ASECS, Cleveland: actresses & plays, women French moralists on marriage; 18thc opera on today’s stages; poetry reading

Hubert Robert (1733-1808), The Louvre

Dear friends and readers,

A final blog on this year’s ASECS meeting in Cleveland. Two plenary lectures, one by Felicity Nussbaum defending 18th century tragedy by way of the salacious mocking epilogues associated with key actresses of the age; the other by Julie Hayes on French women moralists and marriage. Then a miscellany: a session on later 18th to early 19th century drama & novels, one on women’s attitudes towards Rousseau. Sessions on music: I went to one on 18th century opera as performed, now, in the 21st century. Tourism and art. Finally, most delightful, a session where people read aloud their favorite poems and for once revealed why they enjoyed them so much.

Elizabeth Pope Young (1735-9 – 1797), Countess Hortensia in Jephson’s Countess of Narbonne

Saturday, 11:30 to noon, In “Unaccountable Pleasures: the Subject of Tragedy,” Felicity Nussbaum began with the admission many of the plays of the era were poor; if tragedy is central to an era, how explain the aesthetic failure of tragedies when they were so popular. Radical shifts in ways of performing and the new central roles for women make for a different kind of drama: actresses made visible a new kind of bonding whose goal was to flatter and to enable their audiences to escape. She went over the careers of actresses, gave readings of several centrally popular 18th century tragic plays (not all today considered great masterpieces like Arthur Murphy’s The Grecian Daughter), read aloud numerous of the epilogues & and then explicated them and discussed how they were enacted to suggest they were meaningful as performed for their audiences.

One of the sessions, on Thursday, 9:45 am (18, “The 18th century repertoire) can be aligned with Nussbaum’s speech. All three papers were about the radical content of the plays of the 1790s; what unites them with the previous topic is on the face of it these have been seen as poor plays, rewrites of earlier plays or apparently naive recountings of earlier political events. Daniel Gustafson spoke of the rewriting of specific Restoration libertine plays (a revival where they were rewritten and famous Restoration historical figures brought before the public again, i.e, Rochester, Charles II); these manifest a preference for acting out contemporary (early 19th century) politicized ideals. Later plays have characters of lower rank; the earlier time of history is itself de-politicized. Daniell O’Quinn (quoting John Barrell) showed how plays got through the harsh repression and how performances through visuals, noise and a libretto yield comments on what is tyranny. Better plays — as Otway’s whose complexity was little appreciated — can tragically fail. Multiple complex intentions are mostly lost.

From a 2013 production of Sheridan’s Rivals (Emily Bergl and Matt Letscher) at the Vivian Beaumont in NYC

Roz Ballaster explicated the text of Sheridan’s Rivals as a prologue to looking at the interactions (so to speak) of the novel and drama. She went over plays which reworked other plays (Inchbald’s Married Man reworked Destouche’s autobiographical play of the same name); George Colman writes a play that is like an obsessed novel where no conflicts are resolved. We must not read the plays too much as imitations either. She pointed to texts which were read and not staged. The novel heroine is generally more active, more aggressive, more complex, but we get novelistic treatments of heroine in the theater (Southerne’s Isabella).

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Madame du Chatelet at her work table by an unknown French artist

Julie Chandler Hayes first looked at the work of many 17th, 18th and 19th century women moralistsm then singled out 4 individual women and their works to treat in detail and then moved back to generalization. A mordant tradition of moralizing which differ from that of males which has little to say about childbirth or marriage, which women moralists discuss, often as a kind of slavery; they were given no or little choice. Women whose works she covered include: Gabrielle Suchon (1631-1703), Madame de Lafayette (1634-93); Anne-Therese de Marguenat de Courcelles, Marquise de Lambert (1647-1733); Madeleine de Puisieux (1720-98); Madame de Verzure (?1766); Marie-Jeanne de Châtillon Bontems (1718-1768) who translated Thomson’s Seasons; Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte d’Arlus (or Darlus), married to Louis-Lazare Thiroux d’Arconville (1720-1805), and wrote scientific works, translated, whose works have been attributed to Diderot; Emilie du Chatelet (1706-49).

While Prof Hayes discussed some themes as they appear in a few individual works or are of interest for one person, I’ve given just her heads of topic and what she discussed both separately and for the women as a group. SO: they discuss celibacy, companionate marriage, adultery (this was expected, people presented as taking a lover out of boredom, but then finding themselves in a morass of jealousy and resentment). The issue of parenthood is treated abstractly: before Rousseau motherhood is not a topic. More abstractly: unequal power relationships, egalitarian feminism; the necessity of submission, a pessimistic view of humanity, marriage as a perverted institution, hardly calculated to add to happiness of either person. Loss of liberty is central to the truth of marriage, especially for women.

Girls are victims raised with care in order that they submit to this life; boys are put into armies. The moralists say there are husbands who love their wives and wives who love their husbands, but it’s the husband who knows independence; for a wife to know liberty she must be a widow first. People shipwreck themselves for desire and ambition. Bleak depictions of social customs; she must obey him and his self-interest; he can make her unhappy with impunity. We see the interior of households, happiness not common among the lower class people either. Marriage not a natural state, an ideal of an unattached life. Some deeply poignant life stories hinted at: one woman lost her child at an early age and does not get over it. Some see a double movement between ambition (so you follow convenances) and personal identity.

There is little or no emotional refuge to be found in French women’s moralist writings. Novel took on further cultural analyses with its quest to understand human motivations and interactions. these are discourses of self-regulation. They have a profound sense the world they are allowed is not enough.

Portrait of Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807), Georg Oswald May (1738-1816)

Again I attended a session that may be aligned with this general lecture: Rousseau’s Emile (Friday, 11:30 am, No. 113). There were four papers. There were no surprises: Mary Trouille showed Rousseau advised educating women to serve men’s needs absolutely; his novel, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise shows the tragic results; Kristin Jennings went over how 18th century German women responded to Rousseau as seen in their writing, her specific example the work of Sophie Von La Roche whose famous novel she compared to that of another German woman writer; Karen Pagani explicated an unfinished text by Rousseau, Les Solitaires which seems to be about whether a man should forgive a woman who has transgressed. The question (to me) seemed inadequate as the women in question was probably raped. Questions include whether the person should react with personal feelings (which seemed to lead to forgiveness) or do his or her civic duty and set an example. A fourth paper came from another panel: Avi Lifschitz had to leave early so he gave his paper on Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages in this session. I thought most interesting was Rousseau’s idea that words have a natural link with reality through their signing function; that the visual holds us, that language has lost its ability to persuade as it becomes more abstract, that it’s most effective when people say less. Rousseau was frank enough to show his imagined teacher and pupil acting out some of his theories and failing.

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2013: Metropolitan Opera: Handel’s Giulio Cesare

A session I and Jim enjoyed but I probably won’t be able to convey much about was “Eighteenth Century Opera in Production” (Saturday, 9:45 am, No 169). All four presentations used power-point, computers, screens, music, DVDs. Majel A. Connery discussed a recent production of Mozart at Salzburg which appears to have been 3 plays, all intended to reflect his life, his imagination trajectory, his work: she called it “meta-theater Mozart.” The plays were controversial among other things for the way they characterized Mozart’s inner life: wild, nightmarish, when reflective sad. Money (the lack of it) tears the hero apart. Everyone in simple symbolic costumes; the stage a huge box. Annelies Andries discussed what happened when the traditional aria of an opera is replaced by anther aria part of the opera but often left out. This happened in a production of the Marriage of Figaro with Cecilia Bartoli; the audience was apparently disappointed instead of reinvigorated with the apparently new perspective.

Danielle de Niese as Ariel (Enchanted Island)

Laurel E. Zeis’s's “‘Persistent 18th century in two recent Metropolitan productions” was about elements of staging, kinds of voices, costumes, motifs, attitudes, practices, brought into the 21st century from the 18th century stage. I have a picture of some on this blog: the imitation of an 18th century stage in the recent Giulio Cesare. I wrote a blog about The Enchanted Island which was her central focus — and the use of boats on artificial water in the background appeared again in Giulio Cesare. Supernatural elements and computerized projection are found everywhere — though not Dryden and Davenant substituted for Shakespeare. Her suggestion that the “machine” for the Ring cycle was “very 18th century” because it changed the scenery in front of the audience, caused the players to come up front stage, & even dress in front of us was not all that persuasive, but her clips were fun. She talked of operas I’d not heard of (a Little Women), and pointed to unexpected 18th century elements in recently written operas like Nixon in China (a da capo aria).

Giovanni Piranesi (1720-88), Carceri V

Similarly, the strong tourism element of the four papers given in “Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations in the 18th century” (Thursday, 4:15 pm, No 71) were dependent on slides, and clips and photos, and I took few notes, just looked at lot. Suffice to say I especially enjoyed T. Barton Thurber’s talk on lasting impressions of Giovanni Battista Piranesi and British artists in Italy” and the pictures of Roman Antiquities discussed by Carole Paul. I was not able to stay for Jamie Smith’s Lady Mary Montagu and the Masks of Venice,” and unfortunately David Kennerley did not make it with his “Italian Prima Donnas and British Female Singers, 1770-1840″.

A little more on a poetry reading session and I’ve done.

Ellen

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ASECS, Cleveland: Diasporic Jane (my film paper on line): Sade & Barry Lyndon

1971 BBC S&S: Joanna David as Elinor visiting Robin Ellis as Edward in the inn he took refuge in when his mother threw him out

Dear friends and readers,

A short blog to let you know I’ve put my paper, “Diasporic Jane: Imagines of Displacement, Exile and Homelessness in the Austen Films” on line at my website.

It was one of three papers given on a panel chaired by Prof. John O’Neil. It comes from the larger project I’ve been working on for several years now: specifically the fifth chapter which dwells at length on the Tamil I Have Found It: I suggest that Austen’s books lend themselves to contemporary cinema because of her identification as a vulnerable dependent woman and the nature of her stories as well as characters. More narrowly I argue that images of “alienated social identities, de-housed heroines, geographic displacement, resulting epistolarity, and quests for refuge appear as often in heritage as appropriation films.” I include a select bibliography of books on transnational and accented cinema, notes and stills. I couldn’t put on lie the two brief clips I showed: instead I have a series of shots.

2009 Emma: Tamsin Grieg as Miss Bates sending Jane off

2004: Bride and Prejudice: the Bingley characters removed from Jane — even Emma and the gay Punjabi P&P lend themselves to images of exile, displacement

There were two other papers given in this session: Daniel Brewer’s “Screening the Anachronic Sade,” and Moti Gharib Shojanai’s “Kubrick and Kant: Re-framing Enlightenment in Barry Lyndon.” Unfortunately (as often happens when I am giving a paper) I was unable to take notes on the other two papers. Prof Brewer showed how anachronistic and downright misleading Quills was if you are looking for accurate history, but that the film offered a modern vision of today’s world (highly pessimistic, violent) to viewers as well as a sophisticated discourse on the nature of Sade’s compulsion to write. Ms. Shojania’s paper barely mentioned Thackeray’s novel, Barry Lyndon; she took us through the movie in a way which showed how it was about the education of the central character into corruption and despair. You might say it left off where Thackeray’s ironic novel (the narrator, Barry is seen from a stance which recalls Fielding’s Jonathan Wild) begins: we sympathize with Ryan Gosling as Barry as a kind of victim, and again the movie spoke to people today.

I’ve two blogs on these films (part of my study of 18th century film): I see Quills as falling into the genres a horror and period biopic; I wrote about the slowly-moving equisitely set out shots (like paintings) in Barry Lyndon.

It was a well attended session, but the only one on film in the conference.

2002 I Have Found It: Sowmya’s long quest for a job

To pay the rent (our family is threatened with eviction in Madras, the mother sells her jewels for money

Ellen

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On the Oscars

Keira Knightley as Anna Karenina (2013)

Dear friends and readers,

Although 20th century awarding of recognition for achievement in movie-making may not seem appropriate for a blog intended for matter Austen, 18th century and women writers, artists, and I admit I write just about all my film studies blogs on Ellen and Jim Have a Blog, Two; nonetheless it is rare that an art that can so exquisitely capture aspects of life’s fantastical array of qualities be treated on TV with the equivalent of “Hail Stupidity!” so that Pope’s Dunciad becomes relevant. Since I went to most of the movies I saw with Izzy, it’s no wonder I agree with her favored list, and her assessment of the prize-receiving fool’s gold and the way the program was handled.

I am just now listening to a recording of a dramatic reading aloud of the whole of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; the reader is Davina Porter, and I see how brilliant and right was Matthew MacFayden as Stiva. And Knightley was as good as ever I’ve seen Emma Thompson, Hattie Morahan. Emmanuelle Riva was nominated for actress in a leading role (Haneke’s Amour). No one dared not vote for Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln. I assume the grave seriousness of the film was embarrassing to the voters. The great genius of film-making, Ang Lee, walked away with 3.

Still for the most part the choices and proceedings merit:

O Muse! relate (for you can tell alone,
Wits have short Memories, and Dunces none) [620]
Relate, who first, who last resign’d to rest;
Whose Heads she partly, whose completely blest;
What Charms could Faction, what Ambition lull,
The Venal quiet, and intrance the Dull;
‘Till drown’d was Sense, and Shame, and Right, and
Wrong— …
In vain, in vain, — the all-composing Hour
Resistless falls: The Muse obeys the Pow’r.
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
Of Night Primæval, and of Chaos old! 148 [630]
Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea’s strain, [635]
The sick’ning stars fade off th’ethereal plain …

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What new movie in a paying movie-house did I see this year in the movies worth seeing and great? The only ones that remain in my mind are Coriolanus, last February; Alfred Nobbs, last March. I admit since we go to HD operas, I don’t get to see enough new movies.

Ellen

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Diasporic Indian Austen: films about displacement, exile, seeking a home

Hasidia (Sarita Khajuria and Oliver (Mo Sesay) seen from the bus (Bhaji on the Beach, 1993): modern reality transforms the romantic image

Wm Darcy (Martin Henderson) and Lalita (Aiswarya Rai) walking on LA beach (Bride and Prejudice 2005): romance scene left fantasy but with addition of cultural disparities

Dear friends and readers,

For the last couple of weeks now I’ve been watching the 6 Sense and Sensibility films still available, and a group of Indian films, mostly Tamil, powerfully great ones, Roja, Bombay, Guru by Mani Ratnam; plus the two other recent Indian adaptations of Austen, Bride and Prejudice and Aisha. I’ve watched two transnationals: Bhaji on the Beach and Mississippi Masala. And I’ve read in whole and parts several superb books on Indian cinema and essays on individual films.

I had watched them before (see earlier blog on Lagaan, Guru, Bombay, Charuntula, Mississippi Masala) but this time it was with a view to understanding and then writing a paper on Rajiv Menon’s I Have Found It, the 2000 Tamil analogous or free adaptation of S&S.

I’ve come to a few general conclusions. Jane Austen’s novels — or novels of the 18th & 19th century — seem peculiarly suitable for contemporary Indian films, from the typology: chaste heroine, intelligent assertive yet tactful and acquiescent in her subordinate position to men; she also regards having and bringing up children one of her main functions in life. Austen and the English traditions of middle class novels also contain social criticism from the angle of the vulnerable or underdog combined with women’s romance. Finally, they have ethical heroes who are ambitious and want to marry and are respectful of women, the traditional family group, and the arranged marriage for money (for themselves as well).

Further, if we look at the four faithful movies, we find her material has forced upon the film-makers images of displacement, journeys, exile from home:

Striking & memorable image of Marianne pacing un-home-y space (not usually discussed, in “faithful” 1995 S&S)

Turning to both free adaptations, I Have Found It is filled with sudden journeys, by train, by bus, by truck; the characters stand outside buildings they are excluded from; the Elinor character Sowmya has a hard time getting a job and the family is harassed for rent and lacks food for a time; they live in a rented apartment, in danger of eviction. They had lived in a palace type house in their village before the grandfather died and cut his daughter, the equivalent of Mrs Austen, off without any money.

The family’s train journey away from village (I Have Found It)

Sowmya-Elinor can find no place, outsider in Chennai

From Prada to Nada makes the trip from West to East LA profoundly transformative of everything the sisters have known:

Crossing from west (white, rich) to east (Spanish, poor) LA (From Prada to Nada, 2010)

Since I’m interested in Indian films here I turn also to Aisha too. Despite the static quality of Emma’s life in the novel becomes a film of journeys. Aisha is conceived of as a romance about an upper class girl with plenty of leisure time to spend her life socializing in her milieu, but what does she do but tak journeys between four places cities, a town not far from Delhi; Delhi; a resort area; Bombay:

Mumbai seen from the angle of Aisha’s car

Aisha’s coming-of-age story and confused inner life is mirrored in these concrete displacements:

Aisha has many car scenes; here the characters (Shefali and Gambhir) have been tricked by Aisha & are w/o their car and are in a dangerous unknown area, must find & walk home (Aisha)

When I compared Gurinda Chadha’s transnational Bhaji on the Beach together with Bride and Prejudice & distinguished the features of Austen’s 1813 Pride and Prejudice from all that accrues in one’s mind: I saw that Chadha took on board, added, as part of what estranges our lovers in B&P a displaced young man (Wm Darcy) and a journeying set of sisters at risk. Bride and Prejudice is filled with images of journeying, of people displaced, suddenly turning up; planes, bridges, odd angled cities juxtaposed are noticed by many. But the images of moving, of loss, of zoom shots are continual and many unnoticed. The many cars laden with family belongings:

When Jaya-Jane and Balraj-Bingley are separated a visual image of a train on a desolate landscape appears:

This is part of what makes the imitation of Austen’s P&P plot-outline touching beyond the beauty and energy of the dances & songs. Austen’s P&P had nothing to do with cultural liminality and yet the novel lends itself to this sort of deepening treatment.

Since it’s not well enough known by Janeites or Austen scholars, and at the present time the only way to get it is to pay to have a DVD manufactured on demand, I’ll describe Bhaji on the Beach.

One of the many scenes of the women in the van (this one at evening, coming home)

From “Representing the Spaces of Diaspora in Contemporary British Films by Women Directors,” by Anne Ciecko, Cinema Journal, 383 (Spring, 1999), pp. 67-90:

Bhaji on the Beach takes place in the course of a single day. The film begins with a journey down a street in Birmingham, offering glimpses of England’s second-largest city as a marketplace of diversity … Birmingham is [the] place of departure, and the ultimate destination is Blackpool for a summer holiday. In a series of short, parallel-edited vignettes, the viewer is introduced to the dramatis personae, a wide range of pilgrims of different ages (mostly middle class)-women of South Asian ethnic backgrounds- all headed on a day trip to Blackpool sponsored by the Saheli Women’s Center. Through the character of the group leader, Simi, Chadha and her screenwriter, Meera Syal, foreground the site of the Asian women’s refuge and resource center, which provides facilities, advice, services, and information to the community, concentrating on women’s issues with a strong focus on the family.

We have three separate stories threading their way through the trip and day long outing. The first is Asha (Lalita Ahmed), a middle aged Indian women terrorized by her nightmare Gods, who appeases them by saying she will know her place; she slowly emerges from her nightmare and finds herself stumbling among huge grocery store goods, which come down to normal size and she is in a grocery and her family just behind waiting for her to make them lunch. Over the course of her day at Blackpool, she will meet, walk, and talk with a lonely gallant ex-actor British (white) man.

We switch to Ginder (Kim Vithana), a Southasian young woman in her mid-20s reading a letter on a stairway; these turn out to be divorce papers; she goes into the room where her son is and he asks when they will see Daddy in this new place they are moving to. She says she can’t answer that but today they are going to seashore, and she feigns or feels some relief to get out of their tight quarters. We switch to an empty cot for child, near by Ranjit (Jimmi Harkishin) angry Southasian young man on another bed with similar letter; and his young brother, Manjit (Akbar Kurtha) comes in and he cries with real rage, “Will no one ever leave him alone in this family.” Manjit wants to be reasonable (and prevents his brother from kidnapping his son later in the movie) and with a bully tyrannical older brother, Ranjit chases Ginder down to Blackpool, to try to persuade her to return to him and his family on his terms. We learn from seeing her body he has beaten her, and he tries to again as a way of subduing her. He is unable to change his destructive life patterns.

Ginger makes one last appeal to Ranjit

This opening with an insistence he listen to her and make a separate home for them results in his hitting and throwing her on the ground

The third couple is comprised of a 21 year old Southasian girl, Hasidia, daughter of aspiring parents; she has made medical school and they want her to be a physician. She finds she is pregnant by Oliver, her black English boyfriend (Afro-Carribean?) whose existence the parents do not know about — only partly because he’s black. Over the course of the day she argues with him, phones him, he tries to find her; she finds out about abortions and they meet again at the beach where he too followed her. The most directly hopeful moment of the film occurs when they agree they must do the abortion, they are not in a position to marry or bring up a child, but they will see it through together, and they are last seen in the shot I put at the head of this blog, on his bike.

On the bus are relatives of both young women, a grandmother, an aunt, Pushka (Zohra Sehga), Rekhan (Souad Faress) a Indian woman who lives in Bengal. There are two younger women who are “taken out” (or harassed, depending on your point of view) by some British young men (louts is the feel). They wear combinations of traditional and modern British dress.

The film also makes humorous references to the artificial conventions of popular Indian movies, as in the stylized fantasy sequence in which Asha dances in the rain until she is jolted out of her reverie when the man who courts her is revealed to be [her eldely English escort] Ambrose (his brown makeup washes off) … The whole place has a liberal and liberating atmosphere about it; at the same time, it is stiflingly cluttered and consumerist. The Blackpool “illuminations,” the late-summer lighting up of the tacky town with Christmas lights, is ostensibly the reason the women’s group has chosen this place for the summer getaway. … The women from Birmingham are allowed to enjoy the spectacle at the end of the film, when the darkening streets are lit up and the place takes on a unique beauty. Despite the heavy situations encountered along the way, the film has a comforting tone. They also bring with them the enormous symbolic baggage of tradition. Befitting the carnivalesque environment of Blackpool, many are in costume or change their clothing along the way, as if taking on the guise or garb of the “other.”

I felt as with Mira Nair’s Namesake (see Natalie Friedman’s “From Hybrids to Tourists: Children of Immigrants in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 50:1 (2008): 111-27)and Mississippi Marsala which combines an ethnically diverse Southern American town culture with India culture (from Uganda), in Bhaji on the Beach, I could discern the archetypes of Indian filmic culture in this hybrid form.

Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala like her adaptations in general are in mood quite different from Chadha’s — far more grave, melancholic, with more emotional depths. Chadha uses stereotypes far more: of course the husband is wretched and violent; of course the wife longs to return but “I can’t.” Individuals are far more various than this; some hybrid people are happy, not punished, have parents who sympathize. As B&P is shallow easy romance, so Bhaji on the Beach is a situation comedy in type. Nair gets beneath the stereotypes to suggest another self which does not have any public space to be. Nair’s Mississippi Massala uses strong melodramatic patterning (the opening flashback of Indian films, the wedding, the dance) while Bhaji on the Beach is more Western in tropes and does have the inconsequentality of life in feel because of many events not part of the plot-design. Yet in both the same imagery and concern with homelessness, exile, displacement prevails (so too Nair’s Namesake).

Jay (Sethman Roth), the exiled Asian Uganda eagerly returning (from Mississippi) by plane, car to discover he has been dreaming of ghosts, of what is not (Mississippi Masala)

This blog is meant to be suggestive only. I’m working out some thoughts. So I turn to Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar’s “The Cinema of Displacement: Towards a Politically Motivated Poetics,” Film Criticism, where they write:

Home is largely construed in terms of the land to which one belongs: land is a cultural repository of memories and symbolic of a way of life … The spaces that the protagonists occupy become a central feature in their acts of self- representation. In films representing displacement, the protagonists seem to locate themselves in a curious double space. The space in tiie mise-en-scene – a room, a train station, a porch – always evokes an “other” space.

I add the dominant principle in the relationship between the double spaces is intrusion. There is a constant traversing of space.

All six S&S films show the above emotional characteristics & imagery: psycho-social distress becomes literal displacement and liminality. I move from first seeing the Dashwood women lamenting on the stairwell in the 71 S&S:

We see the 3 Dashwood women pressed together on the stairwell surrounded by new furniture crowding them out (1971 S&S);

to the many grim journeys of the 81 S&S; to the dwelling on melancholy stark and fearful landscape in the 95 S&S (even gardens are nightmarish and a piano has to be hauled up a hill); to continual displacements of I Have Found It (2000), and the continual movement of Davies’s 2009 S&S

The classic coach journey (2008 S&S)

culminating most recently (2011) in the use of zoning and moving trucks in From Prada to Nada, where Edward and Nora-Elinor’s love scenes are conducted next to a moving van.

Virginia Woolf pointed out in 3 Guineas how most women have no state for real — if they want any liberation; Carole Pateman that they are attached to the society they live in through men or families who however can eject them at will. These insights are pictured in these films out of Austen.

Ellen

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Andrew Davies’s Austen movies in full context

Edward Ferrars (Dan Stevens) upon seeing Elinor Dashwood (Hattie Morahan) in the library (2008 JA’s S&S)

Dear friends and readers,

Having return to my chapters towards a book on Austen films, working title: A Place of Refuge, you can expect many more blogs on Austen and film adaptations for quite a while.

To begin with, a list:

Davies’s films

Seven of the above are Jane Austen movies: Davies has scripted more of them than any one else. One, the 2007 A Room with a View, from E. M. Forster’s novel, as yet unrecognized as a rewrite of Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Davies was a crucial contributor to the two Bridget Jones movies, like the 1995 Pride and Prejudice, were so commercially successful that they became significant much-discussed sociological events. All seven are revisionist re-tellings of Austen’s novels dependent on his sharply perceptive engagement with the texts.

Elinor (Hattie Morahan) coming into the library, she returns Edward’s gaze

With their Austen matter producing recurring motifs, these seven films form a consistent fabric whose underlying patterns are found across and actuate Davies’s huge corpus. I have tried to write about some of these, especially romance, since Sarah Caldwell’s otherwise excellent study (Andrew Davies marginalizes his romances. As a script-writer of all these various mini-series, Davies is of enormous importance in shaping how modern viewers will see many 19th century and Neo-Victorian novels too.

Rosamund (Trevyn McDowell) showing Lydgate (Douglas Hodge) her Keepsake album: “Beautifully idiotic” he pronounces (Middlemarch)

Molly and Squire Hamley (Justine Waddell and Michael Gambon) and read Roger’s letters from Africa (Wives and Daughters)

Davies’s movies include a considerable body of melodramatic romance, and a number of predominantly satiric films whose crowded scenes explore capitalism and class structures, wars and political regimes, specific regions (where the story is set) and niche worlds: academic, medical, journalistic (the writing career), archaeological, parliamentary, commercial, financial, and (continually) familial. At least half of these are TV mini-series, and, often of pre-mid-twentieth century books, much is adaptation that functions to speak to our own era in the manner of historical fiction. Yet varied as they are, and products of team-work, most of these films may be studied as complicatedly artful film that dramatizes and pictures Davies’s individual consistent world view, one which exposes realities of human desires (especially sexual) and losses that matter in a sensitively intelligent way, to, in so doing, question the soundness of our sexual and social, and by extension, political and economic arrangements.

If you study the plot-design of many of Davies’s melodramatic romances other than those based on Austen you repeatedly find a story of one or more significantly vulnerable heroines caught up in a jealous rivalry, often Oedipal between two men. One of this pair or another male character is susceptible to abjection or (startlingly conversely) seemingly coolly malevolent and/or contemptible. An agon which may take the form of a dark night of self-examination, or cowardly flight or long siege of drunkenness (not always on-stage), ensues. We experience an unusual triangulated quest for identity because most of the time Davies’s males do not end up clearly in charge, but rather dependent on the strength (or money) of heroines whose favor they have had to actively solicit and who seem free actively to choose or reject them.

The continuum includes male types outside Austen’s range, from the tragic (e.g., John Leigh played by Kevin McNally, 1984 Diana), to the psychopathic (Henry Kent played by Michael Kitchen, 2005 Falling), but who nonetheless function in the stories in ways that connect them to the lighter variants within Austen’s range, from introspective sensibility figures, strong depressives (Colin Firth as Fitzwilliam Darcy, Dan Steevens as Edward Ferrars), to shallow and (for a young girl) dangerous cads (Raymound Coulthard as Frank Churchill, Mark Dymond as Captain Frederick Tilney).

From the 1984 mini-series Diana Jan (Kevin McNally) watching Diana

Diana bathing (Jenny Seagrove)

From the earliest of his films (when it was even discreditable to do so), Davies’s scripts called for frequent use of flashbacks for both male and female characters to show us the inner evolution of characters during the story: we are confronted with memories, dreams and fantasy, dramatized moments from the past, sometimes with the image of the past having the present older character doing the dreaming turning up in place of the younger person who was there at the time. Continuity and strong emotions are kept up by much voice-over and pulsating non-diegetic music.

In the five Austen movies written wholly by him, and in a number of romance movies not from Austen but from a text susceptible to transformation into a women-centered movie close in mood, perspective, character types to his Austen set (e.g., 1999 Wives and Daughters, 2004 He Knew He Was Right, and 2007 Fanny Hill), we find a continual balancing counterweight of movement-images or sequences of scenes placed across the movie (yet not closely plot-driven) which dramatize aspects of intimate supportive and/or false women’s friendship (sisters, potential sisters-in-law, cousins, friends, maternal or governess figures), interwoven with the Oedipally-understood heterosexual romance plot-design.

Many Davies’s movies, including political and satiric movies and thrillers, manifest an equivalent male counterbalance: intertwined second stories dramatize ambiguous homoerotic male friendships (1992 Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, 2001 Othello and The Tailor of Panama [Andy and Harry unexpectedly go dancing in a gay bar], 2005 Bleak House [Sergeant George and and Phil Squod], 2008 Little Dorrit [Miss Wade and Tattycoram], 2009 Sleep with Me). Further movies dwell on the absence of this psychologically-needed relationship (a mother, a distanced father) as central to the movie’s tragedies (Wives and Daughters and the 2005 Bleak House).

Amanda Ooms, from the extraordinary werewolf film

If we add to these, movies which substitute homosexual for heterosexual romance (2002 Tipping the Velvet, 2006 Line of Beauty) or include episodic homosexual romance and incestuous familial relationships (1996 Emma and Moll Flanders, 2007 Fanny Hill), movies which depict naturally indifferent or hostile mothers and protective mother-governess figures (1984 Diana, 1989 Mother Love, 1995 Pride and Prejudice, again Moll Flanders, 1996 Wilderness, 1998 Vanity Fair, again Little Dorrit), we see the Davies’s Austen films belong to a set of movies which insist on the centrality of friendship in people’s lives, break the ban on dramatizing the ubiquity of homoerotic relationships, and look equally at loving support and fierce incestuous possessiveness and rivalries within families.

Ellen

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Austen’s Emma turned into a TV serial drama

Emma (Romola Garai), Mr Knightley (Jonny Lee Miller) and Mrs Weston re-hash once again why Jane allows Mrs Elton such liberties (2009 BBC Emma by Sandy Welch)

Dear friends and readers,

A line of thought coming out of my Downton Abbey blogs this week (Season 3, Part 1, and Part 2 and a session I went to at the MLA devoted to TV serial drama (one of the most original of all those I attended at the conference). Is Austen’s Emma Downton Abbey’d, Victorianized, Trollope’d through serial films; to the extent this happens, what does it reveal about Austen’s texts when we look at how it’s done, where the Austen text (as it were) resists this treatment and where it lends itself to it.

In the MLA session Austen’s Emma came under discussion. Why? Because to film that novel as a serialized drama necessitates changing its basic tight structure. Among Austen’s novels, the one with the most artful structure and control is Emma, with its three time entry of Mr Knightley’s point of view at specific points in the narrative, its use of seasons, one year and so on.

The art of serialization requires (among other things): stasis and cyclical repetition for psychological and social development. You hold back what happens so as to lengthen it out and you repeat it in different variations. It’s also the way time is passed; one of the pleasures of these “texts.” (See my Aesthetics of Soap Operas explained and defended.) The 1972 and 2009 Emmas are both mini-series, and they have striking changes in structure and layout from the novel which changes the affect of them. I took down the details the person then cited and will have them in a blog when I get to my notes so you have to take this comparison on faith or just remember for yourself.

Mr Knightley (John Carson) and Emma (Doran Goodwin) share a laugh at Emma’s expense at something that has happened — this film too uses re-discussions as a way of making interwoven stories (1972 BBC Emma by John Constanduros)

But even just thinking about it you can see this in the 1995 P&P especially where a relatively tight book is turned into a structure which can perpetuate itself and spin out and bring characters in and out and have central ritual scenes with repeating crises. Endless dinners, walking discussions, spun out mini-back-stories which are imagined as taking place between chapters in the books, flashbacks while characters read letters. It’s part of the way the novel is changed into something spectacular.

Mr Darcy’s (Colin Firth’s) quest for Lydia (a long spun out story interwoven with other re-worked material (1995 BBC P&P by Andrew Davies)

The point was of the paper I heard was books like say Trollope’s lend themselves to, are almost in effect themselves serial dramas (roman fleuves — I deal with this in the last chapter of my book on Trollope on the Net) with their cycling in and out characters, multiplots, repetitions, lend themselves to serial drama. (Te person’s paper was on the Barchster novels and the 1990s BBC mini-series Northern Exposure which found that it couldn’t center on one character and keep going but had to present a community and group of characters so the central actor sued them.)

I’d add that Dickens seems to have fought against installment divisions: his often are slightly cock-eyed, meaning he deliberately starts a new thread as a last chapter, does not have all three chapters for an installment one thread, at least in Little Dorrit; but his books nonetheless still lend themselves to seralization. Davies has had startling successes with his two dramas, and the 1980s has a number of brilliant Dickens mini-series.

This might be an interesting and a fruitful perspective to take on longer 18th century Victorian novels too as well as Austen’s. How well do they fit serialization? For example, almost all the S&S movies have been mini-series and those not mini-series (I have found it has a cyclical structure). S&S lends itself to serialization because of the centrality of the journey in the novel: the Austen women are (to use modern language) dispersed from their original place and move about. It’s not a novel where time passes — as Mansfield Park is, a novel which much benefits from the 1983 serialization by Ken Taylor. That it was originally an epistolary novel as was P&P can also account for the serialisation fit.

Instead of beginning with the novel and looking at the film from the novel’s art; begin with the film and look at what serialization does to the novel.

Novels like Richardson’s epistolary Clarissa and Fielding’s controlled picaresque Tom Jones lend themselves to TV serial dramas. The 1997 BBC Tom Jones is a superb and fits the form. The problem with the 1991 BBC Clarissa is the model seems to have been classical structure and it was way too short; it really needed something like 6 episodes since Clary itself as an epistolary novel shows many serial characteristics. The strength of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon is its long and he treats his film as as series of interwoven dream sequences.

Yet paradoxically (I didn’t get a chance to say this in the session) the tightly-structured localized Emma lends itself to the 1972 Emma and 2009 Emma, which are closer to the book than say the recent 2010 Aisha which itself is long enough to seem serial. That’s because they are transpositions with hinge-points, central characters, and themes kept. The Indian film is analogous in type, is very long and has songs and dancing, but when it does follow some core elements of the book — the Mr Knightley and Emma discussion-type scenes — it suddenly connects back to Austen.

Aisha-Emma and Arjun-Knightley go out for a run

They re-hash companionably too

Both singletons, the two 1996 Emmas, especially McGrath’s present themselves as transpositions. In the McGrath it’s the wholescale change in mood, with Emma functioning as narrator writing a diary that accounts for the distance. Davies’s play is a transposition but when he turns to end his film-story, we are given a harvest scene — more like a regional novel (say early Hardy) and belongs to the ritual get-together of soap opera aesthetics.

One of the charateristics of soap opera form allows Davies to bring back Harriet and Mr Martin’s intense happiness — the precious relationship almost lost, an emphasis which runs counter to Emma’s idea that Harriet could and would have married anyone.

A few scattered (joke alert) thoughts.

Any readers who know of good TV scholarship or articles on serialization as such, please to cite them?

Ellen

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From Prada to Nada: making a case for working class Spanish-American culture?

Nora-Elinor (Camille Belle) and Mary-Marianne (Alexa Vega) in their aunt’s house in East L.A. (From Nada to Prada 2011)

One of many murals forming backdrop for movie: Mary walking by

Dear friends and readers,

A week ago I examined the tendency in recent films belonging to the emerging & ever increasing Austen canon to erase central themes and inferred conclusions in Austen’s books, focusing on the genre and characteristics of the most recent Emma film, the 2010 Aisha, arguably more a transposition into luxurious Indian terms of Amy Heckerling’s 1996 Clueless than Austen’s Emma: Aisha, or Emma through Clueless lenses?. I demonstrated the reversal of a theme particularly strong in Austen’s Emma, but important in all her books an indirect condemnation of a husband-hunt enforced on women as their best, indeed only “preservative from want,” with the implied corollary women who don’t marry are not made but actually inferior and useless. I also suggested that where Aisha was at its strongest was precisely in those places where it returned to Austen’s Emma for structure and motifs (the heroine’s evolving relationship with Mr Knightley, and her humiliation, however overdone the latter in the film), in these showing the directors probably studied the 2009 Emma (scripted by Sandy Welch) and possibly the studiedly ironic and faithful 1972 Emma (scripted by Denia Constanduros, directed by John Glenister)

Bruno-Brandon ((Wilmer Valderamma) rejected by Mary-Marianne talks with Nora-Elinor, also feeling lonely — in all the faithful S&S’s Elinor and Brandon have moments like this together

Tonight I want to look at the 2011 analogous adaptation of Sense and Sensibility into From Prada to Nada. Unlike Aisha which despite its failure at the box office has been the subject of two excellent academic analyses and a number of popular reviews, From Prada to Nada has not attracted full scale serious examination as yet (it is dealt with by Karen Gevirtz as one of the newer kinds), possibly because its context-nexus includes telenovela romantic comedy, unlike Indian cinema not much explored in Eurocentric Anglo-American film studies. Like Aisha, From Prada to Nada transparently imitates previous Austen films precisely where these films depart from Austen’s books, to the point where its plot-design, key moments and hinge-points are a melange of the filmic Austen canon. I list just a few

when the girls are ejected from their house, we are shown the collapse of a gigantic outdoor dollhouse — an imitation of the huge tree-place in the 1995 S&S

The goodbye scenes (waving from the great-house of those left-behind) recall all the S&S films as does the peculiarly odious Fanny-Olivia (April Bowlby, very strong in the part)

Nora is presented as a near spinster and preferring it — like Emma Thompson as Elinor

Clueless is there in the sequences of Mary-Marianne’s speed-driving, the importance of her wardrobe and Prada shoes and handbag (Aisha-Emma-Cher is also a speed demon in a car and clothes-horse of the latest expensive name fashions)

When Edward Ferris (Nicholas d’Agosto) comes to the Dominguez aunt’s house in East L.A., and Nora-Elinor opens the door it’s love at first sight for them — like the first encounter of Somyra-Elinor and Manhor-Edward in I Have Found It

Nora-Elinor weeps over her father’s case of letters and manly accessories — as does Elinor in the 2008 S&S

Bruno-Brandon is modeled on the melancholy-proud protective, semi-resentful Brandon type David Morrisey conveyed in the 2007 S&S; he similarly directly saves and protects her

When Mary-Marianne is confronted by Marco Antonio-Willoughby (Oliverio Gareli) with his upper class rich wife, she rushes off into the pouring rain, gets herself into a horrible car accident and lands in hospital — this combined the 1995 S&S and I have found It

Edward’s final proposal to Nora-Elinor is not only like Hugh Grant as Edward’s proposal to Elinor, the very words are lifted from Grant’s speech, his very intonations

The Anne Hall moment of abandoment beween Nora and Edward in the kitchn

There are effective allusions to other romantic comedies in the Anglo canon: a kitchen scene with Nora-Elinor jumping onto a kitchen sink and making aspiring gestures is closely reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (this is confirmed in the feature). Probably there are borrowing from hispanic films by Angel Garcia (a respected Spanish film director), but alas I can’t recognize them.

This is not to deny that From Prada to Nada nonetheless manages to become a unified film whose central purpose is (as the again the feature suggests) to present, make understandable and sympathetic Spanish-American culture as it has evolved in the US under impoverishing, marginalizing and stigmatizing circumstances. Austen’s first published novel’s story of a group of females ejected from a high vulnerable position to depend on the charity of relatives and live lives appropriate to a much lower poorer status has been appropriated to display the striking visible contrasts of wealth and poverty in Los Angeles (the girls move from the rich west suburbs to East inner city environs).

The problem here is the depiction of the lives and work of hispanic people in this part of town and the kinds of jobs they can get has been too softened. The film does not have the courage of its convictions. We are not sure the women sewing in the house are illegal immigrants. When Nora and Edward combine forces to threaten an exploitative employer of cleaning people, they win wit unreal ease. The screenplay producers, Gigi Pritzer and Linda McDonough are on record as meaning to make a joyous and fun (this seems to be how Austen films are seen commercially), commercial film (celebratory of Spanish people envisaged as centrally part of the audience) and they succeed in combining gaiety with very touching moments: two parties in the film correspond to two key party scenes in Austen’s book and three of the faithful S&S films, but they cannot at the same time (or at least do not) expose the real pain, hurt, lack of opportunity and fulfilment of latino people in the US. After all both our heroines end up doing very well by the end and their aunt thrives all along.

That there were problems and the film-makers were in conflict is admitted in the features. The film was given up on at least once, and took 6 years to complete. The producers began with one script-writer and switched to two others, revising the first script thoroughly, and then in the last go-round of filming, the film’s content changed again more thoroughly than usual.

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Camilla telling Nora she needs to learn to clean house too — a Spanish housewife lesson (Nora has nearly set the house on fire trying to scramble eggs)

I have not mentioned an analogy for Mrs Dashwood because there is none. This is not the first film to eliminate Margaret (the first 2 S&S films did), but it is the first to eliminate both the mother and Mrs Jennings. The girls’ long-dead mother’s sister, Carmina (Norma Reyna) takes them in and some of her overtly cheerful nature may remind the viewer who had read Austen’s book of Mrs Jennings, but this feels almost like a coincidence. Carmina never embarrasses the girls; she is far more tactful than Mary-Marianne; she shows some grief as she remembers her sister’s death (apparently from a car accident), but her note is one of industrious upbeat acceptance. As with Aisha, Bride and Prejudice, and the 1940 and recent (2003) Mormon Pride and Prejudice this film makes little room for any real deprivation, lasting depth of sorrow, or doubt about the way life today is lived, families treat their members, and human nature is not seriously flawed — except in the case of the cardboard villains. As with I Have Found it, the John Dashwood character, here an illegitimate son, Gabriel Dominguez (Pablo Cruz) is pressured into bad behavior by his greedy snobbish wife: in the Indian film, the man dies; in this one he separates himself from his unworthy wife. We also lose the viciously materialistic Mrs Ferrars, Sir John and Lady Middleton, their children, Mr and Mrs Palmer. Lucy Steele survives as Olivia-Fanny’s sycophantic friend who Edward briefly engages himself to (and easily breaks off from), but her important contrasting sister, the foolishly vulnerable, needy Nancy Steele has been cut.

The effect of the cutting in Aisha was to eliminate all reference to risk of poverty, to unmarried women. Here disquiet, unease, discord, irreconcilable conflicts. There is no need daily, hourly, continually and forever to endure or struggle in the latest entries into the Austen film canon (as there is in all her novels) any more.

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Mary-Marianne’s serious flaw seems to be she shops too much

We were intended to see her first behaving sluttishly (the word slut is used) which seems a travesty of Austen’s critique of Marianne’s penchant for passionate idealism

It’s in this area of real human emotions and thought and problems that this film’s erasure of a central theme of S&S, one found across Austen’s oeuvre occurs. Austen’s opposition of two girls where both experience acute feelings, sensibility, but one (Elinor) is able to control this for her protection, self-respect and safety as well as peace, and the other (Marianne) rejects this kind of control and conformity as hypocritical and getting in the way of living a genuinely authentic existence; Austen’s Marianne regards ardor, idealism, willed enthusiasm, openness, sincerity as noble.

The film presents the central contrast between Nora-Elinor and Mary-Marianne as a matter of goals: Nora wants a career as a lawyer, and is presented as a reading, studying girl (signalled by her wearing glasses most of the time); she seeks a job (like Somyra-Elinor in I Have Found It); she says that she fears sexual entanglement because this will get in the way of her 10 year plan. As the film shows, Nora really fears emotional vulnerability but not because she is not sure her feelings are reciprocated. From the get-go Edward clearly loves her. In contrast, Mary rejects Bruno-Brandon as a poor working class Spaniard not worthy respect, a mannerless man beneath her notice, a servant-type. She goes for Marco Antonio-Willoughby because he is a college lecturer, seems rich, glamorous.

Mary dazzled by Marco Antonio taking her to a stylish lunch and talking fashionably

When Nora tells Mary she hardly knows him in their quarrel scenes, Mary replies he will be able to provide her with what she wants materially. Mary says she does not want to have to work for a living because it’s unpleasant and stressful (one cannot disagree I suppose). She reads a Lorca play (House of Bernardo Alba) to please Marco Antonio as he is presented as a guest lecturer, but shows no comprehension of its presentation of the repression of women’s passionate sexuality (which might have had some connection to Austen). Mary goes to bed with Marco Antonio the first chance she gets, and in a clashing quarrel that ensues between the sisters then, Nora calls Mary a whore.

The scene where Nora and Mary clash strongly

It may be that this kind of conflict is part of contemporary Spanish films: shall you give in to man and enjoy your sexuality freely by way of attaching a wealthy presentable male to you. If so, the question is not resolved, since the plot-design remains to some extent Austen’s and in order to be like Sense and Sensibility, Mary must see that Bruno-Brandon is much better husband material, actually the finer man and end up with him, and she does. In the film he is always honest with her, he fixes her car, he is responsible for making the aunt’s house adequate for her party; he is there for her at the party genuinely wanting to dance with her (not just going along with what she wants as the casual Marco Antonio does) and there for her when she gets out of hospital, all forgiving, all giving. There is no sense of them as the truly congenial pair, though maybe like Darcy and Elizabeth the idea is they are attracted by their very initial antagonisms:

Upon their first encounter, Mary tells Bruno she doesn’t tip, and he replies, that’s good because he doesn’t take IOUs.

We don’t know why she’d want to him as her partner because clearly he would not keep her in high fashion. She really goes for him because he’s there, and its time for the film to come to an end.

Mary attempting to improve her relationship with Bruno

Within a minute and one kiss or so, Bruno wheeling Mary over to where he has been showing children how to paint murals

One real flaw in this film is it’s not long enough: 107 minutes forces them to skirt (whiz past) episodes and foreshorten the denouement. Edward and Nora take less than 5 minutes to get back together again, and like the 1995 S&S all ends in a wedding (Nora’s), with Bruno and Mary seen dancing gaily together as the camera man snaps stills that turn into into black-and-white shot-photos fit for a wedding album.

More to the point, Nora and Mary are not Spanish enough. They are not truly subaltern women. Nora cannot speak Spanish and Mary identifies with upper class American culture. To use them as cynosures for young Spanish women could be taken as more than an easy-out, it’s a meretricious substitute. The women on the bus that Nora helps are genuinely hispanic women but they are presented as simpletons. The Spanish women in the aunt’s house act clownishly to make comedy.

Amid the modernizing changes, cultural transposition, time and budget constraints of From Prada to Nada a fundamental mentality of Austen is lost from view, and I think like Austen’s serious critique of family life and demonstration of the shallowness and dysfunctionality of friendship, her defense of not marrying, and braving poverty rather than selling one’s soul and body for one’s keep and social acceptance, her perception of human nature is not wanted. Austen objects to a blindness to the prosaic realities of existence; she prizes ardor, warmth, sincerity, but we must curb them or we will be taken advantage of or find ourselves living in delusions — as Emma does. I think some of this is found in the all the S&S films until this one, in the 1972 and Andrew Davies’s 1996 Emma, in two earlier analogous adaptations, Stillman’s Metropolitan and Victor Nunez’s Ruby in Paradise.

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Towards the close of the film Edward trying to get up the courage to propose to Nora

The wedded pair

It may be argued that Austen’s original structure where Elinor is the basic consciousness of the novel re-asserts itself in this film in the form of Nora providing the norms of behavior we are to approve her, and her wedding and securing of an individual lawyer’s practice (on Edward’s money and connections) its climax.

I don’t mean to be too solemn or break a butterfly on a wheel here. The film is intendedly light — where Austen Sense and Sensibility is not — nor are her other books, though it is true that commercial presentation of her in films does make her into light romantic entertainment, more than slightly unreal.

Talking in bed — again a scene found in all the S&S movies

As with Aisha, by the time the film came to an end I had become involved and enjoyed much in it. It has genuinely moving moments. It’s filled with familiar Spanish songs and refrains, filmed on location in Monterey, Mexico and parts of West L.A., and large murals painted by young Spanish artists are central to the mise-en-scene. Its strength is in the two sisters’ relationship and their evolving changes with their decreasing circumstances — which is the fundamental basis for all the S&S films.

Here Mary does not just dress Nora but has persuaded her to go the party where Mary is snubbed

Throughout the film we follow one and then the other in their contrasting as well as parallel adventures, with them we go through their crises; these trajectories are punctuated (as it were) by scenes of them talking, dreaming, dressing one another, arguing and supporting one another, quarreling and making up together.

The confiding scene of mutual shared grief found in all the S&S films is here done mutedly, and more effective for that

At the same time they have the triangular heterosexual relationships, Nora with Edward and (although too briefly) Bruno as confidant, and Mary keeping Bruno at a distance until she is betrayed by Marco Antonio. These relationships are presented with great delicacy of feeling and comic wit, and we feel relieved for the girls when at the close of the film they seem to be on their way to stable and secure happiness.

It’s a matter of subjective judgement here, but my sense is this film attempts to hold onto its connection with S&S by keeping the sisters’ relationship so solidly to the fore structurally, dramatically, emotionally (as Aisha maintains its connection with Emma through making Aisha and Arjun-Mr Knightley central). And after all women’s relationships with one another, not just sisters, is central to Austen’s desired vision of women’s lives.

Ellen

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Jefferson in Paris: an 18th century world city, slice of life, sort of …

James (Seth Gilliam) conveying to Sally (Thandie Newton) Hemings his excitement at something he has seen (Jefferson in Paris)

I had read an interesting book by Olivier Bernier about life in 18th century cities: life in Naples, in Paris, & in Philadelphia …

Anthony Chase [first script writer] had grown up partly in France and loved being there doing research, & was interested in Jefferson, & in the whole Sally Hemings side of things …

the enlightened nobles … shown at a dinner party where everyone is talking about liberty and freedom … they of course were the very ones who would soon be going to the guillotine … James Ivory in conversation with Robert Emmet Long

Dining in Paris: we see Jefferson (Nicke Nolte), Maria Cosway (Gretta Scacchi), Patsy (Gwyneth Paltrow)

Dear friends and readers,

I’m just now reading Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello, spurred thereto by my return to Patsy Jefferson (via Cynthia Kierner) and I thought what better could I do to enjoy myself and maybe get some insights through visual recreation than watch Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala’s 1995 film of Jefferson in Paris. As it happens my small journey seems timely since a new book castigating Jefferson I’m told (and for good measure attacking Annette G-R) is making waves, so I’d like to recommend this film and add a qualifying voice to the vehement condemnations I’ve come across here on the Net in the last few days.

What the three (Jhabvala worked on Chase’s script) mean to do is create a sense of Jefferson’s world — he, the people in this world, their norms, clothes, things – entering into and coping with the Paris world of just before the revolution (1788) into just before the terror — in the film Jefferson leaves just around the time things you begin to see the first glimpses of the understandable anger, rage, despair while idealism is still holding its own. Jefferson and Patsy and James arrive around 1783 and, now with Sally and Polly, depart 1789. It’s an able and effective creation of atmosphere, the place, Talleyrand’s sweet time crumbling under the first changes long overdue; with more or less accuracy. We see a slice of a performance of a play really done then, watch Maria Cosway seem to play a contemporary piece on a harp, several historical figures are presented (the king, queen, Lafayette, Mesmer, Guillotin)

There’s also an attempt at a suggestive portrait of Jefferson, somewhat idealized, but not altogether, for he’s the master. The personality is lightly sketched and for the most part kept at a distance, shown in larger social scenes or acting out one-on-one, not alone, not in meditation (there’s no voice over). He’s self-absorbed, self-centered but means well to others too. The credits show the contraption Jefferson invented and used to make copies of his letters; we see him writing with one hand and the other pen imitating the script.

It’s also a self-conscious movie about its art. Scenes recall paintings, some imitate type scenes from other movies; the characters discuss art & make music, are surrounded by art and music.

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The film itself is structured as a flashback, a story told by Madison Hemings (James Earl Jones) to a reporter come to visit Madison and his wife in a cabin-house down south, the slightly incredulous reporter astonished to hear Madison talk of Jefferson as Madison’s father. At some point during the film we return to this cabin, and we come back at the very end.

As a girl visiting Long Island, I saw many black families living in such tiny shacks

Madison’s wife is fingering a shoe buckle and that fades into Jefferson’s shoes and buckles climbing the stairs to his first encounter with king and court. Switch to Patsy (Gwyneth Paltrow) playing piano intensely as if her life depended on it, her father, Jefferson joining her with his violin, and then James, the black half-brother of Jefferson’s wife, in the courtyard struggling with the luggage. The story goes through this first coming to Paris, Jefferson’s putting Patsy in the convent, his meeting with Maria Cosway, their romance, then the reported death of Lucy at home, so the bringing of Jefferson’s other daughter to Paris with her servant, Sally; the gradual attraction of Jefferson to Sally while the romance of Maria Cosway fades (partly because her husband takes her away), and then the clinching moment of the film (very late): Jefferson takes a willing Sally to bed with him. This is tactful: they do not show us the older white man going to bed with this young black girl.

This scene is archetypal for heterosexual films: in Poldark the scene that lead into the master, Ross, going to bed with his servant, Demelza, shows her similarly at his feet, taking off his boots

Patsy is in the house sufficiently to become aware of this liaison and becomes ugly to Sally, flees to the idea she wants to be a nun. Maria returns from London, now longing for an affair but it’s too late. She sees right away what is happening between Jefferson and Sally and she’s out in the cold, not needed.

The film climaxes in James’s discovery of his sister’s pregnancy, indignation, and the confrontation of James (Sally by his side) with Jefferson, where James demands to be let free and to be allowed to stay in Paris. Jefferson says how will you live, you have no money, no connections, I’ll be gone. Jefferson offers James freedom in a couple of years, and Sally upon his death and all the children she may have. Jefferson leads Patsy into the room and the solemn promises are made. Then a scene leaving the beautiful mansion fades into the reporter leaving Madison Hemings’s cabin.

There are separate threads running through. Jefferson’s life as a diplomat: at court, with other Enlightenment figures at a rococo park scene redolent of Watteau’s Embarkation either to and from Cythera.

A group of men contemplating the Declaration of Independence (as Jefferson explains why it omits black people and allows for slavery); scenes of abysmal poverty in the streets, mob action becoming riot, of burning effigies of people, of a head on a pike, of a man hung, another and a house set on fire.

The saddest pictures are of Patsy: in this surely M-I-J have in mind Jacques Rivette’s La Religieuse

The Maria subsection is intertwined with her visiting Patsy, sympathizing with her, and when after Patsy witnesses the door closing on Jefferson and Sally one night, and Patsy seems to decide to become Roman Catholic, Jefferson taking his girl from the convent, indignant. The most powerful scene after Jefferson’s first encounter with Sally in his bedroom is his and Patsy’s final promise to James and Sally Hemings.

Patsy has to sit to have her hair done

Visually beautiful and playful, delicately atmospheric with real factual famous events put before us (the constructed balloon rising over Paris), it’s very much a woman’s art film. Jhabvala’s name is unusually prominently displayed and maybe she was more central. We have so many women’s scenes: scenes of Paltrow as Patsy and other apparently adolescent girls as girls in the convent together; scenes of Newton as Sally playing with Polly; of Scacchi as Maria talking with Paltrow as Patsy and telling of her she once wanted to be nun; scenes of the groups in an artificial landscape by a palace, of them eating, playing table games, very much Rococo genre painting. A strong scene that may not have occurred but something like it — the mother superior’s defense of her convent that she did not try to make Patsy want to be a nun. The mirror type scene of women’s films (the woman looks at herself in the mirror) is left out as this is not a movie about making a face to meet the faces you need to, but we have (Scacchi) writing letters, women in the garden, sleeping with dreams, so many in super-abundant hair-does with either ribbons or hats threaded into the wig. Now Maria, now Patsy submitting to having her hair done, now Sally getting material for a new dress and then putting it on. Sally was not dressed in hand-me-downs, and like James, got a salary over and above her already paid lodging, food, necessities bills. Then the girls getting dresses, fingering the material, men too. In the opening and closing scenes of the reporter, Madison’s wife is central with her tea and talk.

The coming revolution is right there with us: as in this hanging and burning of a straw figure:

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On line I’m startled by the vehemence of the condemnations of Jefferson, often by politically conservative people. You’d think he was the only man not to have freed his slaves after he suggested he felt slavery was wrong. True he did not free Sally Hemings after he died, but she has no income and to enable her to live as if she were free in Charlottesville, she is left as Martha’s charge and since Martha was her owner, Martha paid her bills. The same was done for another black women slave. Jefferson paid the main bills for James, Robert and Martin (Sally’s brothers, his wife’s half-brothers) until they were freed; all was “found’ for them and the salaries he gave them were disposable income.

I am wondering if people kick Jefferson this way because they can. They sense something very vulnerable about the man. For example, his inability to cope with the military, the way he failed to call out the Virginia local militia during the revolution and then had to flee from place to place and partly rely on Martin to keep the house going. Or the way he wanted utterly to downsize the navy and failed. Conservatives might just hate him because he lived in intimacy with this black family all his life. It was highly unusual the way Jefferson took Sally to DC, kept her with him, really a substitute wife.

Jefferson trying out an invention in the courtyard while James asks him for a salary

James had the equivalent for someone in his position of the grand tour. His eyes were opened, his experience enormously widened. His letters of introduction were the apprentice papers that took him to several palaces and several chief French chiefs. He had freedom of movement; Jefferson paid for “all found” (daily food, his lodging in Hotel of course, his clothes). The rest was his. We see this. Sally does seem to have gotten an allowance — like James. So true disposable income. When Jefferson did not need her, she was free wandered in the house and grounds. Oral tradition in Hemings family was she talked of Paris to her dying day; made a huge impression, perhaps like Jefferson himself a very happy time for her. We may even imagine them coming together as presented in the film. A May/December relationship between Jefferson and Sally emerges, with her amusing him (the wonderful dance in the film) and him mesmerizing her (Nolte is more comfortable being sexy with Sally than distantly debonair with Maria). In life, from his letters Jefferson says he did not let anyone get close to him whom he did not value highly. So we may take it he did Sally — at least eventually.

So many moments of unnamed people doing a job, getting through as preparation or part of this or that public festive event

Jefferson in Paris was made right after Howard’s End, and partly during the filming of The Remains of the Day, two of the team’s masterpieces. This lacks the directness of those two, but it belongs to them as a family of films which includes The City of Your Final Destination. Eighteenth century people are in for a treat, historical film people, those who want to dwell in a world of civility, pleasure, aimless (so to speak) aspiration perpetually half-thwarted and half-fulfilled.

Of the books on the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala films, for Jefferson in Paris, see James Ivory in Conversation, by Robert Emmet Long, foreword Janet Maslin.

Ellen

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Review of Nussbaum’s Rival Queens & Peggy Ashcroft and Geraldine James in She’s Been Away

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (John Singer Sergeant) — this is the kind of image many recent studies of actresses want to make dominant

Geraldine Somerville as Daphne DuMaurier (in the film Daphne 2007, written by Margaret Forster, directed Claire Bevan) — the reality captured is a lot more ambivalent and complicated)

Dear friends and readers,

Tonight I watched a great film, She’s Been Away, and put on line my review of Felicity Nussbaum’s Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater (just click), the culmination of a couple of months (at least of work). The review appeared in the most recent issue of The Eighteenth Century Intelligencer, just before the meeting last weekend of the EC/ASECS in Baltimore.

At one time I would have been simply very proud of it: I know it’s excellent, and admit a high point of said conference for me occurred when a senior male scholar whom I very much respect came over to me and complimented me on it. He never appeared to see me before, but in our conversation, especially when he said to ignore if anyone is “snippy” to you about it, that he knew something of me (had observed me). Silly? I couldn’t help it.

I’m no longer simply proud because I know to tell the truth about books is not something most scholars do, nor reviewers for that matter. They are there to compliment their friends, do what will elicit reciprocal favors; not only do you not make friends this way, you alienate people. (They worry you’ll write about their book or essay that way.) I tried hard to be even-handed, balanced and the first five paragraphs praise and describe much that is of value in the book: I called it “stimulating, provocative,” and hope I conveyed how much information, and insight it conveys. By following it, and reading a sample of what Nussbaum had read I learned much not just about actresses, but the conversation that surrounds them today: one that (I regret) has more than occasionally turned feminism (as Gail Dines has said) into essays that seem to value any any act of any woman gaining whatever power (influence counts), money, glamor she can, and turn away from a genuinely reformist social movement for all women together. Celebrity studies seems often to be similarly amoral.

I regret it because the actresses the writers bring into the canon of remembered culture were often fine, good women working not just for themselves but other people and since the mid-19th century some of them consciously and effectively for all vulnerable exploited people, especially other women as a group. I count Helen Mirren as one of these.

Helen Mirren, a Robert Maxwell photo

They include directors, producers, writers, an array of costumer and production designers, entrepreneurs — all of which roles were instrumental in raising the status of the actress by the later 19th century. I know the screenplay writer of a BBC film is a central force in its realization, and much admire the work of Sandy Welch and Anne Pivcevic:

Sandy Welch

Anne Pivcevic, director, producer, writer for the BBC

So I’d like to do more, read, write, perhaps someday finish that etext edition of George Ann Bellamy I started. Catherine Clive is one of my favorite people; Sandra Richards’ book a favorite.

Tonight I watched a very great TV movie, She’s Been Away (director Peter Hall, written by Stephen Poliakoff), the story of a young woman institutionalized basically for misbehavior 60 years ago, and thus destroyed, and how her presence when brought home by nephew since the alternative for her is the streets prompts this nephew’s wife, a young woman in her 30s finally to act out a rebellion – which endangers her life directly (and her pregnancy) and really gains nothing for her, but the important friendship of the first. She also brings the first out of her carapace insofar as the aged women is capable. Both angry, the older much more justifiably, the play explores their thwarted lives and lack of choices. It’s played by Peggy Ashcroft and Geraldine James, I can’t recommend it too highly: it was they who made it the powerful experience it is. James stole the movie by the second half. It was much harder to convey the broken stilled old woman whose life has simply been ‘taken from her,” as Ashcroft says quietly in her last moments as she watches James’s husband (James Fox) storm up the hall towards them (indignant). James is still acting up, acting out. In order to convey these women’s real sense of themselves, and perspective, and how they are really used by their society, the film moves away from realism into a semi-wild haunting sequence in the London city landscape of cars, supermarkets, a hotel and finally a hospital. That year (1989) they played together in The Jewel in the Crown, very different types, James the good (and strong) young woman heroine, and Ashcroft, the tragic victim older woman.

Geraldine James, Peggy Ashcroft meeting outside their overt costume roles

Ashcroft in her prime as Duchess of Malfi

No one picked up my call for papers on actresses for this conference. I was not entering into this upbeat Nussbaum mindset which sees actresses as acting analogously (and therefore praiseworthily) in was ambitious successful academic career women do. I’ve discovered even prostitutes are written about in this vein (e.g., in some of her chapters Kristen Pullen, Actresses and Whores). In the 18th century and throughout much of the 19th the life of the actress (let alone prostitutes) was very different, not analogous at all with the 20th century teacher-scholar at all.

Ellen

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Charlotte Smith’s The Romance of Real Life

Gerard Depardieu as “the fake” Martin Guerre (1982 The Return, based on a novel, “The Wife of” by Janet Lewis, screenplay based on Natalie Zemon Davis’s book, Jean-Claude Carriere; director Daniel Vigne)

Dear friends and readers,

No this is not about the wonderful film adaptation, and not even on its ultimate source: an widely-read Cause Celebre. In 18th century France lawyers routinely published judicial memoirs in which they told of cases they were arguing in court; addressed to judges, they were written so many readers could read them and were ways of trying to influence a local public; the popularity of these attracted two groups of people (I simplify): people who wanted to sell these apparently fascinating stories and those who were reformers and wanted to change norms. One enormously important influential (fluent, eloquent, intelligent) compendium was written and compiled over many years by Nicolas-Toussaint Le Moyne Des Essarts (1744-1810), and it contained the story of the two Martin Guerres.

As I wrote the other day I’m into 2 projects for this summer and early fall which are leading me back to favorite romantic and French books and themes, and hope to write about these here. First up, is Charlotte Smith’s Romance of Real Life: in 1787 she produced 3 volumes of stories from two of the more popular redactions of Des Essarts: Francois Gayot Pitaval’s and Francois Richer’s, both called Causes Celebres et Interessants (1735-44). I’ve read summaries and redactions in Mary’s Trouille’s Wife Abuse in 18th Century France and Sarah Maza’s Private Lives and Public Affairs. I write this blog to suggest Smith’s little lives, for a while a popular read, are not quite accurately represented in what has been written about them in biographies and literary accounts of Smith, nor in Michael Garner’s introduction to Pickering and Chatto’s edition of The Romance of Real Life.

Much that he and others have said is true of them. Enormously shortened, they often focus on a vulnerable heroine, but they are more than abridged. They omit the arguments of the different sides, so unless Smith is particularly interested in these, they are hollowed out narratives that she shapes. Further, most of the time the heroine is lost amid a welter of detail about everyone else involved (family, sometimes friends),and the final lesson drawn is not necessarily in her favor. Rather story after story by Smith reveals to us how the legal and economic arrangements of the ancien regime, daily familial customs, create hatred and resentment and can lead to murder and profound injustice and misery. She brings out first repeatedly how everything is inherited by one person (a male), how everyone in the family has to live with this one man, or obey his ideas or the ideas of those who control or are close to him, and how this creates the hatreds and resentments that give rise to the misery, thievery, occasional murders, physical abuse and threats to women the cases make visible.

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William Hogarth (1697-1764), The Denunciation

So, for example, in “The Count de St Geran” (Volume 2, pp 187-204 in Pickering and Chatto) where various family members seek to murder a wife’s newborn son, the origin of the action is a brother who wants to inherit the property. This is one of Smith’s longer stories and she depicts the whole households, the interactions and motives of the different people with a different relationship to the property and heir. This emphasis or perspective may be seen at length, dramatized in Smith’s The Young Philosopher where the Kilbrodie family, led by an older woman, succeed in treating one of our two heroines, Laura Glenmorris so badly during her pregnancy that her eldest born son dies.

“The Contested Marriage” is another lengthy tale (Volume 1, pp 167-77). Here Smith shows us a worthy young pair of people who want to defy their parents and marry for love and do. We see how the parents are relentless and even after marriage and the birth of children seek to destroy the marriage. In this story Smith produces arguments which in Prevost’s Manon Lescaut (translated very sympathetically by her as Manon Lescaut, or The Fatal Attachment) support Des Grieux, but for his criminal behavior — and that criminal behavior is something Grieux is driven to. In both Prevost and Smith’s texts the point is made explicitly that Grieux would have married Manon early on and gone to live with his father again had the father permitted. In “The Contested Marriage” the marriage is not wholly valid because the law forbids young people to marry who are under 25/30 w/o parental consent. Here her emphasis is on how legal arrangements pervert everyone to behave either illegally or immorally.

Tellingly, Smith depends on her reader to feel how awful is the parents’ continual appeal to legal forms when children have been born, against what I’ll call an inner sense of reality and justice, or fairness. And in all her stories she rings the changes on words like justice, the “heart” (our hearts are supposed to “revolt” at cruel practices), “terror”, “treachery” to our “affections,” and “atrocious behavior.”

Not that females are not shown (implicitly, not explicitly) especially vulnerable. “The Deserted Daughter” (Volume 1, pp. 152-59) is a good example of how females are shown to be vulnerable, but at the same time how Smith’s idea is not to show sympathy for the woman’s risk, lack of power, but rather how property arrangements can hinge on chances, and perversions of feeling emerge when variously desperate and (by virtue of the original arrangements) suspicious people have to cope with realities that result. This too is one of the longer tales.

Emma Brownlow King, The Foundling Restored to Its Mother (1858) — in the 19th century we begin to see sympathy for a women in a woman painter

Smith tells of a child who was born 7 months after her parents were re-united after a separation. As in Mary Trouille’s cases, we find an instance where a very old man (age 69) had been married to a young woman (29). Joachim Cognot just could not accept that his wife had a premature infant, and he farms her out to a woman, Frances Fremont, agreeing to pay her for her service, but in a short while stopping payment. The woman conceives real affection for the daughter and brings her up for 14 years but when she discovers who the mother is, goes to both parents to demand payment. The mother’s conduct shows wavering: she grieves when her baby daughter is taken from her, but then lavishes attention on the one son; when the nurse comes for the money, she supports her husband in refusing to pay; she and the husband do take the daughter, called Mary into their house as a servants, but after he dies, her mother begins to treat her as a real daughter, providing for her a suitable match, but after she marries again, becoming Madame Coquant, herself does all she can to marginalize this daughter. The court after much chicanery on the part of the Madame Coquant, finds for the daughter a right to half the legacy from the original legal father.

Amid all this Smith never loses sight of its origin: a premature baby and father’s angry suspicions. She does not produce a feminist argument against the man who would not accept this child — we never know that there was another man nor who he could have been, but rather warns the reader against “such indiscretions.” A contrast is found in Winston Graham’s Poldark novels where intense sympathy is extended to a heroine who is raped by one of the heroes, conceives a child, but married to his enemy must deal with his suspicions about her 8-month pregnancy. When after much emotional abuse heaped not only on her but the son, she takes a concoction which leads to premature birth (but also risks infection and death), and dies, we are told these two men between them killed her. Her son, Valentine (ironically named) grows up twisted. Graham’s 18th century series often has paradigms which imitate 18th century novel paradigms or realities from an instinctively feminist point of view.

Smith is somewhat interested in the mother’s treachery to her daughter, but not alive to the different mothers the girl had nor that she could be considered a child traumatized by too many re-adoptions, something we do see in novels of the era, including her own.

“The Pretended Martin Guerre” is yet another of Smith’s longer stories, and again a modern treatment brings out what is Smith’s emphasis. Smith’s title indicates how she agrees with what she supposes are conventional sympathies of the reader. Natalie Zemon Davies goes into the subtle psychological nexus we can glimpse even in Smith’s abridgement: the real Martin Guerre fled his parents and wife because he had been impotent and had been shamed and pressured over his failure to be masculine in the appropriate way. Davies sympathizes with the wife’s divagations and terror of her first husband (I’ll call him) and also makes the case that our identities are partly or even largely the result of not on inner selves, but who and what we are asked to enact. This idea is found in Anthony Trollope’s novels about children declared illegitimate as opposed to those granted legitimacy.

The film at times presents a perspective like Smith’s — but not the wife at the center

Smith’s interest is in showing how economic and social arrangements lead to deep perversions and troubles in particular family groups. She emphasizes how the case was brought by an angry deprived relative: Martin’s uncle, aided and abetted by Martin’s wife, Bertrande, originally from a rich family (but that gave her personally no power), who was swayed back and forth by need, fear, her vulnerability. There we do see the woman’s perspective. Bertrande needed a husband, one adequate to produce the heir with her; when the “real” Martin turns up we are made to see he is an angry man and may have beaten and will beat her again. More is known as this went from court to court and had the unusual end result of a real claiment turning up: often these claiments are false, with the original man really dead. Smith goes over the arguments and the welter of emotiona that arises and perspectives turns her book into an anticipation of Leonard Woolf’s horror stories of family in a traditional village, The Village in the Jungle (Woolf was a magistrate for many years in “Ceylon”).

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To conclude, the first story in the volume is the horrifying one of the Marquise de Gange (Volume 1, pp 131-59), made familiar to readers since Sade’s story, Dumas’s novel and other retellings. In Smith’s a great deal of space is spent on the Marquise’s earlier history, including her first marriage, so that we feel we are entering the world of 17th century romance redolent of Madame de Lafayette. Smith cuts short (hardly mentions except as something claimed by the marquise’s mother) the beatings of this woman, the sexual rage of the husband; rather it seems a story of “avarice” and “revenge,” that revenge partly brought on by the heroine herself for laughing at the young stupider brother. Smith is at a loss to explain the “excess of cruelty” here and spends space and time on the agonies the marquise experienced from the shots and poison, and after life of the second brother, the Abbey who escaped punishment by the way in which he elsewhere manipulated the norms and manners. “The Chevalier de Morsan” (Volume 3, pp. 249-74) is a long, the last story, “Renee Corbeau” (Volume 3, pp. 284-85) short high-romance.

But when totally serious what fuels these tales are the ironies and distortions of life set up by customs and laws, fearful worlds they are of violence, of inter-familial hatreds and abuses, desperate intense concern for money, public pride, status in circumstances which exacerbate the rigidity of these laws and horrendous punishments just thrown off. “La Pivardiere” (Volume 1, pp 160-166) about a bigamy case, one of whose victims is whipped, burnt with a hot iron, and exiled to poverty “fore ever. It is not good to be a woman in this world, and not possible to defend yourself against a violent man, but that’s not Smith’s central point. Her central idea is might be said to be to put before us what her later reform minded heroes (Desmond in his novel of the same name, Armitage in The Young Philosopher) assume is the case in life and needs radical change, not just in law but custom.

That this is will be supported by a tale still in print though the author’s name not well-known, Annette von Drost-Hulshoff’s novella, The Jews Beech, about which I hope to write a foremother poet blog soon. It may seem a mild instance but I suggest Austen gets at this too when she has Elizabeth tell Lady Catherine de Bough when Lady Catherine is indignant at the idea that the younger daughters are out before Jane Bennet, the eldest is married or at least engaged: she does not think such behavior conducive to encouraging kindness among sisters.

They also contrast very sharply with the popular sentimental and gothic tales of the era, with their unreal castles, pursuits and pirates, and gushing exemplary emotionalisms (gratitude) on the one side and supposed quiet domestic realism on the other (from Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Lennox to Jane Austen and Elizabeth Inchbald say). I think they justify and like some of her novels are said to have done (The Old Manor House as precursor for Bleak House) the later melodramatic novels of the Victorian era.

Richard Redgrave (1804-1888), The Outcast (1851)

Ellen

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