be no points of view or that pedagogy is not centrally engaged with the question of formulating points of view" (93).  In other words, the instructor should be able to know when they're practicing these projects or positions (imposition/absolute withdrawal/teaching how to have a POV).   By contrast, Hoberek notes that he arrived at his own position "almost by accident" (82).

As it happens, I'm deeply skeptical about Fish's belief that he knows what he's doing.   Most faculty will be familiar with the "I said one thing, the students heard another" phenomenon; there's also its equivalent,  "I thought the class was great, they hated it/I hated this course, they loved it."  Such disconnects extend to self-presentation (I've been told repeatedly that I'm intimidating, which is not exactly how I see myself) and other personality quirks.  Nor, often enough, do we recognize our own flaws, or what about our teaching style annoys our students.   And, I suspect, we often don't know what we're doing when it comes to "engaged" or "disengaged" instruction.  Thinking back to my undergraduate days, I suspect that what I and my fellow undergrads "learned" from the politically-engaged instructors was not what they intended--or wanted--to teach.  By the same token, though, I suspect many "apolitical" faculty, myself included, give away more than they realize.  Fish may well be keeping his "values" out of the classroom, but perhaps his students have a very different POV?

¹ Andrew Hoberek, "'We Reach the Same End by Discrepant Means': On Fish and Humanist Method," Profession (2009): 75-83; Jonathan Culler, "Writing to Provoke," 84-88; Judith Butler, "Which Politics?" 89-93; Patricia Bizzell, "Composition Studies Saves the World!" 94-98; Stanley Fish, "Response," 99-104.

The Voyage Home

Jane Rogers' The Voyage Home is similar enough to Hilary Mantel's A Change of Climate, published a decade earlier, that one wonders if Rogers had it in mind.¹  Both Rogers and Mantel write parallel plots, with the narrative moving back and forth between a repressed past and an uneasy present.  In A Change of Climate, a husband-and-wife missionary team travel to Africa, where they discover that the missionary experience is not precisely what they had in mind; after some misadventures, brought on by overconfidence and sheer obtuseness, they experience an event so traumatic that they never speak of it again.  Decades of do-gooding and infidelity later, their marriage finally implodes, until a self-destructive (and destructive, period) teenager finally offers them the possibility of redemption.  And in The Voyage Home, David and Miriam Harrington, a husband-and-wife missionary team, travel to post-emancipation Nigeria, where they discover that the missionary experience is not precisely what they had in mind; after some misadventures, brought on by overconfidence and sheer obtuseness,the husband has an affair with one of his students, Amoge.  When Amoge reveals her pregnancy, David rejects her and confesses to his wife, simultaneously demolishing both his local reputation and his marriage; he attempts to redeem himself with relief work during the Nigerian Civil War, but only incurs new nightmares.  Decades later, his daughter Anne, returning from her trip to Lagos to retrieve his body, makes two traumatic discoveries: her father's diary and the presence of two refugees aboard ship, one of them a sick pregnant woman.  Believing herself unable to help the woman, Anne tells the seductive first mate about the refugees' presence, with horrific results.  Redemption, however, proves difficult to find.

In many ways, The Voyage Home is a far harsher novel that A Change of Climate, precisely because it denies that the characters can consciously experience redemption, let alone find comfort in forgiveness.  The novel invokes multiple modes of Christian belief: the varying responses of the Nigerian converts, ranging from sincere devotion to canny exploitation; David Harrington's self-satisfied Anglicanism, shot through with the deadly sins of pride and lust; and Anne's own post-Christian atheism, still inflected by her upbringing.  Moreover, Christian themes and narratives structure the plot, yet often ironically or incompletely.   When David asks Anne--then in her late thirties--if she will ever have a child, she snarkily suggests that "perhaps you could ask your God to arrange an immaculate conception" (65).  But the snark reminds us of Saint Anne, descended from King David, who gave birth to the Virgin Mary.  This is all the more to the point in a story that begins close to Christmas and dwells intensely on pregnancy.  (I'll come back to this in a moment.)  David, contemplating the Nigerian teenage girls, writes that they possess "an almost prelapsarian innocence" (97)--then promptly falls (pun intended) for Amoge, his daughter's nanny.  Later, he insists that "I've emerged from the valley onto the uplands again.  He tested my Faith, to strengthen it" (216), only to encounter suffering more brutal than he could have ever imagined. The diary, in fact, reveals that David's Christian self-image undergoes a series of destructive shocks, ranging from his discovery that forgiveness does not necessarily effect change, to his fall into adultery, to his eventual realization that human agony, even his own agony, may not be about him.  Because we read this diary in installments, like Anne, our assessment of his plot undergoes its own shocks: we may well wish to write him off as a stock character, the typical misguided liberal in a postcolonial novel--an urge supported by David's unreliable narrative voice--but his willingness to admit wrongdoing and decenter himself calls our responses into question.   Nevertheless, he cannot do anything to remedy the suffering he caused.  His ex-wife is dead, Amoge is dead, his daughter Lily (another link to the Virgin Mary) has been sold into prostitution, and Anne seems to be morally paralyzed. 

Anne's own life repeats elements from her father's, but always by fracturing or distorting them.  She too commits adultery, including after her own marriage, but she is the "other woman" (and thus closer to Amoge). When she tells Robbie, the first mate, about the refugees, she wildly magnifies her father's own mistaken willingness to forgive and re-employ a small-time crook; indeed, she persists in believing that Robbie is basically a decent person, even though he assaults her, spews bigoted tripe about Nigerians, and effectively confesses that murder is in the cards!  Similarly, in betraying Estelle, the pregnant woman, she echoes her father's betrayal of Amoge.  At the same time, her "decision" does not really seem to be anything of the sort, because Robbie manipulates her into it--just as Tim, her married boyfriend, manipulates her into aborting their child.  Even her "decision" to attend art school, we find, was really prompted by her father's dismay.  Everything she does is either in accord with or a reaction against a domineering, even abusive man; it's no wonder that she sacrifices Joseph, the helpless refugee.  And like her father, she discovers that confession, along with the quest for redemption and  forgiveness, is essentially self-centered and ineffective: although she eventually tells the authorities about Joseph and the murder, nothing happens, and he rejects both her and her offers of assistance (232).  

In the novel's final sentence, Anne "tries to remember if she has ever chosen anything in her life before" (334), but it is hard to read her choice itself as redemptive.  Anne and Vic have been going through fertility treatment to deal with Vic's low sperm count (another echo of her father's past: Amoge had thought she was infertile, but her husband was actually at issue).  Finally, she becomes pregnant--but the child is Tim's, her longtime adulterous boyfriend, and Tim impregnates her during a rape (which she, very typically, believes is "what she deserves" [321]).  This violence is far from an immaculate conception, and her decision to keep the child means that she must keep silent about not only the adultery, but the rape as well.  By bearing this child, she realizes, she makes herself "responsible" for everyone's "happiness": "She is admitting to herself that she is outside what could ever be atoned or forgiven, that she must keep her secret  from him [Vic] always and never let it harm him.  In protecting him, might she at least begin to make amends?" (331) It is not, in fact, clear that she can "make amends," nor can we really believe that the child will somehow fix this marriage (Vic, true to the novel's form, seems unpredictable and dominating); similarly, her unwillingness to see Tim's behavior as anything other than a deserved punishment hardly frees her from victimhood.  By not confessing, she breaks her father's pattern, but keeping silent brings its own suffering.   "It isn't a fairy story," she admits to herself, "wrongs can't be put right, Lily can't be given back her youth or innocence, happiness can't be restored" (332).   Just as her father cannot save Lily, so Anne cannot continue to dream that her child is Estelle's child, somehow magically reborn (327).     If we take the novel's Christian themes seriously, the child Anne bears is the opposite of the Virgin Mary, conceived in suffering and sin.  And yet, because the child carries with it the promise of a future, any future, it offers, if not redemption--for the characters must all abandon their desire for redmeption--then hope.  But that hope rests, not on the child, but on Anne and her willingness to be "responsible," to "choose." 

¹ Milada Frankova also briefly notes the two novels' overlapping concerns in "Jane Rogers' Novel Explorations," Brno Studies in English 31 (2005): 134.

This Week's Acquisitions

(All religion, all the time.)

• Religious Tracts Dispersed by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, vol. V (Rivington, 1811).  One of twelve volumes; this one anthologizes twenty tracts published between 1806 and 1810.  (I also own volume II.)  (eBay)
• The True Catholic, I.i n.s. (1872).  One year of this anti-Catholic, evangelical periodical.  (eBay)
• Jude Nixon, ed., Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).  Essay collection about Browning, Essays and Reviews, etc.  (Amazon [secondhand])

Poetic justice

At the end of the Jane Eyre course, we watched Franco Zeffirelli's 1996 film version, which most people (myself included) consider to be one of the most problematic of a long series of problematic adaptations.  (Really, I should have found a copy of I Walked with a Zombie instead.)  Still, it was worth showing as an example of how adaptations affect other adaptations--in this case, the 1944 version with Orson Welles (which we also watched) still makes its presence felt.  I hadn't watched the film in years, though--since 1996, to be precise--and this time around, I was startled by one of the creative team's odder minor decisions.

If you spend more than ten seconds thinking about the novel's Bertha Mason set-up, it's obvious that everybody in the household must know that a) there's a woman in the attic, and b) Grace Poole is responsible for her.  In fact, the only person who doesn't know, and who keeps refusing to find out, is our heroine.  However, in the novel, Mrs. Fairfax never shows any awareness that Mr. Rochester is keeping his wife in the attic--which is an important distinction.  Mr. Rochester himself tells Jane that "Mrs. Fairfax may indeed have suspected something, but she could have gained no precise knowledge as to facts" (ch. XXVII).  Mrs. Fairfax's own anxiety about the marriage rests on the disparities in age and class, not on Mr. Rochester's pre-existing commitment.  But in the 1996 film, Mrs. Fairfax clearly knows what's going on, to the extent of dropping pointed hints in conversation, recognizing Mr. Mason, and  looking awfully anxious during the marriage vows.  Nevertheless, she can't quite rouse herself to, you know, say anything to Jane.  Which, if you once again spend more than ten seconds thinking about it, makes her Rochester's accomplice in his would-be bigamy attempt. 

During the film's Reader's Digest Condensed Version wrap-up, Bertha Mason tosses poor Grace Poole over the banister.  It's not clear why Grace needs to die: aside from her drinking habits and gruff manner, she hasn't done anything--well, except let Bertha escape from the room while carrying a burning piece of wood, which of course was rather bad form.  But, OK.  Presumably, we're supposed to see this as purging Rochester's past (although, like the 1944 version, the film wrecks the symbolic message by having Rochester live in Thornfield's ruins, instead of decamping to Ferndean Manor...).   Grace is dispatched.  Her patient dispatches herself.  Mr. Rochester, after attempting to rescue Bertha, endures a couple of hours in the makeup chair, and winds up with a contact lens and picturesque scar to show for it.  Everyone involved with the woman in the attic and/or Rochester's betrayal of Jane has now been suitably punished...

...except for Mrs. Fairfax, who escapes scot-free and is still working for Rochester in the end.  And this is why the change to the novel is so odd.  If, again, you spend more than ten seconds thinking about it--or maybe five seconds--Mrs. Fairfax is far more culpable than Grace Poole, and almost as culpable as Rochester himself.  If this were the novel, something symbolic would have happened to Mrs. Fairfax (besides retirement).   But Zeffirelli appears not to have thought through the logical consequences of his alteration to the original plot...

Professor seeks grader, preferably Victorian

Like most faculty at colleges of this size and type, I don’t have TAs or graders.  I’ll admit, though, that at the end of the semester, when I’m buried under avalanches of papers (to complement the avalanches of snow…), the thought of hiring a grader has a certain appeal.  But whom should I hire?

[The LP sits in her hastily-cleared office.  The hubbub of oddly-assorted voices drifts in from the hall, no doubt to the annoyance of several colleagues.]

LP: First candidate!

[A middle-aged man, somewhat redolent of horse, walks in.]

LP: Mr., ah, Barkis.  Given the sample essay you read, what can you do for this student?

MR. BARKIS: Barkis is willin’!

LP: That’s great, but…willing to do what, exactly? Offer tutorials? Line-edit the entire paper? Promise the student Godiva chocolates in exchange for better work?

MR. BARKIS: Barkis is willin’!

LP: Commendable enthusiasm!  However—

MR. BARKIS: Young lady, you tell that student that “Barkis is willin’!”

LP: I’ll…do that.  Next!

[The next candidate seems strangely nondescript.]

LP: Your application says that you were previously employed as a scrivener.  Could you tell me about your experience as a grader?

BARTLEBY: I would prefer not to.

LP: Errrm.  Right.  Um…how would you grade this paper, then?

BARTLEBY: I would prefer not to.

LP [sighing]: That makes two of us.  Next!

[A stiff, lanky gentleman, dressed in clerical black, strides in.]

LP: Mr. Brocklehurst, I believe that you have experience in the classroom.  How would you help this student master his or her problems with punctuation?

MR. BROCKLEHURST: This is a sad, sad sight.  The heart trembles and shudders, as if it momentarily finds itself on the brink of eternal hellfire.  Nothing more appalling than a hardened sinner, blatantly disregarding every rule of semi-colon usage, yet daring to wave its infernal creation under the very nose of authority--

LP [appalled]: Um, hang on--

MR. BROCKLEHURST: Yea, listen unto me: I call upon you all to witness the degraded ooze that seeps forth from every pixel in this blighted mass of pulp.  This student...is...A COMMA SPLICER!

LP [sourly]: Horrors.  Actually, I usually recommend review and revision in such cases, not hellfire and brimstone.  But I'm old-fashioned that way. Next!

[Another gentleman, this one with a rather prudish air, enters next.]

LP:  And you, Mr. Podsnap? What comments might you make?

MR. PODSNAP: I was unable to finish the essay.  The prompt was really most unsuitable.

LP: I...what? Unsuitable? In what sense? It's an essay about the relative merits of hardboiled and scrambled eggs! 

MR. PODSNAP: One can only imagine the effect on a Young Person's untainted mind.  Eggs!

LP: Over easy! Poached! What?!

MR. PODSNAP: The potential associations...I shudder, I absolutely shudder, at the corruption lurking in the word "egg."  That you would assign such an essay...Are you sure that you are fit company for those innocent Young Persons who grace your classroom?

LP:  I...I...I can't...no, I'm not even going to go there.  Next! And hurry!

[A woman enters the room, although the LP finds that she cannot describe her appearance...]

LP: Ms. or Mrs....Governess? OK...How would you evaluate this student's work?

THE GOVERNESS: It seemed to me--thinking the matter over late last night, while I drank my cocoa--that this student had most spendidly fixed the subject of the eggs.  Really, he or she (the mystery of the student's gender momentarily stopped me, as it were, in my very tracks, throwing me back on old memories best left unrevisited) hits on the most brilliant expression of the eggs' very egginess.  I was caught up--brought out of myself--most superbly arrested.

LP: You're saying it's an "A," then? Or am I misunderstanding you? Because I very well may be misunderstanding you.

THE GOVERNESS: But at the moment I was arrested, I became aware of a new hint, of something half-concealed, lurking at the very periphery of my vision.  Something that breathed of unknown horrors, cloaking themselves under this most innocent discussion of eggs.  The eggs, I became convinced, were just another way of putting me off--or, rather, putting me out.  My hesitancy vanished at once.  At last, I knew my way forward--

LP:  Yeah.  No.  I don't want to know.  Next!

[Two men come in, carrying a painting of a rather frightening older woman.]

LP: This...is not what I had in mind.  [Beat]  So.  Painting? Your opinions on the misplaced modifier in sentence three?

[The painting is silent.  There's a strange dripping sound.]

LP: Don't tell me.  Is the roof leaking again? Didn't we just fix it?

[The painting is silent.  However, the LP's attention is drawn to the lower lefthand corner, where she discovers a most artistic rendering of the essay.]

LP: Hmm.  These comments are really quite astute.  And written in such vivid red ink! [Pause]  Blood-red.  [Longer pause] Annnnnnd...what's that dripping on my floor?

[Brief interlude, during which the LP runs screaming down the hall to fetch several brave colleagues.  They toss the painting out the window, then depart, muttering things that the LP decides not to overhear.]

LP [now calm]: Next!

[A beautiful, golden-haired youth enters the room, dressed in the height of 1890s fashion.]

LP: Mr. Gray.  (It is Mr. Gray, and not the painting? Because I've had enough paintings for one day.)  Your assessment of this paper?

DORIAN GRAY: Such lush profusions of non sequiturs, such exquisite clusters of misplaced modifiers, such delicate embroideries of empty sentences…it would be a loss, a true loss to humanity, to make a single suggestion.

LP [sighing]: Just how do you plan to help this student, exactly?

DORIAN GRAY: By encouraging the student to explore the most choice, the most elegant infelicities.  Passive voice! Errant colons! Circular logic! Why imprison this student’s delicate, yet alluringly poisonous originality in the iron cage of correctness?

LP: My colleagues will be so thrilled to hear you say that.  Next!

[The final candidate, another elegantly-dressed man, strides in.]

LP: Ah.  I believe it’s [checks her notes] Dr. Jekyll, yes? How did you do with the writing sample?

DR. JEKYLL: Well, to be precise, I didn’t grade it.  I handed it over to my, er, business partner; we’re at one in all things.  Perhaps you would care to take a look?

LP: This is an unusual arrangement, but OK, let’s see…

[The paper is crumpled, ripped, and discolored with stains of uncertain provenance.  Moreover, the nearly illegible writing—in gigantic all caps—is in ink that suspiciously resembles dried blood.]

LP [holding the paper aloft between thumb and forefinger]: You know, my students complain about my handwriting, but this is just ridiculous.  And I've dealt with enough bloody paperwork for one day.  What on earth do the comments say, even?!

DR. JEKYLL: To be honest, I’m not entirely sure.  I suggest that we ask Mr. Hyde directly.

[DR. JEKYLL takes a mysterious-looking potion out of his pocket, and prepares to drink.]

LP [hastily]: I’ll…let’s just take it on trust, shall we? I wouldn’t want to trouble Mr. Hyde unnecessarily.  [Pretending to look at some papers] Now, if you’ll excuse me…I have fifty more papers to grade. 

 

 

The ongoing chronicles of misleading nineteenth-century titles

A few months back, I noted that searching for Anglo-Jewish periodicals on GoogleBooks turned up many titles that sure looked like they were Jewish, but were actually evangelical Protestant.  The Victorians also liked to score polemical points by using the other side's shibboleths: e.g., Father Clement: A Roman Catholic Tale (not a Roman Catholic novel, but an anti-Catholic novel), as opposed to  The Converts; A Tale of the Nineteenth Century: Or, Romanism and Protestantism Brought to Bear in Their True Light against One Another (not an anti-Catholic  novel, but a Roman Catholic novel).  This afternoon, I finally managed to pick up a volume of a late-Victorian periodical, The True Catholic--which was, of course, a dedicated evangelical journal, and passionately anti-Catholic to boot.  The title draws on one popular line of attack for anti-Catholic controversialists, dating all the way to the Reformation itself: insisting that the term "Catholic," by definition, could not refer to any single visible church, but instead meant all churches (past and present) that witnessed to the eternal truths recorded in the Scriptures.   Because the Roman Catholic Church had deviated from "primitive" Christian truths--the usual accusation directed at transubstantiation, for example--it could not be truly "Catholic."   For a nineteenth-century example, here's W. C. Brownlee, a Reformed clergyman:

This Week's Acquisitions

• Jim Crace, Genesis: A Novel (FSG, 2003).  Popular actor proves over-fertile.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn (Penguin, 1987).    A hired "companion" tries to unravel the mystery of her employer.  (eBay)
• ---, Nuns and Soldiers (Penguin, 2002).  Two women face emotional and spiritual crises.  (Lift Bridge)
• Rosalind Belben, Our Horses in Egypt (Chatto & Windus, 2007).  Woman tries to discover the fate of her horse, shipped to Egypt as part of the WWI effort.  Sequel of sorts to Hound Music.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Banner of Faith (1897).  One volume of a periodical published by the Church Extension Association, now the Community of the Sisters of the Church.  (eBay)

My Year in Books

• Favorite novels (published in the past five years or so): Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games; Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey; James Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack; Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?
• Favorite novels (published in the past few decades or so): Patrick White, The Vivisector; Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them; Robert Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica; Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes; Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant; Elizabeth Taylor, Angel; Hilary Mantel, A Change of Climate; Shusako Endo, Silence; Shusako Endo, The Samurai.
• Best SF: China Mieville, The City & The City. 
• Best Gothic: Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger.
• Most appalling narrator in a good neo-Victorian novel: Stannard in Jem Poster's Courting Shadows.
• Best reread novels: Mrs. Humphry Ward, Helbeck of Bannisdale; E. M. Forster, Howards End. 
• I don't seem to be doing this properly: 1) I buy a monograph; 2) Choice asks me to review said monograph; 3) some months later, a scholarly journal also asks me to review said monograph.
• Worst Victorian poetry: tie between Benjamin Gough's Our National Sins and James Augustus Page's Protestant Ballads. 
• Novels I would have thrown at the wall, except that fixing and repainting the drywall would be annoying, and I'd prefer to spend money on other things, like buying better novels, so I only threw them at the wall in my imagination: Dan Simmons, Drood; Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt, Dracula the Un-Dead.
• Most disappointing anthology:  Dark Delicacies II.  (Shouldn't a horror anthology generate...horror? Mild nervousness, even?  Obviously, your mileage may vary.)
• Novel I liked much better than my review might seem to indicate: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.  
• Sir, put down the pen.  Step away from the  Victorians: Dan Simmons.  (Simmons is an important SF novelist, but The Terror and Drood were, to put it none too kindly, dreadful.)  
• This was amusing once.  Maybe twice: Sticking vampires &c.  into random classic novels. 
• Novel I might have enjoyed more had I not read that other novel: A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book.  (The Corner That Held Them handled the chronicle form much more gracefully, I thought.) 
• Most eye-popping demise in a Victorian didactic novel: Death by wasps in Langton George Vere's For Better, For Worse.
• Most eye-poppingly convenient demise in a Victorian didactic novel: The heroine of E. C. Agnew's Geraldine wants a celibate marriage, much to her husband's rather understandable annoyance.  A year later, he agrees to her request--whereupon he immediately suffers a Tragic Accident and dies, leaving her free to join a convent.
• Most eye-poppingly bloody moment in a Victorian didactic novel: In Mrs. John Cooke's Philippe, a young girl returns home to find the corpses of her murdered family (see here).    
• Most appalling Victorian novel: Anna Clay Beecher's anti-Semitic sequel to Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen.  
• The Bad Plot Prize: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Agnes of Sorrento (a key element of the plot simply vanishes). 
• Best novel read in the course of doing research for Book Two--which is no doubt why I wound up not writing about it: Emily Lawless, With Essex in Ireland.   
• Best Victorian Catholic novel: Mrs. Josephine (Wilfrid) Ward, One Poor Scruple. 
• Down the memory hole: My favorite supporting character from the Dalziel and Pascoe novels, the bibliophilic bookdealer Edwin Digweed, didn't even get a mention this time around. 
• Weirdest acquisition: "Frank Briton"'s By and By: A Thrilling Tale (late-Victorian anti-Anglo-Catholic propaganda in full-blown panic mode).
• Most common experience while browsing eBay auctions: Why, that book looks interesting OMG YOU WANT ME TO BID WHAT FOR IT?!?
• Best eBay deal, antiquarian division: the full nineteenth-century set of Church Association Tracts for 49.99.
• Best eBay deal, new division: The Lives of Victorian Political Figures, Part I, for $9.99.  That's...not what it retails for (and is substantially cheaper than even the secondhand copies). 
• I...wonder how that happened: The number of books in my collection topped seven thousand.