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In Which My Heart Explodes from Pure Artistic Satisfaction

Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy, 1894

Try not to cry, y’all. We have arrived at Thomas Hardy’s last novel. I have a lot to say about this brilliant book. Jude is Hardy’s most autobiographical novel and his most scathing take down of marriage and morality in the Victorian Era. Thirty sticky tabs protrude from the top of my copy indicating passages I adore and want to share with you. Feel free to stop reading at any point. I’ll still be here, spilling my Jude thoughts into the void.

We begin with little unloved orphan Jude watching his schoolmaster pack up and leave for Christminster. This city stands in for Oxford. After the departure of his beloved teacher, Mr. Phillotson, Jude grows to see Christminster as a glistening beacon of erudition, glory and all that is best in the world. He dreams of following Phillotson to Christminster and becoming a scholar himself. An unlikely future for a rustic child whose aunt tells him “It would ha’ been a blessing if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi’ thy mother and father, poor useless boy.”

Dear Jude does try to be useful. He sets off to earn a few pence by scaring rooks off of Farmer Throutham’s grain. And you must read this entire passage, because it is the best thing in the British canon. Not joking. Please enjoy.

The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone there really attached associations enough and to spare—echoes of songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the field from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers who would not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; and in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, possessing, in the one view, only the quality of a work-ground, and in the other that of a granary good to feed in.

The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left off pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance.

He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should he frighten them away? They took upon more and more the aspect of gentle friends and pensioners—the only friends he could claim as being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted anew.

“Poor little dears!” said Jude, aloud. “You shall have some dinner—you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a good meal!”

They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much resembled his own.

Oof. It’s so beautiful it hurts me. Burnished like tassets of mail! The setting is so beautifully described, you can imagine precisely the sight of the lonely field with all its history, the rooks catching the sunlight, the wee orphan whose big heart won’t allow him to complete his appointed task. Channellings in a piece of new corduroy! We have the theme of the novel disguised in Hardy’s early description of previous pastoral pairings. Jude is destined to take his share in the misery produced by Christian insistence on binding sexual partners inextricably through marriage. Inky spots on the nut-brown soil! His lonely tenderness for the crows hits me right in the heart. Poor, dear Jude. A magic thread of fellow-feeling! I know Thomas Hardy; if I hadn’t read the novel, I would know that Jude’s gentleness “suggested that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before the fall of the curtain on his unnecessary life.” Oh, he will ache. And you will rage with me over the trampling the cruel world inflicts on this sensitive soul. Young Jude does not perceive “the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener,” but Hardy does and he will show us just how horribly the laws of Nature and Man punish sweet, innocent souls. Hardy knows the universe is not looking out for us. We are chaff to be ground by the millstone of circumstance. And marriage laws. This is really all about how marriage without the possibility of divorce destroys lives.

Jude determines to become a scholar. His village school cannot prepare him for Christminster, so he teaches himself Greek and Latin. One day Jude is lost in reverie, trying to reckon how far he has progressed toward learnedness when he feels something smack “him sharply on the ear.” His Dark Angel, Arabella, has chucked a pig penis at him. Dang. This forward country lass sets her heart on Jude. She decides to seduce him and trick him into marriage by claiming to be pregnant. It works and “the people of the parish all said what a fool Jude Fawley was. All his reading had only come to this, that he would have to sell his books to buy saucepans.” Alas, he is hooked.

Thus, the pair “swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.” Y’all, I’m married, and I enjoy it. But, if I didn’t have the option of divorce, I never would have signed that piece of paper. Hardy is right. Marriage without the possibility of divorce is bondage. For too many people matrimony is not holy, but dangerous and degrading. The literary canon provides further opportunity for me to comment on the horrifying failure of the Church of England to save neither the souls nor the very lives of women in abusive marriages. Encouraging a person to stay with an abusive partner is plain evil. Ok, deep breath. I’m getting worked up. The point here is that social custom and religious practice require two people who just wanted to get it on to bind themselves together for the remainder of their lives. For better or worse, worse, worse, worse, worse.

Jude immediately regrets his decision. Arabella is not a soul mate. He finds there is “something wrong in a social ritual which made necessary a cancelling of well-formed schemes involving years of thought and labour.” He can’t bring himself to feel that his lust for Arabella was a sin or unnatural. When he finds out that she was never actually pregnant “he was inclined to inquire what he had done, or she lost, for that matter, that he deserved to be caught in a gin which would cripple him, if not her also, for the rest of a lifetime?” Oh, I forgot to mention that Jude’s storm crow of an aunt believes that their family is cursed to fail at matrimony, because “there’s sommat in our blood that won’t take kindly to the notion of being bound to do what we do readily enough if not bound.” So there’s that too. He’s cursed. When the marriage falls apart and Jude becomes romantically entangled with his cousin. Double curse!

Yikes, there are so many more details from this book that I want to share with you. Jude and Sue’s mystic romantic connection. The way Hardy plays with gender to show Sue as smarter, braver, and wiser than her male counterparts. She is fiercely individualistic until her defiance of social rules causes poverty and tragedy. You need to read it and fondle those details yourself. I will hustle us on toward my second favorite moment in all of English literature.

Jude is denied entrance to the hallowed halls of Christminster. The elitist prigs don’t want his kind mixing with their precious lordlings. This happened to Thomas Hardy himself. The English fonts of knowledge were too blinded by classism to educate one of the greatest minds of his generation. They rushed to bestow honorary degrees upon Hardy after he became internationally famous. They were too good to educate a rustic, but not too good to bask in the glory he achieved without their help. A cheerful reminder that our respected institutions reinforce existing imbalances of power and wealth.

Glossing over a host of deliciously described details that you must read yourself: Jude and Sue escape their bad marriages and are free to become legally joined. But their experience with this supposedly sacred institution makes them reluctant to shackles their sweet and pure union with the bonds of “holy” matrimony. They have been living together in supposed sin and accepting the scorn heaped upon them. But a child is involved. Their compunction at heaping scorn upon him as well drives them reluctantly to the whatsit’s office to get hitched. They wait while a soldier and his young bride sign the blessed document. Jude and Sue notice that “the solider was reluctant: the bride sad and timid; she was soon, obviously, to become a mother, and she had a black eye.” Sue and Jude linger, letting another couple pass and conduct their business. This bride brought her groom directly from the prison gates and paid for everything herself. She is “ruddy with liquor and the satisfaction of being on the brink of a gratified desire.” The place seems too sordid to host the “climax of our love.” The couple shies off and heads for a church. Sue feels terrible about the woman giving “herself to that goal-bird, not for a few hours as she would, but for a lifetime as she must. And the other poor soul—to escape a nominal shame […] degrading herself to the real shame of bondage to a tyrant who scorned her—a man whom to avoid for ever was her only chance of salvation.” Oooof. Every time I read those words of Sue’s my heart wants to explode from pure artistic satisfaction.

Hardy rips the still-beating heart out of the Victorian notion that sex and marriage must go together. He skewers the concept of “holy matrimony.” One couple has to marry, because they have already had sex. Their union will be a danger and a degradation to the bride. Sue sees that salvation lies for this woman in escaping the man that Victorian Christianity would bind her to for this life and the next. There is nothing holy about this marriage. As to the other couple, he wants money and she wants sex. She doesn’t want a lifetime of devotion, but the “respectable” thing for a horny person to do is tie themselves forever to the object of their lust. In a page and a half Hardy demonstrates that when sex and marriage are inextricably linked, there is no sanctity to marriage. And I just…explosions…I’ve never read anything better. It’s too perfect. He’s a genius and I wish we could be bffs.

Sue and Jude decide not to get married. Hardy being Hardy, he subjects them to misfortune and misery. They are too good for this world, so the world crushes and breaks them. That sounds bad, but you should absolutely read this book. It’s a masterpiece. I shan’t say another thing about it. Hardy’s words are better than mine. Just read it. Then call me and we can chat.

You might like Jude the Obscure if:

  • You like things that are good.

You might not like Jude the Obscure if:

  • I can’t imagine why anyone would ever feel that way. Oh, right, Henry James found it sordid. But his own writing is mostly terrible, so no one should listen to him about anything ever.

Final thoughts: I am depressed that I am out of Thomas Hardy novels to review. There are no more. At least I can console myself with his poetry. I didn’t even get around to mentioning that Hardy incorporates by favorite Brit Lit trope: paganism versus Christianity. Being a genius, he puts this trope to a different use than most authors. I adore the unspoken anxiety running through much British Literature that the islanders never really gave up their pagan beliefs and are liable to erupt into performances of nature worship at any moment.

Instead of expressing fear of such scary practices as telling the moon that you love her, Hardy uses Sue’s pagan tendencies to show her individualism. After she purchases a pair of miniature nude sculptures of Roman deities, Sue wraps them in leaves to hide them from prying eyes. Young ladies are not meant to indulge in such idolatry. When her scandalized landlady smashes them, Sue indignantly leaves her boarding house. This is one of my favorite sequences in the novel, but only the beginning of Hardy’s characterization of Sue as someone who can see beyond the rigid moral codes of her day.

Jude comes to see Sue as someone so intellectually and morally advanced that she would have a wise druidess, a spiritual leader if she had been born in a different time or cultural setting. I would love to read a book about that version of Sue. The one who lived in a world that didn’t systematically grind her best qualities out of her. Don’t get ground down, dear reader. Be the wise, insightful druidess you were born to be.

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Hot Victorian Nonsense

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The Fate of Fenella, collaborative, 1892

Collaborative novels are a Victorian literary trend too weird to be ignored. I picked one, The Fate of Fenella, essentially at random. There was no reason to think that it would be any good. Twenty-four authors agreed to write one chapter each with no preconceived outline. The next author read the preceding contributions and added on. The result is predictably chaotic. I did not mean to do an oxymoron there. It just happened. Of the twenty-four authors, I am pretty sure you have only heard of Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker.

I have summarized each chapter so you can judge the merit of each contribution for yourself.

  1. Helen Mathers. “Her hair, gloves, and shoes were tan-color, and closely allied to tan, too, was the tawny, true tiger tint of her hazel eyes.” Wow. I mean. It’s original. I have never heard the phrase “closely allied to tan.” I never needed to. The first chapter only goes downhill from this alliterative description of our monochromatic leading lady. The n-word appears in the first paragraph. Very gratuitously. It is quite assaulting. Anyway, beautiful young mother, Fenella, is posing as a widow at an English watering spot when she unexpectedly encounters her estranged husband. Fenella is hoydenish, wild and immature, yet charming.
  2. Justin H. McCarthy MP. Not content with the existing characters, author number two conjures up a young lawyer named, of all things, Clitheroe Jacynth. CJ is so enamored with Fenella that he proposes to her. She refuses.
  3. Eleanor Francis Trollope. Some bloke called Lord Castleton decides to “save” his friend CJ from his suffering by sharing the sordid details of Fenella’s life. The tea: she has been a flirt since birth. (Hard eyeroll.) She had an entanglement with a German count while her husband carried on with a woman, Lucille. They quarreled. Fenella left him. Society blames her, because men aren’t expected to be faithful, duh.
  4. Arthur Conan Doyle. Femme fatale Lucille shows up claiming that Fenella was with the Count again last week. Fenella encounters Frank talking to Lucille, gets angry and rushes off to CJ to beg him not to abandon her.
  5. Mary Crommelin. To further rile her husband, Fenella calls for the Count. He wants to duel.
  6. C. Phillips CJ offers to introduce Fenella to his respectable sister, hoping some of that respectability will rub off on her. The sister refuses. This chapter is wholly unnecessary.
  7. Rita Frank heads to Fenella’s room to slip a letter under her door. He sees the Count entering her boudoir. He sinks into a state of stupor. (Yeah, I dunno.) In the morning he decides to get away from it all and leaves the country. In his distraction, he doesn’t notice the newspaper headlines about the mysterious death of a foreign count.
  8. Joseph Hatton Stuck having to explain the nonsense in the last chapter, author eight declares that the Count entered Fenella’s room without permission. Immediately after retreating to his own room, Frank fell asleep and somnambulated back to F’s room. F was threatening to stab the Count if he didn’t leave, but before she could get around to it, her sleeping husband strangles him. Yep, he murdered a guy in his sleep. When the police come, Fenella takes the fall for Frank.
  9. Lovett Cameron The jury returns a verdict of justifiable homicide. To keep her bloodtaint off of his child, Frank gives little Ronny into CJ’s aunt’s care. Fenella seeks anonymity in the Channel Islands, but cannot escape her past. Frank randomly arrives in her hideaway.
  10. Bram Stoker Frank finally hears about the murder and believes that Fenella did it. He is glad, because at least she wasn’t cheating on him. Lord Castleton figures out that Frank is the real killer, but says nothing.
  11. Florence Marryat Lucille marries a buffoonish American (we’re all like that) and gets her revenge on Frank for loving Fenella more by kidnapping their child and taking him to the U.S. Yeah. She straight-up kidnaps him.
  12. Frank Danby Worst chapter so far. Believing that she is a murderer, not an adulterer, Frank rushes to forgive his wife. Fenella, who has withstood many hardships with great fortitude, upon hearing this good news suddenly becomes so weak that she falls into a swoon. The doctor says that Frank must bring her child to her. Or she will die. Or go mad.
  13. Edward Kennard Frank discovers that his son has been abducted and hires a detective to find him.
  14. Richard Dowling Frank goes to America in search of his boy.
  15. Hungerford Fenella sends CJ to America too. On the same errand.
  16. Arthur à Beckett Frank discovers that Lucille has sent Ronny off somewhere. Then he sleepwalks into her house somehow. Just cuz.
  17. Jean Middlemass Frank attacks Lucille. She gets her doctor friend to shut him away in a mad house.
  18. Clement Scott With no explanation of how they manage it, Lord Castleton and CJ spring Frank from the asylum and put him on a boat back to England. Somehow they also have Ronny. And Lucille is on board in police custody. Author 18 is whacky.
  19. Graves Fenella has a bad dream. Also, what does “Clo.” stand for? Clorence? Clothilde? Carlo? British for colonel?
  20. W. Lucy Shipwreck.
  21. Adeline Sargeant Obviously, Lord Castleton dies. It was kind of the other authors to include this redundant character who could easily be killed off. Ronny, CJ and Frank survive. Lucille is presumed dead. Gee, I wonder if she’s really dead?
  22. George Manville Fenn Her husband, not the American, some other guy, has escaped from prison and wants revenge for something. He tries to kill her.
  23. Tasma Frank is sick.
  24. Anstey Lucille re-reappears. Apparently, Frank saved her life while in a trance. This man is a very productive sleepwalker. She gets arrested for some past bank heist. Frank suddenly dies of a heart problem, leaving the way clear for CJ and Fenella.

Final thoughts: So very silly. It’s notable that when compared to other literary giants, Arthur Conan Doyle is not exceptional for stylistic brilliance, but when compared to this collection of lesser-knowns, his chapter is absolutely the best written. His is refreshingly direct. Far less florid.

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Everything I Have to Say About Oscar Wilde

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Everything I Have Left to Say About Oscar Wilde

Ok, this won’t be everything I have yet to say about Oscar Wilde. His writing, his approach to life, his own tragic personal dramas, pierce the center of my being in a way that I cannot package into words and ship to the cold void of the internet. The Marianas Trench of my feelings for Wilde will not be plumbed, but we will break the surface. Piece by piece.

Poe and Hemmingway have their adherents, but Oscar Wilde has always been the literary icon for me. He is a tragic, flawed hero in the Greek style. Far from perfect, but exquisitely inspiring. I have been fascinated by him ever since I read The Importance of Being Earnest as a teenager. His wit, humor, defiance, and fashion choices move me.

Fairy Stories

His tales for children, including “The Happy Prince” and “The Selfish Giant” are so beautiful, poignant, and sad. Give them a read.

Lady Windermere’s Fan

How could he have become so good at play writing so quickly? This is only his third play. Lady Windermere’s Fan is a saucy takedown of the Angel in the House idea of Victorian femininity. Through a series of misunderstandings, a vociferously upright young wife must be rescued from ruin by a woman she scorned as immoral. Wilde skewers late Victorian prudishness by presenting a fallen woman who, while not entirely selfless, is capable of great sacrifice. She had good reasons for leaving her husband and becoming ruined in the first place, too.

The plot is a bit contrived. I am absolutely not a fan of testing a character’s morals by placing them in artificially complex situations that no one could be expected to navigate. However, I can overlook it in this case, because the ideas and style of the play are just lovely. I love that Mrs. Erlynne is a brazen courtesan who represents everything that good society cannot tolerate, yet she insinuates herself into good society with grace, cleverness and a healthy dose of self-interest.

Enjoy some quotes:

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

I can resist anything except temptation.

Life is far too important a thing to ever talk seriously about.

There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.

“How long could you love a woman who didn’t love you, Cecil?
A woman who didn’t love me? Oh, all my life!”

On now to the next play.

 

A Woman of No Importance

Yikes, this one is kind of bad. Sorry, Oscar. I’m shocked that he actually got it published and performed, considering the very obvious subtext of the plot. Lord Illingworth wants to give a handsome young man, Gerald, a position that he’s under-qualified for. Gerald’s mother is adamant that Gerald not go with Illingworth, because *dramatic music* Gerald is Illingworth’s son. So, you might be thinking that she wants to keep her son away from the immoral man who seduced her and abandoned her. That would be true. But. Also. She doesn’t want Illingworth to seduce his own son. Gross, Oscar. Why even write that?

I appreciate that Wilde stands up for the moral character of unwed mothers, but he doesn’t do it particularly well. His wit does not sparkle. The play is a continuous string of epigrams and paradoxes that become quite tedious.

Here’s a quote:

When good Americans die they go to Paris. And when bad Americans die they go to America.

 

An Ideal Husband

This play and The Importance of Being Earnest are Oscar Wilde’s best work. So clever and funny. An Ideal Husband centers on two couples and the scheming intriguer who would ruin them. Sir Robert Chiltern is a politician whose wife Gertrude, unaware of a sordid trick he pulled to launch his career, adores him as an ideal of honesty and rectitude. This pair takes themselves very seriously. Meanwhile, Chiltern’s sister, Mabel, and her beau, Lord Goring, are models of frivolity and facetiousness. Of course, dear Oscar shows that the seemingly foolish and superficial pair are much more forthright and realistic in their behavior and expectations than the couple that would like to be models of correct Victorian behavior.

I love this play. You should read it or watch one of the versions on youtube or maybe even pay to watch the 1999 film with Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchett, Minnie Driver, Rupert Everett and some guy I don’t remember.

A quote:

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike. 

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The Importance of Being Earnest

Absolutely the most delightful, whimsical play ever written. The wittiest banter of all time. It is silly, satirical and somewhat romantic. I love this play so much. I don’t think I have read anything funnier. The interview between Lady Bracknell and Jack/Ernest Worthing is a particular highlight. I won’t say anything about the plot, because you should just read it. Or at the very least watch the charming 2002 film with Rupert Everett again, Colin Firth, Reese Witherspoon and Dame Judy Dench at her absolute finest. I adore this movie. It really plays up the silliness and faux romanticism of the source material.

If you read only one thing by Oscar Wilde in your life, it should be Earnest. It is a sparkling, unique masterpiece. He was a genius.

Quotes:

I never travel without my diary, one should always have something sensational to read on the train.

Oh! I don’t think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn’t know what to talk to him about.

The Canterville Ghost

I highly recommend this funny story about a brazen, new-money, American family who move into a musty old British manor house and fail to be impressed by the resident ghost. They trample on tradition in a delightful way. You should definitely, definitely, definitely read it.

The Fall of the House of Wilde

I wanted to know more about Oscar Wilde’s life story, but I never can find the time to read non-fiction. The Fall of the House of Wilde by Emer O’Sullivan was the only biography of Wilde available on Audible, so I listened to it. I learned a lot. I think this would be a very engaging read or listen for anyone interested in Irish History, LGBT history or any fan of biographies.

I came for Oscar Wilde’s life story, but O’Sullivan set out to place Oscar in the context of his revolutionary, intellectual, fiercely individualistic, self-destructive, Irish family. It is true that Oscar was not a green carnation blooming in a desert. His father, William, was a noted doctor and archeologist. His mother was a poet. Both were known for their wit as well as their interest in Irish history, folklore and politics. O’Sullivan’s thesis seems to be first that Oscar is a logical outgrowth of his sparkling family and upbringing, not an natural wonder, and secondly he laments that the Wilde family was wiped out of Irish history when Oscar’s trial for homosexuality made the Wilde name unmentionable. Yes, they deserve restoration in their place in Irish history, but must we be so hard on Oscar?

I do think he is a wonder. A green carnation that bloomed from fertile soil, true. But a unique flower, nonetheless.

Final Thoughts: I love Oscar Wilde with my whole heart, but with some reservation. The biographical details of his life would not stand up to modern scrutiny. I have both condemnation and forgiveness in my heart. Read or listen to The Fall of the House of Wilde if you want to know what I am referring to. I think it’s best to hear the entire story than my one paragraph summary.

When I contemplate Oscar Wilde’s life, I am filled with profound sadness for the moral failure of the culture that I inherited. This brilliant man was condemned for loving who he loved and imprisoned in inhumane conditions. He died of illness he contracted in prison. It horrifies me to think of everyone who has suffered like Oscar suffered, for not being straight, for having the audacity to be themselves. It makes me sick and sad. The only consolation is that his art remains to lift us up, to remind us of the beauty and silliness in this life.

Well, This Is Embarrassing
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Well, This Is Embarrassing

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The Well-beloved, Thomas Hardy, 1892

I don’t actually want to talk about this novel. I am embarrassed for Thomas Hardy. This one is so bad. Yikes. Writing a description of the plot is going to hurt. But my author-soulmate wrote this poorly conceived clunker and it would be disingenuous to skip it.

Listen to this nonsense. Jocelyn Pierston is a sculptor. He considers himself a man afflicted by an inconvenient malady: his affection flits from woman to woman in an—according to him—uncontrollable and regrettable manner. Pierston blames his commitment-phobia on his artistic temperament. Here is a blurry, real-time picture of my face as I type these words.

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Pierston’s quest for the ideal female form to immortalize in stone causes his romantic feeling to flee capriciously on to another object after he has sworn fidelity and made who knows what other promises to some poor lass. I know what you are thinking. “Barf, surely Thomas Hardy didn’t think anyone would be interested in the life story of this idiot.” I guess he did though. I can’t explain it. We know he wrote some of the most compelling characters of the entire Victorian Era. Tess! Bathsheba! Gabriel! And then he whipped out this stupendously uninteresting tale.

Pierston thinks of the women he crushes on as embodiments of his ideal “well-beloved” woman and blames this entity, the Well-beloved, for refusing to stay put in one female frame. Sigh.

I’m getting ahead of myself. It gets so much worse. Pierston returns from London to his home town on the Isle of Portland, an insular island that is connected to England by a spit that is submerged during hightide. He sees a friend of his youth, Avice. Not a typo. She is Avice, not Alice. She impulsively kisses him as she did when they were children. This social gaffe—they are much too old for casual kissing—leads to a renewed acquaintanceship and an engagement.

Avice seems cool. She recites poetry publicly and shows other signs of intellect. But, it would be too simple for Pierston to marry his hometown honey. A twist of fate leads him to spend a rainy afternoon in the company of a dusky maiden named Marcia. Of course, his well-beloved departs from Avice and enters Marcia. Ugh. Such a gross concept, Thomas Hardy. Pierston wants to place the blame for his endless string of compromising dalliances on an outside entity. No, sweetie. It’s not “the well-beloved” that is tormenting you. You need to stop obsessing over momentary attraction and start learning to form friendships with women. I’ll say it again: yikes.

Anyway, he ditches Avice and plans to marry Marcia. However, Marcia is proud and imperious and maybe already in love with a different guy. Their attraction doesn’t last long enough for them to follow through on the marriage.

Many years and many well-beloveds later, Pierston returns to the island and discovers that poor Avice has died. She married another, poorer islander, had a sad life, and died young. Pierston is stricken with remorse. He should have stuck by her! She was the one he truly loved all along! That’s what he tells himself, anyway. I can’t bring myself to give a single frog about this man’s emotions.

Anyway, he encounters the spitting image of the Avice he was once engaged to in the form of her daughter. He insists on calling her Avice as well. We’ll call her Avice II. So, this asshole falls in love with the daughter. That’s what he tells himself. He is incapable of love. Anyway, he wants to marry her, mostly to make up for the wrong he did her mother. At this point he is forty and she is about twenty. Avice II is a more worldly, but less cultured version of her mother, whom she closely resembles, probably because everyone on the island is related…so they all look the same? That is Hardy’s explanation. Anyway, it turns out that Avice II is already pregnant with another man’s child so Pierston helps them marry. Cuz he’s such a swell guy. Haha, no. Out of guilt.

Twenty years later…do you know what’s coming? What could have transpired in twenty years? The birth and bringing up of a third Avice. That’s right, he meets and gets engaged to a third Avice. The granddaughter. I am not making this up. What a truly wretched plot. Sixty-year old Pierston wants to marry the granddaughter of the woman he should have married forty years earlier. Yikes! Avice II pushes for the marriage, because she is ill and wants to know, before she dies, that her daughter will be provided for by a rich husband.

Pierston can sense that the youngest Avice is only going along with the marriage out of a sense of maternal duty. She does not want to marry this sixty-year-old stranger. Pierston knows this, and he feels bad, but not bad enough to call off the wedding. Fortunately, on the eve of the ceremony, another twist of fate intervenes and Avice III runs off with her young beau. It turns out that her lover is Marcia’s stepson. Marcia returns to Pierston’s life. She is no longer an ideal beauty to his eye, but he’s a miserable, lonely old man. So, he marries her.

If there is one redeeming element of The Well-beloved it is that Pierston does not marry either the daughter or granddaughter. Yikes. But that is small comfort. What a truly stupid concept for a novel. Cringe-worthy. If we delved deeper into the details of this text you would only be more annoyed.

Final thoughts. What was he thinking? Such piffle.

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A Collection of Classic Creepy Tales

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Hello, spookies. When the first cool breeze of September rustled my hair, I felt the urge to read creepy stories. So, I purchased this ebook of 50 short horror pieces, called 50 Masterpieces of Occult and Supernatural Fiction . It costs only two dollars, so if you too are in the mood for ghosts, werewolves, vampires and haints, go for it. Considering that I have filtered out the duds for you, this would be a very low risk investment. Many of these are worth your time. A few are truly excellent. I have been telling everyone if you only read one, read The Great God Pan. It is so good. So good.

  • “The Corner Shop” by Cynthia Asquith
    • A traditional, cozy ghost story. More chilling than horrifying. Has a satisfying ending.
  • “Caterpillars” by E. F. Benson
    • Ghost caterpillars. Nuff said.
  • “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot” by Ambrose Bierce
    • A cleverly constructed spooky mystery. You already know that Ambrose Bierce can write a good story. This is one of his better ones.
  • “Scoured Silk” Marjorie Bowen
    • This one really got to me. If you are triggered by domestic abuse, skip it. It’s haunting.
  • “The Sweeper by A. M. Burrage
    • Please read this so you can tell me what the hell is going on. What? I don’t get it. I need a second opinion. Yes, your opinion. Please. It’s only a few pages long. Help me out.
  • “The Screaming Skull” F. Marion Crawford
    • So good. Definitely the second-best story in this anthology. I love a monologue and this one is primo. Based on a Dorsetshire folktale, this is a lovable story, but very spooky.

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  • “The Sumach” by Ulric Daubeny
    • I LOVE IT. Usually, I do not approve of creepy trees, because trees are the best. They do so much for us. Trees aren’t trying to hurt us. But this story is so charming that I forgive the creepy tree. This tale evokes the fear that the lady of the house can be seduced away from her duties…by a spooky tree. I love it. It is true that if you leave us alone to think our thinky thoughts, we will get up to some dangerous, patriarchy destroying stuff. Watch out. Don’t leave your wife alone with the trees. She is gonna do weird stuff…with trees. Also, the explanation of why the tree is spooky powerful is very good. Great story.
  • “The Signal-Man” by Charles Dickens
    • A bit predictable, but well-written. I’m not mad that I read it.
  • “The Phantom Coach” by Amelia B Edwards
    • Very nice little ghost story. I enjoyed it.
  • “The Beast with Five Fingers” by W. F. Harvey
    • Such a weird, quirky tale of a vicious, disembodied hand. If you can wade through some odd exposition and enjoy an odd narrative style, you will dig this one.
  • “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne
    • Hawthorne’s supernatural takedown of the Puritan pretense of morality. Basically, what George Eliot was going for with Bulstrode’s character in Middlemarch, but mercifully hundreds of pages shorter and with Satan worship. So much more fun that way.
  • “Oh, Whistle and I’ll come to you, My Lad” and “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” by M. R. James
    • The premises of these stories are great, but James’ writing is rather dry. Still, they aren’t bad.

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  • “The Great God Pan” by Arthur Machen
    • This story is the reason for this whole post. If you like horror at all, you need to read this. So good. We begin with a creepy surgeon wanting to perform a procedure on a young woman that will “lift the veil” and allow her to see the spirit world. As you can imagine, things go horribly wrong. Machen is a good writer. The settings and characterization are compelling. I found the story so gripping and suspenseful that I read it entirely in html in one day and was shocked to discover that is a 100-page novella, not the 30-page short story I thought I had just whizzed through. It’s good, y’all. If you need any further recommendations: Stephen King and Oscar Wilde both admire it. And those are our highest authorities when it comes to horror and style respectively.
  • “When I Was Dead” by Vincent O’Sullivan
    • A wry, cynical monologue. Quite funny and dark.
  • “The Inn” Guy Preston
    • Some very creepy and unnatural things happen to a man at an inn. Very inventive story.
  • “Gabriel-Ernest” and “The Open Window” by Saki
    • The first is a twisted take on a werewolf story. The second is a very sarcastic and satirical little tale. Both are worth reading.

Happy haunting, dear ones.

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A Country Doctor is not the Book about Women Doctors that You Deserve

 

img_7352A Country Doctor, Sarah Orne Jewett, 1883

I had such high hopes for A Country Doctor by Sarah Orne Jewett. It’s about a Victorian lady doctor! Hooray! And it is set in Maine, where I currently live. And it’s written by a woman. I was so ready to love it.

But it just isn’t good.

Firstly, there is a grand total of one, just one, pitiful sad lonely one scene in which our hero Nan—or whatever, I finished reading this book today and I already forgot the main character’s name, but we’ll call her Nan. I’m 90% sure it’s Nan.—actually practices medicine. Just that one scene. She relocates a man’s shoulder. Which is probably not the medical term for fixing a dislocated shoulder. I don’t care about this book enough to look up medical terms.

The beautiful, eerie, shimmering spirit of a good book haunts this novel, but Sarah OJ tragically murdered it. I want to know about the fiery, wild spirit of the young girl who would grow up to defy society and become a doctor. Unfortunately, OJ just hints at Nan’s wild youth through long and tedious conversations that adults have about her. Ugh. Imagine if Little Women or Anne of Green Gables was just conversations among adults and the scrapes the girls get themselves into were never directly narrated. I thought I was done with long conversations about the politics of Victorian medicine when I finished Middlemarch, but I guess not.

OJ focuses most of her wordcount on Nan’s peculiar family history. Nan’s mother was an uppity farm girl who married above her station. Mom’s in-laws were cruel. Dad died young. Mom took to drink and tuberculosis. After contemplating doing away with herself and her young child, the drunk, consumptive Momma delivers the child to her grandmother before expiring from her illnesses. Mom asks the attendant country doctor to look after her child. Her own mother is standing right there, but she asks the doctor to take on this random baby. Apparently, that was something you could do in the 1880s.

In time grandma passes away and the doctor takes little Nan to his own home. She takes to medicine. Thus commences the debate as old as women in the work place “can she have it all.” Obviously, in the 19th century a woman could not have a job and a husband. Obviously, a man appears and falls in love with Nan. Spoiler: she loves him too, but decides she is unsuited to marriage and that her one duty is to become a doctor. The shoulder relocation scene occurs during their brief courtship. Which means that the only example OJ gives of her protagonist’s medical prowess serves to demonstrate the effect of that skill on young men who wish to marry her. Nothing to do with personal accomplishment or utility to the greater good, just “what will the boys think?”

We know from the title of the book that Nan is going to choose medicine over men, so OJ’s attentiveness to this crisis in Nan’s life has no urgency. Her actual medical career serves as an epilogue to the central question of will she choose marriage or a career. Granted, this is an important topic to see inaugurated in literature. Sadly, Sarah Orne Jewett threw Can-She-Have-It-All a rather inept debutante ball.

My favorite part of the novel was the moment when two wives discuss how much easier cooking is with their newfangled stoves while their husbands discuss how much they miss the old-fashioned stoves. Too true, OJ. Too true. Often, men don’t understand how much work the women are doing to keep the house in order.

OJ’s most profound moment lies in Nan’s assertions that she is unfit for marriage. While it is unfortunate that her relatives cannot simply accept that she’d rather be a doctor than a wife, OJ takes some time to consider the idea that not all women are suited to being wives, home makers or mothers. Men at that time could choose whether they wanted to be husbands and fathers. However, women without independent means had no choice but marriage. When marriage is your only choice, marriage is not truly consensual. Neither is the sex within that marriage.

You might like A Country Doctor if:

  • You need it for your Ph.D. thesis on Victorian women in literature.

You might not like A Country Doctor if:

  • I think I laid that out for you already.

Final Thoughts: The topic and the themes of this novel are all I could ask for, but the execution is poor. I would be very interested in reading a history of women in medicine, though. Fascinating topic.

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Surprise, Surprise. Virulently Misogynist Early Sci-fi.

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Across the Zodiac, Percy Greg, 1880

Why does sci-fi have to be so misogynist? That question lies at the heart of this book review, so we will start with it. Contemporary sci-fi culture is steeped in an antique brew of sexism that dates to 1880. In that year, Percy Greg published a story about a man who travels to Mars in a spaceship. Across the Zodiac originated the sword and planet sci-fi subgenre in which humans travel to other planets and manage to conquer the advanced technology they encounter using only medieval weaponry. I don’t understand the appeal of this premise, but I suppose it might tap into some deep megalomaniacal need to prove your superiority over an entire planet while pretending to be King Arthur?

I have so many problems with this novel. I am just going to tackle them in the order they appear. Percy Greg begins his thrilling adventure story with a long, dull conversation about ciphers conducted by a host of characters whom he does not bother to introduce and who have no importance to the narrative. This book is a stylistic nightmare: plodding, overly detailed and yet haphazard. Just try reading this one sentence:

“And you are the first and only man I ever met who hesitates to affirm the impossibility of that which seems to him wildly improbable, contrary at once to received opinion and to his own experience, and contrary, moreover, to all known natural laws, and all inferences hitherto drawn from them.”

That sentence is a heap trash. All he wanted to say was that the character does not reject ideas that are:

 

The subtitle of the novel is The Story of a Wrecked Record, which refers to the journal of a solo expedition to Mars that the narrator pulls out of a wrecked spaceship. Before he witnesses the crash, he spends the evening with some Confederate officers, because Greg felt the need to express his sympathy with the Confederate cause before he told a story about Mars. Yep. I found very little information about Percy Greg, except that his other writings express his “reactionary” politics. I think that means he wanted the South to rise again. I’m pretty sure he wanted to reestablish slavery, but he couldn’t so he did it in a novel, except slavery on Mars is based on gender not skin color. We’re getting there.

The writer of the journal describes his ship, its instruments and their voyage to Mars with scientific meticulousness, which is awful. The point of scientific writing is to describe an experiment in such detail that other scientists can reproduce your results. The point of science fiction is to entertain the reader. We can’t reproduce an imaginary voyage to Mars, so there is no reason to provide such a dismal quantity of detail about the journey. Profoundly boring. The endless logging of imaginary measurements takes up 10% of the book. Really. Greg is so abysmally unaware of what readers want to know. If J.K. Rowling wrote fifty pages of the Ministry of Magic quibbling over the Quidditch World Cup negotiations, that would be approximately equivalent to the beginning of this novel. Except that Rowling is a much better stylist.

When the protagonist arrives on Mars we get some nearly interesting description of the Martian geography, ecology and culture. Greg has a moderate amount of imagination, but he expresses himself so badly that it’s impossible to enjoy reading about crystal mansions, highly domesticated Martian animals or any of the rest of it.

Greg delves into complex Martian politics, which are Communist. But Greg is reactionary, so of course Communism is a horrible threat to those all-important scions: family values, production, religious freedom, male dominance, and so on. To be clear, I’m for religious freedom, I just wouldn’t buy the idea that religion is under attack for a ha’penny. “Whatever could not be produced in quantities sufficient for all to have a share was not produced at all.” Horrors! I mean, that sounds great. Women became “equal citizens, with no recognized relation to individual men.” Hooray! Except the reason they are separated from their dependence on men is to free men from the burden of having to feed women when Communism caused a collapse of the food supply. And of course the independence of women is depicted as horribly destructive. All family affection is destroyed. Seriously. I guess Greg thinks that women only love their children because their husbands tell them to. Makes perfect sense. . .if you’re a solipsistic fuck who thinks that women are incapable of thought or emotion that isn’t dictated to them by a man.

This guy actually thought that science would destroy maternal instinct. Uh. I don’t think he understands what science is. It gets so much worse. Equality nearly destroys Martian women. They cannot physically withstand the toll of education. Seriously. When asked to prepare for the same examinations that the men take “half the girls of each generation were rendered invalids for life.” Oh man, I really want to resurrect Percy Greg and force his zombified corpse to read meta studies about girls outperforming boys in school. Anyway, to rescue women from the torture of having to compete academically with men, Martians determine that they’d be better off as slaves. Yep, they’re basically slaves.

That’s not the end of it. It’s not over until the hero has a hareem of underage sex slaves. Really. Martian people are smaller than Earthlings. So, when the hero distinguishes himself fighting for the subculture of Martians that want to bring back religion and other nonsense, he is rewarded with a bevy of child-sized wives. His favorite is Eveena who “might possibly have completed her tenth year, which epoch in the life of Mars is about equivalent to the seventeenth birthday of a damsel nurtured in North-Western Europe.” Why Northwestern Europe as opposed to any place else on Earth? I cannot say.

I can’t write about this trash anymore. I’m sorry I read it. I’m a bit sorry to have brought it to your attention. You are too good to know about this book. He actually states that women are better off as slaves than as equals. Slavery is better for them than equality. Really. Why, in the 1880s would a man need to envision a world in which women are more suppressed? He’s not the only man to do this. I’m looking at you, Edward Abbott.

Let’s put this sorry mess behind us.

Final thoughts: 1. This book is trash on every level. 2. Fuck Percy Greg. 3. Sadly, I’m not surprised to find overt, toxic misogyny in the origins of the sci-fi genre. Granted, Greg isn’t a significant influence on the genre as a whole, but some people must have read this. It is the first of its kind. It helped create space for destructive and disgusting male fantasy in the sci-fi/fantasy world. That space endures today. 4. I am so grateful to the people who are fighting to make space for underrepresented groups in sci-fi. It can’t be easy. Thank you.

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Introducing Henry James

unspecifiedThe American, 1877 and Washington Square, 1880

Hello. Please welcome Henry James to the blog. Or don’t. He isn’t particularly welcome. I have read one short story, one novella and four full length novels by the fellow and I don’t care for him. The short story, Daisy Miller, was very pretty good, but everything else fell flat. I am not going to list the defects of James’ prose style now, because everything I have read by him contains the same flaws. I plan on working up a post on his many shortcomings to avoid the tedium of detailing them in every post. Dude wrote a lot of novels. You don’t need to read the same screed eight times. Today I will discuss two of his earliest novels and detail the flaws that are specific to them.

Henry James was American but spent much of his life living overseas. He was very concerned with culture clashes between Americans and Europeans. The titular American is a chap called Christopher Newman, a wealthy industrialist who ventures to the Continent in search of culture and a wife. Christopher Newman. Get it? He’s a new type of man that stale European bluebloods have not encountered. And you can tell he’s a good guy, because Christ appears in his name. I rolled my eyes when I first encountered this name. So heavy-handed, Henry. Our American hero is earnest, hard-working and self-assured. He has the excessive confidence of a tall, rich, American man.

The story opens in the Louvre with an entertaining scene in which poor Newman is duped into buying a poor copy of a painting by a pretty, opportunistic French mademoiselle. I was ready for wily Noemi to tempt him into a life of idleness and dissolution. Get in there and corrupt his Puritanical morals, girl. Sadly, Christ-opher is incorruptible. Instead, another character gets involved with her and pure, innocent Christopher is shocked when she becomes the mistress of a rich man. How dare she attempt to escape poverty! Before this scenario transpires Chris has befriended Noemi’s father and the two of them discussed her sexual purity for absolutely no reason. Sensing Christopher’s high-minded morality, the father tries to ingratiate himself by stating that he would kill his daughter if she ever ruined herself. When Chris hears about her ruination, he turns up at the father’s door like “Well…you better go kill her now.” Seriously. He is disappointed that the father doesn’t murder his daughter. Really.

Elsewhere in the novel, James attempts to update the Gothic novel for the late Victorian Era. In Gothic romances a young villager falls in love with the pure maiden who lives in the castle. Her evil wardens mistreat her and conspire against him. Against all odds, he persists, rescues her, and turns out to be the long-lost son of some nobleman. The angels of heaven descend to bless their holy matrimony. Newman stands in for the plucky villager. He came to Europe in search of a wife and he has very high standards. Chris spouts off copious entitled piffle about his search for an ideal wife. He sees this paragon as a reward due to him for his hard work. What is the point of the wealth he has accumulated if he doesn’t have “a beautiful woman perched on the pile, like a statue on a monument. She must be as good as she is beautiful, and as clever as she is good. I can give my wife a good deal, so I am not afraid to ask a good deal myself. […] I want to possess, in a word, the best article in the market.” Did you just throw up in your mouth a little? I did. I know that Henry James is taking a jibe here at the American obsession with money. The very words Newman chooses are redolent of Capitalism. But, we must remember that he is the hero. He is portrayed as a good and pure Christian who deserves the fantasy wife he seeks even though he only seeks her as a symbol of “victory over circumstances.”

Christopher soon encounters the exact embodiment of his fantasy, his “dream realized,” in the person of Claire de Cintre, a widow and member of an aristocratic French family. Unfortunately, the last three quarters of the novel center on this romance and it is not a very convincing one. Claire is quite boring. James does not make his reader fall in love with her. However, in true Gothic style, Christopher is willing to brave the contempt of her evil relatives in his attempts to win her hand. It’s all quite dull. Ultimately, she is too good and pure to disobey her mother. She becomes a nun. Newman returns to America in despair and remains in despair forever.

If The American has a silly and dramatic plot, and it does, Washington Square veers hard in the other direction. He examines how the scenario of the maiden wishing to marry an unsuitable man would play out in contemporary New York with no drama, just realism. Our male lead is Dr. Sloper, an eminent physician and misogynist. His wife dies, leaving him with a daughter whom he does not respect. Dr. Sloper thinks very highly of his own intellect and does not esteem Catherine’s intellect at all. Probably, if he had given her more credit from the outset, she would have accomplished more intellectually and developed more common sense.

A fortune hunter named Morris Townsend starts sniffing around Catherine, who is a bit of an old maid. Dr. Sloper does not believe that anyone could love Catherine for her own merit and forbids her to marry him. Poor Catherine somehow has some self-esteem despite being raised by such a pig of a father. She wishes to marry Morris. Dr. Sloper is right about Morris, but express his reservations in an honest conversation. He is too much of a misogynist for that. Instead he sees the question of her marriage as a competition between himself and the man who wishes for her hand. Who has more influence? Who will she obey? Catherine has never defied him before, and he believes that his paternal sway over this meek and humble girl will reign triumphant. In a way he wins, the two never marry because he threatens to disinherit her if she marries him. Catherine is happy to be well off with Morris, but Morris only wants her if she comes with a giant dowry.

The scuffle between the Morris, Dr. Sloper and Catherine does not end in a marriage. Instead Catherine loses respect for her father, because of his disrespectful and manipulative treatment of her. After the doctor’s death, an impoverished Townsend shows up at spinster Catherine’s door and expresses his regret. He should have taken her when he had the chance. Would she like to go out for oysters? No she would not. She is perfectly happy with her needlework and charity work and doesn’t need him.

On the surface, Washington Square sounds like an interesting reexamination of the well-worn archetype of the defiant daughter. There are some good bits of dialogue. I did take some pleasure in James’ subversion of the dramatic and romanticized elements of these stories into prosaic, everyday reality. However, prosaic reality isn’t all that fun or interesting. The characters are dull and flat. I didn’t care much whom Catherine married. It’s not a long book, but it still seemed bogged down in minutiae.

You might like The American or Washington Square if:

  • you are writing your Ph.D. on Henry James for some reason.

You might not like The American or Washington Square if:

  • see above. I think I covered it.

Final Thoughts: These books are just plain bad.

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The Worst Author in the Canon

the way we live now

The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope, 1875

Hold on to your hats, we are about to review the worst writer in the canon! Anthony Trollope, yes that’s his name, is a horrible writer. Perhaps someone worse will come along, but I doubt it. He packs the double punch of inept writing and racism. Yep.

This is a review of three of his novels, because they do not deserve individual posts. I read The Warden, Barchester Towers and The Way We Live Now. Why did I read all three? Because the racism didn’t rear its ugly head until the third book.

The Warden is a story for those of you who have always wondered how Anglican clergymen get appointed to a parish, which I presume is none of you. But if you are very concerned about the minutiae of church politics in the 19th century, boy do I have a book for you! Briefly, a clergyman who needs more money is offered a plum position that he feels he does not deserve, because he prefers gardening to actually doing his job. His colleagues argue “See here, Old Chap, you simply must take the position. Nepotism and cronyism are the zylem and phloem of the Anglican Church. Nobody in this institution deserves anything they have, Old Boy.” The Warden replies “I really feel I shouldn’t” and the go back and forth for a while. I don’t remember whether he takes the job or not, because who even cares, honestly. I read this one over a year ago.

Now, a kerfuffle over a fairly insignificant clergy appointment seems like a situation that, once resolved, couldn’t possibly have an aftermath. Nevertheless, Anthony Trollope wrote 500 pages of just that. In Barchester Towers old enmities are resolved. New enmities are formed. Lovers are kept apart by misunderstanding, overcome the misunderstanding and get married. Games of whist are described with meticulous detail for no reason whatsoever. If you just love stories of British manor houses, you might be able to tolerate this one.

That brings us to The Way We Live Now. That title. A bit on the nose, don’t you think, Trollope? It does encapsulate the aim of most fiction by squarely declaring the author’s intent to comment on contemporary life. But, why? Every non-historical novel could have this title. Why not change Pride and Prejudice to The Way We Fall in Love? The Great Gatsby could be The Way We Crush the Lower Classes Beneath Our Expensive Shoes. ChangemGreat Expectations to The Surprising Way We Ascend to a Higher Social Class While Abandoning Our Morals. Better writers come up with symbols, phrases or metaphors that encapsulate their point of view on contemporary life, rather than simply braying their intent to make a comment. As the The Catcher in the Rye symbolizes Holden Caulfield’s doomed need to hold on to innocence and The Great Gatsby symbolizes the impossible ambitions of the 1920s. But Anthony Trollope is not a better writer.

Of course, I expended considerable mental effort puzzling out Trollope’s exact comment on life in England in the 1870s. It’s not pretty. TWWLN concerns a wealthy capitalist and the swarm of aristocrats who try to profit off him. Nobles bolstering their dwindling resources by marrying the daughters of tradesmen is central to the novel, but hardly unique to the late 19th century. Sullying your blue blood by condescending to marry new money is as old as the English novel. Older, really. It’s not possible for a family to live forever off the land granted to some ancestor by Alfred the Great. Eventually, one of your heirs will have to stop hunting and gambling long enough to bestow the title of Duchess of Wherever or Lady Somethingorother on the daughter of a man who had the good sense to earn some money. I’m not trying to endorse capitalism here. I just think it’s a bit rich of British aristocrats to be completely pointless and then whine about not having any money.

To abruptly change the tone: the “now” of The Way We Live Now is anti-semitism. It’s not that men with titles are degrading themselves by befriending someone with new money. It’s that they are befriending a wealthy Jew. It’s not that their daughters are marrying merchants, it’s that they are marrying Jewish merchants. It’s not that their sons are gambling away their fortunes, it’s that their sons must now resort to marrying Jewish heiresses. Trollope’s mightiest symbol of how far England has fallen is the admission of a Jewish capitalist into Parliament. I don’t know what to say about this. Trollope wrote a horrible book with a message of racism and xenophobia. I’m glad this guy is rarely read outside of England. Y’all can keep him. No, don’t keep him. Boot him out of your canon. He’s horrible. I’m not talking about a moment of racism in an otherwise well-written book. I’m talking about a shoddily written book with racism as its main theme. Just trash.

Final thoughts: I could continue elaborating on the flaws in Trollope’s writing, but I think you know enough by now. The only decent thing I can say about him is that his books are good soporifics. I realized when I finished reading TWWLN that I’d grown to depend on it to help me fall asleep.

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Lesbian Vampire!

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Sheridan Le Fanu

Horror is back! We missed you. I haven’t read a horror story since the Romantic era. I was eager to love Irish author, Sheridan Le Fanu. I tried. His most noted work is the vampire short story “Carmilla,” which is ok. Everything else I read by him was dreadful.

I was hoping he’d be great, so I started at the very beginning with his 1872 collection of short stories In a Glass Darkly, which is the preferred Bible quote for people trying to be cryptic. Le Fanu sets up a narrative double blind, ostensibly one physician is providing us with his colleague’s notes. The colleague, Dr. Hesselius, treats haunted people. Nabokov uses layers of narrative to great effect. Le Fanu uses them to no effect. There is no reason to have one doctor introduce another doctor. There’s no reason for any of the characters to be doctors at all. Dr. Hesselius doesn’t save anyone. All his patients die. They are haunted and then they die. We didn’t need a special doctor to get that outcome. All Dr. Hesselius does is refer to Swedenborgian theory, which was some kind of Victorian spiritual mumbojombo that Le Fanu loved to mention but couldn’t figure out how to work into the plot or theme in any meaningful way.

Let’s talk about the story “Green Tea.” Dr. Hesselius fails to treat a man who is haunted by a demon monkey. Le Fanu does write this one effectively creepy sentence about the bedeviled man “Mr. Jennings has a way of looking sidelong upon the carpet, as if his eye followed the movements of something there.” That gives me the willies. After Jenning’s suicide, Hesselius declares that he inherited a predisposition to suicide, and that evil spirits got into his circulation through the green tea he habitually drank. Yes, friends, green tea killed him. Nice try, Le Fanu. Green tea is not scary and you didn’t make it so. This might be an expression of imperialist guilt, but it’s also very silly.

I tried out one of Le Fanu’s novels, because I’m thorough. It’s called Uncle Silas: or How to Sacrifice Your Daughter to Your Patriarchal Pride. I added the subtitle. Maud Ruthyn is an innocent maid with a wretched set of relatives. Her father is sore, because of rumors that his brother Silas killed a man who was found dead in his house. Daddy dearest refuses to believe these rumors, because, well because he doesn’t want to. Silas is generally a scoundrel. Dad isn’t on speaking terms with him, but he’s certain that he isn’t a killer, because he just can’t believe that a member of his noble bloodline could do such a thing. Oh, you nonsensical British aristocrats.

Anyway, Dad hires Maud a governess who is evil, abusive and sly enough to get away with it. She’s secretly also in Silas’ employ. Dad doesn’t believe Maud when she complains about Evil French Governess. Dad dies. Instead of sending wee Maud to live with her charmingly forthright aunt, Lady Knollys (I think Lady Knollys is her aunt, but I might have gotten the less-than-gripping minutiae of this book mixed up), he sends her to live with Uncle Silas. This fool believes in the glory of his bloodline so much, he’s willing to sacrifice. . .his bloodline to prove the value of his noble name. Get this guy a world’s worst dad mug. The thing is, if Maud dies before she reaches what’s that thing called? 21. You know. Majority! If she dies before she reaches her age of majority, her money goes to Silas. Dad’s objective was to show the world that he was so confident in Silas that he trusted his only child to him even given that Silas has a strong incentive to kill her. Which he does in fact try to do, but only after his creepy son tries to court her. I’ll say this, I was frightened for Maud. She was in a very precarious situation that could have been avoided with even the slightest measure of caution or care for her wellbeing. Thanks, Dad.

Now on to “Carmilla” the story of a girl and her vampire best friend. This one’s ok. There are some very silly elements, but it’s not complete garbage. The main character is a bit daft, which does nothing for me as a reader. There’s a very silly thing involving anagrams. Somehow, the story manages to be a bit creepy and even a bit charming despite these flaws. It’s a tale of a female friendship gone awry. Men are afraid of very close female friendships, aren’t they? The main character makes a new friend who seems to love her too much. Oh, dear. Being daft, the protagonist suspects that she might be a boy who disguised herself as a girl to get close to her. No, sweetie. I’m sorry no one ever told you about homosexuality. Or vampires. Anyway, if you read anything by Sheridan Le Fanu, let it be “Carmilla.” It’s brief, if nothing else.

You might like Sheridan Le Fanu if:

  • I don’t know, you’d have to be very dedicated to ghost stories. Even so, there are better ghost stories.

You might not like Sheridan Le Fanu if:

  • You’ve read a good ghost story.

Final thoughts: It’s a shame that the great stylists didn’t write horror stories. I do love a ghost story, just not these ones. I’m pretty sure we’ll have to wait another 14 years for Robert Louis Stevenson to get a good horror story. Sometimes if you dig deep into the short stories of great writers, you find a ghost story. Oscar Wilde has a great one. We’ll get there in good time.